(pictures)

And finally, some pictures:

A friend of my dad's was sweet enough to give me one of his buddy passes for my flight to Berlin. This makes the flight much cheaper, though you have to fly standby. This means that in exchange for a cheap ticket, you have a little anxiety in your life about making connections. Everything worked out for me, though I was amused (and anxious) when I took this picture of NYC as I flew over it to Providence, RI in order to fly BACK to NYC in time to catch my flight to Berlin. It was totally worth the extra leg of the journey, though, once I found out I was flying in an extra first class seat!

There's a new soft drink here in Germany, called "The Spirit of Georgia." Anne had a couple of them waiting for me when I got to their house from the Airport. They're yummy, but don't particularly taste like home. The Dr. Peppers that I brought Anne, however, do taste like life in Georgia, so we just put the Spirit of Georgia label on the Dr. Pepper bottle to get things right.

Anne's mom is really sweet, and has been taking great care of me. One day she brought me this little book to help me learn more German. It's called "Grover can be super nice." It's all about good manners--and, of course, when Anne found out her mom got me a book about manners, she gave me quite a hard time ;)

We went to Sanssouci! It's an old Prussian Palace that was Friedrich the Great's summer home. It's especially awesome because Rufus Wainwright sings about it.

This is Friedrich the Great's grave at Sanssouci. Why are there potatoes on it, you may ask? Why, it's because he introduced the staple to Germany! What a legacy.

This flower at Sanssouci will eventually turn into a pomegranate!

Ice cream in Potsdam after the pottery market, and despite the icky weather. Enjoying ice cream on a day like that is really more an act of defiance against nature than anything.

Later on in the week, however, the sun came back for a short visit. This is by the Teltow Kanal, where I went on a bike ride one day while Anne was working at her internship.

Another Anne! Try not to get too confused. This is Anne Graupner, Anne Kutzner's best friend. She lives in Pankow, which is an area in northern Berlin.

This is a pedestrian traffic light with one of the two Ampelmänchen ("little lamp-men") illuminated. You can tell you're in the former GDR (East Berlin) by these guys wearing hats on the lamps instead of more normal stick figures.

The first afternoon we were in Pankow with Anne G., we made a delicious pizza! There's even tuna on it--which is apparently par for the pizza course in Germany.

No surprise here--we play a lot of Uno (one of the "international" games I can play without speaking much German). Even though the games are easy for me to understand, I usually still lose.

Cookout in the Kutzners' back yard! The fire in the foreground was for warmth, since it is far from summery here.

The fancy new central train station of Berlin. This was part of our journey to Greifswald, where Anne studies. It's in the North, right next to the Baltic Sea.

I finally got to meet Anne's roommates! This is Antje, who is (if you can believe it) a little shorter than me! She's quite sweet, as you can tell. I only met the other roommate, Franka, for two minutes or so, at the train platform where we were arriving and from whence she was departing.

On Saturday we went to Bintz--a retiree beach town on the island of Rügen. We completely lucked out with the weather--we managed to catch the sunny hour or two of the day. The weather changes constantly with the strong winds from the sea.

My favorite part of the day was learning to fly Anne's steering kite. It has two strings so that once you get it airborne (and learn how), you can make the kite do spinny-exciting maneuvers. It was definitely the perfect day for kite-flying.

Just because we were at the beach doesn't mean that it was warm! We saw a few dedicated people wading in the waves while all bundled up on the top half!

Naturally, we had to stop for some Apple Strudel and a coffee! It was completely yummy.

This is part of Greifswald, during our Sunday stroll. That's a church spire in the background, and in the foreground are some non-tradtional (for Germany) buildings. Anne informed me that they look that way because they were build when Greifswald belonged to Sweden, between the 17th and 18th centuries.

When we got to the top of the church spire, this is what we could see--downtown Greifswald, in all it's orange glory. You can see the Marienkirche in the back, which you can see from Anne's balcony.

Not to be outdone by the bears in Berlin, Greifswald has fish scattered throughout the town.

We found a hedgehog last night on our way in from Pankow! He was terribly cute and quite scared of us. Apparently, you have to watch out that they won't make a mess of your outside trash.