Sachen zu Tun im Berlin

If I had to make a list of top things that Berliners I know enjoy and recommend about the city, I'd say these are the top choices.

15. Go clothes-shopping in almost any Kiez, or neighborhood
14. Freiluftkino, or open-air cinema
13. Museums (Technical Museum, Berlin Historical Museum, DDR museum, bunker tours)
12. Go up the Reichstag to view the city and appreciate the glass dome architecture -- during the day or even at night (you can reserve times until about 11pm, I think)
11. East-side Gallery
10. Eat a Mustafa's doener kebab (totally worth the 1+ hour wait)
9. Biergartens in the park (Cafe Am Neuensee is my favorite! It's in Tiergarten.)
8. Ride your bike along the canal or from park to park
7. Party randomly until 7am (including going to a squatters flat, for a squatters' party)
6. Flea markets!
5. Kegel-bowling (traditional German bowling)
4. Go to a traditional German sauna (eg. Stadtbad Neukoelln)
3. Bierbike 
2. Street festivals and open-air parties (such as Karnival der Kulturen or Mai Fest in the spring/summer time, and Christmas markets/Brandenburg Gate NYE party in the winter time)
1. (Sing at) Mauerpark's Bearpit Karaoke, in front of -- oh -- 3000 or so people at any given time!

Most of these I've done during my time in Berlin, but Geoff and I are running out of time to do the rest!! I have not had a chance to see an open-air movie here, and we've never been to a German sauna. We also haven't been to some of the recommended museums on the list. In the next week or two, this is my goal!! Chipping away at the bucket list like the best of them. Watch out!!!

Late Autumn in Berlin

Time for a bit of general Berlin updates! (Math teachers who are not interested in this: Sorry, go ahead and move along in your GReader.)

October and November have been fairly busy months for us! First, the Jersey boys came to visit during Oktoberfest. It was a very rowdy good time (we had rented a house in the heart of Munich), and Geoff got all kinds of nostalgic thinking about how this might be the last time -- minus our wedding -- that they could have crazy, random experiences like this, since all the boys are nearing that age when they are thinking about settling down for good...

By the way, I don't know if you have ever been to Oktoberfest, but there they build these huge tents (like the one you see below) for only the month of that festival. It's incredibly hard to get in on Fridays and Saturday nights to one of the big tents, so we had to bribe the bouncers. Once you get in, the tent gets more and more crowded and crazier and crazier as the day rolls on...

While the boys were still here in Germany, we rented a Bier Bike, which is a mobile bar that you can pedal around Berlin while singing out loud and waving at people. We blasted Queen's Bicycle Race several times during the course of two hours on the bike, and we kept going afterwards to a hipster restaurant called White Trash, followed by karaoke until about 3am. It's very Berlin to have a bunch of random experiences all in one day, because this city is just organic and crazy!

Soon after the boys left, I heard via the grapevine that the Berlin Light Show was about to come to an end, and that it was cool to see the light show from the top of the Berlin Reichstag (Congress Hall). I didn't even know that you could make an appointment to visit the Reichstag at night! We had only been there once during the day. So, on a Sunday night in late October, we walked around Berlin to enjoy the light festivities on the famous monuments, and then went up the Reichstag.

Halloween was a bit quiet this year. On the actual day of Halloween itself, we had German class, so I went to class as normal and only wore my cat ears to be festive. My non-American classmates thought it was funny that I would celebrate this type of holiday still in costume. On the way back, I was impressed to see a holiday graffiti at the subway station, since it was quite a production and you know graffiti artists are seriously prosecuted by the subway officials. Later during the weekend, we went to a party where Geoff dressed up as the recycling goddess (he made a hula hoop skirt out of toilet paper rolls that we had collected for over 6 months, and also he made a busty bikini top out of cut-out juice containers), and I was dressed as eine Katz im Sack zu verkaufen, which means I was a cat inside a trash bag, with a for-sale sign taped to the bag. In German, "buying a cat in a bag" means to purchase something (such as a used car or an old building) without having seen it, so you don't really know how it's going to behave afterwards. In other words, I was playing off a German pun, but Germans don't really get why Americans would dress up as non-scary things for Halloween, so it was a fairly obscure costume...

