An Excused Absence

I have had this reason for not putting up a post in the last few days: a friend of mine whom I haven't seen for, oh, about 23 years has been in town! And we've seen each other! And now it's been only a few hours since we've seen each other. It's quite miraculous, actually, and owes a lot to the wonders of the internet, which I choose to boil down to human tenacity and ingenuity. It was quite amazing and now she's gone and I have to say that I'm a little sad about it. But check out her photos - I've added a link to her Flickr page to the right-hand side of this page, so that everyone can enjoy her pictures and appreciate the fact that we are once again in touch. For anyone interested, here's what we looked like the last time we saw one another:

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit.
In other news, though, thanks to all who sent me good wishes regarding finding work - things went swimmingly and I find myself with three definite weekly engagements and more surely on the way! What luck! Or perhaps it was hard work, I don't know. What I do know is that it is very exciting that I feel that my life here in Berlin is becoming more established, that I'm actually a part of the city now and not just a visitor. In honor of that, I've finally followed through with my promise to show a little more of the sights one would see when just living in Berlin, rather than snapping sightseeing shots. Here's one now.

That one is Brad on a really big swing at Mauerpark, which is a park that still has part of the Berlin wall up. To the right is a large field and a very large flea market, which the following picture does only so much justice.

To the left is the standing part of the wall, which is being liberally painted on by quite a lot of people. The American perception of graffiti as a sign of a bad neighborhood doesn't really exist here. Here, it's still a viable form of expression. See?

But that's enough of that. That's really only one panoramic scene of one place in Berlin (in a district called Prenzlauer Berg). There is plenty of art to be seen all over the city, not just in this one place. However, I still haven't captured enough of that art to show a good cross-section of styles and forms. This one building caught my eye - wonder why?...

That building is found in our district, called Friedrichshain. There are so many more things I will show you...
I'm getting more settled here, partially due to finding various forms of work, and also because in the pursuit of these various jobs, I've really been all over the city, so I feel that I'm getting my bearings in a sort of accelerated way. There are days that I spend at least two hours on public transport, and that's a lower limit. It's giving me a chance to see the outskirts, the less urban parts of the city, the rich places, the poor places, the extremely quiet and residential places, and the clogged places. I've gone in plenty of bookstores, several clothing stores, a few museums and a few churches and synagogues in various levels of glory or disrepair. Things are coming along...

There's something about new German films

As far as a good travel narrative, this forthcoming ramble may be a little dissatisfying. However, some film buffs that read my blog may take interest. There's something about new German films.
OK, it's not an across-the-board issue I have, it's pretty half-and-half. However, the bad half is, well, horrid. Here's the issue: the non-ending.
Now, there seems to be a stereotype here about how Germans like non-endings and Americans can't stand them; we want more of a fist-in-the-air closure at the end of our films, apparently. And, maybe, I'm a little guilty of that myself. But I also consider myself a fan of the slow, silent European film, and my tolerance for dangling is quite high. However.
We watched some very good movies, don't get me wrong. We watched a movie that was half German and half Romanian called Offset that was excellent, the kind of movie that you think about the next day without meaning to. We watched Elementarteilchen (Elementary Particles), a film based on a Michel Houellebecq novel, and a movie about anarchism in East Germany called Was Tun, Wenn's Brennt (What To Do In Case Of Fire), both of which sometimes wandered, but both worth watching. And, of course, we watched Goodbye, Lenin and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior), which are both wonderful. We haven't yet watched Lola Rennt again, but we probably will. The Berliners seem particularly taken with that film, as they are with Goodbye, Lenin, and I think I know why. They have endings!
Here are some movies we watched that had no ending: Milchwald, Montag Kommen die Fenster, and, to a lesser degree, Berlin is in Germany. That last, though it had a rather soft ending, still left me feeling sort of satisfied in an "I just watched a movie" kind of way. The previous two, however, left me feeling like I was staring at a blank wall for two hours, with not even the shadows changing. They both had pretty cinematic moments, but for the most part didn't work hard enough to leave off as emptily as they did.
On a positive note, watching all these German movies has helped with my language acquisition! I've refused to watch anything in the English language, and we always watch the films with subtitles on, either English if the dialogue is particulary fast or difficult, or German if the language is simpler and we're feeling a little more exuberant. It's very helpful.
This weekend we wandered through a large chunk of the city, but I'll save my tales of that until I can put the pictures up, too. It occured to me that I've only been really showing images of sort of touristy places with castles and churches and happy clouds, so lately I've been trying to get pictures of what's more like the real Berlin, pictures of places that real people go and not just the sightseeing crowd. It'll be a whole new side of Berlin for the home audience. And also for me.

