lets do a catch up then i'll move on hey??

Having travelled 7 hours in 'Autobahn' revitalisation (i.e. freeway construction) induced traffic from Berlin, I arrived slightly erratic last night in Cologne. Am currently here on the great Rhein river to undertake an Intership at the Administrative Court of Cologne (and neighbouring suburbs!).

Had a fantastic first day, if a bit of an information overload - but before we go into that I think somewhat of a CATCH up of the last um... 2 months (oops!) is necessary.

I think where we left off was Stockholm ja??

So in the middle of may Jeremy and I and his parents, Louise and Reg (who came to visit for the occasion) made the long trip (9 hours in the car!) from Berlin down to South west Germany - Saarland (best name for a state ever) - for the lovely wedding of the daughter of an old friend of Louise's.

Was really great fun, we were slight celebrities at the reception - everyone wanted to meet us and exclaimed about our German Language ability.

From Saarland (close to french border) we managed a day trip to Luxembourg City, in Luxembourg (um obviously!). The city was quite grand and very clean. It gave the impression of wealth, however i later met an exchange student originally from Luxembourg and he explained that they don't have any universities there which I thought was quite sad for a country!

The next weekend (not a sleep in in sight!) Jeremy and I signed up for a student trip organised by our uni down the Rhein river to two of the oldest cities in the country - Koblenz and Trier. Both were Roman-founded military cities and hence have an extensive rich history.

The highlight though really was all the friends we made on the trip, people from Taiwan, Italy, Georgia, US, Austria, Spain, China and more. Our two leaders from the exchange office at uni too were fantastic and there was a lovely group atmosphere - especially when people (jeremy and I included) were running seriously short for time to make the train home (we were admiring Karl Marx's birthhouse on the otherside of the city!) half the group waitd for us at the entrance to the station.

Now with semester over and the summer holidays in full swing many of our friends have gone home, but hopefully we'll visit a few in the next few months.

A day trip to Dresden with Stacey, Matt (both exchange students from our German Faculty at Monash uni) and Veronika (stacey's housemate) occurred sometime in June too if I can remember clearly... great warm weather. Dresden is such a grand city, I'd been last time I was in Germany, about 4 years ago now but was more than happy to return.

After Dresden were exams and our last classes :(. They were a bit sad as I'd grown to really enjoy some. After a semester you get to know the people (who regularly turn up!) quite well. My favourite would have to be my linguistics class where our lecturer called us all by our last names - i.e I was Frau Thompson - but managed to make the class very funny and witty. A group of us always had lunch together afterwards and I really made my first german friends during those lunch hours!

After end of semester Jeremy, Marion (visiting from Melbourne!) our Friend Michelle and I ran off to Hamburg for two days to check out the biggest harbour in Europe (or something similar - was huge!). Along with a world reknown Harbour though, Hamburg also has an enormous prostitution quarter of the city. I found it incredibly confronting, women were literally chasing men down the street to find customers. We three girls created a bit of a fort around Jeremy, it's a bit hilarious now but was quite unbelievable at the time.

Following those two days an old friend, (well known to my family!) Fanny joined Jeremy, Marion and I in Berlin and we decorated the apartment for long afternoon Birthday lunch. The tricksters took me out to breakfast (!!) then lots of friends from different places dropped in to share falafels in bread, champagne and ice cream cake.

Afterwards a group of us headed down to Potsdamer Platz, where they show the original version (that means without German dubbing!) of current movies, and we saw the latest Harry Potter movie - great in my opinion! Michelle was of the opinion that it was a tad slow, however I only realised halfway through that I'd actually read the book (!) and so found the whole movie rather enlightening.

Here are some photos of the mentioned events and trips - shall continue story of Prague trip in the next entry.

love! xx

Marion and Jeremy decorating the loungeroom with colourful streamers

Massive ships in the Hamburg Harbour

Buritto night at Vici's apartment (a good friend from Linguistics class!)

Communal dinner at our place catching up with friends from the student trip south

Michell, Marion and Jeremy enjoying the sun in Hamburg

Sunny Dresden!

