Norwich

We've settled in. Our apartment is lovely, albeit a little far from Brad's job and my university. It's very comfortable, though, and Brad has taken control of the kitchen, while I spend most of my time sitting in the living room, alternately reading and getting tired of reading. As it gets darker earlier and earlier, I have an easier time concentrating.

Our neighborhood is lovely and quiet and our location in Old Catton means we're a bit closer to that picturesque English countryside that we all know from Jane Austen and Merchant Ivory. There are some cows and horses, some farms, and some parks that will look lovely when (or if) it snows this winter.



There's an eerie sort of low-hanging fog that blows in and out, and that combined with all the pastures and foliage makes for a nice walk. There are a few large grocery stores within a couple miles of us - Tesco's, Somerfield's, and the Walmart-owned Asda - and these lovely surroundings make the walk almost entirely bearable. The grocery stores here are as massive and busy as the supermarkets in the States, and they are chock-full of frozen cornish pasties and chicken tikka masala in cans. The abundance of pre-prepared food in this country helps me to understand why someone like Jamie Oliver feels like this country's relationship with food needs to be reevaluated.

But on to the cheerier stuff. This town is beautiful.





The center of town is all twisty lanes that meet at odd angles and we've finally gotten a handle on how to get around. There are small family-owned shops and gigantic corporate stores side-by-side, though all of them are probably getting slammed by the recession that just hit England like a tidal wave. The pound is weaker than it's been in many years, and if the American economy wasn't also crawling along at rock-bottom, it'd be a great time to come visit. Any takers?

Brad and I live pretty much on the cheap, though. The most that we may spend money on is perhaps a shirt or a pan from the multitude of charity shops in town, through which I paw hoping for some hidden treasure. My access to the amazing library at the University helps with my generally uncontrolled book addiction - not that I would have time to read for pleasure these days, anyway. Aside from the theoretical and academic books, I only read the occasional piece of fiction, or maybe one of the books in the poetry series that my professor edits. For anyone interested, the book titled Camp Notebook by Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti is wonderful. Distressing, but incredible.

Contrary to how we normally operate, we haven't had any little excursions. Too much school, too much work, not enough motivation. We will, though...and you'll be the first to know about it. In the meantime, autumn is here, and I'm happy enough to watch the leaves change and wander through town when I have the time.



Now I'll get back to watching that wacky UK television and chewing my nails over the upcoming presidential election. Remember - vote early and often! Good luck, everyone.

2.5 Months Later

We've left Berlin; we spent some time in CA; some time in WA; some time in NV; and here we are in Norwich, UK. Today's weather forecast: rain.

We are lucky enough to have landed in a beautiful town, more specifically in a roomy, lovely flat in the north end of the city. Our neighborhood smells like woodburning, soil and fish'n'chips. It's not a stereotype about an abundance of fish'n'chips here...they are all over. There's one right down the block from us, though I haven't tried it yet. The reason for that isn't that I don't have a burning love for fried fish and french fries...rather, things here are quite expensive, almost prohibitively so. Luckily, Brad got a job.

So let's have a look at our place, shall we?

There are some differences now: we have a dish drainer, so imagine those drying dishes in less disarray; the bookshelf is now abundant with books on stylistics, translation, linguistics and Russian Symbolism; usually, I am on the couch, reading. Incidentally, I love my program.

The campus, however, while being situated on an extremely beautiful piece of land, looks, well, sort of Soviet. It is a mass of concrete, heavy and grey, harshly dropped next to the river Yare. It's on what is referred to as the University Broad, which is a sizable lake bordered by marsh. The land is really quite lovely.

There are thousands of bunny rabbits on campus, but they hide from the students, sadly. They are much more endearing than the rude little squirrels that ran wild on the Berkeley campus. From that picture, you can't really see the hulking mass of the Uni...

That's more like it. The whole thing was built slightly raised off the ground, with all the buildings connected by walkways; the idea behind the design was that it would force students from different fields to intermingle. "Say, I was popping out for a sandwich and bumped into a physicist!" Like that. The idea is more compelling than the execution, however. Mostly it results in bottlenecks.
Though I haven't yet gone inside, there is also a pretty big museum on campus, the Sainsbury Center for the Arts. It's very modern and sometimes free for students, which recommends it highly.

