Learning Italian is Fun: Word of the day: mi dispiace

Mi dispiace questo e ritardo.
I'm sorry this is late.

So it's now Friday! It's been about five days since I've been back from Berlin. So Berlin was great. The first day was the "wall" day. Essentially, we walked for 6 hours in a zig-zag pattern on either side of the wall. My teacher, Giovanni Damiani (yes it rhymes!) wanted to demonstrate a few things. First, how irregular the wall actually was. The wall is actually a series of walls. It was most often two walls with an open space between. In some places the open space was as wide as 1.5 km and in other spaces just a few meters. Secondly, he wanted to show that even though the wall divided the city into East and West Berlin, the wall did not always run North and South. The divider was a very jagged and irregular line. So it was very difficult to know if you were in what was once East Berlin or West Berlin. An easy way to tell, is that in the west the walk/don’t walk signs have a normal person walking or standing. In the East, the man who walks/doesn’t walk has a nice hat. Thirdly, Giovanni wanted us to know how bad he was at planning a walking trip. That was a joke. But seriously, we walked by everything at least twice because of the path that he chose to lead us on. Now the things we saw were very interesting, but I don’t like walking for no reason. I decided I am very anti-hiking in anyway. I don’t like doing it in nature and I definitely don’t like doing it in a city. He was also flustered because the S-bahn stop (the ground surface light rail system) near our hotel was closed. So he had to figure out the proper way to go with the U-bahn (underground rail system). He didn’t like that, but oh well. You have to be flexible when traveling. So we walked by a bunch of buildings by people that you’ve never heard of. Some were good, others not so good. My friends and I stopped in a Bavarian restaurant. I got the special of the day for 6.50 and my friends got various forms of sausage and meatballs and stuff. The sausage they got were so pale! It looked unhealthy. And they served it just floating in bowl of water. It was hilarious. So they got a pretzel and two sausages. And I got something. I didn’t really know what it was when I ordered it, but I thought specials of the day are the best way to go. Usually its something that I would not have ordered, the cook seems to want to cook it (or get rid of old food, who knows?), and its usually on sale! So the waiter (who didn’t speak great English, and was upset we didn’t know what we wanted to drink within the first 2 minutes of sitting down) called it goulash. However, it was more like beef stroganoff. It was a bed of noodles with chunks of beef and brown gravy on top. It was pretty good. We all drank beer. It was delicious. A brief aside: right now I don’t think I’ll be going to Oktoberfest. We originally wanted to go early in the semester, but hotels are scarce and pricey, and I’ve been to Munich before. While I did really enjoy it, I’m just not sure it’s going to happen this year. So anyway, after that they gave me cherry cheesecake stuff. Hooray for specials of the day! I had no idea I was getting desert; it was a pleasant surprise. So after lunch we went to the Jewish Museum by Daniel Liebeskind. I’ve never seen an exhibit about Jewish people mention the building and the architect’s name so much. I’ve been to the Jewish Museum last time I was in Berlin. I wasn’t really impressed this time either. It seems that Leibeskind is an arrogant jerk and just like to toot his own horn. Also, the things he does are all bullshit anyway. He likes to make up silly little metaphors and such about his buildings. Really he’s just being dumb. After the Jewish Museum we were free to go (Giovanni didn’t really want to go into the museum either so he left us there once he bought our tickets). I don’t remember what I did after. I think we walked around the city hoping to find the Puma or Adidas flagship store because both are based in Berlin. We made plans to meet up at the hotel for dinner around 8. We spoke to the nice concierge man and we all (teacher included) headed down to a place called 100 bottles. (well the translation). I think its 100 flaschen in German. The concierge said it was a place for decent German food. I went there and got the mixed plate (after the wild success of the mixed plates in the greek restaurant.) Unfortunately, the mixed plate there wasn’t nearly as good as the Greeks. They had some sausage, bacon, some sort of schnitzel. Essentially I got a lot of fried meat and French fries. Pretty much the most unhealthy meal you could think of and then beer to wash it down. Although I got a hefeweizen. So that’s fruity. So that has potential to be not so bad for you if theres a lot of fruit in it. I didn’t really like it though. Too fruity and sweet.

That was all on Wednesday

This is the "voided void" in the Jewish Museum. Yeah, that's dumb.

This is Aldo Rossi's block. He actually designed every building and wanted it to look like it was a bunch of disjointed individual buildings when it's really not.