Last Thursday was a pretty boring day, just hung on Facebook most of the day I think. Friday started out innocent enough. After watching the refs just outright rob America, I headed home. Robert, Ashish, and I (guys from the apartment building not from the lab) went to the same Italian/Austrailian place I went for my birthday - Belushi's - for dinner. There we got a burger and watched the England soccer game. After we went back, we pretty much turned around again and went out with Pedro and (insert Portugese name I've forgotten) to meet up with Tom and (insert British name I've forgotten), two Brits. We ended up at Kottbuser Tor at this really cool club/bar type thing that was basically over a supermarket. They were only playing music from the 60s which was pretty unique and cool I thought. Later on, we went to another place nearby, and by this point I wasn't feeling so hot and got sick. Towards the end of the night I was suffering and was just trying to get home. We got home around 4 am, which of course, looks like 12 pm because the sun rises so early here.
Now I figured when I went to bed I'd be out of commission for a long time. Not the case, as I somehow (probably due to the massive amounts of sunlight) got up at 12:30, which was great because Robert was leaving at 1 to go to Hackescher Markt to watch the Dutch game. Robert, as you may recall from the very first entry, is from Holland, though he could blend in in America 100%. I am amazed at how completely and 100% he is trilingual. He is the only non-American/British to keep up with my English, he obviously speaks Dutch, and he speaks fluent German on a day in and day out basis at the Hilton Hotel he interns at. Boggles my freaking mind. Anyway, I watched the Dutch game with about 200 other Dutch people which was pretty freaking cool. Though the Dutch language is hilarious sounding, just throwing it out there. I was still feeling very queezy and hadn't eaten so I got chicken nuggets and french fries off the kid's menu and a glass of water and I was feeling pretty good after that. The fact the Dutch won helped too. That night I planned to go and shop a little for the fam but really I just laid down and took a little nap.
Sunday Matthias, Andreas, and I met up to go play soccer with some people from the lab and their friends. It ended up being about 7 on 7, and I won't sugar coat it, I was clearly the worst player on the field. I mean, these are Europeans. When I would do something stupid or miss making a pass I would yell lots of curse words in English that some understood and some did not. (like hopefully the children nearby). The only consolation is towards the end I started to get more chances because I was still going strong and they were all getting progressively exhausted. I was told at one point I have "legs like ze horses!" I double checked to see if that was a good thing...it was.
Monday Matthias, Andreas, and I (you know what, I refer to us so much, I'm just going to start writing The Gang...it's shorter and oh so much more G). Anyway, The Gang met up Monday morning and we were ridiculously sore. Sore in places we didn't know we could be sore in. Though Matthias not so much because half the time he played goalie (and he played a DAMN good goalie, he used to play that position exclusively). Each day this week something else has hurt. Monday was my lower back and my lip, the lip just because I got a fist to the face during a challenge for a ball. Monday Lukas started back in the lab to finish up some fluid dynamics experiments with the column, so I occasionally help him take a sample in the plant while he is in the control room controlling valves and switches and monitoring levels. Monday also marked the first day of the last week in Berlin for Matthias, which is super sad. As such, The Gang has been doing something every night. Monday Spain played, and Andreas is obviously Spanish. We met up at Warschauer Straße and went to an Indian resturant where we were about 5 feet from a ridiculous flat screen. It was a fun little dinner and Spain won. The highlight was when some really weird parade or protest or ...something...came down the street we were on led and trailed by about 5 cop cars. Pictures were definitely taken.
Tuesday I helped Lukas a bit more to take samples. I also meandered around the lab, analyzing some data for Matthias or running a random sample or two. Tuesday's lunch was actually very eventful for me. We happened upon Sophie, a French student that Matthias knew and Andreas and I have become friends with. She was talking in English (didn't know she could do that, actually, since I just always spoke to her in German) with another girl sitting there who I'd never seen before. Turns out it was another RISE student from Rutgers named Jen who is here until the beginning of August. So naturally we chatted a lot, as it was finally nice to hang with another American for an extened period of time. Tuesday night The Gang met up after work in Eberswalder Straße, which is actually walking distance from my apartment, to get 5 Euro huge personal pizzas and watch the soccer game. Sophie came and brought Jen, and we also met up with Claire, my all time favorite British person who I'm friends with through Matthias. At half time we went to a little resturant sans Claire and sat outside and got a drink. We headed out after the game at 10:30, and I got home at 10:45 to Skype with the family and Grammie, which was a very nice end to the day.
