Ich bin ein Berliner!

Not really. But that's mostly just because JFK didn't get it right! I do, however, now live in Berlin for the next eleven months or, rather, slightly outside of it. I arrived on Wednesday (this time, I experimented with Tylenol PM on the flight over, but I determined-to-be-jetlagged body managed to render it completely ineffective). Thankfully, all that the program demanded of me was a dinner together to meet everyone, and I managed to stay awake until my two hotel roommates and I could collapse in our room at 10pm. We had orientation at the hotel with all the Davidson and Duke students for two days (there are nineteen of us), which gave us a chance to learn names, figure out where our classes were, get a feel for public transportation, and see a few major sites.

On Friday, we took a great bike tour (Fat Tire bike tours, for anyone who will be in a major European city soon), in which our (English-speaking) guide led us a on a six hour bike tour of Berlin. (I assure you, our pace guaranteed that the tour was intended for intellectual and not physical exercise.) We saw the major government offices, bikes along the Spree River, saw the East Berlin TV tower, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, the site of Hitler's bunker, the Reichstag, the Tiergarten (a former hunting ground for royalty, now a park), and, of course, had lunch in a "typisch deutsch" Biergarten. I'm not going to translate that- it means exactly what you think it does. Suffice it to say there were adequate quantities of sausage as well!

Friday night, Duke hosted a dinner at the Humboldt University for all the students and their host families. My host mom, Barbara, and host brother, Tobi (23), were very nice. They proved friendly, easy to talk to, competent in English, but happy to play along and speak German with me. About halfway through the meal, just as I was thinking everything was going to work out beautifully, Barbara told me in German that "there was a small problem." Her younger son, Nico (14), was sick. She told he has been given medicine and the doctor said he was no longer contagious, but was I still comfortable coming home with them? I said yes, of course, that was no problem. Then, purely to keep conversation going, I asked what Nico had. Oh, said Barbara, "Schweine flu." That one also means what you think: swine flu. The only logical thing to do then, knowing that he was well on his way to recovery, was to laugh. So that's what she meant by "sick"..... Well, that's the long of it. The short of it is that while everyone is really fine, the program mandated that I stay elsewhere till Nico comes out of quarantine and goes to school on Wednesday, so Barbara's best friend, Maria, agreed very graciously to host me till then.

I am therefore happily settled in a blue and white bedroom on the second floor of Maria's house in Zehlendorf, a- dare I say suburb? - to the southeast of Berlin. Thankfully, Maria's house is very close to Barbara's, so I won't have to learn a totally different way home from school. (With my sense of direction, this would have proved a minor trial.) Maria, her husband, and the two children I have met have both been extremely nice to me. We have been able to converse entirely in German, even serious conversations, and I've even been able to understand the majority of the joking (harder than you'd think)! They are happy to include me in everything, or to let me orchestrate my own schedule. This morning, we all went to IKEA to buy their college aged sons some furniture for their new apartment in Berlin. Clearly, it doesn't get much better than IKEA : ) , so I'd better leave off their. Tomorrow brings another day of exploration, and school starts on Monday, so I'm sure to have plenty more to write about soon!