Pride and Plays

This morning I decided I would take my time getting ready for the day and enjoy staying in bed and doing work on my computer until it was time to leave for the Christopher Day Parade. Natalie, Anna, Leonie, and I all left at 10:45 am and thought we had gotten great spots to see the parade from. Eventually we realized that the parade was going to go down the other side of the street, so we had to fight through the crowd to find a new spot that we could see the parade from. Luckily, across the street from where we were standing Mira, Emerson, and Jasmine were there and we were able to find a pretty great spot. The streets were packed with people there to watch the parade, and it only got more crowded once the parade began. We watched for an hour and a half as groups participating in the parade marched by. There were so many different communities represented in the parade and it really seemed to never end. In fact the parade was still going on when we finally decided to leave because we were all really hungry. We traveled back to Kreuzberg and had a late lunch at a nearby Indian restaurant. After that I went back to the hostel to do some work on my laptop before I headed out to see a play at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

I was meeting Rouja at the theater so for the first time I was traveling to the University on my own. Anyone who knows me can attest to my lack of n

avigational skills, and even though I had gone to the university with a group of people at least 10 times in the past two weeks, I took the train going in the opposite direction of the way we had always gone before. After several failed attempts at trying to read a map and figure out which direction I needed to be going I finally asked someone for help in getting to the University. They were very kind and were happy to give me directions from the station I was currently at. Once I made it to the Bahnhof near the University I ran through some pretty heavy rain to make it to the theater on time. Luckily it seems that showing up at the exact time that the ticket says the show will start is acceptable because I was able to just blend in with the crowd that was also just entering the theater to get to their seats.

The play was called Common Ground and was a story of seven characters that were all affected by the Balkan War. There was a short introduction from two of the characters, then the play took off at a sprint. The rest of the first act of the play was a fast paced journey through time where each character took turns mentioning an important event. The whole timeline seemed very chaotic, mixed with facts and important information about the Balkan wars, and also highlights from sports events, music, and politics. Eventually you see that all of the characters were impacted by the wars and they all ended up in Berlin. I didn’t quite catch how they all met each other, but in the next act they were all traveling to see war memorials and places from the characters childhood. Each character at one point in the play had a monologue that was incredibly emotional and I felt moved by the intensity of their performances. The play in general was very intense and I am still trying to process what I saw and do research on the wars that the play was about because the whole thing seemed incredibly complicated.

Once the play was over I came back to the hostel and debated going back to the Christopher day festivities, but decided instead to stay at the hostel and hang around with other people from our group. I didn’t end up going out with them later in the night because I wasn’t old enough to get in to the place they were trying to go, but I didn’t mind getting a few more hours of sleep.