Stacey and I leading the group

Helga, mother of the Bride, Reg and Louise, Jeremy's parents and Jeremy and I at the Wedding in South Germany

The lovely Bride and Groom - Anne and Patrick

Our faithful Golf - VW that got us down there - no we hired it - can't afford a car here!

tales of an apartment

So finally i've got some time before class to pop up some photos of our lovely apartment for all Facebook deprived people to check out. (Put up an album on Facebook if you're that way inclined) 

Many weeks ago now we held our House warming or in German 'Einweihungsparty'. It was quite the scrumptuous dessert party where everyone had to bring a plate of dessert or something of the sort. We ate and drank ourselves many times full of all sorts of fruit and cream filled goodies and have pasted some photos of the crew who came. 

The apartment itself is in Kreuzberg, right near the metro station Schlesisches Tor smack bang in the middle of alternative club and bar territory for Berlin. The train line really is a party line, coming home from anywhere late in the evening and i'm always accompanied by large groups of young revellers swinging their Becks with lemon and lime all over the train. A rather special thing about this city is that its legal to drink alcohol on the street. Bit confronting at first when you're constantly passing people downing prosecco in groups but most of the time I don't notice any more and it's quite nice to walk around with a beer on your way to a friends place. 

So it's a given that there will always be people around and I feel quite safe most of the time even late at night on my own. 

The graffitti in this part of Berlin is fantastic as well, some of the building long pieces are really famous and it makes the whole place fun and colourful i find. 

have to get to class - hope all's going well! 

Our furnished bedroom - yay for curtains, I made them!

Sandro presents our table of goodies at the housewarming

Jeremy and Thomas (austria) 

Great friend Michelle (US) making shaking ice cream for the occasion - it really works!

my uni? it looks.. um.. brown

Uni is going along quite quickly here - only a few more weeks then finished for the semester! Can't believe it!! What's more unbelievable is that in that time I have to write 2 "hausarbeits" i.e two massive essays - fun fun. 

The problem is I have to decide on my own topics which takes sooooo much longer. It means I'll actually be interested in the theme but URG. 

Here's a shot of the other side of my uni where i don't go too often. Pretty 60's hey? This is the main entrance but i come from the other station (Yes there is a STATION with TRAINS near my uni here, incomprehensible! considering nearest train to Monash Uni at home is 15 minutes by car!) and walk through the back way. There are lots of pretty parks and things around the uni, mainly as they designed it to be open and spacey but also because its situated in a very wealthy area of Berlin and the rich people like green! 

Wonderful shot of my uni! 

Here is a small shot of the huge Mensa cafeteria where we eat a lot of the time. It's sooooo cheap and often the food isnt too bad. AND we have chai tea on tap! although it's a bit sweet for me... 

Chai tea on TAP!!!

Been pretty busy for the last few weeks and this weekend just past was the first I was actually in Berlin (for most of it anyway) for about a month! 

Weekend travelling over the last two months has included: 

Paris, France - Jeremy had a fencing tournament and I caught up with a great friend Marion who i met last time I was in Germany - 5 years later!!!!! 

Marion and I at Versailles - we had a lovely Sunday picnic in the Gardens

The Fencing Stadium in Paris (no that's not Jeremy!) 

Stockholm, Sweden - Another fencing tournament for jeremy and a great excuse for me to explore this scandinavian city - really is a fantastic place! 

Tiny medival Streets on Island Gamla Stan

Me on Skansen - open air park in City. 

Fencing Stadium - lots of flags!

Photos of: 

Luxembourg, Saarland, German Wedding, Koblenz, Trier and Dresden will have to wait! 

Running late for uni - yet again! 

lots of love kids!

manda 

easter sunshine images

really hard to upload images hence a month later... 

Open air Dj set in our local park on Easter sunday 

Stacey and I enjoy Baklava

Circle of friends! Right to left - Jeremy, Thanos, Viktoria, Anne and Johanna

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 2^nd 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’ – 2^nd/3^rd 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 

Easter fun and interesting coffee culture

searching the apartment for easter eggs!

making lentil burgers for our picnic! 

fantastic Greek chocolates supplied by Johanna mum in Greece!

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

1. 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.
2. 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
3. It costs about 85 euro cents – don’t expect much. 

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.

