What Happens When Our Apartment is Furnished

Notice that the last post was in September.  That was about the time we finished furnishing our apartment.  So now we have time to go out and do things.  Hence the lack of blogging but more interesting things to post.  I will now take you back in time to the beginning of October.

October 3rd is German Unity Day celebrating German unification on October 3, 1990.  I was told that while we had off from school there would be no parades or fireworks ("This is not America," a Berliner told me). 

We started our celebration of German Unity and the three day weekend (and our apartment being furnished) by having our first dinner party.  We made chili and cornbread, which I suppose was not in the theme of the weekend, but went over well anyway.  The obstacles of this party were getting all of the cans of things home without a car (I started going every day that week and picking up a few cans at a time), having to make cornbread with no help from Jiffy, dealing with the only icing option really being chocolate glaze (unless you go to a specialty store and pay a lot) and melting your own caramel if you want to use any.  In the end it all worked out, though.

To continue our weekend we went on Sunday to Brandenburger Tor for the Festival of Happiness.  Officially it was the Coca-Cola Festival of Happiness.  The American company logo all over the area celebrating German Unity was quite funny.  The festival was a big concert at the back of Brandenburger Tor.  The stage was at the Gate and the festival with food and stuff stands, rides, and screens to see the concert continued down the street though the Tiergarten. 

We arrived on the wrong side of the Gate for the festival at first and because the stage was blocking it we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to get through at first.  Not a good way to promote German Unity if we couldn't get from East to West Berlin.  We were happy to find that they didn't make this mistake--we just hadn't noticed the way around.

After listening to the band for a bit we wandered all of the stands.  It was a beautiful, warm day out.  It seemed more like summer than October.  It is fun to see what kinds of foods different places sell at festivals.  There was more beer and wurst than we are used to at home.  Also wine and wine with fruit in it.  There were also a variety of ethnic food stands selling things, but not as many as you see in general in Germany.  Cotton candy and candy apples reminded me of fairs at home.  Marzipan and the number of types of nuts were new things at a fair for me. 

The best part about the festival's location was that if you got tired of walking through the crowds you could wander off into the park and sit for a while.  We took some of these nice strawberry-wine-with-strawberries drinks with us.

We wandered back through the stands for some wurst and beer for dinner.  While there the screens from the stage started showing us these people who seemed to be trying to teach us some dance moves.  The dance was somehow reminiscent of Kris Kross, but not quite.  Then the band came on: Culcha Candela.  Once they started singing and dancing it was clear that this was a boy band with the band members being older than 30.  At first we just couldn't stop watching because the whole thing seemed so absurd.  Then it sucked us in and became fun.  We discovered the dance moves they were teaching were for the band and tons of festival goers were dancing in unison.  Wow!  I think that all unification days should include mass groups of people learning a new dance together.

As no band could top this one, and the sun had been down for long enough to make it get colder, we headed home.  We may have missed the last weekend of the Munchen Beer Fest, but we can say that we participated in the German Unity Day celebrations (and there is always next year).