We haven't spent very much time sightseeing since we arrived here. Mostly we've been taking care of things. We've been fairly successful at that so far, you'll be pleased to know. We have been here for less than a month and are already fully entrenched in what will be our lives for the next year. I have a bus pass! I have a cell phone! We have a place to live! We even have the internet! It's pretty amazing. With Bradley's new job (at Rare Grill & Steakhouse), we may not have as much time to travel as we had in Berlin, but I think that bodes well for my studies.
The city itself is very endearing. The town center has one of the oldest outdoor markets in England and the city mostly retains its medieval plan, which means I get turned around trying to get from one end of the city to the other. The streets in the center, mostly pedestrian-only, are very twisty and sometimes cobblestoned. There is a castle (and the mall beneath it is hidden very well) and Norwich Cathedral has the second-tallest spire in England and is exceedingly beautiful inside.

Soon we'll spend a day somewhere - somewhere in the East of England, maybe Cambridge, maybe Oxford, maybe Great Yarmouth. What? Never heard of it, you say? I never had either. I get the feeling it's like a less-urban Coney Island. We hear there are gypsies there.
In the meantime, I'll be studying. The rainy weather is conducive to reading. As I compile random observations about the English way of life (for instance, bus drivers telling people that the bus is full when it is clearly not), I'll pop back and share them. See that? "Pop back?" Stuff like that. Be back soon.

Hamburg

was actually a pretty strange city. We spent the last weekend there; it was our first venture into a Big Western City here in Germany, and I’m not sure what I was expecting. I knew some facts about Hamburg, for example: it is the wealthiest city in Germany due to its gigantic port, and it has the biggest red-light district in all of Europe, but other than that, I didn’t know much about its character or its history. And I have to say: spending a couple of days there didn’t quite change that. I am still confused.

There were parts of it that were truly picturesque, parts of it that were grimy and full of broken glass and prostitutes, and parts of it that were so wealthy I didn’t dare go into some of the shops. I’ll begin with the picturesque…

In the south of the city lies the port, and it was expansive and at times a bit rank, as if they were transporting in a thousand heads of cattle, but it was quite beautiful. In addition to the barges and Stevedores, they had the requisite tourist-trap boats, most of them attempting to replicate, oh, the Pequod or that one famous Ark, but traps or not, they provided a pretty backdrop.

Mostly, though, it resembled the pier or shore district of many cities that have piers and shore districts, complete with randomly placed sculptures of fish jumping and little stands selling fish and chips or ice cream. The rough side of Hamburg was all but invisible around this upscale part of the city, and anyplace that the hooligans and punks reared their ugly heads (or slingshots) it didn’t really ruin the view.

And I have to say, once the red-light district finally spread out before us, I wasn’t that impressed. It wasn’t as skeezy as I thought it would be…but perhaps we were just there at the wrong time. There weren’t any scantily clad women standing on the streets in front of strip clubs trying to lure in men with wallets busting with dollar bills with Someone’s Thigh written all over them (because, actually, the one-Euro piece is a coin, as is the two-Euro piece. Paper money begins with fives, so the strippers probably clean up!), and the signs were mostly not as neon as I’d imagined. There were a couple good things about it, however.

I suppose they figure that the men will be urinating wherever they please anyway, so they’ve provided these handy urinals with no doors and nothing but a long filthy trough inside, so that hopefully the drunkards will be persuaded by the ease of it to use this and not the stairs to the metro station or the corners of buildings. And look: it worked! He wasn’t drunk, though, no worries.

And, of course, the other awesome thing about it was this:
)
That means Big Freedom, basically, and one of the most well-known…scratch that, The Most Well-Known band in history began their musical careers here, before they had the famous shaggy bowl-cuts or decided that they were bigger than Jesus, before they went on Ed Sullivan or persuaded a whole generation to somehow play their records backwards. Ironically, Paul is still alive.

To the southeast of the Reeperbahn (the main drag of all the smut), there is a very odd, very empty neighborhood called Speicherstadt, and it seemed like something out of a futuristic film in which everything is very tidy. It’s all brick, and it is surrounded and bisected by water, and so all the buildings sort of float about ravines, with their balconies hanging off into no-man’s land and strange raised walkways that lead from building to building. I imagine that the new rich of the city live in this area, while the more established wealth is on the western edge of the city. In the Speicherstadt, I imagine we would have seen women wearing Anne Klein tailored suits and men wearing those handsome three-pieces where the jacket buttons to just above their sternum. I love those.


Since we didn’t see anybody, though, we just took pictures of each other.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend, and a fabulous way to celebrate our anniversary. Walking through the city, getting caught in their weird 15-minute torrential downpours, riding in their strangely arranged U-Bahns, watching the landscape of the city move from pulp-board siding to glass and chrome, it was all a good time.

