Juni!

I can't believe it is already June. So much has happened this month and I haven't posted a single thing! As Julie Andrews once said "let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start."

The first weekend in June, the weekend before finals, my friend Holger came to visit. Holger is the son of my mother's host sister when my mother was an exchange student in Germany at age 16. He's living in Bremen and studying to be a pilot for Lufthansa, so he just flew to Berlin for the weekend to visit. We had dinner on the roof of KaDeWe, which is a huge department store in West Berlin that was built basically just to show the east how awesome capitalism is. Then we went to an Austrian bar called No Kangaroo to hang out with my Austrian friends and watch the Austria Germany Fußball game. We ended the night on Simon-Dach Straße, a hip part of east berlin filled with young people, where we met up with my British friend Laura from my FU course a big group of international students. I even met a girl there from Monterey! Small world. The next day Holger and I met up with stanford friends at Krumme Lanke, the lake near the Stanford House (see picture below), and in the evening we went to The Bird and then toured around the Berlin sights by night.

The Bird is an American restaurant in Prenzlauerberg that is an institution for Stanford students. There is a group of Stanford students that actually went every week at least once a week, even though the burgers were 13 euros. The burgers are amazing, there are signs everywhere challenging anyone who tries to eat their hamburger or fries with a fork, you can buy Snapple lemonade, they give you free tap water with ice without your needing to ask, and the waiters are friendly-- American style. Everyone in the bar was also American, it's like this strange little piece of the USA in Berlin, Germany. They were celebrating ten years in Berlin the night that we were there, and it was definitely one of my most unforgettable nights in Berlin.
The next day I went with my theater class, which consists of four people including me, to Leipzig to see the opera Deutsche Misere. In Leipzig we had the most delicious meal at this Tavern where Goethe used to hang out (my 35 euro lunch consisting of wiener-schnitzel, potatoes, salad, local white wine, and four different desserts was paid for by George Will, a very generous alumnus to the Stanford in Berlin program). We then went to this freaky war memorial about defeating Napoleon in 1813, and then we explored the city and went on a Ferris wheel! I decided to explore the city a bit on my own and I coincidentally ran into this open air accordion band concert! Seriously. It was an entire band of about 40 people, made up of entirely accordions! Here's a pic:

The opera that we went to see, Deutsche Misere by Berthold Brecht, was written by Brecht during WWII. He took photographs from newspapers and wrote poetic captions beneath the pictures. Then these captions were set to music. The Leipzig production was the first time that the captions were acted out as scenes, and it was apparently pretty controversial in the theater scene. It was a very graphic and jarring production that ended with a harsh criticism of German involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Here is a short clip:

That was my weekend before finals, you might notice that there was little time for studying. oy vey! Finals week then resulted in the consumption of an absurd amount of junk food to calm my stress. Don't worry mom and dad, there are apples too!

Finals week was hectic, but I ended up doing pretty well. I even had time for one last stroll around my lake in Charlottenburg with my (then future, now current) roommate. Here is a picture of me in front of my home-stay. In the very back you can barely see a white apartment building-- that's where I lived!

We also had our end of the  quarter Bing dinner (the Bings are a generous alumni couple who help fund our program)at this cute German restaurant in Grünewald, which is walking distance from the Stanford Villa. I ate pickeled herring, not gonna lie... it was gross. But other than that it was a lovely lunch, and a beautiful way to close the quarter. Here is a picture of the event, unfortunately it is blurry...I'm still trying to get a hang of my SLR.

And that was the end of my quarter at Stanford in Berlin. The weekend after finals I moved into my new apartment in the East, went to an awesome carnival, and on Tuesday started work at the German Parliament. I'll go into detail about all of this in my next post. Right now it's 1am, and is bedtime. Gute Nacht!

German word of the day:
der Klimaschutz, which literally means climate protection, but more practically is the noun form of protecting the atmosphere and taking care of the environment so that the climate does not continue to change. I love it that the Germans have a single word for this. I think it shows how important the concept is to the German people that it is a single word. I've been using this word a lot at work. :-)