today i've been bustling around my apartment, trying to get ready for my trip to london this weekend, when homesickness totally bowled me over. i don't understand why, because i love it here so much and yet every once in a while i still get these waves of melancholy. i guess i was kidding myself when i thought that i wouldn't feel this way, but i don't understand why it hasn't subsided yet. the weather here is awfully dreary, i feel like i hate all of my clothing, there's no food in my apartment - sometimes all of this stuff just gangs up on you.

i'm going to clean up my room, throw my sheets in the washer, print out my boarding pass, buy some minutes for my phone, stop by h&m, and then relax and think of all of the places i'm going to visit in my three day whirlwind tour of london.

i have been meaning to post again all week, but somehow time just flew by in the last seven days and I haven't had a chance. i feel like everything is moving so fast here! i've already been here for two months!! something about that astounds me. well last weekend i came down with a cold and around wednesday it seemed to have mostly cleared up, but on friday it turned into a sinus infection which was incredibly unpleasant to say the least. i am almost never sick, and so every time that i come down with something it tends to be a tragedy. this was no exception ... it led to two minor nervy bs on friday and saturday, but i came out on the other side and i feel almost 100% again. i think it's a combination of things, one being an unconscious homesickness at this time of year when everyone in the united states is having this shared experience that i'm missing out on here. everyone gets to go home and either hate or love it for a few days, but remember why they love being in college and see their old friends and i felt really detached from it all and i guess that it depressed me more than i thought it would. add to that the fact that it is already freezing here, and has been freezing for a while but has really started to catch up with me, and the general day to day frustrations of trying to live in a foreign country, with a nasty cold that was keeping me in bed - it all was a pretty bad combination. my roommate had a dinner party on saturday, however, and that lifted my spirits, and then she dragged me down to the bar downstairs from our apartment where we got free drinks all night and played in the snow at 5 in the morning when we left. i couldn't believe the giant snowflakes that were thickly descending on the street and coating the cars and parks, but in the morning it had vanished which is kind of sad. i think this city would be beautiful with a sort of "miracle on 34th street"-esque blizzard.


i have a lot of work and reading to do this week, and then thursday i'm going to london! i'm getting more and more excited about london every day! i'm going to take out a certain amount of money and not spend any more than that. i can splurge a little because i realized that i can't afford to go to italy in december, so i'll be saving a lot. i want to buy myself a nice sweater or hat in london, and maybe a present for kathi. i decided to knit kathi and kiki a pair of mittens each for christmas, and to go small on the rest of my christmas presents. it's hard to believe that when i get back from london it will be december. december also signifies the time when i really have to start working on my final papers and thinking about internships. i made a list of goals to achieve in december - a few museums to visit, another trip to the ballet, a trip to the opera, as well as to finish one of my papers. i'm really excited to be in germany at christmastime because they really do the holiday with flair and style and its everywhere in the city, which surprised me. what i lacked in halloween and thanksgiving will definitely be made up at christmas. there is so much to look forward to in the next few months - london this weekend, then everything that makes the month of december christmas month, including advent and lots of dinners and brunches and parties, then sylvester, aka the german word for new years, and then ben comes, and then its my birthday, and then in february my mom is coming and i'm going to prague!! it almost makes me not miss philadelphia ...

saturday will mark the two month anniversary of my arrival in berlin. just thinking about that is insane. two months down, a little over 8 months to go. i haven't updated in a while because i've been running around like crazy lately. i decided that this week is going to be sort of a detoxification week for me, and then i came down with a nasty cold so it's definitely been a detox. my diet has consisted almost solely of fruit, tea, yogurt and crisp bröd*. today i strayed from my diet for the first time with a little börek, which is turkish junk food kind of. its phyllo dough, and i get mine with ground beef, feta and spinach. it's not exactly junk food, it's just really good. gözleme is more junkfoody, but i can never eat a whole one.

anyway, enough about my newfound love of turkish cuisine. this weekend i traveled to scenic weimar with the whole group of midd exchange students. it was really nice, if very cold. we were forced to leave at 7:45 am due to the bahn strike, which was kind of a pain, but it worked out amazingly for us. when i think about the luck i had finding my mom in italy, and the luck we had in switching trains to weimar, it makes me believe in karma. i feel as if my travel luck is my karmic payback for all the stress and crap i have to go through with money and computer stuff and school stuff here. anyway, we managed to switch trains immediately and got to weimar around 11 am. weimar, for the uninitiated, is the hometown of johann wolfgang von goethe, the man the myth the legend. it is also the birthplace of bauhaus, and was the home of friedrich schiller. for anyone reading this who is truly uninitiated with german culture - they're really really important. schiller is considered the most important german classical playwright and also wrote the poem "ode to joy" which beethoven then set to music. goethe is just a huge deal. he did everything and completely influenced everything about german culture and everyone in this country is just obsessed with him pretty much.

