sometimes i rant

my last post (over two months ago), was about “shits” this time i’m writing about puke. let’s hope this is not the start of a really awful trend.

i got some positive feedback from this e-mail experience, and i think it’s worth posting in my blog (that, and i’m too lazy to actually write a real post).

some context.
this weekend (the weekend of 4th of july) i was away from berlin. i was visiting a friend on the north sea (the trip was amazing, and, i promise, i will get around to writing about it too, maybe even putting together a video eventually). I came back around 10pm on sunday night and wanted no more than to talk about my great trip and go to bed. sadly, i was greeted by my roommate informing me that, during the 4th of july bash (which was relocated to our apartment at the last second due to bad weather) someone had puked on the floor of my bedroom. i was kind of bummed. i couldn’t sleep in my room and it’s just never a very good situation.

as i started cleaning up i grew more frustrated by people’s inconsideration, and my frustration finally boiled over in the form of a long e-mail rant to my good friends. i was careful to make the intention of the e-mail neither the search of the culprit nor scapegoats. most people do stupid stuff at parties, i think it has something to do with the combination of three factors: many people, alcohol, and the realization that you can get away with stuff you normally can’t, due to the first 2 factors. the first two factors are just facts that i have no control over, but i think the rate at which the third one comes to fruition may be affected by a well-phrased reminder to be more considerate. the rant follows unabridged.

Fedor Dokshin Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 4:24 AM
To:
Cc:

hi all,

so, as i came home earlier today (yesterday) from my excursion to the nordsee (which was great by the way), i was greeted by a not so pleasant surprise. namely, john informed me that someone puked in my room. being a mellow dude, i brushed it off. you know shit happens, especially when everyone is drunk and it’s the 4th of july. i was just a victim of circumstances, john said he had been scrubbing the floor for some time today, and though certainly displeased, i figured i could take care of it, and in a couple of days i would be able to sleep in my room again. unfortunately, as i continued my surveillance of damage, i noticed more and more puke.

not just on my floor and papers, there was puke on the walls, clothes, and various objects, including electronics, that were so messily spread about my floor. now, i know my room is a huge mess as it is, and that surely played a role in so many of my things being affected, but i still can’t help but feel like i got the short end of the stick on this one. i think quite understandably, i grew a little more frustrated, seeing as to how i was at the time washing puke of things like my laptop, books, and door, throwing away my poor dictionary and piling my previously clean clothes in the laundry basket.

but like i said, though frustrated, i don’t blame anyone for something like this. i don’t care who puked all over my stuff, it could have been anyone. shit happens. but as i went down the stairs to throw away my towel, which was oh-so cleverly concealing the puke on my floor for the better part of 2 days, i did get angry. because there, facing me was a shopping cart, which was surely in one way or another a very american part of your 4th of july celebration. i got a little angry, for now it appeared to me that maybe shit like this doesn’t happen because of silly accidents and much alcohol, but because people simply don’t have the kind of regard for other people’s stuff as they do for their own. a couple of complaints:

1. i don’t see why anyone was in my room to begin with. there were people at this party who i have never even met before. i have expensive things in my room, including: my computer and the big wad of cash i keep tucked neatly under my chair cushion (great, now you know). anyway, it would have been best, if people who i didn’t know were not coming and going bzw. puking in my room.

2. the cart is just shitty, and worst of all it doesn’t only affect us. we live in an apartment with many families. i love our neighbors, they are all very nice (one guy even let me use his washing machine once, his name is sven), and i try to keep on good terms with them. however, i think our relations are complicated, when they find a shopping cart full of trash in our Treppenhaus. especially, since we’re the only americans that live here, and of course a dirty abandoned shopping cart just has “4th of July” written all over it.

3. our apartment being as awesome as it is, we have a lot of parties. that means john and i have to clean up every time, on some occasions more than on others. though i wasn’t there for this clean up, i’m sure the rest of the house was not fun to clean up either. and john did it by himself. show him some love.

although i would love to work on my Hausarbeits tomorrow, seeing as to how i’m pretty far behind, i’m afraid i will be preoccupied with doing my laundry and cleaning the rest of my “shits” (meant in both the slang sense and my mom’s misguided understanding). quite frankly i don’t want to deal with a shopping cart as well.

