Day of German Unity

Happy Tag der Deutschen Einheit! This is the day that Germany was reunited 17 years ago. To celebrate, they had a big free concert in front of the Brandenburger Tor.

To celebrate my sister's birthday, the German women's national soccer team won the World Cup. How thoughtful! I watched the game with my host, which gave us opportunity to talk more about sports. Plus, I found out Uwe has a baseball bat, but only to beat down intruders.

A couple days ago the Carleton group did a theater workshop, which sounded intimidating, but ended up just being fun. The first half essentially consisted of jazzed-up get-to-know-you games, but we all know each other already, so they were actually fun. Then we ate pastries, and came back to play a big improvisation situation where we each had a known role (for example, I came from Finland, had no money, and was seeking a bed for the night) and a secret role (mine was Vater, or Father), and we all mixed in a cafe and talked in German, and waited for hilarity to ensue. It did ensue. The game eventually ended with Jordan (who was in the cafe to meet his gay partner for the first time after 10 years of online chats) pole dancing on the table to music. I'm pretty confident that the lady leading it used to be a hippie (still was?).

Today we saw "Kabale und Liebe" in the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, which is the one that tries to modernize old stuff and throw twists at it. For "K+L" they made der Präsident die Präsidentin, and set everything in modern time, and at the end, cut out a bunch to change the focus. Very dramatic changes in some cases, but they were defensible, I thought. The play was also easier to follow, since we had read the entire book before seeing it. I caught more words than I had at either of the other two plays, but still didn't catch a ton. "K+L" the book was awesome. Love, death, power struggles, vowed revenge, etc. My favorite German work I've read (out of a pool of about four). Action-packed.

Tomorrow we go to the Museum of German history, and Saturday I see my first soccer game here (finally!). Then, we leave Berlin for an entire week, going to Weimar and Nürnberg. Hopefully this time the hotel beds won't break.