Incidentally, I took a picture of an anti-smoking campaign ad that appeared in some of their metro stations that I thought was one of the more ingenious campaign images I’ve ever seen; in the interest of propriety, I’m not putting the picture up here, but if you click on any of the pictures above, you can see it on my flickr page. It’s really amazing.

And, amazingly, we are leaving Germany in two weeks, and I have mixed feelings about it. We still haven’t seen a couple things in this city that I am still itching to see, so I’m sure I’ll be back to the blogosphere at least once before we leave. In the meantime, wish us luck. To some of you, but not enough of you: see you soon.

Happy 1st, Happy 4th

Disconnected

So our internet connection has bitten the proverbial dust, and without it, my blogging has been seriously curbed. However, I feel the need to share and show some of the things that we’ve been seeing and doing during this, the last two months of our stay in Berlin. It’s been strange coming to the realization that we actually have to leave, especially with the beautiful weather and all the German pride of the national football team going to the European Meisterschaft! With our return to California coming nearer, we’ve been venturing into previously unseen territory, namely the eastern pockets of Berlin that we’ve been lightly warned against (poor = angry and dangerous, but that occurs all over the world, really). We live on the eastern edge of the Ring, and to the east of us is an area not frequented by tourists or Westerners, and we’ve normally been the non-frequenters I speak of. However, we headed that direction, to look at the hulking mass of the old Stasi headquarters and the Plattenbau so quickly thrown up in the satellite neighborhoods of the DDR. Visions of Moscow danced in my eyes.



This expanse is not one kilometer from our house, but I’d never seen it up close. I look a little foreign, and coming from a place such as Oakland, where I tend to try to avoid any clear and present danger, I was always tentative to head this direction. Notice how the multi-colored stripes dress up the buildings. Pretty, isn’t it?

Just across the street from these quirky monstrosities is the former headquarters of the Staatssicherheit – Stasi to most. It’s been mostly untouched since it lost its power in 1990, and since then it’s been converted to a museum documenting the various nefarious workings of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Most of the original buildings still stand, and their centers of surveillance and record-keeping still bear the serious facades of DDR days, while some buildings seem newer, desperately attempting to lift themselves from their sad infamy.




Elsewhere, the East seems to be much like American suburbs: lots of trees, lots of strollers and elderly benchwarmers, McDonald’s, freeway entrances lined with billboards. If it weren’t for the tram and train tracks cutting through, I would believe it were some outlying suburban sprawl nudged up against any American city.

And now, as work wraps up and I have more time to explore the neighborhoods and alleyways of the city, I’m sure to find more bizarre scenes of an uncomfortable morph into the 21st century. However, this weekend will be devoted to Euro 08. Wanna see?



Deutschland beat Portugal, formerly favorites and now out of the championship. Tomorrow night it’s Deutschland v Spain… if I could add in the sound of firecrackers and shouting, the experience would really come across, but as it is, you’ll have to settle for this lo-fi screenshot to imagine the fervor. I’m tentative when it comes to the packs of raging, semi-nude celebrators dancing in the streets, but it’s quite a sight. Better than the anti-Scientology demonstration; better than the loud and tangled Pride Parade that we accidentally stumbled upon; better than the bright and tedious Sex and the City premiere that we accidentally stumbled upon; but the sum is always greater than its parts, and all of it has been amazing. Does it sound like I’m wrapping things up here? In a way, I am, focused on the details of our upcoming year in the UK, dreaming of saltwater taffy and Bay Area breeze, but I love Berlin; walks through the city inevitably leave me pleased and appreciative. Especially when the weather is nice.




I’ll be back with more before we leave this great city, but in the meantime, I and all the German football hooligans share the same sentiment: FINALE. Everyone cross your fingers. See you soon.

West Germany, East Germany, Germany 1945

1. West Germany
Last weekend, we went to Lübeck. Lübeck was the capital of the Hanseatic empire of the 10th century. It was immediately and overpoweringly charming, what with the sunshine, the amazing architecture, and the shockingly carefree population. It's in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, which means it's in the (cue the drums) former West. This was our first venture into what was West Germany, and while I was expecting a noticeable difference, I wasn't prepared for how poignant the differences would be. Keep in mind that Lübeck is only a few kilometers west of the old border, but what a difference a few kilometers make. There were laughing sunbathers, fresh-smelling lines of laundry fluttering at the river's edge, and a surprising lack of liquor stores. I don't mean to imply that the Eastern side of the nation is dour, foul-smelling and drunken; I only mean to point out the idyllic aspects of the particular town that we visited in the West. It was crooked, but it it was beautiful.



