Judaism and Islam for beginners, the mayor of Berlin has spoken, and traveling some more

April 7-13

Monday

There were a few sessions being offered in the morning, but Helen and I decided to skip out. She wanted to go to Checkpoint Charlie and I wanted to go to the Jewish Museum because I had heard that is was well worth the visit. We left together and then split ways after stopping at an internet cafe. I got to the Jewish Museum a little after 10 and had until 1:30 to stay. It turned out to be really interesting, starting with the early history of Jews settling in Germany and Jewish traditions, and ending with National Socialism and the Holocaust. Unfortunately, I spent to much time reading everything in the beginning, that when I got to the end, I had to rush through everything. I could have stayed much longer because the exhibition there is very large. It was very interesting and I was glad that I opted to go and missed the first session. I made it back to the hotel just in time to go to the second session, which was a panel discussion on the topic “Germany: A Global Player.” It was interesting to here the questions that people were asking the panel and to hear what they had to answer. After the panel, we had to go and get changed for the opening ceremony at the House of World Cultures. It is the former Congress Hall and is also known as the pregnant oyster for its architectural design. It is now a center for Non-European Art. During the opening ceremony, directors of the Fulbright Commission in Germany spoke, Fulbright musicians sang and played instruments, and there was a guest speaker who talked about Climate Change. After the ceremony ended, we were served a buffet dinner once again and here bread was spelled “bred!” I had to laugh about that one, even though I am sure it was just a typo. After dinner, we took the subway back to the hotel and went to bed because we were exhausted and knew that we had to get up early again on the next day.

Tuesday

After eating Breakfast at the hotel, Helen and I decided that we wanted to go back to the New Synagogue and this time go in it. We arrived before 10 and it didn't open until 10 so we had to wait. In the mean time, three Japanese men, 2 of whom we had met in the elevator at the hotel came over to us and started talking to us. They asked us where we were from and what we were doing in Berlin and Germany. We explained and then they told us that they were artists and do exhibitions and that they were heading somewhere else the next day. The funniest thing that they said to Helen and I, was that we look like twins. We laughed hysterically about this because if you saw Helen and I, we look nothing at all alike. She has red hair and is taller than me. But what they were referring to were our jackets, our shoes, and the way that we were sitting. Then it made more sense to us!

Finally the synagogue opened and Helen and I paid our Euro to go inside the dome. Unfortunately, it didn't meet our expectations and we were very disappointed. You couldn't go into the actual open part of the synagogue and when you got up to the top, you weren't allowed to take pictures. The view was nice though. After the synagogue, we walked around the Museum Island and back toward the hotel. I decided I was going to buy a new pair of tennis shoes as a birthday gift for myself, since I have almost walked out my other ones. I found some cheap pumas in the kids department and they were a great purchase! I then went straight back to the hotel because I had another tour scheduled for today. This was a tour of a mosque.

We met in the hotel lobby for the mosque tour and here we met our tour guide, Ufuk, who was born in Germany, but his parents are from Turkey. We left for the subway, after everyone had arrived who was coming along. We were off to one of the newer quarters of Berlin, where a lot of people with migrant backgrounds currently live. The area is known as Neukoeln and includes the Sonnenallee district. We got out at our stop and walked the rest of the way to the mosque. When we arrived, there were a lot of people in the courtyard and Ufuk told us that there was a funeral ceremony going to take place. He hadn't known about this, but he went and asked if the afternoon sermon was still going to take place and if it was a problem that we were there (we were a group of 20 Americans!). Of course no one had a problem with us being there and we went inside the mosque. The first thing we had to do was take off our shoes, as this is part of the Islamic tradition. Already, I felt as if I was entering a new and intriguing world. When we entered the mosque, I immediately thought it was beautiful. The Arabic script on the walls and the colors made the mosque appealing to the eyes. We sat down in the back to observe the service, while the men took their places at the front of the mosque. I say men, because there was only one woman there and she did not go up to the front of the mosque as the men did. She sat in the back, where we had all assembled to watch. First, they did a call to prayer and then they began the actual service that lasted no longer than ten minutes. It consisted of a series of repeated lines and repeated actions. After the service, there is a part that people can choose to do or not and each person does this differently. When the service came to an end, we went upstairs to the most beautiful part of the mosque. Here we could walk around and take pictures, while the short funeral service was taking place. We could here the funeral service, but once again not understand it because it was in Arabic. When this was finished, we all sat in the center of the dome upstairs and Ufuk explained to us the service that we had just seen and what the parts of it were. He also talked about the building of the mosque and the history of the ground that it is built on. The funds for the building of the mosque ($3 million Euro) was all collected from private donors within the Turkish community and the building of it took three years. The ground that it was built on was given as a gift to the Ottoman Empire as a burial ground for Turkish Muslims. Therefore, the name of the mosque, Sehitlik comes from the word cemetary.
An interesting thing to note, is that there are no pictures of people or statues of people placed in mosques. This is because Mohammed feared that the people would concentrate on him and other prophets rather than on God, therefore, names written in Arabic are used in place of pictures.

