Londoning

For the week of Yuletide, I travelled to London and Wirral. I had a great time wandering around the city and an even better time with the amazingly generous family I spent Christmas with in Wirral. But as I have no energy for an actual entry, what follows is a captioned photo-dump.

Note, too, that I went walking in a beautiful park in Wales, which was very scenic, but the photos I took were on my camera instead of phone, and I only just discovered that the camera is, erm, incompatible with my Mac. So until I find a way to get those pictures off there, you'll just have to picture a misty hillside with farms separated by low shrubbery and herds of sheep. Also, woods and mossy stone walls and rivers and 4-inch-deep-mud. And a few characters from Game of Thrones meandering about.

London Dump Commence:

Kings Cross St. Pancras station

British Museum

My favorite piece in the museum: an Egyptian fertility God with the body of a hippo and the head of a lion, carved from pure raspberry marble cheesecake.

A cute little corner.

The Churchill Arms: the strangest restaurant I have ever been to.

The ceiling is completely covered in baskets, birdhouses, and plants...

And the restaurant serves Thai food.

London Eye through the lights.

Night view of the Thames.

During my nighttime stroll.

Aaaand in the day.

Westminster Abbey.

I wouldn't mind eating stew out of that ark...

Lovely weather!

Selfie on the bridge.

On the London Eye!

Almost to the top...

And at the summit!

Borough Market

My delicious lunch: breads, spreads, and fancy cheese.

St. Paul's Cathedral.

A random building I thought looked cool.

Crossing the Thames to the Tate.

Shakespeare's Globe

Mermaid staircase?

D'awww, cute building.

Awesome old keys at the Victoria and Albert museum.

The V&A lobby: because I got kicked out at closing time.

Sparkly Chihuly!

... and then Welsh countryside. Yep. So... England happened.

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.

Utter Miscellany

I realize that I haven’t posted on here for a long time. There are a few main reasons for this:

1) The photos I’ve been taking are too scattered to form a single narrative. No further examples of Augustus Gloop drinking dairy products from unexpected packaging, for instance.

2) The more I actually get to know other human beings and develop a social life here in Berlin, the less energy I have for writing entries, which in all fairness takes a stupidly long time. Especially humorous analogies. Like an undersea treasure-hunter, it takes a while to come up with anything good. (I’ll take one order of BADUM-TSCH and hold the groan.)

3) I’ve found other, more pressing ways to procrastinate my dissertation. That may seem comical, yet it is actually alarming. I desperately need some butt glue... you know, to glue my butt to a chair so my dissertation will occur. (Why, what were you thinking I meant? EW)

Since my last entry, I wandered around Cologne for a DAAD orientation, gave a presentation in German that was not nearly as exciting as it may sound, gave a presentation in English that was surprisingly more exciting than the one in German, started writing my dissertation and plateaued after 12 pages, took a 4-week woodcut class, explored a cavernous basement filled with sand, discovered the best fast-food chain after Chipotle, visited 6 Christmas markets, drank 7 Glühweins, booked a trip to Turkey in April that is essentially a platonic honeymoon, and figured out how to make decent veggie chili with ingredients from the discount grocery.

And it was delicious. 

More importantly: this time tomorrow, I will be meandering around London with a camera plastered to my eye. I’ll be cramming in as much sightseeing as possible in 1.5 days, then spending Christmas with a friend and her family in a town near Liverpool. An infinite improvement on my Christmas last year, which consisted of holing up in my apartment writing my proposal, not unlike this:

As you can see from my recent DrawSomething sketches, I'm getting into the Christmas spirit this year!

In Berlin, I’ve been enjoying the phenomenon known as the Christmas Market. These range from adorable artisan markets with actual adorable artisans, to kitschy large-scale carnivals that have cheap rides and all sell the exact same things: sugared almonds, creepy StaSi hats, and wool slippers for Hagrid-sized feet. Whether artsy or kitschy, all the markets serve Glühwein, a traditional hot mulled wine that is seriously tasty. This is supposedly a distinctly German cultural experience, but it turns out that virtual replicas of these markets also exist in American cities... like Denver. I was Skyping with my Dad as he strolled through downtown, happened upon a Christkindlmarkt, and drank a steaming mug of Glühwein, all in a setting that looked pretty much like the market at Potsdamer Platz.

Glühwein at a chic bar... with teeny cookie.

The Scandinavian Christmas Market. Featuring: people's heads.

Drinking Glögg (the Swedish equivalent of Glühwein).

As much as I'm enjoying Christmas in Berlin -- and soon, Christmas in Wirral -- I'll confess that it's weird to be in a place where Chanukah is not a thing. Of course Chanukah is not traditionally a major holiday, and only became a gift-giving holiday due to its concurrence with Christmas... yet I still feel sad to miss out on latkes and candles and family. There's a large Jewish community in Berlin, but most of the events I found were more religious than edible. And meanwhile I keep seeing these strange candly-things in people's windows, getting excited thinking it's a chanukiah, then realizing suddenly that it's just this:

A Christmas thingamabob. Oh well.

In any case, back to the future past: I had a fun time in Cologne, getting to know friendly DAAD folks and taking an unnecessary number of photographs of the Cathedral.

Why? you may ask. Because it is extremely large, ornate, and gorgeous.

The museum  next door has an interesting silhouette. 

I wish someone would give me a cathedral for Christmas.

Why even bother trying to capture grand spaces in tiny iPhone photos? 

Imagine for a moment sitting down in front of a block of wood and... carving this. 

Or this.

The cathedral at night... on Halloweeeeeeeeeen!

Part of the DAAD excursion included walking around the top of a very high building at night.

Almost looks like Chicago!

OH WAIT is that a giant cathedral? Guess it's not Chicago.

One of the highlights of my recent adventures in Berlin was my woodcut class. I managed to make three projects without losing a single finger. I have a new appreciation for the art form – I mean, seriously, try cutting into a slab of wood with a dull knife and you’ll suddenly worship Lynd Ward as a kind of god. (Not that I know anything about worshipping artists.)

Woodcut class final critique. Folks produced some really amazing work in a mere 4 sessions!

Wintry lights in downtown Berlin: making 16 hours of darkness per day bearable.

I've also been enjoying some concerts at the Salon Christophori, the strange underground-ish classical venue I mentioned earlier on the blog. Recently I heard violinist Adolph Menzel -- not to be confused with the artist Adolph von Menzel, whose diaries I am planning to read in the Kunstbibliothek for strange and probably fruitless research reasons -- and pianist Julien Quentin.

Adolph Menzel: a man outside his Zeitgeist. Both because he shares a name with a famous turn-of-the-20th-century artist, and also because he sports a haircut straight out of an '80s rock band. 

 They played a massive 2.5 hour program, which truthfully seemed a little excessive, but I had a blast. It was my first time hearing a Stradivarius live, and while the acoustics of the space were too strange to ascertain whether it actually sounds better than other violins, I did feel a hint of that special awe. I think it might have sounded juicier than average... or maybe it's just a placebo effect?

One of the weirdest aspects of the recital was my location: I was all the way over to the side, right next to a long wall of piano bodies. And at the end of every movement, the sympathetic vibrations between the final notes and the old soundboards caused the piano wall to hum. It was kind of magical.

Now: off to London!

So shiny.