Monday, August 3, 2009
lets do a catch up then i'll move on hey??
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
tales of an apartment
Monday, June 15, 2009
my uni? it looks.. um.. brown
Monday, May 18, 2009
easter sunshine images
Monday, May 11, 2009
Starting Uni
The fourth week of uni has just come to an end and with it I think I’ve actually finalised the classes I’m going to commit to. Hence now that I’ve finished assembling my fabulous study plan I thought I’d fill everyone in.
Semester actually started on 2nd of April, when we had two days of orientation with about 1000 other exchange students. And no, I’m not exaggerating the numbers (!) – most of the other students were on an ERASMUS – European centred – exchange program – which meant us kiddies from outside Europe were the minority.
Everyone was separated into their main faculties and in those groups given a little tour around the relevant spaces, i.e. the relevant library (yes they have many, many libraries at Free University) bookstores and classrooms and importantly the best places to obtain good cheap food (emphasis on good will become clear soon) and HOW to obtain that food. (Emphasis on ‘how’ explained now)
There are many different cafes offering different varieties of food throughout the uni, the best of which I’ve only just begun to remember how to find. So the first step in HOW to obtain food is FINDING the café you are looking for.
Step 1: For example: The ‘Sportler café’ is in the middle street of building Silberlaube, which from memory is street K. Once you find street K, you need to head in the direction of street 24, which crosses over K at a right angle. Then you need to find a staircase close by, climb to the second level and walk up and down until you see their little hand painted sign.
Step 2: Deciding and paying for your food. Sportler Café is relatively easy. There are people behind the counter but they mostly just stand around or pretend to wipe down benches. Why is this so? Oh because it’s self serve! Right thanks for telling me, – maybe you should put up a sign?? ! so you reach over the other people waiting to be served, grab your goodies and dig around in the ‘pay tray’ to find your change.
Buying food at ‘the Mensa’ is a different story. This is the enormous main cafeteria where you can buy everything from button machine coffee and chai to gourmet cakes and vegan risotto. The catch with this place is you can’t pay with cash. You HAVE to pay with a ‘Mensa card’ which you need to constantly load money on to at the very few ‘load money on to your Mensa card here machines’ But gross inconvenience aside if you elbow your way through the crowd to get a good look at the food on offer each day you can usually find something nice on the menu. The have a never ending supply of yummy dark bread rolls filled with salad and everything is VERY cheap.
If you didn’t know before, you’ve probably realised now that I have a slight obsession with food – or am slightly, kind of, chronically fussy. ANYWAY – am quite satisfied with the food on offer here at uni. End tangent.
Main point – my fabulous subjects.
At FU I’m enrolled at a German literature student and so my subjects choices are separated into three areas: New German literature, Old German literature and Linguistics. I decided against studying the old guys and went with subjects in NGL and linguistics, mainly because although the literature component to my German studies major at home has been quite broad, we’ve focused on texts from the last three centuries hence I stayed with the trend.
The first year level class I’m doing is ‘Introduction to Text Analysis’. For this we have a ‘Vorlesung’ – Lecture and ‘Basis Seminar’ – self explanatory, just pronounced with a German accent. I’m still waiting for the introduction to happen. It seems a lot of knowledge over texts is assumed, but I have found it really interesting and helpful so far. We spent a whole week on Hermeneutics, mainly because the Germans basically OWN all the literature theory about it and are quite proud of the academic achievement, but I was grateful as it cleared things up for me quite well.
The ‘Aufbauniveau’ – 2nd/3rd year classes, I’m doing are Linguistics: Theories in language development and Politics: Sexuality, Religion and Politics in the Middle East.
The linguistics subject is really great. The class is a good size and very active thanks to our Austrian tutor (great Austrian accent!) who constantly gives us strange grammar exercises and pushes everyone to decide what’s grammatically wrong with a sentence. That aspect is a bit tough for me – given German is my second language! But I still really enjoy the classes and have made some good friends in them already.
My politics subject is a different story. Our lecturer is a very passionate Egyptian women who seems to make up the class as we go, throwing in random pieces of trivia and demanding we all read hundreds of pages of text for each week. The class is huge, it’s supposed to be a seminar with about 30-35 people but there are at least 80. Because of the relaxed atmosphere it’s really fun and we spend most of the time discussing issues to do with differences between Arabian states and European states which I find really interesting.
Subjects I tolerate:
My language course is slightly less than thrilling. We have a big class with a huge range of abilities in German so it can go appallingly slowly or way too fast for any of us to understand which of the thousand worksheets we’re currently working on. It doesn’t help that it’s 4 hours long either!