After his commentary, Ufuk allowed us to ask questions. I took this opportunity to ask him about the woman and why she sat in the back and why she was the only one there. He didn't clearly answer the question, but he did say that the tradition is that women are either in the balcony or in the back of the mosque because they keep a 2 meter distance from the men, although this isn't prescribed in any book about Islam practices. The second question I asked him, was how the Germans view Muslims and the image of Muslims. He answered with an unbiased approach and this led us into a discussion of integration. During the Q and A we discussed some other touchy subjects, but the discussion was never negative by any means and it wa very informative. Following the discussion, Ufuk invited us all to the small Turkish shop beside the mosque for a cup of Turkish tea. Here we were able to sit down at tables and further discuss issues of interest. The tour was overall the most interesting part of the Seminar up to now because it has a lot to do with the research I am doing and want to continue on Turkish-Germans in Germany.

Wednesday

Once again, we had breakfast at the hotel and then walked from there to the City Hall where our sessions for the morning were to take place. To give you a head's up on how many of us there were total, approximately 300-350 Fulbright grantees were in attendance to the Seminar in Berlin, not all from Germany. Fulbright grantees from all over Europe were invited to attend and therefore the group was larger than the amount of German Fulbright grantees. In the morning, five grantees were chosen/volunteered to speak about their work and/or research within Europe and its importance in connection with the U.S. and the greater global society. This ranged from a Teaching Assistant in Hungary, to an Opera Singer in Spain and a graphic design professor in Turkey. There were also a few other grantees on the panel who shared their experiences with us and offered time for questions. This gave us a chance to learn about the success of some of the grantees over the past year in their fields and was very informative.
Following the panel, the Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wolwereit spoke to us in the Berlin City Hall. A little side note, he is openly gay, which I think shows how open Germany is to liberal ideas. I can't imagine an openly gay person being voted into such a high office in the U.S. Anyway, his speech was about the re-unification of Berlin, as the 20th anniversary is approaching, and also how the U. S. played a key role in helping Germany achieve re-unification and gave its support thereafter. Also, he discussed the challenges faced by Berlin during re-unification and the challenges it still faces and must conquer today. When his speech was finished, he also allowed time for questions. He was confronted with questions on integration of families with migrant backgrounds and questions about the Olympics in China and why Germany didn't protest them. His answers came very quickly and were quite impressive. When this came to an end, we were offered lunch at the City Hall and then had a free hour to relax before the next session.

In the afternoon, we again had a panel discussion, this time involving the upcoming elections in the U.S. and the chances and challenges that this will provide Germany. This was also a very active and interesting panel. At the end, a lot of it revolved around the media coverage of the U.S. election in Germany, but this was also interesting. At 4, this was finished and Rebecca and I had planned to go to the Salvidor Dali Exhibition on Ku' damm. There were approximately 450 works by Dali on display there and unfortunately we didn't have as much time to spend there as I would have liked to have had. I had to hurry through the last works to get them all in before we had to head back for dinner. I was really glad that we had decided to go to the exhibition because there were so many works to see and Dali' art is incredible, unique, and fascinating!
We made it back for dinner and finished in time to go downstairs to wait on the buses that would be taking us to the Kulturbrauerei, a disco/bar, where we were provided with two free drinks and an amazing DJ. It was a great time, but was also really crowded once we all got in there and very hot. Helen, Rebecca, and I stayed until about midnight and then walked back to the hotel from there. We packed our things in the evening so that we would be ready to check out after breakfast in the morning.

Thursday

We woke up, went to breakfast, checked out, stored our luggage at the hotel, and then we were off to Potsdam for the day. The seminar was over, but Helen, Rebecca and I had planned to spend the day in Potsdam, which is about a half an hour train ride from Berlin. The weather wasn't the best, but it could have been much worse...at least it wasn't raining. When we first walked out of the station, we weren't sure what to think of the city, but the longer we walked around and the more we saw, the more we liked Potsdam. We made our way to the Sanssouci Park, where about 10 castles are located. The grounds are huge and we spent most of the day walking through the gardens and looking at the palaces. It must have taken us at least 2 or 3 hours to walk through the whole gardens and see everything. When we were done, we were in need of food. We stopped at an Asian restaurant and had a delicious warm meal, before walking around more of Potsdam. Later we caught the train back to Berlin and picked up our luggage from the hotel. We left for the main station and caught our train back from there. I made it in at about 8 in the evening and unpacked, only to re-pack for my trip to the south to visit my friend, Katharina, in Ansbach, close to Nuernberg.

