My first day in was terrifying. It was my
first time traveling anywhere without a parent or guardian either by my side or
waiting to greet me. It’s amazing, I think, how easy it was to transition. I’m
beginning to suspect that nobody really knows what they’re doing any more than
I do, that adulthood is just having enough logical reasoning to follow the
person in front of you if they look like they know where they’re going.
The flight into Chicago was late, leaving
me with only a few minutes to get to my plane, but I had the unfortunate
experience of being directed to an area two terminals over when the plane was
actually just across the way. Needless to say, the flight attendants were not
happy to see me run up just after final boarding had been closed, and were
especially unimpressed with my extra carryon. This was not made any easier by
the fact that the woman I talked to highly overestimated her English ability.
Then, of course, the plane was forced to
turn around about an hour in because the woman three seats in front of me
became ill during takeoff. IVs and everything, so it looked pretty serious,
although I was able to understand the doctor saying that it was a precaution
because the last thing you want is to have it get worse when the plane is over
water and can’t turn around. Then safety checks (mandatory for US emergency
landings, one stewardess grumbled) and refueling (planes have to dump their
fuel when turning around so quickly to avoid the kind of catastrophic failure
that would leave our corpses charred past recognition; this is likely why we
waited to turn around over the great lakes instead of any random field which
could later catch on fire) which took about an hour. I’m not particularly
surprised, though; I nearly passed
out during takeoff and landing that first time, and I’m not particularly Ill.
Whatever was going on in the cockpit, I can guarantee we were ascending and
descending too quickly.
Arriving in Berlin was the worst. Everyone
had missed their connecting flights, so there was much arguing, confusion, and
pushing around the luggage carousel. I stood back and took it all in, content
to wait until everyone else was done because having my luggage meant going out
into the world. Getting a cab was no problem; I walked up to the stand towards
the first car in line and the driver had the hatch open before I had decided
what side to pick. Apparently they have their own system. Thank God I had
written down the name of the hotel and the address; the language barrier would
have been too much otherwise. I was surprised after such a long drive that my
driver refused to take a larger tip; the most he was willing to accept was
rounding up from 18,30€ to 20€, despite my desperately trying to throw fives at
him. Inside I was greeted by two other students and had two more pull up in a
cab before I could even say hello to the man at the reception desk. Apparently
the other two had been on the same plane as me, which would have made getting a
cab much less harrowing, but looking back on it I’m grateful that I had a
chance to strike out on my own.
Once most of us were together, we walked
out to get lunch. Several of the other students had arrived in the days before
and were familiar with the area, so getting to the main avenues was no problem.
It was a good time, though it was obvious pretty quickly that we would be
having quite the lively group. I was the only one who didn’t drink; my roommate
had wine, though she protests that this was because she had been in country for
several days. Everyone else had beer. The lunch was ok, not excellent, and the
price definitely put me off (price shock seems to be at its worst at the
beginning when you have nothing to compare prices with). It was a good time,
however, and being asked to quiet down by one of the other patrons (she tried
Spanish before English, which surprised me) didn’t make it less so.
We returned to the hotel just after checkin
time and went up to our rooms. We had been allowed in before because the
luggage room was too full to accommodate our things, but this was our first
chance to really look around and compare spaces with everyone else. I’m pretty
sure my roommate and I ended up with the smallest of the rooms, but I’ve been
in smaller, so it shouldn’t be too bad. We’ve already established that she and
I won’t be in a shouting mood at the same time, so living in such close
quarters shouldn’t hurt anything. Besides, I didn’t come to Berlin to sit in my
room and watch German TV (which is exactly the same as American TV, down to the
How I Met Your Mother reruns and annoying UPS commercials). The room is about
the same size as the hotel room in the Lake District which I stayed in a few
years ago, with the same peculiarly large bathroom to bedroom ratio and
requirement to insert your key into the wall to turn on the electricity
(apparently this also controls the electricity flowing into the refrigerator
for those students who got bumped up to a suite; a few someones discovered this
the hard way).
There is a desk, but I find myself propping
my laptop on the windowsill overlooking the courtyard. I hadn’t understood when
I began reading “A Woman in Berlin” how the author could know so many of her
neighbors so well, but I have no illusions now. With the windows open (and we
have yet to close them; it’s been a steady 68-75 degrees every day except
Thursday morning) you can hear everything going on in the building. I hear
peoples’ conversations coming from everywhere: the sound of food cooking in the
apartments across the way and up one level, the twang of a banjo in the room
next door, and the flush of the toilet three stories up. We’re situated just
next to the door, also, so I can always hear when anyone comes or goes. It’s
hard not to know your neighbors in a situation like this.