See how this looks a bit crooked? This is the main entrance to the town, built in the 13th century, and it, like many of the town's red-brick buildings, was simply off-kilter. One end seems to dive into the ground, and the spires of the buildings in the background don't seem quite parallel. The whole town was like that. The theory is that the buildings weren't built all at once, but rather floor-by-floor over a number of decades, so they tended to lean one way or the other. However they turned out that way, they were so charming. The town was full of small passages that led to courtyards and gardens, and many of them were just my size.



(This passageway also illustrates their somewhat liberal interpretation of straight lines).

The other striking thing about the town was the churches. Granted, I'm no churchgoer, but I was particularly enthralled with the mixture of sacred and irreverent in the churches in this town. They were nearly all Lutheran or Protestant, but they still bore the dramatic marks of Catholic churches, and they wore them well. There was an excess of skulls in their paintings and sculptures, and mixed with the crumble of post-WWII reconstructions, they seemed to have personalities that were distinct, independent of their particular sect or creed. For instance, the Marienkirche in the center of the town.



I found it so sweet that these two pieces were part of the same operation. All in all, I found the town to be absolutely delightful. Later that day...

2. East Germany
...we returned to the East. We didn't go straight into the plattenbau of Berlin or the abandonment of Brandenburg an der Havel; instead, we went to Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania. It was also generally very charming, albeit in a much more dusty, attic-y way. Many of the buildings were in various states of disrepair, and all but the most main streets seemed a bit abandoned, but there was one spectacular structure there.



It was so beautiful, and though it was surrounded by mosquitoes and flies, it smelled of lilacs and had its own island. I have to admit, I was keeping an eye out for the more downtrodden views of the East because I was fresh off the buzz of being in the West, but Schloss Schwerin really rubbed my eyes for me, even made me happy. See?



I didn't know what to expect, but I'll advise all who ask: don't shake a stick at Schwerin.

3. Germany 1945
OK, I obviously didn't visit Germany 1945. That's not what this is about. I think I would turn down that offer, as a matter of fact. Instead, I visited an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau here in Berlin, a collection of photographs by the Soviet photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, and I have to say, it was one of the most amazing photo exhibitions I've ever seen. He was a Red Army photographer, and he was witness to some of the greatest and worst moments ever captured on film. I disappeared while I was looking at those photos. Highly recommended.

We're going to stick with the theme of WWII and visit Schloss Cecilienhof (the birthplace of the divided Germany) in the next week or so. All you war history buffs, it's your lucky day! For everyone else, I'll try to take pretty pictures...

Spring!

It happened overnight. I woke up one morning and it was warm and sunny, the flowers were blooming, there were leaves on the trees, the cafes whipped out their sidewalk tables, and that was that. Now it's spring.

So, following the change of season, we decided to take a little trip up to the northeast coast of Germany, to the shores of the Ostsee (or East Sea, if you prefer). I'm not sure what I was expecting; I'd say that our experiences in other small towns of the former GDR have been varied, what with all the crumbling infrastructure and depopulation following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Many towns have really pulled themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps, but it's a lengthy process. However.

The towns that we visited were gorgeous. Everything you'd want from a small seaside community. Lots of ice cream and sunshine and little kids and people in visors; pretty standard fare in most of the Western world, I guess. I was pleasantly surprised to see some old GDR towns turning themselves into breezy, carefree villages. That's not to say there weren't some broken buildings lying around, but they were by no means prevalent. They were easy to ignore, at least.

Brad had fun, too. See?



I'll explain the story of the triumphant bridge pose: we arrived in a town called Greifswald to find it sleepy and Sunday-like (everything is always closed on Sundays), but no matter; our real destination was the bay. So we followed the river, hoping that eventually it would lead us to the sea. Brad kept insisting that there was a Dutch-style drawbridge, and that when we found it, the harbor wouldn't be far off. My disbelief lasted right up until the drawbridge came into sight. Hence the triumph.

We spent about half the day in Greifswald and then moved on, to an even more wonderful little town called Stralsund. Aside from the fact that the town was nearly 100% German and not adverse to looking at me strangely, it was a sweet little seaside haven. We even took a touristy little picture of ourselves to really drive the point home.



