Der Sommersemester

Miracle of miracles, Berlin actually has a summer. One forgets these things between August and April, when there's a January and a February like the ones I just survived in between! German university "Sommersemester" courses (from April through July) began about two weeks ago, bringing with them not only homework, but decent running weather and an influx of students who were doing goodness-knows-what in February and March. It seems like even European students spend their whole breaks traveling!

Last Saturday, Kara, Anne, and I went to Tiergarten, the emperor's old hunting ground-turned-park, for a picnic. On a whim, Kara and I also bought painting supplies. Not that either of us are aspiring Rubens or Klimts (we wish!), it just seemed de-stressing to play with tempera and paintbrushes for a while.

Skates, Bikes, and Busses

The transportation theme of this post refers to two epic adventures and one epic discovery here in Berlin. As to the first, Kara Jones and I spent a fantastic week season jumping from Stockholm, Sweden, which is experiencing its coldest winter since 1868, to the balmy 70 degree weather of Barcelona, Spain.



In Sweden, I took a boat tour around 5 of Stockholm's 14 islands. Our ferry crunched through about six inches of ice, and I was mesmerized! While it hit nearly 20 degrees below zero (degrees Celsius) while we were there, Kara and I loved Stockholm. The Old Town of Gamla Stan looked oh-so much like a Christmas village. Other highlights included a visit to the city's Dance Museum and the Vasamuseet, a salvaged shipwreck from 1628. Stockholm was a very expensive city overall, but the most fun thing we did was totally free! Our hostel lent us skates, directed us to a public park's ice skating rink, and away we went!



In Barcelona, after ooh-ing and ah-ing at the green grass, the view of the ocean and beach from the airplane, and being nearly shell-shocked by the balmy temperatures at 6pm, we explored Las Ramblas (of course!), revelled in the fresh markets, and rented bikes to explore the city on for two days.

And what was my epic discovery in Berlin? After spending almost the entire below-freezing winter dreading that 10-15 minute walk from my house to the nearest S-Bahn station, I discovered a bus that runs nearly door-to-door. Yup.

On Getting Dressed

As my host mom and I passed each other in the hallway at about 7 this morning, both cheerfully bleary-eyed, she turned and said emphatically, "Es soll heute Minus 16 Grad sein- noch kalter als gestern. Do solltest dich heute warmer anziehen." [Translation: It's supposed to be -16 degrees (Celsius) today- colder than yesterday (it was -12). You should dress warmer today.] Sigh. I have already developed a new fundamental doctrine for the Christian faith: negative degree weather is the direct result of sin. God never would have sent Adam and Eve into an Eden with weather like Berlin's!

For the record, -16 C is 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit (or so Google tells me). The larger problem this morning, though, was that I wasn't sure what else I could put on to dress warmer! Then again... for the past few days of my Praktikum, I'd sacrificed being able to feel my own limbs on the altar of cuteness. -12 degrees not withstanding, I was going to wear my black pencil skirts to court if it killed me. Compromising with myself, I wore thick wool socks and boots to work, then slipped on heels once I got inside the Justiz Zentrum. This behavior fascinated the German women. As I was about to leave after my first day, I pulled back on my boots; a Referandarin [female law student] saw me and exclaimed, "THAT's how you did that... I've been wondering how you got here in those shoes all day." Which immediately started a stream of conversation about my attire:
Referedarin: " And she's wearing a skirt- how nice..."
Female Judge: " Yes, all American women wear skirts to court." [to the law student]
" German women usually wear pants." [to me]
" Europeans dress nicer in general, though. That's probably why there's not such a difference between what we wear at work and outside. Americans wear track suits everywhere, and then dress up for work."

This exchange is nearly a verbatim translation from the German. It was a very sincere conversation on their part- no slight to me or American fashion intended at all- just the honest fascination that most women have with the dressing habits of another culture. I nearly died laughing inside. To my knowledge, wearing skirts is no more dominant in American culture than in German culture (I've seen a few German judges wear skirts, too. And I only brought a nicer pair of shoes to work with me because I saw a German lady do it when she came to my host mother's birthday party!

But this brings me back to the subject of dressing appropriately for Berlin weather. First of all, the appearance of Berliner women my age is a deception. They go outside in short fashion coats, thinly knit hats, and fitted jeans, and one thinks that one can also survive in such attire. The fact is, you'd get frostbite waiting 10 minutes on an S-bahn platform if that was really all the provision you had against the cold.

