Frühlingsputz

Back in Berlin. Great weather, sunny but cold. I unpacked slowly and spent a good couple of hours catching up with Anna who had been really busy working. She and Diego had decided that they would just be doing better as a couple if he were to move out. They are not breaking up; rather they’re just giving themselves some private space after two years of living together. It makes a lot of sense to me now that Diego told me his side of the story as well. They are really young, and at that point it just was more restricting than beneficial to be living together. Diego loves having new people around him and tons of opportunities to go out and have a good time. Contrastingly, Anna needs to finish her papers and make enough money to support herself through school. Diego is already done with his studies, so his biggest task is finding either another master’s program in Berlin or a job.

Unlike my incredibly painful and drawn-out experience of finding an apartment (which ended very very well in the end), Diego was asked back to the first apartment that he interviewed at. He’ll be moving in to a “5er WG”, an apartment with five people, just north of Mitte within a couple of weeks. I’m not sure when, but I hope that when he does he will still be visiting every couple of days. My rent has gone up a bit accordingly, but Anna and I are good roommates together, and I think we’ll be fine with this new arrangement and that it’s worth the 90-euro increase.

I had a few very specific tasks for the couple days that I had in Berlin, the most important being CLEANING. The gorgeous weather allowed me to open the windows. When Eliza was here she woke up in the morning with puffy eyes because of her dust allergies. Now I completely understand why. Once I started looking for the dust I found no end. My apartment was filthy! Dust had been collecting since last September; only hours of scrubbing and sweeping could make any difference. I washed sheets, towels, clothes, did a lot of throwing away of papers from last semester, and even filtered some books that I was not going to need and brought them to the Oxfam bookshop to be resold. Man, I didn’t expect that cleaning would feel so incredible.

I also got to see some people in between cleaning sessions. Rafi was in town after grand adventures in Prague and Budapest, and we had a lot to catch up on. We went out for Simit and lentil soup at my favorite Turkish café at Kottbusser Tor. Then we walked around the Victoria park, looked at the view from above, tried to find a beer garden, but came back to my place for beers since the garden wasn’t open for spring yet. Rafi is almost a U of C graduate, and is taking advantage of a quarter off before graduation to travel and go back to his home in Israel before grinding out a living as a consultant for a couple of years in Chicago. It was good to see him and really great to hear some of his stories. I hope he had a fabulous time in Poland.

Getting our Mac and Cheese fix, kraft style

I also finally made it out to Kate’s apartment in Friedrichshein. She lives just east of Alexanderplatz, so a few tram stops away. It was really remarkable how dramatically different everything looked as soon as you leave Alexanderplatz by tram. The buildings become more ugly and taller by the block: “bathroom-tile style” as our friend Howie, also on our program, described it. But Kate’s place is just the opposite, in a low, recently renovated building where her apartment gets plenty of light and even has a few trees and a large park nearby. We made wonderful macaroni and cheese (the Scooby-doo, Kraft kind, nice and orange and artificial) and coffee and stopped for a bit back at the Easter Festival in Alexanderplatz. Kate just celebrated her 21st AND on top of that just finished a half marathon last Sunday! Pretty damn great. Hopefully I’ll be a bit more available to her as a friend this
Semester and we might even get to take another class together.

Street artists in Alex-platz

After lots of skype calls home, it was really great to go to Nancy’s for dinner on Tuesday night. We both had trips ahead of us: me to Istanbul and beyond, and she to Strasburg and Baden-Baden to help with all the Obama and G20 craze. Jan and Patrizia therefore were in charge of making dinner, pasta with veggies and shrimp and mollusks. We had no specific dessert plans and were still a bit hungry, so we made a late-night batch of pancakes. Nancy, being the dedicated Canadian that she is, of course had a solid supply of maple syrup on hand, so that made it my second pancake meal within three days. After not having had pancakes for around four months, I’d say that’s pancake overload. But nonetheless, I love spending time at Nancy’s and getting a chance to catch up with Jan and Patrizia, who seems to be in Berlin just about as often as she is in Stuttgart these days (totally understandable… I mean, do the cities really compare?!?).

Clothes clean, room relatively dust-free (or at least a bit more organized), and a few groceries. After that the new project was to pack and prepare for Istanbul. The two things I had learned from Prague (other than the whole Czech culture-part) are the following:

1) be wary of hostels that you find on the internet and always email or establish contact with them ahead of time
2) always print a map out of where you want to get to; an address is just not enough, even if you have maps around

Jess and I conferenced back and forth about where the best place would be to get a hostel. Unfortunately, I really wasn’t having too much luck finding nearby places on the web, so I decided on a backpackers hostel in a tourist area and hoped that we’d be able to make due once I got there. I also went especially to an internet café nearby to print out a map. I bought a few travel-sized toiletries (man, I love travel-sized things), backed one small suitcase and my small backpack, and leisurely made my way to Tegel Airport for my afternoon flight. It was my first time flying out of Berlin later than 9 am I think, and it was so much nicer getting their by bus instead of shelling out lots of euros for a taxi ride before sunrise. I was totally rested, a little nervous, and incredibly excited to see JESS and go to TURKEY!