half way...already?

So here I am, halfway done in Berlin. Next week will be the halfway mark for the whole trip! That's crazy, it so doesn't feel that long.

This week was another busy week. On Monday we went to Potsdam and saw Schloss San Soussi which was amazing. We only got rained on a little bit and it was sunny for the most part. We wandered through the grounds and it was just a beautiful day.



Thursday after school, I pretty much spent all afternoon with Professor Kelling. He wanted to go visit the place where these three Mormons were hanged and Jen and I went with him cuz we had nothing better planned. Then he came with me to the Gemaldegalerie even though he had already been there. It was so cool, I had my own personal tour guide. Then he took me out for dinner and I had some amazing goulash. It was really fun. He is one of those really amazing old guys.


The best part of my week though was by far Saturday. On Saturday I woke up at 3am so I could make it to the train station by 5 and go to the Freiberg Temple. It was me and Jen and Richard who went and it was such an amazing experience, totally worth the 10+ hours of transit it took to get there and back.

We got there by magic!

So there is this girl in our ward who is from Orange County, she is about 25. She only started learning German a little while ago when she moved to Germany because that is where her boyfriend lives. They met at Oxford where they were completing their masters in African Studies. She then lived in NYC before deciding that the long distance thing wasn't working out (I tell you all of this cuz I think it makes for a pretty cool life). Anyway, I decided to make friends with her because she speaks no German and that can't be fun. So she invited my roommate and I over for dinner one night, we exchanged phone numbers and she gave me her address and it was all set up for Tuesday night at 7.

So Kelsey and I go and get off the train at a rather ghetto area of town and I realize that I don't have my German phone with me. I grabbed my useless (in this case) iPhone but not the one that has her phone number on it. We were supposed to call her when we got there to be buzzed up. Kelsey and I decide to just go to the apartment building and see if we could find her. Now, we were going to her boyfriend's apartment because she said that it had a beautiful balcony that we could eat on and the kitchen was better than hers.

There were a row of apartments that had balconies in front and none of the others did. So that narrowed it down a bit. On the list of call buttons, we could scratch out the inner building apartments. Then we start buzzing apartments, asking for this girl who doesn't actually live there. At some point this guy shows up on his bike and rightly asks what we were up to and if he could help. Luckily he spoke English because I could not have described this in German and Kelsey had pretty much been silent the whole time. So this guy says that there were two apartments that it could be, one was some young guys who lived there. So he took us in and showed us the way. We knocked on this random door and it was the right one!!! CRAZY!!!!

sorry I'm so bad at telling stories. But this was amazing. By all means, it shouldn't have worked.

Picture Fail

So sorry I'm so bad at taking pictures, it's just that unless I'm taking pictures of people, it seems pointless. Since there isn't anyone to take pictures of, I'm not taking a lot of pictures. I prefer experiences and memories to pictures anyway.

This week was yet another beautiful week in Berlin, made better by the fact that it was much warmer (finally!). On Monday we did another trip to the Historical Museum and that was pretty cool. We have to see the whole thing because it's pretty much our text for our culture class (um, awesome text much?). Anyway it's huge, so we go in sections and that was my second trip. Then on Tuesday we went to the Ritter Sport store. It is full of lots and lots of chocolate and was lots of fun. Wednesday was dinner with Dr. Kelling. He is having everyone over in groups of 7 to his apartment for soup. It was very good, very German soup with a crazy amazing hazelnut cake-like thing for dessert. I love talking to that guy! He has such amazing stories. Thursday was the New Museum, which has the bust of Nefertti. It was amazing to see, we are going to go back sometime. Then we went to our culture class and to Institute. Friday was the DDR museum. Holy cow, so much fun! It was like an interactive history museum and they had all kinds of crazy things from East Germany. Both Kelsey and I got a little shock at the last part though. You see, as a form of protest, a lot of nudest colonies popped up. Yeah, we weren't expecting that to be part of a museum.

Saturday was the best though. Dr. Kelling took us to Lubec, which is about a 3-3.5 hour train ride. It is a beautiful town with a lot of fun architecture. So much of Berlin was destroyed in the war so a lot of what we see here is replicas of originals so it loses something. But Lubec didn't get so many bombs hurled at it and still has a lot of old buildings. They also have a crazy fun Marzipan store. I love long train rides (as long as it isn't a train-day).

This weekend there is a huge festival going on right around where we live, so when we came back from church there were a bunch of street vendors everywhere and they were cooking good food and I wish it weren't Sunday so I could have eaten it all! It also happens to be a holiday today and tomorrow - Pfinksten (aka Pentecost). Holidays kind of stress me out here because very little is open. In America, there is always that 24 hour sav-on, but not here. I get nervous when things close down.

Um, I think that's all for this post. It wasn't a boring week, but a rather boring post. I only have 5 weeks left in Berlin and 7 left till home!! AHhhh!!!

old, cold and NOT ENGLISH!

