Day 1 (six days ago :)

Okay, so it's day ten, but for the moment I'm going to look back to Day 1, when I was fresh in Berlin, impressionable, homeless, and relatively naive despite having studied in Europe already.

And when I say "fresh in Berlin" I actually mean jet lagged and exhausted out of my mind, all the same...  the cappuccino and hotel breakfast helped cure that!

First action of business: buy phone. Where? I asked at the desk...
The staff had a quick reply. "There's a shopping center just down the street, they will have phones. they have everything. Big pink building, you can't miss it"

Everything? this is Europe, and based on previous experience no store has everything (flash back to Paris: boulangerie, patisserie, fromagerie, pharmacie, la laiterie, la boucherie, la charcuterie, la poissonnerie, le kiosque, le tabac, la droguerie....... okay, overkill I know, I took it for granted that in Europe the big American stores are broken up into lots of little stores, at least for the most part in Paris, and all the time in Rome).

So out I went into the cold grey city, and sure enough once on the main road (a HUGE road for Europe, three lanes? crazy) I saw the it, a giant modern pink building with ALEXA written on it.

Alexa! the big pink building

 

My fist picture of my trip, and its a mall

I laughed to myself as I walked into the complex: six floors of stores, Tommy Hilfinger, Claires, North Face, Fossil.... was I in Berlin? It was like a mall in LA only cleaner and a cooler selection of European boutiques (obviously)-- also including a full fledged grocery store plus, what I most needed, an immense electronic store, "Media Markt" to buy my phone.

I thought of Rome and how the only malls were well outside the city proper, yet here I was, in the "middle" of Berlin, in a mall practically indistinguishable from California, so bizarre. Plus, they were all stores and brands I knew. As I looked around I pined for Italy, for the foreign. I didn't cross America, the Atlantic, and Western Europe to experience what LA and American in general has too much of (mass consumerism). Yes, it was a bit comforting to have a big mall with everything at my fingertips (phone for instance) but I missed the Italian way, the small town way. But I was in Berlin, and, like I said, my first impressions were a bit naive. Over the next few days I would discover that Alexa was not so bad, and that there still was German culture embedded in it all. Just not the prototypical culture one expects from Europe.

My friend, Media Markt--the Best Buy of Germany

At Media Markt, I again encountered the reality that NOT everyone in Berlin speaks English, but eventually I found an English speaker. Fifteen minutes and 22Euros later I walked out of the store with my new prepaid German cell phone. Phone? check.

Alexanderplatz! where consumerism is king!!

I have since found out the the Alexa mall is by no means the norm of Berlin or Europe. Rather it just recently opened and it was a BIG deal. Mischa (one of our program tutors) told me that the Grand Opening was at midnight and people were so crazy to get inside that hundreds of people pressed up against the glass and shattered all the glass doors. I could tell Mischa was slightly embarrassed that Germans had acted so crazily, I mean, that sort of thing is relatively normal in America (relatively).

Other first impressions? Well I am definitely a product of the American movie culture--shortly after leaving Alexa an ambulance drove by with its distinctive sirens blaring and instinctively I thought, "Bourne Identity! Supremacy! whatever!". I had to snap a picture just as a fun record. I had forgotten that a lot of the movie was filmed in Berlin! So yes, first day impressions summed up to modern malls and memories of movies--capitalism yay! Despite being disheartened, I would eventually find the true Berlin, but it would take an apartment search to get there. More next time!

They are after Jason Bourne!!!

The lobby of my "hostel"
definitely one of the nicest I've ever stayed in