summary of the last few weeks

Well, first of all, check out today's how-to. I especially enjoy the line: "When a flag is no longer in good condition (e.g. if it is torn, ripped or badly soiled) it should not be raised or displayed. It should be disposed of in a dignified way (such as a private burning.)"

I picked a dumb day to forget my camera. Today I was very sad to be unable to take any photos in Pforzheim's wonderful DDR museum. It completely exceeded my expectations! It turns out that there really ARE worthwhile things to do in Pforzheim. This museum is really, really worth a trip. It's only open from 11:00-3:00 Sundays, but it's got a great collection of photos, newspapers, posters, books, food, money, etc. from the DDR. The tour guide was really nice, gave me a bunch of free booklets, and talked to me for a long time about how the Luftbrücke and the support of America after WWII and how it was "really not anything like Iraq; they helped us out." Which is something that I hear really often from older people here. When she was a young woman, her parents immigrated to West Germany, and she was not allowed to visit them. She wrote letters to her parents telling them that she would go over (to visit) as soon as she could. The Stasi read them and arrested her, and she was imprisoned for 6 months in a tiny room with "other political prisoners and murderers." I guess the murderers were very spiteful towards her because they had life sentences and they knew the political prisoners would be leaving pretty soon.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. The last week of May, I was in Hamburg for a few days, and then in Berlin:

Hamburg:

We were there visiting an old friend of Ulrike's, who has three children. Svea, in the picture below, is Marlene's age and is studying fashion design in Hamburg next year:








Indian food! (A special gift for me.) I impressed people by eating a lot of spicy red sauce that was really not all that spicy.




Cocktails. Mine is a White Russian!




Berlin:

Berlin ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY exceeded my expectations. I LOVED it. It's by far my favorite city I've visited since getting here and perhaps my favorite city in the world. in contrast to Bonn, the AFS folks were extrememly flexible. We had TONS of free time and were allowed to wander the subway system by ourselves. Unfortunately I failed to take any particularly good pictures:






They've got Muji in Berlin too!







Rebecca looks concerned because we went to an international market with five people and we kept losing them:



We ended up getting caught in the rain a lot; it was really fabulous. Me with some nice girls:




The first week of June, Tang moved in with us. She was having problems with her host family in Karlsruhe, and she stays with us every weekend anyway, so my host parents said it was okay! So now we are five kids. It's been a LOT of fun; she goes to my school with me (although she's not in my class) and it's never, ever boring here. I think every weekend before I go home, I've got something planned. Last week of school, we wrote our first "Zentralische Klassenarbeit", (which are big tests we have to take at the end of 10th grade in Germany, and for the Realschüler are final exams), in German. I was pretty pleased; I probably won't be getting a passing grade, but it was an essay in German. Next week we've got them in English and Math. I probably won't even pass in English, and I'll probably accomplish two or three problems in Math -- in 2 1/2 hours. Failure. But I'm trying (like I have been for this entire year) just to forget about all of it.