The Peace After The Storm

Now that my journey through Berlin and Europe is over I feel it appropriate to take a few minutes to reflect on my experience.

I spent 4 months or 111 days on foreign soil. Mostly in Germany but there were many other places I visited. Amsterdam, Holland. Barcelona, Spain. Paris, France. Geneva, Switzerland. Prague, Czech Republic. Those are five of the worlds major cities which I managed to visit during my travels, four of them in only 10 days time. Then all the cities that I visited in Germany; Dessau, Hamburg, Potsdam, Wolfsburg, Essen, Cologne, Munich, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bernau, Eberswalde, and of course Berlin. All in all I think sixteen cities in 4 months time is pretty special. Its something I will never do again in my entire life for that length of time.

I began this trip in the hotel room in Boston dreading leaving my family, girlfriend, life and everything behind to go to a strange place. But I couldn't be happier I went. I'm actually a little upset that its over. There was still so many things that I wanted to do. It was absolutely very difficult to be gone for that long. I missed everyone so much. But the things I learned and just the shear amount of culture I was exposed to makes it all worth it.

I said in the first post that I was not excited and I hoped landing in London was going to make everything feel better but at the time it didn't. I put on a smile and went on with it. The first two weeks were difficult but it got easier. I finally assimilated into life in Germany and although I missed everyone I learned to really enjoy life in Europe. In many ways it's better than American life. I could definitely see myself living in Europe at some point but who knows what the future holds. So life went on and I became good at German and settled in. Then before we knew it we had to leave. Back to America and back to really life. So in one sense I'm still a little upset about this trip but its for the opposite reason. I'm very happy to be home but I wish going back were easier.

Everything I learned while abroad will apply to my everyday life. From general politeness, to being accepting of foreigners, to all of the architecture facts I can handle, and so many different cultures. I loved Germany and can't wait to go back. I still have to visit Stuttgart and Frankfurt and then the many other European cities. Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, London, Dublin, Budapest, Istanbul, Helsinki, Athens and many more along the way. That may take me a few trips but I would love to hit all of the countries in Western Europe and eventually start doing the Eastern Block and maybe even Moscow. These are ambitious dreams but I hope to accomplish them. For now I can only look back on my four months with fond memories. It was the best experience of my life and I'm sad to see it go. For now it's back to normality and school in Boston. Not as exotic as Berlin but still pretty good.

Thanks to everyone who read this and I'm very happy to have an audience who enjoys my work. Good bye for now and thanks again.

For the final time

-Phil

Pinch Me it's Time To Present

Wednesday was our final critique for our projects. We spent the previous week building models and preparing drawings to show a panel of four critics. Well I was able to finish a day early and took the entire day tuesday to just really refine everything and make sure my presentation was in the order I wanted to present it. So we get to presentation day. As a group we presented our plan for the urban design of our project. This entails how our project reacts and how the urban technique we employed was fulfilled on the site. This was presented to all 10 critics and they weren't too pleased with our scheme because they said that it didn't look like we carried it out intentionally. So the presentations proceeded from there and they all went alright. No ones went bad but no one had a great one either. Needless to say I was nervous. I had not had a good critique in a long time and especially since my teacher and I had been butting heads the whole semester nervous was an understatement. I pulled myself together and presented like a champ. One of the best performances I have put up in a while. But then it happened. I needed to pinch myself. Roger one of the tough critics says "Your project is quite interesting, it works, and I really like it." I almost passed out. I half expected to hear my name being called and the other students trying to wake me up telling me it was my turn to present. But it was real! They loved my project and told me that they had to find something wrong with it just so I wouldn't get too excited. Well it was too late for that I was beaming and I don't think I've stopped yet.

Then at night we went over to café Bilder Buch for our reception. It was like the series finale of a sitcom. All of the old characters get to come back for one final hurrah. Most of our tour guides from the semester were there, all of the critics we had and local architects we met, researched or had any contact with during the semester. I spoke to my teacher and thanked her for kicking my ass the whole semester and told her how appreciative I was. Then I spoke to Roger for a while and got his individual take on my project. It was a nice evening and we had a lot of fun and were very glad to be done with semester and of course excited to return home on Saturday