First week in Berlin

I was placed a week ago into the course C1.1, which is the highest level they decided to offer this month. The people in the course are pretty diverse: outside of we three Americans, there are three from France, two from Japan, one from London, one from Ireland, one from Norway, one from Singapore, one from Russia, one from the Ukraine, and one from China. It's been really cool to get to know so many different people from so many different places. The course work is mostly review in terms of grammar, but we are learning some stylistic points as well that I've never had from an American teacher, so it's definitely worth it.

I've been keeping quite busy with the cultural program that the Goethe-Institut runs alongside the classes. I have been on several walking tours - the first a more general walk through central Berlin, then one focused on the Alexanderplatz, and today an excellent tour with the theme of "August '89", which focused on the events leading up to the opening of the GDR's borders on November 9, 1989. The tour guide himself lived in East Berlin at the time and took part in some of the demonstrations and protests. Interesting tidbit: I never before knew this, but churches played a huge role in the revolution in East Germany. In addition to simply being a place where dissidents could meet, they hosted prayer and fasting services in the tumultuous month before the fall of the wall and they sheltered people from being mistreated by the police.

There is of course a lot that I could write about the various things that I have done. I visited a city museum that had models of Berlin circa 1400, 1600, and 1800. I ate a meal with Eisbein (leg of pork). I went to a church service in the St. Marienkirche - the oldest church in Berlin that still functions as a church. I visited the ITB, a global tourism expo. Rather than ending with insignificant details about these things, however, I thought I might finish by describing Berlin itself.

Berlin is a fairly large city, with about 3.5 million inhabitants, but is spread over such a large area that I have never seen any part of it more crowded than Pittsburgh. It is a poor city, with high unemployment and an astonishing lack of investors, but there is excellent public transportation and little crime. Berlin is a disfigured city, with almost none of the middle-ages old city visible and with plenty of damage around from the last world war, and yet it harbors a thriving artistic and cultural community.

The things I named above are of course mostly things that I have heard from guides and such. My experience thus far has if anything confirmed these things, but I can't claim to have found them out myself. My biggest impression is that Berlin is the center of a wound. One sees here some of the freshest new growth and ideas in Germany growing over, under, and around the scabs left over from a long war against fascism and an even longer division due to communism. This is especially evident when I see an art gallery set up in a bombed-out factory, or slogans of peace and freedom painted on a remaining section of the Wall. I am really enjoying myself here, not because it's a beautiful city (at first glance, it most certainly isn't), but because every little detail that I see or hear is meaningful.