at last

I'm back, man.  I didn't update for two reasons:  1) I was in Berlin for a week and 2) immediately upon my return I effed up my elbow, rendering typing painful and frustrating.  But now I get to ramble again and people can stop asking me if I gave up writing in this thing.

Berlin was a good time.  All the Fulbrighters in Germany and some from other countries (around 500 people total!) converged in one of the sweetest cities ever for a romp through wholesome lectures and panels interspersed with plenty of Berliner Weisse and general depravity.  And it was mostly free!

We were all housed in this ridiculously massive hotel on Alexanderplatz.  This hotel was monstrous.  Amy put it best when she said that it was like the Star of David for drunk people, because no matter where we were, we eventually saw the hotel shining like a beacon in the distance and hazily trudged toward it, being too cheap to bother with the friendly Berlin public transportation.  I accidentally got Dan's and my train ticket for a day too early, and since Dan got back from visiting his woman in Australia the day we were supposed to leave, I nearly had a very inconvenient crisis at hand.  Luckily, his plane got in early enough for him to make our train.  And our other Dickinsonian in Germany, Annie, just so happens to be stationed in Berlin and was awesome enough to let us bum on her huge couch overnight until we could check in at the hotel.  It was nice to see her again and she showed us around Friedrichshain and we met her hilarious British roommate.  

Most of the trip was filled with panels about political issues I don't really care about and lots of speeches by important Germans, including the former mayor of Hamburg (HH represent!) and the editor of the newspaper Die Welt.  It was pretty cool that important people cared about us.  Most of my time was spent with Dan and our friends based in other parts of Germany.  Eventually our little group solidified into a quintet of Dan, me, Jonathan, Zach, and Chelsea.  We accomplished important missions like visiting a bar called Klo (toilet), where we were greeted by a waitress handing out pieces of toilet paper.  Complete with an announcer whose job seemed to be to belittle everyone and seats made out of toilets, this bar was hilarious.  There were TV screens that showed absolutely ridiculous videos of people doing stupid stuff, and we snickered and giggled the whole time.  It was awesomely bad and the night was capped when we were waiting for the S-Bahn.  Dan guessed that the train would come in five minutes when in reality it was coming in seven, and Amy, who had been rather sauced since dinner (free wine got the better of her), declared, as if she had solved some kind of impossibly difficult math calculus problem, "Seven minutes... is more than five."  

I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, I have a bunch of stuff to do yet tonight, so I will continue with describing our epic journey tomorrow.  And how my elbow came to be, according to a very nice German doctor, "microscopically shattered."