Typischer Tag
Every morning at around 8, my alarm goes off and it is time to get ready for class. I usually walk with my roommates to the UBahn train stop which is about a five minute trek from our apartments. From here, we take the train for about a half hour with one transfer in between. It is always rush hour when we are commuting to school so the trains are packed with people on their way to work. Once we are off the train, I usually stop at our favorite pastry shop called Crobag and grab a new pastry that I have not tried before.
By then its a time crunch to get to the studio so we walk the five minutes from the station to the beautiful workspace we get to use at a quick walking pace. Our school space is on the third floor of a building which includes a working, professional design studio and a hostel. Two days a week we have designated studio days which are spent totally focused on our photo class. These days are always so exciting because we start out with a class critique of our edited work. From there, we have time to revise and re-edit things and then we are sent out into Berlin to explore either individually or in small groups. During this time, we are focused on finding great spaces for shooting new pictures that will fit into our project. We reconvene at the studio space around 4 in the afternoon and finish up at 5.
If it is a culture class day, our days are usually jam-packed with sights, museums, and lectures. Most of the time we meet in front of one of the teaching assistant’s apartments and go to our first stop on the tour as a group. We meet up with our professor Jan and he marches us around Berlin. We have covered so much ground in just one short month through this class. These days can include up to three museum visits and countless landmarks. Culture days usually end around 6 or 7.
After finishing up a big day of class, everyone usually rides the UBahn back to our neighborhood of Kreuzberg together and people split up on the walk home to either go grocery shopping or stop into one of the cool little restaurants that line the street back to our apartments. There is also a big street festival that is constantly running at Alexanderplatz which is only a five minute train ride from our home. This has been my favorite place to go after class because they have every type of food you can image here, plus there are incredible street performers. I have seen people breathe fire, do double backflips, and balance a large metal ball on their head for an impossibly long amount of time. This area attracts young families and tourists so the atmosphere is very light and fun. I have made friends with one of the shop owners who strictly sells mango orange juice in huge bottles and love going and chatting with him about the day.
In Berlin the sun does not set until around 10 at night so there is plenty of time to explore after class. We usually get back to the apartments around when it gets dark and on a lot of school nights everyone packs into someone’s apartment and watches a movie. We do not have wifi in our apartments which is kind of a pain sometimes, but it also frees up so much time to hang out with each other which is a lot better.
