ne'er do good

15512 slow day, one of those days where the less you do, the less you want to do, hence my not posting anything. we woke up for Czech language class, after that we had a discussion session with our professor Harlow over the reading, and our experiences in Berlin. a good number of the kids found Berlin dark, and oppressive, or blase. this dialogue has alot more not international affairs/polisci/hist type kids than my last one, so there are lots of people that really have very little knowledge of what went on here. here being Europe in the last 200 years. the unification of Germany, the German empire, WWI, WWII, the spread of socialism,, reunification all that stuff. Berlin is a new city, it was bombed out of existence 70 years ago, and then split in two between competing super powers, so any rebuilding took place disparately. almost all of it was rebuilt in the 60s and 70s, which were not a very good time in architecture, everything is big and cheap, and in the east it was designed to be oppressive, to remind the people that they were but cogs in the machine. the conversation on the reading also had a bunch of introduction to marxism, and soviet communism, so i got to prove my worth there. the readings were personal accounts, primary documents type things about the early days of communism in various countries. while i didnt really learn anything new, it did serve to remind me that my general perception of the "communist empire" that of Russia and Eastern Europe isnt all there is, and even still Eastern Europe's communism wasnt exactly home grown... the Peruvian and Cambodian and Chinese communisms were domestic endeavors. sorry for the light post, tomorrow will be better...