So this is Christmas

After a stop over in Hamburg and Lübeck, with S and L and Santa Claus flying over us and the crowd at the Christmas market, I jumped on the train towards Copenhagen and my final destination - home. 

So this is Christmas, and a Happy New Year. The beginning of next year will be spent in Berlin, and after that - who knows. 

I got 99 problems and a Professor is one

One fine Wednesday evening, panic erupted throughout the Internet and messages were flying between confused students. The Bachelor students, note; not the Master students or both of the classes, but only the 20 or so Bachelor students of our studio, received an email from our Professor stating that he was leaving the studio and the University with immediate effect. He was not coming back. And he was not saying his adieus to us. 

Without an explanation, without any respect for us as students, without any knowing of what would happen next, we were stranded without a Professor - in the middle of the damn term. So we waited a day. Nothing. No news from the University. No news from our teachers. Did we still have a class to go to? A studio to attend? Would we get our credits? Would we graduate? Nothing. 

Not only did students choose the studio because of its Professor (a professor that just gets up and leaves!!) but "miscalculations" on the numbers of attending students in the beginning of the year resulted in three studios being cut out of the schedule - leaving students only to choose between mere four studios, causing well over packed studios. 

Finally we got some clues of what was going to happen. We would continue. Just carry on as before, with our teachers there to lead us - see us through the term. And after that, there will be no more Studio Sauerbruch at the Udk Berlin. 

as the wall came tumbling down we went looking for some freedom

On the night of 9 November, we celebrated the reunion of Berlin. The 25 years that had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. All morning I could feel the excitement in the air, the joy, the historic wings of time and place that were fluttering over the city and the sad memories of what people had to go through and the marks that are still there. To the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the presence of guests of honour and eyewitnesses, white balloons would be released into the skies to commemorate the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Wall. 

So we headed down to Brandenburg Tor to be a part of a unified Berlin but were greeted by police and fencing saying that we could not pass - it was closed. And so we stood there, with thousand of others, our faces glued to the fences trying to see a glimpse of the grand celebrations that were taking place on the other side of Brandenburg Tor, on the right side - in the West. 

We asked the police and guards what to do, how we could get through, upon they all answered "It is closed, you can´t get in… but try to see if there is an opening somewhere, a hole…" "Is this meant to be symbolic?" we replied. But we found a hole. And in the dark we pushed ourselves forward through thickets and bushes in the company of a dozen others to get to the music, the dancing, the currywurst and the glühwein. And then, then it was really good. 

when in Weimar

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip down to Weimar with the International Office Coordinators and international students. Weimar - the place of Goethe, Schiller, Franz Liszt, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, National Socialist propaganda and of course the Bauhaus - the most important art school in Germany at the time, founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. A style that became one of the most influential currents in modern design and Modernist architecture, as well as the art, design and architectural education. First founded in Weimar, it was later relocated to Dessau and we made a stop there to indulge in the overload of great architecture. Not only did we walk around the hallways of the Bauhaus School, eat in the canteen, entered the office of Mr Gropius and hanged out in the students private rooms, we also got introduced to the Masters' Houses - imagine; every teacher got assigned their own house, all in a true Bauhaus style, except for the interior of house Kandinsky where actual golden walls were put up as a backdrop to old style furnitures and big carpets. My kind of house.

After the Dessau stop, we got back on the route to Weimar were we continued in the footsteps of the Bauhaus movement but added a little history of Goethe, Schiller and the Nazis to the to-do-list.

Weimar is a pretty dull place after dark. A beautiful, but dull place. We saw the theatre glowing in sparkling lights buzzing with life and movement, but as the doors opened and people started to spill out on to the little town square, in a second they were all dissolved and on their way home leaving the little town dark and quite behind. Through some inside information we found one local pub that was filled with action, after we had filled our stomachs with crêpes at the local créperie - no sturdy german food for this group of students. 

The last evening in Weimar, I ended up in a true local bar where a jug of beer was handed to me at the measly cost of 1 euro. There the bar lady acted as a shepherd gathering her herd close to her, providing them with beer, good laughs and a lot of gossip. 

Mechanically opened windows.

Luckily we got a guided tour of the newly opened New Masterhouse Gropius, done by BFM Architekten, where the Kurt-Weill-Centre will house from now on. The Masterhouse was destroyed during the WWII and now rebuilt in a most sensible way. Totally in awe of the place. 

On a more tragic note. Buchenwald Concentration Camp is situated just in the outskirts of Weimar. A strategically well-thought-through position - the first concentration camp during the WWII that was actually applied for. So we got on a bus and drove the 7km to the place where 250 000 people were kept prisoners, without the knowing of the inhabitants of Weimar - or so they claimed. It was my first visit to a concentration camp. Enough said. 

