Thursday, September 1, 2005; 11:37 PM
It's only been a couple of days but so much has happened. I met my hosts, Irina and Beatrice, who took me back to their apartment - my home for the next four months. The apartment is so much bigger than I expected! It looks more like a nice little house than an apartment, until one looks out the window two stories up. My room isn't much smaller than my one at home, but I have huge windows looking out on the greenery between the complexes. No closet, but I have a clothes rack provided for me (with coathangers). In fact, a huge number of useful little necessities have already been provided by my generous hosts - including, but not limited to: a bathrobe, clothes hamper, desk lamp, bedside lamp, an alarm clock, city maps, pens, pencils... all sorts of gadgets. My bed is extremely comfortable, every night I've been able to drop right off to sleep.
Irina is in her early 50s, and is an art restorator, from what I've read, but she hasn't said much about her work. Beatrice is in her late 30s and is making her way to becoming a professional singer. Her voice is beautiful! Both can sing, however - I've come along with them to a couple of rehearsals for the Berliner Chorakadamie, which meets every Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday there was a reception with a guest speaker, who was cool, but that was my first night in Berlin and I was exhausted. The guy must've spoken about Berlioz for nearly an hour and a half, and though I tried my best to make out as much German as I could, all I wanted to do was sleep. This evening was much better, however - I sat next to Beatrice in the altos and after some cautious humming I sang along with them, with reasonable success. It's not a professional choir (there don't seem to be any tryouts), but they are very enthusiastic and sound gorgeous.
Yesterday there was some boring documentation/orientation stuff, by which they somehow managed to convince us that the German police department needed our passports for the next three weeks and took them from us en masse. Afterwards, our mentors took us in respective groups on a small walk around the city near IES. Nikolas is still very nice and still very difficult to understand over the daytime traffic. But I learned the very important word gucken ("to look"), which I kept mistaking for küchen ("to cook"). How did I not pick this word up earlier? Yikes.
This morning I got myself lost on the way to IES via two different trams in the wrong direction, and was almost an hour late to a computer info session, but it turned out to be not much of a problem as the lady teaching the session told me everything I needed to know afterwards within five minutes. I missed going out to lunch with everybody, but I found a little Jewish café down a few blocks that had a beautiful outdoor seating area (within the building, so no direct sunlight), and some great hummus for a small price. Then there was another boring orientation session, and then choir practice.
Tomorrow: German Placement Test (ack), group lunch, another city tour beginning at the Pergamonmuseum, and a bar tour(!) with our mentors. Irina also is leaving bright and early for Austria to visit her daughter's family. Better get some sleep, then.
The weather is: cool and humid
