February

Hallo zusammen, and welcome back to another blog post! I can’t believe February is already over [and now almost March, as I've taken so long to edit this post... oops.] That means I’ve been in Germany for 7 months already… only 3 left to go. But I could write a whole blog post just on how I feel about that idea, and right now I want to write about what I did in February. Buckle up, cause it's gonna be a long one!

Sanssouci

At the beginning of the month, I went to Potsdam, near Berlin! My host mom gifted me tickets to the Harry Potter Exhibition there for Christmas and we made a weekend trip out of it.
The first place we visited was Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. The palace was built as an escape from the Berlin court for Frederick between the years of 1745 and 1747; the name, Sanssouci, means “without cares” in French.

Frederick was a true patron of the arts, and this is definitely evident in the decoration and style of Sanssouci-- fine gold detailing on the domed ceilings, chandeliers, sculptures, dozens of French Rococo style oil paintings, a library with a collection of 2,100 books of Greek, Roman and French literature, and finely carved furniture commissioned from the local artisans of the time. One room, called the Voltaire room after its famous long-time resident, is designed to look like a tropical garden; wooden carved parrots, cranes, storks, fruits, flowers, and garlands decorate its walls.
Frederick felt so strongly about his palace that it was his wish that it “die with him.” Perhaps unfortunately for him, though definitely fortunately for us, it did not, and Sanssouci is now visited by more than two million people a year from all around the world.

 

Cecilienhof

After Sanssouci, the next stop was Cecilienhof, a palace built from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house. This was the last palace built under the rule of Prussia, and it was home to Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie, the last of the Prussian monarchs. Cecilienhof was also the location of the famous 1945 Potsdam Conference. Because Berlin was too damaged from the air bombings of the war, the Allies decided on “somewhere near Berlin” and thus Cecilienhof was chosen as the venue where the Big 3, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to decide how post-WWII Germany would be split up and occupied. We were first taken on a tour of the conference rooms, and then on a tour of the private rooms of Cecilie and her family.

The Harry Potter Exhibition

The next day, February 3rd, was the day we visited the Harry Potter exhibition!

The Exhibition is a traveling exhibition, and it was first in Germany a few years ago. It was so popular that it made a comeback and will be in Potsdam until 2020. It’s a collection of the actual costumes and props used in the Harry Potter films, and there’s a couple of interactive things there too, like mandrakes you can pull out of their pots, a Hagrid-sized chair to sit in, and Quidditch hoops to throw a quaffle through. If you rent an audio tour guide, there are numbers corresponding to the displays and you can press them to listen to trivia about the making of the Harry Potter movies. A dream-come-true for a Potterhead. Being from Orlando, I’ve had the chance to visit the Harry Potter theme park a couple of times, and now that I have the Harry Potter Exhibit under my belt, the next thing on my list is to visit some of the filming locations!

 

 

Helmstedt–Marienborn Border Crossing

About an hour and a half west of Potsdam, you’ll find the largest and most important former GDR border crossing. One of three checkpoints used by the Western Allies, the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing, known as Checkpoint Alpha, was established on July 1, 1945 on the line of demarcation between the Soviet and the British occupation zones. The term “checkpoint” was specifically chosen by the Allies, as opposed to the East German word "Grenzübergangsstelle" (which literally means "border-crossing-place") because they didn’t recognize East Germany as a legitimate state, and therefore it couldn’t have a legitimate border.

If you were a West German and wanted to visit East Germany, you could typically apply for a visa a couple of weeks in advance and be allowed to cross the border. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans could not visit West Germany at all. The Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing was dismantled at midnight on June 30, 1990, exactly 45 years after its first opening. 

My host mom once showed me a photograph of a cardboard box on the counter of a very 80s-looking kitchen and told me about how she and her parents would send care packages to their friends and relatives living in East Germany filled with things like coffee and West German candies that you couldn’t get in the GDR. Sometimes the packages never arrived, and sometimes they arrived with things missing, presumably taken by the customs agents to keep for themselves.

 

Måneskin

On February 15, I went to my first real concert! The band was Måneskin, my Italian friend Ester’s favorite band. They became popular in Italy after being on X-Factor a couple of years ago, and Ester recommended them to me a couple of months ago when she heard they were going to be in Hamburg in February. She came over, we watched a few of their music videos, and that’s all it took for me to buy my ticket.

I guess I should be grateful that Måneskin isn’t as well-known in Germany as in Italy, because that meant a smaller venue, and that meant we were able to get a spot right in front of the stage! The music was amazing, the audience sang every word to every song (except for the covers of the couple of English songs they did, but I had those taken care of), the band looked like they were having a blast, and we made some new friends, too!

 

Kohlfahrt

Kale is a big deal in Germany. No, seriously. I don’t know of any other country where people have an entire party revolving around kale being in season again and ends in the crowning of a Kale Queen or King.

