God help us.

A few days ago, there was a guy with a microphone standing on Alexanderplatz, the big square in the eastern part of Berlin. He was shouting about the end of the world and how the only salvation for Germany was Jesus. No one was paying all that much attention, but I noticed him because he's the first of his kind I've seen here. The Germans I've talked to tend to think of Americans as incredibly religious, and there is, to me, a conspicuous absence here of "Jesus Saves" bumper stickers and public debate about things like abortion and school prayer. The boys in the seventh grade class I teach weekly told me that their favorite school subject is religion. When I asked why, they said, "Because we don't have to do anything in it."

And I'd never heard any street prophets and doom-sayers here, either. In Chicago, there's one who totes his microphone about a block from where my mother lives. Whenever I passed him, he always seemed to be going on about how you wouldn't get to heaven if you were a homosexual or smoked cigarettes (Freudians would have a field day with that jutxaposition). The guy on Alex didn't seem to be pushing a particular program of abstaining, just urging the Germans to come to Jesus. As I said, they didn't seem very moved.

This tepid attitude toward religion is also part of Germany's general lack of comfort with the Turkish immigrants in the country, I think. One of my American friends who's also a TA works in a grade school in Kreuzburg, where the overwhelming majority of the kids are second-generation immigrants who have names like Jihad. When my friend was telling one class about different holiday traditions in the U.S., including Hanukkah, a rumor got started that she was a Jew. For the next week, she had these little kids asking her anxiously if she were Jewish, which they saw as a dirty word. It's sad enough that you have these little kids being brought up to see Jews as the enemy, but it's even more complicated in Germany, where most people shy away automatically from anything that smells vaguely of anti-Semitism. I think most Germans would say that their history pretty much shuts them out from getting really enthusiastic within a context of group loyalty, and makes them suspicious of people who do. The Jesus guy will probably lose his voice before he gets a whole lot of recruits.

The Ignorant Critic Strikes Again

I'm not sure what the phrase "experimental theater" means, but I apparently saw a piece of it on Thursday night. I'd seen ads for a one-woman show called "My Ulysses" that was supposed to be a re-imagining of James Joyce's book (or a reaction to it, or something like that). So I went to the theater, which is tucked away in a courtyard and was apparently transformed from an abandoned apartment building only about a decade ago. I'd had to show up early to pick up my ticket, so while I waited for the play to start, I sat drinking a cup of coffee in the "foyer," basically a large cinderblock room with visible fuse boxes and wires and colored lights giving a touch of class. The show itself took place in a similar large room - the crew had set up low bleachers at one end and lined them with cushions for the audience to sit on.

The show opened with some slides of the Greek countryside and a recording of someone reading the first few lines of the Odyssey in Greek. That last bit made me very happy. It was also pretty much the highlight of the play, which is hard to summarize. The woman alternated between reading excerpts from Joyce and talking about the course of "the production" and her search for a new apartment. The general theme seemed to be, "gee, isn't it neat how art imitates life and vice versa, and how we're all on this sort of journey, and how making art is its own journey and stuff?" And that is a neat idea (and stuff), but it wasn't very originally presented. I could have gone and rented "Kiss Me, Kate" and gotten the same message, but with Cole Porter songs. In a show about a book based on an epic that is so much about restlessness and homecomings, I never really felt that the material came to rest anywhere.

Still, the idea that I was watching this show in an old squatter building in Berlin was pretty cool, since Berlin itself is such a restless city - still trying to straddle that line between gentrification and authenticity. It's not a very American spirit, I think. I like it tremendously.

What's the plural of "Madonna and Child"?

I was wondering about this last Thursday, as I was walking through the Bode Museum. State-run museums are free from 6 to 10 p.m. on Thursday evenings here, so if you're cheap and here for a while, as I am, you can plan your visits carefully, not pay a thing, and have the thrill of being in a museum after hours.

Anyway, I was walking through a hallway of medieval art and wondering how many representations of the Madonna and Child I've seen. Madonnas and Children? Madonna and Childs?

Let's not even get into the question of whether it's Jesus's mother or Jesus'.

Roses are red. Garbage smells rotten. At one point, I liked you, but why? I've forgotten.