SO, i don’t want to see that thing there by tomorrow night. i don’t care who, coordinate amongst yourselves, but if you would, please come on down and collect your rusty chariot and do with it as you like.

alrighty, sorry for the rant, i’m sure i sound like a proper douchebag. but i think i just needed to vent a little (just like my room).

anyway, sleep well and strive to be better every day. you can do it, good luck.

fedor

that was my little rant, it was written in a really impassioned 10 minutes at 4am, when i was tired of cleaning and needed a break. when i woke up the following morning (afternoon) i was happy to see my inbox filled with responses. below i include some good ones (names omitted)

X Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 11:02 AM
To: Fedor Dokshin
dear fedor,

normally i don’t read the chain e-mails that people send out to our bcgs group, but yours i read twice. it was amazing. i wasn’t at the party at your place on july 4th, but i want to say that i’m sorry for anything that happened and for all that you have had to, and might have to, do to clean up. i have thrown a few parties in my life that ended up either in puke (in my bed, in the sink, in the bathtub), broken objects (a statue, a glass vase, picture frames, a door frame), empty beer bottles but floors soaked with beer, und so weiter, und so fort. it’s shitty to clean up, and especially shitty in your case because you weren’t even at the party.

i’m assuming that whoever left the shopping cart there is going to go pick it up, but if there’s anything else i can do to help you or john put your place back in order, let me know. seriously.

other than that, i wish you the best of luck with your hausarbeiten and, as the germans would say: bis dahin!

Grusse,
-X

X Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 8:29 AM
Reply-To:
To: Fedor Dokshin

Hi John and Fedor -

I just wanted to offer to come by and help with cleaning up if there’s anything that still needs to be done (sorry if it’s all done now and this is one of those annoying after the fact things.) It was totally unfair for you to have clean everything, especially because as far as I know you weren’t planning on having it there in the first place. I was feeling guilty about it all weekend but I guess the Hausarbeit guilt won, while I’m all far a way in Friedrichshain, but there’s really no excuse today as I will be going to the university anyway.

I have no idea who puked in your room, that’s totally disgusting and – yeah. Disgusting pretty much sums it up. I think you can use baking soda to help get the smell out?

So – basically, if you still need help with anything, I can come over after class today around 6, I think I left a tupperware in your kitchen anyway, and I can bring baking soda.

I don’t know where the schopping cart came from/where to return it to – sorry. (The “sch” just came out, had to leave it)

- X

X Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 11:58 AM
To: Fedor Dokshin <fad7@cornell.edu>

Dearest Fedor,

I am all over that shopping cart. I will be in the city this afternoon trying to get my laptop fixed and will swing by your place around 4. Hope to find you or John there.

-X

there were many more in this same tone, and i’m pretty sure i got some calls too, but i later realized my phone card was not in my phone. when i put it in, more people expressed their sympathy/willingness to help.

to seal the deal, i wrote back the following response

Fedor Dokshin Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:28 PM
To:
Cc:

heyyo,

thanks to everyone who responded to my message and offered to help. although i know that everyone tends to have 20/20 hindsight, i believe you all had the best intentions and the whole debacle was nothing more than an alcohol-induced lapse of judgement. that being said, i think everyone needs a reminder to be nicer every once in a while, and i’m happy i could provide that for all of you.

my mood was better today, for it’s nice to read that people are not as big of assholes as they sometimes act. i was also happy to see josh’s smiling face, as he came to collect the shopping cart and surprise me with a beautiful red rose.

a special thanks to joanna, chris and goran who lent their help after the party. especially goran who, according to john, was actually “eine Putzmaschine,” and helped clean up for several hours.

basically, i think the lesson from all this is quite simple: we should all strive to be a little more like Goran everyday. that would really be the beautiful and peaceful world invisioned by the likes of karl marx, mohandas gandhi, martin luther king, and mother teressa. think about it.

now, i’m off to do some laundry and read some peukert. i wish you all a schönen Abend.

