When I’m enthusiastic about something, I tend to talk about it a lot. Earlier this year I kept posting links on Facebook to shoes I wanted from this company, whose shoes are cute, comfortable, and – oh yes – wildly expensive. I own a few pairs, because they’re sooo gooood. (Financial responsibility note: They were all on sale.)
This morning my friend Sarah was biking through my neighborhood in her early-morning haze when she saw ahead of her a pair of Fluevogs walking down the street. Wow! Fluevogs! in Berlin! She looked up, and it was me, wearing my new heels to work for the first time. Ha.
Ah, the classic evening meal of cheapskates in Berlin:
It’s a döner im Brot. It’s kind of a variation on a gyro – mystery meat shaved off a rotating hunk o’ broily goodness, stuffed in bread with sauce, slaw, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and deliciousness. So much deliciousness. And if there’s not enough carbohydrates in the bread, you can add fries and a soda. Incidentally, Coke tastes so much better here, because it’s sweetened with sugar instead of corn syrup. Mmmm. Suuugarrrrr.
Anyway, this is actually the first döner I’ve had on this trip…and you can probably tell it’s in a mall food court. You’re supposed to buy them from sketchy stands. I’ll do better next time. I was in the mall! It was almost 7:00! I was hungry! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again!
The world championships in track & field were in Berlin last week. I kept forgetting to watch them on TV, so what I saw – the grand total – was the men’s high jump final, about five minutes of men’s racewalking when a TV was on at work, and a few minutes of women’s discus. I did keep seeing athletes wandering around town with their shiny passes around their necks, so that was exciting.
This kid is not a competitor. He’s on a runway set up by Puma in Alexanderplatz – he’s running past speed cameras that flash your kilometers per hour on a board. I think it would be a lot more interesting if they told you how fast you can run 100 meters. Note the Jamaica colors – and there’s even a little Jamaican bar/hut thing in the background, playing reggae.
Facebook sometimes has problems with gender – if it doesn’t know which a person is, it usually throws around “they,” as in “Bruce Fields took their turn in [game]!” because, yknow, English doesn’t really have a gender-neutral pronoun.
Look how much worse it is when you switch your Facebook language to German:
This is Facebook suggesting a friend who I might know. It doesn’t seem to know if Laura is female or not, so not only does it have the kind-of-neutral “FreundIn” (which means Freund/Freundin), it also has to suggest alternative endings for the article (could be ein or eine) and the adjective (could be gemeinsamer or gemeinsame). It obviously doesn’t know what to do with Carleton, either.
Whew! German is rough. Well, it’s rough in writing, when you can’t just mumble the adjective endings.
At last! Today I started work at Bild-Zeitung, far and away the highest-circulation newspaper in Germany. It sells on the order of 4 million copies a day. USA Today, the top U.S. paper, has a little over 2 million circulation. And there are only a quarter as many people in Germany. So, we’re talking about a very influential newspaper. Oh yes – and it’s a tabloid.
If you go look at Bild’s website, you don’t need to speak German to notice something about it: lots of sex and violence. The print edition has a naked lady on the front page every day. There may also be more naked ladies on the inside of the newspaper – you never know what naked lady news may have broken in the last 24 hours – but you’re definitely guaranteed one on the front page. I think more U.S. publications should consider adding this feature, because it clearly sells papers.
I only went in for a few hours this afternoon, so I can only report that the people are really nice and there’s bottled water for all in the printer room:
It’s sparkly water, of course.
I just caught a segment on German public TV called “Countdown: Mauerfall.” Mauer = wall; Fall = fall.
It’s totally cool – they’re counting down to November 9, the day the Berlin Wall fell, by showing TV news from that time. I think it’s actually from this date in 1989. Today’s was about people leaving East Germany. A major way to do that was through Hungary, which was starting to do the whole glasnost thing; people waited for days in lines outside the West German embassy in Budapest, while the East German secret police photographed them.
The news also showed interviews with East German vacationers at campgrounds in Hungary who were like, well, we sure hope they don’t close the border and take away our vacation spot just because some people have to go and abuse the privilege of travel to Hungary.
I’m so glad I asked the downstairs neighbor to do my shopping today (my illness being such that I really don’t want to leave my apartment unless it’s for a medical facility). He was fast, and it wasn’t out of his way, which was nice, but most importantly: I got to learn the ultimate German home remedy for stomach problems.
There it is, my friends. This is the value of life overseas: learning that, whatever ails your digestive system, what you really need is pretzel sticks and coke. Two doctors did ask me if I was drinking coke and seemed a little surprised that I wasn’t. I look forward to trying the local folk remedy this afternoon.
I took this picture mostly because I can’t remember the last time I saw someone use an overhead projector:
It’s my German teacher going over the definite and indefinite articles and adjective endings for what must be about the 10 millionth time in her career. It’s certainly about the 10 millionth time I’ve learned them.
The woman in the middle of the picture is a grad student from Berkeley. There’s another grad student from Stanford, a woman from India, two women and one man from Spain, a guy from France, three Russians, and a small cast of rotating characters – today we had a Venezuelan and a guy who may have been French, and late last week there was a Greek woman.
My measure of success in a foreign language is being able to get through transactions at stores – stores where you have to talk, not supermarkets – without the other person switching to English. I’m achieving this in German, so, three cheers! Example: Today I bought a SIM card for my phone. I told the guy I wanted a SIM card, I told him, no, I didn’t already have a phone number, I said, yes, my American Handy (the german word for cellphone – nice, eh?) will work here, and signed various things, all with him only saying “Thank you” once. Yessss!
It’s a good thing I’m having successes outside of the classroom, because in my intensive German class, I’m kind of a mess. My grammar’s not bad and I think my accent is pretty decent, but my vocabulary is the size of a flea. If I ask for the meaning of a word, I get a definition that uses other words I don’t know. Today we watched a half hour of one of the TV morning shows and everybody else seemed to understand what was going on in the news stories – they could discuss content – and I was the one who the teacher had other people practice their explaining skills on. (“Oriol, can you explain Formula 1 racing to Helen?”)
Oh well, it’s probably good for me to be the laggard in a language class for once in my life. The other students have been here for several weeks already, so it’s not really fair to compare myself to them. And I really do speak quite well (evidence: the SIM card transaction). I just need to expand my vocabulary, and I think two months of living here is going to be very good for that.
Yeah, this is the life. This afternoon after German class and a walking tour of one of the cooler neighborhoods in Berlin, three other Burns fellows and I stopped in at a biergarten. Hey, we were talking about journalism and stuff! It was totally work!
See that bright green drink on the table? Yeah, that’s my drink. I was inspired to get it when I saw a teenager in front of me in line order one. (The drinking age is low here for beer.) It’s a local beer mixed with fruit syrup, which they keep in plastic squirt bottles.
I’d already tried the pink version, which I think is raspberry flavored. The English translation on the menu helpfully told me that the green one is “woodruff”-flavored. Not by her. Apparently it’s an herb. The drink tasted a lot like green sherbet. I think I’m going back to pink next time.