Then, there was the Sparkle Army party this year! The Sparkle Army is an annual party at our favorite karaoke place, where if you dress up in sparkles then you can get in for free. We have some friends who have been going every year for about 5 or 6 years (since the inception of this idea). The slogan of the party is, amazingly, "More is more!" They really want to spread the word of sparkle. Last year we went to the party, but we were pretty last-minute about the preparations. This year, since I had coincidentally run into the Sparkle Army girls while they were shopping for supplies a weekend in advance, I went ahead and made advance preparations. We ended up bringing 20 of our people to the party. It was a blast!!

To give you just a small taste of why this party is awesome, here was actually some random guy (not one of our friends) with an absolutely awesome outfit. He even had slippers with glitter bulbs glued on, and there were stuffed animals sewn onto his pink tutu. Faaaaan-freakin-tastic!

whew. That's all the fall updates for now. December will get its own story, when it's time... My friend comes to visit this Friday, to enjoy Christmas markets in Berlin with us. I have planned already a Christmas market crawl -- in Santa Claus outfits (a la Santa Convention style, like you can find in some major cities in the States). I can't wait! Our cheap Santa costumes will get delivered on Wednesday, and we bought the most hilarious-looking ones with a funny-looking shoulder cape... Let the Christmas season begin!

Mini Wedding Updates

So, now that I am on October break and work is temporarily put into the back of my mind, I thought I'd give a little bit of wedding prep updates. Brace yourselves!

On a semi-happy note, I think I found a dress. It's short, classy, and suits who I am without being "loud." The complication is that I had let 3 or 4 weeks pass in between the first time I had tried on the dress, and going back to purchase it.* So, during that time the dress I had tried on (which was in my size) had been sold, and so I decided to buy a dress that is 6 sizes too big to have them size it down. No problem, except when I went back today to try on the dress again, it's now too small and the dress bunches up in weird places instead of falling smoothly like it's supposed to. The store seems to still think that they can fix it OK, but I really needed their help to zip it up today and it looked very funny anyway -- definitely not the fitting experience I had hoped for. To me, it's all a bit nerve-racking, because the alternative is that I'd have to start over looking for a new dress, with less time left.**

On top of this, there are some not-so-straight-forward stylistic alterations that I want them to make to the existing dress (as recommended by my dress jury and my own gut instincts). It requires them to crinkle some fabric in the same style that the rest of the dress is already crinkled. The store people told me that they're not sure that they can do it, but that they'll try (with a mixture of chemicals, getting the fabric wet, and repeated ironing) and then let me know if it's even possible. So, at this point, the whole dress is a bit of an unknown variable still.

On another note, I am really looking forward to the wedding itself. My boss granted me 2 extra days off (attached to a two-week-long spring break, so it's no trivial matter), and that means that we're heading over to Puerto Rico for a mini pre-wedding honeymoon en route to Belize! Geoff, the ever responsible one, researched to find out that there is some bio-luminescent area of PR that is a must-see. So, we're going to brave Mosquito Bay merely days before our big day. :)

This is not wedding related, but for you non-Facebookers, here is a recent photo of us from Oktoberfest in Munich. Lovely time all around, with a great group of friends from the States!

*Problems in paradise: I went to the Berlin Music Festival, which took up one whole weekend in September. Then, the next weekend I was in Leipzig for a Coldplay concert on Friday night, and couldn't make it back in time on Saturday to go to the store. The following weekend my girlfriends were not around to give me the thumbs up. So, it was 4 weeks later when I finally made it back to the store. In the interim, I had been trying to convince myself that I always get paranoid about things for no reason. Little did I know that my paranoia was totally real, and the one correct-sized wedding dress did sell out within those 4 weeks! 

**I googled this problem, as googling is my way of self-therapy whenever I feel anxious about something. As you would expect, many brides-to-be purchase dresses that are several sizes too small -- on purpose! And then, weeks before their wedding they panic if they still cannot fit into the dress that never fit them in the first place. OMG. As a chronic stresser, I cannot even imagine how panicked I would be to still have a dress that I cannot fit into, two or so weeks prior to the actual wedding. I can only hope that people who do this have allotted extra money to buy a second dress!