I no longer have a working computer, so I can't make my traditional playlist of "Love Stinks" songs for Valentine's Day consolation. Luckily, I don't really need it - V day seems to be a much more understated deal here. I've seen a few shops advertising for sexy underwear or whatever, but there aren't masses of hearts floating around everywhere, and even the school isn't at all decorated. As someone who's been single for every Valentine's Day of her life, it's nice to spend one without feeling like there are loudspeakers everywhere blaring "Single? Oh. Well, good luck finding fulfillment and happiness by next year!"

College is not the best place to be unattached. I didn't go to the big senior ball the school held in the fall - I stayed in with my roommate, and we ate pizza and watched Fever Pitch - but some of my friends did go stag. They were so happy when they left for the dance, looking absolutely gorgeous, of course. A few hours later, though, they knocked on our door after coming back early. You can have the healthiest self-image ever, but if you've gotten all dressed up and are ready to enjoy yourself and hang out with your friends, only to realize that you're one of a few people without a date and are surrounded by couples making out on the dance floor, it torpedoes whatever good feelings you had about that night. You leave early and then spend most of the night sitting on your bed, head leaning against the wall, wondering why nobody wants you. There are no atheists in the trenches? There aren't many feminists at a fancy ball, either.

Not that I imagined that my friends who were in relationships existed in a state of eternal bliss. I had a lot of friends who spent way too much time and effort with boyfriends who were indifferent, condescending, mean, still obsessed with a former girlfriend, or unfaithful. I wanted better for them, and definitely want better for myself.

So anyway, I've been thinking about love at this time of year - like ya do - and the thought occured to me: what would I do with a boyfriend?

I mean besides the obvious and unprintable (minds out of the gutter a moment, my friends). What would having a boyfriend look like, given my current lifestyle? I remembered something an American friend of mine here said, half-facetiously, about her new relationship: "Oh, you know how boyfriends are. They call you all the time. They always want to know where you are. They always want to do stuff with you."

See, this does not sound romantic or nice to me. It sounds pretty awful, in fact. I like my privacy. I like being accountable to no one but myself for my time. I like being able to meet new people and feel that my possibilites are open. And the thing is - it's such a cliche that you go to Europe to find yourself, but in a sense, that's what I feel like I'm doing. Now that I'm not in college, I have no excuses not to call myself an adult anymore and to try to figure out the adult I want to be. And I feel like I'm just starting to realize really important things: how to talk to people, how to care for people, how to be honest with myself. Not that having a boyfriend would necessarily interfere with any of that, but I feel like it would concentrate my social energies when I'm pretty happy dispersing them - enjoying Berlin and the people I've met here, traveling, thinking about the future. I wouldn't mind working on that other cliche of the American abroad and finding a mysterious and sexy European stranger to have a fling with, but I don't really want a relationship right now - I'm definitely feeling less "whither thou goest, I go" and more "dude, let's hang out a while." I don't want to settle. I don't want to have to worry about nursing someone else's ego. I really just want to - cue the music - have fun, and figure out who I am and what I want out of life.

And maybe, in one Valentine's Day or ten, I will find someone who has a sense of humor, who treats me like a person with a brain, who I'll want to love and respect and admire and have phone conversations with that last for hours and be with all the time and all that. I hope so. It would certainly help elucidate most of the Western canon and a lot of bad pop songs.

But, you know. No hurry.

As time goes by

I recently got a notice about my high school's five-year reunion. I won't be able to go, since it's in April. But it's a weird thing to think about.

Less weird, but not much happier, to think about is that my winter break is over and that I have class in about two hours . . . sigh.

Praha

There's nothing like twelve hours of sleep, followed by some leisurely coffee drinking, to make you feel brand new. So, Prague: I saw more of the city than I intended on my first day there - I took the train from Berlin and tried to follow the directions my hostel gave me from the train station, only to find that the directions were apparently written by someone who had never been to Prague or who just liked sending weary travelers to stops on the tram that do not exist. So I tried to work out my way there using the map in the train station and ended up walking around for about two hours, turning my tiny map around in mostly vain attempts to orient myself and asking people for directions every few steps. A nice woman at an internet cafe finally got me heading in the right direction.

I hadn't slept well the night before (I don't usually sleep well on the night before trips, and I'd also been to dinner with a friend until about midnight, which didn't help), so I was hoping to get to bed early. What I didn't realize, though, was that my room was only a few doors down from the hostel bar that was blaring American pop, and that most of the other beds in the room were being occupied by a group of girls who, though they seemed very nice, were also the sort of people who seem to have shrieking conversations at all hours and who need to search through their bags ten times, zipping and unzipping every pocket, in order to find their toothbrush. I realize that staying in a hostel means dealing with these sorts of things, but I was tired and not in a mood to be reasonable.