fedor

all’s well that ends well. i guess

one shitty story

ok i’m lazy. it takes time and effort to update this blog. the logical conclusion is that i don’t update this blog.

but every once in a while comes along a story that i simply must share with the world. if you know me, you know that i moved from russia to the u.s. when i was 10 years old. most people that meet me can’t really imagine that at one time in my life i was laughed at by my ESL teacher for calling a toe a “finger,” or that i stole one poor kid’s toy, because i thought he was giving me a gift, only to realize later that he was just telling me what the thing was called, or that i ran around the soccer field for a half an hour during gym class, because i thought we were supposed to run as far as we could, when in reality we were just running a mile. today, my english is probably better than that of most native speakers. i have very little, if any accent and i am that jackass, who interrupts people just to point out their grammar mistakes.

one way to find out that i am, in fact, foreign, is to come over to my house. because there you will be confronted with these people:

Exhibit 1: my dad

Most Russian thing he has ever done: ordered a heater from somewhere in scandinavia as the final piece to the sauna that he built with his own hands in the basement of our house.

Language problems: too many to list, but once, while at a company dinner, his poor command of the english language caused him to order a whiskey mixed with gin from a very surprised waiter at the restaurant. that isn’t actually what he wanted, but i guess the details got lost in translation.

Exhibit 2: my grandma

Most Russian thing she has ever done: everything my grandmother does is russian. if you looked up the work “babushka” in a russian-english dictionary you will see her picture.

Language problems: none, at least if you ask her. she speaks absolutely no english, and i’m pretty sure she isn’t delusional, but she finds nothing wrong with striking up a conversation in russian with just our very american neighbor, a stranger at costco, or simply trying to explain herself to american customs agents at the airport, where she was detained for several hours for essentially trying to smuggle the seeds from her latest (very successful) harvest of cucumbers into the u.s.

Exhibit 3 (and the subject of the following story): my mom

most russian thing she has ever done: back in russia, my mom would buy these calendars that had traditional russian remedies for all sorts of illnesses. 365 days=365 remedies, and she had more than one of these. to this day you will find strange herbs in the cabinets of our kitchen. once, when i was a kid i got some warts, and my mom managed to cure them with an obscure ritual involving potatoes and what i to this day believe was fucking witchcraft.

Language problems: i think the following story tops all previous blunders. and here it goes…

i created a Skype account for my mom before leaving for germany, so that i could talk to her for free while abroad. everything was going well. i’m online a lot, so it really isn’t difficult to reach me. my mom would call me a couple of times a week to check up, and i would report back that everything was great and that was that. then my mom discovered the chat function of skype. so when i wasn’t actually at my computer, she started leaving messages in the chat window.

now, spelling is my mom’s weakest point, so i wasn’t surprised to read these, and i could translate them pretty easily. for example:

Luda Dokshina: i just wack up = i just woke up
Luda Dokshina: i want tack = i want to talk
Luda Dokshina: why you not ansver? pick ap the phone please = why don’t you answer? pick up the phone please.

that was fine, but then i come home to find this on my skype chat:

Luda Dokshina: Hi, Fedor, I didn’t ask you about sice a bed. I wont send shits. send for me massage. Thank you

then a minute later: Sorry! message with “E”

i will give you a second to appreciate the awesomeness of this message.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
okay, now let’s take a look at what the message actually should have read:

Luda Dokshina: Hi, Fedor, I didn’t ask you about the size of the bed. I won’t send the sheets, send me a message. Thank you.

the best part of it was that she very nonchalantly informed me that she will not, in fact, be sending “shits,” and went on to emphatically correct the misspelling of the word “message.”

the backstory to all this, is that my mom was making a package for me, and one of the things she was going to send was sheets for my new bed.

now, i had a good laugh about the message, but because my mom was not online, i didn’t have the opportunity to correct her spelling. good thing i didn’t, because the following day i get this message:

Luda Dokshina: I sent for your cloths and shits today morning It’ll in Germany after 10 days

Translation: I sent your clothes and sheets this morning. They should be in Germany within 10 days.

ok, by this point it’s getting old and i’m feeling kind of bad for laughing again, but just then i get another message from mom and i’m back rolling on the floor.

