kennen lernen

Okay, I've been playing chicken with the sunset outside my window for the last fifteen minutes or so. I took one photo when I first noticed how lovely the sky was becoming, but every time I look up at it now, it's just getting more and more beautiful. I don't want to keep getting up to take pictures of it and so I am instead waiting anxiously to catch it at the peak of its loveliness...but, of course, you don't know that you've reached that moment until it's already passed. So we'll see how this turns out. See the end of this post for the result of this game I and the Abendrot (translated literally as "evening red"--German sometimes surprises me with how lyrical it can be) are playing...

Anyway. I've titled this post kennen lernen, which means "to get to know (someone or something)" in German. I've been doing a fair bit of kennen lernen with my classmates this week, our first full week of classes at the Goethe Institut. I've spent the most time so far with the two American students in my class, perhaps not surprisingly--language and culture are pretty powerful bonding agents. (Although, they make fun of me for how I say "sorry" and other Canadianisms.) Amy, whom I've mentioned briefly before, is doing her MA in Classical Archaeology at Tufts right now and is here learning German to prep for her translation test in the fall. Evan is a 4th-year undergrad at Pittsburgh (it's his first time out of the USA!) who wants to go to grad school for biological philosophy, whatever that is. They're cool.

Yesterday (Thursday) was a Feiertag (holdiay) here in Germany so we had the day off from classes. I met Amy and Evan in front of the Berliner Dom and we spent the afternoon immersing ourselves in culture and history at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. The museum covers something like 4000 years of German history, so you know, an afternoon is plenty of time to see it all. Not. Really. It's a huge museum, and a pretty great one, actually. We only had time to breeze through it, and even though it was my second time there (I had been during my last trip to Berlin), I still feel like I missed a lot there.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum. It's two separate buildings, connected underground, and a pretty great example of  the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of old and new architecture in Berlin.

Germania, ready for some freakin' action at the beginning of the First World War.

German marks in 1923 at the height of the inflation crisis (denominations visible in this pile include 5-million, 50-million and 500-million marks). Burdened by war reparations and a crushed economy after the First World War, Germany started printing money like it was no one's business. The result was that by the fall of 1923 a loaf of bread ended up costing 3 billion marks and people had to take home their wages in wheelbarrows. People were also paid daily, so they could rush out and buy whatever they could before the value of the mark fell even further. Pretty crazy times, to say the least.

A first edition of Mein Kampf.

There are so many museums here in Berlin, that I guess they have to make sure they don't overlap too much. As a result, though, some patches of the Deutsches Historisches Museum seemed a bit lacking to me. For instance, the museum hardly had anything that I noticed about the Holocaust. It mentioned antisemitism frequently throughout the exhibits, and it did have a concentrated antisemitism section nestled within the Third Reich wing, but there was very little displayed about the concentration camps, and only one measly panel devoted to the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing units in the East which followed the onward-marching Wehrmacht, and massacred Jews and annihilated entire towns as they went). To be fair, the Jewish Museum does a pretty thorough job on the Holocaust, and in general no one could ever argue that Germany doesn't do a thorough job at memorialising the Holocaust. But still. There is a very particular narrative being told in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, a museum set up to take visitors systematically and chronologically through 4000 years of German history--that the Third Reich, and the atrocities committed in its name, forms a significant but still only one part of German history. And, you know, that's true. It is. But...still.

Then again, as big as the museum is, it's not meant to be thorough, I don't think. It's probably the museum equivalent of a second-year survey German history course--you can only go so deep into each topic when you're covering such a large period. And the Holocaust certainly was not the only section that the museum seemed to breeze through. Surprisingly, there wasn't a heck of a lot about the Reformation, despite the fact that the whole thing was centred in Germany.

At any rate, the day was a good one. We took a break after we went through the first 3900 years of German history to have a late lunch at a cafe by the Spree River. The sun came out and everything.

The view from our table. That's the Spree there, and the Berliner Dom on the opposite bank.

And later, on my way home from the museum, I passed by a bakery. And this happened:

Somehow, I managed to get the pretzel home from the bakery in almost one piece.

That was yesterday. This morning was really confusing because yesterday felt like a Saturday but today we had classes bright and early at 8:30am. Not so fun. Luckily, I really do love our German teacher, Martina. She's endlessly patient with us and constantly upbeat. Also, she's super helpful! I had to go the post office the other day and I asked her for tips on what to ask for there, and her advice came in very handy! So class, although early in the morning, is actually pretty enjoyable.

After class, I went with Amy and Evan, and this time also Andrew, from England, to the East Side Gallery--this stretch of the Berlin Wall in East Berlin that is famously decorated with murals.

The beginning of one end of the gallery.

Looking back down the East Side Gallery, with the nearly ubiquitous Fernsehturm in the background.

Some of my favourite murals, along with a couple famous ones:

The inscription reads something like: "So strong and yet so vulnerable, the people, man, the forest, the tree."

I like the chain forcing the hand into a thumbs-up position and this last one the best, I think, if we're going after meaning. If we're going after fun, then it's the faces, clearly!

After the gallery, we had a lazy walk through Kreuzberg, stopping for a while at a bar to wait out some rain, and then continuing through to the Turkish Market, where I snagged some fresh mint leaves and dried strawberries. All in all, it was a pretty lovely day.

But it got even lovelier when I made it back to my apartment! I've been waiting for an air mattress to be delivered to the apartment all week. The guy I'm renting from, Ben, bought it and said I should expect Deutsches Post to leave a notice in my mailbox saying I should pick it up from the local post office. But for some reason, the air mattress was sent via courier instead, and both times they tried to deliver it I was out. Today, after coming home from my East Side Gallery wanderings, I found another notice in my mailbox from the courier saying that they'd left the package with a neighbour. I don't know anyone in this building and no one really knows me, but cool, okay. But, turns out, it was a neighbour in another building altogether! I don't know if they were delivering something else to her and asked if they could leave my package with her too, or if she was walking by and saw them not getting any response at the buzzer and volunteered, but either way...I don't really see this happening at home. It's super refreshing, and apparently very common in Germany. People are genuinely neighbourly here. I, of course, the cynical North American, left the neighbour with my package in hand, wondering if social protocol maybe demanded I should pay her or something??? Of course not. I knew that, but I had to check with Ben at any rate. But no, it turns out that Germans are just really friendly, to each other at least. (In shops, the German penchant for efficiency seems to win over anything else.)

What was also awesome about this--I rang this woman's buzzer at the building next door without even thinking about the fact that I would have to speak to her in German without the benefit of gesticulations and her being able to see my confused, I-don't-really-speak-German face. And I just asked her if she had a package for me. Sure, my grammar and pronunciation probably wasn't perfect. But, she understood me and buzzed me in right away. So YEAH. That gave me a bit of a rush.

Okay, the winning sunset picture from tonight:

View from my balcony.

Also, this happened today. In the U-bahn, on my way home.

I look a little drunk here. But I wasn't. I was, however, pretty happy.

BREZELN COUNT: 5