Road Trip with the Coxes

To blog a bit about our recent travels, the (future) in-laws have been visiting us for about two weeks. During this time, we took a 9-day road trip with them to Heidelberg and Prague, and along the way we had also stopped by the "Disney" castle, Neuschwanstein, and the city of Dresden. It was a lot of driving for Geoff over the course of 9 days, and a lot of wine and champagne and meaty German/Bavarian/Czech food consumption for all of us, but overall the trip was a really great opportunity for me to get to know the Coxes better, and definitely a rare and lovely/special occasion for Geoff and his parents to travel together in his adulthood!

Here are some pictures from Geoff's phone (therefore excuse the weird borders and stuff):

Among other things, we went to an aquarium in Berlin where you can ride an elevator up through a tube of cylindrical fish tank.When you are riding up through the fishtank, you can see through it to see the aquarium hotel that surrounds the fish tank. It's a tourist trap, but a rather nice one.

We also did boat tours in every city (Berlin, Heidelberg, and Prague). Ironically, the weather for our boat tour in Berlin was the best out of the three. Heidelberg was steamy hot and Prague was rainy on the days of our boat tours. Berlin, which is consistently rainy, was actually nice and breezy and dry during those first days of the Coxes' visit.

As one would expect, we imbibed plentifully. In Berlin, Geoff took his parents to the Hofbrauhaus, which is a chain brewery/restaurant that originated from Munich and that has huge beer halls and huge steins of beer, Oktoberfest style. His dad thought the traditional fried pork knuckle from there (Schweinehaxe) was fantastic.

Heidelberg is beautiful. Smaller than Berlin, but a college town and full of buzzing young people. There are charming houses and traditional red rooftops all over, and some random castles and fortified houses up in the hills. We were here for a few days, and it was pretty slow-paced and nice.

We took a drive down to Bavaria from Heidelberg, to visit the Schloss Neuschwanstein. This is the castle that all of the Disney castles are inspired by. The inside is only 1/3 finished because the king died halfway through its construction, but I think the parts that are done are very rustic and medieval-looking; it's worth a visit. My favorite part is a man-made cave next to the king's bedroom. Really random and eclectic interior design!

You cannot tell from this picture, but that day it was about 30 degrees Celsius. I had to strip down to my undershirt, basically, because it was so damned hot. The view from the Neuschwanstein Castle, however, was stunning. It made me really miss Utah from last summer, because there is simply no view like this in the flatlands of Berlin.

Next up, we went to Prague. In Prague, the local food was amazing -- something that I had not experienced previously when I went as a chaperone on a school trip. This time, we ate our hearts out and quite literally every restaurant was amazing. Here is me munching on a trdol, which is a hollow bread glazed with sugar. (They make it simply by slapping dough around a rotating rolling pin, and then sticking it over some coals; afterwards, they add sugar or glaze it.) The bread reminded me of the brioches from Berkeley's Cheeseboard that I had once loved so much.

 

And here is a photo of the roadside "Prague old ham" that is sold in the center of the town. We tried it; it was delicious and juicy, but (in my personal opinion) you should try the sausage from the same vendor. They have the best sausages I've ever had. In my life! The sausages are spicy and literally bursting with juice upon each bite.

Geoff's mom had steak tartare at the same restaurant 3 days in a row, because it was that good. Also very notable is the Czech style of preparing garlic bread: they first fry buttered toast, and then they serve it with raw pieces of garlic, which you need to cut and rub onto the toast. It's sinful how garlicky and buttery the whole thing tastes!


Here is a picture we took in front of an apparently famous water wheel, as seen from the Charles Bridge. When we took this picture, we didn't know that this water wheel was the subject of many artists' paintings of Prague.

Another view of the gate next to the famous Charle's Bridge:

We also went to the Prague castle, obviously. Here's a view of the cathedral, from outside and inside. This cathedral is nice, but not quite as ornate on the inside as the St. James' Cathedral downtown.

