Berlin Stories Vo. 3

Look at me, back after only 2 days. I know, that is like 45 years in Internet-time, I am like an old analog fogey over here, sniffin’ his newsprint, restin’ on his laurels.

I went to a new part of town last Saturday (I think it was Saturday) and took some pretty pictures that I am contracturally obligated to show you all.

Having exercised, napped, and done a bunch of work, the one big item on my Friday to-do list was “for the love of God, interact with another human being.” At the IES cookout the day before Johanna and I had sworn various oaths to hang out at some point over the weekend, and as we just happened to be on a certain omnipresent social networking website simultaneously we made plans to meet on the campus of the Technische Universität (Technical University, usually shortened to TU), where Johanna had a meeting, probably to talk about German with some Germans. TU lies just past the Tiergarten, Berin’s massive central park, in a western region I was wholly unfamiliar with and eager to explore.

Right down the middle of the Tiergarten runs 17th of June Street (named after a 1953 uprising in the DDR that got just completely and brutally crushed), home to the very crowded, insane, heavily regulated Fanmeile (Fan Mile) where thousands of people gather to drink overpriced beer and watch World Cup soccer. In what is probably actually a very necessary effort to keep thousands more from slipping past the no-booze checkpoints and starting a riot, about 2/3 of the Tiergarten is fenced off for the duration of the tournament. I rode along the southern edge, skirting phalanxes of Italians on bike tours and checking out the increasingly new, clean, and boring architecture as I left the east behind. At one point I stopped and looked at my phone, ostensibly to check the time but really because I wanted to listen to a woman on a bike scream at a couple of thick-necked fence security guards. I don’t know if they had disrespected her or if she was just THAT furious about not being allowed into the park, but she absolutely tore into them in a breathless, full-volume tirade with a pitch and intensity similar to that of a screaming baby. It was very impressive, and those tattoo-strewn rent-a-thugs on the fence probably deserved it.

Also common in this fashionable, up-and-coming-and-it-knows-it district: pompus embassies. Here’s a little piece of soverign Saudia Arabia:The façade says, “Why yes, we DO have too much money!”

Eventually I made it back to the funny little corner with a bison statue where I’d had to turn around last time. Outside of the awesome bison I found the spot fairly unremarkable, just another pleasant little stand of trees in the big ol’ Tiergarten, but just 100 meters further west I broke out of the woods and found this big, broad, totally unexpected canal.I took a picture of it from a nifty little footbridge. Neat.

In the OTHER direction there was another footbridge with some nasty-looking star-spikes on the fence, some bored lookin’ Germans, and, dead center, look closer, yes, that is an antelope:I had stumbled upon the long border between the Tiergarten and the Zoological Garden. My access to the zoo was limited, seeing as I wasn’t actually in the zoo and all, but I did see a couple more critters, including this stately llama:And these goofy birds that I first took for ostriches, before I realized they were emus:I was a bit peckish by this time and those emu legs looked a bit like giant drumsticks, but I resisted the urge to kill and eat one. I probably would have gotten kicked in the face, then arrested.

I eventually stopped salivating over the wildlife and made it over the TU campus, where, through a series of increasingly hilarious technical mishaps, Johanna and I repeatedly failed to find one another and eventually gave up on trying to meet. It was super dumb. BUT it was also a new place on a nice day, so I rolled around and took some pictures.

TU was fairly small and kind of dumpy, and even on a totally beautiful summer day it was not that pleasant of a place. Yes, okay, so I was hungry, and hot, and tired, and my meeting had not worked out, so I was not in a place to give glamorous reviews, but look at this crappy sidewalk I had to ride my bike over:Ridiculous! It’s like it was designed to rattle my teeth and rough up my keister.

I found this poster noteworthy, obviously for the top-notch copyright violation, but also bcause it nicely sums up the attitude of the groups opposing the reform of the German higher education system.
The text reads “No Learning Factory! Without Free Education, No Free Society!”

