Erasmusblogs

On Saturday I went to my first KZ (concentration camp), Sachsenhausen, which lies only a few kilometers away from the capital. I should have written about this a few days ago, but I didn´t have the time, so now I´ll have to squeeze a few things more together. My apologies. Well, Sachsenhausen is at the end of the S-Bahn (urban train), line 1 to Oranienburg, and the camp is surprisingly near to this little town, Oranienburg. That´s one of the most impressive things: Sachsenhausen stood at walking distance from the village, but there was a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, which stood straight INSIDE the village. Amazing. It is explained in the camp that the Government in the Third Reich used this vicinity to intimidate the inhabitants and show up in places where news and progress didn´t spread as fast as in bigger towns.

We arrived at the KZ at 14,30 thanks to my two wonderful Spanish mates, who came too late (40 minutes) and I had to wait for them under the sleet. Then of course we lost the train we were supposed to catch…As a result, I could´t see the medical experiment chamber, the autopsy room nor all of the huts where the prisoners lived. On 16,30 everything was so dark and the museums started to close… not to mention the bitter wind that blew in the huge flat area of Sachsenhausen (I got a cold). I shall go there once again, this time alone.

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         In the first week we must visit some offices and deal with hundreds of papers. Frustating. These days I have met Czech students capable of speaking three, four or even five languages, but in these offices few are those who speak English. Receptionists are our enemies. No receptionist can speak English in Prague, I assure you. They can´t in my dorm, they can´t in the Rectorate, and what´s more important they can´t in my faculty. So Ana and me stay in front of our faculty reception trying to know where the International Office is. The woman gives me a phone and a number. I dial. Czech language.

         We go eating to a kebah. The waiter speaks Spanish. We DO NOT need waiters speaking Spanish; we can easily say "A pizza please." In bars they are polyglots, and in the offices they can´t speak English! Definitely something is wrong with the employment policies here. I try to cool off and eat the thing. And the man starts singing "Viva España."

         Saturday morning I go downtown alone with no map. I think it´s the best way of getting used to the streets of Prague. I get lost soon. Fortunately I can find my way by following the McDonalds signals. How strange is being lost in this lovely mixture of gothic and art-noveau buildings, and suddenly get happy when seeing one of these ugly red arrows, "Next McDonalds 100m." Cause no matter which city in the universe you are in, there´s a McDonalds downtown. Globalization seems so wonderful today… I choose another place to eat, though. "Gran pizza para vos. Españoles comer mucho mucho."

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"The Fall has come to hurt". So sings Charon´s vocalist in one of their tracks, but more than fall, it´s winter that has already come to Berlin, hurting all the same. All the leaves in the trees are almost gone and I´m anxious, thinking of the forthcoming weeks of bitter wind and perhaps snow. This weekend we had an abrupt turn on the weather: from the usual 16/8°C we´d been enjoying, the temperatures went down to 9/0° C. Welcome to reality, and the worst is yet to arrive, for we´ve had a very mild autumn: the Germans tell us that the milder the autumn, the colder the winter.

Last week was indeed horrible for me, not only because I felt a so down and blue, but because I´ve suffered great pains in my burnt hand. I couldn´t believe it when I found myself saying on Saturday : I wish it was already Monday! The weekend wasn´t really special. On Friday I had a costume party at a friend´s house, and later on the same evening, an Erasmus party at a Mexican´s flat in our hall of residence. Dreadful, both. We ended up drinking orange juice at Marilo´s flat until 5 am. On Saturday I wanted to go to K17, but once again, no way, no one wanted to pay the 5 € admission fee: this weekend I´ll go on my own, and if it IS an absolute pain, so be it.

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        The week before the classes started, there were parties every night in this dorm, till someone called the police because of the noise. Next day we had notes by the European Office reminding us our duties as "ambassadors of your countries." Nice way of saying "were you raised in a barn?" Here parties start like a guerrilla raid. You are in the hall, you blink and next thing you see is scores of people holding beers the size of containers. Beers in Czech Republic are pint-sized; less than one euro each. It´s the cheapest thing you can buy in supermarkets or drink in a bar. Beer is cheaper than water. Absinth is also quite common and not very expensive. In many countries it is banned, but here people buy it in supermarkets as easily as Uncle Sam Tomato Sauce or dental floss. As regards booze, the Czechs know how.

