1. berlin is so organised that the riots run on a schedule, and there's a doozy planned for tonight. every year on may day, starting at 6pm, i have been told by germans to get off the street because there will probably be a lot of car fires (in kreuzberg) and clashed with police (everywhere). there were eight police vans in front of mauerpark yesterday afternoon, with officers standing around and checking IDs, so i took my passport with me last night when i went to my classmate's party on the other side of town. so, anyhoo, i will be going to a may day party in tempelhof, but leaving with enough time to get home by 6pm.
2. carolyn vs was in town last week and we did all of the touristy stuff that i had wanted to do and she wanted to do but adam hates doing. we went on two walking tours of the city and i got to show off my favourite places to eat things and we hit up two of the flea markets, etc.
3. i went for a walk along the spree with my buddy g on sunday, followed by a walk through the tiergarten and on through to museum island and then we sat around and had a lazy snack in hackescher markt. i spent two thirds of the walk commenting on how lucky we are to have lives like this, i was really tired and maybe kinda boring but g laughed at my jokes and yesterday she credited a joke to me that i didn't remember making. we have both been looking at phd ideas, including some of the same programmes, but we have the same stresses about money and why would anyone even want a phd.
1. adam said that he is thinking about going back to school, except he meant high school, to learn all of the things he wishes he understood, like covalent bonds and grammar, etc, and attend some giant parties. i told him that i would support this. i'm registering for 'so maybe you want a phd' advice seminars and taking meetings with professors and i almost booked a GRE test time but then i chickened out, and i'm talking about potential thesis ideas and learning about 5-dimensional graphs.
2. carolyn vs is coming to town tomorrow for a 10 day visit! and then adam will head up to sweden and then his mum is coming for a week and by then i will be older and wiser and have all of the answers to guide me through decision making.
1. economics of capitalism might be my favourite class, except that some mba students signed up under the apparent misconception that this was going to be a pro-capitalism class. some guy has already quoted ayn rand while trying to prove a point, and i love my fellow econ classmates for turning around in sync to give our stink eyes and then looking at each other while shaking our heads (we sat together / we stick together). also, two business students tried to insist that capitalism is uniquely tied with mass production, and two ukrainians in the row ahead of me laughed and said that, no, state-socialism loved mass production too, it just didn't love efficiency. my research methodologies class might be the weakest class, but it's hard to say for sure since econometrics doesn't start until this week.
2. there's a kosher market near my place, but it's only opened mon-thurs from 13:00-15:00 which is so inconvenient for me and kind of ridiculous and i was not surprised to see the place packed when i finally managed to go last week to buy my matzah, except that's sort of a lie, i was surprised because i rarely see any visibly religious jews in this city.
1. we went to dresden for a few days. the weather was terrible but the city was still charming. we went on a hike around königstein, about an hour's train ride outside of dresden, up to the the giant fortress, which was much more impressive than we were expecting. we hiked down the wrong side though, and ended up one town over, and had to trek back around, looking at the gorgerous country-side and debating weather to stop at a tea shop back near the train station. we wanted to go out the next day to check out the bastei, but the weather was the worst, it started to snow in between periods of rain, so we went on a kurt vonnegut tour instead.
our tour guide was a former high school teacher who got fired post-communism and decided to make it big thanks to capitalism. adam and i were the only people on the tour, but the official tourism season doesn't start until this week, so maybe capitalism will still be kind to the guide. he took us around the city, where kurt vonngeut was held in POW camp, where he worked, where the slaughterhouse used to be; he explained a few factual errors in the book. the slaughterhouse is now an exposition centre, there was an orchid festival this weekend, and the basement (where mr vonnegut survived the dresden firebombing) is now a coatroom and the bathrooms, which is maybe appropriate? the soviets kept the old city centre in ruins as a memorial (or because the soviets didn't want to pay to rebuild the city) but we didn't see evidence of that. the rebuilding of the city only ended in 2009; everything is beautiful. it seems like a hard place to live, though, we heard that the unemployment rate is around 19%, and our berlin friends claim that the weather is always going to be worse than in berlin, but i liked the city quite a lot and i want the people there to succeed.