I've Had a Little Hiatus

I took a little break from blogging because I took a little break from doing interesting things. I spent a few days being a bit stressed out and wondering what I should be doing. Brad says, "Just think of it like time off! Relax!" and I say, "I'm not really good at time off. I like to have places to go and schedules and such" and I don't particularly like not speaking the language and only being able to 1) walk around, and 2) clean the house. Sense some stir-craziness? Part of the frustration is that in many situations, were I without something to do, I would go to a bookstore and browse for hours, but here the books are mainly in German, which is sort of prohibitive, to say the least.
However, we spent the weekend going places and doing things and I didn't feel the least bit stir-crazy. We went to the expansive Treptower Park and walked along the river, lost and looking for the market and some sausages. The weather was beautiful and the Soviet monuments plentiful.

We finally found the fabulously grungy flea market (it was full of Americans, strangely - I guess we love bargains). We walked along the Spree River, and somewhat impossible to miss is this huge, curious, shiny trio rising out of the water. I'd only seen it from a bridge far off, so I wasn't fully aware that it was Quite So Huge. I'm not sure what it's purpose is. It's very playful, and surely isn't stamping out fascism like the towering figure we'd just seen.

The previous day we went to a suburb of Berlin called Spandau, which was quaint and sweet and had a cute little market going on, with many laughing children and jolly adults. In the center of this market was a church, called Nikolaikirche. Both inside and outside were modest and austere, and it was quite lovely. Apparently, people from Spandau are more loyal to Spandau than they are to Berlin, and it was obvious when we were there. Very precious, you know? Spandau also has a citadel, though, a real citadel! Complete with moat! It had a nice monument, too. Lots of exuberance and triumph in the monuments around here...

Finally, we just walked around the old town, and it was a simple, peaceful afternoon. I didn't want to take this picture because I thought it would be, like Spandau, very precious, but here you have it anyway.

That's gonna be it for now. My German is improving and my familiarity with the layout of the city is growing, and next time I blog I'll be more organized and hopefully have some good news about work! In the meantime, I've discovered a passionate love for sauerkraut...

I've Got Two Job Interviews Tomorrow

Wish me luck.

Gone to the West Side

Today was a quiet day, a stay-in day, but we've been mostly roaming as much as possible. We went to the requisite tourist attraction that is the square kilometer that holds the Brandenburg Gate (of "Tear this wall down" Reagan fame) and the Reichstag.* There were the requisite tourists, the expected crowds. Hilariously enough, we forgot the camera that day. No worries. We'll go back, many times I'm sure.
We did, thankfully, not forget the camera when we visited the Schloss Charlottenburg in the western district of Charlottenburg. Brad took this amazing picture.

Just look at it. Let it soak in. In the expansive gardens surrounding this palace, there were people practicing martial arts, people speaking Russian, old women sitting on benches, and tons of banana slugs. Actually there are banana slugs everywhere here.
We saw, too, the broken and burned Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche. It was built in the last decade of the 19th century and almost destroyed in the middle of the 20th. Now it stands in the midst of a commercial district full of street vendors, designer stores and flashing cameras, kitty corner from the infamous Erotic Museum (which was very interesting to visit but not particularly erotic to the non-trench-coat crowd). Despite the tawdry surrounding, though, the church still looms with austerity.

