Germany 4

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today is january second. I've been very busy here and for now I have some free time. There's a Chinese guy saying with me for 5 days from Couchsurfing. He has plans to see everything in berlin on his own, so i don't have to do anything but let him sleep here. that's really great because i told him that i'm busy during the day with my german classes. right now i'm sleeping on the ground and he's sleeping on the bed. i have the bigger blanket. he arrived last night and it was new years so everything was closed. today is sunday so once again, everything is closed. they have more holidays here than i ever anticipated, and they are extremely inconvenient and interfere with my day to day living. usually i just buy stuff on saturday and skip sunday but christmas last weekend and new years this weekend are both on saturday. monday we are going to buy another blanket or two and a tri-fold mat for the person sleeping on the ground. the only problem is that it's a little expensive. the tri-fold mat is 30 euros and blankets are 15 euros a piece for the small ones. i need to find a cheaper store. i'll ask at church today. of course going to a different store also means i'll be paying for it myself which is not so cool.

i was at home for most of the night with my chinese roommate. (the chinese guy from CS arrived on the 1st) i told my roommate that we needed to go to brandburger tor and see the fireworks. i left at 11:15. i tried to go to the brandenburger tor but i got off on Friedrichstraße. people told me that the party at the tor was already full and they weren't letting people in. so i had to ask assuming i wasn't going to the party. people are so weird sometimes. the metro station going there was closed (i was told). the way to get there was walk a block over on Friedrichstraße from the u-bahn to the street, Unter den Linden, and then walk down the three blocks. so i headed off. i was almost to Friedrichstraße which was really close when i noticed that the road in front of me was a tightly packed mass of people.

all of Unter den Linden from the tor to Friedrichstraße was apparently filled with people. the whole city was there. i couldn't even move. everyone had bottle rockets and rockets that shoot in the air. people would back away if someone set off a firework on the ground. all the people launched the bottle rockets at midnight. it was incredible. unfortunately, there was a drunk chinese guy near me who kept putting the bottle rockets in the snow and lighting them. they were stuck and wouldn't take off and they were exploding on us. he was too lazy to grab any of the hundreds of bottles which were littering the ground like sand on the beach. i covered my face for the first two exploded; i was about five feet or 1.5 meters away. for the third one, i turned around and realized that the whole crowd had moved back another 3-4 feet (~1 meter)! i was standing by myself next to exploding fireworks! Ahhhh. a german guy came over and yelled at him so he started using bottles. he continued to set them off under the tree through. as the crowd shifted, i made my way forward and found that the last block before the tor was blocked off because there was a concert going on at the tor. i met a girl there from the french/english speaking part of switzerland, she said it was technically french but everyone spoke english. she was with two guy and one of them kept falling over because he was very very drunk. it's sad that he was too drunk to enjoy the rest of the evening.

after midnight, and i was able to walk through the crowd easier, i walked around to the tor. you couldn't walk through most of the streets because of the concert. the police were telling the crowd that the barricades would be up for an hour even through people were leaving the concert. (some people just went to the tor for the count down and were going to clubs afterward). i kept walking around the perimeter until i finally found a street were the police were busy or inattentive and i went through. (it made more sense than following the whole perimeter until i arrived at the concert properly. the concert was huge and packed with people. it was an outdoor concert and was amazing. the huge screens said Welcome 2011 and then something else in english. i was surprised. the Master of Ceremonies spoke in german and some famous people/groups sang. i didn't know who they were. afterward they had a DJ and played music. i watched the concert for a while. then i left and walked down the long street Straße des 17 Juni through the park. on one side of the brandenburger tor is Unter den Linden and on the other side is Straße des 17 Juni. the street was packed the whole way with stands selling stuff, people, mini concerts. large tents with bars and DJs in them. i guess they were like mini-portable clubs. ha ha ha. then i went to find an s-bahn. the cops at the end of the road pointed me down Spreeweg Street at Seigessäule. part way down i found a really pretty house and i guess it was were the president of germany lives. i've been looking at google maps as i've been writing this and it's called the Bundespräsidialamt.

i spoke to a couple that were making out after i passed the river. the girl was from Minnesota and her boyfriend was Italian. i could tell by her terrible spanish and his thick english accent. i found them at the S-bahn or above ground subway. it's elevated and i couldn't see a station in either direction. a street follows the s-bahn, it's called lüneburger straße(street). she told me to go to wrong direction and they followed me because they were also lost and trying to get to her apartment. i eventually found the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main station) about 4am. it took me a good twenty minutes of exploring the 5 or 6 floors of at least 4 tracks per floor before i found the only track actually takes people inside the city, the S-bahn. the rest are all long distance and the signs are not very clear. in my search, i met some girls from stuttgart. one is them is studying at the university i'll be attending in nürtingen. unfortunately she was not so friendly, in fact she was a little rude, so i just spoke to her friends. at the time it made more sense for me not to understand any german so they wouldn't be embarrassed about talking about me. i arrived at home sometime after 4am obviously, i didn't check the clock. it's a habit. at night i never look at the clocks so i wouldn't have to lie when my mom asked me how late i stayed up. i could always say i didn't know. in all, i had a great new years. it was probably the perfect adventure :-)



here are the things i have noticed about germany. they may be good, bad, or neutral.

-it snows a LOT and snow is COLD, very cold
-the people are very very friendly and nice
-everyone who is younger speaks english
-i feel there are more turkish people living here than germans
-i rarely see germans on my u-bahn and in my neighborhood
-there is a large chinese population
-prostitution is legal and there is supposed to be a large sex scene here. (the biggest one is in hamburg) i have no idea where this is. the sex scene is very contained because i haven't seen prostitutes at all. i've only seen one sex store since i've been here. :-) it's great, i thought i'd be walking to a city obsessed with sex.
-they have 3x the meats we do
-1/3 of the meat is sausage
-frozen desserts here are 5 years ahead of our desserts in the US
-there's not a large variety of fruit juices
-many fruit juices will have pieces of fruit in them
-Berlin is covered in graffiti which the people believe is culture. in normal cities, graffiti is a street gang marking their territory. you are in a bad part of town and should leave immediately. anything is acceptable if it's considered culture. i think because the people want to prove they are not nazis.
-there are very few peppers and spicy things
-SPICY!!! means Maybe a normal, but definitely not spicy
-the beer here is much better than in the US, Chile, and China

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Comments

[Eileen]

Lol
No don't delete it! I like it! : )