THE CHILLING CONCLUSION

Hey people. Y'all may consider this a failed blog, but I only blogged when I had something to say. Which apparently wasn't often. I'ma keep this last post short, to the point, and informative. The Germany 2011 conclusions:

1. I want to do music in my life. Hello, no money/parent's basement/generic rage/alcoholism/profit? I don't want to do physics, it will literally suck my soul dry. I've had music in my head 24/7 over here...my own stuff. Next year, hopefully I can make some of these mental seeds blossom, but we'll see. I'm pretty sure I don't suck, and I can do it...but it's a lot of luck and a lot of other things. I'm gonna spend a lot of time next year at Midd exploring my possibilities and chances. If I ask some of you for opinions, be honest with me.
2. I need a skillset. I already have moderate computer skills, but I need to keep going with cooking, and I need to start with cars and other household doo-hickeys.
3. Artists that define this time for me: Björk, Jamie Cullum, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
4. Big shout-out to the New School friends I've made, none of whom will (not unkindly) read this, for being totally fucking awesome people and I can't wait to chill with y'all in the city.
5. Best German beer: Franziskaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel. Cost: 70 cents. Germany: FUCK YEAH.
6. Germans are great people. Relaxed (a little too much, but still), organized, friendly, safe, not terribly ambitious, accomodating, problem solvers...literally fantastic, the way this culture thinks.

So main thing: my German has gotten better, my life has come into better focus, and I've learned a thing or two about my own person. Academically, this semester may have sucked, but otherwise, it's been good, Germany. I'll be back, promised.

Has it really been a month?

Since my last post? Wow. Time flies. I guess that means things are going better now, because that first month was dead slow. So what's happened since? Not a terrible amount, but it'll be worth going into it anywho, yea? And I'm going to Greece and Italy soon and there will be a ton to say about that. I promise to be a little more regular with this blog. Maybe.

So let's start with the basics. My German has improved vastly. Really, I'm quite proud of it. I still can't really, you know, make friends, but that would literally take much longer for me to really work up the confidence. It's the hardest thing, to just approach someone in German. And besides, like everywhere, people stay in their little niches here. I just unfortunately don't have one because of the whole no-one-else-on-my-program-this-semester thing. Poop, right? But as far as making myself clear as well as responding to people and properly reacting to what they say, I'm golden (see, right there, I almost said 'reacting on' because that's how Germans would say it. yay?).

My classes are fine except for physics, which is brutally hard, boring, totally foreign and completely bereft of human interaction. If I don't weasel my way into another approach (as in, make it clear to the professor that I'm almost incapable of taking a class at this level in a foreign language by myself, and it's harder than anything in Middlebury), I'm well on my way to flat-out failing. And not Bergen Academy/Middlebury failing, like I got a C+...literally F.

So that's bad, right? Let me explain why I almost don't care. I mean, I hope it works out better than that, but there are so many better things going on in my life right now. I mean, let's play the "one of these things is not like the other" game: currently I'm reading German books, working on my vocabulary, learning about German history and culture through conversations and class, travelling around in Germany, singing in a German choir, meeting with someone who's going to America to exchange language abilities (more on that later), meeting (although not totally successfully) with some Germans to try to put together a little a cappella group, travelling to Greece, Italy and Amsterdam, composing and writing music, practicing mandolin, learning to cook...and DOING SUPER-DUPER FUN PHYSICS PROBLEM SETS!! BY MYSELF! YEAA!! So I made that round of the game a little easy, but my point should be clear. It's literally a weekly vacuum of joy in my life that has nothing to do with the rest of the fantastic stuff that's happening here. I haven't done the last, uh, three problem sets. Partly because I don't care to, partly because I'm lazy, and mostly because they're bloody impossible. The only one I managed to do myself I spent hours pouring over math and methods I'd never encountered, instead of bettering myself in much more important ways. No, excuse me, but fuck that. But let's go more into these good things, ey?

1) Acappella group. I use the term here quite magnanimously. Really, it's just been three people or so meeting and singing canons. But that in and of itself is so beautiful, right? The girls I've met through this have all been totally wonderful and nice, and the meets so far have been full of happiness for me. Music truly connects everywhere. We've been singing little canons, like I said, and hopefully we can keep working stuff up as we find more people.

