Spandauer Zitadelle

Yesterday Sebastian and I met up with our friends Sarah and Gretchen to go visit the Spandauer Zitadelle. This is a medieval fortress whose oldest parts are from the 1100's. The tower there on the left is the Juliusturm where reparations for the Franco-Prussian war were kept for some decades in the form of over a million gold marks. Thousands of bats roost in the basement where preservationists study them and tours are given in the summer. Thankfully, we missed the Fledermauskeller this time around.
We let Sebastian dictate our exploration. First he got excited about these ducks who were eating something here, but we never could tell what.
Next he got excited about the cannons; then the tunnel and the bridge; and every time a plane went over he would shout "dewrs anoddoh plane!". We were close to Tegel airport, so there was a plane every two minutes or so. He charmed Sarah with his German words, and Gretchen charmed Sebastian with her bags of mini gummi bears.
This is Pavel from Poland on the left, Lara from France in the middle, and Eddie from New York on the right. Yesterday was also the last day of my German course, and it was sort of politically fraught. We learned about events leading up to the fall of the wall. Angelika was defensive about Moscow and wanted to know "why did they all want to leave?"
Ho got up and explained how much longer, deeper, and higher the wall separating North and South Korea is. I would characterize Ho's German as confident, but incomprehensible. This may explain why I didn't understand until yesterday that Ho is from North Korea. You could see our teacher's gears moving as she started adding up North Korea+scientist+studying in Germany . . . or maybe I've just read Cobweb.
But we got our test scores back and I was pleased. The oral test was very depressing and I felt that we should just not be allowed to speak German -- any of us! But the written test was very similar to the intake test, and I realized how much more I understand. I have picked up a lot of verbs, adjectives, and even new nouns, and I have a rudimentary knowledge of the cases (though that doesn't help me much unless I know the gender of the words I want to use).

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