Update

Can anyone tell me why Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Berlin leader Honecker kissed?

It has been over ten days since I last posted a blog, how have you all made it so long without my witty banter? You are all obviously very strong people to have made.
So whats new in our world. Well it’s a bit of the same old stuff, just trying to figure out our rolls here in the fatherland (as my German friend Stephen calls it). After 3 weeks of paper work..uh I mean training, Erin finally got kids in her classroom. She has this awesome ability to make even the coldest classroom (I say that because her school looks like a bunch of bunkers stacked next to each other), look all warm and fuzzy. Her kids are different then what she was used to, her students in the past did not have the money to travel so when Erin would ask what they did this summer she would get answers like “went to Wal-Mart”. When she asked her new students that question she got answers like, India, Italy, and America (probably to go to Wal-Mart). The educational system is set up so that if you are not on top of it from 4th or 5th grade you don’t get to go to all 13 grades (yes 13) and therefore would end up in a career that they did not love, or even like.
Today is our one month anniversary of being in Berlin. I have spent the free time just trying to get my head around all the death and destruction that went on right where I live. It is completely fascinating to me, how a whole society can have a radical idea and it ends up killing 60 million people across the globe. I have really wanted to just give myself time to take it all in and then start to research the battles, castles, and memorials on a deeper level. It’s really quite perfect that school started for me last week and I am taking a class on Modern Western Civ. So am studying where I live and the culture that surrounds each event in history.

So to get to know this town I have found my self on my bike trying to get lost. Yesterdays adventures found me lost in the down town part of Berlin. Now all over Berlin there are 100’s if not 1,000’s of these bears. They are pretty tall and usually out in front of businesses. Erin and I have always wondered what they heck they are all about. Yesterday I found out that they are “United buddy bears” if you want to learn more go to http://www.buddy-bear.com/. Anyway I guess they are intended to promote peace and fundraise for the poor kids of Berlin. Not a bad idea and they are really pretty unique.

We get our first guest on September 13th. Erin’s mom is flying on over to hang out with us for a week or so, then my mom is coming over for Christmas, and my brother at Spring break. The reason I am telling you this is so that you feel pressured to book your room in hotel Forster early (it’s cheaper that way)
Hope you are all doing well
Patrick

The HAUS that Hitler built:

Growing up playing soccer I always herd about the crazy fans in Europe. People going to a soccer game and finding them selves mixed up in a riot; you know that kind of thing. So needless to say I had to experience one as soon as I could. Our local Berlin team is the Herhta football club; they are not the best, but not the worst either. So yesterday Katy, Bob, our new friend David and I grabbed a beer (you can do that in Germany) and jumped onto the train that takes us to the local Olympic stadium. This is not your run of the mill Olympic stadium, this is were Jessie Owens helped to expose Hitler’s anti Semitism, by winning every running race 800 meters and under. It also holds the huge field that most of the video we have of the Nazi marching (mostly done for propaganda and scare tactics)
Once off the train there was an energy in the air that I have never experienced before at a sporting event. The fans are on a different level, take your most fanatical crazed sport fan from the US double his energy level and invite 40,000 of his closest football loving friends and that’s what this was like (oh yeah and they are not sober). It was for good reason that there where several hundred riot police that looked ready to rumble.
The stadium is clearly modeled after the old Roman coliseums; it is a big foreboding structure that would have been an intimidating place for an African American (Jessie Owens) to travel to in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
Our home team won, as every home team should do, the crowd went crazy and all was right with the world, but the actual soccer game was really a small part of being at the stadium.

As if the history/ soccer lesson from Saturday was not enough Erin and I decided to go on a little bike ride to Potsdam. For those of you that are wondering were Potsdam is and why we would go there I will fill you in. It’s a 12 mile ride threw forests and cobblestone roads away from our house, it’s also were Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met to slice up Germany/ Berlin into all those little pieces changed the world.
There is so much to see in Potsdam that it can’t be done in one day so we thought we would start with the prettiest. Sans Souci is on hell of a “summer home” the existing grounds are roughly 4 km squared and house a many lavish gardens, palaces, bath houses, tea houses, more gardens, and fountains. We spent a couple of hours there and just walked around the gardens and only saw about ¼ of the place and did not go in any of the buildings. If you come for a visit you can expect to come here!

