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!

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. :)

Spring in Berlin

Yesterday was a very "Berlin" day! I think there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than in Berlin, right at this moment. The air is warm and the days are long. People pour onto the streets the way people in cold regions do, when the long winter is finally over. The city awakens in a soft blanket of green foliage, and because the buildings here are not so tall, there is sunshine everywhere. In Berlin, every restaurant has tables outside, and the streets are teeming with pedestrians until 10pm.

Geoff and I biked down to Mehringdamm and had dinner on the bustling Bergmannstrasse. When we were there, we saw a piano player on an old piano in the middle of the sidewalk. A glass of wine sat on top of his old wooden piano. A German toddler wearing plaids watched on, while her dad stood by holding a bike, enjoying the open-air music. We got ice cream before dinner, because it was that kind of temperature. Even though spring has just arrived, I am sure we are already on the cusp of summer.

After dinner, we rode up the street to meet some friends at a biergarten. It was utterly lovely, and the place was just filling up as we were leaving after 9pm. I had two full glasses of wine plus a bit more, which is a bit much for me on any day. I swayed on home happily on my bike and didn't realize we were so close to home until we turned onto our cobblestoned street.

I would write a poem to describe the loveliness of summer in Berlin, but I am not a poet. I would take a picture, except it would do the city no justice. I have always enjoyed the cities in which I live, but I love Berlin like I haven't loved a place in a long time.

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!

Life in Germany

I haven't updated much about life in Germany in a little bit, because honestly, I've been mired in work trying to get through the first season of preparing my students for the IBs. (They leave school at the end of April on a week long "study leave" before the exams begin, so I'm certainly not out of the thick of it yet.)

But, little updates about Germany. Nothing big because we haven't traveled much recently, but just little things:

• Did you know that Germans typically get married while they're having the public ceremony at the city hall? As in, instead of that part just being a paperwork thing, the entire family goes down with them to witness that moment when they get married. In fact, the entire wedding is planned around that appointment at the local town hall. Of course, this creates a bit of issues because Germans really like to get married on "easy to remember" dates, such as 4/8/12. (That means, by the way, August 4. European-style dates, as I now prefer. It really makes more sense if you think about it, than mm/dd/yy.) My friend Mandy, for example, had to reserve a place to hold her wedding reception a year in advance, and then only 6 months in advance of her wedding date could she go down to the town hall to make an appointment for her wedding. The line was very long -- there were people who had arrived at 5am to wait (in sub-freezing temp), even though the town hall doesn't open until 9am. She got the last appointment available for 4/8/12, and there were still about 20 people in line behind her who didn't get their appointments made. I asked her what would have happened if she didn't get that appointment, and she said that basically she would have had to try another town hall, and then maybe another. But, this is not good because that means that they would have had to hire a bus to take all of their family members to possibly a far away town to get married, and then to take them back to the wedding reception area. Phewey! And, by the way, most German weddings are very small and only involve family and maybe a couple of very close friends.
  
  
• In terms of German schooling, I've heard from a math teacher that her child is in a public German school, and they start streaming / grouping by levels in as young as 4th grade. By the 4th grade, kids are already carrying planners around with them all day and there are very high expectations of independence.
  
  
• Of course, this is tied to cultural expectations in general. On the streets of Berlin, I often see very young children (maybe 3 or 4 years old) crying while riding/wobbling on their bicycles for the first time down the street. Their parents are typically at least a block ahead of them and not stopping to wait and nurture the kids as you would expect American parents to do. Of course, for months before that (maybe since they're 2 or so??), those same kids have already been running down the street on their little training bikes going as fast as their parents on the big bikes.
  
  Training bikes look like this. The kids glide on them so fast even without pedals, they're practically already riding bikes down the street.
  
  
  But yes, it's definitely tough love. That's why one of my German colleagues could not understand why a 6th-grader's parent did not want us to just leave the kid at a cafe in a train station by himself to wait for his parents to come with his passport before hopping on the train to catch up with everyone else who would have already been on their way. To Germans, 6th-graders should be perfectly capable of doing these things.
  
  
• And if you have been following the German scandal with their former President, Christian Wulff, you might know that many Germans are very happy to see him step down. The President of Germany, different from their Chancellor (Angela Merkel), is more of a figurehead than anything else. They say that he is "kind of like the Queen of England, except he is elected." Because of that, they expect him to be basically perfect. So, even though his scandal involved possible corruption from when he was a governor, he had to step down. Our German friends were following this bit of news closely in hopes that he would.
  