2) Tandem partner: So Berlin has this totally sweet program called Tandem, in which you (through a university or just on specific websites) post a message stating what languages you speak and what languages you're looking to improve on. So I found a really nice girl from a smaller village outside of Berlin who is going to America to work next year as some sort of engineering liaison. That means that have a hard time translating some things, but generally it's been going really well (besides this guy being late, dumb). For example, yesterday we wandered around a grocery store and went through the names of various products, me for the German names and her the English names. It was totally fun, enlightening, hilarious, and exactly what an abroad experience should consist of. Germans around us were totally getting a kick out of it too, as I'd stare at potatoes wide-eyed like a toddler and then all of the sudden excitedly yell out "KARTOFFELN!", which is the german word for potatoes. Shameful, by the way, that I forgot that one, yet had no problem with the word for pineapple ("Ananas"). I also enjoyed explaining the concept of the word "like" to her, which proved to be a double-edged sword, because then I was like totally conscious of like every single time that I would like say the word like...like, you know?

3) Choir. Well, a little boring, but honestly pretty ambitious for a random choir. We're performing the finale of Mahler's 8th Symphony, Brahms' Nänie and and also Brahms Schicksalslied. A personal note: now that I'm trying to write music myself, and I've done some arranging and such, I've started to fully appreciate just how ridiculous a bro Brahms was. Every chord and measure in his songs works together in such an artful way, and then he simultaneously builds in these beautiful melodies into each voice, plays with rhythm and expectations constantly, keeps a general form and progression to the whole song, and yet makes it all sound so easy and beautiful. Like, how do you DO that? Goodness. I've met some people there, all nice. Germans are nothing if not nice and open, literally without exception. But here's the kicker of it all: we're performing all these songs with the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra - like, Berliner Philharmoniker. Holy hell. More info to that here: http://www.collegium-musicum-berlin.de/konzerte/59-mittwoch-30610-20-uhr-und-donnerstag-1710-20-uhr-philharmonie-berlin.html. I only wish I had not missed the auditions for the chamber choir, those Debussy songs are awesome.

Trip to Weimar. Subtitle: GOETHE SCHILLER GOETHE SCHILLER GOELLER SCHITTE ad nauseum. I finally got to meet the Mainz students...let's just say their lives are a little different from mine right now, lucky punks. But we all got along swimmingly and had a merry time that weekend. We saw a play about Goethe and his women, which I understood...some of. But I had to do a lot of that cued laughter, like other people laugh and then I nervously FAWFAWFAW along with them. I hope I didn't stumble into any traps there. We ate legit Wurst, drank beer (go figure), saw a LOT of museums and generally much merriment was to be had.

Then we went to Buchenwald the next day, which was a concentration camp just outside Weimar (as in, the point wasn't extermination, but it might have as well have been, ya know?). Somber stuff, of course. I felt like I kept having the wrong reactions though. Cue everyone getting images of me laughing at some terrible thing. No, it was more...I think I kept intellectualizing everything, rather than drowning myself in the overwhelming stink of misery that pervaded the camp.

I also kept noticing the greyness of it all - the human things that make the camp much more understandable. Well, not the camp itself...it was obviously a terrible thing. But I always hear people say things like "How could this have happened?", and in my mind it's pretty obvious. The rationalizations, the forced hands, the situational things, the necessities of every day life, the fears and worries, they all had their fingerprints all over the camp. And then there's one or two terrible and ambitious people at the top who conduct and manipulate the confusion towards terrible undertakings. I walked away from that not only understanding how such a place could've existed, but also marveling at the symptoms of the camp's imminent founding (the things people "should've stopped, should've seen coming") and how many of these symptoms can easily be found in our world nowadays. People hold up the Nazi's actions as pure evil, and marvel at how it could've happened. And then those same people fail to see the symptoms of such things in their own world - the manipulation of facts, words, fears, everyday issues. All it takes is a charismatic group of people with a strong vision of something, people with silver tongues who can talk about anything and make it seem acceptable, and then it's too late, too late. People everywhere would do well to stop looking at the Holocaust as this one-time act of pure evil, perpetrated by men and women of pure evil, and would do better to look at how it unfolded and how many of its' symptoms can be found in our own societies. And then we address those symptoms, and stop them.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be heavy-handed here. It's just, the more I learn about things, the more I find out how human and complicated most things are. You learn about these terrible absolute things when you're young ("The Holocaust could never happen here", "Osama bin Laden is just a bad man who hates us for our freedom", "America is the best country on the planet", "Drugs are bad period, and so are the people who do them", "He stole/killed/did this-and-that and he's just a bad man", "God and hell exists" OH SHIT I WENT THERE), and now it seems like I keep feeling foolish because the truth behind such statements is ugly, complicated, difficult to understand and just way too human.

