So today was meh, one of those days where you wake up thinking in English and you just can't shake it. Which was a shame because if I had been thinking in German it would have been a really great day.


Things continue to explode outside of my apartment, and people continue to ignore them. Hopefully I will soon too?



Anyway, recent events!



Saturday night my friend Kelsey sent me a message about Baumblütenfest, which she described as a kind of festival dedicated to the blooming of trees in Potsdam. I figured, what the hell I don't really want to spend the day reading by myself in Treptower Park. So I decided to go mostly because I like riding on trains and I enjoy hanging out with people.


So on the train ride over Kelsey finally reveals that Baumblütenfest is in fact a fruit wine festival taking place in Werder an der Havel and NOT in Potsdam. Naturally I got very excited, wine is one of my favorite beverages and festivals are always good times.

After getting into Werder we passed a few wine stands and I voiced my concern that the festival was going to be a letdown owing to the sparsity of wine stands. Kelsey insisted that the festival was still onwards and that these were fake wine stands. I believed her because it was still early and I was well rested and satisfied after our excellent trip on German Regional Verkehr.

Our first stop was a prezel stand that sold chocolate prezels. I didn't buy one and after tasting it I'm kind of glad that I saved my money. The pretzel was really dry and the chocolate tasted like it had been sitting in a bin at slightly above the recommended temperature for a couple of hours. No one else seemed to share my opinion.

After walking some more we ran into what Kelsey termed a Weingarten, though really it was just the first real winestand that sold wine at low enough prices for all to enjoy. I started out with a berry wine of some kind, I don't remember what though (not my fault! my host explained that fruit wine goes straight to your head). There was a stage in front of us with a group of germans that would lipsync to American pop songs and periodically encourage the audience to dance. This was the inspiration for my newest blog, Germanpeopledancing. Kelsey and I "retard danced" (her words not mine) for a song before returning to our imbibing.

We decided that we'd had enough wine to enjoy the Ferris wheel (or at least enjoy it more) so we shelled out 3,50 and waited in line with all the other winos. The ride was really nice except for we kept passing this one house that had a confederate flag waving in its yard. I wasn't really offended so much as confused.

German festivals have way better food than American ones, the half meter brat beats the foot long anyday (though I didn't get one) and Quarkbällchen are way better than funnelcakes.

Corndogs still win though.


All in all I think I had about 5 or 6 different glasses of wine. I really enjoyed everything I drank, especially as the day wore on...


Baumblütenfest is a real good time, even if you don't drink. It's one of those quaint German things that you have to do every once in a while to remind you that Germany is more than just Berlin.


I should get back to my critical reading for my Jewish class. I've understood most of it but I haven't really read it that hard and my battery is almost dead.


I'm going to Kopenhagen in a couple of days to see Will. So excited.

My German speaking achievement for the day was successfully ordering train tickets, only to initially find them too expensive, then return later in the day after learning they had quoted the price for two people and not one.


I am going to Kopenhagen and it most certainly did not cost over 300 euro for one person, that would be silly.


Now I am doing reading tonight, so that I may enjoy a tree blooming festival in Potsdam relatively guilt free.

Yes, I am doing cultural things. I will not regret this!



Also I just really like riding on trains for one thing. I hope the baker is open tomorrow, I'm out of bread.


rambleramblerambleKantishardtounderstandinanylanguageramblerambleramble

This is Spargel. It is delicious.



My host prepared some for me a few days ago, she served it with potatoes and assorted meats. It was one of my favorite meals that I have had here. It is like regular asparagus but thicker and less like a vegetable, which is why the Germans love it. To serve it you must also make a special cheese sauce that is also wonderful.


Mom, Dad, if you're reading this come to Germany immediately and eat Spargel. I know how much you love regular asparagus.


Today is Katarin's (host's daughter) birthday and to celebrate we had Spargelsuppe, which is a soup made from Spargel. It is wonderfully creamy and delicious.



First meeting of our Sprachkurse happened today. It looks way too easy, but at the same time I don't really need to learn anything new I just need review. This class is cool because there are international students in it, and they are friendly. Like the guy from Turkey who laughed when I bought what was basically a corndog out of the vending machine. It was bad, not much else to say about that.


Also ate döner today. It was pretty good. Not that that is unusual or anything...

