This week has been a extremely confusing one, because we are having trouble figuring out our courses and modules, and how many credits we can obtain. We need a certain number of credits in order to graduate on time. We have seemingly spent the entire week emailing lecturers - from Nottingham and Berlin - to try and find out what's going on. We still haven't got it completely figured out, but we are getting there slowly.
Alice and I attended three introductory lectures this week. In Berlin, people attend lots of lectures in the first week to see if they like the look of a module, and then pick their final modules after that. On Tuesday we went to a module about major issues in Antebellum history. This sounds like quite a good module, and the lecturer was really nice. It was nice to have a female lecturer, as from my experience American Studies seems to be a fairly male-dominated subject. The module will entail reading documents from Antebellum history relating to major issues including prohibition, farming etc., and then interpreting the documents. On Wednesday we attended a Sociology lecture about religion and society. This sounded quite interesting but the course looked pretty intensive on the reading side. It was also assuming quite a lot of prior sociological knowledge, and whilst my undergraduate degree was half Sociology I didn't feel confident about the module. Alice has never really done any Sociology so we decided to rule that module out. The third lecture of the week was on Thursday, and this was the course we were most looking forward to - the modern American presidency. This seems to be focusing on the Bush and Obama presidencies, how a president functions within the American system, who has the most power etc. It was all stuff I had done on a more basic level in first year at Keele, however this course will go into slightly more depth. It should be a very good course. The lecturer was slightly scatter-brained, but very enthusiastic.
We had a free day on Friday so we decided to go into Berlin and go to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. This was a ginormous museum which followed German history from 100bc until the reunification in 1989. The amount of stuff in this museum was vast, and you could spend weeks in there and not see everything properly. It was 4 Euros to get in for a student, which was pretty good value. After that we left, grabbing a Dunkin Donut from Fredrichstrasse to eat when we got home.
On Saturday we had planned to go to the Ritterfest - a medieval festival - however we didn't know exactly where it was so we ended up pottering around the local town, doing a bit of shopping and having a Starbucks. We went to the supermarket on the way back home. Saturday night is Deutschland Sucht Den Superstar on TV - the German version of Pop Idol - so Alice and I watch it together. It's great because all the singers are quite bad compared to the British or American versions... but we enjoy it :)
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