Goodbyes

These last couple of weeks have been sad as well, since all of my close friends from Berlin have gone home or are traveling. In my experience, most of the time we try to find people going through the same things that we are to reflect, grow and mainly have someone to talk to. For that reason, during study abroad you can get to know people incredibly well after only a couple of months. The best friends that I made here in Berlin it seems like I have known a lot longer than just four months.

Since I am staying, I have had to say goodbye basically one by one to all my friends here. But not without some fun in between. In the last weeks it was a mad dash to do everything that we wanted, see everything that needed to be seen, and have some last good times with friends before the end.

The big event was the going-away party that Luis and Verena planned for us. They rented out a basement in an art-house, got some volunteer DJs and invited all of the FU-BESTers, plus our host-siblings, tandem partners, and anyone else we knew in Berlin.

Two of the volunteer DJs happened to be none other than Annie and myself.


[DJs have to have cute outfits]

At the time when we volunteered, we thought it would be fun and cool. The night of the party, we were stressing to try to make our play list just right, get the best parts of the songs down, and make the DJ programs we downloaded from the internet work. This stress basically lasted until right before we started DJing.


[Paula, my host sister, came for a little bit too!]

In the end, there was a mixer there, and Annie and I each had a computer with, which solved all our problems. We used each of our computers as a turntable and mixed some pretty sweet beats, and I'd like to think that everyone had a good time dancing while we were mixing. In the end, it was cool and fun, but we had no idea what we actually were getting into when we volunteered.

Other fun things that we did before people headed out were: having last-night drinks basically every night before someone left; going to the top of the Reichstag dome; doing various fun activities in parks due to the beautiful weather; and visiting the zoo [which there are unfortunately no pictures from since as I was taking a picture of a baboon, my camera stopped working!] Here are some other pictures though!


[Relaxing, trying to look for stars at the top of the Reichstag]


[A big group after the Farewell Dinner]


[Jessica's last night in Berlin]


[An American college tradition brought to Berlin]