At the request of a bunch of friends, I thought I should finally update my blog since I have been in Berlin for a week and a half already. For your reading pleasure, I will divide my update into three handy-dandy bullet pointed lists:
Awesome things about Berlin:
• Having an apartment to move into right away. Thanks to last year's team, there were two apartments ready and waiting for happy stinting occupants when we got to Berlin. There was some furniture here already, though we are still not totally set up (more on that under "Not so great things"). The single girls, myself included of course, live right across the hall from the single guys on the team, which makes informal group hangouts easy.
• Public Transportation. America has nothing on European public transportation. The S-and U-Bahn (elevated trains and subway) in Berlin is clean(er than the El in Chicago), reliably on time, and gets you anywhere in the city in a reasonable amount of time.
• Our Neighborhood. We live in a neighborhood that is informally referred to as Kreuz-Kölln. We're on the border between Kreuzberg (the up-and-coming hipster neighborhood that has every kind of cuisine imaginable, lots of cute shops and a good chunk of the city's student/young professional crowd) and Neukölln (the predominantly Turkish part of the city which has awesome outdoor markets in different places almost every day of the week, the rent is a bit cheaper, and there are nearly as many Döner vendors as residents).
• Döner. The aforementioned German/Turkish treat. It is basically a fresh-baked pita or some similar kind of bread stuffed with lamb or chicken (which is sliced off of a giant hunk of meat before your very eyes), lettuce or cabbage, tomato and garlic sauce. These excellent bits of sandwich heaven usually cost 2-3 Euro.
• Richard. Richard is one of the students that last year's stinters became friends with. He studies politics at the Freie (Free) Universität and apparently loves our whole team already. He is super fun and hangs out with us on a regular basis. Like almost every day. It's awesome. Also, he claims that I speak German with a slight Swedish accent.
In between things:
• Ikea. Normally, Ikea is a wonderful thing in my life, but it made the in-between list for this week because I have spent SO MANY HOURS there since I arrived in this city. I am still oh-so-thankful for their decently priced home furnishings, but 3 trips to Ikea in one week at 3+ hours a trip is just too much.
• Language School. Right away when we got here, we started in on our three weeks of language school so that our whole team could have at least some kind of handle on the language before we get down to business. They put me in the advanced class, but it's still mostly a refresher of what I already know, since I've studied German for upwards of 10 years. Taking language class is a non-negotiable requirement, though, so I'm using it to practice speaking and learn some new vocabulary. My teacher, Svea, is awesome, so it's pretty fun most of the time.
Not so great things:
• The perpetual unfinished-ness of our apartment. I am majorly grateful to have a place to live, but having most of my clothes laying in piles on the floor (no dresser), sleeping on a mattress on the floor (no bed frame), and not being able to do laundry (no working washer or dryer) is starting to wear on me. We are making significant progress, though. The first few days, we had a total of two lamps in the whole place before the boys installed some light fixtures for us. We also now have a shower curtain and bedroom window curtains, though no towel rack yet. Also, we only have one working shower for the five of us (we have another one, but there is no shower head on it, so there’s no way to get water out), which means we have to carefully plan our shower schedule to get out the door on time every morning.
• Weather. Berlin has weather that is a little like the northwest coast of America. It's cloudy most of the time, rains a lot in the winter (not too much yet), and the temperature is moderated to some degree year-round because of it's proximity to water (the North Sea is about an hour north of us). It's been cooler than normal for this time of year at a steady 55-60 degrees. The winters here are supposed to be long and rainy, which I should be able to handle after years of long, harsh winters in Chicago and Detroit. The part I'm not sure that I'll be ready for is the reduced amount of daylight. Berlin's latitude is 52 degrees (which puts it even with the bottom of the Hudson Bay in northern Canada), so the sun goes down by 3 p.m. in the darkest part of winter. That might be something of a challenge.
The new stint girls took a little trip down to Wannsee the other day while it was sunny. The adorable Asian girl in front is Elaine, our new British teammate. She taught us to say things like "dodgy" and "cheers."