Blogging in darkness

Whoa, sorry for the blogging break! I can’t even blame it on being busy, because I haven’t. Well, this week has actually been somewhat active (I held a presentation on the Berlin blockade for my German course and made a day trip to Leipzig, among others), but otherwise I’ve been busy procrastinating, tops. Some sort of autumn coma going on here.

The clocks were turned backwards on the last weekend in October, due to shifting to standard time, which to me means that the sun sets an hour earlier. I have to say I’ve been quite dismayed and disheartened by the early and profound darkness. Finland is so extreme with its lightning (it’s all the time light during summer and dark during winter), but in Germany it actually gets dark in the evenings during summer, so I somehow assumed that darkness during winter would also keep to a moderate level. Boy was I wrong! In addition to the standard time, things are worsened by the time zones, something I hadn’t thought about at all: when the sun sets around 5 PM in Finland, the time is only 4 PM in Germany. Ok, the sun sets around 3.30 PM in Helsinki and at 4 PM here, so the day is still longer here and basically I shouldn’t have anything to complain about. But nevertheless it just somehow feels a lot... darker here. I guess it’s due to the lack of snow and decent street lightning or something?

Well, luckily I assume that the worst part is soon over, and with a sigh of relief I’ll have to conclude that it has lasted only a short time. Even November has been nice and gentle to me, to some point: it’s been quite warm, the trees have still kept on to their beautiful leaves, it hasn’t been terribly rainy, and even when it has rained, I’ve managed to enjoy the melancholic beauty of wet streets and leaves in yellow street lightning. Only during the last two weeks or so has the novembery November been depressingly present, and now the temperature is already dropping fast. Next Wednesday it should be snowing, so I have really high hopes that winter’ll be here soon and replace the darkness with a lovely blue light! :)

Now that I think about it, it’s crazy how the weather has changed in two weeks! Now it’s maybe –3–4°C, and exactly two weeks ago it was +17°C (!!). Of course, it was exceptionally warm then, but still! That Sunday I made a day trip to Potsdam by bike and it was absolutely fabulous. It was my first visit in Potsdam, but unfortunately I still can’t tell you much about the city as it was so dark that I didn’t see much :D And Potsdam certainly hasn’t invested in city maps, so most of the time I had absolutely no clue where I was. I guess that trip was more about the journey than the destination :)

I would have liked to see the Sanssouci palace and park, but as said, it was pitch-dark, so I had to give up on that idea. Well, the main reason I wanted to see them in the first place was the name, so I guess I’m not that passionate about the whole thing :) But I wonder how French names for places always are so sympathetic? Sans souci means “without a worry” – sounds quite stress-free to me :) Then there’s Monbijou Park, where the former Monbijou Palace used to exist: mon bijou means “my jewel” or “my piece of jewellery” – how romantic ♥ The third example that comes to my mind is the park Mon Repos in Vyborg, Russia. (Apparently there is also a palace by the same name in Germany!) Mon repos translates into “my rest”. I guess the normal association would be a place where one relaxes during holidays or something, but for some reason I find that the name has a beautiful and sad tone to it: it makes me think of someone’s last residence before death – the final, yet peaceful rest on earth.

In this melancholic feel I end this post and drag myself to bed for the final rest of this week. Good night, sleep tight.

Settling down

Aaahhh, it’s mid-October and I’ve finally moved to my Kreuzberg-flat :) It’s cosy, wonderful view, great location and it’s warm with central heating! G’bye 15°C bathroom, won’t miss you.

The moving itself was somewhat arduous, phew. I didn’t want to spend my money on a taxi, since I was in any case going twice to the Kreuzberg-flat; on Thursday to pick up the keys etc., and then on Friday I could really move in. So I figured I might just as well drag along my belongings. So on Thursday, I loaded my bike with two 29″ bike wheels, two large(ish) bags and my spare bed, aka a gigantic airbed, and with my backpack fully packed I begun my journey through Berlin leading my wheeled load. Of course I didn’t walk or ride the whole 10 km, but used the S- and U-Bahns. Luckily all three stations (S-Schönhauser Allee, S/U-Gesundbrunnen and U-Kottbusser Tor) had lifts, so I didn’t have to drag the whole lot down or up stairs, that would have been a torturous experience. Though I have to admit, I almost thought about it anyway, because waiting for the lifts was very frustrating :D Patience is definitely not one of my strengths, at least not when I’m trying to get things done or get from a place to another, then I(’d) want everything to be quick and efficient!

