Brrrrrlin

The best way I can think of to describe the city of Berlin is cool. The general atmosphere of the city is modern. It is the current center of the alternative scene in Europe. When I talk to my friends on campus overwhelmingly everyone loves Berlin. In our trip we got a pretty good mix of the historical half of the city as well as the new city.

Our first day we took a free 3 hour walking tour with this company called New Europe. They provide free tours in most major European cities in English and Spanish, and they are really good! On that we saw most of what used to be East Berlin. Including the Brandenburg gate, Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, Nazi buildings, Holocaust memorial, museum Island, opera buildings and much more. The one negative thing I can say about it is that it was soooo cold!! It was about 6 or 7 Celsius the entire time with rain. My friends and I all did my mom proud and dressed in layers though. That night we made dinner with people in our hostel which was pretty cool and then a group of us from the hostel went to go dance in one of Berlin's famous night clubs. The had animated screens inside and played lots of techno, it was pretty cool.

Sunday we met up with a friend from school who used to live in Berlin and went to a giant flea market. It was way in the North of the city, we were lucky and had sun that day. It was so cool walking around seeing the random stuff people were selling and the really amazing things people had made. The market was next to a park and a amphitheater. The amphitheater was entirely covered in street art. When we left there were tons of people gathered there for karaoke that happens on Sundays. After a quick stop off for boba tea (Sarah and I were ridiculously excited to find Boba in Europe) we went to the East Side Gallery. This was my favorite tourist attraction/museum in Berlin. The East Side Gallery is the longest standing stretch of the Berlin Wall and it is entirely painted over by street artists. It is a little over a kilometer in length, and its gorgeous. All the paintings remember the wall, give messages of hope and capture the spirt of the change that took place with the wall coming down. After the wall we decided to try the schnitzel, which was about what you would expect fried chicken to taste like.

Monday we decided to hit all the free attractions which ended up being a little depressing. We went to the Mauer Memorial which documented the evolution of the wall with descriptions of individual escape attempts. The really unnerving thing about the history of the wall is that it came down around the time me and the people I was traveling with were born. It's unbelievable how recent the devision of the city was and how in what is basically our lifetime it has developed so much. It is also interesting to wonder about people who can freely walk into previously forbidden parts of the city and how seeing remnants of the wall makes them feel. We also went to The Topography of Terror, an exhibit on the SS which stands on the land that used to be their headquarters. We soon realized that most of the free exhibits were free because Berlin wants people to remember things like the Wall and the SS so that they do not come about again. We also saw Checkpoint Charlie, and while we were walking away we ran straight into a group of people from our school! Which just shows that I can never escape the Bubble.

On Tuesday we went to a concentration camp. We debated going because it seems weird to go and take a tour of somewhere so full of horror, but came to the conclusion that it is a necessary experience to really understand what happened.

Wednesday, which was supposed to be our last day we went to the Pergamon museum. However because of the strikes in France our flight was "disrupted" and we couldn't leave until Thursday morning at about 8am. The Pergamon was really cool though, especially because we had learned about a lot of the exhibits in my art history class this semester! Between that and the Louvre I felt like I had just rehashed the first half of the semester.

I really enjoyed Berlin, I would love to go back sometime, hopefully when it's warmer! I want to just explore the real city next time. We had fun walking around the neighborhood around the flea market and just looking at houses and restaurants. I also loved all the pretzels I ate in Berlin. The depressing sounding exhibits were offset by the amazing people I was with, the general atmosphere of the city, and the dancing at night. We also ended up with some entertaining hostel mates, including two very smelly older German men, one very drunk man from Mexico, a really nice singer from South Africa and a nice very quiet German guy. I really can't pick between Berlin and Paris, they are complete opposite cities and I enjoyed them both. I will write about Paris in the next day or so.

Epic Blogging Fail (Ik faal in het leven)

It has been far too long since I updated this, partly because living here has felt more and more like regular life at school. It is interesting comparing study abroad experiences with my friends in other countries because our programs are very different. After comparing notes it appears my experience is something like being at boarding school, which is actually pretty fun.

Since I last posted I have been to the Hague and Amsterdam. I have also gotten my hair cut from a woman who didn't speak English, joined some clubs and had a wonderful birthday. Also I have eaten a lot of delicious food. So I will go over the highlights of the more interesting things. This is what I get for waiting three weeks to update this.

Our trip to the Hague was really nice, I went with two other Americans. We just wandered around the central part of the city looking at buildings and hopping into stores. We found a really large square with many cafes and decided to grab and early dinner there, when we were about finished it started to rain. So we decided we would sit under our umbrella until the rain lightened up because we were pretty unprepared apparel-wise for the rain. After an hour of the rain only getting worse and worse we decided to make a break for it and walk to the train station. After about a five minute walk I could actually wring my pants out, they were soaked. The rain storm was followed by a movie night in with lots of hot tea.

Last weekend my friend who is studying in Paris came to stay, which was a lot of fun! It felt strangely natural to have a friend from Santa Cruz staying with me in Utrecht. On Friday I took her around the downtown area of the city and fed her dutch cuisine such as stroopwafels. We tried to make Dutch pancakes and completely failed, I blame the hot plates and instructions in Dutch. On Saturday we went into Amsterdam. After finding the right train and right tram we arrived at the Van Gogh museum, where we walked right in because we had planned ahead with our tickets. The museum features not only Van Gogh but works by some of his contemporaries. I really enjoyed it, some of the floors were so full of color. We then took a tram to the ferries so we could hop on a ferry to Amsterdam North to my friend Shira's house. There we took a wonderful nap. Then we got some delicious indonesian take out and went out dancing. Sunday after my friend returned to Paris I spent the whole day studying in Shira's house with her and her sister. This week is midterms week, so that is where much of my time has been going. It was so nice to be able to relax in an actual house; I left for Utrecht with a very happy heart and a little homesick for my own parents and sister, but in the best way possible.

I have also been getting more involved on campus. I somehow ended up in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace which should be fun. They needed a minor roll filled and my friend asked me if I wanted to join. I have also become involved with UCTV, our campus tv station. I did UCTV Sunday a week ago last Sunday. We spent the day writing making and editing a short film. At the end of the day we had a screening with the other groups. It was pretty fun, after the midterms break I am going to help make another one for the series called Beyond the Gates. This is a series where we show students that life outside the bubble exists.

I have also started going to a student led yoga class on Wednesday nights, she calls the routine goodnight yoga. It is from 10-1130pm and by the end I am so relaxed that I can just fall straight asleep.

I also celebrated my birthday last week and was shocked by how incredible my friends here are. My unitmates taped balloons with Dutch and English Happy Birthday phrases on them all over, I had some friends show up at midnight with cards and cookies and two of my girlfriends banned together to give me gorgeous boots and flowers. As well as that everywhere on campus I had people stopping me to give me the traditional Dutch three kisses. It was a really nice birthday, I had friends over that night too.

Apart from the actually eventful things that have gone on I have really settled in here, I have been here about two months. I feel relatively comfortable biking in traffic, I understand most of the ins and outs of UC, I am running into less and less moments with Dutch friends where I feel entirely clueless and I can reliably order food without getting thrown by questions such as "for here or to go?" or "would you like cinnamon on that?" I also realized that being in the "bubble" all the time can be stressful, so one of my new favorite things is going off campus to a cafe and just reading a book for fun for an hour or two.

On Friday I am leaving for Berlin where we will stay until Wednesday when we leave for Paris. So expect some pretty exciting news!