Too big for the jungle gym

Friday was the 19th anniversary of Reunification. For dinner, I went out to a nice Vietnamese restaurant called "Good Morning Vietnam" in the hip part of town with my host sister Kathy and her friends from West Germany. There was one vegetarian item on the menu, so ordering was easy.

Afterwards, I went with Kathy's two friends to the Reunification concert at Brandenburg Gate near Unter den Linden. It was massive and had been going on since 1pm. Apparently 200,000 people showed up, and Germans from all over came to Berlin to see this free concert of German bands. We got there kind of late, so I only caught glimpses of random DJs. Treading through the rubble of plastic cups from the fallout of this enormous party, I realized that not being with my Stanford friends this weekend has allowed for so much more immersion. I spoke intermittent German through the night, used only German with the waiter, and even managed to impress the Kathy and her friends with the declensions that I had to memorize for the last test.

Maybe I was just feeling good from glass of Merlot I had over dinner or the Glühwein I had at the concert. Glühwein, by the way, is pretty awesome. It's this piping hot, red wine drink mixed with spices. Drinking it in the cold, you're warmed by the hot cup in your hands, liquid in your belly, and the general warming quality of alcohol. People usually have it around Christmas time, but I guess the celebratory atmosphere sufficed.

Saturday was pretty tame, but actually a lot of fun. I spent it with my host mom and my 7 year-old host niece, Elisa. She spoke to me just once before Saturday, and by the end of the day she had spoken more German to me than any other person since I arrived. Including my teacher.

We walked to an outdoor market in the morning, which was really interesting. Farmers sold their groceries, jam man sold his jam, starving artist sat awkwardly in his booth because no one wanted to go up close to look at his art (probably to avoid feeling guilty about not buying). On the way home, I carried kartoffeln—potatoes—in my messenger bag because the environmentally conscious culture here meant that people usually brought their own bags when grocery shopping.

In the afternoon, the three of us went to a park in the the forest near my homestay. At one point, Elisa took me to this part of the forest that was basically impossible for anyone over 4'3" to navigate. I crouch-walked like an awkward confused crab while she just charged ahead. As she doesn't speak much English, I told her I was too big in German. That cracked her up. The picture above is her using my camera. I had to hold it steady for her while balancing in my lap my German cultures reader, which I naively thought I would be able to read at the park. Instead, we climbed trees and rode the zipline and played on the jungle gym. The monkey bars are a lot tougher now and I stepped over things rather than going under them.

After a light dinner of soup and bread, we played German board games. We changed games after playing each once, so by the time I learned the rules we were moving on. Then we played with dolls. My dolls, Jari and Jochen—named after my German teachers because I couldn't comes up with other German names when her dolls asked mine for their names—failed to communicate with hers. Elisa's dolls spoke in paragraphs, but my dolls only stammered in fragments and drew from a vocabulary that didn't extend far beyond ich, bin, and Glühwein.