So, for the first few days, I was walking the city on little sleep. I feel like I don't have much to say about the city itself. I think my expectations were a little high going in; I'd heard from other people about how beautiful the city was, and I got there and sort of had the feeling, "Well . . . yeah, it's nice. I guess." It is quite a lovely city, with all sorts of interesting architechtural mixes, a nice place to get lost in. I did go up into the palace, which wasn't very impressive. The most exciting part was seeing the window where the 1618 Defenestration of Prague took place, but it was still only a window. I also went into a few museums that seemed like a triumph of advertising over content; they were housed in really neat buildings, but had confusing layouts and really vague captions that weren't always very well translated into English. I feel like there are some cities, like some people, with whom you just have more chemistry. When I first came to Berlin and to Rome, I felt like I wanted to stay. After about a day and a half in Prague, I wasn't desperately unhappy, but I felt like I would have been okay with going home. I'd already paid in advance for both my hostel and my train ticket, though, so I stayed.

And I ended up being glad I did. That night, the group of girls moved out and a bunch of new people came. All of them were traveling singly and inclined to be sociable, and they came from all over - a few Australians, a French Canadian, an Italian, a French guy, and various others. It was a really nice group, and we ended up going out the next few nights to the various jazz and other music bars near the hostel. So, I didn't get any more sleep than I had for the first part of the week, but I was in a better mood about it (and of course we were all as quiet as possible when we came back to the room late, and made sure beforehand that we had our toothbrushes handy). In deference to the linguistically challenged Anglophones, everyone spoke English. One thing I've sort of gotten to like, both with the assistant teaching and with doing some traveling, is hearing English spoken with different accents and all the different influences that go into them. The Frenchman, for example, had the sort of typical French accent, but he'd spent two years working in Ireland and had also picked up some typical Irish vocabulary: "Hmph, and I told 'im, I don't give a fuck about zat!" So that was quite funny.

Oh, and there were also a couple good bagel places near the hostel. It's hard to find good bagels in Berlin, so I pretty much lived on them while I was in Prague. Probably as a result of not spending much money on food, I came in under budget and actually changed money back to euros. A lot of Prague was pretty cheap, and even in the touristy areas, the prices were really only equivalent to what they might be if there were in euros at a normal price, not a tourist-trap price. So that wasn't too bad.

Anyway, like I said, I had a good week - as you've presumably gathered, though, more from the company than from the city itself. Today will be a grocery shopping day, since I have nothing back at the apartment (dinner last night was a bagel I brought back with me).

Back in the ex-DDR

Well, I got off the train from Prague about an hour ago and came back to an inbox full of e-mails. I had a good time, but since I haven't had a decent night's sleep in about a week, I'm quite tired. And hungry, and kind of grimy. Anyway, more tomorrow. And too bad about the Bears, eh?

Big plans, large bills

I know I've been a little lacking in the blogging department lately. It's not so much that I've had nothing to say. Actually, this has been quite a busy week in more than one respect. My Betreuungslehrer is back from watching the kids on work experience, so I pick up the classes that were canceled when he was away, and a few other teachers asked if I could work a few extra hours this week. So I actually had things to do around school, which was nice.

It's also been an unusually social week. On Tuesday I had dinner with another teaching assistant and friend from orientation, and then we went to a concert where another friend of ours was playing. And on Wednesday I met up with some other foreigners in Berlin who get together to practice their German (and drink beer). And then I've got something else tonight. This social schedule is pretty exhausting by my standards, and I think a nap might be in order this afternoon, but it's good to be busy.

Also, the beginning of February marks the halfway point of my time here. I've already filed the mandatory midterm report with Fulbright, which included questions about my budget, with the requirement that the answers be given in U.S. dollars. I've gotten used to thinking in euros, so that was sort of a pain.

Anyway, I wanted to do a more informal version of a midterm report here, since it is a good time to stop and think about the last five months, but I think that'll have to wait until next week. There's no school next week - it's the winter break - and tomorrow morning I'm going to Prague for five days. The Czech Republic is in the EU, but isn't going to switch over to the euro until 2010 or so, so after a visit to the money changers, I now have a wallet full of bills with absurdly large numbers on them. I suppose it's part of the Eastern European experience.

So that's what I'm thinking about for the next few posts. In the meantime, I hope everyone's doing well.