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Published: August 11th 2009
Brandenburger Tor
also known as, the Brandenburg GateHello everyone! It's been a couple of days since Week 2 ended, but now is when I have time to catch up on everything! First, let me reassure everyone that I'm having a WONDERFUL time here, especially now that some of the 'newness' of everything has worn off, my stomach has gotten used to all of the food, and I'm undertanding the majority of what people are saying to me. 😊
Classes: This was a crazily busy week! Between a ten minute oral report on Heinrich Zille (he was a famous Berlin characturist and illustrator in the early 1900s), a two page essay comparing the standard of living in Berlin and San Diego (which is not long at all but it seems it when you're writing in a foreign language!), a mid-term exam, a journal entry, and normal vocab/grammar homework, we were all definitely kept on our toes! But, I feel like all of our hard work is paying off-I can understand the majority of what people are saying to me (well, at least the general gist), I can speak more comfortably in German if not that much more correctly, and I'm picking up new vocabulary like crazy. The high
point of classes for me this week would have to be our Wednesday excursion to Prenzlauer Berg. Instead of normal class on Wednesdays we have cultural excursions/field trips across the city, and this week we visited an eastern, "trendy" neighborhood. It reminded me a bit of Hillcrest in San Diego with all of the different cafes and types of people hanging around. We toured a small museum dedicated to the home lives (rough translation) of normal German people around the turn of the twentieth century, then we gave short reports on different historical points of interest before taking a lunch break. I tried some excellent chicken sharma from a Turkish roadside stand (there are a LOT of Turkish immigrants to Berlin, so Turkish restaurants here are similar to Mexican restaurants in the Southwest-authentic and all over the place). Then we had a scavenger hunt of sorts-also called can you follow street directions and understand where you are based only on German descriptions-and hopefully we were able to find our professor at the meeting point an hour later. My group made it (barely, with the help of a local shopkeeper), and then we were done for the day.
Excursions/Extracurricular Activities:
1) Tuesday: Dance Class 1. One of the highlights of the week! At orientation, we had the opportunity to sign up for three ballroom dancing lessons, no partner/shoes/experience required, for a few extra euros. This week we learned the basic step and a few figures from the disco fox and rumba in a mixture of German and English. It was soooo much fun!!!!! We had more girls than guys (big surprise, I know) so I had to lead at my giant 5'0", but it was fun all the same. Maybe because I've done quite a bit of tap and modern, but the basic steps didn't seem that hard to me, and it was great to get to know a different group of people. Thankfully this week I got to dance with guys! (But that is a different story). All around very fun.
2) Wednesday: Tempelhof Tour. I signed up for this extra tour of the old airport because they said it was very historically important and a wonderful architectural place to tour. Well, it turned out to be....an old, decayed, empty, airport. Truly, I've seen an airport before. I know what a runway looks like. I know what a check
in counter looks like. I've also been inside and in the basement of old buildings. There is quite a bit of history connected to it, especially in the days of the Wall, but it was all in German so I only understood half of the stories, and I could have read most of them in a book. Well, it was an experience, and that's what traveling is all about. Just as a warning to future historian visitors to Berlin: the Tempelhof tour is a tourist trap for historically minded people!!!!! They should have payed us to come and listen to them for three hours in a deserted building, not the other way around.
3) Thursday: Movie Time 2. This week we saw "Sophie Scholl: die letzen Tage" -translated "Sophie Scholl: the Last Days" It was an EXCELLENT movie that I would highly recommend, however it was incredibly depressing. Go cry your eyeballs out afterwards depressing. It is set in München during WWII, and it follows the story of a university student (girl-Sophie) who gets caught with pamphlets promoting the end of the war, ie Germany's surrender. It is truly an inspiring story to see how she dealt with the situation
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Goethe and Schiller she was put into using her faith to sustain her and never giving up her morals. I think it's also important to see how many underground (and aboveground) movements there were to change Germany from the German people, and also perhaps why more didn't take a stand. Do not judge lest ye be judged.
5) Weekend trip to Weimar!!!!!! We left Friday afternoon to get in to Weimar that evening. After checking into our hostel and settling in, 10 of us walked into the center to find something to eat and drink, only about a 20 minute walk from the hostel. We found lots of fun little cafes, and had fun eating a late dinner and having a beer or two before calling it a night. The next morning we got some breakfast and ate in the garden behind the hostel, then walked into town for a guided city tour. I chose to do the English tour so I would understand everything, but it turns out Weimar is not that much of a 'guided tour' city, more of a wander and discover city. I have to say, though, highlight of the trip so far was seeing the same church and
the same organ that Bach attended and played for many years as the resident organist!!!!!!!!!!! WOW-that is an experience of a lifetime! We then had time on our own for lunch (we found yet another Turkish restaurant and had a lovely 2 1/2 hour lunch, splurge of the day but so worth it) and free time-a couple of us went shopping. We met back up late afternoon to tour Goethe's house. This was a very interesting tour-I had no idea that Goethe was such a renaissance man! He did it all, and they have examples of his different types of work throughout the house in addition to photos and pictures of his family and friends and recreations of what the different rooms would have looked like. I found Goethe so interesting I decided to do my next oral report on Goethe. 😊 We all had dinner together at Shakespeare's Restaurant afterwards, which was a mistake. Though included in the price, we all payed for it dearly-the rest of the night was spent at the hostel playing cards or trying to sleep...The following morning after breakfast at the hostel, we made our way to Buchenwald-the former concentration camp just outside of
Weimar. Hardly any of the original buildings are left, and there is far less graphic information presented than at Dachau, but an eye-opening and powerful experience nonetheless. A tour guide showed us around the grounds explaining exactly what would have happened in each spot, then we saw a short documentary on Buchenwald, and then we had a little bit of time to explore the museum there on our own. I skipped the main exhibition area as it was very similar to Dachau, and went instead to an exhibition of the prisoners' artwork. The first room was dedicated to artwork saved from inside the concentration camp (on pieces of bark, chips off the walls, etc). The other two rooms are all of artwork done by survivors after the fact to cope with what they saw or to explain what happened to them in a way that words couldn't. It was a very moving experience, but I don't have the right words in any language to adequately describe it.
Free Time:
Between school, planned outings, and a previously unplanned rendevous to the public transportation office to clear a few questions up, I didn't really get a chance to explore very much
on my own this week. Tune in next week for more outside sightseeing excursions!
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