A Berlin Thanksgiving

As promised, I've got lots of pictures fom my weekend trip to Berlin. Andrew lives in Friedrichshain, an area on the east side pretty close to Prenzlauerberg, which is where Martin lives. Unfortunately my host-brother was in Hannover while I was in town, but I had plenty of people to catch up with and meet!

I left Göttingen a little after 9am on Thursday morning, got to Hannover for my transfer around 10:30, and had to wait an extra half hour for my train to Berlin Ostbahnhof. That leg took another two hours, and then I walked/biked from the train station, finally arriving a little after 2. Cooking was already underway, but we did decide to take a break and play some American-style football in the park across the street. My team lost 3-5, but it was close at first! Then it was time to get back to the kitchen.


Here I am enjoying Thanksgiving cooking smells. For the number of chefs we had working at the same time, things went really smoothly. Plus, I learned how to make really yummy (if squishy) sweet potatoes!


Here is Elegant Meghan making Elegant Pumpkin... especially her Elegant Right Arm. You can see my yummy (and squishy!) sweet potatoes cooking behind her pot on the stove.


Andrew converted his spacious room into our dining room. It was a little tight, but everyone fit.


And of course, dessert. In addition to pumpkin pie and an apple turnoverish thing, we had the most beautiful - and gigantic - apple pie I've ever seen. There's a couple of kilos of apples in there.


Another Berlin Fulbrigher, Zack from Colgate, who is doing international relations. That's his pie, so due credit! I told him to look like a "happy pie man" for the photo, and this is what he came up with.


The next morning I woke up to a my first German snowfall. This is a view out the window in Andrew's apartment-mate's room, overlooking the park across the street.

We spent Friday wandering around the city and taking in the sights. I missed my family's traditional Friday-after-Thanksgiving shopping spree, but I still managed to get one important part of my Christmas shopping in - a German baby doll for my almost-three-year-old cousin.


The day got a little more gray as snow continued to fall, but we wandered around Berlin anyway. There's a giant tree in front of the Brandenburger Tor, which looks eerily pretty lit from within.


This is definitely my favorite picture. Felix, Jen, Leslie, Andrew, Amanda, and Meghan in front of the Brandenburger Tor.


And here I am, in front of the Reichstag. Maybe when I come back in March I'll finally get to go up in the dome.

We visited a couple of other Berlin Fulbrighters Friday night, watched The Big Lebowski (leider auf Englisch) and went out to a club that night. Then a bunch of us stayed up until 5am talking, which was great.

Saturday morning was a little sluggish, but we did manage to meet up with yet another Berlin Fulbrigher (there must be about a hundred of 'em) for lunch, and then I caught an evening train back to Göttingen.

It's amazing to think that it's already almost December! Seeing the Kiel crew brought me right back to this summer, and we picked up again as if the last couple of months had hardly passed. And yet, I'm flying back to St. Louis in less than three weeks (19 days!!) and two weeks later it's already 2006... and not long - about a month - after that, I'm halfway through my time here. It's definitely not as foundation-shakingly surreal as approaching graduation last year (and my heart goes out to my friends from Kenyon's class of '06, who are rapidly coming to the end of their penultimate semester) and yet, the compression of life-changing transitions that the current year has encompassed is simply unfathomable.

Funny how life works that way, endless changes. And still more to come...

Well, bring it on!