Finally made it out to IKEA today to pick up a few necessities - a better pillow (more appropriately, an actual pillow), a desk lamp, and I had intended to get some better curtains (again, I think perhaps “actual” works better here instead of “better,” since what attempts to cover my window could hardly be considered a curtain) before deciding that I didn’t want to deal with the hassle. Exciting, I know, but actually the IKEA itself was pretty impressive, a veritable hodgepodge of every home decoration and necessity you can think of crammed into a massive building that puts the Super WalMarts to absolute shame. I don’t think you can walk out of WalMart with a stack of plywood and a 5′x8′ framed map of the world.

My Irish friends dutifully informed me of the upcoming “Arthur Guinness Day,” celebrating the life and legacy of the man who gave us Guinness beer this very Thursday, 24 September. This amounts to something of a national holiday for my Irish cohorts, and they’ve been talking about it every day for the past week as though it were Christmas or the Irish equivalent of Thanksgiving (actually that works pretty well).

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depends) for me I’m committed to saving my energy for Munich on Friday. I believe I wrote about this before, but I’ll mention once more that this Friday I’m headed off to Munich for the famed Oktoberfest. The Germans, and probably Europeans in general, have really perfected the art of cheap travel; we’re traveling by way of “Mitfahr,” roughly translating quite simply to “drive with.” I’m sure the same option exists in the U.S. too, but here many people are quite dedicated to it; you simply post a listing if you’re going somewhere and have extra seats in your car, and people call you and offer to go with you in exchange for a little bit of money. My flatmate Sofía and I are driving 6 or 7 hours with someone who posted on the site for €30, a much better alternative to the €110 (minimum, at this point) to get a train. Not a bad deal.

Of course I’ll take my camera with me and write about the festival and post pictures when I get back. For the moment I have very little to write about; not much changes in the course of a regular class week and I haven’t found anything particularly amazing or perplexing to write about. Check back on Sunday or Monday for a full account of Oktoberfest.

Yup, missed the Thursday deadline already. Oh well, at least I’m still writing.

Not much has happened in the past few days. The weather has kept at a nice ~72 degrees all week, and looks like it’ll stay that way for a little while longer, which is good. I have continued to notice, however, that Berlin, perhaps just Germans in general, really enjoy doing things together. Or perhaps I should reword that: they do the same things we do in America, just on a much larger scale. When there’s a protest, it’s like the whole damn city out there marching through the street. When they have some kind of party in the outdoor area of a restaurant, there’s a huge multi-colored tent, waitresses in full Fräulein garb and the Backstreet Boys on the radio. When they have a flea market, it takes up an entire street. The scope of everything here just seems to be much greater.

This holds true as well for the cleaning and recycling initiatives they have in place here. By that I mean, no matter where you are, you’ll find at least two bins, sometimes as many as four, and everyone actually pays attention to them as well. On more than one occasion I have been holding an empty plastic bottle that I have brought all the way back with me to my house because I couldn’t find the right bin otherwise. Also, much like our own recycling system, everything that is able to be recycled (excluding glass) has a “Grünpunkt” (”green point”) symbol on it, which means it can be tossed in any Grünpunkt-friendly bin, and those are almost everywhere.

The other thing that I wish had caught on more in the states is the idea of “Pfand,” which means “collateral” normally, but in this case it’s the name given to money you get in return for returning glass bottles. At most bars, if you buy a drink, they will give you the drink and some kind of pin or button or cap or something. When you’re done with the drink, you bring back the bottle and the object, give them both back to the person behind the counter and usually you’ll get €1 back or so, and they put the bottle in a rack with other empty ones to be recycled. Outside of bars, most bottles can be traded in at almost any convenience store for about €0,15 (in contrast to the $0.05 you get for plastic bottles back home, and not even in every state). All of these things combined means you can actually make a lot of money picking up and returning bottles, which in turn means the streets are a great deal cleaner between the recycling and the idea of Pfand.

The weird side-effect of this is that you can alternatively leave a glass bottle pretty much anywhere that can easily be seen, and a bum or even anyone who just wants to get some extra money will pick it up and return it. This is actually the most viable alternative to bringing it in yourself or finding a proper recycling bin, and people literally do it all the time. So I guess I was lying before when I said the streets are a great deal cleaner; perhaps they’re just as messy but in a more organized way. People tend to leave bottles in clusters, and I always imagine someone looking for bottles happening upon these clusters as though they were treasure.

