update? what update?
Whoa, sorry. Still here. Just lazy. For the past few days, anyway. Before that I had a good excuse for not posting. Last week I spent most of my time over at Alexanderplatz with a whole bunch of crazy Americans who took over Berlin for the Fulbright conference. I caught up with some people I haven't seen since I met them in September, listened to some people present research projects on everything from immigration in Sweden to making chairs out of tree branches, ate some free food, and listened to some lovely music performed by other, more artistically-minded Fulbrighters. At one point I had to ask myself, while surrounded by that many Americans, whether I was really still in Berlin. A few of them even stayed after the conference ended on Thursday, and the floor of my room was rather more occupied than usual for Friday and Saturday night, but now I'm back to life as usual.
I've also been pretty busy helping one of the teachers at my school with a bilingual American history class for 8th graders. They've never done this before, so we're writing the curriculum from scratch. It's bringing back all kinds of memories of 4th grade: Pilgrims and Indians, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving, the Mayflower Compact... Last class period, we had the kids make posters advertising the New World to prospective settlers back in 17th-century Europe. One of the groups, choosing as their focus the religious freedom to be found in North America, drew pictures of a church and a Bible and also a mosque and the Koran. Yet another incident of a rather interesting change in perspective.
Last night I went with a friend to see The Good German in the posh movie theatre in Potsdamer Platz. The movie looked interesting, and I liked the book it's based on. They made it in black and white, to be more contemporary with the setting of the plot, which is Berlin in 1945 immediately after the end of the war. Turned out to be a pretty good movie, besides the fact that it's fun to see what I recognize of the city I now live in, and realize how drastically it's changed in 60 years. George Clooney, however, for all his suaveness, speaks some really awful German.
I've also been pretty busy helping one of the teachers at my school with a bilingual American history class for 8th graders. They've never done this before, so we're writing the curriculum from scratch. It's bringing back all kinds of memories of 4th grade: Pilgrims and Indians, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving, the Mayflower Compact... Last class period, we had the kids make posters advertising the New World to prospective settlers back in 17th-century Europe. One of the groups, choosing as their focus the religious freedom to be found in North America, drew pictures of a church and a Bible and also a mosque and the Koran. Yet another incident of a rather interesting change in perspective.
Last night I went with a friend to see The Good German in the posh movie theatre in Potsdamer Platz. The movie looked interesting, and I liked the book it's based on. They made it in black and white, to be more contemporary with the setting of the plot, which is Berlin in 1945 immediately after the end of the war. Turned out to be a pretty good movie, besides the fact that it's fun to see what I recognize of the city I now live in, and realize how drastically it's changed in 60 years. George Clooney, however, for all his suaveness, speaks some really awful German.
