When it rains it pours...

There hasn’t been much to say up until now, and with the terrible internet connection it’s been impossible to upload new photos. But of course, no news is sometimes good news and now with the end of my first month in Berlin I can finally share some stories.

It was a quiet first month. The program here is new and a bit disorganized (though everyone running it from this side of the Atlantic is helpful and brilliant) so it’s taken some of my classes a while to get going. With the weather being so cold and the German government holding our passports for visa processing, I’ve really been spending a lot of time just reading for school. Things finally started to pick up about a week and a half ago. Since then, I’ve had two class trips, explored Hamburg, presented a midterm, and begun an internship. Though not necessarily in that order.

One of the field trips was with my German class. We went to see one of the few old buildings in Berlin: the Knoblauch House (Garlic house, apparently). The building has been turned into a museum that gives insight into the life of the city’s early wealthy. We followed that trip with some time practicing German in a café before going to a museum that looked at the lives of the city’s early (as in industrial-age) working and elderly characters. That museum focused on the work of the artist Heinrich Zille. He worked with crayon, lithograph, and film, and he loved to showcase the ordinary: women with children, old people walking, furniture, men at work…the people of Berlin as he knew them. I really enjoyed his style, but can’t find an image of my favorite picture anywhere so can’t share it.

The other field trip was with my Cities, Culture, Communities (I think?) class. We met early on a Saturday in Kreuzberg to learn about the history of the neighborhood. The area had a bad reputation so a few years ago some of its young residents decided to begin giving tours to show people the Kreuzberg that they knew. Our tour started at the neighborhood museum where we heard a lecture on the history of migration (since apparently the government here doesn’t like to acknowledge that immigration exists) since the settlement of the area. The first immigrants in Kreuzberg were actually the French Huguegnots way back in the day. Currently, people talk about the Turkish population but the area actually has a lot of Arab immigrants and a huge Polish population. It’s the home of the anti-Nazi “gang” SO36 (aka the “36 Boys/z”), a small petting zoo, numerous bars, courtyard mosques, a legal red-light district, excellent food and the park where the May Day demonstrations take place each year. All things we saw or visited on our trip. Our tour guide was 12 when the wall came down so she remembers growing up with it cutting through her neighborhood. She told us about how she used to bounce balls against it. She also remembers a time when she couldn’t fathom that there were people living—a whole city of them—on the other side, strangers she later hugged and cried with on a cold November 9^th when the wall was opened.

While all this was happening, I was planning a midterm presentation on the biographies of objects for my museum class. Well…that and studying for German and hunting through a fleamarket in search of pieces for a friend’s art project. Also, NYU here doesn’t arrange internship opportunities but the art teachers independently set their students up with artists in the city. One of my good friends started working with a pretty awesome woman who mentioned that she may need more help with event planning and publicity stuff over the next few months. My friend suggested me because she knows I’m interested in curation and have a bit of experience in all the non-art things that her new artist friend had mentioned. So I went for an interview and ended up hanging around to help clean the studio for a fundraiser that happened last night.

In between the cleaning and the event itself, my school took us on a ‘mandatory’ (because people would not go?) to Hamburg. We took a bus tour and a boat tour and a museum tour… I actually had a pretty good time. The tours were tough because it was hard to hear over the chatter of my restless peers, but they sat through the 4 hour bus ride there and then a 2 hour bus tour and then a 2 hour boat tour so I totally understand the restlessness. The city is interesting. It’s small and the only real residential area we saw was full of mansions on the water. The rest of the city is built around the center-city shops and the ever-busy port. In the evening we walked around the famous red-light district and decided that it looked like Times Square before running away to an area where we had been told the student like to hang out. We found a place called Culture House and just sat in there for a while to talk and people watch until it was time to return to the hotel and get some rest.

