Ich bin kein Berliner...

... but I did enjoy the excursion.

Before I get into that though, I will elaborate more on events in the month of January. The day after my last post was my 21st birthday, which was (while anti-climatic, as expected) absolutely lovely. Becca came over in the afternoon to make no-bakes, and stayed for the lovely dinner Kara and Noah cooked for me. After dinner we headed to Schlappen, where approximately four girls and one thousand boys joined me for drinks. Since I started a little early I was completely unopposed to taking the last Strassenbahn home, which I did, and then continued to "drink" aka attempt to do my dishes in the kitchen. Since I was kind of drunk and kind of ridiculous, I went to be at the early hour of 2-3 in the morning (memory eludes me). Despite the absence of my two darling birthday enforcers (Ashley and Stacy, of course), I had the happiest and tear-free-est (err...) birthday I've had in a long time.

Classes started and my good mood ended on January 7. The following Monday I had a Referat (a long and painfully German oral presentation) in my history course. Joanna and I were assigned the 1973-1989 time period, so we focused on environmental protection, the peace movement in East Germany and the Rote Armee Fraktion, a left-wing terrorist group that was active in the seventies. It was actually extremely interesting to do the research, which meant that I got very little sleep all weekend. Overall, I think the presentation went relatively well, and I think I'm going to write my final paper for that class on the RAF, which means I have a bit of a head start as compared to last time in that I actually know something about the topic I'm writing about.

Thursday I left for Berlin with the twenty-something other AYFers in the class (history) for which it was a requirement. I'll shortly summarize the trip day by day:

Thursday: Wake up excruciatingly early (remember when I said I didn't get much sleep all week?) to get to the train on time. Sit on the train for seven hours. Arrive at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and wait outside in the deary, muddy cold for forty minutes while our program coordinators try to remember what we're supposed to be doing. Go to the hostel for dinner and a Referat on the Holocaust Mahnmal. Go to bed because we're all unbelievably tired.

Friday: Wake up excruciatingly early. Head to the Bertold Brecht Haus. Become immensely confused as to how to split a group of 25 into two. End up not going with either group and instead chatting with my (adorably) geeky history professor (teacher?), Becca and Kara. Get a private-ish tour of the house and cemetary. Eat delicious Thai food. Walk to the Brandenburger Tor and slide around on the ice. Go to the Holocaust Mahnmal (memorial) and Information Center below (which was extremely interesting in a devastatingly sad way. The entire time I was in there I was completely absorbed with a feeling that I simply cannot describe. The thing I remember most clearly was a room where excerpts of letters of the victims were illuminated in boxes along the floor. One of them was the postscript of a letter from a little girl to her parents in which she said goodbye to her father because she knew she was going to die and be "thrown in the pit" with all of the other children). Go back to the hostel and have dinner. Join many other AYFers, our resident director and our history professor at the hostel bar. Have a few drinks, then head out to a club dressed completely inappropriately for anything involving clubs. Dance and sweat like fools until two in the morning. Take the U-Bahn home.

Saturday: Wake up excruciatingly early. Take a tour of the Bundestag which wouldn't have been bad had I not been ready to fall asleep standing up. Head back to the hostel to drop off the comically large and rather unimpressive calendars we had all picked up (I suppose it's hard to resist free stuff). Have lunch at Checkpoint Charlie and meet up with the group for the longest and most painful Stadtführung of my life (try 4+ hours of walking around in the freezing cold while some mega-expert on Berlin explains, in great detail (and in German, no less), the most seemingly insignificant landmarks you can imagine. Berlin has such an extensive history and so many important and identifiable buildings/monuments, but did we go to the Brandenburger Tor, or Alexanderplatz, or really anything at all? Not really. At one point though, we did stop in front of a charter bus and a Trabi-Safari tourist attraction for about a half hour. We even had to take a 45-minute coffee/warm up/reassume sanity break at a nearby cafe for a while, which may sound nice but really just made the tour even longer). Go back to the hostel for dinner. Take a 2+ hour nap while all of the kids in the theater class go to a play. Hang out for a couple of hours and then go back to bed.

Sunday: Wake up excruciatingly early. Take one hundrend U-Bahns to the Stasi Museum. Find out the Stasi Museum isn't actually a museum, but a horribly-decorated former Stasi building (which sounds cool, but it wasn't). Experience the longest and most painful non-Stadt Führung of my life (it was so bad that our resident director and half of the group stayed on the first floor (read: American second floor) while the rest of us almost died of boredom upstairs. Upon discovering that we had been locked in the building, two of the AYFers (Colin and Jay) actually jumped out the first floor men's bathroom window in an attempt to escape. Colin may have broken his foot in the process). Take one hundred U-Bahns back to a normal part of town and have to rush to eat because the awful tour took an hour longer than planned. Go to the Jüdisches Museum which was enormous and extremely cool. Go back to the hostel for some rest before dinner at the local Barbeque and Pizzeria (it was better than it sounds). Chat with some very vulgar newspaper-reading boys. Attempt to watch a movie with my hostel roomies. Join the men in the hostel bar for a beer. Go to bed.

Monday: Wake up excruciatingly early. Go to the East Side Gallery, the largest remaining section of the Berlin Wall which is currently covered in beautiful artwork (and lots of graffiti). Take the U-Bahn to Zoologischer Garten and wander around for an hour looking for somewhere to eat. Find an adorable cafe and chat with Becca about things far in the future. Go to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächnis Kirche. Goof around on the fountain/modern art behind it. Go to the Hauptbahnhof and wait an hour for our train. Sit on the train for seven hours. Arrive in Freiburg and head directly to Schlappen to have a beer for Jason's birthday. Get home at one in the morning and decide the things I was going to prepare for work are simply not important enough to keep me from my bed for any longer. Fall asleep.

Perhaps that wasn't as short as I originally intended.

Today at work I had my first day of the writing "class" that I'm now teaching every two weeks to Gymnasium (high school, kind of) students. I only have two students at the moment but I'm supposed to get more later. I worked with them on prepositions and the correct way to write an introduction to a paper. I thought it was going to be disastrous because I had barely prepared anything due to my overwhelming exhaustion the night before, but it was about one thousand times better than I had expected. It's kind of amazing to even myself how much I really genuinely enjoy teaching. It baffles me sometimes that I found something I love to do so much so easily and early in life. I really have no idea how I happened upon it, but I feel so lucky for having a direction in life that I am so excited for.

I've been here for almost five months now. The time has gone by so fast. I don't want to be close to halfway done; I have so much more I want to do and see. For the Semesterferien, Andy Webb is besuchening me, plus Becca and I have planned and booked a trip to Dublin, London and Edinburgh in March (we'll be in Dublin for St. Patrick's Day...!!!). I am incredibly excited for both.

So while I'm no longer sickeningly optimistic, I am genuinely happy, in all aspects of my life. I really am such an extremely fortunate person for everything I have. I can't wait to see what the future will bring.

Sorry for being so corny and sentimental. :)