But I want to close this blog with some optimism...it really wasn't my intention to turn this into a little diatribe. Hand-in-hand with these life lessons and demonstrations of how complicated life really is, I've been learning beautiful things. Beautiful people, good intentions and works of art are everywhere, and no one is really just evil or something. The world's a wonderful place, yea? And there's so much to learn in it. It seems like the only terrible thing in this world is apathy, this horrible lazy tendency people have to just wave their hand complacently at life and go back to FarmVille or video games or some shit. Now, I'm just as guilty as anyone of that (not FarmVille specifically, forget that crap), and sometimes we need that laziness. And I'm not advocating we all start campaigning for president here. But when people are complacent and literally just live their life day-to-day with no ambitions, passion, interests or whatever...that's no life whatsoever. Such people could actually die and it wouldn't matter. They'd be forgotten and that would be it. History is defined by people who weren't complacent. Sometimes we wish they were apathetic, like in Hitler's case. But I guess that's the main lesson here, and something I really struggle with as well. Not to be apathetic. Because if you're not apathetic, you find out that life is complicated and fascinating and gray and beautiful and ugly and invigorating and so on.

It helps that I'm listening to a very inspirational-sounding song right now. Thanks Jamie Cullum!

Sorry that this blog wasn't as funny or as goofy to read as the others. But so it goes.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, the chick who started the a cappella group was totally inspirational on one front. She detailed out a giant trip she took around eastern Europe and Asia, all the places she'd been to, and rattled off the like 15 languages she knew how to say hello in. I was like rock on chica, you do that cultural experience. New life goal acquired.

BREATHE IN BREATHE OUT GO GO GO

HI EVERYONE DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME TO TALK GOTTA RUN YEA TEA SOUNDS GREAT OKAY TUESDAY COOL CIAO

That's all you really need to know of the last month. I'm serious. Maybe another subtitle would be "John stresses, grows up a little, loses a few pounds from malnourishment(how? from where? my eyebrows?), and comes out...okay?". What a month this has been. Now I think I officially settle into more routine stuff, if I choose to. I choose not to.

Let's start with Amsterdam, ey? Subtitle: hey...we have that in America too! Amsterdam is wonderful and beautiful, but who cares? I could lend y'all a couple overly verbose descriptions, but I don't like to stroke my own ego (HAH). Look up some pictures. What are the highlights? We took a tour from a wonderfully awkward girl from New Zealand (kiwi, ey?). Awkward in the sense that she was clearly used to large, diverse tour groups with varying senses of humor. Alas, it was me and my friend Kfriend. So she bust out plenty of concert hall-scale jokes about marijuana and would be greeted by Kfriend's empathetic laughter and, by the end, my stone-faced lip twitch. Oh, I'm that ass.

Some bro had put some books out for free on the street. I grabbed two. A compendium of Chekhov's greatest plays and some German book. I read part of one of Chekhov's plays, then realized what I was doing and stopped. So it goes.

And then pub crawl. Oh pub crawl. In principle, it was fine, as far as pub crawls go: way too loud music, watered-down shots of...something, lots of foreigners, and lots and lots of Usher. Thank god. But here are some HUMOROUSLY-TOLD ANECDOTES that I've collected.

