Berlin and Beyond

It has been less than a week since I last posted but it feels like much longer. So many things have happened!

1. I had to move out of my apartment. Michel (the landlord) came by one night to tell me that two Russian boys were moving into my apartment and I needed to get out by the morning. This was at about 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night, mind you. I had to move upstairs to an apartment for 6 which has 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a small kitchen and a washing machine. I was a little unhappy (I had already cleaned and settled into the apartment I was living in) but what can you do. I am happy to have a home and reasonable rent in Paris - complaining seems a bit rude. So far I have 2 other roommates (Nina from Serbia and Riane from Holland), but Michel tells us that there are more coming soon. We shall see!

2. I had my first class today! Classes here meet just once a week for 3 hours. It is nice to meet just once a week, but 3 hours is pretty lengthy. It was a little rough! The class was International Finance and today we just went over basics which I have studied before. I have another class tomorrow, but the rest of my classes don't start until September 29th. It is a weird system I will explain some other time.

3. I went to Berlin! Definitely the coolest of the things that have happened. I flew out at 5 a.m. Friday morning (after staying out at a club until 2 - OOPS!) and met my friend Nell at the train station. It was so great to see her! We spent the first day walking around, seeing the city and shopping. We stopped at an authentic looking restaurant because I wanted to sample some real German food, and I think the place was pretty authentic because we could see the old German woman cooking in the kitchen and we were surrounded by locals (who ate piles of food and drank beer like it was their job, by the way). For those of you who don't know, I don't really eat meat. It's not that I have a serious problem with it and I'm not really a vegetarian, I just usually avoid meat because I don't really like the taste. So we were at this restaurant and I ordered schnitzel because I was under the impression that it was some kind of doughy-noodley stuff. Of course it came and it was just a giant slab of fried meat - meat I couldn't identify except to say that it tasted like chicken, but wasn't. Haha. Luckily the plate also came with a heap of potatoes and salad, so I just ate that. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I was thinking of streudel. I think. :)

Beer in Berlin was crazy cheap! Nell and I were trying to save money so we just went to a supermarket to buy bread and cheese for dinner, but of course we had to sample German beers. So we bought 6 half-liters of beer and only paid about 4 euros! I couldn't believe it! At the pubs here in Paris, beer is 4-6 euros a pint. So we ate and drank beer in our room at the hostel, which felt very nomadic and cool. ;)

The next day we took a tour of the city, putting names and stories to all the buildings we had seen before. It was an interesting city - not as ornate as Paris, but beautiful in a "gritty" way, as Nell put it. We saw the Brandenburg gate and old Nazi buildings and of course the wall. I have some pictures I will put up soon. That night we hit up happy hour at the hostel's bar (giant mugs of beer for only 1 euro!) and then went on a pub crawl through the city. We started out with a group at our hostel and grew to about 200 by the end of the night! It was great to meet people from all over the world and see everyone having fun together. I talked to a ton of people, one of whom was an American soldier currently on leave from Iraq. I started asking him about the situation in Iraq and (insert an image of me looking sheepish here) I ended up talking politics with him for about 2 hours! Ridiculous, I know, but talking politics is my weak spot and he had such interesting things to say!! It was great to hear his perspective. That's a lot of why I'm here - to get different perspectives and experiences, so I was glad to meet him. Even if I felt a little silly discussing protectionism on a pub crawl!

Well, Berlin was great and I was sad to leave. And it was sad to leave Nell! It was such an odd feeling to be coming "home" to Paris. But at least here I speak the language! I feel downright fluent in French after spending 3 days in Berlin speaking ZERO German.

A Bientot!