Later that day we saw a different sort of monument, one about which I was less than delighted.

Germany recently had a tussle with the Scientologists, so I'm surprised that they would have such a huge building in the center of Berlin. They're nothing if not stubborn.
And, as I said, today was a quiet day. I did, however, manage to go to a bakery all by myself and order some pastries and pay, all without saying "Wie, bitte?" (Rough translation: I'm sorry, I'm stunted). That was quite satisfying. Mostly I allow Brad to do the talking because, a) he speaks more German than I do, and b) he looks more German than I do. This has resulted in generally clean interactions, with the occasional compliment to his accent and one strange instance of someone accusing him of being Austrian, and therefore slow. It was both an insult and a compliment, I suppose.
Finally, on a personal and domestic note, I have killed absolutely none of the plants that we are now living with. My involvement with them has been limited but ten days in my company usually converts plants to compost, at best. I'm on a roll.

*We went to the Berlin Airlift Museum the other day, which is where I learned about how apparently important that Reagan speech was. It was being played on a continuous loop; it didn't bring tears to my eyes. It was, however, a fascinating museum.

So I'm Getting a Bit More Comfortable

It's our ninth day here, and I'm beginning to not feel like such a foreigner. Learning the language would probably help. I've been attempting to speak it and have generally not made a fool of myself, and maybe I'm learning more of it than I think I am, what with the immersion and all, but it's still a struggle. But really - when you order a coffee to go in the States, do they ask if you want a lid with it? No, they assume you'll just need one. This was one of the problems. So for further reference - Deckel means lid.
Today we went to two distinctly different neighborhoods. One was populated mainly by Turks, the other mainly by hipsters. And when I say hipsters, I mean Chuck Taylor- wearin, dyed hair-havin, studded belt-sportin hipsters. I felt like I was in the Mission district, except it was populated with Europeans and not North Americans. Lots of record stores and trendy shoes and locked hair in topknots. One thing missing: tasty burritos.
And now for some non-sequiters:
Just watched the movie Charade for the umpteenth time. Still good.
According to the two-screened TV that plays in the U-Bahn, 31% of kids ages 13-17 in our district smoke cigarettes. What is going on there?
I'd like to get a job.
Stay tuned for pictures of the inside of the Kuhlschrank.
Today we ate at a Russian stand - an Imbiss. I had some awesome pelmeni with dill on it. My Russian came back easily. I consider it a personal triumph that I was relieved to hear someone say "Надо еше?"

It's Only Been Five Days

I estimate that we've walked perhaps twenty miles or more since we've arrived here. It's nice but sort of a shock to legs grown lazy from cars and couches. A very helpful source tells me that calcium and potassium are necessary for muscle contraction and relaxation (hi mom!). We are eating helpful vitamins. Additionally, they are coming to us in the form of vegetables that are a bit more tasty than those back home. The tomatoes and the cucumbers have flavor! The eggs are delicious! Today we made pelmeni from scratch! Other funny food things: the wrappers at McDonald's have nutrition information, all based on a 2000-calorie diet; popular here is currywurst, a sausage with ketchup and curry powder all over it; there is practically no Russian food.
As for the sights around the city:

That's the Soviet TV tower.

That's a very Soviet statue. Recognize a theme?

That is an old sort of concentration camp. It wasn't a fatal place to be, and the people concentrated there were apparently politicians, held so they wouldn't interfere with the actions of Hitler. Now it's a pleasant sight in the middle of a leafy, upscale 'hood called Prenzlauer Berg, a district for which I have a distinct liking.
We ventured a bit east and went to a smaller city called Potsdam, which was the relaxation grounds for Kaiser Wilhelm. It was quite beautiful, and the countryside getting there was not blistered by the century as Berlin was. The more I walk through the city, the more the fact of war sets in. There are so many buildings in disrepair, so many memorials and preserved centers of fallen powers. It's really quite staggering.