Wednesday was one of those epic days in Germany, in the end a "Einmal im Leben Erfahrung" - once in a lifetime experience. Wednesday morning at the lab Steffen, I think looking for something for me to do, introduced me to a tensiometer to measure surface tension of liquids. I briefly orientated myself to it, which I am proud to say I did with a German manual. It wasn't important though for me on this day. The Gang went to lunch a little earlier today (12 instead of anywhere from 1:30-2:30) to see Frau Guten Tag (Mrs. ... Good Day). Really we call her that because of the comical way in which she says "Guten Tag!" Something like "gut-TEN Tag!" where if this were musical notes it'd be like, A C B. Matthias really wanted to see her and luckily she was there to serve us coffee post lunch. Then at 4 Steffen let me go to watch the United States game, though really it was the England game because Germany could only show one and that's the one that was on. I watched that game with Matthias and Claire on a beach at a place called Box At The Beach I believe. It was so cool, we were lounging on beach chairs watching a huge big screen projection of the game. Right as the English game ended, I was just, not in a good mood because it was the last minute of the USA game and we hadn't scored, so we were going home. Then they switched the game over to us celebrating, and when it finally hit we had scored in stoppage time and advanced, I was just overcome with joy. I was ridiculously happy America had made it through, and plus, it would help not having to hear it from Germans for a while longer.
I left the beach at 6:30 to meet up with Claire and Matthias around 8 again to watch the Germany game. In the meantime I went to the store and bought a sick Germany soccer team scarf to wear to the game. In the end, Matthias, Claire, and I met up with Jen and her two coworkers in the lab to head over to Brandenburger Tor to watch an outdoor viewing. We met Andreas on the way, and The Gang was once again complete. We got in to the park about literally 30 seconds before they closed the gates for good because they were way over capacity. So I took that to me there were a few thousand people I guess. I later find out there were TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND people in this place watching 8 screens. It was ridiculous, and the once in a lifetime part. Germany won and they went crazy, it was shoulder to shoulder crowded, everyone united to watch their team win. I can't even explain how awesome it was.
Afterwards we went to Oranienburger Straße to a little pub. I was exhausted and the other half of the group trickled out about a half hour before The Gang left, but I had to stick around, because although Matthias is leaving on Sunday, Andreas is going to Spain for the weekend and he was leaving Thursday at 5 in the morning. So this was actually the last night The Gang would be together on this trip. We walked from Oranienburger Straße to Hackescher Markt, where Matthias would catch his S-Bahn home. Andreas and Matthias said goodbye and it was a very sad moment. Afterwards Andreas and I walked to Alexanderplatz where Andreas got his S-Bahn. We chatted about future trips to Spain or France or the US and I don't doubt one will happen. At Alexanderplatz I was supposed to get my U-Bahn but apparantly I find out it stops running at 1 am, and it was 1:30. So I had to walk about a half hour home, which sucked but whatever. It's good I knew where I was and what I was doing, and also that I found out there were only 3 murders in Berlin a year, and two are drug related (thanks Jen...). To give you an idea of the awesomeness of The Gang we didn't even coordinate it, but all three of us have the sample profile picture on Facebook of us at the public viewing. I love this picture, it's getting framed when I go home: The Gang
Today I designed the tensiometer experiments to calibrate the device to water at 20, 30, and 40C, and then ran mixtures of 15 and 20 weight percent EVONIK II (an organic amine) at those 3 temperatures. That took most of the day, along with helping Lukas occasionally take a sample. After work Steffen and I met Matthias for dinner at a local Berlin pub, or as Steffen put it, "one of the last authentic Berlin pubs in Berlin." It was cool, I got an interesting food thing that they said was pretty good...and it was ...ok. It was basically like two meatloaf patties, home fries with onions, and then an egg over hard thrown on top. After dinner we went our separate ways, and now I'm just writing this and doing my laundry.
