Weblog

So, we all slept in pretty late. I crashed on John's futon with David. I didn't bother getting undressed; I just slept in my clothes. We got up and wasted no time around the house. We first went and got groceries. We came back and had hamburgers for breakfast. After that, we set out around Berlin with John's two transportation passes and climbing on buses and trams and trains. We went down to the central part of town with no apparent itinerary in mind. Although we saw a part of the Berlin Wall yesterday, today, we went down and saw more of the wall. We headed down to Checkpoint Charlie. It was basically a tollbooth set up in the middle of the street with a Soviet soldier with a Soviet flag posing for pictures (which I thought was great). Along the sides of the streets were street vendors selling tons and tons of communist memorabilia. If it weren't for the fact that we were walking a little too fast, I probably would have purchased one of those flippin' sweet hats. We then went to a museum dedicated to the wall and the Nazi war trials. After that, John left us to go to his church's worship practice. So, we were left to explore the city on our own. We took our transportation passes and set about to head over to Tiergarten. Once there, we decided to have a bit of lunch. We took the advise of an advertisement that we saw in the station and headed to the nearest restaurant that only happened to be twenty metres down the street from where we were, Burger King. There's really nothing much notable about Burger King. We walked around in the Tiergarten itself. The Tiergarten is essentially the Central Park of Berlin. The part that we happened to walk through was an English garden. After enjoying the sights for a bit, we decided to head back to John's apartment on the other side of town, but we still had plenty of time left before we needed to be back. So, we hopped onto random train after random train with no apparent destination in mind. It wasn't a waste however; we got to learn how the train system in Berlin worked. Berlin is a great city; one can live in Berlin and not need a car. It's amazing how great public transportation works in cities like this.

We eventually made our way back to John's house. Once there, we relaxed for a bit. I made a call to my parents to let them know how I was since I haven't been able to post any updates yet. It happened to slip my mind that today was their anniversary which wasn't really hard since I haven't the slightest clue when their anniversary is (well, I know now). Other than that, I just did some catch up homework for American Government. When it came time, we got on the tram and headed down the street to John's church. John's church is… unconventional. Rock Berlin is a church that occupies the top floor of a building. My first impression of the church was that it was a yuppie, Starbuckesque coffee shop. Where churches have pews, Rock Berlin has softseat chairs and couches. It turns out that Rock Berlin is a “free church”. I had read earlier in my German polity book that there is a nine percent tax levelled on all people in Germany that is used to fund one of the official churches of Germany: Catholic, Lutheran or Jewish. However, there are some churches in Germany that don't receive funding from the government. These are free churches. Most of the members of the congregation, I later found out, had filed papers to be exempt from paying the church tax.

Church began at precisely 18:07 (like I said, unconventional). The worship service had songs in both English and German. The sermon was given by an American pastor with a German translation. The pastor got a little theologically heretical when he said that the 1989 World Series were the best ever when any red-blooded American knows that it was the 2004 World Series. After church, dinner was served to the congregation. I couldn't help but think how similar this was to the first-century church by the way that it conducted itself. We had some conversations with several of the church members. I had a nice conversation with a German man over the issue of baseball hats, linguistics and the English language dominating the world. Concerning baseball hats, we were talking about how the preacher incorporated baseball into his sermon and how the Germans in the congregation found it hilarious. I asked if Germans really knew what baseball was all about. I have seen several people all around Germany equipped with New York Yankees hats; on the train into Berlin, I even saw a guy in a Yankees jersey. He explained to me that most Germans don't even know who the Yankees are and that they think that they're wearing plain, New-York hats. Commenting on his good English, I asked him what the general consensus was about having English spoken practically universally in Germany. He stated that when business deals internationally, there needs to be a common language. It didn't matter to him at all that English was that language. He tried to explain to me that this one guy in Poland had an idea once to create an international language called Esperanto. My response was simply “Mi parolas Esperanton.”. He then asked me how many languages that I knew. I thought about it and gave him my answer: English, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Latin and now German. He told me that my linguistic abilities were not what he expected from an American. He then asked me if I was sure that I was an American. After giving it some thought, I eventually responded with “No”.

Normally, after church, the convention is to show a film. However, John thought it best to take us back to his place instead of watching Bend It Like Beckham all in German. However, before we went back, we went to the church's recreation room where we played a game of foosball and two games of 301. Melody and I took some of the stuff back to John's apartment while John, Jim and David went and helped on of the members of John's congregation move some equipment. The guy offered them all money for the trouble, but they refused monetary compensation. So, the member gave John two bottles of Chilean wine in return. Normally, I would leave out such a small detail, but, my future roommate being from Chile, I had to mention it. For the rest of the night, we relaxed and watched a movie while I did some more homework. I took a break from homework to write in my journal about my day. However, while I was writing, I kept noticing a problem in my typing. Apparently, my instinct is to hit the y key with my left hand when I think that it's actually proper to hit it with the right. So, every time that I've been making a mistake with hitting the key with the wrong hand, I've been having to go back and correct myself. Yeah, I'm sure that you wanted to know that.