Yet another random burst of my wonderfulness!

I just changed the weather location on my computer to Utrecht--I didn't know you could do that!

It's Halloween for me before it is for you!

Happy Halloween! It's Halloween here already, so I can start acting like a maniac and blaming it on the day before anyone else! Oh wait, I already do that! And how will I be celebrating? A full day of lectures and a tour of the Red Light district in Amsterdam--ooh, scary...
I can go trick or treating before anyone else can--haha!!! Except I don't have a costume, and few people celebrate it here. Except for the little girl I heard screaming at her mom last week "Mommy, Halloween costume, I want a Halloween costume!" in Dutch, so I don't know how I picked it up, but I did. Iveta has promised that we can trick or treat her room, and she will have candy for us, but that is just to make sure we don't get bored and "trick" her. I have plans for the evening (not Halloween) but otherwise I would "trick" regardless of the "treat." It had better be a good treat, that's all I have to say. I miss the wonderful commercialism of Halloween, because I really want some Pillsbury Halloween cookies with the pumpkins or bats on them! Just give me a pumpkin cookie cutter and some cookie dough, and I'll be a happy camper! I already have the chocolate sprinkles for decoration--the Dutch seem to be obsessed with them! And I desperately want to carve a pumpkin! If I didn't have plans for Wednesday, I would hunt down a pumpkin and carve it in the hostel, and make pumpkin soup with the insides, and put the jack-o-lantern in the window of the hostel. Or if I couldn't do it in the hostel, I would carve it on a street corner. In a country that has legalized marijuana, I figure I wouldn't be any further out there if I carved a pumpkin on the a street corner!

People

I've finally met up with cool people! (Molly, thanks for the cool vocabulary!) Oh I have been looking forward to this since NOISE! Wonderful people were at NOISE, and now many of them are here in Utrecht! Before I left Berlin, I emailed Katha and Stephanie, and I heard back from them right away! When I got to Utrecht Sunday night, it was an amazing feeling to know that I was in the same town as lovely people!--I am a little starved for stress-free companionship at this point.
Then on Monday morning, I was eating breakfast when I heard someone call my name, and Elaine is standing at the front door of the hostel, just having got in from her flight from the U.S., here to spend a day with the program. A nice person! The world was made right when Iris (van der Tuin) and Marta (Zarzycka) walked into our room at Drift 23. Next Domitilla and two other Utrecht gender studies students talked with us about their experiences as Utrecht gender studies students and their involvement with the student organization Ask Annabel. Then we had a lecture by the one and only Rosi (Braidotti) on her article "Identity, Subjectivity, and Difference." I never thought I could actually understand psychoanalysis, and apply it to issues of class! Rosi just talked, and knowledge flowed out of her very being, infecting us like wonderful feminist viruses (seriously, that is a legitimate simile from NOISE).
Then on Tuesday we met Gloria Wekker, who gave us an amazing lecture on the construction of Dutch identity and multiculturalism, followed by the always lovely Rosemarie (Buikema) who gave us an amazing and incredibly enlightening lecture about Dutch migrant art during the 20th century.
Wednesday evening, I was in the grocery store, trying to figure out how to weigh my carrots on the scales, when I was going to stop and watch a girl weigh her produce on the scale. She turned around, and it was Katha! I just had this feeling that I would meet up with her at some random place rather than the two of us planning on getting together! So we had this giant hugging scene in the middle of the produce section at the Plus store and we talked in English probably too loudly for too long, but neither one of us cared. And she did show me how to weigh my carrots on the scale, and we made plans for this Saturday night.
Then on Thursday, Iveta tells us that we are required to go to two of the three Bienalle lecture focusing on Dutch identity while we are here. So Martha, Ashley, Leah and I go, and while we are waiting in line to get in, we see Katha, along with Somaye from NOISE and several other MA students. It was so lovely to see them once again, and be with nice, "cool" people.

If you have a ticket to A-dam...

