I will come back here; bring me back when I'm old.

Czech phrase of the day: Velikonoce
Meaning: Easter
Pronunciation: "Vel-eek-o-no-tseh"

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It's been a long time, huh?

I've had a very busy two or three weeks, what can I say? But fear not: I've got a full report for you.

First things first. Two weekends ago I went to Bratislava with a group of friends (two Slovenians, one Croatian, and one Bosnian, if you were wondering). Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, which was, as I'm sure you've figured out, the other half of Czechoslovakia. Bratislava doesn't seem very much like the capital of a state, much less a country, as it's very small - small enough to see all in one day on foot. It's got a castle (which unfortunately is currently closed for renovations), some cool bridges, and a really nice central area with lots of cool shops and cafes. It's one of those charming Eastern European cities that I've fallen so much in love with, with narrow, winding cobblestone streets and crooked, centuries-old buildings all haphazardly arranged at odd angles. Oh, and it had a pretty awesome museum of weaponry with medieval armor and swords and stuff. If the Zombie Apocalypse comes while I'm here, I'm raiding that place for supplies first.

Bratislava also lies right on the Danube River, which flows through the middle of the city. You may have heard of the song "Blue Danube;" well, I can tell you that the Danube is no longer blue. It is brown, and the brown water, combined with the waterside atmosphere of Bratislava - wind, squawking of water birds, etc. - reminded me so much of coastal Georgia that I had to keep reminding myself where I was. Bratislava was also the first time I've ever used euros, which required a mental leap after getting so used to Czech crowns. Using euros is like using dollars if everything were more expensive and the most common denominations were $1 and $2 coins instead of bills. Since then I've had the opportunity to use euros extensively and I don't like them. I don't like using primarily coins, and euros require a huge mental shift from crowns. I see a shirt for 30 euros and I think, "That's a great price!" until I remember that it's euros, not crowns. 30 crowns is less than $2, but 30 euros is more like $37. The only exception is euro bills, which I love because they're really, really pretty and shiny.

Bratislava was especially nice because the Easter celebrations were in full swing. Easter is a really, really big deal here, although in a region made up mostly of atheists, it's more of a cultural holiday than a religious one. Eastern European people have a bunch of really romantically rustic traditions based on pagan practices. Easter Sunday itself isn't much of a big deal, but Easter celebrations begin several weeks before Easter and culminate on Easter Monday, which is the really big deal. When I went to Bratislava, there was a big Easter fair set up in the main square with traditional Slovak food, arts and crafts, and folk music. The Brno Easter fair only got set up last week, but it was essentially the same as Bratislava's: lots of traditional food and people running around in traditional Czech clothing (like this). But from about three weeks before Easter there were people setting up lone stands on side streets selling homemade traditional crafts and such. Hand-painted eggs were everywhere.

My favorite was the guy who stood for three weeks in front of the main train station in Brno selling pomlázka. The pomlázka is a whip made from braided willow branches and decorated with ribbons. The tradition is that, prior to Easter Monday, all the boys and men go out and collect willow branches and braid their own pomlázka. Then, on Easter Monday, they use their pomlázka to whip the women and girls.

Yes, for Easter the boys get to whip the girls.

Wait - it gets better.

Once a girl has been whipped, she is supposed to reward the guy who whipped her with a decorated egg or a shot of alcohol. In some places the girls get to retaliate by dousing the boys with water, but it seems that in this region, the tradition is rather the opposite: in addition to whipping the girls, the boys get to throw water on them, too.

The old pagan tradition is that whipping a girl with a pomlázka transfers the willow branches' youth and vigor to the girl, and will keep her young and beautiful all year. Unfortunately, I didn't get to witness this tradition because I was on an eight-hour train ride from Berlin on Easter Monday (I'll get to that later), but I heard a lot about it. Easter is a public holiday here, so most of the students here went home for the weekend and took part in this tradition. When I asked my English class to tell me about it, all the girls in my class said they'd gotten whipped and most of the boys had plaited a pomlázka and done some whipping. Don't worry - the girls said it doesn't hurt. I was envisioning scenes of mass chaos with girls running frantically away from hordes of whip-happy young men, but apparently the boys tend to stick to girls they know, family and friends. My roommate spent the holiday in one of the tiny villages that are so common in the countryside here, and she had to give her permission to the boys before they would whip her. So it's not nearly as barbaric as it first sounds. =)

This is one of the reasons I love Eastern Europe more than anywhere else: though in most respects it's part of the modern world, fully developed technologically, economically, governmentally, etc., it's not nearly as commercial as "Western" countries. It retains a lot of its old cultural identity, which is sometimes very weird but always very beautiful and romantic. I think in the US we imagine these places where people still live in tiny villages and frolic in green fields in traditional dress, and while they don't exist exactly as we imagine them, they do exist in the mentality of the people here, who do still live in tiny villages and hand-paint eggs and hold to pagan celebrations. It's all very beautiful and completely unthinkable in America, where the only tradition often seems to be, "What do we buy for this holiday?"