It’s called a Kohlfahrt (“cabbage-journey”) and it’s a mid-winter tradition that comes from Northern Germany, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia. As the story was explained to me by an American ex-pat I met, kale was typically harvested after the first frost of the year (back before GMOs were a thing), the late harvest ensuring that the bitterness of the plant had disappeared. German men would go out to to the fields to harvest it, fortified with Schnapps against the cold. Then they’d return home, their wives would cook up some of the kale, and serve it with a traditional sausage called Pinkel. (My American ex-pat friend stifled a giggle and informed me that “pinkel” also means “to pee” in German. Google says the name for the sausage is either East Frisian in origin and means “little finger,” ...or it comes from the fact that this kind of sausage drips with fat for a long time while it’s smoking. I’ll let you decide.)

Nowadays, a Kohlfahrt is a walk through a Dorf or a city organized by a group of friends that ends with a dinner at a restaurant where Kohl and Pinkel (and beer, of course, this is Germany) are served. The organizer, the Kohl King or Queen from the previous year, is the only one of the group who knows where the restaurant is and which route the group will be taking. Someone in the group usually pulls a wagon along with a speaker in it, and games are played at stops along the way. You can win the honor of being crowned kale royalty by either being the one to eat the most or being the winner of the games. I went with my host mom and her group of friends on their Kohlfahrt, and we played Teebeutelweitwurf (teabag-distance-throwing). The people in the group often wear little Schnapps glasses on ribbons around their necks, for what I assume is ease of use. It’s a lot of fun. A tradition so amusingly German I wouldn’t have believed it was a thing if I hadn’t seen it myself!

 

Galentine’s Day - No Boys Allowed

I have someone from the CBYX group chat to thank for this one - they suggested that if we didn’t already have plans for Valentine’s Day or just wanted an excuse to hang out with friends and eat chocolate, we could throw Galentine’s Day parties, so that’s what I did after the Kohlfahrt! I got my host parents’ permission to have a sleepover in the living room, my wonderful host mom supplied the chocolate and snacks, and I convinced 3 or 4 friends to come over and watch sappy Netflix chick-flicks. (You know the ones: ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’, ‘The Kissing Booth’… the Sixteen Candles of our time.) Those of us who stayed awake through the second movie stayed up until 1 or 2 critiquing the moral contradictions of the main character, and also which guy we thought she really should have wound up with because he was way cuter anyway. You know, sophisticated discussion. The next morning we cooked American-style pancakes, planned what we were going to do the next weekend, and cleaned up the candy-wrapper carnage from the night before. Then after the others had to go home, Ester and I spent the whole day out on our bikes enjoying the first blue skies and warm weather we’d seen in months. 10/10 weekend.

​ The next morning we cooked American-style pancakes, planned what we were going to do the next weekend, and cleaned up the candy-wrapper carnage from the night before. Then after the others had to go home, Ester and I spent the whole day out on our bikes enjoying the first blue skies and warm(ish) weather we’d seen in months. 10/10 weekend.

 

 

Karneval

The next weekend was the Karneval parade in Bremen! Truth is I didn’t know it was happening until the evening before, but it’s apparently the biggest Karneval celebration in northern Germany. It’s always samba music, but the theme changes every year. This year’s theme was Laune der Natur, which translates to ‘Mood of Nature’.

I hung out and watched the parade by myself for a bit and then wove my way out of the denser crowd in the city center to find a better place to take photos from. I bought myself a pretzel and watched the parade for a while before meeting up with a group of exchange students who also happened to be in Bremen and spending the rest of the day with them.

I made a lot of new friends that day! At one point we were trying to get back to the city center from a mall a few miles away, but for some reason, the tram wasn’t coming anymore. Someone from our group pulled up her phone and said there was another stop in the area, but that the tram was coming in a few minutes and she wasn’t sure how to get us there. A girl our age was standing there with her group of friends and waved us over, saying that they lived in Bremen and had to catch the same tram, so they’d show us the way. She turned out to be from Moscow, though she’d lived in Germany for 5 years, and her English was so flawless that I said, “Oh, another American!” when I first heard her speak. As we walked to the tram I talked with one of her friends, a boy who’d been to Florida (where I’m from!) with his family lots of times, had lived in Singapore the previous year, and went to the international school in Bremen where I’d done my Praktikum in October (and he knew my boss, the American ex-pat friend I mentioned earlier!) We all talked the whole tram ride and exchanged Instagrams as people had to get off at different stops.

Moments like that are what makes being an exchange student so awesome. You meet so many new people and create friendships with people from all over the world, and you never know when it’s going to happen, which stranger standing across from you at a tram stop is about to become a friend.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Bis zum nächsten Mal,

 

Marli