St.Nicholas day and good German wine

I woke up this morning and got ready to come to the IES center for classes. As I was getting ready to leave, I noticed that my shoes were filled with peanuts and walnuts, and near them were an orange, an apple and good chocolate for me. And I understood right away that I was visited by St. Nicholas Day last night… I guess this means that I was good this year and I can expect Santa to visit me too.

Saint Nicholas was a real person, known as Nicholas of Bari. It is said that when his parents died, Nicholas received his inheritance but he gave it away to the poor. It is apparently a pretty important holiday in Germany and Europe, from what I understand.

I came to IES and in my German class (and today we were supposed to have four hours of German in a row), we celebrated Sankt Nikolaus Tag for an hour. Our German teacher bought Christmas cookies and sweets, and we drank Glühwein. Oh, it’s soooo good and I have to explain what it is. People usually drink Glühwein when it’s cold outside. Many say that it’s a typical drink for Christmas, but I doubt it because I drank it at Halloween too. Anyways, Glühwein is a hot wine with spices, such as: cinnamon, lemon, and… I don’t really know what else. The wine with the spices is heated but not cooked, because otherwise the alcohol would evaporate. The translation of this drink into English (according to the dictionary) is Mulled Wine, but I never heard of it so I beg for your forgiveness if I got it wrong   :) . In
Moldova we also have something like that, except that we heat the wine and add black pepper and honey to it. It’s actually pretty good: sweet and sharp.

Then we had a little “Secret Santa” today, and my “Santa” gave me a bottle of champagne and good German chocolate, because my Santa knows that I can just not stop eating German chocolate. It’s the best thing ever! It hasn’t been a day yet that I  have been in Berlin and not have a Milka, Ritter Sport, or Kinder Chocolate.

After coming out of class in a very good mood, we are stuck again in the computer room to work on our papers. I have two papers due tomorrow. One is for my film class and I am writing about the movie “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. It’s an amazing silent movie and it represents the German society after the World War One. I highly recommend it. The second paper is for my business class and it is about the obstacles that  make it hard for Moldova to be part of the European Union. It’s strange, but in our business class we have talked much more about politics and the EU then about business per se. But it was a good class overall.

Other than that, life is sad at IES. Partly because of the finals that are next week, but mostly because almost everyone is leaving and we will really miss each other. It’s been a wonderful semester!