Damn, I thought I was done, but apparantly in this title I promised opinions on traffic lights, the homeless, and the German language. Crap. Ok. If I wrote it before I gotta finish it up, and besides, my laundry is still in the drier. Anyway, to start out: Traffic lights in America we know are placed on the opposite side of the intersection. So if you're stopped a red light, that light is physically placed across the intersection. But here, the traffic lights are basically even with the limit line. So I was thinking of the pros and cons of this set up. I think the pro is it forces you to really stay behind the limit line, because if you're over the line, you can't see the light. The con is for the pedestrian (though any law abiding citizen would say this is a pro)....it makes it so much harder to jaywalk. You can't see the light really since it's above you, so you can't jump lights or anything like in America. Which is annoying for me, I'm trying to get places and can't jaywalk to get there! Randomly, the left hand arrow goes AFTER the straight ahead traffic. Not really sure if anything changes pro/con-wise versus our set up of having the left arrow before the straight ahead traffic.
The homeless. So in Germany you can collect bottles and receive a "Pfand" - deposit - for them, by bringing them to pretty much any common grocery store. So like, last night for the Germany game would have been a bottle collector's dream day, because they were everywhere. You can make sizeable money, for a homeless person. So this leads to interesting observations. First, there is very little litter, because if there's a bottle in the street or near a trash can or on a building ledge, it won't be there for long, because people snatch it up. But at least once a day while waiting in Alexanderplatz for my train, I see people walk up to trash cans, peer in, sometimes ruffle really quick, and move on. I can't really get behind this. But I don't want you to think it's like, a guy with one shoe looking throw the trash, there will be people in nice clothes looking in. So the class of trash rummager is nicer here...it's a nice system they have set up all around I think.
Finally, the German language. Little parts of German have been creeping in to my English, and some of it is starting to annoy me. For example in German there is no phrase for "There is/There are" i.e. "There are a lot of buildings here with grafitti." Instead Germans say "Es gibt" for both - literally "it gives." So, in German, "Es gibt viele Gebäude mit Grafitti." Last Skype call with my Grammie when describing Berlin I said "It gives buildings here with grafitti." Which makes no sense and sounds as if a German was directly translating his German in to English. I also told Claire she had "Kein confidence" in England against Germany, for some random reason saying Kein instead of no. However, some idioms I think work in German and I like how they sound. So for example, while the phrase "Spaß haben" - "to have fun" - does exist in German, more often they will say "Spaß machen" - "to make fun." So you say something makes fun. Which I think in more optimistic. In English, it's either fun or it's not. Traffic court - not fun. Rollercoasters - very fun. But here, you MAKE fun, so it's all up to you. Maybe traffic court could be fun, you have to make the fun. Also, they don't say to take a photograph, it's "ein Foto machen" - "to make a photo." And I think that's more artistic. Because while you could argue you are taking an image from the camera and putting it on paper, or you are taking a part of where ever you are back with you, you could also say you're changing the light/color/contrast to make the perfect picture. I think both work.
Ok, so that above wasn't finally. I have one more finally. I am actually really liking Berlin. Like, it's almost like a switch was flipped. At first I was lonely, a bit homesick, not too many friends, and the city was so unfamiliar. But now, I am constantly on my grind. Lots of friends, the end is in site, and I've seen enough of this city to say I know it extremely well. I will be able to come back in 20 years and know how to get around, know where things are, know where to go to go back to places I've had good memories at...I always said when I got here I liked Munich more. But I can't say that about Munich. At this point I can barely remember Munich, I was there for 2 days. But I will always remember everything about this city. It is definitely my second city after Philly (let's be honest Pittsburgh, you never made the list...get bent). I will most certainly one day come back, whether it be passing through for a day or taking a two week vacation. Klaus Wowereit, the Mayor of Berlin since 2001, once said in a 2003 interview "Berlin ist arm, aber sexy." - "Berlin is poor, but sexy." It's really true. It isn't the prettiest of places, sure the buildings have some grafitti on them, but it's really a ...sexy... place. A place you might not like at first, but god damnit, this place will grow on you. And before you know it, you love Berlin. So I gotta speak the truth: I love this city.
Pictures to come at the end of the week, I want to have a large album of this entire week with Matthias.
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