Brief background I promise not to bore you: German higher education is underfunded, overcrowded, and wildly inefficient. Students spend years and years pursuing degrees of dubious value in crumbling lecture halls. The system is almost 100% government-run, and totally free up until a couple of years ago. Recently the state has undertaken a massive reform of the universities, trying to model them on their generally much more successful American counterparts, i.e. a bachelor/masters/Ph.D. system, with limits on how long you can take to complete your degree and, heresy of heresies, small fees for students (about 500 euros a semester, i.e. about 1% of my tuition at Northwestern).

The backlash has been massive and, in my humble opinion, pretty childish and counterproductive. You can make just a real basic argument in favor of the reforms—i.e. “Higher education is incredibly valuable and very expensive, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect students to pay what they can afford and finish their degrees in a timely manner”—and the only response is “No, I don’t wanna pay or work, make it free and perfect instead.” Those opposed to the reforms don’t really present any solutions—outside of the “totally free absolutely perfect education for everyone” fantasy plan—and spend most of their time whining, pouting, and participating in big drunken protest marches. Hence, this scowling, obstinate, copyright-violatin’ Calvin strikes me as a pretty good symbol for the whole stupid close-minded self-centered tenor of this particular protest movement.

I’m not saying the reforms are perfect, or that the American model is any kind of ideal. I just think German higher education hurting now and changing in the right direction, and if these idiots think otherwise they should quit pouting come up with a better solution.

This sign on the sidewalk reads “Summerfest.” It pointed to another, identical sign a little further down the sidewalk, which pointed towards an empty field.

it is short for "summer festering"

I don’t think the Germans have a very firm grasp on the concept of "Summerfest."

I eventually got too hungry and had to high-tail it home. I found some cooler stuff on the way out. For example, here are some columns and stuff:
Also, here is an incredibly huge tube:This picture does not capture the scale of this tube. It is like three stories in diameter. I think it is part of some kind of defunct water laboratory that is presumably now crawling with supervillains and/or hobos and/or spiders.

Here is an old man dressed in yellow, enjoying his view of the tube:
I pedaled my way northeast through the non-fenced off portion of the Tiergarten, stopping to photograph this scummed-over pond:Uh oh, junior rangers! It looks like this pond has gone through the process of eutrophication! Fertilizer runoff from the perfect, professionally manicured lawns of a bunch of brand-new yupscale condominiums has encouraged the runaway reproduction of algae, disrupting the pond’s delicate ecosystem and choking out all other forms of life. AWESOME GREAT JOB WEST BERLIN.

In other news, this man is fishing with four fishing rods at once. I think he was also drinking a cocktail and talking on his cell phone. It is nice to know that at least one person has finally solved the riddle of life.

An unexpected church! The Germans love to hide churches in their parks. I took a picture of this one because I liked the spiral staircase in the bell tower.

This is the Siegessäule (victory pillar—I guess it is named after one of the victories they are okay with having won), the perpetually under-construction centerpiece of the Tiergarten. The scaffolding, which was about halfway up when I arrived in Berlin, has now consumed the entire structure.How wonderfully ugly!

Finaly, to end on a positive note, here is a picture of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World) in full summer bloom: The HKW is looking much nicer now than it did in May, don’t you think?

Then I went home and ate a huge meal, the end! More stuff tomorrow if I am good, including a long-overdue update on my World Cup experience thus far. Take care!

P.S.: For those who care my translation final went well today and I'm done with my final lit paper. 3 classes down, 2 to go!

P.P.S: I forgot to write about these photos but they are awesome so here you go. First, this old school white moped in front of Phil's apartment:
And then, more importantly, the ridiculous sticker slapped on the front of it:
Awwwwww yeah. Not only is he a skeleton with wraparound shades and cartoonish Elvis-hair, he is standing in flames and drinkin' gasoline. Regardless of who they are or what they stand for, I don't think the Leningrad Cowboys could have picked a better logo.

Hello, Good Morning, How Are You, I'm Fine

Hello.


Hello hello.


I will be the first to admit that it has been an unforgiveably long time since I rapped with you all. My readership now probably consists entirely of internet advertisement robots who are trying to sell me something. I am not one to go bandying around words like “monotonic” or “terminally ill” or “dying”—especialy when it comes to something as important as a blog—so I will just say that trusty old Unterwegs has been looking a little green in the gills lately. Let’s give it a little kick-start, shall we?