So its 3:30 Saturday morning and I get woken up buy a guy moaning. Before you jump to conclusions he was on the front steps to the apartment building. Now the last time I heard a guy moaning like this I had just finished doing CPR on him so I thought I would get up to see what the deal was. Well he was not dieing, but he did kill some brain cells that night. The old guy must have had one heck of a night out on the town. In the states I would have given him several not so nice options of were he could go, but this being Germany at 3:30 in the morning what to do was a little unclear. The moaning continued for the next hour waking us up several times so I thought the thing to do was to call the cops. Have you ever tried to call the cops while in another country? It’s not easy, especially when you can’t speak the language, and when you finally get your point across they try and tell you that the street address you just gave them does not exist. Frustrated I gave up. I looked out the window at our poor drunken village idiot to see that he was gone; someone had let him in past the front door. Now our booze loving neighbor was slowly coming up the steps yelling please in German and shouting something violently. After an hour of this he finally made it past our door to the last flight of stairs. Wondering what he was up to I went out of our apartment to find an open door to what I assume was his apartment and him passed out in the hall way. So that’s our neighbor.. Wow city life is a little different..
To our moms that are reading it, don’t worry we live in a very very safe part of town and I will be amaized if this was not the most excitement we see all year.
That’s enough for now, hope you all had a great week!
Patrick

Another week gone by

It is kind of funny this whole blogg thing. I have never before had the time or cared to reflect weekly on what goes down in my life, but I think that thats what berlin is going to do for me. Give me time to reflect on past trials and tribulations and get psyched for the next adventure state side.

(Name the gate)

So the sort of funny dramma from this week is that half the time I was crankie because I thought my bike was stolen. Yes I said crankie and that best describes it. I moved here and the one adventours activity I was planning on still being able to do was to go mountain bikeing, and when I thought my bike was stolen I got full on crankie. So I filled the insurance paper work in the hopes that I could get some money back to buy some kind of bike. 4 days go by of me being crankie and still no bike, I roam the streets of Berlin just looking for the guy that stole my belovid bike, visions of seeing the bike riding theif roll threw my head along with a vision of me doing a flying leap across trafic; cloaths lining the guy and making him pay. Not a great way to experiance a new city..

Monday comes and the only guy that speaks any English calls me over and says he needs to show my somthing. He takes me into this other part of the building that I don't have a key for and shows me MY BIKE!!!! I hug the guy ( mental note: germans don't know how to react when a strange American is hugging them) Turns out the last place I put my bike was not OK with the guy that runs the appartment so he took the liberty of hiding it for me. When I asked his wife about it four days before the language issue got in the way. I am sure there is some sort of lesson in all of this, but I have been to busy riding my bike to think about it. Yesterday I road almost to Potsdam and checked out some really cool Palaces that are now parks along the river. Sorry I don't have any pictures but you will all just have to see for yourself.

Since we told everyone that we were planning on moving to Berlin there have been alot of people that said they were going to come over. We fullfilled our end of the bargian and now it's time for you all to pony up and buy some plane tickets over here. We even got a larger place just to host all of you. So some quick facts on what Hotel Forster has to offer. If you come over you have your own room, all to yourself (nicely decorated by Erin). We have a full kitchen and there is a good chance I will cook most of your meals if you ask nicely. We are located in the "Suburbs of Berlin" our places is surrounded by trees and a 2 minute walk to the train only about 20 minutes from down town. And the best part is you can't do any better on price $19.99 per night! (I am kidding we are not going to charge you) So really it's time to start making plans; or if you are thinking to yourself "Berlin sounds great and all but man I always wanted to go to ??????" Then let us know and there is a good chance we could be talked into ?????.

