So a lot of the draw of studying abroad in Berlin is the thrilling nightlife. Berlin is known for it’s music and clubbing scene around the world and a night out is never dull. In the spirit of that, I thought I would give you a glimpse into my typical Friday night.
4:42 – Return home from hanging out with our Furman professor all day. On days there are no classes, such as Fridays, our professor offers activities we can sign up for. I was the only student who signed up for today’s activities. That is actually a great thing, because it means we treated ourselves to fancy art, fresh ginger tea, and bon bon making demonstrations. My host mother is often confused with how much I hang out with my professor, so most of the time I lie and just tell her I am hanging out with friends.
5:00-6:22 – Start making corrections on the paper that my teacher has critiqued while watching Modern Family episodes dubbed in German. When I do homework on Friday, I reward myself by multi-tasking with Netflix. This just means that I watch Netflix. But I watch it in German, so it’s educational . . . right?
6:22-7:45 – Take a schlächen. That means little sleep, aka nap. It has been dark since 4:07. No joke, that’s the actual time the sun set today. It makes 6:22 feel like 10:22, and I can not help but sleep, especially since I must also wait for dinner.
7:45-8:25 – Realize that my host mother, who works until 7, is very much late. I recognize her pattern. She is probably hanging out with one of her countless friends and will come in at any moment exclaiming how hungry she is, and telling me that she told her friend that she didn’t want to eat with them, she was going to go home and eat with Molly. This will most likely make me curious about what else she tells her German friends about her host student.
8:25 – My host mother bursts into the door, exclaiming how hungry she is, and how she was just visiting a friend who offered her dinner but she denied because she said she was going to come eat with me. I am curious about what else she tells her German friends about her host student.
8:30 – My host mother reminds me that “The Voice of Germany” plays tonight. I am shocked that I forgot. The Voice of Germany, is perhaps the best show on all of German television. I have never seen the American version, but I find the German version extremely interesting, also the songs are mostly in English, so I can watch it and still have little breaks where I don’t have to concentrate on the words so much. We watch it while setting up Abendbrot.
Abendbrot is the best invention. It is the cold dinner that Germans eat when they have had a warm lunch (I have been told that you shouldn’t eat two warm meals a day unless you want to get fat, which based on the amount of cheese I eat on Abendbrot nights, makes no sense). On an average night it consists of various types of bread, cold meat, cheese, cream cheese spreads, butter, mustard, pickles, and salad.
8:39. My host mother laughs about how we will have an “American Night” watching TV and eating at the same time.
8:47 – Eat Abendbrot and watch Germans sing American songs. I have said “ja” to everything that my host mother has offered me. As a consequence, I have stuffed myself with some very powerful cheeses and some delicious, but cat-food-looking-like sausage spread that comes from France. I exclaim how great each new thing is, using the same phrase each time, because my German isn’t good enough to say it in two different ways.
9:24 – For the third time in a row my host mother has guessed the right contestant that will move on to the next round, and I never guess it right. Also for the third time in a row she has asked me if I want another glass of wine**, which, when I do not say no fast enough, she says “ja, oder?” meaning something along the lines of, “yes, of course, you do or you would have said something, right?” and quickly pours me and herself another glass. Her “ja, oder?” is perhaps the best part of every dinner since it is the best excuse to eat and drink well past I am satisfied. The Germans do not have a word for “stuffed”. When you are full, you say I am satisfied. This is a major flaw in the language because most German meals make me absolutely stuffed.
9:26 – She brings out just one little jar in which she has baked one little cake and dumps it into a bowl. She hands me a spoon and I try it. It is warm and gooey and delicious, and then she informs me that it is all for me, she prefers the cheese, and she got for me because of my sweet tooth. I am glad that through the language barrier I am still able to communicate the important things.
10:04 – A couple glasses in**, a second favorite show has come on, and we are ready to start talking politics. Politics happen nearly every night, I actually enjoy it, unlike I would in America. It encourages me to keep up with the news, plus I get to learn about German politics as well as German perspectives on American politics. It has become a great way to better understand their culture and my own. But when we have these types of discussions, my host mother gets very concerned that I will not be able to understand her opinion if she speaks in German, so she says most of it in English. I respond in German in an effort to practice and because really we should be speaking German. My sentences are slow and I am extremely nervous that a mistake in verb tense, or noun declension will alter completely what I am trying to say. Based on her reactions, I am almost positive that I have completely butchered the language, so I try again in English. This time, she understands.
10:31 – She brings out the quitten bread. A very distinctly sweet, gummy like, dessert. At one point there were about 30 pear sized quittens littered around the house. You can not eat them raw, and processing them is extremely time consuming, but when they are cooked, the yellow quittens turn bright pink, which makes all variations of quitten look comically fake. The taste is different than anything I have tried before, and extremely distinctive. Since the time of the arrival of the quittens I have tried quitten jam, spicy quitten spread, and sweet quitten bread. Quitten bread, has become another daily tradition, as after you have partaken in the extremely time consuming quitten processing, you must participate in the even more time consuming quitten bread making period. There has been one pan of quitten bread drying for over two weeks. No lie, two weeks.
10:54 – We make plans for the following week, to go to IKEA together. I am beyond excited.
11:01 – It is bedtime. Perhaps tomorrow I will act like a normal college student and go out of the apartment and hang out with people my own age. But when you can stay home, and have delicious food, German reality television, political discussions, and extremely labor intensive desserts, who would ever want to leave?
** The writer of this post is 21, any and all alcoholic beverages were drunk responsibly, and in the name of host mother bonding and cultural immersion.