My Trip to Leipzig, or How Everything Has Changed in Berlin for Me

Old German Stock ExchangeI wanted to use this post to, as the title implies, update how I’ve been feeling about Berlin and being abroad in general. I was totally stressed out and anxious when I wrote the last free post. Nothing felt like it would just be okay. But, yeah, everything got better. I think the best way to demonstrate how good things are going now is to write about the NYU-sponsered trip to Leipzig I took this past Friday.

Leipzig is a smaller city about 90 minutes to the South of Berlin by train, and given how deliciously speedy trains here go, it probably would be more like something that was two or two and a half hours away by normal forms of U.S. transportation. That is, it’s noticeably outside of Berlin on a map. Anyway, normally I would be upset about having to wake up so early on a Friday, but since all of my friends had to go too (since all of the are on the trip), it made it much more tolerable. No one really did anything Thursday night and we all napped on the train together anyhow. It was nice, it was childlike.

When we got off the train, the sun was out, we were given some time (about an hour) to do cafes and markets before we regrouped in front of the old German stock exchange in Leipzig which is an adorably small building that has been restored. Anyway, from there, we went on a walking tour. We heard about how the entire city was bombed to hell and rebuilt, much like every city in Berlin. We learned about the tragedy of communism and about how this communism had an especially strong grasp on Leipzig. We saw two churches, one of which was the home of Johann Sebastian Bach while the other served as a shelter for those who were politically active against communism. We learned about a coffee house that was responsible for overturning the prohibition Germany once had on coffee, since caffeine is pretty analogous to cocaine in the doses most people used the two substances back in the day: lightly used cocaine, heavily used coffee. We saw an art museum in passing.

The latter two things we saw on the long walking tour are important only because when we were given free time after the tour, my friends and I decided to revisit them. We went back to the coffee shop, which was actually more of a coffee museum with a sitting area that served as an overpriced café. I ordered a Mozart coffee. It was 5 Euros but huge and liquored. I think it’s the most absurd thing here, the way people drink during the day, but it feels so right now that I’m here in Europe. The museum at Leipzig, the specific name of it unfortunately fails me, was really huge. All the pieces got the space they deserved, and nothing bothers me more than when pieces are crammed together. I mainly stuck to the first (second) and third (fourth) floors of the museum. The first housed many beautiful German expressionist pieces and the third housed this collection of oversized modernists and futurist pieces that were really well done as opposed to really incoherent, as is often the case.

We left Leipzig with smiles on our faces. We came back to Berlin and went to a so-called Poor Taste Party until 5am. I really, really liked that day. Nothing went wrong, and it made all the problems I’ve dealt with trying to adjust really well worth the dealing.