Ach So!

Week 1 - Ach So!

So it’s the end of the first week, and so much has occurred in the last 7 days! I have made LOTS of new friends and experienced Berlin in a very different way than I did last time. As many of my friends know I have decided to move up to the B2 class. I’m still not sure this was definitely the best choice for what it is I need to accomplish here, but I’m definitely going to become more fluent. We (my friends and I) are trying to speak German as often as possible. At times we just decide to go with English, but more than I spoke outside of class last time. OK So let’s recap on this week. Tuesday ummm I can’t remember anything in particular other than moving up in classes that happened on Tuesday. Actually wait maybe that was the day Rory, Chloe (a swiss girl in C1), Olivia, Derek another person although I can’t remember who right now and I all went out to Friedrichshain again. They had all gone on the Spree boat tour that the program set up for us. I was supposed to have gone as well but had transportation issues. Lol I seem to be having quite a few of those this trip. I am not remembering how the U and S-bahns connect very well and so I had decided to just take a bus…. BAD IDEA. As bad of an idea as trying to take a bus in DC during rush hour and attempting to get to your desired destination on time…. Mostly it was bad, because it was definitely Berlin rush hour when I took the bus. It took me an hour and a half to get somewhere that should never take more than 30-40 minutes to reach. GAHHH! Well I figured at that point the boat tour would be getting back to the pier when I arrived, and I might as well see if they wanted to do something in the city. So I sat with Olivia and her friend (who is the person I couldn’t remember before… but still can’t remember her name :/) and waited on the boat to get back. Olivia and her friend had been on the earlier of the 2 tours FUBiS had set up for us. When Rory, Derek, and Chloe got back we all went to a Mexican place. It was basically chipotle. Olivia and her friend have been here longer so they are a little tired of German food and missing home food apparently. From there we went to hackeschermarkt and sat at a restaurant couldn’t believe the drink prices and then left the table. Some of the group thought it was a little rude, but the rest of us refused to pay €8 for a drink just to be polite. SOOO from there we went to Friedrichsheim. By this point we had been wandering around for quite a while and some members of our group DESPERATELY needed to use the WC. So we just chose a restaurant that looked like it would be cheaper and had a few drinks there. We just had a beer or two at a restaurant and went home. We had spent so much time looking around for places to go most of the night was already gone, and we all had class in the morning. This was my first night actually staying up later than about 4 in the afternoon so I was beat.

Now onto Wednesday… Wednesday was another epic day in Berlin. I went to class had some fun there and learned that June 1^st is ascension day (which I already knew),that Germans get that day off, and that it is also Father’s day in Germany. The way Germans celebrate Fathers’ Day is getting a large case of beer and hiking and/or just walking around town, drinking and singing. Then at night the fathers take their sons out and buy them their first beer…. And then their 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th beers soon follow. In a nutshell German men drink and sing all day long in big groups and then get their sons at night and get them drunk. I think it is a pretty fantastic way to spend that holiday lol. SO after class Matt, Jacob and I (Jacob is one of the Jacobs I described last week. He is super tall and is as he describes a Medievalist.) went to the tiergarten to witness the holiday festivities. Matt is a little bit more adventurous than Jacob and I and he decided we were going to just walk up to a few groups and see if we could get invited to the festivities. The first group was nice enough; they talked with Matt for a while and explained the day to us again. We then moved on and found another group of guys playing a game with wooden blocks and batons (batons as in the batons used in a relay race, but made of wood). We watched for a while and then Matt again struck up a conversation. They invited us to play and told us it was called Wikingerschach which translates to Viking Chess (immediately thought of you Big Steve!). I have some video footage of it I will try to put up later, but basically there are 2 teams standing about 20 feet from one another. Each teach has about 6 wooden blocks in a line in front of them and one tall block in the middle that has a red crown. In addition to the wooden blocks on the ground there are 6 batons. There is only one set of these batons, because each team uses these to try and knock over the other team’s wooden blocks. When a block is knocked over, the team whom the block belonged to, on their next turn, throws that block before throwing their batons as close to the other team’s blocks as they can. Wherever this block lands is the new line from which the other team is allowed to throw from, which is always just a bit closer. Whoever knocks over all of the other teams blocks first then gets to try to win by knocking over the king block in the center. However to knock this block over you have throw it facing backward between your legs granny style. My team lost, but it was SERIOUSLY fun… although I’m sure that my long description was not nearly as fun as my experience playing lol. ANYWAY after we played a game we went with the Germans we had just met (who were all college students as well) to a sixties restaurant. It was American and the Germans had already planned to go there prior to our joining the game and they invited us to join them. We spent the evening just having fun talking to the Germans drinking beer ( I actually didn’t drink I was already quite tired from the night before) and sharing stories. We got their contact info and we’re FB friends with one of them now so we may meet up with them again.