Well, I should have more to report on, but it's been mostly museums and I am getting all museum-ed out! Though we did get to see the Old Gallery and that had a bunch of paintings in it and I love me some paintings. I am one of those people that can sit in front of a painting and just stare at it and be happy (most paintings, but not all, some are gruesome or just plain dull). Before that, all our museums had been full of old crap! I really don't care about the pots and pot fragments they found or the bazillions of old coins. I am just not interested in that kind of stuff, I prefer paintings and parks/landscaping.

We also took a short day trip to Stettin in Poland (I can't remember the name in Polish right now). It's just on the border and Nathan found us a great deal so it was super cheap and 30 of us took the 2 hour train trip. However, when we got there it was super cold and rainy and so we stayed for 3 hours and left (we weren't planning on staying much longer than that anyway, it was meant to be a short trip). We did see some pretty churches though.

Speaking of rain, this afternoon was the first day in about a week and a half that the sun came out. I went for a lovely walk before my skype date with my mom. If it keeps being cold like it has, I am going to go mad! I love the rain, but I was just not prepared for this and do not have warm enough clothes to enjoy it and you can't have a picnic on wet grass.

Also, I am getting a little sick of all this German. I came here to learn the language, and I am trying even if I could be trying a little harder, but it's just so hard! The Germans speak so fast so most of the time I can't pick up a word of what they are saying. I want to understand it all already, it makes me uncomfortable to not understand.

update

Hello dear friends! So I have officially been here for over a week, how crazy is that! I already feel pretty comfortable here (with the exception of not being able to understand a good 80% of anything people say - Germans talk very fast) and our group has fallen into a good pattern. We do stuff in big groups or we don't, and we all talk with each other, nobody is being drama queens (yet. Let's keep it that way folks!)

Speaking of doing things together, on Saturday 14 of us went to this place that one of the RMs used to go to that had Meter Pizzas. We ordered two, and while I ate a salad because I was feeling like I needed veggies (thank you Kelli, you have put it into my mind that I'm going to get scurvy from not eating fresh things!) those pizzas looked/smelled soo good. They were huge, I mean a meter in diameter, thats roughly 2,512 square inches of pizza (if my math is correct, which I believe it is but then again I haven't taken a math class since calculus junior year - ps how many times do you think I can use parentheses in this one post?). As for my salad, best salad I've ever had and it was only 3 euro, my dinner was cheaper than the pizza dinner.



I think that my favorite thing to eat here is the pretzels. They are super good, but then again pretty much all the bread is super good and there are Backereis everywhere.

Oh, and here is my weird German culture thing of the day: they wear all their clothes many times before washing them. Like I am totally OK with pants being worn many times, but for the most part, I think it's weird to wear shirts or socks more than once. However, I do come from a place where it gets rather warmish so sweating is an issue whereas here you have to try to sweat. Anyway, the point of this is that my Hausmutter does our laundry (most of the Hausmutters do - I think its a big deal to have a laundry machine here, she doesn't even have a dryer) and it makes me feel like an American pig if I have a lot of laundry to be done. Kelsey lived in Germany for like 3 years and so she lives like a German anyway and she isn't an American Pig.

Oh, and I made a friend, for those of you that didn't see on facebook. One of the members of the Bishopric invited us over for some snacks on Sunday night and about 12 of us went. They are from England but have lived in Germany for 12 years and he talked to us about everything and really tried to make us feel comfortable here. Their youngest is 12 and she and I became friends. It all started when I commented on her fun nail polish and told her about the fun things my friends and I did with our nails. Then she found out I was from LA and asked if I saw any movie stars and I told her that we see a few (which is entirely true and this made me so cool in her book) then when we left she commented on my bow and brought me my jacket. We're besties now. (sorry that was a long story, but she is just so cute!)

Since my last post we have seen the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, part of the German Historical Museum, the Bode Museum, watched Iron Man 2 (in German even though we could have seen it in English. btw, they sell beer at movie theaters and the seats are reserved). And if you want to learn more about any of those things, look it up yourself because I already had to write reports on it all for my class and I don't want to write it again.

Everything New

I know that I just blogged on Sunday, but if I waited any longer, this post would be way too long, there is just so much to say!

Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Class: On Monday, we had to take a three part test. The first part was multiple choice, then there was a short writing section, and an interview/oral test. Then they graded everything and put us in a class. I am not in the most beginner class, but not far from it which is good. The weird thing is that the class has to be entirely in German because not everyone speaks English. We have three Muslim girls and a Chinese girl in our class. Our teacher is amazing, she puts up with all of our terrible speaking skills so well.

PS - a special "thanks" to my lovely sister, Ashely, who taught me how to figure out a subway while we were in England, and to my parents who bought me a bus pass for Provo which taught me about buses. Between these two things and common sense, we have been making it around pretty easily with only a few minor bumps. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but if I hadn't been there, Kelsey would have gotten lost so fast and she agrees with me. She kept trying to get on the first train that would show up, whether it was the right train or going the right direction or not. And now back to our regular programming...