So super train networks aside, my back really isn´t doing too well. It´s probably because of the crappy beds and pillows i´ve been sleeping on, so hopefully when we settle into a routine at uni in a few weeks it should feel better. When i can unload my suitcase and aren´t constantly bending down to get stuff out of it, my back might get a bit of a rest.

Due to the horribly low 20 Kilo limit coming here on the plane Jeremy and I both left many things at home with the expectation that we could pick up lots of things here. That we have done. Jeremy found a nice warm jacket, I some pants and so on. However, one thing that has been a bit confusing to navigate around are the strange seemingly random hours that many shops are open. If we were to rely on the old 9-5pm opening times, then we definately wouldn´t have got very far!

Supermarkets seem to be the easiest to navigate around, they seem to be mostly open 8am to 8pm monday to friday, saturday is all over the place and sunday, well about 4 supermarkets in the whole city seem to be open on sundays.

Clothing and shoe shops are the most bewildering. it seems to depend upon the area that you´re in. Monday to friday they´re open mostly 12-8pm with 5-7pm seemingly being the ´busy´shopping period of the day. Saturday I don´t really get yet and Sunday only a few of the Big Big department stores are open from about 1-6pm.

Bakeries and Flower shops seem to be the only things constantly open. But really, who needs flowers that often?

In other news we´ve been going on nice long discovery walks and here are a few pictures from our wanderings.

Jeremy with his mates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of Communism. Suffice to say this park, a homage to them both, is in the old east, i.e. communist, Berlin

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!

Audi, Audi and a few mercs…

Every time I go to dash across a road in this City an Audi sweeps by.
Whenever my innards start to cringe at the increasingly louder thump, thump, thump indicating a big man in his BIG ride is going to drive past I turn to see a road-hugging, tiny little Audi crawl past. The driver inside nodding along to his street cruising ‘musik’. No more cruising commodores for me.
When the familiar roaring purr of a 4-wheel-drive barges its way into the tiny ‘smart car’ city traffic, the small circular Mercedes sign glints along with it. This time the driver glares out the tinted windows, defying anyone to question why the hell they’re driving a 4-wheel-drive in the middle of the city when the nearest hill is about 300km away somewhere in Poland. I guess if you’re going to have any such ridiculously sized cars in a city centre nice black mercs would top the list.
Then there’s the cute little VW police cars that zip along. If they weren’t icky green and white coloured (German police colours) then they might be my favourite.
As it stands though, if you exclude the millions of bikes charging all over the place, threatening to run you down if you walk on their side of the pavement (yes it’s split in two) which is hard to figure out mind you when there aren’t any little bike pictures painted on either side, I think the super mini ‘Smart’ cars that squeeze into spots you didn’t know were for parking are the types of cars I like here best.

Jeremy enjoying a snooze with melissa, our sausage dog, in the hostel room

A cozy little space at Circus Hostel.

If you look closely you can see me taking the photo in the reflection. Only a few trains on this line, the U2 i think, have these little mini Brandenburg gate pictures all over the windows.

Cute!

packing, repacking and the perils of not shaking jetlag

before tuesday jetlag was never something i was concerned about - never had a problem hence didn't think much about it. 

but NOW i CANNOT SLEEP IN!!!!!!

every morning at 5am berlin time POP go my eyes and i'm awake. Jeremy is much the same - i look over and there he is staring at the ceiling. 

The first response we had was - alright we'll just stay up late. so tuesday night it's 8pm here and we're both sliding off the seats in the U-bahn (underground train network). come 9pm in our hotel room i'm drooping on to the laptop keyboard and jeremy's staring sleepy eyed at his. I think it was about 10:30pm when we both crashed. 

and wednesday morning - up at 5am AGAIN!! 

Wednesday and thursday were the same - we try to stay up but come 7pm we're really fighting it and end up going to bed before 9pm. 

this morning was a touch better - woke up around 6am. maybe it will be bearable by sunday then hey? 

In other news we're moving on to our 3rd place of accomodation which means repacking - URG. 

we're leaving the Circus hostel (fabulous by the way!) and moving our baggage that has grown to ten separate bags (!!!) to an apartment that a woman who's visiting cologne is renting out to us for a week or so. Should be cool - we can wash clothes and jeremy's excited about the prospect of an iron. the worst part will be shuffling our way there on the underground - just form a mental picture of us two pretty much covered in baggage squeezing on to seats and knocking out other train users. 

