It is now July, but I will finish up writing about my June adventures. In my last post I left off when I moved into my new apartment in the East. That weekend I went to an awesome carnival called "Karnival der Kulturen", which means Carnival of Cultures. Angela and I went exploring all three days, and saw concerts, met people from all over the world, and ate Germanized ethnic food (which means Indian food that was not spicy... like no spice... it was shocking even for me). The picture is of me at the Carnival. I also hung out with my friend Felix and all his friends at the Carnival. That was good times, but they all refused to speak German with me. It was a little bit frustrating, but eventually I just gave in, spoke English, and had a good time teaching the boys some American slang. I also spent time with my Korean studies friends, and invited them and some other Germans we met back to my apartment to chill and eat ice cream on our balcony. I loved having the freedom of being able to invite friends over to my apartment, this was a completely different world than my life with my host mother.On Tuesday, I started work! The first day of work is always scary, but the first day of work in a foreign language at the seat of national government... SUPER scary! I am working this summer for Hans-Josef Fell who is a Green Party parliament member. He works on energy policy for the Green Party and is writing a book this summer on renewable energy. I am working on doing research for his book. First thing in the morning I met with Hans-Josef Fell to discuss my summer work. It was seriously way too early in the morning to be expected to have an intellectual discussion about climate change. Then I spent the rest of the day sitting in a meeting with top executives of German banks, who were discussing how to fund renewable energy in Germany. What I understood was interesting, but let me tell you, I did not understand much. Then Georg, one of the other interns, gave me a tour of the building. It is a fascinating building, and I'll definitely write more about it later.
On Wednesday, my roommate Stephan came back from his trip to Austria. It was the first night that Katharina, Stephan, and I were all in the apartment together so I decided I should make snicker-doodle cookies to celebrate and welcome Stephan home. Katharina was so excited to learn how to make American cookies, and my friend Angela also came over to help. Us three girls had so much fun making the cookies, and we were all just waiting for Stephan to get home so we could finally eat them. Then when he finally arrived, we discovered a few unfortunate things. The first was that Stephan doesn't like cinnamon (but he was very polite and ate them anyways and pretended to like them), the second and fatal discovery was that we used about 8x the necessary amount baking soda. We discovered this when after eating half a cookie our tongue went numb and our throats started to burn. My poor friends! The mistake comes from a translation error. The recipe called for baking powder and baking soda. In Germany they have something called "Backpulver", which translates literally to baking powder, but is in truth baking soda. We then all assumed that Backpulver was baking powder and proceeded to quadruple the amount needed to make up for the lack of baking soda. ooops.
The next weekend, I can't really remember what I did, but I do remember going on a walk with Stephan on Sunday and taking this picture near my apartment. Not too shabby right?
The following weekend I went to Christopher Street Day, which is a huge gay pride festival in Berlin. The pictures are worth a thousand words:
The next week my friend Chris Seewald came to visit. That was great fun. Chris and I went to see Candide at the Staatsoper, we went to the Pergamom museum, and I gave him and Stephan and Florian (another Austrian friends of mine) a tour of the German parliament. Here is a picture of me at work inside the parliament dome!
On the weekend, I am particularly proud of Katharina and I cooking together because it turned out really well! Here are some pictures of our meal and my roommates and our apartment. :-)
Lask week I went to a Tajikistan tea house with Carsten and Eto, two people who work in my office. We sat in the tea room for three hours and had a lovely time. The room was a gift from the soviet government of Tajikistan in the 1970s to the east Germans. There is a cool blog post about it that I found here.
Last weekend I made brunch for my roommates and then we went to the Schlachten See, a huge lake in West Berlin. This week has been very chill and I haven't done much at all except work and facebook, but I am going to justify it by saying that I needed a break. :-)
German word of the day today is genmanipuliert which means genetically modified. I think this word is interesting because in German they say genetically manipulated (manipuliert) instead of genetically modified (modifiziert). I have a hypothesis that the use of the word manipulated, which seems to me to have a negative connotation, is correlated with the German negative view of genetically modified food.
