21 Juni – Day 2

Day 2 has come and gone in Berlin with a host of new memories and experiences to combat this feeling that I cannot possibly be here, nearly a world away from home. I woke up before my alarm at about 8am feeling great — I don’t want to jinx it, but I don’t think jet lag really hit me too hard at all! Then again, I’ve mostly been doing fun stuff and haven’t had to think too hard about school work or anything.

Today we walked — a LOT. If you look at a map, we are in south Kreuzberg and we ended up wending our way all the way to Mitte! On Google maps that’s about 4.6 kilometers with a straight route, so we think we ended up walking about a 10k today. The Birkenstocks (well, “licensed by” Birk) treated my feet well! I will be ready to sleep tonight but I feel great. We had the Berlin television tower in our sights (the German word: Fernsehturm) and so we kept walking until we got to it. The picture from today is with the Fernsehturm at our backs and the main square area in front of us. On the way, we walked all along the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall, which was very moving. There’s some really incredible artwork and I’m looking forward to going back on our class trip there.

I had some delicious Turkish pizza for lunch on the walk home and later we had Indian food for dinner. When I was ordering I had to keep stopping myself from trying to use Spanish — it’s like my brain knows it shouldn’t use its native language, so anything that’s not English will work. Pretty soon I’ll be speaking some pretty messed up Spanglishan! Also, I’m surprised at how pretty fluent German sounds — it’s not nearly as harsh as we think it is back home.

Today I also got to check into my permanent room for the next 2.5 weeks, so I’m looking forward to settling into one place. It’s a lot nicer than I was picturing a hostel to be! After dinner, a couple classmates and I walked back to the bridge/spree (river) one more time to see it at night. There was a band playing on a boat (couldn’t get a good photo), drums in one of the streetside parks, and tons of people out and about on our first weekend night in Kreuzberg.

A few notable differences from today:
-It’s normal for dogs to run around without leashes. Their owners are all close behind them, and the vast majority of dogs are incredibly well-behaved.
-It’s legal to drink beer in the streets!
-A more minor one, but the pedestrian walk signs here turn directly from green to red with no “slow down” symbol.
-It’s not very common to have trash cans located around the city, and if you do see one it’s likely to be very small.
-Maybe it’s just me, but the streetside park I mentioned earlier is extremely common here. If there’s any space at all between streets and on the sides of roads, there seems to be grass and trees and a space to sit and eat or watch the world go by.

One more German lesson for today. On the note of garbage cans, we kept seeing three different colors of “rubbish bins” on the streets but couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to put in them. It turns out that they’re all recycling bins and the names correspond to colors of glass (can you guess what these are?). :)
-Grünsglas
-Wießglas
-Braunsglas

I think that’s it for now! Tschüss :)

-J