Our plans so far are as fallows:

Barcelona Spain September 22-24

Belgium, Amsterdam, Luxonburg October 13-21 (Thanks Mike, Eric, and Stacie)

Turkey for Thanksgiving (Seams fitting)

Christmas break (I don't know some were warm hopefully)

January sometime (Skiing in the alps with My sister and John, Heather if you are reading this you and John should come over in January)

Easter Vacation March 17 to April 4:

Croatia, Greese, Italy

And finally to wrap this weeks blog up I will leave you with this little peice of wisdom we found painted to the side of a blown up building from WW2.

Erin and I are on week two of this life altering event. This week had it’s moments, both good, bad, and funny (I suppose that’s how most weeks go, but I have never written about them before)
The first learning experience this week is that in Germany people don’t make eye contact with you while on your bike, walking down the street, or doing anything. Initially I was mildly offended by this. I don’t usually think much about my looks but when I do I don’t feel that I am painful to look at. So I walked around in my American bubble (that is how I feel not knowing the language or really were I am going) feeling like some sort of horribly disfigured outcast that was to painful to look at. It was starting to get to me; it kept me awake at night with thoughts about getting my second chin sucked away, or some bo tox to make my cheeks look fuller, or maybe I needed a nose job. Then I sat down at a little café and watched people (it’s really fun to do in the country, there wear a lot of spandex and still love the mullet). I started to notice that NO ONE LOOKS AT ANYONE! You could be on fire and they would not look at you. I was immediately relieved just thinking about the money I would save not getting all that plastic surgery done. So do me a favor next time you are walking down the street look at someone; hell maybe you could even smile, you never know when you are going to end up in Germany missing this little part of America.

So I came over to Germany without a job. This is a little detail that has been driving me NUTS! I rely on work to give structure to my hours, days, weeks, and years. I don’t want to “just be in school” I need to work. So I found my first job over here. I was a lab rat! They hooked me up to all these electrodes and made me answer questions about a bunch of sentences that were sung to me by an opera singer. I walked away with 21 euros ($30 US) for 3 hours of my life. The big hang up with finding work over here is the lack of work visas. Unemployment is as high as 20% so if a German can do it they want the work to go to them and not a foreigner. It looks like my best chance for work is going to be substitute teaching and/or painting houses.

Erin and I have bikes over here. They are our main form of transportation around town (they get great gas mileage) In our apartment complex there is a room for the bikes, at first I was a little weary about putting my expensive bike in the basement with everyone else’s bikes, but I thought I would give it a try. So I locked our bikes together and put them in the basement for the night. During the night the key to the lock walked off never to be found again. So in the morning I had to unlock the bikes with my leather man multi tool (thanks mike). I went down to the room to find our bikes thrown in a pile on the other side of the room from were I put them. This did not make me happy, who would be rude enough to throw our bikes in a pile to the other side of the room?
I went to work cutting, twisting, bending, the cable trying to get it undone, it was going rather well. Just as I was about finished someone started to open the door, this caused some concern because I was pretty sure I could not tell someone in German that I was breaking the lock to my own bike and had no intentions of stealing the bike. The lock broke just as they came threw the door. All the sudden the little old lady that walked threw the door starts yelling at me. Not about the broken lock but the fact that I “parked” our bikes in her spot last night and she had to move/ throw them in the corner. At least that is what I think she said because she was yelling at me in German. Not knowing how to say kiss my ass in German I smiled and walked away saying danca (thank you in German).