I went with a group to the Hamburg Deichtorhallen on our second morning there. We walked in and the gallery was strangely empty of people. Then a man came in and asked what we were doing there. Apparently the museum was closed and the door was locked. He asked how we broke in and our group leader explained that the door had been open and that she had called a few days ago to let the gallery know what time we would be coming. He insisted that she hadn’t called and she told him to check for a recording. He also insisted that the door had been locked and we must have broken in. Since we were standing inside the front hall, arguing this point really seemed like an exercise in absurdity. Amongst ourselves we decided that, sure, we must have broken in. Right.

Later, when we were legally inside, we explored photographs done in a diverse range of styles. Stephan Tillmans makes “Leuchtpunktordnungen” shots of television screens while Helena Schätzte groups portraits of old people with photographs of rugged landscapes. Interesting stuff. The other part of the gallery was hosting a Gilbert and George exhibition. I’ve never been sure how I feel when confronted with their work, but this time was different. This time there were a mind-blowing number of works covering this huge gallery, and there was a film screening in a side room which explored their many years of working together. Seeing their pieces as components of different series’ with different names and goals helped me appreciate them much more than before. The video also mentioned that they curate all their own shows and are the only living/British artists to show a retrospective at the Tate Modern. It was pretty fascinating.

With two hours until we headed back to Berlin, a friend and I went in search of adventure and stumbled into a Carnival celebration. There were people dressed in beautiful ornate costumes posing for pictures and dancing in the street. Inspired, we went in search of masks for ourselves, which we found (along with some lunch) just in time to get back to the bus. I read on the way home and then unpacked and cleaned for a bit. Suddenly it was 10 pm and I was meeting my friend to head to that fundraiser I mentioned.

I feel like I’ve lived 10 years in the past few days. So last night we ended up bartending at the fundraiser. It was supposed to end around 1 am but 1 came and went. We were having a lot of fun talking to people and dancing and practicing our German a bit. Everyone there seemed to be having fun too. The crowd was mostly a chill one and people were friendly. Then around 5 some drunk jerk set off a fire extinguisher in the hall so that was the end of the party. We tried to clean up a bit but I got cut on some broken glass…between that and the chemicals and the fact that we hadn’t slept the past few nights we decided to head home. We spent today cooking and doing homework quietly in my room. Tomorrow classes start again. I have one week to do a field study, crank out another midterm, and figure out how to best host my soon-to-be visiting friends when I’m in class most of each weekday.

And spring is officially coming. I saw a crocus blooming in a park.

As I said, things are starting to pick up at last.

semester šednost

So that's Czech, not German, but it's appropriate.

My days here start around 8.30. I get up and get dressed, make breakfast and pack my bag for the day. I open the window curtains, turn off the lights, put on my coat/scarf/shoes, and lock my door on the way out. Walking to the U2 station nearby takes only a few minutes but is always cold enough to make getting to the station a relief. I walk past the American Church, a Turkish bath place, and usually someone with a dog. Yesterday, I saw a man on a razor scooter walking his chihuahua.

Unlike in Prague, I get a seat on the U-Bahn every day and I don’t have to transfer at all. It takes about half an hour to get to the “Culture Brewery,” the complex that NYU’s building is in. I walk from the U2, passing expensive cafes, bike rental shops, the original curry-wurst place, three gold stumble stones commemorating the murders of the Jewish residents of a building, a plaque commemorating the murder of an “anti-fascist,” an absinth bar, a men’s underwear shop, and a grocery store all before turning up the steps into the complex which I cross to the school building.

My classes are wonderful. I’m behind in German, but so is everyone else. I’m re-reading my old notes and hopefully I’ll be ready for our first test next week. My Architecture of Berlin class also has a graded assignment next week. I’m presenting a midterm assignment (early, I know) on the biographies of objects. I’m actually really excited, and then I’ll go on to write a paper on the same topic which will be my final exam. The class is interesting. We discussed how the museum was developed to provide a place for the “common man” to go for examples of how to culture himself and build his home. It was the one cultural space, save the department store, where women were also allowed, and it was hoped that women would both make sure the men behaved well. The other theory drawn up by those new to positions of power in the industrial age, was that including artifacts from the lives of the common men would pull them in because they would feel proud to be included. In post-modern times, the museum has developed in such a way that the ritual of ‘visiting’ it (for a transformative, cleansing purpose) has become hugely important. Apparently, our instinctual draw towards stability and stasis used to be soothed by religious and community rituals but now is soothed in cultural institutions, such as museums (the article we read was by a man named Tony Bennett). Interesting ideas… And my professor always starts by asking us to write something down on colored note cards, which he then sticks on the board in clusters by topic. Visual learner? You bet.

