Thursday, July 18, 2013

Week....??

Apparently some weeks have passed since I last wrote. Oops. At first I was busy because my friend Terrance visited one weekend. Then after that there wasn't much to talk about. I guess everything is much more normal to me now, even though I've still gone to different places, mostly with the school.

The school year ended and there are only about 15 kids that come (at the most). Allegro Grundschule is sort of a day care in the summer. Some kids come almost every day, some come a few days or weeks then don't come back, some come every once in a while. I think it depends on when their parents have vacation. People in Germany have a couple of weeks off in the summer. Around 3 if I remember correctly. I wouldn't mind that!

We take the kids somewhere several times a week. We mostly go to parks and lakes. One place we went to was the Grunewald (green forest). It's located in the west side of Berlin. We first climbed a big hill and when we got to the top we had a wide view of the area.




The camera doesn't do it justice, especially on the second pictures. One of those "you had to be there" moments.

As I mentioned earlier, my friend Terrance visited some weekends ago. That was really fun. I've met new people here and interact with them, especially at work, but it was really nice to have someone I knew better around. We went sight seeing the whole weekend. I actually got to see a lot of things that I hadn't done before. My favorite was the Berliner Dom. So beautiful!


The inside was just as beautiful, if not more. Terrance and I both loved the design. I guess it didn't have a lot of objects, but what made it great was the intricacy and attention to detail in the paintings and the objects they did have (like statues, organ, etc.)

This picture isn't great, but you can see the paintings on the ceiling which are actually illustrations of the beatitudes. And if you look closely, a little lower you can see carvings.


Last time I wrote about language barriers, and I said that I was gonna take some steps to improve my German and that there are many opportunities to do so. One step I've taken is to find a tandem partner. For those who haven't heard of this, a tandem partner is someone you meet with to help each other with the language you're both trying to learn. For example, you can meet for two hours and speak one hour in your native language and one hour in your partner's native language. I've met with two girls so far, and it's been cool! I've especially connected with my first tandem partner. We click well, I could see us being good friends! It may seem sketchy, I kind of thought it was at first. But so far I haven't gotten kidnapped, so all is good.

Ok, last big event that's happened–I went to Prague last weekend! Prague is great. Honestly, it was refreshing to get out of Germany. It's a great country and Berlin is an awesome city, but I really needed a break from everything. I feel much more refreshed after that weekend. We went to the touristy places like Charles Bridge and the Prague Castle. I really loved that area. I wish I could've stayed longer. I don't think I got a good "feel" of the city and culture because there were so many tourists. Everyone around us seemed to be tourists.

Prague actually felt much smaller than I imagined. But I think it's mostly because I've been living in Berlin, which is huge. Nonetheless it's great and beautiful. Here are a few pictures.




Till next time.

1 comment:

  1. It's great that you got involved with the tandem partner program! I'm sure that if you continue going, your conversational German will improve greatly. I never got involved with that when I studied abroad, and I regretted it!

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