Go into a German apartment sometime, and you will learn the secret to the lack of frostbitten Berliner women on train station platforms: On the drying racks (which the Germans insist on using to dry their clothes even in the ides of January), you will see a plethora of long underwear. Underneath the cute jeans and the short jacket, those women are wearing approximately three layers of thermal underwear. No one ever tells you this, though. You just have to learn to add a layer every time you're cold. It also requires creativity to find clothing items in your wardrobe that will layer well without making the topmost layer look funny.

For example, getting dressed requires me to find the following items and put them on in the appropriate order:
1 pair thick tights
1 pair running leggings
2nd pair running pants

camisole
long sleeve shirt
thermal running shirt
North Face fleece

thermal ski socks
thick wool socks

thickly knit hat
scarf

I am now reasonably prepared to be warm while inside the house.
(You think I'm kidding, but I wrote, edited, and submitted approximately 10 law school applications in this exact outfit.)

If I actually intend to go outside, still more forethought is required- beyond the obvious addition of a wool coat, two pairs of fleece-lined mittens, and boots. I cannot appear in running pants, a pink North Face fleece, and a striped scarf in a German court. Neither may the under layers peak out from underneath a buttoned blouse. I must also have an optional topmost layer available if it gets cold in the courtroom, and I must be able to survive life indoors without the help of woolen socks (they don't fit in the high heels).

The challenge grows even greater when you wake up the next morning and must manage the same feat with a different outfit.

My conclusion: German customs officials should issue long underwear and ski suits to all visitors entering the country between October and March. For the time being, I've started wearing pants to court.

Back for More!!!

Dear Readers,

If you are reading this, you are to be commended for being the most faithful of blog followers. I realize that I haven't given you any incentive to continue reading since... November. As you might imagine, a lot has happened since my last post. Namely:

1) One of my last semester program-mates from Duke, Anthony Sanderson, and I started dating about midway through November. That would be the first reason why you haven't heard anything from me for a couple months : ) We spent a wonderful whirlwind month and a half in Berlin together, doing everything from making sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving, to attending La Boheme at one of Berlin's many opera houses, to visiting Christmas markets in multiple German cities.

2) I applied to twelve law schools: University of Virginia, Georgetown, Emory, Vanderbilt, University of North Carolina, University of Washington, Wake Forest, William and Mary, Washington and Lee, American University, George Washington University, and George Mason. That would be the second reason you haven't heard from me since November : ) I have since been accepted at Wake Forest, rejected from GWU and George Mason, and the jury's still out on the other nine... Keep your fingers crossed for me!

3) In late December and early January, I spent a little less than three weeks hopping continents and coasts for the holidays. I went to my parents' in Spokane first, then we caravanned with the Tenolds (Hawaii branch included!) and the Johnson family to spend Christmas at Brittany and Mark's in Billings (or rather, Molt), Montana. We had a fabulous five days together, playing Wii with Brandon, Beth, and Elita (though Bryceson and Ryan provided just as much entertainment), heart-to-hearting in front of the fireplace and in the kitchen, snowmobiling near Yellowstone, and skiing at Big Sky.

Then, there was a quick trip to visit the YakCats (my older brother's family in Yakima, Washington), and I flew to spend five days in Washington, D.C.

There, I met up with four of my closest girlfriends from Davidson: Rachel, who now attends Georgetown Medical School and graciously let us all crash in her apartment; Eva, who works at mobile med clinic through Americorps and lives just outside the city; Becca, who is a senior at Davidson still; and Mary Beth, working as an RUF (Reformed University Fellowship) intern at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to hang out with Rachel's roommate, Kristina, who is from Seattle! We had about six months of our lives to catch up on in person, so you can imagine that there were a lot of deep conversations in the living room, with the obligatory tea-drinking and chocolate-eating, of course! Anthony stopped by for a few days in the course of a road trip up the East Coast and got to meet everyone, which made it extra fun.

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I have now made it safely back to Berlin, to be greeted by VERY cold weather, but loads of snow. I was surprised at how easily I jumped back into German life- though driving in the States in winter had quickly made me want public transportation back! It was good to see my host family, and I was SO excited to return to my German church. I got into Berlin on a Friday, so that I was able to go to church only two days later, and instantly experienced that deep sense of home-ness that comes only with worshipping with a group of people you connect with well. My language skills came back in full force- better, actually, because I no longer spend my days in class with Americans, with whom it is easy to slip back into speaking English.