If it's Wednesday, it must be A-dam. My life changed a little bit when I looked at the train schedule at the station and saw "A-dam" used as an abbreviation for Amsterdam, and "R-dam" for Rotterdam. What can I say, I'm easily amused and it made me happy early in the morning. Amsterdam is less than 30 minutes away from Utrecht by train. On Wednesdays we go into A-dam for lectures with NGOs, and yesterday we were at the IIAV, the International Information Center and Archives for the Women's Movement. It is housed in a former church, and it can be a borderline religious experience stepping into the place, as it has nearly everything about the Dutch and international women's movements. We had a lecture about the European Feminist Forum, which is a network of feminist affinity groups that advocate for social change at national, regional, and international levels. In the afternoon we had a lecture about masculinity and violence, which is always a welcome change for me in women's studies. I always like discussing masculinity because I spend so much time deconstructing the concept of "woman" and femininity, and also because I think the group as a whole needed a little bit of male energy and a lot of male perspective--just to counterbalance all the estrogen in the air.

For lunch we went to a neat little Turkish restaurant, where we sampled their assortment of pita concoctions; I had the one with feta cheese and spinach. We all had baklava, and then while everyone was having their tea chasers, I tried two of the cookies from the bakery case, which, despite being bright yellow and pale brown, were actually fairly good. All this and a drink for less than five Euros!

Iveta got us train tickets all the way to Amsterdam Centraal (our stop was one stop before Centraal) in case we wanted to go into A-dam. Surprisingly, I was the only one who wanted to take advantage of it! Which of course was fine with me. I realized that in all of this traveling, this was my first time entirely on my own since Bologna, and the first time trying to figure out trains on my own--sheer bliss! I didn't really know what I wanted to do, except just to take advantage of my ticket to Amsterdam and walk around to try and get a feel for the city. I did find the map that I wanted to get, but "feel for the city" part was a little bit more complicated. First of all, the weather yesterday was cold, wet, and dreary--typical October Dutch weather. I had to be realistic with myself that I would not see the A-dam of a postcard, which was probably the most important part. Secondly, I did not venture far beyond the train station, just walking down the main street, past the royal palace (I think), and back up to the train station. I only spent about 45 minutes or so there, but it was enough time for me to get a picture in my head of how the streets run and to find out that despite its size, shops and businesses in A-dam are just like those in any other Dutch city and close around 6:00. I was so proud of myself when I went back to the train station and got right onto a train headed to Utrecht Centraal--I'm a pro at this! It felt unbelievably good to be traveling alone, on my own terms, without other people stressing me out, and discovering Amsterdam and the Netherlands for myself. And discovering, for instance, that I don't think you really need a ticket for the commuter trains in the Netherlands, because I never saw a conductor or any sort of authority on any of the trains I took. My next scheme is to test this hypothesis perhaps head to Belgium next weekend, without a train ticket to Rotterdam--I know, it's crazy, but I think it just might work! Or maybe I'll just take advantage of the 30 Euro student fare that Ashley found on the internet.

A block away from "the end of the world"