Dear Germany,
I'm not normally one to judge appearances, but orange is not a skin color. All too often I see women with jet black hair and robustly orange skin. This is worrisome to me because I am concerned about your health, cancer is all too pervasive in the fake tan game. I'm also worried that someone may have told you it was ok to go out in public looking orange and on behalf of whoever that was I would like to apologize whole-heartedly; you were the victim of a cruel joke that has gone on for so long the people who told it no longer remember the punchline. It is with the upmost conern that I beg of you to return to your normal skin-tone and learn to live with your natural pigmentation.
-John

PS

To the turkish Guy wearing the glittery NPA (National Porn Association) shirt on the U-Bahn and looking really proud of it.

You are very classy, I just wanted you to know that.

So I went to a Hertha game on Sunday. It would have been a more mindblowing experience had I had the gumption to sit with fans, however I chose instead to sit with my friends. It turned out to be not so bad, because I have been hell of gimpy as of late. These new shoes I bought were tearing up my heals (which have since healed) and somehow I managed to roll/sprain both of my ankles to the point of massive swelling. I would not have been able to give Hertha the attention they deserved.


I also was an idiot and forgot to bring a camera. You will never know what I saw because of this. I don't think I can really afford to go to another game either.


It was still fun, Hertha beat Werder-Bremen with a very exciting last minute goal by a guy who's name escapes me.


I bought a scarf for 5 € thinking it was a great deal, only later I realized that Hertha BSC doesn't actually appear anywhere on it. At some point I will find a Hertha store and buy a scarf, then I will have two.


I met three Hertha fans on the way to Olympiastadion who asked me about my Waterloo shirt (everyone always does). They were surpised to learn that it is not a shirt from Waterloo station in London (lame!) but it is in fact a kick ass record store in Austin. They were glad I was from Texas and not London. They seemed to really hate London.


HT came to visit this weekend. We went to the zoo and I again forgot my camera. She had hers so I took a bunch of pictures. I think she will post them or send them to me at some point.



My Humboldt classes are terrifying, though the professors seem really nice and accomodating to some degree because of my Americanness. I will make an attempt to speak up in my Kant class because it is pretty small and I do have a passing familiarity with the subject. Jewish characterization however is a different story.


Also I might make a German friend soon! I registered for a Sprachpartner the other day. We spend 30 minutes speaking German and then 30 minutes speaking English each week.


Not much else. I ate blutwurst for the first time, and it was amazing. Also potatoes, are amazing.

I have decided to grow a beard in Germany!

Ach!



I am getting better I guess. My week is done and Huiting comes on Friday!


So anyway a quick rundown on my Humboldt classes.


My class on Jewish Characterization is terrifying. The professor seems nice and flat out told me and James (another dude from IES and also from Dickenson, Tx!) that she didn't really expect us to give any oral presentations. I'm still not sure what I need to do to get credit in that class though.


My Kant class steht in this incredibly ghetto ass east german relic of a Gebäude. The halls have no windows and every room is packed tightly against the room next to it. The class room itself obviously very tiny and the furniture has not been replaced since the Wende, and probably well before. Nevertheless it was a surprisingly positive experience. The teacher (you don't refer to them as Professors unless they've published a certain amount and have been recognized as such by the University) is from Italy and just got back from Italy yesterday. Her German is nice and slow and easy to understand, which should then make Kant a little more digestible. I was surprised that I was one of three people in the class who'd read him before. Yay Grinnell?


One more thing.


I don't ever want to hear another word about pretentious people at Grinnell, they don't exist. You see they simply can't compete with their European counterparts. German university students, well at least like the few in my philosophy class, outpace them in all areas.


I've also noticed that Germans have very good handwriting, und ich hab' dass nicht.


I apologize for the random breaks into Denglish and German.

Vielen Dank für ihr Verständnis


Also dann, Tschüs!

It is a sad day when I realize that the last thing my body needs is glop on top of carbohydrates.

so much for Pommes mit Mayo anytime soon.


I am sick and today was the first day of university courses. I was shocked by how little of what went on around me made sense. I think I was supposed to sign up for a presentation but did not. I talked to the professor afterward and from what I was able to pick up she doesn't really want me to give an oral presentation so now I'm completely at a loss. Thankfully IES makes her sign a sheet that says what I need for credit. If I just do that exactly I think I should be ok.


I hope.

No joke I have had experiences in Berlin like this.



