Ich bin ein Berliner!

Hello everyone!

To those of you who have been waiting for me to post something, my apologies - up until now I had to pay to use the internet, so I tried to minimize my time online. (Blogger is not a good place to be when you want to minimize your online time!) So, if you haven't already heard, I made it here to Berlin. I was delayed a bit and of course very tired, but I'm pretty much acclimated now, at least physically! Mentally, everything is a bit crazy. There's just so much to take in! But I shouldn't get ahead of myself here. Let me first give an update on what one of my new friends here calls "the honeymoon phase" - that is, my first few days in Berlin. You could also call it "the unabashed tourist phase."

Day 1 (some mixture of Tuesday and Wednesday): I arrived in Berlin sometime in the early afternoon - I really don't remember exactly when. My flight out of Nashville was delayed due to weather, so I missed my original flight to Berlin and instead was put on a flight to Frankfurt and then another flight to Berlin. Miraculously, my luggage made it too. I was greeted at the airport very warmly by Manu (short for Manuela. Manu and her husband Timo are pastors of a new church in a part of former East Berlin called Pankow. I found their church website at the end of last year and have been in contact with them throughout the summer. They were soooo nice to offer to greet me at the airport - it was especially nice after my longer-than-planned-which-still-would've-been-long journey. She was there with her brand new baby girl (whose name is Heidi!! so cute!!) holding a sign that said, "Welcome Christina Lordemann." Everyone here spells my name with 2 n's. :) Manu was sooo friendly, and she drove me to the youth hostel where I was staying, made sure I got checked in okay, gave me a few subway maps and showed me how to get to the church. After she left, I called my mom at home (the signal was amazingly clear!) and then took a nap... a 6 hour nap that is. I woke up around 10, got online for a little while, then went back to bed at midnight and slept until almost 9:30. I didn't sleep especially well, but I slept long, and that was probably what I needed most! So, Day 1 was Sleep Day.

Day 2: Breakfast at the hostel was from 7 to 9, so I missed it of course, having woken up closer to 9:30. I took my time getting ready - I had a lot of fun with the shower, which was very confusing! Not all of the showers here are like this, but the shower in my bathroom had extremely high water pressure, but you turned it on sort of like you turn on a faucet in a public bathroom - you push a knob, and then after about 30 seconds it shuts off. Also, the tempurature is controlled by knobs that are on the wall outside the shower. So it took me a little while! But I finally got it to the right temperature, and actually I think the whole 30-second thing is pretty smart because it wastes a lot less water. You only turn it on when you need to rinse. You also shower faster that way. It's really quite efficient.

After that interesting experience I went out in search of food and drink, since I hadn't had a real meal since I was on the airplane. (Fear not - I did eat this amazing pretzel that I bought in the airport that had cheese and ham on it - wunderbar!) Fortunately there was a little cafe just down the street, so I went there. While I was there I heard the song "Hotel California," which I thought was funny. They also had these great ads on the window for Berliners. A Berliner is something like a jelly-filled doughnut. Of course whenever anyone hears the word Berliner, everyone likes about JFK's infamous speech, when he said, "Ich bin ein Berliner" (which would be something like saying, "I am a jelly doughnut"). Pictures coming soon.

From there I decided to wander a bit. Everything was really new exciting. Berlin is an absolutely beautiful city. Especially where the hostel was - a part of town called Wilmersdorf - there are TONS of trees, and the buildings are mostly much lighter in color (and often also prettier!) than they are in other cities. I can't really compare it to any American cities that I've been to. It's really pretty.

When I checked into the hostel the day before, they told me that another girl from the program (BCGS - Berlin Consortium for German Studies) was already there, so just before lunch time I decided to find her. Her name is Suzy - she's really nice. We decided to get lunch and found this great cafe where they had really good tomato soup and really good ice cream too! Ice cream here is amazing - it's more like gelato, so it's not quite as creamy but richer in flavor and thus you eat less (and it's cheaper too!). After that I took another nap (a shorter one this time!) and then headed out to Pankow to go to a sort of small group meeting at the church.

It was a really nice evening. It was a small group - just me, Timo, and three others, plus one of them's son who is 6 years old. We had "Abendbrot" together (literally "evening bread," that is, a light dinner, more like lunch - cold cuts, bread, etc.) and of course much conversation, sang some songs together, which was totally awesome, since some of them were German translations of English songs ("Herr Dein Name Sei Erhöht" = "Lord I Lift Your Name On High," much better in German than in English, and also "Shout to the Lord" in German), had a time of prayer and then Bible study/discussion. Toward the end (that is, the Bible study part) it got harder to understand, and it was cool to pray in German but I wasn't ready to pray out loud in German - the thoughts didn't come naturally in German and it was distracting to translate myself. But it was a really nice evening and it was amazing to see God at work in these people's lives. Everyone who came is new to the church and just started coming after their big evangelism event they had about a month ago. It was so awesome. And everyone was sooooo friendly! I wanted so badly to go to church there this morning but I had stupid orientation stuff at the same time as church started. (How dumb is that? On a Sunday!)

Day 3: On Friday Suzy and I got up early and were the first ones at breakfast. At breakfast we met a girl from Barcelona named Olga - whom Suzy had actually already met - who is here for a year to study architecture at the technical university. We planned to meet up later in the day with her and one of her friends who is also from Spain. After breakfast Suzy and I wanted to go shopping and/or try to the find the university, but it was raining and neither of us had umbrellas, so we took naps instead. :) When I woke up, I had a new roommate - Jamen - but she was ready for a nap, so Suzy and I made our way slowly out to Kreuzberg, where we were meeting Olga and her friend, Eva. Kreuzberg (another part of Berlin) is really cool - and really Turkish! We had an awesome Turkish lunch for way cheap. Çok güzel! From there we split up again and Suzy and I headed for Kurfürstendamm to do some shopping.

Sure enough, we found exactly what we were looking for - an H&M! This part of town was sort of like 5th Avenue. Just like in NY, there was an H&M on every corner - we saw three all on one street, less than a block apart from each other! We also saw our first Starbucks in Germany. :) After buying jackets at H & M (since it's already cooler here than it was back home) we visited the Kaiser Wilhelms Gedächtnis Kirche (memorial church). It was built just before the turn of the 20th century, but almost completely destroyed during WW2. Only the main tower is still standing, but there's a new building next to it where they have services and such. After that we thought we should go back to the hostel and see if Jamen wanted to go to dinner.

Sure enough, that was the case! Jamen and Suzy were wanting to try their first German beer, so we asked the guy at the front desk if there were any good bars around and we got about a 30-minute answer! We picked one of them because he said they had live music, so we went there and it was actually pretty nice. They had a cafe upstairs and bar downstairs. We ate dinner upstairs and then decided just to walk around for a bit instead of going downstairs since it was really smoky there. We found a great little ice cream stand! After that we were, of course, ready for bed.

Since I have written an absurd amount tonight and I doubt no one really wants to read a novel right now (at least not one written by me!) I will stop for now and continue with Day 4 tomorrow. On Day 4 (yesterday) the program started, so I've basically covered the honeymoon phase. Fear not - I will not be giving you a play-by-play every single day! No one wants to read that! Just for now, while everything so fresh and new is...

Time for sleep. I love and miss you all!!!