A good landslide in the new year!

Or as they say in German, "einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr." I learned that you only say this before midnight hits... but of course I learned this the hard way, by saying it to nearly everyone after midnight until someone finally corrected me. And in honor of my constant language gaffes, I have decided to name this post-new-year's-post after a phrase that no one will say again until December 2015.

New Year's in Germany: it's festive in many ways, but from a foreign perspective, somewhat bizarre. Way back in the beginning of December, I started hearing these strange, loud booming noises out the window. Given the strict weapon prohibitions here, I suspected they weren't gunshots. They seemed too loud, too resonant to be construction work, plus they occurred sporadically at all times of day and night. And they were never followed by sirens, so I assumed nothing was amiss.

As New Year's Eve approached, I started seeing the impulse-purchase crates in the discount groceries morph from Christmas cookies to piles of scary-looking explosives. And at this point I realized... oh. Fireworks are legal here.

Now technically it's only legal to set off fireworks on two days of the year: December 31st and January 1st. But of course jerkwads around the city, and particularly in my neighborhood it seems, set off fireworks for weeks in advance of, and (thus far) days after, New Year's. And of course you could call the police on them, but I think the police have better things to do than poke their heads into every apartment courtyard looking for perpetrators.

I was already getting sick of the loud booms -- particularly the ones taking place between the hours of 11pm and 7am -- but New Year's has tipped me over the edge. People are so rambunctious with fireworks that, as I walked to the U-Bahn (at 7pm, not terribly late) on my way to a NYE party, I twice had to literally duck from fireworks that people set off in the middle of the sidewalk -- and with the air full of smoke and the sounds of explosions left and right, I honestly felt like I was in a war zone.

Perhaps my squirrel-personality is too skiddish to find fireworks festive. When the madness really erupted at midnight, I felt a genuine feeling of fear. And although I was so tired (from the dregs of a bad cold) that I wanted to go home right away, it was advised I should stay for an hour or two longer -- it's not safe to walk on the streets of Berlin when half the city is alight.

The celebration is all well and good -- but the fallout is disgusting, and actually kind of alarming. The streets are littered with muddy shrapnel:

This is not even a special patch of ground -- the entire ground looks like this.

And around the corner from my apartment, some fireworks apparently got way out of control. This used to be a glass billboard:

Just a few feet away from the glass billboard: the entrance to my neighborhood grocery.

And a few feet away from that...

Yes, that is indeed a trash can that has been pulled over.

The whole city is a mess, but my neighborhood is starting to look third-world. And the piles of tires, mattresses, office chairs, cat boxes, and heaping bags of trash that have accumulated outside my apartment building are not making my impression of the place any better.

That black hole isn't sucking up trash like it used to...

My frustrations with this particular holiday are shared by the venerable John Oliver -- and it's worth mentioning, for the record, that this madness is nothing compared to France.

BUT. HOWEVER. NONETHELESS. The highlight of New Year's was the phenomenal party thrown by my German advisor. I chose to work with him because a) his research interests overlap with my own and b) he seemed like an incredibly nice guy. But I certainly didn't factor in his formidable skills as party-host -- I really lucked out! Highlights included: learning 18th-century dances with live strings accompaniment, watching terrifying fireworks from the roof, the best soup I've eaten for a long time, and a Feuerzangenbowle:

The burning "Zuckerhut" (literally, sugar hat, which I want to use as a term of endearment from now on).

By far the coolest Christmas tree I have ever seen. It was suspended by invisible threads from the bannister.

So from all of us at Musikalische Stadtbummel (cough), wishing you a very happy 2015!

London photo-dump to follow.