Tuesday 3 September 2013

A productive start

After two days in Berlin, the feeling of being "settled" seems a little more achievable. I'm sharing an apartment (and bedroom) with two other girls; I couldn't really have wished for better people to spend a month in a foreign country with.
Yesterday was primarily a cold and rainy blur. Orientation meeting in the morning, a hurried lunch break, during which all seventeen of us new City Travel Review recruits piled into one tiny cafe on the corner of Rungestrasse, and then a four-hour city tour in the best imitation of horrible British weather that Berlin had to offer. The tour itself was brilliant, covering some of the biggest historical and cultural highlights, and our English tour guide was undeterred by the drizzle. On a better day, the length of time we spent standing still to admire the architecture and listen to Chris' encyclopaedic knowledge of German history would have made an incredibly enjoyable afternoon.
A group of us headed straight back to the apartments at the end of the tour, agreeing a need to change our optimistic and soggy clothes for something warmer. Seven of us ventured out to Warschauer-Strasse after dinner to hunt out a bar. The gumption and expert haggling of one girl got us cocktails for 3€ each, an impressive discount from the 4,50€ advertised outside. We shared the suspicion that getting a group of girls to sit in their open front window was the primary motivation for the staff's willingness to slash the prices. The cocktails were all similar lurid shades of pink and orange, but upon testing we could confirm that each cocktail was indeed what it has claimed to be on the menu.
Although it was only Monday the bar we were in and those around it were filling up by 10:30. We chatted over the first and second drinks, then decided we had better head back to the tram stop so we didn't miss the last one home. I made a hasty detour into a hotel on the way to borrow their toilets. All in all a good first night in the city, and things can only improve from here on in, right?
Today has included an intense German lesson - well, intense if you're a total beginner like most of us are and the teacher refuses to speak a word of English. It's an effective way to run a language class, but after an hour and a half my brain was begging for a sentence I could understand without first analysing the infinitive.
The first project meeting with our team leader Marcus was an eye-opener. He told us about his conservative upbringing in West Berlin, how the city changed culturally after the fall of the Wall, and shared a gargantuan list of things to do and see and places to visit in the city - everything from museums and art galleries to churches and government buildings, to flea markets and vintage shops, jazz clubs and burger restaurants, cafes and lakes.
Having the chance to hear about all this from a native Berliner was pretty invaluable. It's all very well being in one of the most artistically diverse and historically rich cities in Europe, but when there are centres in every one of the twelve districts that have their own characters and points of interest it can be difficult knowing where to start. Apparently within the week my knowledge of the city, its hotspots and the public transport systems will be more solid. One can only hope.

3 comments:

  1. Remind me to only try and visit when you've scouted the best bakery and pub !

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  2. Sprechen Sie Deutsch noch? Sorry, that was Google-Translate-German ;) What do the Berliners make of your little Suffolk accent?

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  3. IWorking on it, haven't had many chances to get out and explore and the workload is pretty heavy so we'll have to see how it goes! Don't know if the Berliners go so far as detecting a Suffolk accent, they just recognise the English hesitancy and broken-ness in speaking another language! :P

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