Second Letter Home

Meine Erste Wochenende (My First Weekend)

Friday was a really short day at work. Annika and I went over exactly what I will be doing for the first week or two. She showed me the samples of soil that I will be working with and she explained to me some of the background information about what we are studying. It was pretty interesting. I wasn’t sure how excited I would be to be working with soil, but so far it has caught my interested, so I’m excited to start working. We got done with everything around 1.30pm and she said that I was free to leave whenever. Because my office is the only place where I have internet access, I stayed there until about 5pm talking with a few people online, checking email, looking up travel information (cost of train rides, flights, etc), etc. Unfortunately the building my office is in is closed over the weekend so I am not able to access my computer over the weekend.

After coming back from the office and relaxing a while I set off to find some dinner. I have been making it a point to fix breakfast and lunch in my apartment and then go out for dinner. I walked around the Altstadt for a while looking at different food options. The Altstadt is a large square in the “downtown” area of Cottbus. Altstadt means “old city”, so it is the part of town that was there from the beginning. There are a few restaurants around the square (one that I have already eaten at) and some ice cream parlors and the like. After looking around at all of the restaurants I decided not to eat at them because it would look really weird if I went in all by myself. Many were very crowded and it would just look sad if I went in and took up a four person table by myself. I walked around some of the smaller streets looking for a restaurant but again, I didn’t really feel comfortable eating in many of them alone. Finally, after a while of looking, I found a place that had a lot of tables outside, many of which were empty. I decided to eat there. I ordered this delicious pasta – it was like fettuccini shrimp scampi and the sauce tasted exactly like coconut! I knew there was coconut in the dish somewhere because I saw it on the menu, but I had no idea that it would be a coconut sauce. It was really good! I also ordered a few beers – Beck’s. I think we have those in the states, but that’s all they had. It was a fancier place but I didn’t feel like paying for any nicer drinks. After that I headed back to the apartment and watched a few more episodes of The Office.

It was surprising to see everything close so early on a Friday night. It was kind of sad because I had planned on checking out a lot of the shops and stuff in the city. Oh well. I ended up going to bed pretty early for lack of anything else to do (I was pretty tired though) and was then woken up at about 2am by other students hanging out in the apartments and making lots of noise. Reminded me of home, hah. Except I wouldn’t be sleeping that early. Oh well.

Saturday I slept in until noon. I decided to sleep in and then go explore this really large park that is south of the city. I left around noon and packed my backpack with my books, some snacks, water, and my camera. The plan was to find a nice place in the park to read and relax. I headed out with my map and started my journey. I passed through many smaller parks on the way to the large one that I was looking for. I was walking through this one park that ran along the river when I came upon this large group of people with lots of 90’s music playing. The music was in English, which made me happy. When Germans listen to English music they are a decade or more behind – it’s pretty amusing. Turns out it was a radio station putting on something in the park. Oddly enough, everyone was carrying rubber ducks with them. I looked and the ducks had writing on them – numbers and letters – but no words or anything. Huh. Well, I kept on walking, passing all the people, until I got to a bridge that had a large sign on it that said “START”. I’m pretty sure that they had a giant rubber duck race in the river! It makes sense because when I saw all the people, there were workers removing this huge inflatable tube that stretched across the river – that must have been the finish line and the way that they kept all of the ducks from continuing to float along the river. I’m really upset I missed it – it would have been awesome to see all these yellow rubber ducks racing down the river! I’ll keep my eyes open to see if it happens again.

I keep going through the parks, walking along the river most of the way. I was walking and saw these people standing off to the side of the path next to the river. They were looking at something so I stopped to investigate. There, a few feet away from the water on the bank, is a giant otter! It had to be about the size of Pokey! First I wasn’t sure if it was an otter or a beaver – it had big teeth and really long whiskers, but no large tail, just a little thin one. Without the huge tail I assumed it had to be an otter. The people were trying to feed it something and a few more of them came out of the water to investigate. I began to take out my camera but I think I scared them off or something because they all ran back into the water. The people left but I stayed to take some pictures of them swimming in the river. A few minutes later they all started to come out of the water again. There were probably 5 or 6 total. You could see at the bottom of the nearby trees where they had been biting the bark. I continue taking pictures and this other family comes up, lead by two little girls and their dog. The dog sees the otters and immediately starts barking and chases them into the water. It was pretty funny. For the next 15 minutes the family comes up and we all watch the otters and watch their dog bark at them and try to run into the water the catch them. At one point the otter and dog were about 1 foot apart from each other and sniffing each other. I have a great picture of it – pretty funny. I wanted to ask the family how to say “otter” in German, but I never did. I’ll have to look it up.

