New Roommates!

I guess I've kind of been slacking on this blogging thing… As you know, I moved in last week to a new apartment in Neuköln with some pretty cool new roommates. Last weekend I was able to go out with them and meet some of their friends. It turned out to be a pretty calm weekend compared to some of them that I have spent in Amsterdam or falling asleep on trains. We ended up chilling in a bar in a bar for a while and talking all night. I guess there always comes a point in the conversation which it switches to soccer, and then the next discussion will always be politics. We followed this progression although I can't say I understood everything that was going on… As much as I've been practicing, I've still got a lot of work to do before I can get in political debates with the Germans. Anyways, I took a few pictures from the night and put them up in my see all pictures place on the right.

Interesting facts about my new place:

-One of the main roads nearby, Sonnenallee, used to be a major division between East and West Berlin and there used to be a lot of crossings along the way. There's even a movie written about some kids who live around here (with that guy from Viktor Vogel for anybody who was in my German class…).
-Just down the road there's a strip of lots of different kinds of Middle Eastern restaurants. Definitely would not be very common in the U.S.
-Everyone who has a dog walks around without the dog on a leash. Sometimes you'll see the dog 20 ft in front of his owner just roaming around on his own free will. Then, when the owner calls him he'll come right back.

Last week I also went to the Pergamon Museum on Thursday, which held the Pergaman alter, a giant stairway that was excavated from the ancient city of Pergamon and brought to Germany. The museum hosted an amazing assortment of Greek and Roman statues, mosaics, columns, and other architecture that made me feel like I was visiting Rome. The frieze that ran around the main room described the Roman mythological story of the battle between the giants and the gods, for who would control the world. The scenes were incredible renderings of Zeus, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, and all of the others vanquishing their enemy and restoring order to the world (I feel like I'm back in Latin class…) The museum was really very incredible and I'd highly recommend it to anyone coming to visit Berlin. I also went to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie last weekend and saw that museum, dedicated to the division between Berlin during the Cold War. The museum contained some pretty cool stuff like a car that had been smashed through a barricade by some East Germans escaping to the west. It really made me think about all of the history that's happened here in Berlin just over the last 50 years. Recently, I was also able to watch a German movie that really highlighted the pre-unification times called Das Leben der Andern (The Lives of the Others). It was all in German, but I turned on the subtitles J. This is an incredible film that shows the twisted way that socialism ruled the East Germans back in those days. I think it also won an Oscar for best foreign film. For most of the movie the main character has his entire house bugged and the Stasis can see every little thing that is going on in his life. It reminds me a lot of 1984… It's hard to believe now that people could live knowing that every action they made, word they spoke, person they made friends with, could be recorded and used against them.