In the end, it was so pleasant that we'll be returning to the north part of the country this upcoming weekend, to a couple of towns that I've only heard some strange and mystical stories about. Lübeck and Schwerin, to be precise. I'm quite excited, actually. I'll let you know all about it.

Budapest, Part Two

As promised, I return to regale you more with tales of how positively amazing I found Budapest to be. I've talked to people that have loved it and people that have hated it; obviously, I am one among the former. We spent a good amount of time in both halves of the city - it's actually two cities joined together: Buda (the quiet one) and Pest (the wild one) - and there wasn't one place we went to that didn't completely fascinate and delight me. Okay, one place - the underground around Nyugati train station was your typical seedy city scene, so I felt fairly ambivalent about that.

When we first arrived in the city, I was prepared to feel on guard in the same way that I have in, say, Warsaw (which apparently boasts neo-Nazis so plentiful that their football team is often not welcome to play with the other European teams) and Moscow (enough said). However, Budapest was an incredibly friendly and optimistic city. They had the same war-torn buildings and frost-broken sidewalks as many other cities, but the people themselves behaved as if they were living in a metropolitan Eden. They had such pride in their city and their history, and they exhibited it in a way that I've not seen anywhere else. For instance:

There was a lovely sculpture (an art form that is in abundance in the streets of Budapest, by the way) of Imre Nagy, leader of several uprisings in the 1950s who was eventually killed by the Soviet regime. The sculpture itself is sort of haunting and serene, standing in the street the way it does:

but what was most compelling about this figure was the fact that every night, a small crowd would convene around it with lit candles and flags and song. Being the skeptic that I am, when we first stumbled across this vigil, I thought it best to steer clear, in case there was a riot on the way. However, as we discovered that it was a nightly ritual, it became clear that they are simply still honoring the spirit of independence that Hungarians so pride themselves on. Not far from the Imre Nagy statue was this, a sight that would alarm and enrage most Americans:

Yes, it's the Hungarian flag with an enormous hole cut in it. This flagpole is directly in front of the amazingly beautiful Parliament building (see the last post for that one), and it has an explanation in bronze in front of it. In 1956, the Hungarians put up a stubborn and vicious fight, trying to drive the Soviets out, but the uprising was brutally put down. Of course, that didn't happen until the Hungarians had sawed Stalin off at the ankles (or a bronze likeness of him, at least) and cut the Soviet emblem out of the middle of their flag. The flag (and the dismembered feet of Stalin) are both on display in Budapest, as a little reminder that they still relish their independence.
There is a park not far outside of Budapest where they've collected some larger-than-life old Soviet monuments, erected generally by the Russians. While I don't want to glorify the Soviet past, some of the monuments were amazing.

That one I like because of the added surreal thing in the background. What is that? A water tower? It's a nice juxtaposition of history and...well, I don't know. As far as I know, that "water tower" has been there for decades.

And that one I like because, simply, it's awesome art. I'm actually not sure who the artist is, but I suspect it was done by the sculptor and painter Imre Varga, who was sometimes Soviet and sometimes not. If it was truly him, this must have been during his Soviet times. We visited the Varga museum, actually, and it was mesmerizing. Despite the fact that we were followed around by the attendants (we were the only ones there, strangely), I was rapt the whole time.

But aside from the marks of 20th century history throughout Budapest, remnants of several centuries were all throughout the city. There was, of course, the epic St. Stephens Basilica, several beautiful small chapels, some imposing and ethereal synagogues, the Danube, a castle, a citadel, some Roman ruins casually scattered throughout metro stations on the Buda side of the river (and not too covered in graffiti) and delicate, intricate turn-of-the-century moldings hidden on the roofs of buildings all through the city. In short, I loved it. Highly recommended.

The near future looks a little slim on extra-Berlin adventures, but I'm sure I'll be able to find adventure within Berlin, as the weather is getting a little nicer. I suppose spring is coming, but I sense that mostly from the blooming flowers and not so much from my sniffles and rain-soaked socks. These continental weather patterns leave me sweating in the rain and shivering in the sun. Or, in the words of Imre Varga:

Hello! Welcome back to my blog. The very strange computer-to-computer internet connection that we use failed us for the last month, so I wasn't able to regale you, dear readers, with stories of March. March was an eventful month full of 1) my birthday, 2) Budapest, and 3) a visit from my mother and her husband! Much to their chagrin, I'll most likely post a photo of them, but first things first. In the middle of March, Brad and I went to Budapest.