1) Team Plaid. Y'all know the type. Most dudes have probably skirted along the edges of this group at same point of another. You know, small group of dudes, no girls, all wearing those stripey button-down going-out-to-get-laid shirts (DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME) with jeans? Who will try to push themselves up against anything in the neighborhood of 98.6 (now you actually can't look at me)? This particular flavor was from, I believe, Sweden, a particularly ruthless strain that thrives on awkward glances, takes no hints, and only seems to grow stronger with each rejection. I never saw if any of the little lion cubs found an easy prey, but I saw enough misses for a lifetime.

2) Team "WOW WE'RE HOT AND HERE BY OURSELVES OMG LOL WHO ARE YOU STOP THAT HAHAH OKAY!" This strain manifested itself in the form of two short blonde French girls. Y'all still know the type. The type that gets more head nods in their general direction than a guy going over speed bumps. And then, oh! they fall into some dude's arms, dance with their respective guys while they talk to each other laughing about it, while everyone else gets to watch a thousand crestfallen boys limp away in disappointment like newly-made eunuchs. Yikes. They exist everywhere.

3) There was a dude whose sole job was to mill about the first bar squirting a mixed drink (contained in a label-less water bottle, no less) into everyone's mouths. I was unaware of this new low of blunt simplicity when it comes to drinking. Like, I can jive (sorta) with keg stands, floor slides, bubble pits, vodka pong, vortex with nothing but surprise cups, whatever. But a guy squirting off-pink liquid into your mouth with nary a smile to be seen? He could have literally not worked for the pub crawl, and could've walked in, squirted liquid with like spider's eggs in it, and walked out. We all woulda accepted anyway.

4) ...

5) Don't tell yourself how surprising it is that you're not drunk yet. It makes the eventual fall a matter of pride as well as, uh, survival. Also, don't try walking home at night in Amsterdam. Everything looks the same. Thank you English-speaking man with iPhone who shook my hand in a nonchalant "wow, I'ma read about him in the newspaper tomorrow" way, for helping me home. And no, responsible parties, I wasn't black-out or something. Not even close. But I wasn't about to go shooting no apples off heads or something ya know heh heh

That's enough of the mildly uncomfortable stories, innit? Moving on.

While Amsterdam had the immediacy of a nuclear warhead, Germany is a grower, like a Joanna Newsom album or something. By now I'm pretty cozy with the city. I'm working up some travel plans, working up some chutzpah to cook something more ambitious than bread and jam, or pasta with salt, and working up the courage to starting really solidifying connections. I've met some random people, but since FU students are strewn all across Berlin, it's impractical and difficult to actually make something of a friendship. So be it. I've found a potential a cappella group (coed thank goooood, as a physics major on the men's track team in a male a cappella group I find activities with women in them startlingly beautiful), a choir for sure, and a language speaking program or something. Maybe I can try to find a swing dance club, so Lankyville and Limbs 2011 can hit Berlin.

So I've cooked some honest-to-god meals for myself lately, and oh my gah. Suddenly my facial hair has felt fuller, my voice a little deeper, my mind a little sharper. I cooked. And it was good. I really think so. Onions, garlic, sliced tomatoes with some tomato extract stuff for more flavor, salt, and pasta/chicken/rice/potatoes. Total number of ingredients exceed 5...that's a big moment.

I'm taking four courses right now. Three are good, one sucks, so I need to find a new one ASAP. German lecturing styles tend towards a stream of words with a breath every fifteen minutes are so. When the lecturer is engaging, this is okay, even when you miss some words. When the lecturer has all the presence and charisma of Droopy the Dog, it's not okay. Thus is my last class. And the stimulating subject matter of different historical theories applied to the Renaissances as a case study means John's eyelids are heavy. I'm not doing that for a semester.

The choir is dandy. It's a choir. It's kinda boring and easy. So it goes.

Anything else? I visited a bunch of places recently.

