Three Months Later

It is the last day of my third month in Berlin, and I have no topic for my final blog post!

So on that note, I bring you updates on my life that no one asked for or, probably, wants.

1.     I am in an orchestra now. It’s a wonderful group of people that rehearses in Friedrichshain on Thursdays, and the practices are my weekly therapy. There’s going to be a concert in a bit over half a month, for which I am unprepared but also really pumped.

2.     The weather in Berlin is beautiful and everything smells like flowers, except for the trains, which smell like armpits a lot of the time. Summer always comes with a catch.

3.     I gave a referat in one of my Humboldt classes and survived. I have not gotten a grade back or anything, and being a slightly superstitious person, I am hesitant to say anything crazy like “It went fine!” or “I passed!” But I can empirically confirm that I am still among the living, so at least I know I have that going for me.

4.     After three months, I have finally figured how to use the trams. Which, I mean, they operate basically the same way as the trains, so that’s not super revolutionary of me or anything.

Actually, yeah, let me rephrase that:

After three months, I have finally figured out that there are trams.

Like, seriously, for the first month and a half here I thought that they were just smaller S-Bahns, because I thought S-Bahn stood for “Straßebahn” (it doesn’t) and…basically the moral of the story is that I probably shouldn’t be let out in public.

5.     On a similar note, a part of my regular U-Bahn line was recently under construction and so the train that I take was just shuttling back and forth between like, three stations. So long story short I spent like half an hour on a train going from Frankfurter Tor to Strausberger Platz to Frankfurter Tor to Strausberger Platz…before finally wising up to what was going on.

Anyway, in conclusion it turns out that I can make my morning commute in 30 minutes if I really need to, say, if I wasted half an hour riding back and forth on the same train like an idiot. Also, I now know what Ersatzverkehr means.

Anyway, I am 100% aware that this is by no stretch of the imagination my most interesting blog post, but the latter half of this month has mostly been me trying to get ahead on homework.

That aside, I’m pretty happy with my life right now. I’m getting pretty good at cooking, I’ve been mostly on top of assignments, and I’ve been making an effort to be more social. It might not be great story material, but life is good.