The Wild Boar Hunt

Yesterday we went wild boar hunting.

Well, we need to be truthful here: Yesterday we went for a walk in the Grunewald, a huge coniferous forest that begins in our general neighborhood and stretches eleven square miles to the south and west. Like everything in Berlin, it’s filled with history: It contains the Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), one of the highest points in Berlin, built out of the rubble of 400,000 buildings carried out of the city after World War II. Under the Teufelsberg lies a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so sturdy that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.

What made it especially interesting for the Zetzsche family yesterday, however, was the possibility of a wild boar sighting. Berlin is known as the one of the world’s greenest capitals, and as such has recently also become the resurgent wild boar’s playground. Apparently there are about 8,000 wild boars that make their home within the Berlin city limits year-round, and another 2,000 move in during the spring to have their litters in the many green pockets throughout the city.

Hmmm. This isn’t actually reassuring when you hear these beasts described by hunters as being among “the most dangerous of quarry,” “the size of a motorbike and with much the same acceleration,” and “able to rip up and kill dogs with no effort.” Maybe that’s why all dogs have to be leashed in the springtime when they walk with their owners through the Grunewald.

The Grunewald itself is an eerie place in the late winter. For those Pacific Northwesters familiar with the wet deep green of a forest of firs, you have to think brown: brown bare trees, a brown thick carpet of decaying leaves, brown paths of churned-up dirt. Not a green shoot in sight. To me it seemed, well, very brown. But Jost soaked it up, showing us the birch bark that could be burned even when everything else is wet, and Hannes speculated on the best den possibilities for the female boars (sows?). Anna stayed close to me and held my hand.

We didn’t see any, of course. And I left the camera in the car, of course. Leaving you to imagine those brown beasts lurking in the brown forest among the brown leaves.

The Berlin International Film Festival

Star Gazing

Living here in the capital of a cultural mecca, we get a little blasé about the stream of celebrities that hang out in Berlin. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were here with little whatshername for most of August, Robert Redford pops up now and again, Matt Damon and Clint Eastwood sightings are common, Will Smith was here last month for his movie premiere, and local favorites Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie just bought a loft apartment for their family in the heart of the city. Media are calling Berlin the “new New York,” with an exploding cultural life and a grittiness and lack of paparazzi that’s appealing to artists and the Hollywood crowd.

This week it’s getting a little crazy again during the Berlinale, Berlin’s international film festival. The Rolling Stones kicked off the week with Martin Scorsese to plug their new documentary, and today Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Natalie Portman, and Madonna were busy kissing cheeks, giving interviews, and walking the red carpet.

For Jost and me it’s intensified a problem that we’ve had since we arrived—we just can’t leave the house without being mistaken for Brad and Angelina.

Yes, here it is again—ambushed by the paparazzi.

Brad's--I mean Jost’s patience is wearing thin.

Please don’t hate us for being beautiful!

Hannes learns to ski

Just Call Me Hannes Zetzsch-ski

This is me on my first time down the slopes (LOL)

I just got back from the Czech Republic where my class spent almost a week learning to ski. We went to a ski resort called Spindleruv, near the borders of Germany, Czech Republic, and Poland, in the Karkonosze mountain range, called the Giant Mountains in English. It was a little more than seven hours by bus from Berlin, through most of eastern Germany.

The Giant Mountains

Most of the kids already knew how to ski because the class went skiing together last year also. Some of them are already unnaturally good because they’ve been skiing since they were two years old. Not me! When we started skiing we were divided into two groups: the know-hows and the losers (I’m a loser!). Our teacher had hired two ski instructors, a Czech man and woman who spoke no German, and the woman stayed with the beginners. She taught us in English, so I was the interpreter for our group.

I quickly learned that the hardest thing about skiing is getting on the ski lift! I’m not sure whether they have this kind of lift in America, but you sit on a disc hanging from a tow line above and your skis stay on the ground the whole time. On the first two days I had some really amazingly grand splats trying to get on the lift, but by the third day I looked like a pro (I think). The skiing itself was a lot of fun. I decided that keeping your balance is not that hard, but keeping control of the speed can cause problems.

This wasn't actually our ski lift, but it's the same kind

Altogether we skied three days. On the first and third days we skied at a small slope, but on the second day we skied at a large resort with a lot more slopes. While I was there I went on a slope that was classified red, the second hardest type of European piste. I spent a bit of time on my rear, but I made it down—and quickly! On the morning of the third and final day of skiing, we rented some sleds and went down a four-kilometer luge run. That was really fun, but it was also the activity that caused the most injuries—a broken thumb and various running-into-tree accidents. Fortunately I remained more or less unscathed.

Here's the pool

We stayed at a four-star hotel, and we had a great time hanging out in the evenings, swimming in the pool, sweating in the sauna, harassing the waiters at mealtime, and watching movies until the wee morning hours. I didn’t get much sleep this week, but it was sure fun anyway.

Our four- (well, actually three-and-a-half-) star hotel

Now I’ve started trying to persuade my family that a ski vacation in Switzerland would be a perfect activity for Easter vacation!

Report cards

Neue Kantstraße 3:
"Where the women are strong,
the men are good-looking,
and the children are all above average!"
--borrowed from A Prairie Home Companion

The anticipation was great—after five months of school, the semester was finally coming to an end and report cards were being issued!

The third graders in Anna’s class were excited to be receiving real grades for the first time. This grading period was especially important for Lara’s classmates in the sixth grade, who would also be told which secondary school the teachers were recommending for them: college prep, a trade school, or a school for “laborers.” And Hannes’s classmates at his comprehensive school were nervous about receiving bad grades that would make them go down a level in their courses and prevent them from getting a college prep diploma.

We had made it clear from the beginning that we weren’t too interested in the kids’ grades as long as we could tell that they were working hard, so the report cards were not anxiety-producing for our family. On Friday the kids had a period or two of classes and then the homeroom teachers ceremoniously passed out the Zeugnisse, the diploma-like report cards that the children carefully put into Zeugnis folders containing all their previous report cards.

Anna's expurgated report card
(grades were removed to protect the innocent)

On the German grading scale of 1 to 6, a grade of 3 is probably equivalent to a C+ and a 4 to a C-. Germany doesn’t seem to have been affected by America’s grade inflation, and the teachers didn’t take the language barrier into consideration in their grading of our kids, so we knew we wouldn't have to worry about straight A's. Not surprisingly, they ruined the curve in their English classes, but they had some other nice surprises as well. And Lara came home happily proclaiming, “I’m a college-prep student!”

We took the report cards as evidence that they’d really applied themselves, and we’re tickled pink with the results!