A lot of people ask what I'm doing in Berlin. Of course I'm not just traveling around and writing blog. I'm in a study abroad program held by Art Center College of Design and doing a project until Oct 30. There are 10 students in this program and most of them are from graphic design. Each of us has individual project and it has to related to Berlin underground (not main-stream culture, alternative). It's great coming back to school surrounded by creative kids and have so much freedom doing my own design project. (In my previous intern, clients had a lot of saying. )

It's not easy to see underground culture and figure it out what we want to do for our project in a week especially most of us came to the US as the first time. We don't speak any German either... We have German language (jaaa!) and culture class which the teacher, Michael, will take us around the city or into the museums. So we understand the Berlin history more than the average tourists. We also have Tuesday German movie night which made me very, very depressing because it was really messed up...

To have our own perspective towards this special city, in the first week we were asked to explore as much as we could and gave a subjective presentation as group.

We use the cool website called "New hives" where you can mix and overlap the different media on one page. Check out our page (Michelle / Franco / me) - http://newhive.com/jaaaaaaaaaa/profile/feed

At the beginning of the second week, each of us pitched three ideas and then decided one to work on.

Normally I won't talk about my project until the final presentation because it changes all the time lol I'm pretty sure what I'm doing now and I've been here for a month so it's good time to take a record. Next week will be the midterm presentation so the concept is getting solid.

Let me introduce the new experimental dancing studio - EMOSCHÖN

SCHÖN = Beautiful in German. So it's a kind of dance about emotion and beautiful. That's how much I can tell you now haha. Will keep it posted after organizing my research.

When I pitched the three ideas at the second week, apparently dancing was the strongest one because I love it. (Previous article about how I love dancing) Before I went to dancing studio when I wanted to take a break from the academic work or design projects. Now going to the dancing studio is also part of the research. How great is that! But I started to try different genres of dance that I never thought I would try such as modern dance technique, contemporary dance (gaga, contact improvisation). I still like street dance so I go to different dancing studios every week. Also see some dancing performance to get some inspiration.

Here's the list of the dancing studios I've been:
Flying steps academy (the monopoly of street dance studio in Berlin. really nice studio)
Tanz Fabrik (contemporary)
Motion Tanz Berlin (contemporary / street dance)
Marameo
DanceWorks (Modern / contemporary)

Some classes are taught in German and that was really..... challenging.... Seriously, German is so HARD!!! I really like to live in Berlin but I don't want to learn German...(I never practiced speaking German with Berliners because I don't think anyone will understand what I'm talking...)