My Museum Island professor is new to teaching American students, new to teaching this course, and new to dealing with the university. He was surprised that they hadn’t ordered readers for us, not knowing that he had to submit a master copy before they could send out for copies. Poor guy. He also wanted to schedule extra trips on Fridays or Saturdays, but he’s somewhat shy so he let two girls with trips planned every weekend bully him out of using those days. Sometimes I don’t understand my peers. Hopefully the professor will get more comfortable and confident as time goes on. He’s fascinated by how maps change over time and how public space is (or isn’t) used at different points in history. He talked us through the growth of Berlin from a fishing town and medieval manor to its current urban mass.

After that class, I stay in the same seat for the next class as well. New York and Berlin as Knowledge Cities is the class that I joined after talking to the professor over dinner at the end of orientation. It’s an education focused course and it’s discussion-based. We started with a light piece that describes a fictional knowledge city, and he used it as a springboard; we discussed what we felt was good or bad about the city described in the piece and by doing so were able to better articulate our understanding of what a ‘knowledge city’ should be. I’m curious to see how the class develops. At one point, we got sidetracked because one of the boys asked if we could define ‘knowledge.’ I worked through my own thoughts on a piece of paper while listening to the professor and the class talk out all their different understandings of ‘knowledge.’ The struggle between their desire for a workable definition and their understanding that the definition would have to be so broad as to barely qualify as a definition was really fun to listen to. I haven’t been part of a conversation like that in a long while. The professor is a very energetic lecturer because he is totally in love with teaching. And he’s fascinated by changes in youth culture that he witnesses by working with new students each year.

The class I had tonight is Cities, Places and Communities of Berlin. The professor gave us a lot of country history and an outline of the current political system (party platform sketches included). He also assigned us a graphic novel as our first reading assignment. He usually teaches a Friday morning class of 4 that takes a lot of in-depth academic trips. This semester, he was assigned a Thursday evening time slot because my school decided that study abroad sites shouldn’t offer Friday classes so that students would be able to travel. Which I have my own opinions about either way, but you’d think the school would have asked the faculty and/or students if we supported this new idea of theirs. *Sigh* Because it’s a Thursday evening instead of a Friday morning class, our professor has suddenly found himself with 18 students and more trying to get in despite the course cap. He’s a bit overwhelmed. Today he gave us travel suggestions and a website to go to for restaurant ideas. Saturday, he’s taking us on a trip through a Turkish neighborhood. We’ll see the mosque, the immigrant museum, and a restaurant where we will eat and where he promises we’ll return once we taste the food. I’m pretty excited.

That’s my classes. We have a mandatory trip to Hamburg next weekend, and then it will be one weekend to do work before Hillary and Alex come. I’m a little curious about how we’ll all sleep in my room, but I’m very excited to see them.

Also, I finally got some pictures online. They're here!

One small step for mich!

First full week of classes down. I have to spend tomorrow running to different print-shops and bookstores to pick up all of my coursebooks—which I’m not looking forward to in the rain—but the courses themselves are all incredible. I’m taking elementary German II with the woman who coordinates the language classes, but I’m also taking “Place-Building-Time: The Architecture of Berlin,” “Creating an Educational Landscape: Museum Island,” “Cities, Communities, and Culture: Neighborhoods of Berlin,” and finally…well…

I was supposed to be taking another EU course because the one last semester was such a good experience. After having a class taught from a Czech professor’s perspective, I was excited to try a class on similar themes from a German professor’s perspective. Then, at the dinner we had with the faculty, I realized that the EU professor will be a lovely teacher but will be focusing on economic policy. Which really isn’t what I was looking for. When I sat down at the table that night, I was joined by a gentleman who introduced himself and mentioned a course that he will be teaching at Humbolt University once their semester starts. The course is called “Globalization, Education, and Social Identity” and I told him at once that I would beg to audit if my German were any good. It turns out that one of the courses he is teaching at NYU also has a heavy education focus. It’s called “New York and Berlin: Global Knowledge Cities.” Aside from laughing at how fantastic these names are and the ease with which I just earned (most of) a sociology minor, I’m more excited than I can possibly express after meeting all of my professors.