On that note, my current schedule is an odd one. Our program last semester ended with the American schedule in December, but my next semester starts with the German schedule- in April. While my program director, Jochen, is still available for me at any time, there is essentially no program in which I currently participate. My daily program is kind of cobbled together from a variety of activities, but I have so far found it productive and enjoyable. Primarily, I have a legal internship, officially through a Berlin law office and a court in Potsdam. I have greatly enjoyed this so far. One of nicest aspects of my internship is that both places tell me everything I can take part in, but then allow me to attend as much or as little of it as I like. My host mom has connected me to several friends of hers, which will also allow me to spend random days job shadowing judges in several different types of courts, and even accompany a member of the German parliament into one of their sessions! This flexibility also allows me to take time to do some of the traveling that didn't happen last semester. I currently have a trip to Stockholm and Barcelona planned for mid-February with my friend Kara, and I'm looking forward to visits from Anthony and my mom in March. My program will kick back in shortly thereafter with a program trip to various places in Germany- like classical Weimar. My classes at the Freie University here in Berlin will start after Easter and last through mid-July.

This week, one of the judges from the chamber I'm working with at the Justiz Zentrum Potsdam (Potsdam is the former East German city just to the SW of Berlin- it's practically in my backyard, a beautifully short commute!) allowed me to sit in on some of her cases, and then even took me with her to an offsite "Ortstermin." An Ortstermin is usually interpreted to mean "the scene of the crime," but, given that I'm working with a civil court, our Ortstermin was not nearly so dramatic as the term sounds. It was a case in which a woman was suing the man who built and sold her her house. According to her, he made everything cheaply, and it started falling apart immediately. So, when the judge and I came to the "scene of the crime," it was really a meeting of several lawyers, the judge, and the lady who owned the house to look at all the places in the house where she claimed it had been faultily designed. We documented them with photos in preparation for the hearing. The fact that everything took place in German may have added to the interest level, but I found it pretty interesting to begin with. Even when certain German legal terms go over my head and I don't understand exactly what's happening, I'm learning a lot about German civil and professional procedure. The German legal system is pretty interesting to begin with, because it is based off of law books, rather than natural law and case law, and there is no jury.

There you have the overview of my life at present. I hope to be a little more faithful with my blogging now; I find that an irregular schedule lends itself to blogworthy events!

Mauerfall: A Crash Course in Berlin Tourism Twenty Years after the Wall Fell

Strolling through Berlin on the weekend before Monday, November 9^th, you wouldn’t have been surprised you to learn that Berlin won the award for “Best Graffitied European City.” After a panicked few minutes in which Savanna and I could not find each other in the gargantuan Hauptbahnhof (main train station) on Friday, I escorted her on a walking tour of my new home city, starting with the main tourist sites. We started with the famous glass-domed Reichstag and wandered along the route where the Berlin wall stood until 1989— now lined with 1,000 colorful “dominoes.” These temporary blocks of Styrofoam had been sent all over the world, one hundred were painted by notable international artists, and the rest by German schoolchildren. They lined the metal strip eternally marking the city’s division from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburger Tor, where the dominoes would fall during the dramatic ceremony celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall on Monday.

On Saturday, we made the obligatory pilgrimage to Checkpoint Charlie, the renowned border crossing between West and East Berlin that was used primarily for American diplomats. Pieces of the wall— looking oh-so-much like slightly sturdier dominoes— dotted Berlin, serving as reminders of the momentous upcoming anniversary and for easy access to tourists with ready cameras. Since the fall of the wall, the nature of Berlin has shifted drastically from the highly symbolic border between socialist block countries and the free world to the “poor, but sexy” European tourism capital.

It didn’t rain that weekend (for the first time in November), so we meandered through the open markets looking at street art, buying a 1945 copy of Grimm’s Fairytales, and drinking Glühwein (German mulled wine) from plastic cups. Selecting carefully from Berlin’s double abundance of museums (neither half of the city would allow that their museums, their zoo, or their opera house be dismantled after unification), we visited the Pergamon Museum, a home to Greek temples, Roman houses, and Babylonian gates, and the Neues Museum, newly reopened to feature the bust of Nefertiti and the Trojan jewelry discovered by Heinrich Schliemann that the Russian didn’t steal upon occupation. (The note accompanying an ancient headdress remarks snidely that the rest of the Trojan treasure can be found in Moscow, where it is being held “in continued breach of international law.”) To be fair, as we walked through the room containing the Greek temple, through the Roman Courtyard, and through the gates of Babylon, Savanna balked in astonishment: “The Germans stole the Ishtar Gates?” Umm…. yes. But if anyone from Turkey would like to see some of his or her former national treasures, the Pergamon Museum is open seven days of week and till 10pm on Thursdays.

