Schoenen Abend...

Last meeting of class (incredibly low-energy), at least for this round. Hilariously, and unfortunately during the last set of final presentations in our class, the adjacent class had theirs, too. Except ours were the three quietest girls in class discussing Jewish life in Berlin, and theirs were three...opera recitals. Literally. The other class boasts three opera singers, and damn! are they loud. Beautiful, but it got absurd after a while. A nice memory, though.

Clearly someone whose window also faces the Hof is watching either a horror movie or some sort of American Idol equivalent -- there is a lot of high-pitched TV screaming coming from somewhere. But the city is quiet tonight, generally -- there's no football on. Tomorrow is the Germany-Argentinia game (and yes, Zel, I am staying here, and maybe even going to the Fan Mile), so I suppose folks have to rest up to rev up for tomorrow.

I sat down to write tonight because one of my classmates did something really sweet and extraordinary as I was leaving the bar we ended the night at. She's quiet, usually, and more of a giggler than a talker; she and another classmate had a mostly-clandestine relationship for the entire month that was absolutely adorable in the end. So one gets that she's a keen observer. But tonight, as we were all together in this very old, famous German restaurant, she made a series of traditional Polish toasts:

The first, to friendship

The second, to a good evening and good people

The third, to love

She made these all over the course of maybe 6 hours. And as I was leaving the group, hours later, she stopped me and said "There is a fourth toast. And we say it is to the next time we will meet." It was so sweet. A little glimmer of closeness, or just an acknowledgement that we all made it through this relatively intense month spending most of the day together. It would be nice to meet again, as unlikely as that is. I do have some great pictures to show for it, though.

Except for a slightly awkward moment when I had to assure someone that I was quite okay getting myself home in a taxi, it was a really lovely evening - and I had a very nice taxi driver who spoke English and German with me. I also bought my first Tanzania-oriented article of clothing: a nice, modest, lightweight, wholly unprovocative floral print skirt. Hopefully I'll like it as much tomorrow as I did in my rush this evening.

Another thing that McFee and I discussed last night when we were out in the Turkish neighborhood - eating döner kebap and then catching (amazingly) the newest Wallace & Gromit at an open-air theater - was street food and urban culture. Or, more to the point, that the primary street food in Berlin is döner kebap, like a Turkish gyro. Except for the walking wurst-cooking guys (which I can't explain without a photo), it's your best bet. And there's been a lot of discussion over the "Gastarbeiter" (=guest worker) population here, how hard it is to become a German citizen, that Berlin is one of the largest urban Turkish populations in the world, etc. And for some reason I thought about pizza, in New York. Here, also a day-to-day food from a previously not-quite-welcome immigrant population, and pizza totally defines the city now. You could make the same argument about bagels, too. I'm sure there's more to say, and probably a more sophisticated point to it, but it struck me how the public discourse - about citizenship, nationhood, and so on - perhaps glosses over the more ubiquitous manifestations of a polyglot culture, like food, music, etc. And Berlin, like New York, certainly has that.