Ruhrgebiet: "Industry-Culture-Landscapes"

Last weekend I went to the small town in germany that I grew up in. The area is called the Ruhrgebiet and is known as the blue collar, (de)industrialized part of Germany, but I love calling it home. I got a ride there from a woman I found on a sort of hitchhiking website. I stayed with my elementary school best friend Sarah, who visited me in New York last year, and the 48 short hours were very eventful so I'll give some highlights.

Day 1:

-We went to the dentist's office Sarah works at because they had a photographer come in to take pictures for the website. They had me play patient and messed around in my mouth. Apparently I brush well. I'll post pictures when they go online.

-Then we went to Schloss Burg, an old castle with a great view of rolling hills. I bought a kids shirt there that makes me look like a real live knight.



- After dinner we went to Kleinbeck. The local club where I saw several friends from elementary school and where the Whiskey Cokes, my drink of choice, were only 2 Euro.


Day 2:

-Sarah is on a local women's soccer team and they had a game on Sunday that they let me play in. Even though I've never played on a team I did a god job; I had a bunch of tackles and the girls who didn't know I was only passing through asked me to join the team. Despite my mad skills, we lost 9:0.



-We also walked around my old street, here's the view from my neighbor's house:



-We walked around Hagen, a beautiful, old city where Sarah's boyfriend lives. He treated us to ice cream.

Midnight Train to Poland

This past weekend I went to Krakow, Poland with the entire NYU Berlin group: 41 students, 4 teachers/ staff, 1 tutor. We took a 12 hour night train with compartments that sleep 6. On the way there, I got to share one with all of my best friends here; on the way back the train was overbooked and I volunteered to share a compartment with the teachers, it was fun because I had been doing a lot of bonding with them on the trip anyway.



Our first day we did a tour of Krakow, a city that was founded in the 8th Century and became known for its large Jewish population as early as the 11th Century. The first night our group went to a restaurant in the Jewish quarter where they organized to have a Yiddish band play for us. There were three youngish guys on traditional instruments and this awesome older lady who sang and danced. Afterwards, most of us went to some bars and clubs in the area.



The second day we took a bus to Auschwitz; the concentration camp is about 1.5 hours from the city. It was an appropriately cold and rainy day and hardly anyone spoke or made eye contact the entire time. Being the only German student in the program, which included about 10 Jewish kids, I was extremely uncomfortable in addition to depressed and shocked about all the atrocities that happened on those few square miles so I mostly stuck with the teachers to avoid having to speak to students. I only took one picture, it's of the train tracks at the Birkenau extermination lot where the Reichsbahn brought 1.5 million Jews and Polish elite. I had managed to hold it together for hours but walking the tracks I finally broke down.



After we got back to the hotel that night I sat around with the teachers and we talked about family involvement in the Holocaust, they ended up inviting me to join them for dinner. It felt good to be with a bunch of Germans to sort out discussions of residual guilt and collective consciousness. I also used opportunity to practice having academic and intellectual discussions in German, which I am still not quite comfortable with.



That night was Passover and some kids threw a huge party in their room with tons of wine and the telling of the Passover story. After that we hit the bars and tried to momentarily forget what we saw that day.

On the final day, we got a few hours to explore the city on our own so Sam, Lauren, Elena and I headed for the old castle where they have a statue of a dragon that is the basis of their founding story.





The trip was really successful; I had the chance to bond with kids I had never really talked to. Turns out one girl is from King of Prussia, PA and another girl is totally into Riot Grrrl music, she even has a tattoo of Courtney Love and Kathleen Hannah!

Sorry about the long post, but I just really had a lot to say that seemed important to me.

Enjoy

see more crazy cat pics


see more crazy cat pics


see more crazy cat pics


see more crazy cat pics


see more crazy cat pics

Viva Riga, Lat-Via

I have returned from my 48 hour trip to Riga and I have to say my first visit to Eastern Europe, or "Central Europe," as the Easterners like to call it, was incredible. I only brought a small backpack, filled with my camera, a few extra t-shirts, a sleeping bag strapped to the bottom, and my friend's beat up copy of Kerouac's On The Road (I also brought underwear but that doesn't sound as poetic).

We stayed with a really nice couple in their early twenties who live in this run down communist building on the outskirts of the city.

Our first morning there, Sam and I took a 2 hour walk into the city and got to enjoy the decrepit parts most tourists don't have the chance to see. Visiting a second world country is fascinating, some buildings look like they had been bombed the week before, but really they're just leftovers from over 20 years ago.