We spent 5 days in Budapest, so I'm not sure that I'll be able to successfully recount how amazing and beautiful the city was. I have to be honest - I thought that Budapest would bear the bleak marks of the other post-Soviet countries I've visited, but that was not the case in the slightest. Okay, the buildings were often brown or grey (or a combination of the two), but the people were the farthest thing from drab. They weren't offended or irritated when we slaughtered our way through the Hungarian language, they didn't seem to have the same population of shaved-heads as I've seen in some other Eastern countries, and the city itself was so lovely. Their parliament building didn't conform to the otherwise earth-tone color-scheme of the city, and from across the Danube, the ever-present construction that seems to be going on in this part of the world wasn't so noticeable.

If you try to ignore the scaffolding and miniature crane on the right-hand side (and notice the bird in the foreground, which I particularly enjoy), you can almost see how beautiful this building is in real-life. Cranes are so ever-present.

I'm going to make this post a short one, mostly because I'm exhausted, but before I go, I'll leave you with another image that is outfitted partly in scaffolding, this time looking across the river from the other side.

The very tall church in the foreground is beautiful but not what I'd like to direct your attention to. Mostly, I'm taken by the church on the hill and the stone fortress that surrounds it (called, for some reason, the Fisherman's Bastion, even though it's quite a hike from the water). This city was very well-lit; they must know how beautiful it is.

I'll be back in the blogosphere tomorrow. Goodnight all.

Oy, Berlin...

Things have been slow here, with some small exceptions. Notably, I got into the graduate program that I've been dreaming about! Enough about me, though. I'd like to talk about Berlin.
It's gotten cold again, sadly. We had some days of nearly warm weather, which was lovely. Now it's back down to about 0 or 2 degrees Celsius, which is not truly that bad; it's only that I'd been so happy with the warmish weather and random sunshine, and now I'm shocked back into scarves, hats and underthings. To any Canadian readers, please excuse my weatherly disposition. Canada would scoff at my shiverings.
The cold here, though, is amplified by the fact that we're in the throes of a transportation strike that threatens to spread and worsen; the trains generally offer a temporary respite from the brutal winds, but they're currently unavailable. It hasn't been too awfully disruptive so far, but come Monday, the whole city may be at a complete standstill. I'm sure the Berliners won't riot like the French seem to when they have mass transit strikes, but I'm also sure it'll be a real pain. Berlin is fairly expansive, and the metro system is very effective. Its absence is alarming.
There are two separate companies that run the public transport in Berlin. One is called Ver.di, and that's the one that's currently on strike. That means all the underground trains and the buses and trams are out of commission. The other group controls the above-ground trains; they're called S-Bahn Berlin GmbH, and they're not striking yet, though they went on strike a few times last year and seem to be leaning towards a strike beginning on Monday. If they decide to go on strike, well, I'll be alternately taking very long walks and sitting at home. I like the idea of city- or state-owned public transit; it seems like this sort of mini-crisis would occur with less frequency.
Finding a bright side, though: I'm seeing more of the city that normal, as I'm forced to walk routes that I would normally be zipping by on the U-Bahn. It's allowing me to take pictures of some building-sized murals that I usually see flying by out the window. For example, the paintings along the U1 line, such as my personal favorite, the astronaut.

There is also a 5-story technicolor character that I really appreciate, mainly for the extreme detail in his pants and scarf. I'd like to know how people get up the sides of these exceedingly flat buildings to paint their pieces.

And finally, there's this strange skull-made-of-babies (or skull-made-of-nude-bald-men, I can't tell) that I stare at every time the train passes it, and I still can't decide if I love it or if I hate it. I suppose I'm ambivalent. However, according to a couple websites, it's one of the best murals in Europe. I don't get it.

I'm trying to make the best of the bahn strike by taking the time to appreciate the city, and I have to say, despite the frustration about transport and the chill in the air, Berlin is a pretty easy city to appreciate. My next task for myself is to have West-Berlin-Appreciation-Hour. I don't get over there much, and my interest was piqued after venturing to that side of the city for a friend's dance performance. It's like another world on the other side of the invisible wall. Although, you wouldn't always know it by the architecture or the monuments. I find myself roaming the old American sector, shocked at how Soviet everything looks. Like this, the memorial to the Berlin Airlift of, oh, 1947 or so.

That is not an attractive monument. I sort of like how stark it is, but I still feel that it should be a little more triumphant.
Before I wrap up here, I'd like to acknowledge the blogging hiatus I've taken and promise that it won't happen again. I'm planning on having much more of interest to bring to the table, rather than the grey days of work and February that I'm still waking up from. Spring will be welcome.

