In an effort to actually update my blog on a more regular basis, I have decided to try posting every evening with my Pow and Wow of the day. The Pow and Wow is a tribute to my first Evanston apartment, 718 Simpson, 1E, where we would review our Pows and Wows almost every evening in the kitchen, usually on Danny or Don's insistence (Pow and Wow, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, is a daily high and low). Pow always has to go first, because, as everyone knows, it's better to end on a high note.
Pow: Despite the fact that I swore I never would, I finally caved today and bought my first pair of leggings. Black knit ones that go down to about mid-calf. Now, the Pow part of this situation is that I made fun of the leggings-as-a-replacement-for-pants trend for MONTHS and now here I sit in my very own pair of leggings and shirt/dress from H&M. Even still, though, I have a hard time feeling bad about this, because they are just so dang comfortable.
Wow: We had our Semester-Anfangs Party (beginning of the semester party) for CfC tonight, and probably 25 students showed up, including a few of my favorites. At last count, there were people from at least seven different countries (Kenya, China, England, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, etc) and probably three or four different languages being spoken. Quite international and cool
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After adapting the Evolution of Dance video for our New Year's conference, Tomi and I decided that we needed to use our skills to make at least one other dance before leaving Berlin this year. The first thing we thought of: OK Go's "A Million Ways" dance. It took us four months to actually get it done, but over Easter weekend, Jon, Tomi, Erin and I finally pulled it off. Shockingly, it only took us two hours total to learn and polish the dance, but then we had to figure out where to show it. Lucky for us, Northwestern's Cru had World Vision Night this week at Real Life and wanted us to make short videos of ourselves talking about why we went on STINT, how God led us here, what we were like as students, etc. We did them one better: STINTers dancing to OK Go all over Berlin. We made quite a scene filming the video, which resulted in some hilarious people watching us in the background. Check it out on YouTube here. I think mostly, I have decent luck taking good pictures every now and then-- that and a good camera--but I was particularly pleased with this one. If only I could have gotten the right angle to get the whole reflection of the tree! I can't imagine it's good for the tree to be surrounded on all sides by water, but it made the mirror image nearly perfect. I found this on one of my friends' facebook profiles a while back and loved it. So much so, that I've committed it to memory without even trying and taken to writing it down all over the place. Why not on my blog, too? According to the very non-official source of my friend's facebook page, it was found penciled on the wall of a cell in an insane asylum in California in 1917. Turns out, it's one of the most sane things I've read in a long time. There is not much that can surprise me in terms of fashion in this city anymore. People walk around Berlin in literally every kind of outfit possible. And now, like a true Berliner, I don't even bat an eye at girls in short short shorts or men in skirts or totally obscene color combinations or crazy hats or polka dot pants. But yesterday, I saw a new one. A moderately scruffy-looking guy was riding the U7 with no shoes on. From the look of his bare feet, he'd been walking around for a while with no shoes on. Otherwise, his clothes were perfectly fine, if a little worn-out. He got off at my stop and was leaving damp footprints on the platform. I mean, I'm a lover of bare feet myself, but in a big city? Gross. Yesterday on my way to meet some friends, I came up from the U-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse and ran into my theater teacher from Freiburg. He's here visiting his daughters and, out of 3.5 million people, happened to find me. Weird. Today on my way home from campus, I was wondering to myself if Germans do April Fools Day like Americans do. I checked my email when I got home to find a message from one of our German staff guys saying that Campus für Christus and SMD (the German version of Intervarsity) were going to merge into one group. It was a whole long well-written press release about how the groups were going to join together since we do so much of the same stuff already. I'm still not sure if Tim, the guy who forwarded it over our staff listserv, was in on the joke or not, but following his email came another one from my boss, Uli, reminding us to note the date of this historic decision: April 1. They totally got me. This past weekend on a retreat with my church, I met a guy named Tobias. The first night, we were all sitting around talking and Tobias started asking all kinds of questions about how we communicate with God, why Jesus is so important, why it isn’t good enough to just live a good, moral life. He definitely believed in God, but had no idea what to do with the Bible, and certainly didn’t know what to do with Jesus. He grew up going to church off and on with his family, but wasn’t sure if he had ever actually believed any of it. |