the nice thing about the trip is that middlebury paid for the hotel, the train tickets and the museums/theater. all that we had to pay for was food, which actually ended up costing me a little more than i'd like. friday night luisa, meredith, alice and i ended up going out for a ladies' night which ended up at a crazy techno club with a dance party downstairs. we were there for a really long time, and on saturday i came down with a really gross cold. all in all i visited the bauhaus museum, goethe's house (which was amazing), schiller's house, a (really cheesy) ginko museum, and also spent a lot of time eating thuringer rostbratwurst, drinking hot chocolate (because it was freezing), and drinking schwarzbier (which is delicious). on sunday we went to buchenwald, which was really emotionally disturbing. the weather was freezing and really foggy, which made it even more depressing and unsettling. there were so many striking aspects of the camp and i feel as though the way that they have set it up as a monument to the victims is really well thought out and powerful. the museum exhibit was really impressive and i had to restrain myself from buying a few books.

this week i've been battling my cold and trying to keep up with everything happening around me. there is so much that i want to do and see here, i really need to start planning better. i also need to clean my room and get organized. i have no drawers here, which is kind of problematic for me. i might need to take a trip to ikea and buy a few more things for my room. i also need to start visiting more museums. i feel as if the city is still so foreign to me. this is what everyone meant when they insisted that i go for a year - they said that after one semester you will only begin to feel at home there, and it's so true. i've been thinking about internships and i decided i want to try to intern at the checkpoint charlie museum or the jewish museum. i'm going to do a little more research first, but either one would be really enlightening i think.


on monday i had my first oral report - it was an interesting experience to say the least. i have always disliked group work, and at least at middlebury i am dealing with other english speakers. it's really hard to judge someone's personality when you're speaking in your second language - my relationships are slightly more superficial i think, and so it was hard to tell how we'd work together as a group. we also didn't have a choice, but i was amazed at how the guy in my group acted the entire time. he appeared to be really well put together but in reality did very little work, put it off till the end, forced us all to work on his schedule, COMPLETELY stressed me out, and then spoke for an excessive amount of time during the actual report on a subject that we had already gone over in the last two class periods. for my part, i got really nervous and spoke a little too fast, and went on a little long as well, but my professor said he was really impressed with my work and my spoken german, and 3 friends of mine in the class told me they thought it went really well. i felt like it could have gone better, but i have two more to do this semester for other classes so i guess it will improve. my next report is on 12/3, but it's not really a traditional "referat" like this one was. for the upcoming one i have to read this novel, which by the way, is over 1000 pages, and come up with 3 theses on certain characters. i dont think i'm going to be able to read the entire thing, but i'm pretty sure that luckily my characters are only in the first part of the novel. i'll be consulting a lot of secondary literature for this report, but i think that's okay. had i known that i would be reading this book, i might have begun in august. there's just no way that i have the time to read all of it within the semester on top of 3 other classes.


anyway, things are going pretty well i just need to get myself a little better organized and chill out this week. next weekend i'm going to london which is really exciting! i'm staying for free with my friend lisa, and my goal is to spend as little money as possible. then two weeks later i'm going to florence!! for christmas kathi is having a big dinner here, and then i'm going to her parent's house which is really nice. i'm also planning on staying in berlin for new years and spending it with my friend laura and most likely tyler and luisa, if they're here. my plans are extending longer and longer - i've even got plans in february already! time is flying by here, but it's really great - constantly overwhelming, but great.





*i felt that crisp bröd deserved a footnote. it is my german obsession. just like how polar pomegranate and vanilla flavored seltzer waters became important parts of my life at middlebury, crisp bröd is amazing. i only like viva vital brand. its like a flat bread, i think it's originally swedish, and my roommate got me addicted. its got a million grains in it and at first i hated it because i felt like it tasted really cardboard-y, but it has become one of my favorite foods and i'm not sure how i'll cope without it in the US. it's also mad cheap, which is nice.

i am back from italy and so i figured i should write a little update on my life. i took like 200 pictures, and they're all up on facebook. i'm too lazy/busy to try to then update everything on flickr and then figure out how to get them on my blog. chances are if you read this, you can see them anyway. so after a full week of classes, on thursday i woke up at 4 am, pushed the dog out of my bed and grabbed my things and walked to the train. it was kind of eerie to walk around so late (and sober). i felt like a teenager running away from home, for some reason. i took the train to schönefeld airport and got on a plane and flew into milan. my mother and i met up by the GRACE of GOD on this airport bus, and we got on a train and headed out to lake como. como lago, as its called in italian, is a BEAUTIFUL lake in northern italy about 45 minutes outside of milan, where the versaces, roberto cavalli and george clooney (among many other rich people) have villas. it was absolutely spectacular. we met up with the group, all together numbering around 120 people, and ate lunch and took a boat tour of the lake. we then road the funiculare up the mountain and got to see the lake from way up high at sunset, which was really beautiful. later we stopped by a silk factory, but rather than taking a tour which would have been interesting, we ended up just shopping for extremely expensive silk things.