2. the new semester begins tomorrow. another one of my classmates has dropped out. except, unlike the dame who quit in january, i liked this guy and he left because he received a pretty great job offer. at a party last night, he said that we'll still keep in touch, but who knows, he lives outside of the ringbahn and his girlfriend hates parties and so on. i asked him how he will survive without ever completing econometrics. we were supposed to be study buddies this term! ugh, now i have to be study buddies with my buddy m, who is too smart and once drove me bananas last semester with his insistence on making up weird hypothetical scenarios while we were studying macro.
3. wait, adam is reading me the news. justin trudeau beat up a conservative in a charity boxing match?! adam pointed out that although justin trudeau was already a babe, he has now just made himself the dreamiest man in canadian politics (RIP JACK LAYTON). HE PUNCHED CONSERVATISM IN THE FACE, MADE IT BLEED, WHILE HELPING TO CURE CANCER.
1. here is a thing about going to a movie theatre in berlin: you get assigned seats, and price varies depending on the seat you pick. our matinee was billed as costing 10 euros each, which is steep but we haven't been to a movie, so, okay. but, our tickets were only 7 euros each because we ended up sitting two seats over from the centre; it would have cost 1 extra euro each to move back a row. so efficient? i enjoyed the hunger games so much and adam enjoyed it a medium amount.
2. then we went out with a high school friend of adam's, who has fake-married a german woman to stay here. he was a bit of a loose cannon, in other ways, but we had a neat conversation about gender.
3. then, brunch at a friend's house today. spoiler alert: so much food, so much fun.
4. things have changed; now i wear pink lipstick.
partly, this is a story about how i went to potsdam yesterday morning with some friends and we rented bikes and biked around to several of the castles and climbed on a ruined castle and ate a picnic and got ourselves tired out. partly, this is a story about how i showed up yesterday morning and yelled 'i'm wearing my comfy jeans!' and c + her sister were wearing their comfy jeans but anna-lynn had us beat because her jeans were even better.
me: ARE THOSE MATERNITY JEANS?!
anna-lynn (with a smug smirk): YES!!
she bought two pairs a few years ago when she was on an exchange in finland, they keep her belly warm in the winter, they look so comfortable, and now i want some too. file this under FASHION TRENDS 2012.
1. adam is trying to teach me self-sufficiency skills; he is leaving in four months and i might die of starvation without him (or only eat sandwiches and marzipan which sounds fine, i don't know why he worries). anyhoo, this week i've made beans and rice (a modified version of this) but with black beans and kidney beans, plus some other odds& ends we had on hand (half a red pepper + lemon juice + coriander + i think i got stressed so i added a lot of ginger). that was so good that i made it again yesterday. oh, and i learned how to make my own pierogi, which are delicious but you should never try to make these if you're hungry because you'll be hungry for at least two hours.
2. oh, we're trying to do our taxes. this story is boring, but also a bit funny because i had to call revenue canada yesterday and the information-giver tried to tell us to just lie on our taxes and pretend that we'd never left the country, but i want our refund sent here, so that plan is not very good.
3. papers, parties, giggling with adam, everything is still the same. new semester starts april 2; until then, i am sleeping in and gossiping and showing up at friends' places at midnight to watch a documentary about graffiti in berlin.
didn't get the job, but i got a trip to paris, which is the exact opposite in terms of having/not having money.
here are things about paris: the rumours are true. it is a very beautiful city and the food is the best and some people were jerks to us and some people were very helpful and, overall, i got homesick for berlin. paris is more polluted than berlin and everything is more expensive and adam refused to speak any french/doesn't remember most of his elementary school french so all interactions were on me, which was mostly fine and sometimes a hassle.
one key difference was between the airports. at schönefeld, the security guard was joking around with two british kids who hadn't yet finished their water, the one-bag rule was casual, there is wacky wallpaper of paparazzi greeting you when you arrive. at orly, there were police with rifles greeting us, there were constant announcements about the bag restrictions, and the security sassed us, saying our plastic bags holding our toothpastes and other dangerous "liquids" were too big, except that they weren't too bag and she knew it and she would only speak in french so i had to simultaneously translate for adam who thought that she was trying to confiscate our stuff and non-argumentatively agree that our plastic bags were big but they were properly sealed.
