good news bad news

–>i started (and almost finished) this post on sunday, but i was interrupted, so i’m posting it now

so it’s only been 2 days since i last posted, but, being in a new place, so much has happened that i have way too much to write about.

i guess i’ll start with the bad news, so that i can finish on a good note. i most likely won’t be running the marathon in april. i wasn’t really sure what to make of my 6 miler on friday, but once i woke up in pain on saturday, i finally realized that i’d just been kidding myself by trying to train through my injury. i should have discovered this much earlier, but i guess i’m too stubborn. the truth is my foot has only been getting worse for the past month, and the shot only dulled the pain for two days. if it hurts so bad now, i can’t imagine what it will feel like in even 2 weeks, let alone 2 months. i’m pretty disappointed, i’ve trained pretty hard these past two months and i’ve already paid the fee, but there’s not much i can do. i’m just not going to think about it, and enjoy the extra free time i now have to explore berlin.

now better news. i met the rest of the students from my program yesterday, which was pretty cool. most were not very interested in speaking german from the get-go, so that gave us a chance to actually get to know one another. there are some cool people there, but then you also get some of those typical new-yorker reading/boarding school attending/east coast native (but not necessarily) people that think they’re better than everyone, but that’s to be expected given the schools that the program is sponsored by. most of the students are nice and quite interesting people, so it should make for a fun semester.

so saturday night our program director, carmen, took us all to an italian pizzeria for dinner. it was an interesting choice of a restaurant, given that most of the people had just arrived in germany earlier that day with the purpose of exploring the german way of life. at first i found it a bit ironic, but upon reflection, the choice, although unlikely intentional, did reflect the nature of berlin. although it remains a german cultural center, berlin has become a cosmopolitan city. it is no new york, but as i walked the streets i could hear and see numerous languages. as a matter of fact, when i came into a grocery store at 8:55pm, only 5 minutes before closing time, i was asked to leave in four different languages via loudspeaker (sadly i could only understand 2, so i’m merely guessing that the other ones had the same message).

anyways, after dinner we had some more time to just talk and, since almost everyone had only arrived earlier in the day, most people were eager to go to bed. i felt much better, having already spent two nights in berlin. in the morning, we had a lot of information to go through, which was aided by the fact that carmen, the program director, speaks 1000000 words per minute, and all in german. nonetheless, that took up the whole morning an part of the afternoon. surprisingly i got well more than 50% of what she said. overall, meeting the other students was encouraging. i really thought i was a good deal behind with my language,  having taken an entire year off, but, i dare say, i wasn’t the worst one there, and i could even carry on some basic conversations.  later on sunday, i had a long conversation with my “host mother” about anything and everything, and again i surprised myself at how much i could understand, although expressing my own thoughts was a bit more strenuous.

monday we have some time to take care of errands and hopefully see the city some more.

bis später!