So on Monday night we went to FHe at the stake center, which is also where we go to church. It was really fun, we played this awesome game where you stand in lines of teams and everyone puts Vaseline on their noses and you have to get the cotton balls from the beginning of the line to the end. Awkward, but those are the best kinds of games (but I must say, it was probably a good idea that the FHE parents didn’t participate, that would have been a little too much – a 45 year old married man with 19 year old girls…yeah, no)

Here is the thing though, Berlin is a safe city, but that doesn’t mean that I want to be out late. Kelsey and I were walking/u-bahning home from FHE around 9 and it was dark. I was so glad that I have a roommate, some of the girls don’t. I would even go so far as to say that I wished we had a boy with us (which is not something I usually admit). Some creepy guys at the u-bahn station were trying to get our attention and it was weird and wouldn’t have happened if we had had a guy with us.

Oh, on Monday we also went grocery shopping which was an experience. They don’t exactly have supermarkets, but they do have markets and a bunch of fruit/veggie places and bakeries. Luckily there are a bunch of shops one street over, so Kelsey and I could go and wander around for a while. Now, I try to pay attention to what I eat, but it was hard to look at a label in a different language. However, after being here for a few days, I have realized that it doesn’t really matter. They are a generally healthier people than us Americans. They eat very organic and natural which just feels better than all the processed crap in the good old USA. I have only seen two gyms (a far cry from Provo where there were three gyms within a short distance from my dorm) and very few runners and yet there are very few fat people. That being said, there are very few deathly skinny people or super toned people. They are just normal and I love it!

Then the next day, we were on the U-bahn, and some kids got on and they were like in the middle of a fight. It was just verbal with a mom and another guy trying to break it up as it turned into a full out fist fight. It was two against one, and the one kid was super creepy. He reminded me of Jackson Rathbone as Jasper. He just had this look on his face, it was so weird.

Then today. Today was so beautiful! It was sun-shiny and warmish so we decided to go to the zoo. It was much fun, but not because of the animals, they were just a side attraction to the playground. We probably weren’t supposed to be playing on it, but we just couldn’t say no. And let me tell you, that if you thought little kids speaking British was cute, you need to see/hear some little kids speaking German. It is just about the most adorable thing I have ever seen.

PICTURES!!!!
A wooden cow, complete with udder, of course we had to climb on it and take pictures.


Hiding from the storm.

Facing the storm head on!

Kelsey got attacked by a goat when feeding the animals.

Guess which Disneyland ride this made me think of...

Overcoming Jet Lag by Writing a Post

First of all, whenever traveling for long distances, I suggest British Airways. They give you socks, and eye masks, and a little toothbrush with little toothpaste and they have a huge selection of movies. I also suggest that you make that flight as few times as possible because it is very long. I was reminded multiple times of my last trip to Europe. Kelli and I were sitting there and they had given us drinks and fed us and we had napped and had second drinks and read our books. We decided to check the map to see where we were…WE WERE OVER MONTANA! We totally thought that we would have been somewhere over the Atlantic, more than halfway done, and boy were we thinking wrong. I was reminded again of that trip when I was killing time in Heathrow and came across some of our favorite candies (don’t worry Kelli or Syd, I will bring you back some).

Anyway, so I finally made it to Berlin and took a taxi to my house. It was so weird interacting with Germans because I knew I should be doing it in German, and yet my first reaction was to respond in English. That is going to take some getting over. I arrived at a beautiful apartment building with a park across the way and buzzed the door because Kelsey said that she would be here. Nobody answered; I waited and tried again, to no avail. So I went down the street a bit and sat. Honestly, I am very proud of myself for not breaking down right there. It was a little scary, being in another country, where I don’t speak the language very well, and hitting a bump in the road like that.

Then out of nowhere, over the peaceful noise of the kids in the playground there comes this loud man’s voice. He was seriously angry at this poor woman. I really think he was drunk, because he was all over the place, and she was just standing there taking it. I felt so bad for her. Being only short distance away from the quarrel, I decided it was time to try the door again, so I did and Kelsey answered, thank goodness.

This set up is really nice. We each have our own rooms on the first floor and we share a bathroom. We each have a shelf in the kitchen and a big drawer in the kitchen for our food (which I think is more room than I had at BYU). Nora, our house-mother, has offered to do our laundry because it wastes less that way and is just a little easier for everyone. She is so nice, doesn’t speak much English, but is so kind about my inability to speak German.

Here is a picture of my room (yes, the bed is a couch, but I'm assured it is very comfortable)


Kelsey and I went for a little walk today, too. We ended up at this old cemetery. It was so pretty. All the graves were overgrown, but in a good way.
I think this was my favorite statue there. I don't know why, perhaps its the Marinist Catholic in me coming out (oh, Chaminade). Also, they had a lot of statues of Christ that look a lot like the ones in the visitors' center at the Temples.


ps Jet lag is the worst!