Friday

Because of the seminar, I took the whole week off, thinking it would be pointless to go to school for one day and the one hour that I have on Fridays. Instead, I planned to visit Katharina, who I had met my freshman year of college when she had studied abroad at Bethany. I hadn't seen Katharina for over two years. The last time being, when she dropped me off at the airport to go home from Heidelberg. So I was really excited to finally get to see her again after all this time!
I took the 9:21 train to Hamburg and from there went to Nuernberg. From Nuernberg I had one more short train to Ansbach, where Katharina was waiting for me at the station. After fighting traffic, we went to Sandra's, a teacher with whom Katharina works, for lunch. Sandra has a three year old daughter Miriam and she is really cute, although also hyperactive (well, aren't all three year olds?). Sandra is also a very nice and sincere person and I was glad that I was able to spend part of the afternoon getting to know her and Miriam. Later, we went to Katharina's apartment and dropped off my bag. I was excited to see her place and when we got there, her apartment was very spacious, nicely decorated and had lots of light. I doubt that she could have found something better! For the next few hours, we walked around Ansbach. The city itself is quite small, but has a lot to offer and is very beautiful. We walked through the palace gardens and through the city. It's your typical small town in Bavaria with lots of beautiful architecture. When we were done with our walking tour of Ansbach, we went shopping for some food. At the store a guy was acting very strange and as two normal girls would react, we started laughing. He yelled at us and said we were typical Germans...this put me in hysterics, as of course I'm not German! Katharina laughed and said she wasn't going to say anything in return. When we got back to her apartment, we unpacked the food and then watched “Amelie.” I hadn't ever seen it, but it turned out to be a great movie. Katharina was tired and fell asleep during some parts, but she had already seen it. After it was over, both of us were exhausted and we went to bed.

Saturday

Today we planned to go to Nuernberg for the day. It is about 40 minutes by car to Nuernberg from Ansbach. When we got to Nuernberg we parked on the south side of the city and started walking toward the city center. We stopped and asked a man for directions to the castle along the way and he thought we were crazy. He made it seem as if we were hours away from there. A woman informed us that we just needed to keep going straight and we would get there. We figured out that it wasn't as far as he made it seem. I was in Nuernberg for a few hours on my way back from Svenni's Birthday party, so I somewhat knew my way around, and we found our way into the city center through the city wall that is still intact on most sides. We walked around and went into a few stores along the streets. Then we decided to go up to the top of the castle because the weather was so beautiful and the view was perfect. There were a lot of American tourists running around up there and it reminded me of Heidelberg. There is an army base in Ansbach, where Katharina lives, so maybe some of them were from there. We also heard a bunch of Americans in her city when we were walking around yesterday. Apparently the base in Ansbach will remain open, unlike many other bases that are closing in Germany.
Anyway, when we came back down from the castle, we were starting to get hungry, so we found a nice cafe where we had lunch. The portions were really large and the location of the cafe was along the water, so a lot of people were there. You could tell this was one of the first days of Spring because everyone was out enjoying the weather. We walked around a bit more after lunch, and then went back to Ansbach. We wanted to go to the movie theater in the evening so we looked up films and found one that sounded interesting called “Juno.” It was a really good movie that was very comical, even though other parts were dramatic.

Sunday

The two of us had planned to go to Rothenburg today, but then changed our minds to go to the zoo with Sandra and Miriam in Nuernberg. We had a great time looking at the animals and trying to keep Miriam content. We were rushing to leave because we didn't know if we had enough time to catch the train that I wanted to get from Ansbach to Kiel, so we called the train company and asked when the next train from Nuernberg to Kiel would be. He told us in 18 minutes. We still weren't sure if we would get that one either, but we were hoping. We said our goodbyes on the way and I bailed at the station and ran to the track. At first I freaked out for a second because the sign didn't say anything and then I realized that the train had switched tracks to the one beside it and it still wasn't there anyway, thank goodness. I called Katharina's cell to tell her not to wait, that I would get the train and said good bye and thanks again. I had a wonderful time visiting her and meeting Sandra and Miriam. The visit was long overdue and we had fun catching up on Bethany gossip and sharing stories from the past few years. In addition, this was a relaxing finish to the past three weeks of traveling. When I finally arrived back in Kiel, I walked home, unpacked, and prepared my lessons and materials for the next day.