In the evening, we met up with friends in Berlin’s popular Orangienburgerstrasse, a locale where one can find any variety of nightlife from “Aufsturz,” a cozy restaurant and bar that houses a hundred beers from all over Europe, to some of Berlin’s more famous clubs, to a bombed out department store turned heavily-graffitied squatter art gallery. After dinner, we headed to this last to wander through Indie-looking art studios, gaze at creations from East Berlin street signs, examine jewelry made from spoons, and tilt our heads quizzically at the occasional portrait of an Indian overlaid on a Confederate flag. (No one ever promised that freedom of speech and paint wouldn’t lead to some outlandish results…)

On Sunday, we traveled back to the era of the liberal-minded Frederick the Great, who preferred building palaces in Potsdam for his friends to the war-waging typical of other German emperors. While the gardens near the palace of Sanssouci and the Neue Palais are astounding, their eighteenth-century beauty is still overcast by the recent days when Potsdam, to the northwest of Berlin, was a prominent but predictably gray city in East Germany. The miniature Brandenburger Tor in the Altstadt (oldest portion of the city) now overlooks a sufficiently bustling street of shops, cafes, and restaurants and the ongoing reconstructions of several national monuments.

Our adventures of the weekend were only an appetizer to the feast of spectacle that took place on Monday evening, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over 100,000 wet people (the November rained returned) congregated in front of the Brandenburger Tor at 5pm to await a program than included performances from Bon Jovi, a concert directed by Daniel Barenboim, interviews with former members of the East German resistance movement, and speeches from Klaus Wowereit (the current mayor of Berlin), President Sarkozy of France, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gordon Brown, and, of course, Angela Merckel. President Obama was distressingly absent from the festivities, but he had recorded a brief speech that was projected over the screens flanking the Brandenburger Tor while the crowd waited for official start to the festivities. November 9^th is a tricky date in German history, as it marks not only the fall of the Berlin wall, but Kristallnacht, also known the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938. Certainly all the important speeches memorialized the darker moments of German history as well as emphasizing the areas of the world where walls have yet to be broken down. The man standing next to me in the crowd was originally from South Korea; it was evident that the commemoration of the unification of Germany through the peaceful dissolution of a communist state was fraught with personal significance for him. The night, full of jubilation and sated memories, ended in fireworks and fallen dominoes.

"Cooking is at once the simplest and most satisfying of the arts..." (C. Claiborne)

With the second point, I will agree. On the first, I'm not so sure!

On Wednesday, I determined to have my first German baking adventure this week. Stovetop cooking doesn't change much as you cross the water: pasta still goes in the water when it's boiling, vegetables sauteed in olive oil still taste good, and you just cut the chicken open to see if it's cooked through. Baking is another story. And technically, I ought to begin telling this one at the point when my host mom left for Italy at 4am on Thursday morning:

When I woke up a few hours later and entered the kitchen to eat my bowl of muesli before heading out the door, I found my host dad looking dolefully at an empty sugar bowl. While I cut my banana, he looked everywhere for the sugar bag. No luck. I ventured to help and turned up a dish of something that looked like sugar. Well, three teaspoonfuls of salt into his coffee later, we discovered there was also no more milk. That's when I decided I needed to move beyond my usual trips to the fruit and vegetable stand near the train station and find an actual grocery store.

After class, I found a grocery store midway down the S-1 line, where I bought sugar, salt, eggs, milk, bread, almonds, and raisins, but baking soda had me stumped. I knew that the German word for baking powder was Backpulver, but no dictionary nor German I encountered that day knew what the word for baking soda was. I decided to hope for a recipe for zucchini bread ( a pretty safe place to start my first time baking in a foreign kitchen- I made it a hundred times last year as a form of thesis procrastination) that didn't require baking soda, and hauled my ingredients back home. No easy feat, actually when you have a heavy backpack, a large bag of groceries that includes eggs, and there's a ten minute walk to get to your front door!