otherwise, many things were great:
1. we went to see bill orcutt at the contemporary art museum. for reasons not totally clear, this set was in between an experimental noise artist's and a german electronica guy. so, everyone who came to hear a barefoot guitar guy also got a mixed bag gift with purchase, and same for anyone else who only came to see one of the very different performers. about five minutes into the first set, the noise set, with very abrasive siren sounds turned into scales and broken chords, some guy started yelling to turn down the music, and a lady started screaming that the first guy was a fascist, and within another five minutes, a different guy had stormed the sound box and was removed by security. then! there was a commotion, with people leaving, and i started talking to the woman on the other side of us about how this was all very exciting, it was maybe performance art? the piercing siren noises were still going strong up until a long-haired guy stormed the stage and toppled three of the four sound stacks and was tackled by three security officers. that ended the first set. then, bill orcutt was great! the third guy wasn't great. adam and i left, along with many others, and outside of the doors there were police officers taking down information and causing a commotion.
2. we ate delicious morrocan food. dudes, it was so good, now i want to go to morocco! my grandfather's good friend was moroccan, and i used to get invited to his house for supper when i lived with my grandparents, so i knew about loving the mint tea and the vegetable tagines, but adam didn't know and he was in for a treat. we ate at two different places and both were the greatest in terms of food and friendly service and feeling the best kind of full afterwards.
3. we did silly tourist things, like walk around montmartre so that i could pretend i was amélie, and we walked around the 5th and 6th at night, and we went to sacré-coeur twice because i wanted to see the view at night and during the day. we went to the flea market out in saint-ouen and we went spice hunting in the alley shops and we got tired and sat in cafes and spent all of our money on marzipan and tea (me) or very small cups of coffee and french trappist beer (adam). we ate at least two baguettes per day and everything was good.
so, paris was wonderful, i was very sad to leave but happy to come home. today is for grocery shopping and thinking about the last paper i have to submit by the end of march.
1. the u-bahns, trams and buses were out on saturday, from 4am to 7pm, while the drivers were on strike. the bvg had been alerting all passengers since monday, in german and english, and they'd set up emergency buses for people who work on saturdays and the s-bahns were still working, and the general feeling among my classmates was that the city depends on public transit and the workers have not had a raise in ages and so demonstrating the necessity of the service (during the film festival and on the day of a soccer match) was reasonable. we all knew to plan ahead and leave the party by 3am and the numerous reminders were pretty great. take notes, ttc.
2. last night i had a dream that i got kicked out of school because i never paid the $30 000 bill and i didn't know how to get the money and it was all a giant panic. then i woke up and was stressed because i do have to pay my school fees for next semester, but then i remembered: i'm in germany, i owe €240 and that's to cover my student metro card from april 1 - september 30. i will never be this lucky again, but in the meantime alles gut.
3. two of my classmates are coming over tonight and we're going to help edit each other's papers for international econ. turns out that i work harder on a paper if i have to show it to my classmates than if i'm just handing it in to a professor. also, turns out that, even after years and years of thinking about why i hate the IMF, and writing so many ridic papers on why the IMF is the worst, i still really enjoy thinking about what is up with the IMF and how to criticise it and maybe this could be the rest of my life, complaining about the IMF every few months in 3000-3500 words. this is maybe a job?
1. i got an interview for that researcher job! aaaaaaaaand that professsor with whom i argued over my grade is conducting the interview, so. except that i saw him again yesterday and we're maybe not on bad terms? he can't think i'm that bad at macro theory if he selected me as an interview candidate? who knows.
2. the interview is next wednesday, and on thursday adam and i are going to paris for five days. i'm so excited, so excited!
3. adam baked me a cake and bought be a copy of hark! a vagrant and we went out for supper to a korean place nearby that brags about their vegan kimchi. the kimchi was pretty great, actually, well worth the trilingual brags. topics of the night included: bands adam hates and never wants me to mention again, except they were all bands i've never brought up in my life. bananarama!?
1. adam hurt his thumb yesterday, and told me it was because he gave too many thumbs up. adam is good at lots of things and one of those things is making up the facts.
2. i asked adam what he would do with his time if he never had to work again. he suggested that he might take up day-trading, and we both laughed. adam is good at lots of things but not very good at finance and, also, the idea of adam in a patrick bateman-type outfit is very silly.