I received quite a good deal of puzzled looks with my moving load, haha. I’d like to think they were looks of awe and admiration, but probably they were just feeling sorry for me or at least thought I was losing my mind. Very many helpful hands were offered :) But well, comparing to that I would have dragged all that stuff just with my two hands, I would have needed a second round. So I’m actually a bit proud of my bike-moving-idea! And the effort surely paid off, now I’m in my new flat and won’t have to move anywhere until May <3

Mid-October also means that the six-week German course has come to an end. I can’t quite understand how time flies so incredibly fast?! “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” The language course really has been very, very helpful, although it has required a whole lot of work. Well, maybe these two things are related... :) But in any case, it’s really encouraging to notice I’ve actually made some progress, especially with my spoken German and vocabulary. It still is a far cry from fluent, and especially when I’m tired I still tend to freeze. But at least I am better understood than six weeks ago, and also I understand better; I can follow TV programmes or films and understand pretty much everything. But I still suck :D But I believe it does me good to really suck at something, and still have to try to cope and get better. It’s quite humbling.

A weird thing related to the process of language learning is that my French has totally degraded. It's really weird, German and French are somehow in the same category in my brain, which is strange since my French is a lot stronger than my German. Or was, at least. Now when I try to speak French, I really have no guarantees whatsoever that I'll actually speak French?! I use German words and even sentences without even noticing (or at least noticing it when I've already blurted it out, and it thus is already too late), and when trying to think of the correct French words, all I can think of are German. Wtf...

Mid-October also means that next week, the academic year starts. I’ve got quite interesting courses ahead: a seminar in social/labour market/economic policy, a couple of courses in environmental policy, a course about politics of memory (i.e., political history), and then a German course. I’ll actually be able to get quite a good deal credited in Helsinki, so also my master degree studies are advancing here :)

I guess everyone recognises the slightly frustrated longing for a change from time to time, a boredom with everything being always the same. But I must say, more than the acute change with all the new things, I like more the phase thereafter, when things aren’t all new and strange to the point of intimidation. It’s exciting but very tiring, and I do, however, need some sort of routine and familiarity in order to feel... well, I guess “safe” or “comfortable” are somewhat the right words. It’s quite a perfect balance: life is not (yet?) in a boring rut, but has a freshness along with a nice familiarity to it :) A long story short: life’s good <3

Spreche nicht Deutsch

It's Thursday and the first week at Freie Universität has almost reached its end. The actual courses won't start until mid-October (thank goodness, I haven't yet had the slightest glimpse of any course programmes, I guess I should do something about that here in the near future), but I'm participating in an intensive course in German, which will last until the beginning of the semester.

We met on Monday morning at 8 AM, something I think should be prohibited by international law on the grounds of human rights and world peace, and first there was this basic "Welcome to the FU, we hope you'll enjoy your stay here and in Berlin" yadda yadda yadda. After that, all the participants were to take a placement test, according to which the actual groups were formed starting Tuesday.

I "scored" the CEFR level B2, which was the highest level among the participants, but I really feel I belong in an A2 group or something. Everyone in my group speaks at least a gazillion times better German than I do, I feel really tongue-tied and can't seem to get it round anything I'm trying to say. My head just goes completely blank from all the pathetic vocabulary I've managed to gather in my tiny head, not to mention my complete inability to pronounce anything properly. Or at least so it feels, and I'm really having trouble imagining that I could ever manage this language fluently, Swedish-speaker or not. (For those readers who don't know, Swedish is my mother tongue. Apparently it should be very helpful in the learning of German, Germanic languages as they both are. So it does in theory, but I'm proving practice to be something completely different.)

Oh well... We have a proverb in Finnish saying "Siberia will teach" (meaning one will eventually learn the hard way), I guess Berlin will be my Siberia. [Does this make me the 21st-century Zakrevsky, who called Finland "his Siberia", and, thus, Berlin the 21st-century Grand Duchy of Finland?! Oh goodness, that was such a crappy history nerd joke that everyone should just ignore it, and it shouldn't even be published – but let it be my punishment as public humiliation.] Enough of this whine now, it's almost past my bedtime and tomorrow it's Friday, meaning parteey!