Trip preparations

Passport?  Check!

Euros?  Check!

Adapter?  Check!

In less than 48 hours, I will embark in yet another adventure.

This time I won't be studying a romance language in a college town in France and eating crepes on the cobblestone streets nor teaching a group of middle schoolers English in rural South Korea and eating bibimbap.

Soon I will be eating Wurst in Deutschland visiting government buildings, meeting various dignitaries and touring broadcast stations in Belgium and Germany.

I will join 12 other American journalists for a two-week fellowship part of RIAS Berlin Commission, which goal is to foster a "German-American understanding in the field of broadcasting." Since 1994, the commission has facilitated a transatlantic exchange between American and Germany journalists, and currently boasts of 1,500 fellows.

I am humbled to be part of the program's growing alumni and can't wait to start this journey and meet the group in two days!

In preparation for this trip, I've read a lot of material suggested by the commission on German politics, history and current affairs.

One of the recommended books was Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Australian journalist Anna Funder. It's a nonfiction piece of work that describes the journalist's time in Germany in the 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell.

She meets with Germans who used to live in East Germany about their lives under socialism and the constant surveillance by the Stasi, the government's secret police.

Normally I do not read nonfiction books because I prefer to escape into a world of fiction where I can use my imagination and know that at the end of the read, it wasn't real. There's already an abundance of nonfiction every day in my profession covering stories of everyday life, mostly crime and breaking news, which can take a toll on one after a while. So escaping into a fictional place is liberating and fun.

However, I can say this book was gripping from the beginning and was easy to ready and follow along. Funder really does a great job in describing her sit-down interviews with former Stasi and those persecuted by them. It's really eye-opening how this agency and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had control of millions of people just a few years after World War II.

Besides the book, I watched two fictional movies about the GDR. I took a trip to a local library and rented "The Lives of Others," which won an Oscar for best foreign film in 2007. I just finished watching it today, and it was fascinating!

Like the book, it also told about the Stasi's ways of excessive surveillance, interrogation methods and imprisonment of innocent Germans who showed any resistance to the communist political party. Warning though: the ending is heartbreaking 😥

The second movie I watched was Good Bye, Lenin. This was also interesting to watch and a powerful story of love between a mother and son.

It talks about ostalgie, which refers to the feeling of nostalgia East Germans felt when the socialist system crumbled. The main actor goes to great lengths to keep his mutter (mother) happy after she suffers from temporary memory loss and doesn't know that the Berlin Wall fell, which was the start to the end of socialism.

Now, it's the waiting part. I have a few more things to pack and do before I leave Tulsa, but I hope you join me on this journey! I will try to post often during the two weeks, so you can get a glimpse of what RIAS and the fellowship are all about.

Auf wiedersehen for now! Goodbye! :)