That’s about it for now. Going to go make use of the rest of the day, it’s a lovely 73 degrees and sunny and there’s no reason to be in here any longer.

At last, I think it’s time to officially start writing in this. It’s Monday, 14 September 2009, at about 18:02 in whatever timezone Berlin is, and I’ve double-tasked in writing that last sentence by also debating how frequently to write in this. Because both nothing and a lot happens during the week, I think each Monday and Thursday sounds like a pretty good deal; Monday because they suck otherwise anyway (which is actually a worldwide phenomenon) and Thursdays because they’re not Fridays, thus eliminating the potential and quite probable conflict of interest between writing a blog and exploring Berlin. This first post will be rather lengthy, as it will attempt to encompass the past couple weeks that I’ve been here in the least-boring way possible.

I flew out of Logan Airport somewhere around 5:30pm on 26 August, waving goodbye to my parents and knowing that my mother would be counting the seconds between my arrival in Berlin and the first e-mail sent to her. I spent the next 6 hours traveling 12 hours into the future, zipping through space and time alongside two large Italians. At the end of the flight their son leaned over from the seat in front of us and mentioned to them that “American food is crap,” referring (sadly) to the airplane food, which I was tempted to call him out on, before I realized “American food” doesn’t actually mean a whole lot by itself…so maybe he had a point.

I had a short layover in Amsterdam and then it was a hop, skip, jump, short walk down the ramp and an hour-long plane ride to Tegel Airport in Berlin. It was at this point that my previous worries that Carmen Banciu, soon-to-be host and owner of the apartment, may not be real at all started to kick in, and that I might be the butt end of an elaborate German joke. Thankfully these fears were quelled by my parents’ words of wisdom (”The Germans don’t have a sense of humor”) and my spirits were high as the Israeli-German taxi driver gave me a whirlwind tour of the city.

That was two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve moved into my apartment, met both of my housemates (Sofia from Spain and Liana from Bochum, Germany), and started my intensive language course, the so-called “Vorkurs Deutsch,” which has been a relatively positive experience so far. We were placed via an electronic test in a language level, starting from A2 (where probably about 50% of people ended up) and going all the way up to either C1 or C2, although as far as I’m concerned, if one ends up in C2 they probably don’t need an intensive language course. I was placed in A2 at first, but after a week of almost falling asleep, I asked to be moved up to B1, taught by Ingo Fehrmann, a gangly guy full of life and energy.

I’ve met a bunch of people here, the majority being European and hailing from such exotic places as: Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, England, Turkey, Hong Kong, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some already. They’re all doing the “Erasmus” program, ostensibly the inter-European exchange program. As an American I’ve felt relatively well-received, no obvious animosity, although a friend Aziz from Amsterdam gave me a hard time about American ideology before telling me he was just testing me (followed immediately by him admitting he’s a psyche major, at which point everything started making sense), and everyone seems to get along with each other very well. The French seem to be very clique-y though; there’s always a table or two of purely French people every time I go to eat lunch.

I’ve explored a great deal of the city as well, something which is actually quite impossible not to do, what with people living pretty much everywhere. I’m in the very center of the very center of the city (you can look me up on Google maps by simply typing in “Leipziger Straße 61, 10117 Berlin”), which gives me the convenience of being fairly equidistant from everything, but also is kind of a bummer because I’m pretty much equidistant from everything. Two of my good friends, Nate and Cormac (both of Ireland) live way out in Schlachtensee, which is mostly a student area on the far far outskirts of Berlin. To get there requires me taking two trains and a bus, so needless to say I haven’t gone out there very much. Anyway, each district of Berlin is in itself a unique city, and each has their own reputation. For instance, Kreuzberg and Freidrichshein are two of the more popular destinations for good food and a good evening, while Mitte (where I live) is very much a financial and general living district with not much more than big buildings and some grocery stores. The train system is very easy to navigate and is extremely punctual, however, so getting to other places usually doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, with most of that time being spent in the station waiting.

Well, I think that about covers the very general experience thus far. Beginning Thursday I will write more about individual experiences, recent or ones that I feel are important, and I’ll see about putting some pictures on here as well. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and unlike my California blog I’ve actually found some semblance of comfort in writing about everything that’s happening here, as it’s a unique experience that I enjoy relaying. In moments I’m heading out to watch a brief film experiment as directed by Carmen’s son, so we’ll see how that goes.

As they say in Germany, tschüß!