I was enrolled in (or still am technically) in an exchange student subject relating to literature about the Berlin wall, but it’s way too slow for me. Our lecturer is very lovely but slightly patronising in the way she relates to us, mainly I think because of her perception that as German is our second language, she thinks we might be slightly demented. Not kidding – I couldn’t stand it! Not going anymore but have to unenroll somehow. Hhmmm
Monday, April 13, 2009
Easter fun and interesting coffee culture
on the train - Jeremy, me, Thanos and Johanna
Easter fun and Interesting coffee culture
Please pardon the delayed posting of the festive event and all things interesting about German coffee and food, I wrote a draft while we were without internet but seem to have lost my USB (v. tragic) and hence need to rewrite it!!
So what’s German Easter about? One word: Lindt!! Everywhere and soooooooo many varieties! Quite enjoyable it was browsing the supermarket Easter chocolate sections.
Aside from the great chocolate, for our Easter celebration we decided to team up with our other friends and have a picnic in one of the many lovely parks in Berlin. So this is how our Easter long weekend (they have Friday to Monday free like at home too) panned out.
Friday – realised we didn’t have any toilet paper left in the temporary apartment we’d moved into the night before. Meeting in Friedrichshain with friends at 11pm, move around at a few bars and arrange the food shopping appointment for Saturday.
Saturday – bleary eyed and clutching handbags stuffed with plastic shopping bags (you have to pay for plastic bags at supermarkets) we brainstormed a wicked picnic menu and a shopping list while sipping tea and coffee at a grand old pub/café then hit the supermarket. We spent the rest of the day at Johanna’s beautiful temporary residence at a friend’s apartment in Charlottenburg and prepared lentil burgers, potato salads, garden salad, tzatziki (how could we not have tzatziki with 3 Greeks attending!) and beef burgers for the next day in the sun.
Sunday! – Jeremy and I staged a bit of an Easter egg hunt through the gorgeous apartment we were staying in. Check out the photos – Jeremy was a bit cunning!
We headed to Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg, around the corner to where we were staying, and found a lovely spot for everyone in between the other festive parties utilising mobile BBQs and foil coal packets. As you can imagine there was a lot of ‘cooking’ smoke but the atmosphere was great as there were just sooooooo many people together enjoying the gorgeous weather and fabulous oddities that compromise German picnic/BBQ or ‘Grilling’ culture. One such oddity was the DJ table that set up in one of the little valleys in the park and despite attracting the attention of 3 ‘Polizei’ vehicles which drove at a crawling pace through the thick crowds of revellers, the desk stayed til late in the evening and different DJs jumped on and off. We joined the party later in the afternoon and there was a mass of people dancing and drinking and soaking up the sun.
COFFEE!
You may know that I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but having many friends addicted to the drug, or just being a law student is enough really at Monash, I have observed much of Australian coffee culture and tend to think I know what’s going to be presented to a friend when they order a variation of long, short, black, white, tall, grandé, skinny, soy, whatever. So. I’ve really enjoyed being surprised and even stifling a laugh at some of the fabulous concoctions that have been served up for my coffee-drinking friends here. I have a few photos to show, but they really just scrape the surface.
Basically we’ve observed that the first rule to trying to figure out what shape your variation of a coffee will take is to observe which part of Berlin you are in. Secondly, what type of café, bar, side of the road van is it? Thirdly, what does it cost.
These three rules will give you a bit of an idea. For example – at uni
- You’re at Uni – there’s maybe one café in the whole outer Berlin suburb that actually has a real coffee machine (espresso machine) the rest just press a button for ‘machine fresh’ mixed stuff.
- You’re probably in the mensa which means you have to press the button YOURSELF and the sup is likely only to get half full
- It costs about 85 euro cents – don’t expect much.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Super trains, back pain and bewildering shopping hours
The train network here is just fantastic! While I was here last time on exchange I mostly took the main lines through the city on the rural service from my town. But this time we’re going all out, jumping on and off all over the place because we CAN! Maybe I should show you what the underground map looks like. For someone who spent many hours cursing Connex and their reliably late trains that often picked parts of the line to stop where there was no station, the system here is sadly quite exciting!
At the moment we’re living close to ‘Gesundbrunnen’ station. You most probably can´t see where that is, no matter.
The Berlin Cathedral, right in the main Tourist precinct in the city - look at all the bare trees!! so cold!
looking around in the nice park
The famous TV tower that can be seen from most parts of the city, in Alexander Platz
Jeremy in new jacket and pants!