Relaxation

Being that I've finally put together all my applications for graduate school, I thought I'd get out of the house and take some pictures of the street art that covers our neighborhood. For the most part, the graffiti is just bad tagging and little craftsmanship, but there are some things that I think actually qualify as good decoration.





They don't seem to have the same stigma about graffiti here as they do in the States; it's not a sign of a bad neighborhood, nor does its presence lower rents in the area. It's just the norm. I like it - it dresses up the streets even when the weather is grey and gloomy.
Everyone looking forward to Super Tuesday? I know I am. I can't wait to see what happens. I'll definitely be up all night waiting for that...hopefully I'll be able to stay awake for the class I have to teach the next morning! In the meantime, I'll just do a bunch of crosswords kindly sent to us by Brad's grandma and revel in the fact that I finished my applications. I figure I've got a couple weeks before I start stressing out about the results, so I'll enjoy the peace while I can. Everybody wish me luck...

My Second "I'm Sort of Homesick" Post

Hey folks! It's not so bad, really. Here are the things I miss the most:

1. Family (obviously). This applies both in California and Washington. The Chinese extended family is a really comfortable thing, and stabilizing (even if the family itself isn't the most stable!). Our Sunday night dinners are something that I feel the lack of really strongly, which brings me to something else I miss so so much:

2. King Wah. This is the best Chinese food place in the Bay Area, in my opinion, and for all who are in the neighborhood and don't go there often, please visit King Wah on 9th Street between Webster and Franklin and give them my love. Especially give them my love by eating the chow mein and the won ton soup. In general, I miss Chinese food, Thai food, Mexican food, Indian food, and many other cuisines that are based heavily on vegetables and spice. There is not so much of that here. Salt and pork, anyone?

3. My friends. Oh, how sad to be so far away from my friends. Admittedly, many of them no longer reside in the Bay Area, but somehow being on the same continent, even 3,000 miles away, seems so much closer, doesn't it?

4. Movies and television in English for when I'm feeling brain dead. The only thing I can really relax to here is CNN International and the German show Quiz Taxi, which is sort of like that show Cash Cab they play on I-don't-know-what channel in the States. On a side note to this, I just watched the movie The Pianist for the first time, and I know I'm behind the curve on that one. I don't know if I'm glad I waited until after our trip to Warsaw to watch it or not. On the one hand, it was terribly sad, and maybe it would've cast a dark shadow over our time in Warsaw, but on the other hand...actually, I think the two hands are the same in this scenario. I think the dark shadow would be fitting, no matter how sad.

Those are the main things that are really driving me crazy right now. Of course, there are other, smaller nagging desires, like bookstores stocked with books I can read, the ocean, the ability to get out in the wide empty space between the Bay Area and Sacramento, things priced in US Dollars, etc. Those things are not so hard to deal with, though. There are many things I don't miss though, such as the mud-slinging political commercials that run at all hours in these months of primaries and the hours spent sitting in traffic. I can do without those things quite well, thank you very much.

Berlin is still pleasing, though, despite all the griping. We've been having pretty constant rain and some intense wind that makes me look like a mime when I walk down the street sometimes, and I'm surprised that I actually miss sunshine, but the weather has gotten warmer since the beginning of the month, thankfully. All my various jobs are actually sort of pleasing and interesting, especially when I get to tutor people that were living in East Germany and have all sorts of stories to tell. We've been cooking a lot to stay out of the cold, and my phobia of kitchens has somewhat abated. And, perhaps most importantly, I've been writing a lot. Enough said about that.
I have no pictures to share because we've been boring boring boring homebodies for the last couple of weeks. As soon as I get the gumption to go out wandering again, I'm going to snap some of the street art in this city. There are some amazing pieces spread all over Berlin, and I feel the need to share them with you.
That's all for tonight. I'll probably stay up very very late tomorrow night waiting for the results of the South Carolina primaries, so maybe I'll blog deliriously at 3 in the morning, but I hope not, because the chances that I'll ramble uncontrollably are directly proportionate to how exhausted I am. With that said, I'll be back again soon.

