integrating

marija and i moved into our new apartment yesterday. it feels kind of unreal, kind of unsettling, but mostly good. we're subletting the place from this german guy who's moving to austria for at least a year, which means he left all his stuff. this includes: a huge, old, ratty, l-shaped beige couch that could easily seat 8 or 9 people, a good 10 potted plants, some of which could be described as trees, a few dozen empty/partially empty bottle of alcohol on high display shelves in the kitchen that have clearly never been washed, and many other random pieces of crap/dirty things. so all of that is a bit difficult, but mostly we're so happy to just have a place where we can relax and feel at home, even if it means a week or two of cleaning and re-organizing.

the apartment is in neukölln, which is the hippest neighborhood in berlin right now, since most of the formerly punk/turkish kreuzberg has become too gentrified and overrun with americans. so i'm helping with the gentrification of neukölln, though i feel that living with a dirt poor serbian is helping to keep it balanced. it's also the most foreign neighborhood in berlin, with a huge turkish population but also people from all over the world. on the subway today i saw a cartoon (on the tv in the trains that plays news) of an old stereotypically german man walking down a crowded street looking anxious, holding a sign that said "kreuzberg und neukölln raus aus der eu!" which means "kreuzberg and neukölln out of the eu," seemingly making fun of german xenophobia and specifically the german fear of turkey becoming part of the eu.

i was about to write something about studying this subject on a daily basis, but then i realized that that's really not accurate. my program is so much more nuanced and engaging than i'd imagined, while also really allowing me to gain in-depth knowledge not just on the turkish-german relationship, but on the role of each country in their respective regions, their history, their government, their people, and much more, really. so yes, to some degree i'm studying turkish-german relations, but more accurately i'm studying social and political theory with a focus on turkey and germany, the middle east, and the eu, with the overarching theme of gaining a more firm grasp on how the relationship across and between each party/nation/region works. it's a rather huge task, but i'm nearly always so happy to be engaged in it. one of our main professors is a foucaultian political philosopher, so his research and mindset has heavily influenced the nature of how we tackle topics in many of our classes, and i'm surprised to find myself becoming more and more enthralled with foucault. using his theories as a jumping off point for examining german/turkish/eu issues allows us to maintain a human, social lens while working through dense political and historical issues. i'm so incredibly glad our professors are not hardcore rational actor theorists or something terrible like that, since i feel that the perspective we take allows me to draw on my psych background in a very positive and helpful way while engaging with constructivist/post-constructivist theories of what could be dry, de-humanized topics.

sorry, i think maybe that was a lot of surface sort of blather about my studies without taking the time to really get into any true topic... but instead of delving deeper i'm going to go back to my readings.