At least i guess we'll be warm - it's pretty damn cold here. we were seriously snowed on on our first day when we visited our uni. Just raining a bit at the moment but they are expecting more snow. 

and yes jeremy got his BAG BACK!! yesterday or the day before. all good except a zip is broken. 

we've been trekking all other the city looking at different apartments. Mostly in the areas Kreuzberg and prenzlauer berg. these are the two boho, interesting areas. almost everyone recommends KBerg to us but its really popular. We find an apartment online that's within our price range and then go to call and its already gone, almost in a few hours. 

We should find something soon though, we're looking at 3 tomorrow, one in Berlin Mitte - like the CBD area but bigger. the area where we've been staying this week at the hostel is fantastic, in Berlin mitte and just really cool. lots of good spots are within walking distance and a few really good berlin designer shopping strips too. we found some apartments near here but they keep getting snapped up too quickly for us. 

much love to all!

 

3/4 of a day in China

house boats and the like on the river near us. 

Our hotel! Was cold.  

Ying Li and I outside the expensive, empty department store. She's a professor in computer imaging in northern china. 

Plane food - hhhmmm

Our short dance through china began it's course of moderate - to high confusion before the plane was out of Australia. 

Our vegetarian meals hadn't been registered although we'd been told they were confirmed twice by our travel agent, so we struggled to resolve our lack of meat-free food with the chinese hostess's very limited english and our complete lack of chinese. 

They were very helpful though and gave us a number to call once we were in shanghai to confirm our meals for the next leg on monday. 

Shanghai airport is absolutely HUGE and was almost empty when we arrived sunday night. We really had no idea how our free stop over worked so stopped every staff member we came across. Many gave us a slightly frightened look but eventually one guy offered to call our hotel to work out how it worked. We then realised our driver was waiting for us  - YES  - with one of those cool little name signs on the other side of customs. 

It was another 10 minutes before we found him though due to an immigration staff member walking off with our passports and asking us to 'sit at that chair over there' - around the corner! We compromised - stood in between his desk and the far away chair and proceeded to shoot him suspicious 'we-think-you're-doing-something-seriously-dodgy' looks until we were abruptly presented with them again with no explanation. 

All the people we dealt with on our short time were incredibly polite and very helpful - from the cleaners pushing carts through mounds of rubbish along the footpaths to the lovely shop assistants in the empty, expensive departments stores with zero english. 

They all went to a lot of trouble investing in intricate hand gestures that we rarely understood, BUT we learnt how to say thank you in chinese so made sure that everyone understood that we were thankful.  

our SAVIOUR came in the form of Ying Li, a chinese woman staying at our hotel who was returning to her university after working at U Sydney for a month. She had much better english than anyone else we encountered and was continuously enthusiastic to help us out. She helped us communicate with the staff at the hotel and even went shopping with us to the local supermarket so we could navigate around the live turtles and chicken feet in the isles. They have a dumpling stand in the middle of the shop!

Grocery shopping in other countries should be offered as a subject in language courses  - we couldn't read any of the price tags and most ready-to-eat offerings were in big pots, thus we managed to confuse many, many vegetables with meat products (Ying later set us on the right course) and ended up getting biscuits and fruit juice because the packaging was vaguely recognisable. 

Aside from feeling mostly helpless due to our inability to communicate, the whole place was just fascinating. I’d love to go back when I have a chance – hopefully I can learn more than three words of Chinese.

One of the most interesting things was the amount of people employed in the different shops. In the supermarket, Lotus, there were staff on every table ready to bag produce for you and at the expensive department store there we three women with big red sashes waiting to greet you at every entrance. 

The food was really similar to the Chinese food in Australia – we’ll see what the standard is like here in Germany.

‘til the next post! 

hello everyone! 

just had our first breakfast in berlin! 

We need to run off to start organising our LIVES now. 

in short - jeremy's bag has been lost so in between  our enrollment admin stuff we're going shopping - yee haa!

hope everyone's well. 

CHINA was fantastic - shall upload photos and all when we get back. 

MUCH love to all. 

xx