amerikanerin in berlin

I was sitting here thinking, I should probably blog because I haven't in almost a week, but what do I have to talk about? And then I remembered I went to a play and a ballet last week. It's just, you know, I've become such a big-city girl, and I absorb so many highly cultural events on a regular basis, I forget that what is daily life for me may be extraordinary for the masses. Because I'm really VERY cultured.

The play was Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters. I saw it at the Schaubühne, a long-famous Berlin theatre known for radical and experimental productions. The Chekhov production was modernized, and the set they used was really fascinating. The whole floor was mirrored, and the back wall looked like corrugated metal. During the first act there were lots of plain metal chairs on the stage, and a 3-foot-high platform across the whole front of it, which they used as various rooms in their house. For the second act they took everything down, and there was just the mirrored floor starting at the feet of the people sitting in the first row and running all the way to the back wall. The actors stood and milled around on stage, and the lighting was such that their shadows and the shadows of their reflections in the floor were cast on the back wall.

The whole play was in German, too, which added another interesting dimension for me. I've been getting better at understanding a lot more, though, particularly when it's not clearly spoken, which is always more difficult. Like when a character in a play throws a crying/screaming/falling down often fit on stage. (There's a lot of that in Three Sisters.)

On Friday night I went to see the Berlin Staatsballett perform Swan Lake at the Staatsoper (State Opera House). I wish I'd been wearing a long black evening gown and elbow gloves and fur-lined cape, watching the ballet from a seat in a box. The opera house is plush and ornate and opulent, and such a great place in which to see my favorite ballet. (Of the few productions I've seen, that is, but I'm pretty sure it will always be my favorite.) I was actually wearing pants and sitting off to the side in the first balcony among a lot of people speaking French--not the best seat (though I have nothing against the French), but great considering I didn't buy a ticket until half an hour before the performance, and plus it only cost me €5.

If you think you're probably not going to be able to make it over to Berlin to go see Swan Lake with me in the next couple months, remind me to take you to see the next conveniently-located production of it near you. Your life will be better for it.

by LP at 10:15 AM (Berlin time) | Permalink | Comments

Last Sunday I walked over to the Kudamm to see the Karneval parade. Karneval (Carnival, or Fasching, or Fastnacht) is basically Mardi Gras, only it's not just Fat Tuesday here. It depends where you are in Germany--it's huge in the Rheinland, especially Cologne--but here it started on Sunday, and then yesterday was Rose Monday. People dress up in costume--lots of wigs and homemade outfits--mostly, I think, as an excuse for being allowed to put rum in their hot chocolate at 10:30 am.

Here's everybody milling around, waiting for the parade to start:

The little white-tented huts (set up on the same square where that giant Christmas market was, you may remember) are selling bratwurst and various other chunks of grilled meat, also beer and cocktails and the aforementioned spiked hot chocolate.

Here's how narrow the people-lined street is:

And here's how big the floats in the parade are:

There are no paltry balloon-covered pickups involved here; most of the floats are on semi trailers. Which means the people on them are up pretty high, which means the candy they throw lands not on the pavement but on the heads of the crowd. This becomes particularly entertaining when they throw full-size chocolate bars. People hold open umbrellas upside-down for optimal candy-catching, with the added benefit of the extra head protection.

I was standing in front of the EMT truck, helping the rest of the crowd to block it in because getting the most candy is more important than saving lives, and one of the emergency response volunteers, a girl probably 16 years old, was sitting in the driver's seat window taking pictures of the parade. Everyone on the floats who saw her immediately pelted her with candy, trying to make handfuls of it through the window into the truck. Since she was basically sitting just over my shoulder, I got caught in some crossfire, but at least the kids standing in front of me scored a pretty big take as a result.

There are also lots of girls in these fluffy skirts marching in the parade and sometimes forming can-can kick lines:

The weather was gorgeously sunny, and I made it out with minimal cranial damage, so I'd call it a Sunday morning well spent.

Labels: Berlin life

by LP at 12:56 PM (Berlin time) | Permalink | Comments

Just now I got home from a leisurely trip to the secondhand shop up near Nollendorf Platz. I bought a skinny burgundy leather necktie. I wasn't even aware I needed a burgundy leather tie until I saw it there on the table among many other leather neckties, but now I'm not quite sure how I've managed so long without one.

See? Great, right?

Anyway, on to what I'm really here to blog about. (Hang on, cause it's gonna be a long one.) At long last, I made it to Prague. Met up with James here in Berlin last Wednesday and boarded the train for a quick little four-hour jog over to the Czech Republic. (Have I mentioned how much I love how easy train travel is? Cause I love it.) The city was absolutely as beautiful as I'd always dreamed. If you happen to find yourself in Prague, try to see the Charles Bridge for the first time by moonlight. And if you can manage it, add a little misty rain too. Here it is during daytime:

It's lined with old, blackened statues of saints, which are eerily cool by night. Also there were fewer people. During the day, artists set up shop on the bridge and sell watercolors and sketches (and caricatures, too, for the most touristy of tourists).

