It was quite a bit cooler today, and rainy at times. Actually needed a jacket (first time in over a week) and umbrella. Nevertheless Timo and I headed out again, this time to check out the "Franco-German Festival" in northwest berlin.
It took about half an hour to get there, after two connections with the u-bahn and then further on a bus. The festival itself actually was pretty similar to the state fair in the states, albeit different language, and different food. The only part of the whole festival that was actually french was in one corner of the grounds with some french food stalls, as well as live music (a trio with guitar, accordian, and violin), a statue-maker exhibition, and a place where you could make soap.
One of the food stalls was selling spiced sausages, all of which were quite tasty (i.e. we said that we would buy a few, and they let us try all of them!). We ended up buying a fig sausage, a sausage with herbs de prevence, and a third one with Thyme. The guy running the display was actually german, from berlin, and interestingly enough was willing to talk to me in the local berlin dialect (berlinerisch), so I could start getting my ear around it (I got a recording as well...more analysis to come :) ).
After a while Timo and I headed out, this time over to his grandmother's apartment (had to pick up a few things there). While there, she actually let me borrow a few books of poetry she had, all of which were written in the berlin dialect of german. This definitely bodes well for me actually possibly learning to speak some of it!
Soon after we met up with Julian and spent the rest of the saturday night in the true berliner style (well, maybe not most berliners) at an observatory! Julian and Timo both had worked there and had been under the mentorship of Wolfgang, one of the guys that works there.
The observatory is currently being used for the set of a movie, the title of which I never heard. Apparently it's almost done being filmed, but there is one last scene they needed to get involving the office of the "mad scientist" character (which was all being staged upstairs in the room with the telescope).
The rest of the time we were there, Julian was getting some help with questions he had about some aspects of quantum mechanics from Wolfgang, which went on for a few hours. It was cool to actually learn how to do some math in german (not necessarily new theorems or anything, but more how to do the basics like "times" "plus" "square root" "eigenvalue", and other vocab like "take an integral", among others).
After that it was about 1am, and we needed to head back. We stopped quickly at an Imbiss stand to get some Döner (none of us had had dinner), and then headed back to our respective homes after that.
Note: I used Timo's camera to take pics from today, and still haven't gotten them from him, so pictures will come soon.
