Monday, May 10, 2010

So This is Berlin...

I'm somewhat late in contributing to the "blogosphere" (it's a thing, I promise), and so much has already happened, that I'm not entirely sure where to begin. I could start with our arrival in Berlin and bring everyone up to speed on our escapades, but that would take entirely too long. I could talk about one of the tours, but I feel that so much of what made them interesting would be lost, as a text explanation hardly amounts to actually being there. I could talk about Doener, and how delicious it is but...but....

Actually, I think I will do that:

Doener is delicious. And cheap. America, you don't know what you're missing. Unless you've already tried Doener, in which case, you do. But that still probably doesn't ease the sting of being currently, and POSSIBLY ETERNALLY, Doener-less.

Too bad for you.

In all seriousness, however, I think the topic for me to blog (it's a verb now too!) about would be yesterday, which, in my opinion, embodied best what this trip is all about, as well as why I lurv (also a verb) it so much.

As the Germans say: Also...

Yesterday started bright and early around 7:00AM. Of course, I wasn't too thrilled about having to wake up that early (Dad, before you say anything, it's early for me), yet I had a strange sort of energy as I showered and ate breakfast. I'm not certain why. Maybe I was just subconsciously excited for our first scheduled event:

The Stasi Prison Tour!

I'm pretty sure Roxi covered this tour pretty well, so I don't really have much to add on. It was interesting and made you think, which is exactly what a tour should be.

Afterwards we stopped by a large shopping plaza (the name escapes me) to eat lunch and explore. Now, when I was preparing for the trip, I vowed to try new things any opportunity I had; this extended to food as well. Yet at that point in the expedition, I had only eaten Pizza and Sandwiches (and Doenna). Delicious, sure, but I wanted some German food. So that day for lunch, I sought sausage. Fortunately, I didn't have to look far. A new Restaurant had opened near the train station and was serving Currywurst. I had never had that before, so it was a perfect candidate to fulfill my "try something new" mantra. So I got some. And it was delicious.

However I didn't have too long to enjoy the food and rare rays of Berlin sun (which had begun to peek shyly from the endless grey clouds); we had another tour scheduled that day, and it was time to get on the move again. This next tour was being hosted by a British friend of Janet's, who met us at the S-Bahn station to take us on a tour of Jewish Berlin. The experience was as equally engrossing as it was fascinating; he seemed to know everything there was to know about Jewish History in Berlin. I had never considered myself interested in the topic, but that tour sure changed my mind.

Theater was the final order of the day. The scheduled performance: "Trust". I went into the performance with almost no idea of what to expect. Turns out, that was the right way to go, because I was completely blown away. The show was an aggressively energetic, hilariously comedic, and deeply profound blend of dancing, acting, and music. Normally a production like that would lead me to question the necessity of throwing all those elements together into one big Theater Stew, but in this case it all seemed to mesh together perfectly: each part seemed essential to providing another perspective on the topic of trust in modern society. In short: it was pretty cool.

Yesterday was everything I wanted from the trip: Fascinating tours, delicious foreign food, and amazing theater performances.

And to think, we're not even half-way through!


(An aside: I'm looking at this blog now and realize that, though I sing its praises, I never actually explain what Doener is.
I'm going to do so now.
Doener is a combination of specially seasoned and cooked meat (usually chicken or lamb) wrapped together with veggies and delicious sauce. Om nom nom nom.)

(Also, I'm looking at the spell-checked version of this blog, and apparently "Om" is totally valid word, but "nom" isn't. What's the deal with that? Does anybody know what "Om" actually means? I'm hoping it's a verb. That way I could tell somebody they just got "Om'd". Hahaha.)


2 comments:

  1. Oh, and 'Om' is... 'a mystic syllable, ...the most sacred mantra.' You know. How people meditate in cartoons.

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