the next day we woke up around 7 and spent the day touring milan. my mother and i opted to walk from our hotel into the downtown, which took about 45 minutes at a leisurely pace and was really beautiful. italy really does not get started until 11 am. we were walking around at 9:30 and everything was closed, which is very different from berlin. italy also closes earlier, which is annoying, and apparently (obviously) has much stricter alcohol-in-public laws. not as bad a scotland, but still, kinda lame. anyway, we walked around and saw the duomo and a big workers strike happening, and then i met will and noah in the plaza of the duomo!!!!! i was so excited to see not just familiar faces, but familiar faces of old friends. it was really really nice. the four of us ran around and got lunch and chatted and caught up and drank a fair amount of wine (at least two of us did). we then met up with one of the groups and toured the duomo which is beautiful and really unique inside. we went through an old shopping plaza which might have a 7 star hotel, but noah doubts the credibility of our tour guide. then we took a tour of la scala, which was really beautiful, and i felt lucky because i got to see a special exhibit of maria callas' costumes, and i wrote my final paper on her j-term of my freshman year. i bid goodbye to noah and will, and the group went to the church santa maria de grazie to see the last supper (la ultima cena). it was spectacular. to go in you had to go through two rooms in order to maintain the climate in the room, and each group is only allowed in for 15 minutes.

after the last supper we walked through a beautiful old castle which used to mark the northernmost part of milan, but now is smack in the center. we then went to a wine tasting dinner which was absolutely delicious. by 8:30 pm it was full of drunken middle aged women dancing with the almost-as-drunk waitstaff, which was pretty hilarious. that night, after everyone else went back to the hotel to sleep, i met up with MARY CHILES!!! which was also amazing because i haven't seen her since may and i have missed her dearly. we caught up for a few hours in a bar down the street from my hotel, and when we came back to the hotel my mom woke up and we all stayed up talking till around 3 am. i was so happy to see mary, it almost didnt matter that i had to wake up the next day at 5:30 am. i managed to get out of bed and stumble, still drunk, onto the bus for the best part of the vacation.

yesterday we took a 3 hour bus ride (which i clearly slept through) to VENICE. i'm not kidding when i say that it is my favorite city in europe. i want to live there for the rest of my life. i want to live there at at least 7 different historical time periods. i want to walk every street and ride a gondola through every canal. i could have spent the whole weekend there and been satisfied. we took a gondola ride and ran around the city and ate a delicious lunch in a restaurant in the center and went to the murano glass factory to see a glass blowing presentation and gawk at tacky glass figurines that cost 45,000 euros. the whole city was absolutely unbelievable, and i really didn't want the day to end. eventually we made our way back to the bus and i proceeded to fall asleep for another three hours on our return trip to milan. last night i went out with my mother and her friends and a few other people to a restaurant and gorged myself on gnocchi and caprese salad. this morning was frustrating, especially because i was functioning on practically no sleep, but i woke up at 4:30 and eventually landed in berlin unscathed, if a little poorer. upon landing in berlin, for most of the landing i couldn't see the ground which made me very nervous. the cloud cover was extremely low, and as we were a few feet from the ground i finally saw why - everything was covered in snow. that's right, november 11th and it has been snowing steadily all day. in the city it isn't sticking to anything, what with the heat from the cars and all the foot traffic, but in schönefeld, way out in the suburbs, there were at least 2 inches coating everything.

it was really wonderful to see my mother (and im not just saying that because she's my #1 blog reader). it was also nice to get some comforts from home in the form of slippers, dial soap, junk food and a few essential DVDs. it did remind me of a lot of the people i miss, as did seeing mary and noah and will and gossiping about middlebury. it's hard being so far away sometimes, especially when i see the pictures from halloween or think about people who are going to be back for j-term. i am really happy here, though, and i realized halfway through our second day in milan that i really was missing berlin. i was missing my apartment, my bed, ditte and kathi, my street and my new friends, and i think i even referred to it as "at home" a few times. i really am feeling very much at home here, but at the same time the trip away was much needed. it was equally nice to get out of the city as it was to come home and feel like it was a homecoming. being greeted by kathi and ditte as i walked in, given a cup of tea and a blanket on the sofa, i told her about my trip from start to finish. the german word is gemütlich, which means cozy and homey, which is really how it's starting to feel here.

it's been a while since i've updated. things here have been moving at an incredibly rapid pace. i'm really starting to feel sucked into the whirlwind that is this city. there is always something happening and always somewhere to go and something to do. it's leaving me completely exhausted. i'm going to milan on thursday to visit my mother, which will probably not help the exhaustion, and then next weekend i'm going to weimar. the weekend after that i think i'll be forced to calm down and take it easy.


the only thing that is really stressing me out is my banking situation. for some reason this has been the most difficult part of my arrival here, and no one else seems to have had this problem but me. everything else went smoothly - all my trips to various offices, my classes are going well, my living situation is perfect, yet my money situation is really screwed up. i still don't have a bank account, i'm not sure where the money from middlebury is, and i'm not sure how to make this situation work out. after this works out i will be really settled in, but the waiting seems endless.



i've been listening to minus the bear lately and it is adding to my recent bout of high school nostalgia. i haven't been talking to many people from home, which worries me slightly, but i think it's normal. i really want things to go well this week and i can't wait to see my mom again in italy!!