3. i'm applying to a job as a research assistant with an institution affiliated with my school. it's a long shot; one job and at least 60 people applying. the upside is that it's an opportunity to practice writing german-style CVs. these are ridiculous, they are a WHAT NOT TO DO for canadian resumes. because i love learning from examples, i asked my german classmates if they could share their CVs with me (to give me a better sense of what is commonly done, as opposed to the variety of examples i found via google). what i have learned: everyone includes a picture, birth date, nationality, and including religion is optional. also, i've learned that everyone includes their elementary school information, that one of my classmates has already published a full page-worth of articles, and that a different classmate's mother told her to include her brothers' and sister's birth dates to show that she has "family values". we agreed that last one was maybe not necessary.
two of my classmates refused to share their CVs with me, even after i promised not to plagiarise, so now i suspect they have something to hide.
4. 
you are always my favourite, john campbell.
1. i got the german equivalent of a B in macroeconomics, and i got into a half hour argument with the professor who gave me the grade, which probably didn't help but it made me feel better. also, to clarify, we were not arguing about the actual grade, we had words regarding the theoretical paper i co-wrote that got me the grade, and how i think that this is a disagreement over opinions (true!) and the prof thinks that i just don't understand the theories (maybe true but maybe not true) and maybe we're both right or wrong, but either way, i got a B. this doesn't match my other so-far grades of As in everything, and now my life is over, i'll never get into phd school, i have to go back to canada to work for the government forever, i'll never get to see paris, etc. my NERDPROBLEMS became overwhelming yesterday: one of my classmates and i phoned each other to say consoling things and adam took me out for a walk and my buddy f pointed out that this grade is only worth around 7 percent of our overall gpa and i corrected her because it's 8.25 percent. f and i made cupcakes, and i feel better today.
2. one of my german classmates wore a t-shirt to class on wednesday that read WHAT'S UP, CRACKER? turns out that he didn't know this was maybe a not-great shirt to wear from a north american point of view. dudes, consider the wackiness of explaining racial terms to people from other cultures who don't have the context and i am not totally sure about the origins of the terms and i have not often/ever(?) heard "cracker" used in a derogatory way in canada so i was not at all offended, just kinda baffled that some german company has mass-produced this shirt. the conversation ended with the guy putting on a sweater.
3. on tuesday night, on the walk to the subway to get home from school, three drunk germans told c and me to "go back to where [we] came from". they yelled it in english so that we'd understand, which was helpful. we kept on walking and i was more upset when i got home. also, after writing about it on facebook, every single one of the germans in my programme gave me mini-speeches about how that was not okay, and i know it's not okay, but also i know that outsider-hating happens everywhere. for instance, members of my own family have said anti-immigrant nonsense on occasion, which is gross and eye-rolly but also proves my point that this is not something that is a german-specific problem. however, it was a sucky few minutes and i am glad my classmates recognised that.
4. something more positive? lots of things are going well. i'm on a semester break from school until april 1, although i have to hand in two essays. new classes in start april! adam t plus me are planning trips and adam got to meet a my favourite professor at our department party on thursday night and we have a bunch of social stuff to do this week. i made delicious bean dip, i will make delicious vanilla pudding with cinnamon sprinkled on top, and i'm going to see some local band tonight because c has a crush on the singer.
1. i smell like pudding because i made chocolate pudding tonight, using the same recipe that i used to make delicious pudding for my brother nathan when we were kids. this is my life: smelling like chocolate pudding and feeling mostly proud of myself.