Apology Phase completed. Commence Excuses Phase:

I have had a looooooong week. Yes, you read that right: there were 7 Os in that “long,” and I am only exagerating a little bit. I suppose I last blessed the World Wide Web with my finer thoughts and observations a week ago yesterday, but it feels like it’s been a gosh darned month. School concerns have been the primary time-sink, so let’s start out with those:

My Monday-Tuesday* academic gauntlet went pretty well, all things considered. After lots of prep and with much sweating and drumming of fingers I survived my Referat on Monday—I may have already explained this, but a Referat is a real fun German university practice where you essentially have to lead the class for the day. Luckily I had a good team around me, with two v efficient Germans to pick up my slack and one dimbulb slacker German to make me look good, and they let me go first because I am a poor widdle American with a stutter auf Deutsch. I took my time, spoke slowly and breathed deeply, and my 25 mintutes of rambling about the narrative style in Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann—was nun? were over before I knew it. That’s when the real challenge started—sometime over the weekend before this whole ordeal I had managed to tear up a little spot at the back of my throat something awful (possible causes: yelled a bunch, forgot to strain my gravel tea, pinecone eating contest), and as I sat there in silence, holding back a coughing fit as my teammates gave their respective spiels, that little lesion started to tickle…then itch…and then hurt very badly. My body wanted to cough and did not take it well when I held back—I sweated and turned red, began to fidget, and I think my B.O. kicked up a couple of notches as well. It only got worse until I took advantage of couple of awkward pauses to fulfill that particular physical need and hack like an ancient smoker. It was a weird experience.

*(Yes, I do mean last Monday and Tuesday. I am behind.)

I was just ludicrously overprepared enough for Tuesday’s political thought test to feel confident going into it, and I think I regurgitated enough facts about the Stasi and 1989 and Germans and stuff to get myself a good old fashioned American A. This was an okay class, poorly organized but taught with verve by poor old Wolfgang Bialas. It didn’t challenge any core beliefs or trigger new ways of thought, but I learned a lot of interesting facts and got a new perspective on worker’s rights movements and socialism that should come in handy in a lot of inane, fruitless arguments over the next couple of years.

The best part about German Political Thought? It is OVER. Let’s put a big black X through a fifth of my course work, alright?

X

Well done. In stark contrast to a typical quarter at Northwestern, which is a two-month buildup towards a hellish two-week work-orgy until you finish your last final and turn in your last paper and then you lay down and die, my semester in Germany looks ready to end with a wimper, as I finish up class after class with time to spare. Let’s ask the obvious question:

Q: What do we get to X off next?
A: Professional Translation Skills, that’s what!

On Wednesday at 2:15 pm I shall download a German text about the use of composite materials in the construction of aircraft. Before 5 pm I shall translate that text into English, then send it off to to unconquerable Micheal Davies to be graded. At that point I shall be done with another course.

A week after that I’ll take my final French test, and sometime before that I will turn in my final paper for my literature course (I finished a draft yesterday instead of having fun), which will leave me with nothing but my German class (where I am certain we will be tested up until the last possible moment) for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully blogging will increase as class demands taper off. NO PROMISES.

Other Stories:

Sure, I spent way too much time on schoolwork, but that is the norm for me. What else had me so busy that I couldn’t come and blog for you fine people even once this week?

Well, for one thing I had to take a picture of this car:Obviously.

Outside of that, Thursday was the last day of courses through IES, my well-meaning study abroad service, a fact we all celebrated at a surprisingly excellent BBQ at the IES center. Look at this spread of sidedishes:

the watermelon was fresh and juicy, the couscous spicy and oniony and delicious

High class. And this was just one of three such sidedish-laden tables, PLUS there were some burly Rote Kreuz (Red Cross) volunteers grilling up pounds and pounds of chicken and sausage (a fundraising effort, I imagine), PLUS a fairly large quantity of free beer and wine distributed in a very liberal way. To a poor student stretching every euro this event was like Hobo Heaven, where the hens lay soft boiled eggs and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks. I stayed for several hours and ate two large meals’ worth of food, avoiding conversations I didn’t want to have by saying, “Excuse me, I am extremely hungry” and slipping back to the buffet.