This weekend will be running around to get books, starting on an immense amount of reading (my fault for overloading), visiting a Turkish market, sampling some Georgian food, and maybe even taking in some German Techno (Yes, Matt, I’ll be thinking of you the whole time).

Over the next weeks, I need to figure out 1) how to catch my family on skype when the limited internet means I can’t just keep the window up while I write papers, and 2) what are some colorful cheap dinner dishes I can make since I can actually use this whole kitchen.

Apologies for the misinformation in the last post. The neighborhood I live in was part of West Berlin. Where I walked and where I go to school were in the East...

I put some pictures up on my Picasa. The link is here.

Now it might be time to rest. Sleep well!

Strolling in the Rain

So I spent this rainy day just walking East. At first, I wanted to go to a park I saw on a map. I walked until I found a park (the one I had been aiming for or not, I do not know) and started to explore. In the center of the park was a hill with some kind of monument. I climbed up and from there saw a tower that I started to head toward. And so it went: I’d see something, walk to it, see something else, walk that direction…I actually feel like I had a pretty productive day. I stopped to watch a soccer game for a bit. The colorful graffiti plastered all over a children’s playground also inspired me to pause and wonder. I’m in East Berlin, in Schöneberg, so there are many slab concrete buildings and buildings that are in disrepair still. What is interesting about being here now is that there are renovated and reconstructed buildings around too, as well as brand new modern buildings that wrap around older structures. I would love to see pictures of some of these blocks 20 years ago, and I wonder what they’ll look like 20 years from now. On a tour we took yesterday, we were told that 1) much of Berlin is swamp-land so the breweries will always be on hills and construction projects always take longer because digging is difficult AND 2) Berlin has traditionally been one of the cheaper and poorer cities in Germany so most construction projects are funded by whatever government is in power. He also mentioned that the governments put a lot of work into keeping Berlin alive. Men have been given draft exemption in exchange for agreeing to move to Berlin, and students have been given stipends for coming here. Many people have mentioned to us that the neighborhoods have changed based on rent fluctuations, and I’m actually hoping to learn more about the specifics of how groups of people have moved around the city in the last few years.

Classes start tomorrow and I could not be more excited. My classes all sound awesome! I already met one of my professors, and he gave me a list of his favorite things to do in the city. He also suggested getting a bike. Everyone seems to be saying this, and it would be nice to not have to buy 3 more transit passes…I just don’t know if I’m cut out to be a city-biker. I hardly ever rode my bike back home! At this point I have my transit pass for a month still. When it expires, maybe I’ll bike for a month and see how it goes. Keep you updated!

Sound of Silence (and cars outside)

Greetings from Berlin! I'm starting a new semester and could not be more excited.

So my room is huge and beautiful. With limited internet access (I have a monthly limit of 5G), no SIM card yet, no class-work yet, and no idea which rooms in this huge complex my new friends live in, I’ve been spending a lot of time being alone and enjoying the space. It’s kindof lonely, but I know that soon each night will be filled with homework or friends or both. Once everyone has working phones and has exchanged numbers, the fact that it gets dark by 5 won’t keep me from exploring the city. I just don't know enough of the neighborhood to be confidant walking alone after dark.

