Deutsche Tastatur

So currently I'm at the center, dinkin around on German keyboards. Typing is sooo much different on these things. I just wanted to say (and show) that.

Jetlag und Andere Dinge

So it's about 7:15AM right now and I can't seem to fall back sleep. Today is my first day of class (need to be somewhere at 9:30AM) and I guess I won't be getting a full night's sleep. It probably has something to do with going to bed at 4AM on Sunday, getting up at noon, and then taking another nap from 4PM to 7PM.

So I reread my last post just to see exactly how much I've said about what's actually gone down, and I guess I got an unfortunately gave a rather bleak view of my first day and homestay. It was a nervous time, indeed, but I guess I'll take this away time to mention some of the good parts of my stay so far!

To state unequivocally, my host family has been incredibly generous, welcoming, and very helpful. My host mom continues to be very kind, as are my host-brothers. It turns out that the older of the host brothers, Max, turns out to be only 4 months younger than I am. He's incredibly kind, mature, and has a big heart. Yesterday, I hung out with my host-brother during the day and my Stanford friends at night. While hanging out with my host brother, I found out that the father of the family passed away about three years ago, and since then, they've remodeled the house and all of that. I've also been learning a lot of German culture from him regarding schools, politics, tensions between Germans and the Turkish minority, etc. Overall it's been great.

I'm eager for the school quarter to start so I can continue to meet more Stanford students, figure out what sport classes (if any) I want to take at the nearby Freie Universität, and decide on my courseload (whether or not to take 13 or 18 units). But I'll probably have more to say about that later.

Bis bald (literally "until soon" or "see you soon," but only figuratively of course),
Charlton

Erst Tag

My trip to Berlin was long and disconnected. After sleeping only an hour from 3:30 to 4:30 the night before my 7:21AM flight from LAX to O'Hare, I was expecting to sleep through much of the plane rides (which I thanfully did). I looked through the German vocabulary book, reviewing fruits and traffic words and useful phrases; and when I got bored of that I flipped through a sex-encounter-filled book called The Reader by Bernard Schlink. It was a great, quick read. It also was a rude awakening to how little I knew about where I was getting myself into for the next 6 months of my young college life

In short, my route was LAX 7:21AM --> 12:30PM O'Hare 2:23PM --> 5:00AM Frankfurt 7:30AM --> 8:30AM Berlin.

All my luggage arrived and as I walked out of the gate, my uncle quickly greeted me and drove me around the city to a) get some moneys exchanged, b) buy and insert a sim card to my phone, and c) bring me to the Center.

The Center was pretty sweet. Fully equipped with a library, a "student lobby," a kitchen, a weightroom, clerical offices, a garden, and other fun things, it was exciting to roam around the place where I would be spending my mornings and early afternoons for spring quarter. I chatted with some of the other students and commiserated with them on how little German we knew. Wow.

I arrived at the Center at around 12PM. I was given a tour of the house by my good friend and fellow Phi Psi Arty Rivera, had my computer connected to the network, and most importantly, found out where my homestay was.

At first I was disappointed to hear that my homestay was only 2 U-Bahn (pretty much, SUBWAY) stops away from the center. Then the housing director told me my host family consists of a single mother and her two sons, ages 14 and 16 she guessed. She wasn't far off. She also said they were a VERY nice family. All day I was anxious and worried and, well, it finally got time for me to go to "home."

My host family said they were be at home ready for me to arrive at 4PM, but there were complications and I ended up not leaving the center until about 6:45PM. When I arrived, a young guy with long-ish brown hair and pretty good English welcomed me in and helped me bring in some of my bags. He was the older of the two host-brothers, and then I was introduced to his younger brother and my host-mom. They were incredibly pleasant people! I found out my younger host-brother (equivalent in age and school to a sophomore in high school) plays a lot of WoW, and my older host-brother plays a lot of... well, I don't know, but I do know he likes Mechanics and Physics and that kind of stuff.

Today for a school event, the students had an event called "Kasselauf" (I'm not exactly sure why the "Kasse" but the "lauf" means run). It's essentially a big run around a lake, 2.6km, in which teams of three carry around 24 8 oz. bottles of beer in a big box. My host brothers said about 200 people were there, with 50 teams of three. The team of my older host-brother (who is still younger than me, only by a year though), named Max, placed 4th in the event, and the team of my younger brother (the sophomore in HS), namedTobias, placed 15th (but the first in his grade).The rules are that the first team to both reach the finish line AND finish all the beers without purposely inducing vomiting along the way (apparently some teams did that last year and it gave them an unfair advantage. Hahah). There were several obstacles to overcome: If you didn't drink the beer and carried the case to the end, it was tooo heavy and cumbersome. If you drank too much beer and tried carrying the case to the end, you'd be too drunk and ... well, dysfunctional. Most teams had a balance (though I hear one team pre-gamed the event and then used non-alcoholic beer for the beer in their case... haha). That was the most German culture I learned today (oh and that school goes until 13th grade here, which is something like a intro to college ...).


My host-mom speaks pretty much perfect English, and I think at some time in the future (probably sometime next week) I'll ask her to speak to me in German so that I can practice and learn some. I need to ask the same of my host brothers.

It turns out she ordered pizza, so all 4 of us ate pizza and watched German television, in the form of a kind of toned down version of "MOST EXTREME ELIMINATION CHALLENGE" or MXC for those of you in the know (a pretty crazy Japanese reality TV show). That was fun.

The brothers were going out to play poker, and I tagged along to try to get to know them better. They were really pleasant and nice and brought me on the U-Bahn and all that good stuff. We then went over to one of their friend's houses and we played Texas Hold'em for a couple hours. That was one LOONG game, and I felt lost perhaps 80% of the time since I couldn't understand most of the German.

It had an odd effect. On one hand, it almost made me want to give up on the language and perhaps focus my studies on the history of the country, since the language... is really just too tired. It also made me question why I had chosen a country in which I would understand very little during any important conversations, and why I had decided to disappear from Stanford just as things were looking up for me.

In the end, my ultimate evaluation was that tonight I wanted to get to bond some with my host family, and that I did, and I'm happy I did that. I have to take this Berlin business one step at a time--afterall, this is only day one and I shouldn't sweat about the little things.

People almost like pictures, so I thought I'd attach some pictures of my room. Unfortunately my camera makes my room seem a lot smaller than it is, but it's actually quite large. The only sad part is that I'm without a pillow since my bed is a futon.. but I'll find one somewhere soon.




Anyway, this is probably one of the more detailed posts I'll ever write.

I miss you all.

Finals Procrastination

My good friend Ragini suggested the URL for this blog, and now it exists in the middle of finals week.

Thank you Ragini, thank you procrastination.

That is all for now.

Charlton