A steel slab on the grounds of Buchenwald engraved with the names of fifty-one national groups that were victimized there. The slab is set at a constant 37 degrees Celsius, to suggest the body heat of those whose memory it would enshrine. In winter, with snow covering the rest of the ground, the slab is always clear, an all-season marker for the site of the original attempt to commemorate the crimes of Buchenwald. 

what you doin' in the club on a Thursday?

Fun facts I've picked up during my first weeks at UdK:

1. People smoke in school. Inside the actual school. Granted, not in the studio, but in the hall ways, on the staircases - thick deep smoke from roll-your-own cigarettes. 

2. Germans drink juices and sodas all the time. Not water, but juices. When they are thirsty they buy a glass bottle of juice. When we have a five minute break, they buy a glass bottle of juice. And then they sip that through out the whole day, until they buy another one. 

3. On our ground floor the toilets are lit with UV lights. The headache when you really need to relieve yourself and enter a dark, small cubicle with only the glowing toilet paper as a guide on your way. 

4. Our crouqis model not only has a huge vagina tattooed on her upper back - I mean huge, with specific detailing - she was also wearing a tampon during last session. My first impulse was to stand up, slow clap and end with raising my hands in a foam-finger-matter yelling You go girl! But I didn´t. 

I just kept thinking how she was coping - how did she feel lying there all naked with that deep dull aching, spasmodic pain, the irradiant feeling down your back and upper thighs… aaaah, I really hate having my period.  

I know I got a bad reputation, walking-round-always-mad reputation

During the days - after coming back from uni - I blast up the radio only to find the same songs playing over and over and over again. What's worse - I like it. Sigmas remix of Bound follows me to the bathroom and when I'm done with business I dance down the hallway accompanied by Robin Schulz's Prayer in C. The dishes are done with the soundtrack of Calvin Harris' Blame, then they turn it down a notch - enters does Sam Smith with his Stay with me. 'Round about here they mix the list up with some classics like Eminem's Slim Shady or Backstreet Black's No Diggity and as I do my about-to-crawl-into-bed-routine All about the bass comes sprinting through the speakers and my body starts to shake. Of course it all culminates into Shake it off with Taylor Swift. Then it ends abruptly with me switching the damn radio off. 

Last weekend I happened to meet up with my dear, oh-so-lovely ms. N in the presence of some dumplings and an organic beer. Her former job offered an excursion to Berlin with them and she gladly accepted, leaving the cold north behind. It was as if we had never parted on that warm summer day more than two years ago. After the lunch we strolled down Schönhauser Alle and I got to meet her cousin who is an artist based here in Berlin - own shop and all. 

All in all, the week has been good on me. I´ve started to talk German, and with started I mean I sometimes order my coffee in German. Better than nothing. 

No sugar for the monkey

Spent the night with a fun gang of people at Twinpigs Neukölln - where masters of drink making have their operation.

Yikes. We sat from 10am until 7pm listening to the presentations of all the courses, studios and projects that are available to choose from this Winter semester… all oral presentations… all in German… nothing to be found on the grand Internet or on a trustworthy piece of paper... oh how my head hurt at the end of that day. The key for us students from abroad is to find courses, seminars, projects that fit the programs back home, we also need to have the same amount of credits at the end of the term as we would have had back home. Here in Berlin though, they do not give a rats as about that and all their courses and seminars have way less amount of credits that we are used to. This all means that we, to get enough credit, need to take a lot, lot of different courses. After a bit of smooth talking though they were more than willing to raise the amount of credits given in each course. So I guess we are saved. We had to choose the studios we intended to be in right there and then after hearing the presentations - not much to analyse or proscratinate, just pick the one that seemed right enough. We had to rank three studios that we could consider being involved in. I got my second choice - which was very disappointing. I mean not getting my first choice - epic fail. At least at first. My second choice of studio was not and is not a bad choice - far from it. I really think I'll have fun there, in Mr. Sauerbruchs studio. This term we are going to have cooking classes together. While the other studio is off to France for a week…

That day I also got my Mensa card and ate at the Mensa student cafeteria for the first time - awful food, but nice place. It was the first time I see anything automized in this country. You actually received a card there on site, which you then filled with money at an ATM-sort-of-thing. Then when you picked your food, choosing from a vast range of different things, you get up to the cashier and place your card on a thingy, without the need of speaking or greeting anyone, and you food is payed. Voila! 

