Woche Eins

Hallo! Ich werde auf Englisch schreiben, weil auf Deutsch zu viel Zeit nehmen wird. Spater werde ich auf Deutsch schreiben, in future posts.

Everything is going very well here in Germany. My host family is wonderful. After a long and uneventful trip to TXL (Tegel airport), my Gastvater, Nico, picked me up. There are a ton of Mercedes and BMWs everywhere in Berlin. My Gastfamilie has one of each. The roads are narrow, with cars parked on either side, so there is almost never room for two cars going opposite directions to be on the road at the same time. Driving is a little bit crazy.

I woke up very early (3 am) my first night and could not get back to sleep. Also had no food. Germans do not get up early on the weekends, so this was not so good. Now I'm on a pretty regular sleep schedule.

This is the breakfast table. Every morning, ich trinke Schwarztee (black tea) with milk and sugar, and usually eat some fresh bread or toast. We have nutella-like spread and honey also.


I have now had all of my classes once. In German Literature, with our main Dartmouth professor (the one who accompanies us on this trip), we are reading fables in German. They are incredibly hard. My older host sister, though she's 24, comes home from her apartment a lot. She was helping me tonight, and had no idea what a lot of the words were, and found it really difficult (some antiquated German is used, I guess). It's difficult enough to analyze literature in English; harder in German, especially with such an incredibly limited Worschatz (vocab) like I have. German 3, intermediate German language, is taught by a professor from the Goerthe Institute, and she seems very good. Someone yawned in class without covering his mouth, and she informed us that that's completely taboo and disrespectful. Yikes. Today, I had German 6, German History and Culture. Every Wednesday, we go on an excursion to a museum somewhere in the city with our professor, Christine. Christine is also a native Berliner (like my German 3 prof). Today, she brought us to the Story of Berlin museum. We were lead through an overview of Berlin history by a great tourguide, and the tour was in English, which was definitely necessary.

In the museum were three segments of the Wall, from the western side. The eastern side didn't have any graffiti because the residents would get shot if they were close enough to spray paint. We were each given a small piece of the wall. 

  Above is a picture of an actual, preserved bunker from the Cold War era. The museum owns it and allows visitors to explore it. The bunker was said to be able to hold 3600 people for two weeks in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. However, provisions were... interesting. The beds hung from the ceiling and were more like triple-stacked trampolines than cots. There were only two bathrooms for women and two for men, with only about 20 stalls each... you can do the calculations. Interestingly, the air filter for removing radiation from bunker air was also set to filter out 50% of the oxygen that came through it. The tour guide said that historians don't know whether that was on purpose (to sedate people while they hung around in a bunker for two weeks), or whether it was a technical error/shortcoming.

All of our classes are held in the same classroom, which is about 30 minutes by foot/S Bahn. There are three main transportation systems in Berlin: UBahn (which is the subway), SBahn (which is the train) and a fairly extensive bus system. It is really easy to navigate around, even if you don't have a good grasp of the city. Above is a picture of some of the boys in my class playing in the courtyard outside the classroom. 

 There is a garden very near to the school where our Unterrichts (lessons) are. Flowers are starting to bloom, and the days have been warm, with highs in the upper sixties.

 German beer is actually as good as they said it would be. We have a Biergarten very close to the house on the Schlachtensee (the local lake), and it is a beautiful place to have a drink with friends. Food is fairly cheap in Berlin. You can get a restaurant meal with a drink for about 10 euros.

The city is an interesting combination of old and new. Some of the buildings that look old are actually fairly recent, or have been restored recently. There is no real skyline in Berlin, and not even very many landmarks. It is a sprawling city with a bunch of different, unique neighborhoods. Our neighborhood is called Zehlendorf. There are some really beautiful houses in the area; I'll take some pictures on my walk to the subway tomorrow. 

We took a riverboat tour on the first day of classes. The audio was quiet, in German, and I was jetlagged. Also, as before stated, there is nothing particularly architecturally impressive about Berlin. Needless to say, I feel asleep. But I did get a picture of the iconic TV tower in Alexanderplatz. Alexanderplatz was the center of the city before the Wall was constructed. During the cold war, it was in the DDR. Buildings look very communist-esque-- concrete, square, minimalist. 

Last Sunday was the Berlin half-marathon. My host dad ran in it, along with more than 30,000 other Berliners. The course is basically completely flat, because there are no hills in Berlin. Apparently the course time is very fast for professionals. Maybe I'll come back and run in it some day.

More to come about host family and house, plus school etc. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?