And Here We Are

This is our apartment.
This is also our apartment:

If you look closely at the bathroom, you'll see that it is sort of funny. It is, however, a fabulous aparment and just the right size for the two of us and the apartment is in a section of the city that resembles Moscow in a way that, frankly, took my by surprise. We live in what used to be East Berlin, so it's not surprising that the architecture and grid system is sort of Soviet, but I wasn't expecting it. The East, though, has done a good job of preserving some of the more grandiose, fourteenth-century buildings, too, though; it's not a black and white distinction between East and West. And despite the Soviet-style aesthetic, the palpable air of casual intolerance and violence of Moscow is not here, of course. Moscow was an Olympic-grade hater.
It's only been two days, so I haven't much else to say, except that we've probably walked about ten miles so far (or fifteen or so kilometers - I don't get the metric system yet, nor do I have a realistic grasp on the dollar-to-euro conversion). We've seen about a half mile of the Berlin wall, we've walked on Pushkinskaya - excuse me, Puschkin Allee - and we've been through at least enough of the city to see astounding postmodern design adorning the buildings, about a hundred hair salons and a statue of Lenin, neatly tucked into a little parking lot. People here have lots of dogs and kids. It's all very lovely.

Things I've Learned From Selling Harry Potter

1. People who are into it are suspicious of those who are not. They shut down and back away; won't look you in the eye.

2. I began to think to myself by the end of the night that maybe I should buy one. It's not because I would read it right away, and it's not because I think it'll become a collector's edition anytime soon - they printed so many millions of them. It's because they became a commodity like a cell phone or an ipod - you simply must have one! What, you don't have one yet? You're a holdout.

3. Only one person asked for it by its full name. "Hi, do you have a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?" I laughed. He said, "why are you laughing?" I told him that most others truncated it. "The new Harry Potter book?" "Harry Potter?" "Harry?" These were the timid ones.

4. People from every fashion, age- and income-range of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora are seeking out this book.

5. I wish I lived in a big, spooky castle where I could creep through damp hallways with a candelabrum and then arrive at a stony, tapestried room, where I would then sit and read James and the Giant Peach.

6. As a bookseller, there has been and is no other thing in the store that is sold with the same ferocity as This. (Well, one thing - but I won't go into that). This becomes the opposite of the "forest for the trees" thing.

7. Many people deny themselves sleep.

I Don't Usually Do This

I am generally quite against blog posts that are comprised of nothing but diatribes about this or that, but I am disgusted with Scholastic. I can't believe how lawsuit-crazy they have become. Remember when you were in elementary school and you'd get those thin little newspapers that invited you into the Weekly Reader Book Club, and many of those books were Scholastic books, struggling to get noticed and bought for the totally reasonable price of a dollar ninety-nine? Now Scholastic is pretty much giving the finger to any little kid on a budget that can't afford a thirty-five dollar book. It's a cash cow, but it's a book for kids, so it's ethically sound - this renders its makers untouchable. It lives again, reincarnated by the wonder of film. It's a bit Augustus Gloop.

Here I Am Again.

I've been remiss in my blogging because
a) I've been in school and really boring,
b) I sort of forgot I had a blog, and
c) I've not been taking pictures that are interesting in the slightest and people really like pictures and don't so much want to read about how boring a class on Modern Art might be or how many people ask a bookseller where the nonfiction section is.
However:
I am moving to Berlin. This means lots of pictures! And also a great distance between you, dear reader, and I. For that reason you will need to see my face only through virtual means, and in doing so you will see pictures of interesting Germany! And Poland! and France! and Pompeii!
Stay tuned!

Also:

Hello I'm Home

Hello all! I've returned to the balmy Bay Area. I'm not sure how I feel about being home again quite yet. I think that I may go insane in just a little while; what's the opposite of seasickness? That's how I feel. Too stationary.
No, not really. But I do think that I was expecting home to be a bit more exciting than it's turned out to be. So what do I do now? I go through the pictures I took during my travels, realize that there are not very many of them, and decide which of them I will put up here to try to indicate to you, dear readers, what it is that I miss and don't miss about Moscow and the other spots in Russia that I visited.