In the meantime, I’ve been attempting to manage my solitude gracefully. Sure, I did a dance when it finally hit me that this whole quiet space is mine to work and sleep and cook in. Otherwise, I’ve been trying to listen to German radio. It’s somewhat difficult to find songs that are in German. I keep finding stations that play English, Turkish, and French music…nice but not helpful. I also have a television in my room. As much as I hate TV, I sometimes turn it on to music videos just for the noise. German top 100 currently includes more German music than the radio does. I can’t pull up any of the videos here on YouTube, but here’s a quick sampling:

Unheilig “Winter”

Culcha Candela “Berlin City Girl”

Milk and Sugar feat. Vaya Con Dos “Hey (Nah Neh Nah)”

Of course, there is still English music scattered in between. Rhianna is so colorful in her “What’s My Name” video! And I’m pretty sure all of Europe is obsessed with Katy Perry. Better than nothing though.

I’ve been playing a lot with the Byki (Transparent Language) Learn German software I downloaded back home, and I’m hoping that if I work hard enough at this I can pick up enough language to be conversational next time someone approaches me in a store. At least it’s closer to English than Czech! Makes it a tad bit easier.

We had our first day of orientation today. The academic center is located in an old brewery complex alongside a grocery store, 4 clubs, a music store, a travel agency and a movie theater. The neighborhood we live in has stations for all the main public transit lines (metros and buses). One of these days, I’ll get out while it’s still light so I can take some pictures to share. I think I’m really going to like it here.

I also did part 1 of my ‘moving-in-to-a-new-kitchen’ shopping. I ought to just have a list that I use each time I move someplace new. Between that and the one month transit pass, residency permit/visa cost, and housing deposit (and the SIM card that I have yet to buy), I’ve feeling a little financially anxious. Guess it’s a good thing I haven’t found anyone to go out with yet. Make those euros last a little longer…

I kindof wish I could show my sisters the bright yellow metro, and I know Cass would have loved to be part of the conversation my RA and I had today about special education. Such thoughts only threaten to get heavy when I’m home for the evening. Otherwise, I’ve met some wonderful and interesting people. I just don’t know how to contact them after orientation. Yet. In the meantime, guess I’ll write another application essay. Or something.

PS There was one good English song on the music channel: Adele “Rolling in the Deep.” Just saying you may want to check it out.

un peu de mélancolie

I actually don't have much to say as I continue to wallow in the liminal space of the almost-traveller. As I set off on another adventure, I shake my head at how much changed over the course of this week two years ago. My senior year of high school, the week from January 28th to February 5th saw my world turn upside-down. I had an impromptu night out with my dad in which I discovered rush-tickets to musicals, won the freedom to go venturing in the city in a blizzard, and started to like Philly. I had a fateful reconnaissance with two friends from Governor's School (plus a follow-up coffee date that would be the first of many).

And then I came home from a normal day of work to learn that the woman who taught me everything I know about horses, roses, patience, homeopathic medicine, and book exchanging had died suddenly.

Everything about my life seemed to scream that this was the end of the first installment of my life. Now it's two years later. I'm spending the night in a hotel room near JFK because tomorrow I intend to confront the ice and snow of the impending blizzard and take off for my second semester abroad. This time, I'll be writing from Berlin, from within a smaller group of Americans, from underneath a heavier course load. Life hasn't really settled since senior year. I'm never in one place long enough to live there. I'm spending quite a long time living out of a suitecase (plus carry-on!) and looking to do so next year as well because my options are either gain field experience doing that or graduate that May. Without the skills to be confident looking for a job and without the money to move into a city where the car won't eat up whatever paycheck I can manage.

Time keeps on slipping into the future...er...the past... and I would swear it's speeding up each day. Wonder what that teacher would think of where I am now? With everything going so fast, I'm glad to have a writer's spirit. The compulsion to write thus becomes the compulsion to record and to remember. And by remembering, I can maybe begin to pay her back for believing I could get this far in time. She was right.

Tchuss.

The roses bloom in her memory:
Mary Lynch
b. 5/12/1941
d. 1/31/2009

Cue 'em up!

I must say, Kate Patterson would be so proud of me.

Just as I was coming home for winter break, my dad got a pretty great deal on a Netflix membership. Since I do try to be a considerate sister and girlfriend, there were many days when—instead of taking the car Em and I share or begging Cass to drive us somewhere—I stayed home with Harley dog and watched movies. Sometimes I even got a sister or two to join me. So in the past month, I’ve seen more movies than I had in the entire preceding year! Crazy stuff.