1) Tempelhofer Damm - a former airstrip now relegated to function as a park. Quite lovely on a nice day, huge field with tons of giggly children with kites. Tons of Germans on rollerblades...my goodness, Germans seem to love their rollerblades. And everyone has safety gear on, elbow and knee pads, gloves, helmet, very thorough. Meanwhile they meander contently along the runway like lazy sloths (sidenote: I had to look up whether the plural of sloth was "sloths" or "slothes". Harumph.) It was almost like the beginning of a twisted horror movie, right before everything goes wrong. I took some pictures. They'll be up on my photo account later tonight.

2) Zoologischer Garten. As the name suggests, it's a zoo. It was a normal zoo. Animals rejected my birdfeed, whatever the hell it was. Monkeys touched themselves, and eight different languages began firing off at once, all of them surely saying something like "LOOK THE MONKEY IS MASTURBATING". Very united we all were, for a moment there. The lions were missing. Knut is dead. Sad. But it was fun, and I can cross that off my last now.

3) Großer Tiergarten. A giant park. Oh man, I wandered through this alone as if I was high. I kinda wished I was, because these place was beautifully scenic. Again, pictures up later. But I'd walk around a corner, or into a new room, and my knees would literally weaken. I never realized I was such a sucker for nature. But I guess I am.

Library at FU is about to close, so I'm gonna close this blog post at the same time. Some massively sad (read: cheesy) piano music is being played right now, I guess to denote the sadness of the library closing for the day. It sounds like a scene out of a Final Fantasy game, where the love interest dies or something. NOT TODAY GERMANY. Anyway. I'll begin uploading pictures when I get back...so cheers. For now. I promise to be a bit more consistent in the future.

First week. made it.

Hi people. I greet you now in the midst of a complete stupor that is just now tapering off. Sure, there's the obvious reason for it: I fell sick two nights ago, and was completely knocked out all of yesterday. But more subtly, whooooaaaa Berlin. Holy crap. Well, hold your cockles there, I hear you say. Is that good or bad then? Undecided, if I may be honest. Verdict withheld for now. I'm waiting for durpuhdee-durp normal Berlin to emerge, then I think I'll understand what I think. That should address questions as to how I'm doing, right-o? Yea right. Let's get down to specifics here.

SO. I dunno. What do people usually write about on these things? I've had a lot of beer. Seriously, they sell that shit EVERYWHERE. I went to a stand that was a joint ice cream/beer stand. I mean, that's the sort of thing people make up when they want to make fun of Germany. "Oh-ho-ho beer with breakfast, beer with vitamins, beer with ice cream!" As it turns out, quips of such a nature are spot-on. On the trains, on the streets, everywhere. In short, it's wonderful. My favorite so far is any kind of Hefeweizen, I had a big one of those two nights back and it was lovely. Followed by some absinthe WHAT DID HE JUST SAY ABSINTHE OH MY GOODNESS. Funny story with that: the bartender served up two shots of absinthe, one for me and one for a friend of mine, and said "Traditional recipe! One part absinthe, five parts water! Good for Americans FAWFAWFAW". Where is it traditional to serve one part great with five parts shitty diluent? Nah. He thought we couldn't handle it. Whatever, bald German man. I was hunky-dory.

Let's talk language mishaps. Goodness, there's been some of those, right-o. My worst one so far: I'm opening a bank account at Deutsche Bank. The lovely young blonde (god, I sound like an old man) helping me is being very patient with this foreign boy, so all is good. Then I want to ask how I transfer money from my TD account to this new one. Already a dumb question, cause of course I would be the only one able to do that. But in asking, I say: "Wieso kann ich mein Geld überweisen?" 'Wieso' means why, not how. 'Wie' means how. So I asked this poor woman, "Why can I transfer my money over?" She gave me a blank look and blurted out "uh...WIE?" (uhh...how?). I shoulda rolled with it and tried to get all existential or political with that initial question. Another example. A friend of mine here wanted to ask for the bill at a little pub. The word for bill is "Rechnung". Instead, she finds the word "Regierung". Which means goverment. So she gets to ask, "Können wir bitte die Regierung haben?" ie "Can we have the government?". Yea. Yucked it up over that.