The first picture I took was of the
keyboards in the IES computer lab. It’s strange how the little things are the
ones that get you the most. My second picture was of three small plackards with
peoples’ names on them sunk into the walkway just down from our hotel; I wasn’t
sure what they were at first because I couldn’t read them, but the professor
later told us that they are a sort of art project showing where Jews lived
during the Holocaust and listing what happened to them after they were taken
away. An interesting proposition, having them in the ground. Back home they’d
almost certainly be displayed prominently on the wall for everyone to see.
Our first major assignment was to go on a
scavenger hunt with an assigned partner. On the one hand having a partner
assigned to you is probably a good idea: otherwise we would likely have all
stuck with our roommates and failed to gel as a group. On the other hand, I
think some people had a bit of trouble with it because groups were assigned
without any idea of who knew the language and who did not, resulting in some
groups being practically fluent between them and some… not so much. It was, at
first, a pretty boring assignment. My partner and I looked up our destinations
and made a point of plugging the addresses into google maps (which has been my
number one resource during this whole thing) which gave us excellent directions
using public transport. The trains were the easiest to figure out; google told
us to get on such-and-such a line heading towards such-and-such a place, wait
so many stops and get off at such-and-such a street. The busses were the
stumbling block; google gave us the same kind of directions despite the fact
that the outside of the busses displays the next stop on the line rather than
the eventual destination. Because of this we overshot our second destination by
three stops and had to wait almost :45 to get one going back the other way (it
would have been quicker to walk if we hadn’t been terrified of getting lost).
Eventually we found it: an old watchtower overlooking the river.
Walking back we decided to skip the bus and
see if we couldn’t make it back to the main terminal we had accidentally run
into before. Because of this we were able to detour into a graveyard. Anyone
who’s heard me talk about Europe knows that my favorite places are graveyards;
they’re so gorgeous and so old, with so much history behind them (not to
mention the quiet because of the almost universal avoidance of other
passersby). It wasn’t hard to convince my partner to go in, so we took a little
walk through it and photographed some of the more intricate graves. I saw that
there seemed to have been some overflow at some point; the back wall had been
broken through and graves were out in the open on the other side, as well as a
bike path that seemed very well used. It wasn’t until I started thinking about
how ugly that back wall was, concrete against the fine carved stone of the side
walls, that I realized that the partition had nothing to do with the graveyard
itself. And that’s how I got my first glimpse of the Berlin Wall.
We’ve had a few other excursions since
then; the Reichstag, the Berliner Dom, the area where the palace is being
rebuilt, and a bus tour around the center city. All were gorgeous, all were
moving, all were very similar to other such sights in Europe with little to
report in the way of cultural epiphanies. More interesting to me is the trips
that my roommate and I made to the store. I chose not to pack anything that I
thought I could get while here: toothpaste, shampoo/conditioner, etc. This has
led to some surprises. For example, while my normal brand of shampoo was
readily available (with the same bottle, color, pictures, and font all
displayed on the front) the shampoo is thicker and the conditioner dryer than
their American counterparts, leading me to believe that they are likely much
more concentrated (despite being much less expensive). There is fresh fruit
available on every street, fresh vegetables is every sizable market, and boxes
of crackers and candy bars and bottles of wine and beer everywhere, but I had
to go to three different places to find a refrigerator (holding only juice and
beer) and only one place that I’ve seen had a freezer (ice cream bars and
microwave meals, both staged as though it was expected that they would be
consumed almost immediately).
What really threw me, though, were the
personal hygiene items, especially the toothpaste. Dentagard, at 0,75€ for a
regular sized tube, was the best choice for my budget and peace of mind, having
reassured me with its Colgate parent company sticker and soothing green color
which I understood to imply a familiar mint flavoring. Imagine my surprise upon
first use to find a wholly unappetizing combination of mint, chamomile, sage,
and myrrh. Yes, myrrh. While I imagine my mother or others raised more
religiously would find myrrh soothing, all I can think about is the storied
history of cloaking bodies with it to cover up the stench of decay. This is
what I’m putting into my mouth every day.
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