Our weekend trip to Bamberg, Bayreuth and Kulmbach was amazing. Bamberg was the real highlight of the trip. The town was founded in 1049 and survived both world wars and so it was in amazing condition. In the town is a large monastary and a Cathedral that I still found to be very impressive even after the dozen or so Cathedrals I've already seen in my European travels. Many towns I've visited have an old district, but Bamberg appeared to be frozen in time. The entire town was either beautiful high peaked Bavarian style roofs or elegent stone facades. I felt that it was a great contrast from the big city Berlin life that we experience on a day to day basis, the people were very friendly and the food was all traditionally German. The little extra Bamberg had to offer for us was the beer, as it is home to the German Rauchbier. Once there were 65 breweries in what is now a town of almost 70,000 people and today still ten of them are in operation. For Sean, Frodo, and I who consider ourselveses to be rather experienced beer tasters the Rauchbier was a new treat. It was a very richly flavored smokey beer, so strong was the smoke that it reminded me of the smoke cure used for smoking meats. We liked the stuff so much that we carried back on the train four small kegs which we plan to space out over the remaining length of our stay here in Berlin.
One experience that also stood out was our happening upon an old antique store. It was run by an older man probably in his 70s and after inspecting the store hoping to find some authentic old beer steins, we came across his collection of Nazi memorabilia. He had every thing from books with Nazi propoganda to toy Nazi soldiers waving banners with swastikas. It was shocking to see because I knew that things of that nature were illegal to sell. After seeing that and being aware of all the Nazi history in Berlin that we have been discussing it really made me think about what the Nazi past of Bamberg was. We were probably walking through a small town that had an equally devastating past for its Jewish inhabitants, but there are no memorials to tell the story. It was clear that Bamberg had a Jewish past because we past a street named Judenstraße. Although I've honestly been a bit overwhelmed with monuments lately, the fact that there were none seemed creepy because the perpetrators never recognized it there.
After returing from our trip we realized as a group that the week would be difficult because of the number of things we had planned. Tuesday was the Berliner Ensemble, and Jessica's birthday. Wednesday was Halloween. So for filming our main project that only left us with Thursday available to film ping pong clubs.
The Berliner Ensemble was really enjoyable especially because for me it was the first time that I had attended a performance entirely in German and at the end of it walked out feeling that I had understood everything. The way the dialogue between charachters helped in that each would finish the sentences of the other and also it was very simple language but I still had a sense of accomplishment.
Our Wednesday screening of Wings of Desire, and the discussion that followed on Thursday was interesting mostly because it made me think about perspective. The discussion and debate that insued over white male angels propogating the image of white male dominance really sparked my thinking on the topic. Specifically how our perspective is formed and the judgement of one perspective by a person of another perspective.
Before class on Thursday I had my first meeting with Conny, the tandem language partner that Thorsten set me up. From the start it was clear that she requires very little help with her English speaking skills. For her the most important thing is to become more comfortable speaking the language. Our first meeting was definetly more English oriented because after my overcelebrating of Halloween, German was not coming easily to me that next day. I'm really glad though that I have someone to meet with and I'm confident that speaking once a week with her will really help. If nothing else it will force me to study my grammar text that I brought, just so that I can save face.
After our chaotic week was finished we came out of it with not much getting accomplished. The only real steps forward that we made were gathering some iconic footage of the Reichstag, organizing and cataloging all of our footage to this point, and obtaining leads for ping pong clubs that we will follow up next week.
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