BERLIN, Part 1

Arrival

Last weekend I took part in a seminar over Media and Politics put on by InWent (the German company that is financing and supporting me during my stay in Germany). Not many people know about these seminars (probably because of how awesome they are… or because each participant costs InWent a significant amount of money). Free travel & local transportation, free stay in their hotel, free breakfast, free bus tour of the entire city…. The list goes on. Basically… it was the best way I can think of spending my first time in Berlin. I arrived Thursday afternoon and met some fellow CBYXers in the train station (which is HUUUGE, by the way). We got to the hotel and got our rooms (private big apartment-like room, great view, bathroom, and big TV… thank you InWent). We ended up being the first ones to arrive at the hotel, so we had some downtime to watch some German TV. Heck. Yes. In the 3 months that I’ve been here, I’ve probably watched a total of 10 minutes of German TV (not including soccer games). We ended up watching a show about dysfunctional families around Germany which was hilariously entertaining from start to finish. Now I wish I had a TV.

Seminar – Day 1

We then started the seminar after everybody arrived. There were a total of about 20 or so people, and they were all non-Germans (mostly from East Europe, including some from Ukraine and Russia) involved in some sort of InWent program. We all had to go around the room and introduce ourselves, say what we were studying/why we were in Germany, and what we wanted to learn during the seminar (all in German… of course). All the CBYXers sat together and were the last to speak, so we got to hear how good and pretty much fluent sounding the other participants’ German was. WOO. That made me kind of nervous for a second, seeing as I had to make up something fast about what I wanted to learn out of this seminar… auf Deutsch, even though I was honestly only there for the free trip (psh, you would be too). It wasn’t bad at all, though. I always work myself up over nothing. We then got an overview of the different media stations and newspapers around Germany and a look at their websites.

We were then taken to a nice Italian restaurant and given a limit of 18 Euro to spend, in addition to any drink we want. This resulted in lots of appetizers and desserts ordered by everybody. Delicious (thank you again InWent). Then us CBYXers went out to a couple of nearby bars, but called it a night pretty early.

Seminar – Day 2

We started bright and early (around 9:30am…) and received a lecture from a journalist from Der Tagesspiegel (a major West Berlin newspaper). She talked about the different newspapers in Berlin and who the target audience is for each, etc. We also learned more about the different media stations, and then were taken on a private bus tour of the entire city, stopping at some of the media stations to describe them further. We ended up going into ZDF’s headquarters (one of the main TV stations in Germany), saw where their morning show is taped, etc… But most of the time was spent driving around to every single neighborhood /district in Berlin and learning more about the city. This was completely unexpected, as we all thought we were just going to go to media stations, so we were all very excited. It was nice to see the city from a bus, since it is so huge and kind of difficult to see it all in one day by foot. It was also cold and rainy outside, so we stayed pretty comfortable in the bus.

After the bus tour, we were dropped off at the Arkaden, which is a huge shopping mall, to get some lunch (yes, InWent gave us money for this, too). Me and Helen walked around and ended up finding a random festival going on (I don’t know how we always manage to do this… there is always a random festival in Germany). We got some German food and then met up with the others to walk over to the Reichstag.

The Reichstag is the building where the German Bundestag (Parliament) works (like the US Capitol Building). There was a huge 2 hour long wait to go in, but seeing as we were with InWent (a government-funded program) we got to club cut the line and go straight in. Awesome. We also got access to the chamber and listened to a general overview of the room. Afterwards we were going to go up to the top of the Dom, but we figured we could do that when we have to come back to Berlin and meet our Bundestag Representatives for our CBYX End of Year Seminar in May. See you again soon, Reichstag.

After this we were free and some of us decided to check out the Brandenburg Gate up close (instead of only driving by in a bus). It was less than a 5 minute walk from the Reichstag, and we got there just as the sun was setting (which by the way, sets at about 4:30pm now… it’s getting light later in the day now, and darker faster in the night… very short days). This is where I saw the bricks. There are bricks that surround the city and show exactly where the Wall originally stood. It was still pretty hard to imagine. We then went back to the Arkaden to shop (gloves for me!) and saw an IMAX movie at the Sony Center (yes, paid for by InWent). It was a 3D IMAX movie about Arabia, all dubbed in German. I found this kind of hilarious and (accidentally) fell asleep during most of the movie.

Later that night we met up with some CBYXers that live in Berlin for their permanent placements. We ended up seeing a pub crawl going on and secretly joined in (they never noticed) and met a few people… but we mostly danced. It was fun to see them again since we haven’t really hung out since Washington, D.C.

Seminar – Day 3

Day 3 we walked to Axel Springer (a publishing house that is one of the largest multimedia companies in Europe... thank you Wikipedia) and sat in on a meeting between the heads of each department and listened to what each team was going to be writing about and publishing. That was some serious German speaking right there. Yikes. Never heard it talked so fast in my life, and I kind of just sat there and smiled. That’s okay though, since I got the gist of it, right? After the meeting was over, we sat and talked with the head honcho and he explained the process they go through to publish their newspapers each week. He also gave us a tour of the newsroom where we saw people working on layouts, editing, websites, and photographs.

After this, most people went to the train station to go back home, but me and another CBYXer, Whitney, had decided long ago that we wanted to stay another night so that we would have more free time to explore the city. We stayed at a hostel in East Berlin, which was the coolest hostel I have ever been in. It had a heated indoor pool and sauna, along with huge rooms and awesome decorations. We stayed in a 6 person dorm, which we ended up having all to ourselves, and it had TWO bathrooms in it. At most hostels there is usually a community style bathroom for the entire floor, so for us to have two private bathrooms and a huge 6 person room to ourselves was pretty cool. The hostel also had a huge restaurant and bar where a Berlin CBYXer met us. They were playing Jersey Shore on mute, with German subtitles on. We started reading out loud the English translation which resulted in way too many laughs and new words being learned. We all then went to a club only about a 2 minute walk away from our hostel (have I mentioned how awesome this hostel was?) which was underneath the U-Bahn station.

Earlier that  night we walked to the East Side Gallery (again, only about a 2 minute walk from our hostel), which is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still intact. The murals on the wall were redone after the Wall came down and are now painted on the East Side as a memorial representing freedom. 

I hope on my next trips to Berlin I will have time to visit some museums and walk around exploring the city some more. Check out pictures of the Berlin Wall murals and the rest of my trip on my Picassa Page.

Coming soon!:

Part 2 – 4 day trip with my school in December

Part 3 – 4 day trip for New Year’s Eve with CBYXers