Just not with currywurst. I had the sense to read this arc a long time ago

So as I was talking to a friend of mine today (in German!) I realized that I may have been a little too hasty in trying to shove all of Poland into one little entry. The trip really was one of the best I have been on in a while. It was a great experience because it taught me how to communicate when the people around you don't necessarily speak the same language but more importantly it taught me how much fun you can have in one single unplanned afternoon by just simply doing things like walking into a restaurant where nobody speaks english, or buying that weird looking pastry just because the name looks funny. It was a good primer on how to travel in Europe, something that is actually more complicated than it seems. Knowing German and English together helps tremendously, as those are two of the most commonly spoken languages here, but there so many more experiences to be had outside of those two languages. I want to go into a little more detail into one my experiences where there was little if any english spoken and the rewards for taking a risk where tremendous.


So on our tour through the old city section of Warsaw, which was completely destroyed during World War 2 and then rebuilt exactly, Marcin brought us into an old restaurant that was a hold over from communist days (at least that's what I think he said, I wasn't really listening at that point) and I looked at the prices and everything was dirt cheap. The essential set up of the restaurant was that you ordered your food, then after you paid you walked over to a window, handed the woman at the window your ticket and in a few minutes you received your plate of food. It's a wonderful take on American fast food, everything is already prepared but they don't use any of the shortcuts that we do. Greg, a really nice guy from my program, noticed that someone was eating chicken and mashed potatoes and realized that it would probably be cheap to come here with a translation of chicken and potatoes and hope for the best. We had lucked out on Polish food up until that point, and at about $3.50 a plate what did we stand to lose? So we asked our guide for a translation of chicken and potatoes in Polish. He wrote it down for us and we returned to the restaurant with our friend Brian in tow. Greg did the ordering for all three of us, it turned out that the cashier spoke enough English (most everyone in Poland knows English actually) for him to get our order across. We went over to the counter and this is what we ended up with:




























For reference, that is a plate with a full chicken breast, a huge pile of mashed potatoes, and heaping serving of cabbage. It was all delicious and really cheap.




That was kind of sappy, but I feel like the only way I can really do a blog like this is if I do the big events in a hurry and find little moments to cover. I really enjoyed eating lunch at this little cafeteria because it was so good and very Polish. I don't know if I could even find this place again if I tried. It seems pretty old and settled, so I'm sure it'll still be there if I ever decide to go back to Warsaw (which I would very seriously consider actually). I have pictures with the name on them that I can use for reference. I'm not even sure if I would go back to this place even.


I dunno. Poland was a first rate country, we had an excellent guide so point us in the right direction but the most fun I had was when I was just walking around own my own with other people. Not having any plans or knowledge about the country.



Poland you were amazing, now it's time to move on to other things.


Like Bristol, I'm going to Bristol in about a month. Crazy!

So I realized that Poland is rapidly becoming a distant memory and new things have happened in Berlin that need to be recorded before they too become distant memories, therefore I'll give a more abridged version of Poland.



We saw some castle in Warsaw that was bullshit, then I went to an Art Gallery and it was crazy.


Also Polish kebab is pretty good, or at least that one place was.



Some guy at a polish dance club yelled at me to get out of his seat, he was in a wheelchair so I got confused because he was already sitting.


We ran into some guys late at night who weren't from that particular hood and asked us for beer money.



Warsaw Day 2


Saw another bullshit castle, the guide was really rude and would yell at other groups were louder than he was. I accidentally yawned and he made a bunch of bizarre signs with his hands around his mouth that I eventually interpreted to mean I should have covered my mouth.

Marcin took us on a tour of the old city, it was gorgeous.

Greg, Brian and I walked around Warsaw. We stopped in at this place for lunch that had no english on the menu. Thankfully Greg had asked Marcin how to say chicken and mashed potatoes in Polish so we had an amazing meal for 11,50 zloty each.


Greg bought some Spiritys, which is 95% abv. It is very gross.



The train ride was uneventful.



KRAKOW!


Krakow is gorgeous, we ate at a restaurant that was communal dining. The portions were huge and one of the dishes was a huge chunk of meat wrapped in a leaf of cabbage which you then garnished with a generous portion of tomato soup. This was one of 7 courses, of which we had already had 4.



Auschwitz is depressing, but a necessary stop. Sorry not to include more, but it was pretty emotionally taxing for all of us.



Jew food is great! We went to a little restaurant in Kazimir, which is the jewish district. They played Klezmer music and I had 2 glasses of wine.


