29,7,08 I´m sorry, but is that clothing or underwear?

(or: When to Keep Your Mouth Shut)

Sometimes you´re very hot and tired, and you´re walking to dinner. And sometimes, the corridor happens to smell like stale cigarettes mixed with pond scum from Chernobyl. And sometimes, while running, holding your breath, and dreaming of hard rolls, you pass a room containing a girl with a zebra-striped posterior. Is it shorts? Is it underwear? I don´t know. Is it fashionable? Certainly not. Is it painted on? Possibly. I chose not to ask.

What´s funny is, this is not at all abnormal. I saw a 60-odd year old woman yesterday with green hair. One of the Goethe-teachers (in her 50s) wears more revealing clothes than most of the students. Which is saying something. I have seen an outfit made entirely of yellow pleather; a Parisian in a white suit, a la John Lennon; necklaces elaborate enough to have been stolen from the tomb of Tutankhamen…the list goes on and on.  Oh, and someone wore a corset yesterday. Then she decided (in the middle of the cafeteria, no less) that 32°C is a bit toasty for middle-ages garb, so she removed said symbol of repression. This is when I realized that there is such a thing as a body´-less shirt. Sleeves, yes. Big, billowing sleeves. But no front, no back. No seams! Maybe I should knit one.

For afternoon class, we had to interpret sculptures. Two of them, to be exact. In all, this took about 20 minutes. What did we do for the other 70 minutes of class? Smoke cigarettes (everyone else) and watch pidgeons (me). Thanks to the awesome instructional time, my german is really blossoming. But my pidgeon fascination grows daily.

Then I went to the DDR museum, which is tiny, but FULL of cool stuff. However, it was so jam-packed together that I gave up and left after half an hour. I did get a nice little stroll around Alexanderplatz, though.