Great food and beautiful weather aside, the most interesting part of this event was the alcohol policy. No wristbands or coupons or like big permanent marker Xs on your forehead to mark how many you’d had, just a little bar with a couple of friendly Germans who gave you first a goofy, sheepish smile, then your drink. As I savored my third beer and my second heap of couscous, I reflected on how successful and appropriate this booze system was, and how completely insane it would seem in an American context.

Students drinking booze? MADNESS. On the grounds of an academic institution? OUTRAGEOUS. Provided and paid for by said institution? MARY FETCH ME MY CONVERSATION HAT AND FOUNTIAN PEN, I NEED TO WRITE AN ALL-CAPS LETTER TO THE EDITOR, ADMINISTRATIVE HEADS WILL ROLL.

I suppose you could argue that American students, raised to view alcohol as something forbidden and dangerous (i.e. awesome), would automatically overdo it and go drunkenly burn down some zoos if a soft-headed liberal official ever served libations at a school event. But these were American kids—albeit in a European context—and nobody got cirrhosis, or really even made a fool of themselves. They were just relaxed and social at a relaxed social event. American booze culture is gonna get on my nerves for a while I can just tell. Hopefully being 21 will soften the blow.

Organization has never been a strong point for me so let’s jump back to an hour before this event started, when I showed up at IES for some reason. As I was A) an hour early and B) extremely wound up, I took action and went for a very long walk.

I went a couple clicks east, south of Alexanderplatz, to a region I’d ridden through one evening when the twilight was dim and my camera was useless. That was the night I first found this archeological dig:You know your city is old when you’ve got an archeological dig in the middle of it. When I first took this photo I thought it was of the crumbling foundations of a structure from the 16th century, but now further inspection of those v regular, smooth white bricks on the lower right makes me think I may have photographed a much newer (maybe early 20th century) set of crumbling foundations on accident. IN ANY CASE, these are cool, and located in the middle of this big vacant lot/permanent construction project that keeps getting held up by politics. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I believe this was the former site of the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), the symbolic headquarters of the socialist state of East Germany. I ain’t precisely clear on why it isn’t still here—the lovey-dovey informational boards said “Dismantled, Not Demolished,” but it looks to me like it got torn the hell down—but I do know that some folks are tryin’ to rebuild it and other folks are doin’ their darndest to keep it from getting’ rebuilt. For some reason. Local politics in Berlin: just as stupid and petty as local politics anywhere else.

This street is called Underwater Street:This does not strike me as a very fortuitious name for a street. It is like calling a street “Sinkhole Street” or “Gas Line Rupture Street,” or just “Completely Destroyed Street.”

I took a dim photograph of this badly-lit bridge because it is goofy. Closer inspection revealed that it was built sometime in the 1750s and is the oldest surviving bridge in Berlin. I walked across it and it did not collapse.

I thought this Coke sign looked good in the orange summer evening light.
This tagger is seriously concerned about the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so he draws attention to it the only way he knows how: with areosol spraypaint.
A neat fountain I’d never seen before. I don’t know why but I always dig on the multiple nested basins effect. It was much better lit about 15 seconds before I took this photograph.

Here is Schinkelplatz, named after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a big-time Berlin architect and city planner back in the glory days. I think he’s the middle statue, plus he has his face all over that building in the back, which I think is an architectural school named after him. I know they have a prepoderance of great dead white guys around here, but man, do they ever love their great dead white guys. I tried to learn more about Schinkel but all of the plaques were just about the boring history of the Schinkelplatz, i.e. this narrow little triangular spit of land that I guess people have been bickering about for decades. It is like Mark Trail with the zoning disputes around here.

The fountain in the foreground wasn’t working, and I was about halfway through composing my grouchy paragraph-long complaint about that when it kicked on long enough for me to take this photograph:30 seconds later it turned off again. The only reasonable explination is that I am now Berlin’s foremost fountain critic and this fountain’s owner/operator knew he/she could not afford another bad review.