We went to this club called Kitsch that played nothing but 90's american pop music in one room and minimal techno in the other. It was a great time, I actually talked a Polish girl. Her name was Olga and she was very nice.



I somehow found my way home after not paying attention to how I got to the club at all.




Day 2!


Toured yet another bullshit castle (way too many people built castles in europe)


Walked around krakow, it is gorgeous. Bought a silly hat, saw a huge pillowfight, ate dinner



omygodpolandisgoneImissyoupoland!



The train ride back was even worse, because instead of just three to a cart we were six. German pass control is really terrifying.




I'll post pictures momentarily.





Also I started school this week, it looks to be pretty easy. I start Humboldt next week, that terrifies me.


I went to the Philharmonie today becuase my host couldn't go. It was fantastic.



The Polkaholix were off the chain, imagine a german speaking Brave Combo.



I had the worst falafel ever today, it was microwaved and essentially a dry paste that was so bad.




gross

This was seriously the only interesting part of Marienberg now that I think about it.



Yeah they're aussteiging in whatever direction they please, they're polish they do was sie wollen.


I'm being a little unfair to Marienberg, I'm sure it's a pretty little town, it just seemed like all we were doing there was visiting a castle. And if any of my readers have ever been to Germany, or Europe in general for that matter, you fully understand that one castle is enough to last a lifetime. Though the Schloss at Marienberg is actually very impressive considering it was entirely rebuilt after the second world war under a communist regime, it still doesn't excuse the fact that Castles for the most part just aren't very interesting places. I took tons of pictures and I will post them at picasa as soon as I've sifted through them.


After the castle Marcin took us to field where he said a hotel was supposed to be built. The only problem was that it turned out that the field was full of 2000 corpses. Yeah, that was nice and pleasant to hear right after touring a castle and before eating lunch.

Lunch was awesome though, Marcin took us to this really great Polish place that had Pierogi, which is one of my new favorite foods (as are most polish foods actually). It's basically a polish dumpling but it's so good.


Afterward we went to a polish super market and I was a little depressed by how indistinguishable it was from an American one. Seriously get rid of the polish aisle labels and it's basically an american store.

At any rate we bought provisions for the long train ride to Warsaw (about six hours) and gathered at the train station you see in the photo. The train we were one was actually really nice, we had our own compartment and the six hours went by surprisingly fast. The Polish country side is actually very pretty, although there are some parts where you wonder how the hell do people live in places this remote. We actually saw clumps of houses surrounded by nothing but fields and the railroad. I guess living in Grinnell isn't much different, except I think these people might find Grinnell to be a sprawling metropolis instead of a quaint little Iowa town.

We got into Warsaw kind of late, luckily the hotel was still serving dinner. The hotel we stayed at this time wasn't as authentically polish as in Danzig. I was a little disappointed by this, but at the same time everyone working at the hotel spoke English so at least communication was easier.

I ate like three plates of food before finally calling it quits. Thomas and Stephanie had a desert eating contest that eventually pissed off the people working the dining area because they were ready to close up shop.


Afterwards I went clubbing and stuff happened that I don't want my parents knowing about.


Next time, Warsaw proper!

I had a fucking shitty day today guys.


Dudes was hella borin me out and not having taken medicine for a week really dragged me down today. Ugghh I hate feeling that lethargic.



Classes actually started today, so I have some homework. I'm really tired. I'll update more about poland tomorrow.

Reise nach Polen!

So this is going to be updated in multiple parts, mostly because there's a lot to update and also because it would get monotonous to read and write.

I also took over 400 pictures of Poland so it's going to be a little bit before I post them. I posted pictures of the giant pillow fight I was in but the rest is going to probably go up a little later this week.


I'm just going to give you guys a basic rundown of what happened first

Itinerary:

Gdansk, formerly the free city of Danzig and onetime home to legendary author Günter Grass, who's house I was not able to see.

Marienburg, home of a castle that we saw, not that exciting

Warschau: Amazing, simply amazing. Completely destroyed by the bombs of WWII but is not completely (if not almost certainly largely) rebuilt.

Krakow: Amazingly survived the war (mostly) intact, absolutely gorgeous however the side trip to Auschwitz put somewhat of a damper on the festivities.