2. so, yes, i'm looking into phd programmes; i gave a speech about how much i love being in school so much, most definitely more than any job i've ever had, and i will learn to be a teacher and a professional researcher if it means that i could get to study for the rest of my life. i'll be meeting with the head of my department on tuesday because he says he has specific suggestions that he thinks are well suited to my interests. in the meantime, i've been talking with adam about what this means. by that, i mean not settling down for another 4 years, not having any monies ever again, etc. adam says positive things, even though at first i was just looking at mcmaster and ottawa u, and neither of us could work up much enthusiasm for living in ottawa after having lived in berlin (hamilton could be okay? maybe?). sorry friends! but we are now accustomed to very cheap rents and excellent public transportation and cheap food and fun things open past 7pm. i was only looking at these places because adam gave me a list of places where he doesn't want to live and that list includes: west-coast canada, east-coast canada, quebec, alberta, england, australia, and some places where we were probably never going to move anyway, and so it seemed like ontario was what he was really saying because he is getting sick of not speaking german. adam is okay with new zealand, but i don't care for all six of the econ phd programmes in that country. oh, and while we both don't want to go back to non-stop american politics on tv, adam has expressed a strong want to live in nyc. actually, that last one is kinda funny because adam can't live in nyc due to visa hassles, we covered that already when i was looking at masters programmes, plus we both made promises never to fly through the u.s. again after a sucky 4-hour layover in jfk last summer and the introduction of some travel fee that canadians have to pay to enter the country (and a general dislike of american politics - aka the same reason why england is out). and he can't live in stockholm (his other big choice, and i do like the programme at the stockholm school of economics even if it seems excessively math-heavy) without marrying someone with a european passport, like say maybe me, but he is too much of a feminist to get married. we're going to visit stockholm over break to check it out, though. scotland is on the maybe list, too, and maybe paris? i don't know, dudes, this is all sorts of ridic at the moment - not the least of which because i only have one grade so far, since my first semester isn't over for another two weeks. everything feels so hypothetical and daydream-y, instead of the giant hassle that is actually moving.
1. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
romps sent us proper peanut butter from ottawa! i have been eating it all week: with a spoon, made into a sauce with couscous, etc. this would have been a huge treat at the best of times, but this was also called GOOD TIMING because times were getting dire. i thought that i finally found some good peanut butter in a bio shop - it comes from the netherlands, we already know all of the german peanut butter is not so good - but, on closer inspection, it still contains salt. dudes! who knew that peanut butter could get lost in translation?
2. adam t plus me took the train out of town on friday for a weekend trip to bad saarow, which is a spa town about an hour outside of berlin. here are things to do in spa towns: swim in cold, medium and hot healing pools of water, indoors and outdoors; get a massage; get lost a few times and have to ask the same person for directions twice, so that she finally walked us to the place we couldn't find (the shop was located, it turns out, exactly 10 metres from where we were standing, with a sign outside that read SHOP, ooops). we went for wanders around the lake and i got over-excited because mallard ducks are pretty neat and swans are neat but there were also ducks we couldn't identify, with black bodies and white beaks, and they made a mocking-honking noise that irritated adam but made me giggle.
3. one of my classmates bought me homo faber for my birthday and i got a chance to read it this weekend. it's the first novel i've read in ages that i have enjoyed to the point of actually feeling satisfied and completely delighted with individual sentences. my classmate was concerned that i had not read any german novels before, which, now that i think about it, isn't correct; gunther grass had me depressed for a solid week and i think that herman hesse counts as german? anyhoo, what's there to say? maybe you will like this book, too.
4. okay! if you are interested, i will share one of my favourite tumblr pictures with you.
Were you ever told that it is not safe to play around with fireworks? Nobody has told this to Berliners. In Berlin, everybody (EVERYBODY!) buys fireworks and lights them from sundown (aka 3:45pm) until sun up (or so I was told, I was in bed by 5am) beginning Dec 31. Folks were throwing them out the window in our inner courtyard, throwing them on the streets, lighting them on the u-bahn platforms. It was unbelievable if you, like me, come from a place where fireworks are the FORBIDDEN FRUIT of exploding fun.
Adam and I met up with some friends at Heerstraße station and walked through the forest - guided by the light of my sparkler and F's cellphone - to Teufelsberg. Here is the deal with Teufelsberg: it's one of the areas where all of the post-war ruins were piled up on top of a bunker, to make an artificial hill. Then it was used as an American spy station during the cold war. Now it's a big empty hill overlooking West Berlin, which is a lot of fun to climb with your friends and makes a great launching site to throw fireworks.
Here is how to throw fireworks like a Berliner: light the fireworks, maybe aiming them at people and maybe aiming them in the air. I was briefly on fire; my jacket got a bit burnt. Adam got hit in the head with a firework, and he's okay. C accidentally lit her finger on fire and I told her to soothe the blister by drinking more until she couldn't feel the burn. These things happen, don't blame the fireworks. We ate traditional new year's marzipan and I have never been so full of wonder before. We had a fantastic view of the city, where we could see more fireworks than I have ever seen in my life, in addition to the multitude of burning things flying all around us on the hill. Not exaggeration! Not hyberbole!