Aaaand you know what? I have a lot more pictures to show you and stories to tell you but in the interest of getting something up on this blog and making it to my doctor’s appointment in a timely manner (my ear is all clogged up), I think I will end this post here. More adventures+World Cup coverage coming soon! Love you all, sorry about the huge delays, IT’S JUST SO NICE OUTSIDE.

What I Do All Day/State Of The Hair Address

Hello to all and sundry. I, your faithful blogger on the scene, have been selfishly devoting my time to vain and petty activities like schoolwork and exercise while turning a deaf ear to the internet’s desperate plea for anecdotes and silly pictures. Oh, how the electronic masses clamor! Yesterday I realized I had not taken nearly enough picures this week, so I unsheathed my trusty silver Sony and, sure enough, found a few things worth photographing, many of which sort of tie into my major themes these days. LET’S GO TO THE FILM:

Here is a portion of my political thought class on our field trip to an outdoor exhibit about the peaceful revoltion of 1989. Between 4 and 6 pm on a swelteringly hot, humid day we walked around in full sun in the middle of the Alexanderplatz, exactly the sort of treeless multi-acre inner-city expanse of glass and concrete that one generally strives to avoid at all costs on a firey summer afternoon. However, our professor—Wolfgang B, the older fellow in the middle whose face is so sunburned that he could probably peel it off like a mask—has never been one to allow practical concerns get in the way of talking about the history of German political thought. We wound painstakingly through the (actually very interesting) exhibit, gradually paying less and less attention, less interested in the intricacies of reunification than in precious shade and places to sit. I don’t think I learned very much about 1989 that day. The final is on Tuesday, so I suppose I’ll find out soon.

Two points of interest before we leave this v unpleasant experience in the past, where it belongs:
1. That clunky old video camera in the rear right of the photo above is the same model that a couple of reporters snuck into East Berlin and used to film the massive protests in October of ’89, protests which the East German government was naturally interested in covering up as much as possible. These dudes got the film and smuggled it back to the West, and the next day those images of tens of thousands of Germans taking in the streets went around the world. Pretty raw.
2. As you have hopefully learned at some point, East Germany had all kinds of insane restrictions of free expression, esp the production of critical political texts. Printing technology was tightly controlled, and mass-produced texts were fairly easy to trace, so resistence groups would print their tracts by hand in basements and churches and distribute them personally to trusted sources. The term for this sort of underground literature is samizdat, from the Russian for ‘self-publishing house,’ and I really dug on this display of genuine illicit pamphlets. I suppose people treasured these things.

(Side note: this samizdat picture is totally image number 1984 on my camera. COSMIC.)

In other news, beers:Or actually, empty beer bottles. Seven of them, to be precise, sitting on my windowsill. Seven, in addition to being the most magically powerful number, is an important benchmark in the empties collection process, at least for yours truly. Each bottle is worth 8 euro-cents, you see, and seven times eight makes 56, and as the cheapest cold beer in walking distance costs a mere 55 of those euro-cents, this little line-up represents another half-litre of pure hearty German pilsner, with a thin penny to spare. Sorry the picture is a little out of focus, Phil took it, he is a Philistine with sausage fingers and the shakes.

Fueled by that single free beer (The other 7 were obviously collected over the course of a week, one per night, with dinner. No, wait, let’s say I was cleaning up trash in a local park and took these home so, uh, bears wouldn’t trip on them. Yeah, that’s pretty good.), I took part in a not-inconsiderable bike adventure to the über-hip south side of town. Phil and I met Lucy in a park and we went for a bike ride during which I took precisely one photo, apparently because I am an arrogant elitest and think you hardworking people back home don’t deserve to see all the cool stuff I see. Shame on me.

(Side note: I’ll be referring to Lucy as “Lucy” and not “my friend Lucy” from now on, partially because you all presumably recall that Lucy is a friend of mine, but mostly because Lucy noticed that I referred to her on this blog as “my friend Lucy” and called Phil just “Phil,” and she got very worked up about it. In a sub-side note, Lucy is extremely neurotic.)

I did get one pretty nice shot of this urban mosque in the sunset. I really dig on Islamic architechture and wish I saw more of it in Berlin.