Here are some things that I do miss:



The ghostly nature of the provinces really gets under one's skin. This picture was taken in Vladimir, once upon a time the capital of Rus' and now a fairly deserted, snow-covered wonderland. There's not a lot of places I can go in the Sacramento area that rival the austerity of this.



This was taken in Novgorod, also an old capital. It was every bit as spooky as it looks in the photo. Tilden is spooky sometimes, but not in this way. My imagination is the spookiest part of Tilden; i can't say that about Novgorod.



This is Masha! She's the three-year-old I lived with, along with her brother and parents and the grandparents who were usually absent and their three cats. Masha spoke much better Russian than I do.

I really really miss being able to walk across the Moscow River and go to Red Square whenever I want to.

Here are some things I don't miss:



Cookie-cutter Soviet style apartment buildings look like good places to waste away in, silently waiting for death. They're just as awful on the inside.



What do you mean I can't take my ice cream in there? But it's so creamy and delicious!

As you can see, there are more things that I miss than things that I don't. If I had some pictures of myself commuting through hellish Kievskaya station every morning, that would be under the "things I don't miss" column. However, give me a little time, and I may even be missing that.

Stay tuned for more pictures from more places. I'm still getting caught up. Glad to be home. I think.

Hello once more

Prague is quite beautiful but certain circumstances are preventing me from enjoying it to it's fullest. First, the cold. Second, it is sort of awkward to take pictures of one's self gazing out at lovely panoramas. Third, tonight I will sit at the Prague Ruzyne airport all night waiting for an early morning flight. I do not trust either myself, cab companies, or customs to make sure I am on time for takeoff. Therefore, I will be reading a James Ellroy novel that I paid a few too many dollars for while I sit and sit. And then, I am coming home.
My trip to Moscow was safe and almost completely without violence or theft. I feel alright saying that now that I am out of the city; I was a bit too superstitious to make that bold claim before my outbound plane was safely out of Russian airspace. It's hard for me to believe that I no longer have the choice to walk, on a whim, to the Moscow River or Red Square. I've been somewhat distracted from my exit from Moscow by my time in Prague, but it's beginning to dawn on me that I am no longer staying at 59 Kutuzovskii Prospect, and I will no longer see statues of Lenin everywhere. I won't have to be crushed as I file, head down, into the Metro, and I won't have to wonder every time I pass a police officer if he is going to ask me for my documents. It is quite an adventure, Moscow. I'm still processing; will be for a while yet. Retrospect is much more orderly than the thick of it.
So, I am signing off, exhausted but jubilant. I will come up with some sort of buzzers-and-lights system to alert you all when I post more pictures from the former USSR. Thank you for your time.

3 Things That Say Moscow

This is the metro sign. It's everywhere. It means "You're About to be Packed in Like Clowns in a Volkswagen But You'll Get Where You Need to Go".


This is St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. It's not quite as impressive in person but the inside is delicate and beautiful and somewhat eerie.


This is Cara and Steve. The woman behind them is hunting for treasure. I appreciate a country where even adults still believe in treasure.

All in all, all is well. Right now I'm in Tallinn, Estonia. It's quite beautiful and right on the Baltic Sea, in which I skipped stones.