We made it home and our street looked like a war zone; we stunk of gunpowder and we were a bit choked from the smoke.
Then I got up five hours later and finished that horrible terrible macro paper with C, once she finally made it over, while eating leftover marzipan and reminding ourselves of the best parts of the night before. We handed in the paper today! We will present it on Wednesday and then I will have three solo papers, all on much more interesting subjects, to write by 15 Feb and then my first semester is over.
2/3 of this year was hard: graduating, working, applying to grad school, planning to move to a new continent.
1/3 of this year has been unambiguously wonderful: quitting my job! berlin! grad school! adam came with me!
i enjoyed a lot of tv shows this year: misfits, community, parks&rec, buffy (new for me), avatar (new for me), bob's burgers, and more that i know i have forgotten.
i enjoyed a few movies this year: another earth, the greatest movie ever sold, harry potter.
i enjoyed some new music: pj harvey's let england shake which i played constantly, for three full days in a row while writing my undergrad thesis in the ryerson library and again while moving and again whenever i felt like it; robyn's multi-albums of body talk which maybe came out last year but i only started listening to it this year; the mountain goats. maybe that was it for new music? the rest was all same-old same-old wonderful stuff.
tonight, adam and i are going out to a party on a hill outside of berlin with a few of my classmates. we are going to watch the fireworks over the city and light our own fireworks and maybe get lost in a forest. happy 2012, everyone. did i say this year was going to be my year? this might actually have been my year. if i did call 2011, you can call next year.
1. Working on a group paper that's due Jan 2, worth 100% of my grade for macroeconomics. I finished my part last week, my buddy C finished her part last week, and on Dec 24 our other group member admitted that she wasn't done her part and couldn't do anything because she doesn't understand our topic. We have been working on this thing for two months! We've been in the library together, we reviewed which sections everyone was covering, we've done check-ins. I was so mad. SO MAD. And I pulled myself together and asked for her sources and read them myself and wrote her entire section yesterday. Dudes, one of her sources was wikipedia. Today, I started doing revisions on my sections and C phoned me up while on her vacation in Dresden to review our next steps. I am so sick of this paper.
2. Adam got bored this afternoon and peer pressured me into leaving the house, and my shoolwork, to go exploring. We went for a wander through Kreuzberg, through Görlitzer Park and its inscrutable public art, past the Mexican restaurant covered in Buddhas, and into...the shopping district. Adam had tricked me; he wanted advice on new trousers.
3. Oh! We had a class supper on Sunday night. It was a lot of fun! And we're doing a group party on New Year's Eve, maybe one house party and one party on the outskirts of town, and I'm excited. I know that I keep saying that I didn't expect to make friends in this programme, that I came to work, but making friends has been a delightful surprise.
1. Dudes, I am bringing back capital letters.
2. In some ways, my life is quite similar to how it was 10 years ago: papers, parties, party dresses. Instead of living in Toronto and missing my friends in Ottawa, now I live in Berlin and miss my friends in Toronto and Ottawa.
3. Oh, some things are different this time. I am not so poor that I have to eat cabbage every day, that is very nice.
4. It's easier to be poor in Berlin than in Toronto. My school offers subsidised meals for students: three meat, one veg and one vegan option every day for 1-1.50 euros. If I don't like the vegan meal, I can grab a box of chocolate soymilk and make my own salad.
4a. One of my classmates made a list of 35 free activities she wants to accomplish this winter - now we are crashing art shows, only going out to house parties, holding meetings in the Christmas market yurt down the street.
5. In most ways, my life is much better than 10 years ago. Carolyn said that she hadn't seen me so happy in ages when we were on Skype last week. I think this is true; I love my studies and I am making friends and I am enormously in love with this city. (Do my ill-written sentences look better without capital letters?) Anyhoo, I have a sense of purpose as a student. And, yes, now I'm thinking about PhD options. Just thinking about it! And talking about it.
6. Got a letter from the government the other day. Opened it and read it, it said they were suckers. Specifically, the German government wants me to pay a radio tax, but we don't have a radio, so I will not be paying anything. Oh, and I got a letter from the government today that is apparently the German social insurance number equivalent. Now I can work and pay other taxes! Thanks Germans.