Luda Dokshina: I hope this chats with you help me in my spelling.Yesterday I sent box of sh… for you,because of my spelling. I put word sh… on list of items what I have in box.Post office lady ask me do I have any liquid in the box? I told her here just sheets(my pronunciation was correct, I worked with it) and lady told me Oh, is it what you mean?(She all ready read my list). My fill bad with English, but fill little bit better with thing how many people I make laught. Sorry, Fedor!

not many would have such a positive outlook on something that could have been pretty embarrasing. for that i really admire my mom and i know she wouldn’t mind me posting this, because maybe it’ll make some more people “laught.”

so i finally get a hold of mom on the phone. apparently she went to the post office with my package. when filing for insurance, she wrote “shits” among other things. now, imagine yourself as the post office worker and a 50-something year old woman tells you that there is “shit” in the box. you have two ways to interpret that information.
the first: “wtf? i ask a serious question about the contents of a package, and this lady says “oh, just some shit.”

or the second, apparently taken by the actual worker: try to keep a straight face and say, “mam, is there any liquid in the box?”

finally today, i got my “shits” in the mail, and was thrilled to find this on the box

the “Detailed Description of Contents reads:” Shits, Clothes, candy.” just think of all of the people my mom made “laught” en route.

actually opening the box brought even more good surprises.

for example i was particularly excited to find these “Peeps” lollipop rings (lollipeeps for short) in Marshmallow and Strawberry Cream flavors.

the other thing my mom sent me was a new memory card for the camera. so now i have more space to record videos. so i’ll work on that. maybe the next post will be a video of my new wohnung. don’t hold your breath though, this could take a while.

bis dann,

fedor

one more time…

so it’s almost 1 in the morning, i haven’t so much as looked at my homework yet, and i have class at 9am. perfect time to start a blog post.

so a couple of my program-mates have just informed me that they saw my blog. this made me happy, because i honestly believed that the only person who read this was my mother. and i don’t need to impress my mother with my awesome german adventures, because she already loves me. so it’s nice to know that i have more readers.

without further ado, to prevent the hoards of excited fans from going insane out of anticipation, here’s my newest blog post.

life is good. i no longer feel like a complete noob in berlin. i take the wrong train in the wrong direction less than 50% of the time, when i order something at the restaurant, the waiters no longer answer with “would this be easier in english?,” and i suspect that my guest family is beginning to break with the first impression they got of me, namely that i am a complete idiot. what more could i realistically ask for?

today was the last day of the easter vacation, and class starts back up tomorrow. right now, i’m only taking the one german course. it’s 4 hours a day 4 days a week, which although painful at times, actually leaves a good deal of free time. i manage to fill 90% of that free time with utterly useless activities, but the other 10% is actually enriching, fun, or just something i can honestly say was “worth doing” afterwards.

among these are the ongoing excursions we have on fridays. some have certainly been more fun than others, but all in all it’s been a good experience. for example, the week before last, we went to the reichstag, where we toured the building, watched a debate over extending social benefits, and spoke with some german political dude. here are some pics.

the reichstag

die kuppel der reichstags

awesome elevator with mirrors on all 4 sides

view from the top

brandenburger tor (right around the corner)

Aeroflot –WTF?

but as i said, there is definitely a range in how fun these activities are. the tour of prenzlauerberg, while interesting was a bit on the dull side, for example. there is an extreme outlier however, and sadly it’s in the negative direction.  i like to think i’m pretty open to culturally enriching activities. i certainly enjoy most museums, i like to just sightsee, and pay pretty close attention during tours of historic sites. where i went wrong here, however, is assuming that because i mildly enjoyed “hairspray” on broadway, i would be able to appreciate the wonder that is german opera.

we were 5 minutes late to the show, and only a half hour later i wished we had never showed up. i don’t mean to knock on opera in general, maybe it was just this one, maybe i was tired, maybe it was the fact that i have a hard enough time understanding spoken german, let alone sung german. i don’t know, but when it ended, 3 hours later, i was certainly of the impression that it was at least 2 and a half hours too long. i tried pretty hard to pay attention, but couldn’t help nodding off at least a dozen times. the worst part came, when, 2 hours into the show, the lights went on and everyone was getting up from their seats. in my still dazed state, i grabbed my jacket and breathed a sigh of relief, only to be informed that it was the intermission and we had over an hour left.