Let's talk entertainment. Been to a couple of, shall we call them "social environments" in Berlin. Let me tell y'all, America straight destroys entertainment. I mean, we all sort of know and appreciate that, but like REALLY. All the movies and all the music. Especially music. Germany seems to be in a strange time-warp with music though. For example, we heard Christina Aguilera's 1999 classic "Genie in a Bottle" playing after such tracks as "Like a G6" and "The Time (Dirty Bit)". I was all over the dance floor for the former...not so much for the two latter songs. Now, per my Facebook status...Germans can't dance. Now I ain't no toe-tapping prodigy, but I swear, they would just rock tentatively back and forth like firm tall oaks swaying in the wind, fists up and closed tightly like Rocky prepping for a tussle. German girls were somewhat better, but pretty aloof. No story there; there was just no warmth in the atmosphere. Except these two crazy Asian guys for about 10 seconds. I feel like you find that stereotype everywhere, all smiles and no English. Alas. Opportunity missed. PS: Everything is unavailable on Youtube here. Anything that is anything. Perfect (sad) example: once Friday from Rebecca Black got too big (15+ million views), it got taken down in Germany. What the flunk.

There's a place in Berlin that's like straight-up fairy tale land. That place is called Museum Island, a little strip of land isolated from the rest of Berlin by a river. As the name suggests, five differently-themed islands are speckled across the island. I haven't been to any yet (we were a bit short on time), but the place was staggering to walk around. And please take that seriously; I usually give zero craps about scenic beauty and whatnot, but this place was out of a movie. I have some pictures on my Flickr account (look how trendy I sound!). Some of them, by the way, are from the dope "Third Reich" tour I took with a couple friends; these are accompanied by little summaries of the wonderfully-told stories our tour guide had. Horrifying stories mostly, considering the subject matter, but totally fascinating. I plan on taking quite a few more of those.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60789836@N06/

That's my photo collection so far. To be expanded with more elaboration on certain pictures, but there they are.

Assorted thought bubbles below:

1) Avant-garde sax-driven music does not suite a night club, no matter how freakishly hipster it is. Adding a rhythmic tambourine does not get people to dance.

2) When one of the highlights of the evening is meeting a Canadian and getting asked "Why did you guys elect George Bush for 8 years?!", the night must be questioned.

3) Pretty sure we got offered drugs by two cute German girls. We didn't understand though, and they apparently didn't know the English words for "HAVE SOME DRUUUGS". They did wish us a very pleasant stay-vacation in Berlin yes, though.

4) In the UK, notes don't have the same time-duration names. As in, a half note is a minim. A quarter note is a crotchet, eighth is a quaver, sixteenth = semiquaver, 32nd = demisemiquaver. One dares to assume a 64th would be a hemidemisemiquaver. That means a conductor might call out in a piece "AWRIGHT SO THIS MEASURE IS TWO QUAVERS FOLLOWED BY A CROTCHET TIED TO A MINIM, THEN REPEATING THOSE DEMISEMIQUAVERS,". Seriously, how do you get more British? Probably the best part of the Third Reich tour, learning all this.

5) I had a delightfully ridiculous conversation with an older woman in a phone store, where she spoke in broken English and I spoke in broken German. First time I've giggled with a random 50+.

6) Clubs are certainly not for me. Bars playing old Herbie Hancock tunes with cool lighting certainly are.

7) I'm starting to love the way German sounds to my ears. Really. A pretty young girl asked me if I had a bottle opener for her soda and I coulda died. She has no idea. Lol, right?

Well, off to Amsterdam in seven hours or so. Hope I don't die. Be back soon with pictures and more tidbits. Cheers.

HOLY CRAP (the first day)

Well, that was interesting.

So we landed in Berlin. Not much to see, small airport, whatever. First impression: friendly people! A woman just kinda involved herself in our dumb English jokes as we waited for our luggage, all smiles and heavily-accented English. We (meaning mostly just my friend Jon) chatted with her a bit, moved on. Encounter number two: imagine to yourselves four offensively foreign foreigners trying to figure out the German ticket machine (pro-tip: selecting the English option just translates the welcome screen and nothing actually helpful, or so it felt), when suddenly an old embittered German man rambles up and just takes Euros from one of us and starts pressing buttons. We immediately engaged in some awkward hemming and hawing, threw some noncommittal German syllables in there ("uhrr"), and eventually managed to convey our respective destinations to this couldn't-be-more-German old man. This little anecdote is necessary, as it foreshadows the rest of my day quite well.