One night, we decided on a whim to go catch a performance of parts of Don Giovanni at an old opera house in Prague. We decided to do this because it was the original theater where Mozart himself had directed the same opera, which he had written in Prague, for the people of Prague. The music and the singers' voices were absolutely enchanting, even though the lyrics were a mix of Italian and German and we couldn't follow the storyline. The theater was magnificent, and the experience of sitting in a box seat (Geoff's parents had decided to splurge a bit, so we went along with them to stay altogether) was also unique and very luxurious. (Of course, I did not bring appropriate attire on the trip for such luxurious occasion; you can't see it here, but I am wearing sneakers.)

On our last night in Prague, we had the most delicious meal on top of an old clock tower in a restaurant called Zvonice, because Geoff's parents wanted to relive their fabulous experience of dining there 7 years ago. (It's not the famous astronomical clock tower, but another one downtown somewhere.) It was expensive, but mostly because of the awesome wines we had. I think you could have a terrific meal in this cozy restaurant with breath-taking views, for about 30 to 35 Euros per person, which isn't too bad considering the phenomenal experience you would have. You could even see in the corner of the picture below of the large bell that still hangs behind Derek in the middle of the restaurant / tower. My lamb dish was every bit as good as it looks, and so were all the other dishes.

  

On our drive back from Prague, we stopped by Dresden for a bit. Not my favorite German city, unfortunately; I don't think it has that much character, to be honest. If you are familiar with the history of Dresden, basically 95% of the downtown area was destroyed in the air raids of WWII, so what's left now is mostly a reconstruction of what the old, beautiful Dresden had once looked like.  We walked through the old town, which still has remnants of the past glory. The food in Dresden was also mediocre -- typical German fare, and a pale comparison to the complex flavors offered by the cuisine in Prague, sadly.
 

But, all in all, it was a fantastic trip! Now that I have a flip-flop tan, I am truly in the summer mode. :)

Hamburg!

We are in the middle of a 4-day weekend (Tuesday, May 1, is Labour Day in Germany, so we have a bridge holiday on Monday as well), so Geoff and I decided to take a weekend trip away. Originally we were planning to go to Rotenburg Ob Der Tauber, which is a walled medieval city in Bavaria, but because of some last-minute logistical issues, we changed our plan and took the train instead to Hamburg for two days.

The city of Hamburg is elegant and lovely; if you go, I highly recommend taking a free daily walking tour that starts at 11am in front of the Starbucks in the Rathausmarkt. (Since this tour is publicized by Starbucks, you can get flyers from any Starbucks in the city, that includes a city walking map.) The tour runs on tips only, but the tour guide we had was fabulous and weaved together all of the architecture of Hamburg with fascinating historical details for about 2-3 hours.

In Hamburg there is the former headquarters of the factory that produced Zyklon B, which was used by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews during WWII. The tour stops here for a bit as the tour guide points out the fact that the German government had to win a lawsuit against the current building owners in order to put up a plaque at its entrance to help people remember the crimes that took place.

Also, there is the St. Nikolai Church ruins that are a testimony to the 8 days of 24-hour nonstop bombing campaign that the Allies bought upon the city in 1943. The raids were ominously named Operation Gemorrah, which in itself is a name to make me shudder. At least 40,000 people died in the air raids on Hamburg, and the fire storms in the city grew to be three times the height of the St. Nikolai Church, displacing over a million Hamburg residents. Today, the scorched church ruins are left as a memorial to the damages done by war. (It's hard to gather unbiased information about this, but I think that Germans consider the raids an act of war crime from the Allies.)

The St. Michael's Church in Hamburg is also where Johann Bezenberg made his experiment to help prove that the earth rotates about its axis, using the observation that the object dropped from the top of the church does not land directly underneath but lands slightly "ahead" of the rotation.

Besides that, there is a very lively and touristy red light district to check out in Hamburg (prostitution is legal in Germany), where the Beatles had frequented/performed during the time that they had lived in Hamburg. There is also a Miniatur Wunderland, which boasts to have the largest model trains in the world, which Geoff loved. (I am not very interested in model train cars, as it turns out. The place was far too crowded for my liking; I did like their airport models, however, with planes taking off and landing on schedule, and I liked that they altered the amount of daylight periodically to show dusk, dawn, morning, and evening views of the various models.)