In between all of these places we traveled by polish trains, which waver between incredibly adorably eastern European and actually comfortable. Our first train was a sleeper, which meant the rooms were incredibly compact. Even so we were able to fit at least five people comfortably in order to hang out and ride out the compulsory sobriety. I would not recommend sleeping on a train if you can avoid it. The train ride to Danzig shouldn't be more than a couple of hours but because our program directors elected to save us a bundle of money it took us 12 hours or so. The reason for this is the trains stops every so often for long periods of time in increasingly smelly parts of the country.

We randomly ran into two American dude-bros who were claiming to be making a film about the Holocaust. The general consensus among the ladies is that they were creepers. I think Americans in general are starting to bother me, which is a problem. I love America. Mostly I think it was because they interrupted our game of old maid, which was getting pretty heated.

Needless to say after disembarking (pictures to be posted later), we were all tired, thirsty and hungry. None of us really understood that being on a train for 12 hours means you can't get off and buy food and that we should have done that before hand.

Anyway after gathering myself together and cursing at everything that moved I joined my compatriots in disembarking from the station. It was here that we would get our first dreary glimpse of Danzig, as well as our first introduction to a man who would become more than just our guide, but also our friend. I'm speaking of course of Marcin, the polish guide who speaks 5 languages and free lances for National Geographic. Yeah, he's pretty impressive.

From there we got our introduction to Polish breakfast, which is full of meat and fruit all soaked in grease and fanned on a plate. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I must have put away at least 5 plates of food, which was actually about average.

The hotel itself was 5 kinds of crappy. It was probably a nice hotel for Danzig, but there were just too many things wrong with it. The beds were small, not that I got to sleep in a bed, though the hotel was kind enough to set up a cot in my room. I shared the room with two dudes who were pretty crazy chill.


From breakfast we embarked on a tour of the city. I don't know what it is about the Poles and German (actually I do know what it is, most of them really hate speaking it and try to avoid it as much as possible) but our tour guide's speech patterns were confusing and almost impossible to follow. When trying to understand German it is incredibly important to hear the entire sentence in order to glean any kind of meaning. This is because german sentences place the primary verb in the second position and shove all other verbs at the very end, where they share space with sepearable prefixes and sometimes conjunctions. Our guide would pause at the oddest of places in her sentences and linger just long enough for me to forget what she had said to me so that the remaining words would be completely out of context. It was a taxing tour, though Danzig is a beautiful city. I could begin to feel my shoes giving way, and indeed by the end of the week they had holes in the souls, so my feet were in great pain. By the end of the tour I was exhausted, hungry, dirty and really really had to pee.


A little warning about Poland for those of you with weak bladders. Public bathrooms are not free, sometimes taking pictures inside of a building isn't free, and if you don't have any small change you can probably find yourself out of luck. Restaurants also do not allow you to use their bathrooms unless you are buying something, this is true of Berlin as well.


After the tour, our guide suggested that those of us who didn't want to walk around the old city could go to the beach where there were plenty of places to eat and we could walk along the longest pier in Poland. It isn't that long, but Poland also isn't really a coastal country.


A group of us grabbed lunch and beer (Polish beer is great by the way, Zwieck was my favorite, though I'm sure I'm misspelling it). Afterwards a small group of us stayed behind to explore the beach and drink beer. We were already kind of tipsy and frankly saw no reason not to keep going. I mean it was spring break man, what else were we going to do. Unfortunately Poland isn't as open about it's open container laws, which means we were all technically breaking the law as we loudly walked down the pier drinking beer (hey that rhymes!) but the cops didn't accost us or anything so that was ok. I remember really having to pee very badly but not wanting to face the woman at the WC twice in a row. We won't go into how we solved that problem...


Anyway of course we got lost, and if it weren't for some very friendly polish people who warned us not to speak any german we were able to make our way to the restaurant about 15 minutes late right as the soup arrived. The rest of was pretty relaxed. At some point I managed to shower and grab some more beer from the spätkauf down the street. I won't go into what happened after dinner because it wasn't very exciting. Danzig is a beautiful city in parts, but of all that we saw in Poland it was the most stereotypically eastern european, which is a shame because it was a genuinely beautiful city.



Next up, Marianberg!

I just returned from Poland.


I have no food and my host is on a day trip.



Also in Germany Lebensmittel generally aren't open on Sundays.



I've also started speaking more Denglish.


Also Poland was awesome, and I missed my mother's birthday.



More on Poland later