Took the U-bahn home after that. Ahh this U-bahn. Filled with people. Live music for one stop. Street musicians always hop on for one stop. Always performing the same songs - First Hit the road Jack - which I would like to say to them as well and then Ai se eu te pego… although I am fed up, I see how the tourists immediately shine up when the see the show and a large smile awakens in their faces. At least they think its nice.

Who peed in your cornflakes?

The whole thing with the School of Arts being unstructured and 'free', with a do-it-yourself attitude, is making everything a lot, lot more difficult than we anticipated. On our first information meeting, where we were supposed to get an introduction to the Architecture department, we were told - after no questions of ours were being answered - that it kind of was our own fault choosing the school… words delivered by an engineer. Bravo. I guess we will figure it all out eventually. Next week the school starts of with a Projektbörse, a word I hadn't heard before, where we will be given an introduction to all courses and projects we can choose from and then we have to chose them. So stay tuned.

I wrapped up the day by meeting up with L at Alexanderplatz. We took the U5 to Astra Kulturhaus in Friedrichshain where First Aid Kit was booked to share some tunes with us. It was a cozy night with great people and great atmosphere. There were songs being played unplugged and there were singalongs. There were jokes delivered, about cheese(!!), and a song by Jack White being sung. The girls played both old and new stuff and it was all done with a golden backdrop and sparkling light. 

the moose's name was Ron.

On the day of registration I met S, since then we have been following each other around. As students of the University of the Arts we were welcomed by the head master, on a wednesday morning, in the Georg Neumann Saal at the Jazz Institute where all newcomers were gathered. And as I sat there with musicians, artists, designers and dancers beside me and the grand piano on the stage in front of me I felt excitement and great expectations. This would be fun. 

After the welcoming, our herd of students walked down to the Spree and positioned ourselves on a boat that would take us around the city. With a beer in our hand and a view of Berlin in front of us, we were kept busy for the next 2.5 hours. We ended up in Kreuzberg. S took me and a bunch of others to a local pizza bar that serves heavenly pizza slices - very thin dough combined with unusual toppings just as they do in Toronto where the owner once worked, hence the name Ron Telesky Canadian Pizza. The place is guarded by a giant moose head, bigger than the joint itself. There they got some interesting pizza on offer, like the Couchpotato with sweet potato, rosemary and cheddar, the Wayne Gretzky with caramelized garlic and Herman the German with sauerkraut, potatoes and kasseler. And then you may add additional topping like hot maple sauce, sweet mustard (which was yum) and homemade tabasco sauce. Great stuff! After that, as the rain entered into our lives, I headed back home. 

suicide sue and morning blues

We tried and tried and finally made it - to get a seat at Suicide Sue. One great coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice later (and a promise to be back) we made our way to the Jewish Cemetery where we walked around among ivy and fallen headstones. 

Later that evening we were invited to some friends house for pizza and wine. They were all German and as I nodded along, playing a master of pretender, occasionally throwing in a Ah Mann!, a Doch! and Genau!, they had a fruitful and rewarding conversation. It was nice though, listening to chatters in German. And actually, I did understand, a lot.  

I´m walking, I´m walking, I´m walking

I spend the upcoming days walking around alone, strolling around alone, sauntering around alone. I am alone, in Berlin. L is working late hours and school has not yet started, so the sum of it all is me being alone. Oh the irony. I have always told myself - one day, one day when I have the time I will spend my days writing, writing, writing. Now that I do have time I instead acquaintance myself with Lidl, Penny and the shopping mall down the road - ploughing through them for food and drinks. Summer is in town so people are horizontally scattered in parks, including myself - until a strange dude places himself way to close to me, waiting. I am pretty sure he wants to rob me of something. But since I do not have something, he stands up and continues down the road.  

As I walk towards Wedding for the very first time, thinking it is just a working-class neighborhood  (it was known as "Red Wedding" for its largely Communist working class after the World War I) I suddenly pass the famous Mauerpark - apparently not at all far from where I live - and, further down the road, I stumble upon the wall(!!) The Wall! There it is - die Mauer - and I just happened to pass by it. I have been totally obsessed with the Berlin Wall since 1961 (minus some 35 years) and was mentally preparing myself for a day long excursion of me finally meeting it. And then I just head down the road, without a map, and am suddenly confronted with this concrete wall, DDR and its history. Bernauer Strasse is on my way to Wedding. When the Berlin Wall was being built in August 1961, many who lived in these buildings frantically jumped from their windows before the buildings could be evacuated and their windows bricked up. 

Anyways, me and L end the weekend in Neukölln with a view of a sun soaked Berlin sitting on the rooftop of a parking house which houses the bar Klunkerkranich. 