I continued walking and found a planetarium. It was closed but I might check it out before the summer is over. The place looked really run down, but it could still be interesting, even if it is all in German. Annika explained that Cottbus is a really poor town with bad infrastructure. The planetarium showed that well. She told me that it used to be a big mining town – that was where most of the people that lived in it worked. After the Reunification of Germany, many of the mines were shut down, people lost their jobs, and the city hasn’t really recovered ever since. Most things here are covered in graffiti and there are many buildings that are just abandoned with graffiti everywhere and their windows broken in. Kind of sad. Throughout the Planetarium Park they had scaled down models of the plants that were placed throughout the park at scaled down distances from the planetarium, which represented the sun. Many of the larger planets were covered in graffiti and torn up. I saw Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Uranus was really far from the planetarium, way after I stopped looking out for them. Not quite sure where Pluto was, or why they would even put it up because it is so tiny and far away from the planetarium, hah.

Continuing on my walk toward the park, I started walking down this large street and then stopped for a minute to check my map. This man on a bike rode up and stopped and said something to me in German. I told him, in German, that I didn’t speak it well so he switched to English. I assumed that he needed help or had a question because he saw me with my giant map pulled out, but it turned out he stopped to help me because he could tell I was lost a little. How nice! He spoke some broken English, I spoke some broken German, and he pointed me in the right direction and gave me some background information on the park and what all was inside of it. It was really cool that he stopped and helped.

As I continued to the park the sky started to get dark and I could tell it was going to eventually rain. I ended up finding the park and began to walk and explore it. There was supposed to be a large dirt pyramid in the park, which I ended up finding. I also wanted to see the “water pyramid” that was supposed to be there as well. It is a very large dirt pyramid that is in the middle of this lake. It’s really cool! It’s essentially this big island but it is all just a giant pyramid that sticks out of the water. Pretty neat-o. By the time I found that it was raining pretty steadily and I decided to try and find the café that was supposed to be in the back of the park. I started following the signs that lead toward the Schloß because they had a picture of a fork and spoon on them, which I figured meant food. I eventually found the café by the time it was pouring rain. Apparently everyone in the park was headed that way to get out of the rain so it was pretty crowded. I successfully ordered a cappuccino and a piece of cake entirely in German. I asked her where to pay, how much the post cards cost, and a few other things all in German! I was very proud of myself. I can work my way through a restaurant in German, which is pretty cool. Kudos me.

Anyhow, after the café I explored the rest of the park. It stopped raining and sun came out again so it was nice. I spent good while there and took lots of pictures. It was a really cool place. There’s a castle (well, a large palace/house) in the back of the park and I walked around that and all of the other buildings around it. There were two people, a man and a woman, dressed up as the people who lived in the palace. I avoided running into them because I didn’t want them to talk and embarrass me in German, hah. I’m not that good yet…

About 6.30pm I ended up back at my apartment. I showered (because I was dirty from walking in the park while it was raining) and got all nice to go out to dinner. By myself. I found this Mexican restaurant on the way back to my apartment that looked good and it stayed open late, so that’s really what I was looking for. I started out of the apartment building and it started to rain. Then pour. Then torrential downpour. I had my little umbrella but ended just making a circle around the block and headed back inside. Yesterday I bought some chicken nuggets at the store just for this occasion. I don’t have a freezer, just a mini-fridge, but I figured they would be okay because they are precooked and it’s okay if they thaw a little. Well, I opened the box and found that “chicken nuggets” in Germany are really cut up pieces of uncooked chicken that are breaded. Go figure. Apparently Germany isn’t big on the frozen foods. Probably for the best. Well, I cooked them in my frying pan (Annika let me borrow cooking stuff). Turns out they were gross and as soon as I started cooking them the sun came out. I decided to throw the nuggets away and head back to the restaurant that I set off to in the first place.

The restaurant was good. I ordered gnocchi (potato pasta) with chicken. Yes, although the restaurant was called “El Mexico”, they actually specialized in Mexican, Italian, and Argentinean food. Go figure. This was no Mexico Tipico… Which actually makes sense if Mexico Tipico means “typical mexico” (but I’m not sure if that’s right or not, so whatever). The gnocchi were good but the sauce wasn’t the best. Oh well, it was still much better than my chicken nuggets, just not as good as my coconut pasta. Once again I checked out the beer menu. They had a large selection, unlike the last place that I ate at. At every restaurant I’ve been to someone has ordered some drink and it looks like red beer. Looking over the drink menu I found what I had been seeing all of these other people get. It’s called a “Potsdamer”. Potsdam is another city in Germany. The description was “red lemonade with beer”. Hmmm. I decided to go for it – why not? It was actually pretty good! Tasted like strawberry/lemon beer. More strawberry, less lemon. I liked it. The beer they used was Warsteiner. Sounds German enough. They also had a drink called “Diesel”, which is coke and beer. I think we have those in the states, but I’m not sure. I’ll have that for another time. So, two successful restaurant trips in one day! And I spoke in German the whole time! Go me!

After dinner I headed back to the apartment to do what I’ve been doing every night since I’ve gotten here – watch The Office. I find it’s a great way to end the day.

Sunday I slept really late for lack of better things to do. Then I cleaned my room a bit and downloaded the pictures that I took the last few days. And now I’m here finishing up this letter. Woohoo.