Tutoring is tannnnnnn genial.

I just wanted to stop by really quick and mention how much I love my new and old kids I tutor.  Today at approximately 7:47p.m. Alvaro, my 11-year-old tutee, and I decided to spend the last few minutes of our session playing cards.  Before I was able to get the cards out he asks if this time we can play with points.  I say, "What do you mean with points?" and he says, "On a paper, can we play with points?"  So I say sure of course. He hands me a pen and paper and asks me to write my name down on it.  As soon as I clicked down on the pen an electric shock went through my hand and Alvaro started busting up laughing.  He had handed me a gag pen that shocks you.  Once he caught his breath from laughing I asked him, "So do you even want to play with points?"  He looks up from bending over giggling and shakes his head with a smile on his face.  I wish I had cool English tutors who I could shock when I was 11.

Also I have new additions to my English tutoring repertoire, now including a 6 year 1 week old and a 7 year old brother and sister pair.  The younger brother knows 4 colors and how to count to 8, but yet hearing them repeat the animals "goose" and "horse" makes me so satisfied, I don't even mind it when a loose bogey accidentally falls on the table.  Also I've never seen someone so ecstatic over the PROSPECT of coloring.  Simply amazing.  I love children.

Ich liebe Berlin!

So from Paris my friend and I took a whopping 14 hour bus ride through Brussels to the capital of Germany.  The most memorable experience throughout this claustrophobic cabin ride, among watching "Up" and reading Harry Potter in Spanish, was being nudged awake by a man carrying an automatic weapon at 4 in the morning.  Apparently at Germany's border you have to show your passport, and as I did not know this, I was quite surprised to see the Polizei officer standing next to me in the middle of the night.  


Once in Berlin we took the U-bahn public transportation to our hostel on the east side.  We went straight to the center where we went down the main street Unter den Linden until we hit Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate.

This area is also close to all the international embassies and although you can't see them the American Embassy is on the left and the French is directly on the right.  Near the French Embassy we noticed a group of people anxiously standing around and asked what was going on.  Come to find out, they were about to be guided on a Red Berlin tour throughout the city.  We decided to join and boy do I not regret it.  This tour explained in awesome detail the years directly after WWII until 1989-91 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was no more.  Our tour guide took us through East Berlin and showed us a lot of historical monuments and sites.  This city is so incredible, for so many reasons, but my favorite was that it was embedded with history everywhere you looked.  Every step I took I felt like hundreds of years of important and consequential history occurred on this exact spot.  We started at the now Russian Embassy that, 65 years previous, had taken the liberty to violate the city's building codes and construct the tallest and broadest embassy in Berlin.  As I'll show you in the pictures coming up, there are still some traces of Soviet Union influence on the building itself.  We then went through what is known as a "ghost station" in one of the underground subway stops.  During the era of the Berlin Wall and Berlin's East/West intersection, sections of the underground subway started in West Berlin, went through East Berlin, and ended up back in West Berlin.    Commuters from West Berlin at first were not allowed to ride through the East stations and had to disembark and take a different line.  Finally the Soviet Union allowed West Berlin to utilize the tracks and stations of the underground S-bahn (for a characteristic exorbitant price), but with a catch.  These stations in the East were completely sealed on the outside with bricks and cement.  When the train approached the station underground it would slow down and eerily crawl through the station without stopping while Soviet guards paced back and forth along the platform, ensuring that no passengers exited.  The train would then continue on until it reached its destination in the West.  The abandoned and frightening stations earned the name "ghost stations" and to this day retain the same font on their stops from Old Germany (which was also a favorite of the Nazis, making it even more unnerving).  These stations are just one example of the severe measures taken to ensure East Berliners never crossed to the West.

Russian Embassy

I spy, with my little eye, an old Soviet relic...

Old German font at Ghost Station

From there we took the underground to a Berlin Wall / Death Strip Memorial.  I don't know if I can do justice to the convoluted historical background that preceded the Berlin Wall so for details on that we always have wikipedia.  What I learned was that the Berlin Wall actually wasn't constructed until 1961.  Before they had tried to create a barrier with fences and barbed wire but the cement wall was not actually put up until the early 60's.  Also the Berlin Wall essentially encompasses the entire West Berlin city.  It does not intersect the city but instead circles the West side.  There was a loophole for East Germans to become West German citizens wherein they would go to East Berlin, cross over to West Berlin, become West Germans by West German law, and then could move freely anywhere in West Germany.  The Soviets attacked this loophole by creating the massive structure that culminated into the Berlin Wall in 1961.  This wall was actually two tall walls with rounded tops to prevent people getting a good hold.  The Death Strip refers to the middle ground between the two walls where there were watch towers, floodlights and sensors to watch for intruders.  Although it is still controversial, documents have come up in the past 10-15 years that corroborate the Soviet Union's orders to "kill on sight" whenever they found intruders trying to cross to the West side.  The Memorial had pictures of those killed from 1961 until 1989 when the wall was torn down.