If I recall correctly, this particular house of worship was inbetween Hasenheide, a huge rambling park that’s easy to get lost in (always a good sign), and Tempelhof, the former West Berlin airport that was just recently converted into a huge rambling park that is impossible to get lost in, because it is just a massive flat airfield criss-crossed with runways. It was bizarre to be able to see so far under such a huge sky after so many months at the bottom of concrete canyons. Makes a fella nostalgic for the Great Plains and hundreds of miles of corn fields, you know? I can see Tempelhof being a sort of horrific inferno during the oh, 20 straight hours of sunlight it probably picks up at this time of year—just like a blasted hell-heath crawling with centipedes and horribly tan oiled-up Germans, the air thick with the acrid black smoke of ten thousand pungent ethnic sausages popping and sizzling on ten thousand filthy billowing grease-trap grills—but in late-stage sunset it was serene and cool and very beautiful. We rode our bikes very fast and in a lot of fancy formations (i.e. THE FLYING V) around the well-marked five-kilometer loop and watched the sun set very slowly over the supermassive old airport building. It was grrrrrreat.

Later that night I got ANOTHER flat tire on my bike—number…four in Berlin, I believe—and had to take my injured bike back home via the U-Bahn (subway). While waiting alone for the last train of the night I noticed these little “We Are Watching You” monitors and decided to play with them.You can’t see my goofy smile in the full-body image so I moved in closer for a glamour shot:Aw yeah. Even got the bike in there for good measure.

Hay lookit, it is a newer, less-crumbly version of that terrifying hot-dog man:Chillingly, his intact arms, busily applying seasoned purees to his forehead, only confirm my earlier hypothesis that this creature is intent on eating himself. I do not know why he would start with the face. Seems to me like you should save that for last.

The other awesome new detail here is of course the American flag, presumably a giant fiberglass napkin, wrapped tighly around hot-dog man’s white bread carapace. I have studiously avoided the terrible “American-style” food they serve here in Berlin, but if this stand actually serves each tube of processed pig offal in a miniature American flag it may be my patriotic duty to try one.

Having covered food, we can now move on to bathrooms. Mensa Nord bathrooms, to be precise:I don’t know why I like this life-sized full-door MEN’S ROOM pictogram, but I do.

The joke in this picture of a toilet is the corner of the window where the faux-frosted plastic laminate has been peeled away, presumably by bored dudes sitting on the can. Thanks to the tireless efforts of those bored dudes on the can, future generations will be able to enjoy this magnificent view while crappin’:I can see a bike from up here!

These Berliners are crazy with the plants and the green space, so this lovely (and probably v energy efficient) little rooftop meadow on the Mensa shouldn’t really be a surprise:
I have got so much hair these days, it is crazy:I’m not sure how much longer I can just let it grow out. As long as I condition it thoroughly and regularly it stays way up in the air where it is supposed to be instead of all over my face and in my eyes, BUT the thing is it is summer in the city and a head with this much hair on it gets HOT pretty quickly. On really nasty sweaty days I will often fantasize about what it would be like to not have this scratchy rug all over my scalp and down my neck and behind my ears...I dunno. I also like having a lot of hair. Makes me feel like a big man. Should it stay or should it go? Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Here is a second, slightly goofier photo to help you decide:Beard comments will be permitted but ignored.

Here is a picture of my bicycle, because I do not photograph it enough:Oh, Bikey. Our days together are numbered. I figure about two weeks before my departure I will put up some ads and find Bikey a new owner fer a hundred euros or so. The parting will be sad but the money very necessary, especially considering I’ve got a big ol’ European tour to fund and many gifts still to purchase. For now I just gotta savor every moment.

One way to savor every moment: spontaneous backroads bicycle adventures. I took a road less traveled out of Mauerpark yesterday and came upon a bizarre little system of paths through the undeveloped space around the rail lines.I liked this dude climbing with the clouds above him:

I kept rolling along these unlikely little paths, certain the trail would dead-end at any moment, and eventually came out the other side:

bikey rolled slightly ahead of me to watch for bears and aggressive hobos

I think discovering a totally new route through what I thought was a thoroughly explored area might be my favorite thing to do.