7. Maybe I have run out of things to say.
1. on monday of last week: got a package in the post from ms rosalie! nutrional yeast and some tea and a copy of this year's miriam toews novel, et le roman est en français par-ce que mon amie ne veux pas que j'oublie tout. (dudes, my french is getting terrible - the french guy and i have made a pact to only speak to each other in french because we're worried that our german-learing and english-speaking ways are going to ruin us.) also, i got another package: my new boots!. monday was all last minute presentation practice after class and studying studying studying.
2. on tuesday, i had to make a presentation on the UN's climate change strategies. it went well? i was relieved. and the two presentations afterward were much more controversial (peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions), which meant nobody cared about mine because there was a lot of yelling. went out after class to work on wednesday's presentation.
3. on wednesday, i had to make a presentation on fiscal policy during economic crises. it was a mixed bag, but i learned that my macro prof is in love with the bank of canada? neat. on wednesday night, i stayed home and watched tv-on-the-internet with adam t.
4. on thursday: went out on a date with adam after class. here is something i didn't know, germans love these things called christmas markets which are like craft fairs and actual fairs and places to buy a lot of hot spiced wine (glühwein). turns out that i like these places too. we walked down to alexanderplatz, where there is a very tourist-y christmas market with a giant ferris wheel (which are called WIENER RADS here - viennese wheels). the sun sets at 3:30 now; alexanderplatz looks beautiful in the dark, with all of the multi-coloured lights (orange and yellow on the ferris wheel, blue and white on the museum area down the street).
5. on friday, i got sick during german class and sent myself home. i missed school gossip, i ate potatoes.
6. on saturday, adam and i took the subway to potsdam. (i can give my ode to berlin's public transportation system some other time, but short version: i ♥ berlin's public transit system.) our landlady had told us to avoid the tourit half and concentrate on the parks in the east side. we didn't listen; i wanted to see the palaces and where stalin+churchill divided up europe. as a result, our impression of postdam is that it is cute to the point of seeming fake - like a disney version of a european town. on the plus side, there's a giant christmas market down mainstreet - fresh marzipan! we came home, we switched outfits, and we went to a party with my classmates and had a whole lot of fun until 5am.
7. on sunday, we stayed in our jammies all day and ate fried potatoes.
1. on thursday, i asked my classmate patrick what berlin was like when the wall came down. he's the same age as me and doesn't remember very much from 22 years ago: a lot of people dancing in the streets and his dad, sitting on the couch with a with a grumpy face watching everything on television, moaning that the commies were going to ruin his city.
also, patrick told me that i am very east berlin, which made me laugh, because patrick had just told me that he didn't care for former east berlin or anywhere in the former DDR. he says that he meant it as a compliment, though.
2. on monday, adam and i went to our landlady's house for supper. we had a great time! i asked her and her husband what berlin was like before and after communism. our landlady said it was hard: she was squatting in an apartment and, since she hadn't been assigned the apartment by the government, she couldn't get coal rations. also, vacations were limited to the former eastern bloc: hungary and czechoslovakia. her husband disagreed; he loved berlin in the 1980s. he was stealing electricity in his apartment, which he claimed everyone did in east berlin (his wife disagreed) and he used to steal hand dryers from bathrooms, take them home and wire them up to his stolen electricity, and heat his apartment like that. (me: soooo, you had a good ten seconds of warmth and then you had to push all of the buttons again? him: what is neil young's accent??). mr landlord thought that the 1989-1992 period was the most exciting time: when he wasn't sure if communism was really gone, and most of his friends were still completely bailing on the former east side in case the wall went back up, except for the brave few who took over the vacated giant apartments.
oh, also, we got our lease renewed and adam made maybe plans to go on a beer-tasting tour in upper franconia with mister landlord.
3. all of my projects are due within three weeks! everything is hard! and i'm supposed to be thinking about which classes i want to take next semester, but i'm torn. math-based classes are recommended if i want to get a PhD eventually, the math will add credibility to my arguments. except, i want to take gender&globalisation and class struggle studies and the economics of capitalism, which will maybe help me with my future career plans as...a person who will tell you all about a book i just read? to be determined.
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