Only a few bits of the Berlin Wall are still standing. The only way you can really see how the Berlin Wall split the city in half is on certain tourist maps. As I was looking at one the other day, I noticed that the red line that marked where the Mauer once was seemed to be only a block or two away from my apartment on the map.
Then Tuesday evening I had a great conversation with Sabine about the neighborhood. It seems she has lived in this part of Kreuzberg since she came to Berlin about twenty years ago and has seen so much of the neighborhood change. She enjoys living in this part of Kreuzberg, with its eclectic mix of everyone from traditional Turkish immigrants to hippy artists and everyone else in between. She told me that her building, which once was part of social housing, was sold in July to a private owner, and that now she expects her rent to triple. The building next door was sold a little before Sabine's, and the landlord drove the previous tenants out, changed a few windows, and charged high rents to "yuppie" students--or rather the yuppie students' parents. Twenty-four buildings were sold along with Sabine's, and she said that if what happened next door happens in all twenty-four of these buildings, Kreuzberg will change forever, and not for the good in the eyes of Sabine and many of her neighbors. Don't you just love gentrification? The residents have formed a type of housing union, and have been fighting the city and the landlords, which is really inspiring.
But all of this still somewhat shocks Sabine, because she lived here before the Mauer came down. She told me, "You could go for a block in two directions, and there was the wall. No one wanted to live here; it was really the end of the world. Now everyone wants to live here." I learned so much during the conversation, about the Berlin, the neighborhood, and Sabine.
So after we talked, I naturally set off to see the Mauer--or where it once was--for myself. I walked down Adalbertstrasse in the opposite direction of the U-Bahn station. Along the way, I literally stumbled upon a "stumbling block." Carolyn pointed them out to us on our tour of Berlin on Saturday. Stumbling blocks are little gold plaques that are about the size of any other stone in the street, but they small memorials to Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. They are outside homes and other buildings, and they basically say that a victim of the Holocaust lived here when they got their deportation papers, where they were deported two, and when and where they died. They are meant for everyone to stop and remember that a person from the Holocaust actually lived here, and that now we live in the same place. This stumbling block was only about 100 meters from my apartment. I definitely mentally stumbled upon it, and I was so surprised when I saw it that I think I actually stumbled across the stones. It's language is simple but straight to the point: "Here lived Klara Winkler, born 1887, deported in 1943, killed at Auschwitz."
I walked a little further down Adalbertstrasse, remembering that Sabine said that although the Mauer doesn't stand there anymore, there is a park where it once ran. I came to the corner of Adalbertstrasse and there it was, a park the ran straight down the middle of the street. If I didn't know any better, I might have thought that it was just a neighborhood jogging path down the middle of the boulevard. There are few signs actually saying what the park signifies, just a few inconspicuous blue street signs that say "Berliner Mauerweg." As I stood on the corner of Adalbertstrasse, I realized that I was doing something that was not possible twenty years ago--I looked east down Adalbertstrasse. Then, I crossed Bethaniandamm to the park. There are no traces of the Mauer left, the park is even slightly below street level, below the foundations of the Wall. It was an intense, almost eerie feeling. But actually, I think it goes beyond using the noun "feeling." I was standing where the Berliner Mauer once stood, and for me, words can't even begin to describe what was going through my head. I tried to picture the scene twenty years ago, with the Mauer winding its way like a snake through the scene, with barbed wire and armed guards with machine guns along the top, but I really couldn't grasp it. When I crossed Adalbertstrasse into the former East Berlin, I realized that even though I did something that was impossible twenty years ago, today it is very unremarkable. If I stopped in the middle of the street trying to take it all in, I would end up as a hood ornament on one of the cars careening down Adalbertstrasse and turning onto Engeldamm! Crazy Berlin drivers! The park is now an absolutely beautiful neighborhood space, with benches hidden in small groves of trees and bushes, and jogging paths run along each side. That's what it is now, a jogging path.
There are two churches, one on either side of the park. Thomaskirche is in the former West, Michaelskirche in the former East. Both are large red brick Evangelical/Lutheran churches with large grassy parks surrounding them, but their present states are testament to the two very different histories they have, just a few hundred meters apart. I first went to Thomaskirche which is an absolutely lovely neighborhood church. There are services at 10.00 each Sunday, and on Thursdays a theater group meets that is devoted to giving voice to women's experiences. The inside is a mix of old and new, the original dome, above the new chairs and alter. It is a very welcoming space, and there are several binders near the door that have very detailed histories of the division of Berlin. Even though I had studied the building of the Mauer and the Berlin airlift in German class, it was completely different to be in Berlin, less than fifty meters from the Mauer, reading about this as local history, and although it a significant period in world history, I was reading the account of a neighborhood, of people who had experienced this; my new neighborhood, my new neighbors.
After I left Thomaskirche, I walked to Michaelskirche. When I got to the front, I was frozen in my tracks. I looked up at the facade of Michaelskirche, first at the gates that prevent anyone from entering the front, then at the mural above the doors and then through a circle where a window once was. There was nothing there. The light of day shone to the opposite side of the church, revealing only a hollow shell where the nave once stood. The church looked to have received a direct hit by a bomb, and because it was on the east side of the Mauer, it had not been restored or demolished. Just left there. On the right of the facade is a small playground. At first glance, it may seem like a ghost, a testament to the horrors of war and then a totalitarian state, but as I walked around, I found a different history being written. The back part of the church is being restored, probably so it does not collapse, people walk their dogs around the church, and small children were learning how to ride bikes across the street. Michaelskirche still looks out over its neighborhood, and is still part of the residents lives. As I was walking around, the clock struck six o'clock--the clock in the bell tower of Michaelskirche. Even though it stands on the edge of ruin, remarkably the bells still chime the hour, just as they have since the nineteenth century.
I can only imagine and begin to understand what it was like to live on Waldemarstrasse twenty years ago. It must have been rather unnerving to live so close to "enemy territory." It really was the end of the world. Life continued on both sides of the Mauer; people lived in their apartments, children played, church bells chimed--parallel lives, only audible to each other, with governments, ideologies, and fears embodied in the Mauer that separated them. Today there is no Mauer through Kreuzberg, no separation between east and west, just Berliners, their neighborhood, and their memories.