The city itself is surrounded by canals and waterways, and it is lovely to walk around, especially in this fresh spring temperature. We didn't eventually have time to do this, but there is also a water ferry #62 that is covered by your all-day metro tickets that you could ride around the city. I plan to return at some point to Hamburg to see their famous Sunday fish market, to try their famous local Hamburg fish dishes, and obviously to ride the ferries! So, till next time, Hamburg! :)

PS. We noticed that Hamburg -- or at least the parts where we were -- had few people drinking on the streets as compared with Berlin, even though technically it is still legal to drink in open air. Our tour guide told us that the city has been making a concerted effort to drive what it perceives as "bad" behavior out to the fringes of the city, by playing classical music on the intercoms near the financial center of the city. Hilarious. We did hear classical music being played everywhere from the intercom speakers; it is amusing that it is viewed as a deterrent for drinkers to linger around. Of course, our tour guide also thinks Berlin is "bombastic!" :) :)

PPS. Much to my disappointment, hamburgers (the delicious things they sell at In and Out) didn't come from Hamburg!

Shanghai Exchange

I just spent a weekend hosting four teachers from a traditional public middle school in Shanghai. Our school has an exchange program with them, where they take a small group of their students here to visit in the fall, and we take a small group of our students over there to visit in the spring. The kids stay with host families and go with their host students to classes, and the adults are hosted by local adults in order to get an authentic feel of the place.

It turned out to be very useful that I can speak Chinese. Two of the teachers spoke English very well, as they are English teachers at the school. A third one understood a decent amount, but a fourth one did not speak any English at all. It was not necessary, therefore, for me to speak Chinese, but the fact that I could helped all of them feel comfortable. Geoff tagged along to also be a tour guide, and we took the teachers to see all the usual touristy places.

We started off in Alexanderplatz on Saturday, took some pictures at the Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall), and then they declined paying to go up the TV Tower, which is the highest point in Europe. I then took them shopping (as per their request), and after lunch we went over to the beautiful Reichstag, which is where the German laws are made. We had made a reservation beforehand, so we got to go up to the beautiful glass dome of the Reichstag, and to take a self-guided audio tour that introduced us to the features of the buildings surrounding the Reichstag and the features of the dome itself.

On Sunday, we first went to Schloss Charlottenberg, which is a beautiful palace built hundreds of years ago during the Prussian dynasty, and still today reflects the luxury of those times. During WWII, much of the palace was bombed and destroyed, so much of what you can see today is the result of reconstruction in the 80s. Still, you can get a sense of the grandeur that once dominated this palace. After some hours at the palace, we headed over to the famous Checkpoint Charlie to take some photos, and then we walked along the Eastside Gallery, which is a stretch of the remnants of the Berlin Wall that has since been turned into a symbol for hope and inspiration as artists have made the wall into an elaborate art display.




During the course of the day, I got a chance to ask about the school in Shanghai. One of the girls told me that in Shanghai, there are four tiers of schools: city-level magnet schools, district-level magnet schools, "normal" schools, and private or independent schools. At the end of every level of schooling (ie. elementary school, or middle school, or high school), kids need to take a city-wide test and apply for the next schools. The system is very competitive, because in order to get into a good college (or perhaps any college at all), you need to be from a top high school, which means you needed to be from a top middle school. There are some exceptions to this system, however, such as the fact that a kid who lives within a certain close proximity to a school has the right to attend that school, even if the kid is not academically qualified. And, on top of that, there is a lot of pressure from the government to make sure that ALL kids pass every class by the end of middle school, regardless of whether the child was qualified to attend this school in the first place. So, that creates a lot of pressure on the teachers AND on the kids who need to struggle to pass just ONE class, let alone all classes.

In Shanghai, this teacher tells me that they teach roughly only half of the time that I teach, but that in every class they have 40 kids. I asked her if she thinks she has enough time to reach every kid and to take care of them, and she said no. Most of her prep time is spent on correcting the daily homework that was assigned. The kids go home and most of them do their homework through midnight each night. So, it is an eye-opening experience for their kids to come to our school and see that our middle-schoolers have barely any homework and enjoy so much freedom at home and in school.

I look forward to visiting their school in April to see for myself what it's like!