Uhh, we passed buildings. They looked nice. When I start taking pictures on tours, y'all will be more easily able to glean whatever you want about the appearance of the city from them. I'm not very keen on such things. For what it's worth, it's got the bussle of New York with a nice splash of quaint European-isms. So far, I like it. And I haven't really seen anything that Berlin actually tries to show off yet.

So people have claimed Berlin is logical and simple to navigate. Not true right from the beginning. Yea, now I get it, and most of my mistakes were rookie suburban white boy mistakes, not really the fault of Berlin. But damn. I had a stressful couple of hours. My friend Kfriend and I ended up at Hauptbahnhof (literally Main Station) and crashed with our luggage in a couple of chairs in a food court-y place. Kfriend bust out a plethora of maps and guidebooks, I sat in a chair, stared at things and said unhelpful things like "we need to find a bus". I figured out that I needed to take bus M85 (because it said so in English in the email I had gotten from Middlebury people...I put that one together well), and I walked outside and there it was. Now, this email said "Get off at Appenzellerstraße after 50 minutes". Okay.

I'm now convinced that Berlin busdrivers (Busfahrer) are universally stone-faced middle-aged men with a propensity for brevity, mumbling and scaring the hell out of foreigners. I say "Appenzellerstraße", he says "Ich kenne sie nicht" ("I don't know it") and mumbles some other things. I get confused, he promptly gives up on me, as well as making me pay, tells me there's a sign I should check. I find no such sign, I think I'm totally crazy, he eventually gets up real quick to show me where it is, then says "Schild nicht da, tut mir leid" ("Sign not there, sorry") and runs back. So now I'm on this bus, clueless whether I'm going the right way or not, haven't paid for a ticket, lugging two huge suitcases around, and sweating my balls off from nerves.

Let's cut the story short. I spent the next two hours getting all sorts of broken-English and scary-German advice about where I needed to go. I got on and off bus M85 three separate times in confusion, paying only once because I asked the busdriver, uhhh, don't I need to pay? And he said "Mmm ach so!" ("Mmm, oh yea!") and I paid. Apparently busdrivers are much more concerned with staying on time (and they are ON TIME) than making sure everyone there has paid. Most people have IDs or passes that they show so the busdriver kinda just apathetically flaps his hand to wave everyone through while looking German. That confused me more. And they were all terse, stone-faced middle-aged men. Could've been the same Helmut for all I know. In the end, I figured Berlin's public transportation out, doing much to damage the already terrible notion Europe has of Americans in the process. Sweated through one shirt. Got tons of pity smiles from German mothers. So it goes.

So. Now I'm settled in. My room is nice, other than the moment where every shelf in my closet promptly fell off their mounts and crashed to the floor, scattering all my nicely placed clothes. I could almost hear the damn laugh track, and had to cover it by saying "OH THAT'S JUST RIDICULOUS" to no one in particular. I've been to three stores; all the names sound like burly German men. Ladl (think small Walmart), Konrad (think Best Buy), and Roller (think IKEA). I was warned that Germans expect you to bag your own groceries SCHNELL SCHNELL SCHNELL, and it's mostly true. The silence permeating the store while I frantically bagged my stuff was, frankly, shriveling. Sweat through shirt number two! Here's a tidbit: you have to buy your own grocery bags in Germany, and most people bring their bags with them. Also, carts are all locked together, and you have to put in a Euro coin to unlock it, which you then remove and re-lock the cart when you're done. Yea...definitely creeped on an old German man for that information.

Tomorrow is a big day. Gotta do a bunch of official stuff and travel all over the place, so it should be interesting. I'm sure I'll have plenty of funny stories involving my extreme humiliation tomorrow, so tune in next time!

I'm bad at, uh, writing things that most people want to know. So let me know by email if there's something you wanna know. Cause I'll probably just write about weird things. So it goes.