i felt kind of like a jerk complaining about the opera, because some people obviously were enjoying it, but at that moment, i just could not believe that. i guess i’m not cultured enough. oh well.

the dreadful place itself

this is me before i fell asleep

that’s all for now. i’m kind of tired, and this homework isn’t going to do itself. so, until i muster enough motivation to post again, keep it real.

jokes

so my guest mother’s son, florian, is a history and english major at Humboldt, and we’ve had some good talks about lots of different subjects. he usually has a very interesting perspective, which makes for fun conversations. anyways, here are three topical jokes that he told me in english.

the first two came up when we were talking about learning different languages, and he remarked that in europe the stereotype is that the brits tend to not care for learning new languages.

1.

what do you call a person who speaks three languages? multilingual.

what do you call a person who speaks two languages? bilingual.

what do you call a person who speaks one language? a brit (you can substitute “an american” if you like)

2.

while traveling in britain, a swede stops to ask directions from two brits. the problem is he doesn’t know english. so first he asks them in swedish, but they can’t answer him. then he asks them in french, but again they don’t understand him. he asks them in german, and still no answer. he tries spanish, but no luck. he gives up and walks away. while he’s walking away one brit says to the other, “hey george, don’t you think it would be useful to learn another language?” the other one answers, “no, did you see how many languages that guy could speak, and what good did it do him?”

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

ok and this last one is about the humanities. florian is a history and english major, so he can really relate to having absolutely no certainty in the job market.

a biologist asks “how does it work?”

a physicist asks “why does it work?”

a humanities student asks, “do you want fries with that?”

sad but true, oh well

die wohnung meiner gastfamilie

here’s my first video post. i’m just learning how to use final cut pro, so cut me some slack. i’ll have plenty of time to do fancy transitions and super cool graphics. this took me long enough as it is.anyways, this is where i am currently living in berlin. enjoy!

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.

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!

first run in germany

so as i wrote earlier, i was pretty uncertain about my running as of two days ago. i’m no more certain today. the shot that the podiatrist gave me definitely dulled the pain, but it certainly didn’t take it away completely. i still have pain where the nerve is between the 2nd and 3rd metatarsal, but also farther to the left, closer to the little toe. i went for a 6 miler today to test it out, and it was pretty uncomfortable, but not unbearable. if the pain doesn’t get worse in the next week, i’m just going to keep training for the marathon. if it gets worse, as the podiatrist said, it must be a hairline fracture, and i’m going to have to hang this up. it would take at least 2 weeks completely off to make it better and then i’d have to ease back, with no chance to be ready by april 27th.

it certainly doesn’t feel good that i didn’t run for 4 days in a row, and only twice in the last 8 days with only 2 months until the race, but i already paid the entry fee, and i’m not about to let it go to waste without at least trying.

this is definitely not something i wanted to go through before my first marathon, but we’ll see what happens.

good morning

woke up today 10 minutes before my alarm was set to go off, promptly at 7:50am. i’m about to go out and explore a little, but before that i wanted to post this. it’s my breakfast.

when i asked for cereal yesterday i expected that “tony the tiger” stuff in a box, but this is much better.

ok i’ll post more pics of the city today. actually, i’ll probably get a flickr account and post them there. i’ll post a link on here though. later.

first day in germany

3 things i learned today:

1. i am incredibly awkward

2. can’t speak german

3. all germans drive tiny hatchbacks (the smaller the better)

4. german bathrooms are really strange

(EDIT): 5. i don’t know how to count

i was too tired to write a departing message yesterday, so i’m writing this time already from berlin. the journey was something.

of course, i didn’t get ready to leave early, so i ended up running errands all day yesterday. i had a red-eye flight that left detroit metro at 10:55pm.