Hello all.
So it's currently ten minutes to three in the middle of the night where I am. Wanna know why I'm still awake? I'm sure you do. It's because at five fifty five in the morning I'm flying to Milan for my second (much-needed) vacation. I know, I know, I was just on vacation, but I'll tell you, freezing weather and a bunch of grumpy Russians really put you in the mood to head for greener, more pasta-laden pastures. Don't get me wrong, Moscow is a wonder and as extreme as I was hoping for, but it is so extremely exhausting that I can't even explain it in words. The people are constantly scowling, and it's fairly impossible to get anything done in a timely fashion. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that as winter gets more biting, we're all going to be seeing some people frozen to death in the streets. Already the old babushkas that stand asking for money everywhere are getting more and more frail, lost in their folds of scarves and fifty-year old housecoats. The young women here are extraordinarily tall, so I wonder how they get so short later in life. It's a nastoyashii mystery.
I'm sort of just killing time right now and I don't have so much to report, except that it'll probably be snowing when I return from Italy on the 28th of this month. Oh, to go from 70 degrees and sunny to zero degrees and sleet is going to be quite a shock to my little system. All will be fine, though. Now's the time that we start going directly home from school and talking with our babushkas and looking at their ancient household appliances, for the first time actually taking the time to wonder how they work. I've not yet wondered how the people themselves work, though. It's too complicated a question to grapple with. If I think of anything amazing, I'll be sure to let you know. Vnimatel'no.

Moscow: Metro.



Moscow: at Bilingua.




Vienna: Schloss Schönbrunn.

Spot the difference.

Strange that My Moscow Diary is actually beginning with My Vienna Diary, isn't it?

Hey folks. I'll tell you something...it's hard to stay on a computer in Moscow for long enough to download pictures and even "blog", as they say, so instead, I came to Vienna. I came to Vienna for a variety of reasons. 1) It's beautiful. 2) Moscow is exhausting. 3) I've never seen figure skating up close and personal. And of course, 4) I can now write something for you, dear readers, to peruse at your leisure. So where exactly does that leave us? Okay.
I've been in Moscow almost exactly two months. I've surely learned a lot of Russian but it doesn't feel like it because I still constantly struggle to have interactions more complicated than ordering coffee and food and fetching things for my three year old host sister. She's adorable. Her name is Masha. There's also an eleven year old boy called Zhenya, and their parents, Irina and Viktor. And Irina's parents, but I can't totally remember their names and they're still at the dacha anyways. Soon they'll be back with cats two and three and a dachsund. It's a four room apartment, people. Welcome to Moscow! Here are other fun facts about my life:
I am consistently jostled on the metro. No, I am consistently sweating and squished on the metro. The people running to get on the train sort of just run at the crowd as hard as they can and hope the doors don't close on them. That's fun.
A cup of non-instant coffee costs about four dollars. However, a delicious baked potato or khatchapuri costs about ninety cents. Getting into Dostoevsky's boyhood home costs approximately forty cents. Go figure.
I live in a really ritzy neighborhood. All my neighbors have German automobiles.
No one stops for pedestrians.
There are more monasteries here than you can shake a sin at. It's strange because it's one of the more sinful cities in the world, I think. Plus orthodox Russians cross themselves backwards. Like up, down, right shoulder, left shoulder, rather than left then right. It's bizarre. It looks scary, for some reason.
If I never see dill again, it'll be too soon. They are crazy for dill.
On Saturdays, people get married and then drive through the city partying in different places. All the brides get their dresses muddy and sometimes brass bands follow them. It's completely amazing.
The phone system is willfully inefficient. It's controlled by the mobile phone company Megafon. Megafon is apparently owned by Putin. Go figure. He's a smooth talker, that one.
That's about all I got for now. Really there's so much more but I'm not sure how much I can fit into digital expression. You're all just going to have to see my metro face to understand what's going on. It looks like this:





See, that doesn't tell you much, does it?
So tomorrow I return to Moscow from this ideal place, Vienna, where the streets are clean, the people smile, and around every corner is the most beautiful building you've ever seen until you turn the next corner. At the end of the month I'm going to Italy. I vow to be a more faithful blogger from here on out. Keep me to my word, dear readers, by acknowledging this Very First Entry with thoughts, comments, questions, non-sequiters, what have you. Thank you and good night.

Hello everyone.
This post is experimental. It is not experimental poetry nor is it poetry nor is it entirely experimental. It is a picture of my very cute grandmother.



You see, soon I will be going to Moscow. From there I plan on maintaining a blog, and this is step one toward that end. And beside that, I really love my grandma.