We saw the lunar clock, where on the hour a row of saints files past and peeks out two little windows at the top, and a skeleton rings a bell. The Jan Hus memorial is also really striking at night, though you might not believe it from this picture:

Thursday we went up to the castle and walked around, then wandered the city some more and sat in a super cool cafe and bookstore for a few hours, during which we played (but did not finish) the first and only chess game of my life. Now if I never play chess again, at least I can say I played once in Prague.

Later on we went in search of a brewery James read about in a guidebook, and when we found it, it turned out to be one of the best parts of the whole trip. These guys were walking around playing Czech folk songs, and hearty old Czech men with mustaches were singing all the words:

This place, U Fleků, is supposedly the oldest brewery in Prague--founded 1499. Right around Columbus' time, you know? It's always crazy to me how young my country is compared to Europe.

On Friday we got back on the train to head over to Dresden, where James' friend Alice was kind enough to put us up for the weekend. On the way out, I took this picture, because I found it interesting how shiny and polished the (touristy part of the) old city was, while the scenery surrounding the (not main) train station is clearly a holdover from socialist times:

Dresden was beautiful too, and the cool thing about that city is how recently it's all been put back together. Only last summer was the restoration on the Frauenkirche finished; before that it was completely in ruins. The East German regime didn't put too high a priority on rebuilding a giant church after we bombed it to pieces.

Alice lives in Neustadt ("new city" part of Dresden), which is full of university students and all kinds of cool clubs and cafes. We met lots of great people. On Saturday we wandered around the city a bit. It was very cold. But the architecture is all really impressive because Dresden used to be the seat of the Kaiser. Here's the court church:

I didn't take that many pictures in Dresden, but there are a few, along with more from Prague, on my Flickr page.

Sunday we headed home. Our last hurrah in Dresden consisted of getting fined for not having tickets while riding the tram to the train station. We wanted to buy tickets from the automat on the tram, but neither of us had enough coins. So we're like, oh well, what are the odds the controllers will come around? We'll have to chance it. Should have known, though, that as soon as we said that, the controllers were pretty much guaranteed to come around. Which they did, leaving us with no choice but to play dumb American. We're all, ticket? what ticket? We had day tickets from Saturday, and in a stroke of creative idiocy, we took to arguing that we thought the 4:00 on the ticket meant it lasted until 4 pm (16:00), though we were perfectly aware that it was good till 4 am (that morning). The controller, who was WAY nicer than I would have been to a couple of stupid tourists waving around American passports, patiently explained multiple times that our tickets were expired and only made us pay €10 cash instead of the €40 normal fine. He also refrained from calling our bluff when we insisted on speaking English to him, even though when he asked at one point, in German, how far we were going on the tram, we both answered "Hauptbahnhof" without missing a beat.

On the train back to Berlin, there was an elderly couple in our compartment who told us they were from Prague. When James asked whether they'd always lived in Prague, the old man smiled a little and said he'd spent some time moving around a bit too, pulling up his sleeve to show us his ID tattoo from a concentration camp. Six different camps, actually, for six years starting when he was 17. He spends his time now traveling around to schools and talking about his experiences during the war, which include having met and worked under Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz (because he'd told them he'd been a medical student).

The woman said that students always ask the man whether he harbors any hate for the Germans, but he always answers that he doesn't because some Germans helped his family during the war. He's like God judging Sodom, she said, willing to spare the city if only ten righteous men could be found there--he's forgiven all of Germany for the sake of the few Germans who were kind to his family. So there I am, a girl from South Dakota, sitting in a train compartment with an 80-year-old Czech man showing me his ID tattoo and telling me he's forgiven the Germans, having just left a city which only recently finished putting itself back together after we bombed it to rubble...and I'm thinking, how did I get here?

This isn't history class anymore, you know?

Labels: travels

by LP at 2:17 PM (Berlin time) | Permalink | Comments

A few anecdotes from the past couple days of class...

Today, I played Tabu with an 11th-grade class. It's a game wherein you have to describe, in this case, film titles in English for your teammates to guess. (Like a verbal version of charades, or like that game Taboo only without forbidden words.) One girl who got The Mummy started out by saying, "It's another version of 'mother'..."

Yesterday, in a 12th-grade class, the theme of discussion was "What is love?" One young man, when confronted with a list of possible definitions, asserted that love is the affection that a mother feels for her child, because he doesn't think anyone can ever love him as much as his mother does. (Sounds to me like a stressful in-law situation awaits some lucky girl...)

And in an 8th-grade class yesterday, during a discussion of global warming, the teacher brought up CFC-free refrigerators, saying that the old appliances made before the ban on CFCs are mostly all gone now. One student, a boy who usually does something clowny at least once per lesson, asked whether the police are allowed to break into households suspected of harboring non-CFC-free fridges in order to arrest the owners thereof.

by LP at 1:28 PM (Berlin time) | Permalink | Comments