BLACK SWAN (2010)

A dark and visceral suspense film about a ballerina who cracks under the pressure of preparing for a schizophrenic lead role. Really. The film got a lot of attention because of Natalie Portman’s performance. Watching her character was like watching a car accident or a fire: I wanted to look away because it hurt to watch her, but her catastrophe was a dance of its own and it was mesmerizing. To infer from the dialogue, there may have been some moral about the dangers of obsessively chasing perfection, especially when ‘perfection’ is defined as physical beauty. After years of watching what my dancer friends go through, I had already decided that I’ll do my best to keep my kids out of dance classes if at all possible. Knowing some scary true stories made this fictional one particularly frightening for me, and I can’t say that I enjoyed watching it…but that’s why it was so good.

THE SECRET OF KELLS (2009)

How many movies are there with young monks as protagonists? I really can’t think of any. The animation in this is stunning. The whole movie is a Celtic kaleidoscope, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course I’m biased because I’m always going to love movies about the importance of books.

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (1966)

A dark Czech comedy set during WWII, this film follows the coming-of-age struggles of an apprentice dispatcher. I would really like to discuss whether the boy does or does not become a man, and why, by the end of the film. Doing so, however, would require giving away the ending. Watch it and then call me so we can talk.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988)

An American film based off a Czech book, I was actually surprised to like this as much as I did. I’m always a skeptic when it comes to “based off the book” films. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the whole book. I started it mid-semester and had to stop because my work piled up. I have all intentions to finish it though. Someday. Anyway, I really liked the movie and am curious to see which of the motifs were pulled from the book and which were emphasized by the director. There was one sequence that brilliantly stitched real footage of the ’69 invasion with cine-magined ones, changing the style of the manufactured scenes to match that of the real footage. How the producers managed to make the changes from black-and-white to color and back (with different levels of graininess and other such film tech things) without disrupting the flow of the plot is beyond me. So cool.

YOJIMBO (1961)

Cass picked this one. A warrior wanders into a town divided by two warring gangs. I really can’t comment much because I’m not familiar with the genre, but I bet you’ve heard the director’s name before. This is kindof a classic.

MAX AND MARY (2009)

A super dark claymation about a young Australian girl with her dysfunctional family, an older American man with his aspergers, and the pulse of their strange relationship. If you needed proof that claymation isn’t just a children’s medium, look no farther. Alchoholism, loneliness, suicide, abandonment...seriously, this one is troubling. And maybe inspiring in a twisted way.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (2005)

Another film-based-on-the-book, except that this one isn’t at all. If you haven’t read the book by the same name, do so at once. Then you will understand what I mean when I say that the movie was pretty good because it didn’t try to be the book. It was as if someone picked a single thread of plot out of the quilted book and was content to illuminate that thread in a film adaptation. Yes, there were holes. Yes, they cut out the whole flashback. No one could do that whole book as a film and do it justice. The cast includes Elijah Wood and Eugene Hutz (of Gogol Bordello fame), and it explores culture clashes of varying types and how the stories that defined the old cultures can be buried but not banished.

THE HURT LOCKER (2008)

I had actually already seen this but watched it again. The scene in the American supermarket cereal aisle throws me every time. Why do I keep watching these intense movies?

LIFE IN A DAY (2011)

Yup. The YouTube experiment. All told, I thought it was a pretty cool multi-media collage and I’m glad someone did it. I have a huge respect for the people who put it together because I can hardly imagine how difficult sifting through all that footage was. That said, I thought that from a cinematography standpoint it was a little iffy. The segment about “What’s in your pockets” should really have been cut so it could be expanded and turned into its own mini-film. I felt like there could have been more comparative sequences (all of the people making eggs for breakfast!) and more contrasting ones (the man coming out to his grandmother and the fearful man near the end both addressing the idea of homosexuality as an illness) to tie the clips together more tightly around their theme of humanity. There were some pretty amazing stories expressed, though, and I’m glad to have seen it.