my first awkward moment was still in detroit. the lady at the check-in counter definitely thought i was an idiot. apparently, i didn’t realize how many bags i was allowed to bring with me, so i was shocked when she told me i could check two, after i had spent all day trying to cram all my belongings into one. then i couldn’t put the bag on the conveyor belt the way she wanted, and finally i pulled an epic “Brian Regan” moment as i walked away.

counter lady: have a great flight!

me: you too! errrrrrr… I mean….. yeaaaaaaaaaah… (walking away)

the flight to london was long but not too bad. they had a lot of stuff to watch on the plane, so that kept me occupied. first, i watched the highlights of the 2007 nyc marathon (no idea why they had that), then a good portion of “the darjeeling limited” before i passed out for 2 or 3 hrs. i woke up as we were getting ready to land in heathrow airport. i videotaped some of the landing, which i thought was cool, maybe i’ll post it later.

we ended up arriving nearly an hour early to london, which left me with a lot of time to lounge around. there were a bunch of really expensive luxury stores and duty free shops with tons of different stuff. i took this pic of a pack of marlboro cigarettes with what i thought was an overly straight-forward warning. i guess they have more stringent rules about this stuff in the uk.

i finally got on the plane for berlin at 12:55 london time. the flight was only two hours, but due to the 1 hour difference we arrived there at 3:45pm berlin time. i was listening to my german podcasts, hoping to pick up some last minute phrases that could be useful in conversation, before meeting my guest family. finally, i exited the baggage claim, but no one seemed to be looking for “fedor.” i waited.

everyone had left and i was the only one standing there 20 minutes later. surprisingly i wasn’t really panicking. i knew i was an idiot for forgetting to write down the address/tel. # of my guest family, but i also knew that i could get that information through my e-mail. so i went in search for a computer. sadly airports aren’t in the business of providing free wi-fi for people. i needed to get change to use at a computer station, and thus was faced with the daunting task of starting my first real german conversation. i believe it went something like this:

Me: kann ich diese fünf euro zu münze wechseln?

dude at currency exchange: ja, kein problem.

success.

as i was walking toward the computer station, i walked by the information desk, and had the brilliant idea of asking them for a phonebook, rather than wasting money on internet. the woman at the counter answered me in english, and gave me the phonebook. thankfully my host was listed and was the only one with her name. i wrote the number down and went to a pay phone. i felt good after that win at the currency exchange.

i dialed the number and someone replied almost immediately: “hallo, frasch.” in broken german, i managed to explain to him that my name was fedor and i was the guest student that was coming to stay with their family, that i was at the airport, and i needed to be picked up. that’s how far i got before he replied “i think this would be easier in english.”

PWNED!

it was easier, the guy spoke nearly perfect english. apparently i told them the wrong time to come pick me up (the time i was arriving in london and not berlin), so this guy’s mom spent two hours at the airport before i got there. i felt awful. he told me that a bus would get me to their house in 15 minutes, so i said i’d take the bus.

when i arrived at my bus stop i got off and waited where i thought we agreed to meet. the guy was waiting on the other side of the stop, so it took us another 25 minutes before we actually found one another. during those 25 minutes i made the curious observation that there is a ridiculous amount of tiny hatchbacks driving around. 9/10 cars are hatchbacks and most are not much bigger than a mini (there are also a lot of minis).

anyways, finally i could say i knew someone in berlin, and there was a place that i would be staying at for the night, so that was nice. the host family’s apartment is really cool, it’s fairly large with really tall ceilings, and the room i’m staying in is spacious and very nice.

here are some pictures:

that door leads to a balcony, it’s too dark to see anything off of it now, but i’ll take some pictures later

anyways, i’m just settling in here. tomorrow, i’m waking up at 8 am, and probably going to go for a run and explore a little. it’s only half a mile to the Tiergarten from here, so i’ll probably check that out. then later, i’m going to get a bus/subway pass, and go see some more of berlin.

i don’t have time to get into my last lesson of the day, namely that german bathrooms are really strange. maybe i’ll get around to describing them in detail some other time, but for now i want to leave you with the mental picture of someone 6′ tall trying to shower in a bathtub where the showerhead is at his knees, and also this picture that i could not resist taking.

yeah, that hung above the toilet.