I finally found it!

Ever since I got past immigration at Heathrow, I have been on a quest for the little pink bars of scrumptious heaven, so much better than the holy grail--Yogurette chocolate bars. The size of Kit-Kats, filled with strawberry yogurt goodness. It has been a heart-wrenching love affair for too many years to count. OK, so they are probably ordinary chocolate bars, but I happen to absolutely love them! It was the first thing I bought the last time I came to Germany. I had hoped beyond hope that their reach extended beyond the borders of Germany, but they weren't in any duty-free shops in Heathrow or Gatwick. Nor were they in anywhere in Bologna, Krakow, or Prague. I had just about given up ever finding them again, when I ventured into a Lidl for the first time in Europe. I know, Lidl's are nothing special--a grocery store where you can buy many things in bulk quantities--but I had seen them everywhere else I'd been, but had never gone inside. Actually, I thought the one down the street from Alma Mater in Bologna was a big laundromat, and even though I eventually figured out that it was a grocery store, I could never get away from it being a laundromat. Anyway... So I was in the Lidl, not really finding anything resembling the macaroni and cheese that I was craving, when I saw them! Yogurette bars, there in their pink strawberry goodness. It was better than finding the holy grail! I proudly walked to the cash register, bought my Yogurette bars, and barely made it home and made myself finish my Chinese take-out before I dove into them, because I knew that after eating a Yogurette bar, nothing else could possibly measure up. Last night as I was scouting another local grocery store, I found more of them--a bulk package with 30 strawberry Yogurette bars and another kind of Yogurette that has mixed berries and is in a lavender package! I didn't get them last night, but when I go grocery shopping today, you can believe those are at the top of my list! I absolutely love this--rediscovering things that I love about Germany and finding even more things to love!

Think local, eat global!

On the last day of NOISE, Katharina said to make sure to go to Kreuzberg when I made it to Berlin. I even wrote it down in my planner so I wouldn't forget. Well, Katharina, I did a little better than that--I live in Kreuzberg! Kreuzberg is amazing, and huge! Kreuzberg is one of the especially alternative areas in Berlin, and I have spent days wandering around, and still there seems to be more! My U-Bahn stop is Kottbusser Tor, which connects to the U-1 (which goes to the East Side Gallery on one end to the Kufuerstendamm on the other) and the U-8 (which has so many neat neighborhoods, including Mehringdamm, along it). Kreuzberg is also home to a large immigrant community from all over the world, but we have mostly Turkish immigrants and their families in our neighborhood. At first I was a little hesitant to use my German, because most of the time I have (what sounds to me like) a pronounced American accent, but Sabine said not to worry, because there are so many people from different countries that I would fit right in. I'm just adding to the linguistic diversity in the neighborhood--how amazing! I live near Oranienstrasse and Adalbertstrasse, which have so many great clubs, restaurants, and cafes, as well as little alternative shops that you really can't find anywhere else. There is even a random Italian bookshop on Oranienstrasse that really has more books in German than in Italian, but nonetheless has many books in Italian and some great feminist postcards. I haven't been into the African store yet, but that will change. Along Mehringdamm and Bergmannstrasse there are a neverending supply of awesome second-hand clothing shops and eclectic shops selling all sorts of things from around the world. My favorites are Checkpoint (second-hand clothes) and Alt-I can never remember its name but it's on Bergmannstrasse (for everything from Indian hammocks to scarves to pillows and chairs and so many other things I could go for broke on. Then there are the endless parties within a ten minute walk from my house--amazing! But probably my favorite thing about living in Kreuzberg is the seemingly infinite amount of ethnic restaurants--Turkish, Lebanese, Syrian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Vietnamese, Indian, and I know I am forgetting so many more! I literally can't stop eating! And it is all sooo good! When I told Kellie about what I had eaten in my first three days alone, she couldn't believe that I hadn't eaten any "German" food, and I told her that I can't do that because if I want to eat what is in my neighborhood, I can have Thai for lunch and Lebanese for dinner (which is a terrific combination, might I add). I love it! I have yet to get around to sampling Turkish food, but considering the fact that my cousin Kriss lived in Turkey for two years and now considers Cajun food to be blah and mild, I might hold off for a few more days if I want any tastebuds left. I love that I live in a place where if I want to "think local," I automatically "think global!" Amazing!