By the way, I told my English class that I should import the whipping tradition to the US. The girls would be horrified that they were expected to endure a whipping, but the American guys would love it like nothing else, I'm sure.

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Now for the reason I didn't get the pleasure of being whipped myself.

Last Thursday (hey, that's the name of this blog!) one of my absolute favorite musicians, Laura Marling, had a concert in Berlin. I wasn't planning on visiting Germany, but I knew I couldn't pass up this chance to see Laura Marling, and I figured if I were going to go to Berlin, I might as well stay all weekend. So early Thursday morning I skipped my classes and took an 8-hour train ride to Berlin. Just before the train arrived, I noticed an American guy standing on the platform talking to a Czech guy. I'm not normally one to initiate conversations with strangers - or anyone, really - but spring was in the air and I was thinking about how nice Georgia must be at this time of the year, and that touch of nostalgia for home made me talk to the American guy. Turned out he was in Brno on business and on his way to Prague. When the train arrived he asked to ride in a compartment with me, and when it turned out I'd have to pay to upgrade to a first-class ticket, he paid to upgrade my ticket all the way to Berlin so I could keep him company on the way to Prague. He was super nice and it turned out he was in the music business, so we had a lot to talk about. It was lovely to talk to a fellow American besides the students here - plus I got a comfy first-class seat out of the deal. I guess Mom was wrong when she always told me not to talk to strangers!

From Prague, the five-hour journey to Berlin was interesting because the countryside is so beautiful. When you head north to Germany you run into mountains with sheer cliffs, with tiny villages carved into the side and castles perched on top. Much of the train track follows a river valley cut straight through the mountains, and it's all very green and lush and beautiful. Things do look more modern and generally nicer as soon as you step over the German border, but in my opinion the Czech side is more quaint and beautiful.

In any case, when I got to Berlin, I made a beeline for the first Burger King I saw, then went to my hostel. Hostels, for those of you not aware, are very, very cheap lodgings for travelers on a budget. They're everywhere in Europe, and I wish we had them in the United States, because they're very nice. They're nothing like the ratty motels that provide cheap lodging in America. Hostels are generally very clean and well-ordered. The reason they're cheap is that everything in a hostel is communal: the bathrooms, showers and kitchen are typically shared with everyone else in the hostel (although there are separate girls' and boys' bathrooms and showers) and you usually sleep in a dormitory with about 5-7 other people, much like summer camp. You also generally have to pay extra for extra things, like towels, soap and shampoo. On the other hand, they often provide free breakfast and internet access. So if you don't mind having roommates and bringing your own soap & shampoo, you can sleep in a clean, comfortable, safe place in one of the top tourist cities in the world for about $18 per night.

I stayed at one of the top-rated hostels in Berlin because it was the closest to the concert venue. It was a beautiful old townhouse with four floors. The first floor consisted of the help desk and a large living room-like area for people to just hang out, and the other three floors held dormitories. I stayed in a room with five Greek 20-somethings who had randomly decided to spend the Easter weekend in Berlin. They were super nice - in fact, when they left in the wee hours of Sunday morning to catch their plane back to Greece, one of them left roses on my bed to say goodbye. It was so sweet.


But back to Thursday. After I settled into the hostel, I went to the nightclub where the concert was held. I met this cool German guy who was likewise a huge Laura Marling fan; he and I were the first people to arrive, so we chatted for a while until the doors opened. The concert was awesome; there were no chairs and no backstage, just a low stage in a one-room club, so the audience crowded around the stage and the musicians had to squeeze through us to get to the stage. That meant that Laura Marling brushed right past me, and the whole time she was close enough for me to touch. The performance was simply amazing. She's younger than me, but she writes all her own songs and picks the guitar and sings like someone twice as old, and her lyrics are so eerily mature that I can't imagine how she's even close to me in age. Anyway, enough fangirling; suffice it to say that it was probably the second-best concert I've ever been to. And I made a new German friend that night - who, by the way, recorded most of the concert and put it on YouTube. If you search YouTube for "Laura Marling Privatclub," his videos of the concert will pop up.

The next day, Friday, I went on a tour of Berlin to make sure I got in all the must-see stuff. Here are some of the awesome things I saw:

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It's essentially a whole city block filled with huge cement blocks of varying height. It looks like just a bunch of blocks, but when you start to walk among them, the ground beneath your feet undulates and dips, so that the farthest blocks you can see in this picture are actually ridiculously tall. As you walk further into the memorial, the blocks get so tall that light can't penetrate them and you quickly lose all sense of direction and proportion. It starts to feel like a maze you'll never find your way out of. I think it's a fitting memorial to perhaps the most senseless, irrational acts in recorded history.