  
• I recently witnessed the German BVG people (sort of "subway and bus police") come around and check tickets on a bus. It was very funny because the bus was very crowded and the stops were too frequent for them to be able to catch people getting off the bus right away when they had gotten on. They ended up jumping off the bus at the first stop, because they thought someone who didn't have a ticket was running away. The whole thing was pretty comical, and I wish they would just stick to checking tickets on the subways, which seems to work pretty well for them. Busses are just too chaotic for doing that kind of thing. ...But, I have to also say that I think people should just buy bus tickets legitimately. We need to support the public transit!! The German transit system is by far the best I've seen!
  
  
• Something for me to investigate is cigarette laws here. Geoff and I met a Marlboro marketing guy when we were in Turkey, and he said that in Germany it's legally allowed to post cigarette ads everywhere. In fact, Marlboro right now has a huuuuge campaign called "(May)Be" that has the word "Maybe" but the first part crossed out. I never understood what it meant until he explained that it means that instead of being a "Maybe" smoker, you should just "Be" a smoker. How terrible that this is allowed!!
  
  This definitely has a negative effect on the young smokers. I regularly see teenagers smoking around schools. I have also seen them at the bus stop rolling their own cigarettes, which is interesting because it looks like something else. I can only imagine that if you roll your own cigarettes, the filter doesn't work very well and you're getting even more carcinogens into your body.
  
  I don't mind when adults smoke (as long as they are not disgusting about it), but I think it is really bad that we let kids, whose bodies are still growing and whose minds are not yet ready to make their own decisions, be exposed so readily to cigarettes. :(
  
  
• On another note, I've been learning German, slowly but surely. I am really glad that I make weekly appointments with my private tutor, because if I didn't, I surely would not feel motivated to be doing stuff every week on top of being incredibly busy at work. But, with her I feel that my reading comprehension is certainly getting better, and my understanding of the German grammatical structure is as well. On top of it, I've now finished the Pimsleur Book 1 audiotapes and have begun Book 2. I am happy because I think I am moving along about as fast as I did when I learned Spanish, and I was certainly comfortably conversational in Spanish by the time I had left El Salvador. Right now I can make broken sentences to say to my German teacher to tell bits and pieces of a story, but sometimes I still lose patience and switch over to English. By the end of the year, I hope to be able to say everything in German!
  

Updates from Deutschland

I thought I'd take a minute and do some life updates. Time is flying by!

Things are going smoothly over in Berlin. I had put in a lot of work (ie. over 10-hour work days daily) from August to November to learn the new curricula and to earn the trust of my colleagues and student parents, and finally I was ready to re-focus on what I needed for myself. So, in a non-trivial gesture, I'm back doing yoga on a weekly basis and am LOVING it more than ever. (My new yoga teacher is really tough, but I love him!) I've also arranged for a private German teacher to work with me starting in the new year, since I feel like I cannot commit to 6 hours of classes like Geoff does during the work week. Socially, things are good and we've met a lot of fun people. :) Overall, despite the weather getting colder and the days getting darker, we are enjoying our first winter in Germany!

Recently, we got some free tickets to check out a Christmas market outside of Berlin, so we took the local train there last Sunday. It turned out to be a fairly small market, but the town was very charming!

The town had a lot of old people on bikes. I did not see a single young person riding a bike that day. I told Geoff that some day, we're going to retire to towns with old people on bikes. :) The town also had statues that looked like they were from old Grimmes' tales.


There were gondolas ferrying people back and forth between the two sides of the Christmas market. The ride was long and a bit chilly, but we had blankets and people were drinking hot mulled wine ("gluhwein"), which is common at Christmas markets and really all around Germany at this time of year.



We also saw a for-rent sign next to this cute little barrel of a room. It's even smaller than our apartments in NYC!!


Geoff took a photo of some locals moving a tractor via two gondolas.


All in all, it was a lovely day away from the city, and a much needed break from all of the stress I had been feeling from nearing the big semester exams. :)

I am looking forward to checking out some of Berlin's very own Christmas markets this weekend. Gluhwein, here we come!

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!

Binders and Other German Updates

Did you know that in Germany, binders (for holding papers) only have two rings, not three? That's a Geometry postulate in action! How many points does it take to secure the hinge of a piece of paper?




(There is at least one advantage to doing the two-hole punch; your hole-puncher is smaller, and has a retractable frame that comes out to meet the full length of the paper.)


In other news, another interesting tidbit about Germany: If your baby is half German or more, you can only name them certain "acceptable German names" from a list. Yikes.