Remnants of the Wall 

Tribute to those murdered

Old Watchtower

View through the cracks of cement into the Death Strip

View from above of the Death Strip

When I told my fellow teachers at school that I would be visiting Paris and Berlin for Christmas they told me, "Wow!  Que stupendo!  You will love both.  Berlin is beautiful and great.  But also really sad..."  I thought I understood what they meant and what I would be getting myself into, but you really have to visit a city like Berlin before you can understand.  Something I didn't know (and wouldn't until the following day on our next Berlin tour) was that 90% of the city center was completely destroyed during WWII.  90%.  As an American that is something I just can't quite wrap my mind around.  This city was very sad, but also showed that it can persevere and come through it.  The monuments and memorials are everywhere which serve to remind, but also to prove its enriching and complicated history.  I still have tons more to say about Berlin but seeing as how this already took an hour to write and I have to go to Spanish class soon, I'll have to save it for a future date.  To give you some pictures to ponder upon while I go here was one of my favorite parts of the city, the East Side Gallery.  This is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still erected and it serves as a kind of outdoor art exhibit with artists painting murals on sections of the Wall.  I find them all to be simultaneously provocative, depressing, inspiring, whimsical, disturbing, enlightening and overall encapsulating but I will leave you to find your own interpretations.

Checkpoint Charlie

Christmas in Paris

Heyooooo!  Back and ready for action.  Sorry for the delay folks (I'll pretend for now that I have followers) but the last couple of weeks have been filled with non-stop commotion.  To give you an idea all within the span of 2 weeks I was kicked out of my apartment, forced to find a new place, found one that required a 3 month deposit, left for Paris and Berlin with close to no money, then had 3/4 of my clothes misplaced on the airplane.  Take home message:  I have 2 new awesome roommates in a great location and I now have an excuse to dress more European (for better or worse) once I save some money.  Oh and did I mention I might need to have my wisdom teeth removed?  More on that later.

So besides the luggage fiasco the trip to Paris for Christmas was all a go.  I had my friend Sherbert visit me from California and he accompanied me on the voyage.  We managed to coincidentally find a cheap room at the same hostel my old high school chap was staying at so we met up with him early on the 22nd.  Paris, per usual, was a beautiful city, especially decorated for Christmas.  The first day we went directly to Versailles.  I've been to the gardens outside the palace before but never actually inside.  Luckily since I am no longer an illegal resident of Spain and I have my temporary residency card I was able to gain free admission into the palace.  Unfortunately, the outside gardens were not as beautiful as I had once remembered 3 summers ago. Many of the sculptures were covered and the fountains weren't on because of the season...

..but overall the gardens were still majestic as usual.  We even made it to Marie Antoinette's getaway retreat house and all the surrounding little cottages where her farmhands lived.  This area seemed like the most quaint village with watermills and mini light houses.  I imagine the concept for Snow White and the 7 Dwarves was conceived here.

I build stone bridges in my free time.

Then we were off to the Palace.  So Louis XIV put in the plans to build the official Versailles Palace (le château de Versailles if you will) around 1661.  It had originally been a hunting lodge for the Royal Family, but the Sun King had another vision in mind.  He wanted to shift the main seat of power in France to the rural Versailles area about 20 km southwest of Paris.  By moving the court and government to Versailles, Louis XIV hoped to get his way more with the govt. and nobility and move away from the main French population. He required nobles and officials to spend a certain amount of time in Versailles every year, thus weakening their regional influence in their own areas.  Eventually Versailles became synonymous with the absolutism of Louis XIV and the Ancien Régime, or main governing power of France for the previous 4 centuries or so, overall.  It was not until the French Revolution in 1789 that Versailles ceased being the main seat of French power, when Louis XVI was forced to return to Paris shortly before his beheading.  One reason in particular that I find Versailles so fascinating is its use as a tool of humiliation between France and Germany.  At the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, the newly solidified German state forced France to surrender in the Palace of Versailles, giving a crushing blow to France's previous prestige.  Then at the end of the First World War, Germany was blamed for causing the war in the same room France was forced to surrender in nearly fifty years earlier.

All history aside, the inside of the palace is astonishing to say the least.  Many of the early rooms are dedicated to Roman gods and goddesses to capture the essence and purpose of each room.

In case you didn't think Louis XIV was full of himself for building his own palace,
he has sculptures and busts of himself everywhere so you never forget.

Then the main attraction:  The Hall of Mirrors.

Hey, that's me!  I'm in the Hall of Mirrors!

Then once back in Paris, we had a great time seeing the sights, eating the best falafel in the world, and enjoying some Parisian cuisine.  On Christmas day we had an INCREDIBLE dinner at a legit French place for only 19 euros.  If only I had taken a picture to show you how delicious the food was.. oh wait, I took two.



This time around I didn't take nearly as many pictures around the city, but here are some of my favorites.

Wait, it gets better.

Told you.

There is an ice rink on the first tier up.  That's awesome.

This is my high school friend Kevin.

He's a grad student.

I.M. Pei's controversial glass addition to the Louvre.

Joyeux Noel from Paris!

Arc de Triomphe.