A surviving part of the Berlin Wall. As you can see, it's taken a beating.

Another part of the same stretch of the Wall. Notice that it's now protected by a fence.

The Brandenburg Gate

The courtyard in front of the New Museum and the art museum, two of the museums on Berlin's "Museum Island," which is literally an island in the middle of the river Spree where there are like five museums all clustered together. That big bluish building you see on the left is a cathedral.

Some random guy fishing in the Spree on Museum Island. He actually caught a fish, too.

The Hotel Adlon, better known as the "Michael Jackson baby-dangling hotel." Yeah, it's that one.

The Berlin TV Tower, built by the Soviets to transmit TV (and propaganda) signals to East Germany. There's an old story that the Communist government wasn't too happy when, after meticulously destroying all crosses and crucifixes displayed in public, it turned out that the light reflected from the top of the TV Tower makes the sign of a cross on the ball part of the Tower. You can see it in the picture if you look hard.

The American embassy in Berlin - the first American embassy I've seen in Europe that wasn't surrounded by a huge, impenetrable fence.

Just one example of the awesome artwork painted on buildings literally all over Berlin.

I also saw the Reichstag (the German parliament building), Checkpoint Charlie (the major checkpoint in the former Wall), the Checkpoint Charlie museum (which documents all the clever ways people escaped from East Germany), the East Side Gallery (the longest existing stretch of the Berlin Wall, which is now one big space for artwork by artists around the world), and the memorial to the thousands of books burned by the Nazis, which consists of an underground room beneath one of the main squares in the city. The room is inaccessible and only viewable through a plexiglass slab in the ground, and the only things in the room are a series of empty bookshelves big enough to hold all the books that the Nazis burned. It's pretty eerie and chilling to look at.

I spent Saturday mostly just walking around exploring the city and its shops. My hostel was in what used to be East Berlin in a district known for two things: Turkish immigrants and punk/alternative culture. The entire district is basically a mix of Turks and punks with mohawks. It was pretty awesome (particularly because the German language drives me crazy and I prefer to be surrounded by Turkish speakers than German speakers). The district has the most epic graffiti and street art I've ever seen and a ton of awesome ethnic restaurants. I found this little Turkish chicken restaurant that made the most delicious non-fried chicken I've ever had in my life (and it was better than most fried chicken I've ever had, too). I ate there two nights in a row and I was so, so very sad to leave it behind.

Speaking of food, besides the chicken, the Burger King and the youthful, energetic spirit of the city, I found two other reasons to love Berlin: 1. They sell sunflower seeds there, which I haven't found in the Czech Republic. Apparently sunflower seeds are popular with the huge number of Turkish immigrants in Germany. 2. They sell Snicker's Crunchers there! That was the only candy bar I've ever really loved, and they stopped selling them in the US years ago, but they still sell them in Germany! When I laid eyes on one, I immediately bought all the ones the store had, so I wound up bringing about 40 candy bars back to Brno with me. But it was so worth it: when I took the first bite of one, I nearly cried.

I meant to spend Sunday morning hitting up as many of Berlin's flea markets as possible - it has about a billion flea markets - and go to the museums in the evening, but the museums sold out before I could get tickets, so I wound up shopping all day - and yes, spending lots of money (for the first time since I got here, actually). But as usual here, the vast majority of the money was spent on my family. I never realized how irrevocably tied to them I was until this weekend. The whole time it was like they were right there with me, in my head, so when I saw something one of them would want, I just had to buy it as if I were buying it for myself. For instance, I saw a T-shirt that I knew Misty would just have to have if she were there, and I couldn't not get it for her. The same with my dad. He might have more restraint than I did when making purchases on his behalf, but if he were here to see all the awesome antiques that are just sitting around, he probably wouldn't. I got him some awesome stuff he's gonna love. I also finally found my mom's birthday present, so I dropped a bit of money on that - but she's gonna have to wait for it.

In all, despite my disdain for the German language, I loved Berlin. It was a lovely city and I would like to go back someday to see the museums and hit up the flea markets I missed. =)

I'm sure I've forgotten to include some things, but I've been typing this for like 3 hours now, so I'm going to take a break now, lol.

As for what's next: who knows? I'm gonna use this weekend to catch up on some practical things, and next weekend I'm hanging out with a Czech friend, but I hope to organize a trip to Krakow, Poland with a couple of friends, and there's talk of going to a few other places as well. If nothing happens, I'll just have to make another trip by myself. At least now we know I can do it. =)