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Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Chapel Hill, Boston, Istanbul, Calgary, Washington DC, Austin, Tunis, Warszawa and counting

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Day 2

The second day of my Kippa experiment came and went yesterday and the - positively - surprising thing is how little actually happens. I sat at the river reading the newspaper (a canal actually but whatever) and afterwards played some ball around the corner from my place (quite surprising how well that thing stays up there with the help of some hairpins). I live in Kreuzberg which if you mention it to people from outside of Berlin is quite a hotspot of immigration and perceived criminality - not that I ever had any problems here. Accordingly there were about 40% Germans and 60% foreigners on the court (the foreigners are German mostly too of course even if they might not have a passport their German skills make quite clear that they were born or at least grew up here). Nobody said one thing (even if some dude walking on a court with a Kippa is, well, not quite ordinary here (never have seen that actually not even in the US)). I got a couple of weird looks, but nothing was said and the looks weren't even negative just kind of weirded-out. One of our games (we won like five in a row and thus ran the court for a while) was against a group of gangsters (I assume you know what I mean with that term, their illegal activities probably do not go further than smoking pot every once in a while, but the attitude is what I mean), whom we beat soundly (good fun that always) who clearly fell in the category of kids with an immigration background and educational problems. Yet, again, nothing was said. Nothing.

All in all, so far so good, I'll be wearing this for another five days maybe and keep all of my interested readers up to date.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

that's all reassuring then :)
oh and congrats on your acceptance at UNC!!