         Some days after my arrival I went with Sandra, Vanesa and Yolanda to an Open Air Party run by Czech university students in a little, cosy island in Vltava river. There were a big scenery for concerts, drinking beer contests… Somebody misinformed us, so when we arrived the gigs were over and the Czechs as pissed as a fart. Czech people are so quiet. Even when drunk they keep silent and polite. Of course they kick bottles, puke or fall over, but smoothly, like if trying not to disturb. We drank two quick beers and stumbled toward Cross, a huge arty pub, completely decorated with recycled stuff, disposal materials and found objects. Awesome!! People in harlequin clothes and red wigs about to performance in first floor -a kind of retro-futurist cabaret, like being stuck in someplace between Twin Peaks and a Marilyn Manson video-; a harcore concert upstairs in a bleak, absynth-scented room; and an easy-going atmosphere underground, where we stood dancing reggae.

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These days I´ve been following with great interest what the papers said about the turmoil in France, and surprisingly, no Spanish newspaper says that the revolt has spread over more countries, luckily, because my mother could die of a heart attack. On Monday, on the street where I live, there was an accidental (?) fire on a building, dramatic: people were inside, the firemen had to move them out: two fire engines, three ambulances, six patrols…pretty impressive, with people crying sitting on the floor and all that. I was so dead curious that I had to go down to ask what was going on.

Also that night, seven cars were set alight. What the fuck is going on?
I also burned my right hand with oil on Monday. The WHOLE of it. Fireday 100%…

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…or Das Loch in German, is a bar we´d been hearing of ever since we arrived in Berlin, and eventually we went there. As its name claims, it´s a hole, a hole in the ground, and much better than I had imagined, for it´s supposed to be an illegal punk dump. It looks like a sewer from the outside and you have to do a balancing to manage getting in; once you´ve entered, you come face to face with a dump (yes), muggy, dark and however GREAT place, with candles, some punk paintings on the walls, a big swing for three people (my feet didn´t reach the ground and I had the feeling I was going to fall every now and then). They played Nirvana the whole night long and we met some very nice people there, and surprisingly (I don´t know how come it stills amazes me, actually) everybody there spoke Spanish. One of the waiters was Portuguese, there were two Brits who could also speak Spanish, and the same was true for one Italian and a few Germans. 0,5 l beer, 1 €.

Later we went to another pub, close to Das Loch. We had to pay 2 € as admission fee, for there was an Air Guitar Contest (I laughed myself enormously). Drinks were also cheap there, although not as much as in Das Loch, but the scene a Spanish girl made was worth the higher prices. She was flirting to death with a German who obviously wasn´t interested, but anyway she didn´t want to give up and went on embarrassing me and the air-guitar-players.
I don´t know what I´m going to make today, but tomorrow I´ll try to start with the translation of the Spanish Constitution into German, my first piece of homework for the subject "Law Translation". I´m already working like a slave on my translations, there´s always so much homework to do here…

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        People working in this dorm can´t speak English. The first days you have 1000 questions to do and all you get at Reception are shrugs. "Can you give me more sheets? Why don´t I have a reading lamp while many people do? Is it true I have to pay for the washing machine, the vaccum cleaner and the ironing board?" Just indifference and suspicious looks. So the first week you feel as a burglar tiptoeing at night, till one day you stop worrying, shut your mouth and use the washing machine only when your pants stock is out.

        As regards problems with language, going to the supermarket may be pretty funny. Everybody fails when shopping, no matter how prepared you are or think you are: czech dictionaries, lists of czech food, consumer´s sixth sense… Nothing works. Everybody has his/her particular record of mistakes. For instance, once I was looking for parsley. Provided the vegs department was full of similar herbs, I had to smell every one. Finally I gave up when I noticed everybody was looking at me, so I took one at random. It tasted like petrochemical-plant product and ruined my dinner.

        While such cultural shock it´s funny in shopping, at offices it´s most depressing. When going to ask for something, they usually send us to another office. Then we cross our fingers and wish it was the promised English-speaking desk. "Hello, I´m an Erasmus student," is a sentence that has completely lost its sense and spins in my mouth like a tasteless chewing gum. In addition, the timetables are always in Czech, even if it´s the English or the French department. We asked the secretary to translate them to us, but couldn´t cause they were in abbreviations. "Not even the Czech people can understand this?" Ana, my classmate, and I stood there astonished, staring the letters like if they were Egyptian hieroglyphics: birds, big eyes, or men in underwear frozen in awkward posture.

        Generally these days you feel puzzled, foolish and like teleported to Uranus. The third say Ana and I got lost and couldn´t find our dorm. It was sunset, nobody in these silent, gloomy streets, only big dogs barking at us. When we finally found our way back, the receptionist´s wooden face seemed to us the prettiest image in Prague. "Home again."

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