Seeing as I'm stuck at home with a sore throat, a cough and a stuffed nose, I figured I'd take the time to procrastinate some more on my final papers and finally catch up on this blog, which has been woefully neglected due to the avalanche of events that followed my spring break, so here we go.
Wednesday April 22 was marked primarily by homework, a lazy morning, the start of my last month in Berlin and the GDL train strike. I spent most of the day at home and only went out in the evening to meet up with my friend and his visiting friend yet again. They were about two hours late, as they had traveled across the city fighting effects of the train strike that had started that day. We chatted for a few hours until I yet again had to bid farewell to return home and work on school work. I also learned that I had been voted to the history student board for the oncoming year at my home institution.
It was slightly fortunate that I wanted to be home-orientated that day as due to the strike, the international/national, regional and city train were either been shut down or were operating on a very reduced schedule. Fortunately, the BVG, Berlin's transit company, had not struck, so the U-Bahn (metro/underground/subway/whatever), the busses and trams all still ran and I was able to commute to the bar earlier. However, even this was not enough and the city slowed down immensely, with increased crowds on the still operating public transport. Train strikes are so much fun.
The following day, the strike was still on, but didn't affect me, as I was able to go to classes without any issue. This was fortunate as I had two more presentations, another on Albert Speer and the other taking form as a German oral exam. Fortunately, I did quite well in both.
That evening my program had the option to attend the Komische Oper's performance of Odysseus. Seeing as I had never been to an opera before and the performance choice, I was looking forward to it. I also had the chance to dress up again, and choose to fauxhawk my newly-cut hair for the first time ever. I was pleased with my result and that combined with an enjoyable performance made the evening quite worthwhile.
The opera itself was, to me, quite normal, when compared to the rest of the German theater that I had seen. It was a more humorous take on the story, and I enjoyed it, especially since I was actually able to understand what was going on due to subtitles and previous knowledge. The same cannot be said of many of my peers. During the performance, I counted five of them who fell asleep, and during intermission, the majority of them left. Of the twenty-five-ish who attended, only about seven of us stayed through the end of the performance.
On the way home, myself and a girl from my program were engaged in conversation by an elderly American woman who had overheard us speaking in English and chimed in. She was fascinating, as she said she was living in Berlin for three months just to attend operas, she spoke no German, had previously lived in Spain for nine months, and lived normally in the Caribbean. Sadly, our talk was cut short due to train changes and different routes home. I was quite happy to find that the strike was over and I was able to return home my normal route without any difficulty.
Once I arrived home, I Facetimed my mother and frantically packed for Hamburg, as my program was leaving early the next morning for an overnight excursion there. I also managed to sort out my summer housing issue, and received the good news that a close friend of mine had received a long-awaited acceptance to a master's program, which made me incredibly happy and I fell asleep on a good note.
Stay tuned for the next post in which I talk about my adventures in Hamburg.
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