Some comments on my trip:

- Latvians are a very proud people. They refer to the Soviet era as the "time of occupation" and still don't like Russians. Consequently, they now strongly associate with Tibet.

- At the Russian Market I put my valuables in my front pocket so I could keep better track of them. Referencing the stereotype that Easterners steal, Sam said he doesn't like intolerance. I said I rather be prejudice and safe, than p.c. and sorry, but he still thought I was a bigot. Later that day his phone got stolen.

- Latvian is the closest modern language to Sanscrit.

- There's a great art nouveau neighborhood that houses all the embassies. Here's Belgium:

- At the mall they had spacey, blue lighting in the bathroom stalls and I thought it was some gross way to hide the dirt; turns out it's so heroin addicts can't find veins to shoot up.

- To get home from a night out in New York, we sometimes take "gypsy cabs" than run illegally. In Riga they have illegal trams that run at night.

UPDATE: Katie told me there were problems with the facebook gallery so I made a new album on Picasa. Here's the mini-slideshow. Click on it to see the pictures bigger and with captions.

Last Post Before Latvia

Tomorrow I leave for Riga, Latvia. I don't know much about the city, but it was really cheap to fly to. To avoid the cost of a youth hostel, my friend Sam and I found a guy on the couchsurfer website who said we can stay with him, his cat, and his girlfriend.

Here's my travel schedule for the remainder of my time studying abroad. Click the city to see its Wikipedia page.

April 11-13: Riga, Latvia

April 17-21: Krakau, Poland

April 25-27: Wuppertal, Germany

May 15-19: Antwerp Belgium; Maastricht, Netherlands

I'm going to do more traveling when I meet up with my Mom in late May. She wants to go to Italy, I'd love to see Greece. We'll probably settle on Spain.

It rained today so I couldn't photograph my bike, but I recently took good pictures of Berlin:

Hot Mess Morning

This morning I had to turn in a 5 page paper on the socio-political impact of Berlin's Old Museum's architecture. I finished my paper by about 10 PM last night, but had unfortunately volunteered to have the program's only printer in my room so I had people coming in and out till 2AM. One friend stayed till 4:30 to write his paper, long after I had gone to bed. Even more kids came in the morning and one crashed my computer. After dealing with that, it was 9:40 and I had only 20 minutes to shower (I was long overdue) and get to class to hand in my own paper. I showered as fast I could, grabbed the jeans, tee-shirt and hoody closest to me,  ran out the door, jumped on my bike and raced to the subway, only to realize I forgot my wallet so I had to bike all the way to class; luckily it was only 10 minutes away. That class went 15 minutes over, so I couldn't go home and had to bike straight to another class that was even further away. When I finally got home around 6 PM, I google mapped my route and realized I biked a total of 8 miles today! That'll hurt in the morning. 

Here's my route and back again:

Größere Kartenansicht

Bored

I'm bored and refuse to write the 5 page paper due in 36 hours so I decided to blog without saying anything and to change my blogger profile picture. I realized that out of context, and to people who don't appreciate my sense of humor, the old picture looked extremely pretentious and made me look more annoying than I am. Pictures of my zebra bike to follow soon. I'll also sum up my exciting travel plans that will bring my country count for study abroad to 9!

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And now, your moment of zen:

Since London

The same day I came back from London, Mukai and her friend Frank came to visit Berlin. We hit all the sites pretty hard on the second day, the weather was definitely with us, so I finally took the chance to see the East Side Gallery. It's a graffitide part of the wall that's left and is only a ten minute walk from my apartment and runs for about a mile. The third day we walked around all of Berlin to find some special camera with a plastic lens; this sort of mission turned out to be a great way to explore the city. We also went to Bang Bang Club, it's always fun to go, but it's more fun with Mukai because they play all the same music our favorite DJs in New York spin so every five minutes we jumped up because it was "our song," about ninety of them. 

Midterms are this week and serve as an unfriendly reminder that this is in fact study abroad and not hang out in a hip city with a bunch of cool kids. Today I even had to open Microsoft Word! That turned out not to be fun so I closed it again and used the leftover electric tape from my charger to make zebra stripes on my bicycle (pictures coming soon.)

Upcoming Plans:

next weekend I go to Latvia with my friend Sam. The tickets were really cheap and we want to find people online whose place we can crash at.

Week after that I'm going to Poland on an NYU trip.

Belgium, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Finland are also on the agenda.