I actually came very close to this path in my early days here in Prenzlauer Berg. Late one night Phil and I wandered beneath this bridge and ran into what we thought was a dead end. We must have overlooked this little entrance in the darkness:
Flower Update: The rose garden at Humboldthain is starting to shape up. It may not exactly be carpeted with blossoms yet:But some promising early contenders have already appeared:Killer. I figure this whole plot should peak out just in time for my mother to photograph it with great gusto and checking of light.

Finally let’s take a brief tour of the things on my desk and the stories behind them. This may look like a pile of schoolwork, and it is:My political thought course through IES ends on Tuesday, so I have a final paper due and a final exam to take. I ain’t too excessively worried about it, because it isn’t too difficult and is definitely not worth too much anxiety. Heck, I need to save my anxiety for Monday, when I (and a couple of very friendly, capable Germans) will have to present on/lead my lit class’s discussion of Kleiner Mann—was nun? (Little Man—What Now?), a very good novel by Hans Fallada that I have been thinking and writing about for months now. Provided I make it through Tuesday morning my workload should drop considerably for my last bit of time in Berlin. Wish me luck!

This may look like more schoolwork, but it is actually my hostess Anne’s copy of the files kept on her by the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi (from Staatssicherheit, meaning “state security”). The Stasi kept an incredibly close watch and amazingly detailed files on East German citizens, and after the collapse of the DDR the new German government set up a system to allow ex-East Germans to examine and copy the files kept on them. Anne’s is full of photocopies of private correspondence, official documents, and these thorough, coldly bureaucratic analyses of her intentions and relationships that I find chilling and unsettling. Anne, on the other hand, finds it funny and bizarre, and is obviously comfortable enough about it to let her weird American subletter leaf through it. I guess if you grow up with it you eventually get used to this sort of thing.

This is a special rail ticket that ought to get me way the heck down to the Austrian border and back again for a mere 122 Euros, which is one heckuva deal. The weekend of July 8th-11th I am traveling south to visit family friend Ted France and his wonderful family in the Austrian Alps. For a while I didn’t think it was going to happen due to financial constraints, but then Anne mentioned this deal to me and everything fell into place. I had to buy it in a Saturn—a Best Buy-ish major electronics retailer—and it came with a fairly neat soccer jersey and some Fanschminke (facepaint), because Germans will buy anything associated with the World Cup no matter how little sense it makes.

Oh yeah, the World Cup (Weltmeisterschaft) is going on right now, and yes, it is crazy. Flatscreens on the sidewalk in front of every bar and restaurant, Germans wearing flags as skirts and drinking all day, thunderous cheers, queasy patriotism, etc. Everyone was ecstatic and walking around with puffed-out chests after the 4:0 opening victory over Austrailia, and now they’re all slouched over and grumpy because “the boys” dropped their second game 2:0 to Serbia. Whamp-whaaaaamp. I hope Germany picks it up and goes deep into the tournament, because if it is this intense during the early-stage group play I cannot imagine how nuts a semi-final would be.

This is the little leather saddlebag full of tools and patches that came with my bike. (That old dude was a serious bicyclist.) It is out because I have actually been using it lately to, like, repair my bike. Remember that flat tire I got a couple dozen paragraphs ago? Well, rather than paying some jerk 20 euros for a new tube, I walked Bikey down to a Fahrradladen (bike shop) in Mitte where they let ya use their tools and give ya advice if you ask nicely. Phil directed me to this joint, and despite a bum knee he showed up his own self and instructed me in the ancient art of removing wheel, tire and tube, finding the hole, slappin’ on a patch, then reassembling the whole mess. It took about a half hour and cost 40 cents and will stay with me forever. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

Last but not least, here is a slice of delicious apple strudel warming up over a big mug of tea. Anne gave me the pastry and it was goooooooood, and the mug has a rainbow pattern on it that I think LUCY will appreciate.

That’s it for now! Off to finish my political thought study guide and email Wolfgang my remaining questions and then go celebrate Lucy’s 21st by being very responsible in a park. I miss you all!