ich bin ein berliner

so i’ve been too busy and lazy to update lately, but just on my way home i found out something so interesting and urgent that i just had to make time to write this quick update.

get this: you know that funny accent that indian people have when they’re speaking english (this isn’t a knock on indian people and not meant to be offensive, i think it’s basically a fact, i mean even russell peters admits it) well, anyways, i heard an indian person speak german today. and….. it sounds even funnier! i know, i coudn’t believe it either, it made my day.

ok, now that i’ve insulted about 1/6 of the worlds population, i can actually start my post. basically, the last couple of days i’ve been taking care of a lot of official paper work for the program. so i didn’t have too much free time to just explore, but there’s still plenty to write about.

on monday, we had an excursion of Freie Universität Berlin (FU), the university that we will be studying at starting in mid-April. the FU is the biggest university in berlin and was founded during the cold war as an alternative to the universities that remained in the east side of berlin. the architecture is really interesting in many buildings, sadly i haven’t taken any pictures of it yet, but i will post as soon as i have some. but here are some pictures of other things around the city that i’ve taken over the last couple of days.

Die Spree in Tiergarten

die Siegesäule: not a great picture, but you get the point

Potsdamer Platz

Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz

so i was going to label this as “dangerous german jungle gym,” but then i wasn’t sure if i was spelling it right (i thought maybe its one word) so i looked it up on wikipedia. this is what i saw under the entry for “jungle gym”:

jungle gym

apparently these deathtraps are endangering kids worldwide.

i thought this was interesting, not sure what it’s called, or where it is for that matter (i was lost when i came across it.

die Gedächtniskirche: the one that wasn’t fixed after world war ii (note the “smart” car in the street. these golf-cart-sized things are all over the place).

okay, i have much more to write about and more pictures to post, but lack the motivation to do it. so it will end here for now, and we’ll pick it up where we left off next time.