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.