In the kitchen, everything went really well- till I couldn't figure out how to pre-heat the oven. Then, I wasn't encouraged by the bewildered expression on Nico's face when I asked him how to work the oven and explained that I was making zucchini bread. My activities must have caught his interest, however, because he popped into the kitchen at least 6 times throughout the evening. The first four were on the pretense of getting a drink, when he must have gotten tired of drinking water, he finally just came in and asked directly if the bread was ready yet.

In the process of putting the groceries away, I found the sugar we'd looked for that morning, but realized that the cinnamon was missing. (Cinnamon is nearly always a key ingredient when I bake, so this was a serious blow.) I then proceeded to take my American recipe, double it, convert everything to the metric system, change the oven temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, use nutmeg instead of cinnamon, hope no one would notice the lack of baking soda (at least the recipe included baking powder and I put plenty of that in), and pray. Perhaps the largest risk I took was that I baked such a large quantity because I wanted to bring it to Biblestudy the following night.

Thankfully, everything turned out more or less alright- everyone at church seemed to like whatever it was (it turned out to be a zucchini-carrot-apple-raisin-nutmeg bread in the end) and Nico devoured the slices I left out for him the next morning. I'll never be able to repeat the recipe again, of that I am sure. Perhaps it would be easier to use German cookbooks next time.

On another note, I came home from Bible study tonight to find no less than 9 cartons of milk in the fridge. Apparently, after his horrible breakfast on Thursday morning, my host dad is determined to never run out of milk again.

Don't walk alone through the dangerous streets of Zehlendorf....

But not because they're at all dangerous. When I was there earlier today, it wasn't even dark out yet! And, if you know Berlin at all, you know that Zehlendorf is actually one of those nice suburban areas outside Berlin where there are lots of trees, family houses, bakeries, and nice shoe stores.

My particular difficulty was that I went to Zehlendorf on my way home simply to go to the bank- and came home an hour later with an eclectic assortment of parcels under my arm, including, but not limited to three Clementines, a cucumber, a pair of brown socks, nail polish remover, a package of dried mangoes, and a take-out box of fried rice with vegetables. The good news is that I only spent money that I had before I went to the bank and, I had actually been meaning to get all of them for a while. Except the fried rice. That was a spur of the moment decision, based on the knowledge that it was 7pm and that my shelf of the fridge at home had nothing particularly appetizing on it. It was good fried rice, incidentally.

As long as I'm sharing words of wisdom acquired in the past week or so, I would also advise against trying to buy a ticket from Prague to Krakow while you yourself are in Berlin. Apparently, as Deutsche Bahn has informed me via a person at the ticket counter, internet alerts, and three failed attempts to use an automatic ticket machine in the train station, this is impossible. In fact, no one seems to know how anyone from Berlin can get to these places, unless it is by taking a round trip to each in succession (ie. Berlin to Prague to Berlin to Krakow to Berlin). If you look at a map, you'll see that this is hardly a logical itinerary for a weekend trip. If I ever get a ticket, I'll be sure to let you know how it's done.

In other news, this week has been a particularly cultural one (or it will be, once we get to the end of it). On Wednesday, the entire program went to a performance of Mahler's 3rd Symphony at the Berlin Philharmonie, which was stellar! (See photo below; I suppose a clip of the music would be more interesting, but I don't think you're allowed to record the orchestra unofficially...)

Today, we visited the house of Bertolt Brecht (most famous as the author of "Mother Courage" and "The Three-Penny Opera"). We have just finished reading the German language version of "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," which is a satire on the rise of Hitler. He appears in the play in the character of Arturo Ui, who is the head gangster of a group of mafia men in Chicago. His underling-gangsters masquerade as harmless cauliflower vendors, but are secretly trying to overthrow the honorable mayor of the town, Dogsborough. In the play, Brecht presents the main events of the rise of the 3rd Reich, such as the burning of the Reichstag and the annexation of Austria, through parallel happenings in Chicago. The culmination to our week of culture will be this Saturday night, when we attend the play. Tomorrow we are also visiting the house at Wannsee- practically in my backyard, actually- where the Final Solution was decided upon.

Other than these, the most exiting events in my life have been the brief threat that I had swine flu (which thankfully came to naught), progressing on law school applications, and seeing a giraffe made entirely out of legos.