The Second Week

Sorry it's been so long. I am still alive, however, and staying very busy.

This past week was good. I feel like I can almost completely understand my teachers and I feel a little more confident in my speaking German.

The public transportation has become second nature. I have even almost become an expert at my route to school. I know that on the first U-Bahn ride, it is better to be in the first car because when I come to the station to change from the U-Bahn to the S-Bahn, the tunnel connecting the two stations begins on that side of the train. I also know that when I get onto the S-Bahn, it is better to be in the last car because of the direction I need to go to leave the station towards my school. I'm getting the hang of this.

This week, I participated in two excursions with the school. I also wanted to go to the seminar of German pop music from 1970-2010, but the teacher was detained for some reason and it was cancelled. The first excursion I participated in was on Wednesday. We went for a three hour walk from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburger Tor. I can't seem to find a suitable map to illustrate this, but the street we walked on mostly is called "Unter den Linden."  It was exciting to finally see some of Berlin's most well-known landmarks like the Berlin TV tower, the Berliner Dom, Museum Island, the Reichstag (German's Parliament), the Weltzeituhr (world time clock), Humbolt University and the Brandenburger Tor. It was quite an interesting tour. Here is the group in front of the Brandenburger Tor. Do I stand out as an American?

Then on Thursday, I went with a school group to visit the Pergamon Museum. It was not as interesting to me as the Jewish Museum last week, but this is what was there.  There are three wings in the museum and they are the antiquities collection of the architectural
 halls and the sculpture wing, the Near Eastern Museum 
and the Museum of Islamic Art. Here, I saw Shahnameh, the Persian Book of the Kings, as well as the Quran. There was some very interesting architecture inside the museum as well. However, when I stored my backpack in the locker that cost a euro to use, I forgot my camera. 


Friday, I took my first test. It was very easy. I know for certain that I answered everything on two of the four sections correctly. Another section I feel extremely confident about and the last section, I am not so sure. I am still having a difficult time remember the different genders for each noun. 


Before the test, we played a game in class. We were going on a trip and packing our bags and we had to tell what we would bring. We had to use at least one adjective with our item. The catch is, we had to remember what everyone else was bringing too. The teacher started it off saying that he was going to bring his broken glasses. Then the guy from Norway who sits to my left must say, "I will take your broken glasses and my empty coffee mug." And then I say, "I will take your broken glasses, your empty coffee mug and my boring book" and so on. There are 10 people including the teacher in my class and we did two rounds. I was the next to the last to go on the second round, so I had to say 19 things altogether. 


The difficulty about doing this game in German is the genders and adjective endings. When you say "my" in German, the word you use  whether it be mein, meine, meinen, meiner or meinem depends on what case you are in and what gender the noun is. Luckily, we were always using the accusative case during the game, so the case was not changing. Accusative case is simply the case of the direct object in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "I drive the car." the direct object is the car. What am I driving? The car. 


And now, the adjective endings. When you use adjectives to describe nouns in German, it has to have a certain ending. Where in English, we simply say blue pants, a blue dress, a blue skirt, blue shoes, it is not as easy in German. My teacher often says how boring English is because of the simplicity, but that German is so interesting!For the accusative adjective endings, for masculine nouns the ending is -en. Blue in German is blau so when using an adjective with a masculine noun you must say blauen. For neuter nouns it's blaues, feminine blaue and plural blauen. And these endings are just for the accusative case using articles like "a" and "an." There is a whole different set of endings for adjectives when using nouns with a "the" article. So, in my opinion the test that I took at the end of class was much, much easier than the game we played. 


Friday evening, there was a street festival a few blocks down the road. I went with Toni and some of her friends. I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a male belly dancer until this day. He did one song by himself and then was joined by four girls for the next song and they only wish they could dance like he could. 


At the festival, there were many stands set up selling alcohol, t-shirts, dresses, souvenirs, food, purses and anything you can think of. We walked around and looked at the different things and also listened to some of the music being played on the two or three different stages. It was fun. 


I have been eating well this week. Here are a few lunch pictures:

McDonald's in Berlin tastes exactly the same as McDonald's in Birmingham. The portion sizes are smaller here though. I got a small drink and fries, and it seems like the drink is the same size as the water cups they give you in the U.S. and the fries are the value size. I am not complaining at all. I wish we had smaller portions like this in the states. I haven't seen many fat people here at all. Everyone seems to be in good, healthy shape. I think I've lost 5 pounds since being here too. 


So, when I am going to and from school and taking part in all of my excursions, I always make sure I have a water bottle with me. The German word for this blog is "Wasser" which means water. In German, there is no "w" sound. The w's are pronounced as v's. So this is actually pronounced as "vasser." 


Tschuss!