I got racks, racks, racks, 'til the ATM jam

As soon as L picks me up at Alexanderplatz, on the day of arrival, and we step out onto the buzzing streets of Berlin I am greeted by a band playing under the viaduct. I had left Schönefeld airport dragging along 30 kg of overstuffed suitcases with sweat pouring down on me. No signs to be seen. No information on which platform the damn express train would depart from. And no connection with L. So when I arrive to Alexanderplatz, exhausted, disorientated and thirsty, the music from underneath the viaduct is well needed. The first evening in Berlin is spent in an Asian joint just around the corner from the apartment where beers mixed with Sprite are drunk and big plates of tofu are being eaten. Ah Berlin!

Since school is not on the agenda for another week or two, the first days of me being in the new capitol I stroll around Prenzlauer Berg, walk down Kastanienalee and Schönhauser Allee, end up in Mitte, pay visits to shops, find myself in front of the Berliner Dom and continue around the Museuminsel. As night falls, music from the street musicians fill the air and peoples chatter is all around me as I made the long walk back home.  

Then the sun went up again and it was once again out and about. This time L was with me and we took the U-Bahn to Charlottenburg, watched the city marathon as we flew passed high above, walked to Kurfürstendamm (Ku'damm) with ice cream cones in our hands and enjoyed the tall green trees in Tiergarten. As tiredness and fatigue took a hold on us we headed for Clärchens Ballhaus and ate Käsespätzle with Röstzwiebeln and Apfelkompott and got a taxi to drive us back home to Prenzlauer Berg.

Facts about Berlin. The taxi is super cheap - it cost us almost the same as a U-Bahn ticket to get home from Mitte.  

The whole thing with not paying with card. It is amazing how cash is king in this country. They actually charge you extra if you want to pay with card - in the taxi and at the restaurant. So befriend an ATM, treat it well and all will be good.

I could move to a small town and say my name was stacy

And so I arrive in Berlin. 

A year ago I would never have guessed that I would be able to scribble down Berlin as my hometown. A year ago I would never have thought these streets would lead me to the red door with the golden door knob that needs a pull whilst turning the key and then a push to open and reveal the white painted apartment which I now call home. I wake up staring through the window at the ivy coated wall, listening to the floor boards as they moan when L pass by the room. When people ask for my address, I now say Prenzlauer Berg - Berlin.

Walking around, hours after hours, was my main occupation during those first days upon arriving to the capital of Germany.

turn the radio up for that sweet sound

Seven weeks of project work had come to an end and we all gathered at the Jomo Kenyatta Sports Ground to present and discuss our work with the public. Of course it was mostly men asking the questions, however some fine ladies came up to us with encouraging words like the radio hostess at Urban Radio. Our group ended up talking about our project live on air the following Monday. Now that was an experience worth remembering!

Photos courtesy of A. S, P. L and Y. A K.

how to escape the full-mouthed, clamorous place of people and vehicles

Kakamega Forest National Reserve

hard rocks and strong girls

Paid a visit to the weeping rock Kit Mikayi with the students of Maseno University. Astonishing nature just outside the city of Kisumu.

Kit Mikayi

As a part of our project we created a memory game with Lake Victoria as the theme. A way to try to spread awareness about the conditions of the lake. Golden Girls Foundation were kind enough to invite us to try it out on their little girls. At Golden Girls Foundation girls are encouraged and empowered to take place, raise their voices and be proud of themselves and their sisterhood. 

There was also some postcards being made and poems being written. Later on we were joined by the teenagers of the foundation. We had a nice chit-chat with them about what it is like to be a women back in our homes and cultures, what it is like to study, have our own home and family. What our troubles and struggles were, what we thought was hard and how we dealt with it and how important it was to talk to each other, listen to each other and have each others backs. 

Photos courtesy of A. S, P. L and Y. A K.

he didn't cry on a safari

We took a weekend down south with the animals. Surrounded ourselves with elephants, giraffes, lions, rhinos… The Masai Mara was truly beautiful.

On the very last day we suddenly happened to find the rhinos hanging about.

There were carcasses all over the place.

As the sun was about to settle one evening, the van of another tour company got stuck in the mud. Big strong men were trying with complicated measures to get them out whilst the passengers just stood by watching. Time passed by and people were starting to get nervous as the darkness crept closer and they were all stuck in the middle of nowhere. Until our group, all of us half the sizes of the passengers that just stood there, strode up and, within minutes, pushed it out. Come on people!

The mandatory visit to a nearby Masai village.

The local school of the Masai.

Photos courtesy of A. S, P. L and Y. A K.