I honestly just can’t remember what I did Thursday. Not that I drank so much I don’t remember or anything like that. It has just been a crazy week and I don’t remember Thursday. I feel like I did something, but oh well I’m sure I had fun lol.

Friday I had planned to go to the Goerzallee Welcome party… but I fell asleep. I met one of my flatmates though and he and I had a tea and got to know one another pretty well. He’s an Indian guy named Abul and he is just a cool guy. He’s promised to take me to watch a cricket match while I’m here! After my tea with Abul I crashed and slept until about 2 am. I had a lot of missed calls and texts from friends and then finalized my Saturday plans with Rory to go to Potsdam. THEN I went back to bed.

SO Saturday… all I can say about Saturday is that it was awesome. At about 11:30 Rory Jacob and I headed out to Potsdam to see the city. We walked through the main streets of the city grabbed some lunch and then saw the Nauentor (which we thought was a fake installation at first), the Jaegertor, and the original Brandenburger Tor. All three were nice to look at and interesting. Then we headed off to Sanssouci! I just LOVE sanssouci! We didn’t pay to go in but we wandered all around the parks and gardens. It was an absolutely GORGEOUS day! We watched these absolutely adorable little kids playing with their parents in the shade of the Neu Palais (I’m definitely not sure of this name) and rested a while there. It was a crazy hot day and we all needed a rest from the long walks in the city and gardens. On our way back to the Potsdam Hbf, Rory taught us a word game. Each person in the group has to give a letter trying to not be the person who ends the word. The words can’t be less than 4 letters long, no proper names or nouns, and the person who ends the word loses the round and has to start the next round with a new letter. If at any point you believe the person before you is not actually spelling a word and is instead just giving a random letter, you can call challenge. If they have a word in mind and the letter they gave would once the word was completed be part of a correctly spelled word, then the challenger loses. If the person challenged has no word or the letter given would create a misspelling of that word, they lose. It sounds a little boring, but it is super addictive. We added some more rules as went, just to make it competitive, but they are essential to the play of the game so I will leave them out. SOOOO after we got home we went our separate ways and got some work done and rested. After about an hour or so I went and hung out with some other FUBiS people at a bench outside and we decided to get some dinner. We went to an Italian place not far from our dorms and omgosh was it delicious. I had already made a sandwich and eaten before I knew the dinner plans so I got something small and inexpensive. I can’t remember what I thought I was ordering, but what I got was snails in hot gooey mozzarella. HOLY CRAP WAS THAT GOOD! Chloe and I left a little early from the table, where a nasty political argument had broken out between some of the FUBiSers and german guy who is a flatmate of one of the people in the group. We paid for our food and made plans with other people mainly Rory, Jacob, and Matt to go out into the city. We went into the city with the people from dinner and the boys previously listed and had a great time at a happy hour in Kreuzberg. Chloe and I were the only girls in the group lol except Derek ;) who we met up with on the way and we all just had some nice girl talk, and had fun talking with the boys and watching Matt and Rory see which could finish a tall beer faster (Matt totally won btw under 5 seconds!). Rory and Chloe then struck up their own little romance lol and we began to head back to Goerzallee. Derek and I had fun chatting on the way home. Then when I got home I went straight to bed. I woke up around 2 in the afternoon Sunday morning, went to the silberlaube after a shower and much needed absorbent breakfast and chatted with my mom and Kelly. I SOOOO needed some girl talk with a friend from home. I miss all of you sooo much! Not having internet at the dorm is really very hard for me and I am definitely not a fan. Abul said he may be getting internet soon, since the person he was sharing with recently changed the password on him, So I might go in on it with him. We’ll see what happens. OK well that was my week! I hope it was entertaining and informative : )

LOVE AND MISS YOU ALL!

Kathleen