Also, liver is very popular here; something like a traditional fare. You have to be careful, because German words are long and if a word ends in leber it means it's some type of chunky liver dish.

I've started discussing current events weekly with my home room, just to gauge how they feel about certain things (and maybe in the long run, I can gently influence their opinions on some issues). We started yesterday with talking about how well over 500 cars have been set on fire in the city of Berlin this year, by arsonists, and why they think this is happening. Interesting stuff, because I don't think that adults have the answers to this question...

Germany: First Weeks

To put it mildly, Geoff and I have been very busy since our arrival in Germany 13 days ago. In those 13 days, I have: gone to the bank (twice) to start new bank accounts; gone to the school (twice) to do HR stuff and to meet my future administrators; registered with the city as a current resident and received a tax ID; seen a dentist/surgeon and made a follow-up appointment for wisdom teeth extraction for next week; gone to IKEA 3 times, in the rain, by subway and then a lot of walking each time (first time at IKEA, we were there for 8 straight hours, no joke); gone shopping at different stores nearly everyday for the apartment, since there is no equivalent of Walmart within subway reach of Berlin and our apartment needed fridge, washer/dryer, shower curtains, mirror in the bathroom, and everything else in between; run around to get our prepaid internet 3G stick/phones working; started to look for yoga studios and to explore our beautiful neighborhood; read two books on my new Kindle, and bought two more; confirmed that our permanent internet will be hooked up by early next week.

I know, that doesn't sound like a lot. It is. And that doesn't include building furniture, which Geoff pretty much did single-handedly (both because he's awesome and because he doesn't trust me to build our furniture).

First impressions of Berlin:

* Beautiful bike lanes throughout the city
* German girls are oozing with style, even on rainy days -- this is the first place I've lived where girls look simply decadent and fabulous in their black stockings with big holes (not by design).
* Everything is so do-it-yourself. I ordered an ice cream softie and they gave me a token. I mistook it for a Euro dollar, and put it away. When I got to the machine with my cone, I realized while examining the machine that it requires a token to get started. You put your cone inside the holder, insert the token, and press a button to start the automagic making of a perfect swirl. That's one of many examples of how Germany is awesomely efficient.
* I cannot say that Berliners are very nice to foreigners who don't speak German. I really don't intend on being one of those assholes who speak English everywhere, but when I say, "Haben sie wein fur cooking?" I expect them to not yell at me for sucking at life. I cannot wait to have time to study German.
* My new coworkers, the ones I've met anyway, are very worldly and interesting. I am hopeful!
* The toilets are shaped funny. Really. Check out this article.
* There are outdoor markets and farmer's markets EVERYWHERE! yay!!
* Berlin has a lot of ethnic food. So far, I've had decent Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, French cuisines, and some mediocre Indian, Tibetan, and Italian meals. There's a good falafel place just down the street from our apartment. And the cheese breads here are to die for! Brotchen mit kase!!
* As you would expect, the subway system is superb and runs on an honor system a lot like the lightrail system in Newark, NJ, where you get your ticket validated and the police only does pop checks for tickets, no turnstiles or anything. It makes me wonder what the overall loss/gain of profit is when you take away all those people who have to work full time at the NYC stations to monitor that no one is jumping the turnstiles, and you replace it with an honor system.
* One time fairly late at night, we had trouble getting home because all the trains were running on opposite tracks and only going for one stop because of construction. It was weird. Not something I would expect in Berlin. Even the locals were confused!
* On Sundays, everything closes. That's nice for two reasons: Everyone stays out until sunrise on Saturdays. You sleep in on Sundays until the afternoon, and then have a super lazy day afterwards.
* Here you can choose your electricity company from a list of various options (some are more eco-friendly than others but also cost more). And our "condense" dryer operates on humidity-sensor. In Germany, people really like to go for the natural stuff, so you can find Mango lassis on the street and people don't get general anesthesia for oral surgeries. I am discovering new things daily that remind me that I live in a first world country!
* Last but not least, I've been giving some thought to how we are all defined by our past, our present, and our future. My question (which will take me a while to answer) is how the current Germany is affected by its Nazi Germany past? Geoff asked someone about how many Jewish people live in Berlin. That person (a Berlin local) said that there are always German policemen stationed next to the Jewish schools for security reasons. Sadly, Neo-Nazis are still very much a real thing in parts of Europe, Germany included.

Anyway, that's it for now! I've got some big posts coming up. I'll get back to this Germany stuff later. Ciao!