The last notable adventure this week was the five hours of my life spent going to, shopping at, and trying to get home from Ikea. For those of you that are not in the know Germans love Ikea more then they love David Haselhoff, and why not you could literally furnish your entire home with one stop to this store. So Tuesday after I got done playing test dummy and Erin got out of school we took the train to Ikea. Now I love nothing more then spending hours on end picking out the perfect towel pattern for the kitchen and bathroom but after 5 hours I was ready to pay up and get out of there to never look back. So $500 euros later (a new kayak in my language) we were done! Once we walked out of the doors I noticed all the taxi drivers averting there eyes and shaking there heads. There silence explained that there was no way our new bed was going to fit, and I would be forced to spend the rest of my life stranded at Ikea. Just then this random guy in his early 20’s swoops in and saves the day. He says that he has a van and could give us a ride if we wanted to hitch hike. Now back in Co I do a lot of hitching when I go kayaking. It is usually pretty safe, but some times you end up on the back of a Harley bear hugging a 300lb biker dude. Anyway back to hitching in Germany, after talking to this guy long enough I figured his intentions were good and he was not going to kidnap us or anything. So four of us crammed into the front of a 2 seater van for probably the funniest ride I have ever had. Turns out the one guy must of learned most of his English from rap music. I would like to elaborate more but you just had to be there.

(Relaxing after building everything we got from Ikea)

This weekend Erin and I are planning on going to Potsdam to see the castles and learn some more German history (you can’t turn around without running into some) then next weekend I am going to try to ride my bike to the Baltic sea (I should have one or two funny stories about that).

It's all about the cheese

Life so far has really all be about the cheese. Not that the cheese is good or we have had that much of it, but it comes down to the fact that I can’t read the ingredients or nutritional break down of this bag of cheese we just used for dinner. This problem does not solely apply to cheese. It permeates everything in every aspect of our day from how to get anywhere, to trying to figure out witch country my lost bike was in, to buying beds, couches, cookware, to meeting new people, buying lights (since most places don’t come with light bulbs or the wiring for that matter), to getting bank accounts, to getting internet, to witch bathroom to use. It is a huge slap in the face to someone that has most every aspect of his life wired back home. In a few short days this experience has thought me that I was comfortable back home, it was getting too easy, this decision of ours is not easy, and to be honest the last few days have had times that have really sucked, and times that have been really interesting ( usually after a beer garden) but it was/ is necessary. I am getting out side my comfort zone, not by falling off a waterfall, hanging off the side of a rock face, but by taking my ability away to know were I am going, how to get there, and what to eat once I get there.
Sometimes when you are kayaking you swim out of your boat. It’s not the preferred way to run a drop, but it happens, fortunately you have life jackets and safety gear to save your ass. Our life jacket/ safety gear for this waterfall of an adventure come in the form of Katie and Bob (Erin’s friends from Colorado). If we have any question the usually have an answer to it, from the best place to by groceries, to the people that have cheap furniture. They basically took this week (and probably many more) to get us set up with the million little things we will need to make this place home for a year.

(Our first dinner at our empty house)

Some of you are probably wondering about the little things like were we live, were Erin works, what city life is like. To those of you with these thoughts here is your answer. I am all about great deals and our apartment is one of them. Our place is huge! We have two bedrooms a big living room, and a nice sized kitchen. Currently it’s empty, but it is slowly filling up with donated/ cheap furniture that we have been able to get. It feels really weird going from to many roommates in our old places to no one but ourselves (So if anyone wants to move to Berlin for a bit I will give you a deal on a room). The part of the city we live in feels more like a suburb. It feels very safe, very clean, not smelly, and very orderly. There is a really cool little market that is about 150 meters away (things are in metric now) several large grocery stores and cool little shops tucked in on side streets and old world allies. It will be a cool place to live for a while, it a good mix of city life off set with a suburban feel. It’s hard to comment on Erins school, she has met most of the new staff, but really has not seen the classrooms or the other teachers. Everyone we have met so far seams like they are a bit shell shocked from there own adventure of moving from the states like we are. There are several mandatory trips to the beer garden that are built into training so I am sure I will have a better handle on who people and how the school is after they are done.
I have to get back to putting posters on the wall so this place looks more like home, hope you don’t mind but I am signing off for now. Life is good, challenging, and exciting and that’s how I like it!

Hope all is well

Patrick

This is "queer grizzly" that we ran into near buddy bar in Berlin.