Hey everyone. Just a quick post to let you know that this blog may be experiencing technical difficulties in the next few days because I'll be, insanely, posting and reposting an essay for my grad school applications and then taking it down again. It's sort of a long story; all I can say is that it's a real pain to email a document that contains cyrillic letters. Especially when one doesn't have Word, as I don't. I know, I know, "how could you not have Word? Doesn't that make it impossible to send and receive documents from, I don't know, ANYONE in the world?" And yes, it does. Hold tight. And anytime now there'll be some beautiful springtime photos up, but I'm waiting for the rain to pass. I'll be back soon, and thanks for your understanding...

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! Here we are.
We spent our New Year's in freezing Poland, and despite the harsh weather, the strange accomodations, the packed and dirty trains, and my increasingly drying skin, it was a lovely time. We left a few days before the New Year, very early in the morning, and headed to the fairly large city Poznan, in the region of Wielkopolska in western Poland. I don't have much to say about Poznan - we left about 3 hours earlier than expected and were pretty excited to get out of there. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't the worst city of all time. It just wasn't really charming. There were some decently attractive shopping promenades, and the main market square was quaint and lovely, but other than that, it was a very Soviet cross-hatch of grimy trams, icy and muddy streets, fake fur and more camouflage clothes than I'm usually happy about, and a generally unpleasant train station. The aforementioned main square, however, was, by all definitions, very pretty.

Right? There's nothing unpleasant about that, not in the slightest. It was just that when one left the very small confines of the Old Town, there was nothing to see except American fast food joints and discount clothiers. Though both of us hedged around saying so, we just didn't really care for it at all.
On the other hand, though I'd heard many negative things about Warsaw, from the moment we stepped out of the train station it was pretty much perfect. Adjacent to the station is the Palace of Culture and Science, a museum that towers above the city with the weird glory one would find in one of Moscow's Seven Sisters buildings.

Here, the streets were wide, the shop windows were adorned with pictures of Pierce Brosnan (whom they seem to love all over Eastern Europe - I'm watching a dubbed episode of Remington Steele right now!) and our hostel was in a neighborhood that straddled both the Old Town and the former Warsaw Ghetto, which allowed us to see pretty much everything we wanted to see without having to figure out the tram system. As a sidebar - knowing Russian doesn't help in Poland, despite their common linguistic family. Okay, carrying on.
The Old Town in Warsaw was so much more picturesque than I'd expected. It suffered an incredible amount of damage during WWII, much of it completely irreparable, but there is a lot of reconstruction going on, and they've obviously done an unbelievable amount of work since working their way out of the Soviet Bloc and into the European Union. Aside from the tourist trap of the Old Town, the financial and shopping districts, along with the theater quarter, have really pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

See? That's the theater of a world-class city. We took a large handful of very pretty pictures of Warsaw, and I won't post them all here; just click one of the pictures to look at the rest of them.
The Old Town, though, isn't the only noteworthy part of Warsaw. It may be the place most frequented by tourists, but we walked a few kilometers outside it to visit the former Warsaw Ghetto. There is basically nothing left of it, as it was bombed to pieces by Germany in the closing days of the War, but what's left is pretty stark and chilling. We visited the Pawiak Prison Museum, where some of the original cells and lots of documents and artifacts are open to the public. Without going into any of the extremely awful details of the prison, it was either the final stop or a waystation to the final stop for thousands and thousands of Warsaw's Jews. Outside of the museum, along with a small section of the original front gate, stands a tree; it's not a real tree; rather, it's a bronze copy of the original tree that stood there in the front yard. The original tree became too diseased to continue standing, but it was, famously, the only survivor of the prison, and it was cut down just a few years ago.

A couple kilometers from the prison, there is but one synagogue that survived the war; it survived it with many wounds, and now a greatly renovated version stands in its place, but at least it's still there. And just across a small park from the synagogue, there's an apartment-lined street, the last street of the Ghetto left standing. It's a small block on Ul Prozna, and I didn't take a picture of the remnants of the red-brick homes. Instead, I took a picture of this completely insane little corner of a building. I'm afraid I'm having one of those moments that people have when they see Jesus on piece of toast or the Virgin Mary on the side of Camaro, but I swear there's a little pudgy image of Hitler on this bit of surviving building.

Maybe that was a bad comparison. Jesus and the Virgin Mary are generally positive characters, while Hitler is, well, Hitler, but I still see his likeness on these smudges. Anyone who sees it too, please leave me a little comment, so that I can feel a little less delusional.
We were genuinely sad to be leaving Warsaw. People that I know who've travelled there haven't said many good things to me about it, perhaps because it's too Eastern or too torn up (as I said, the reconstruction is everywhere), but I really loved it. I recommend it to anyone that's not afraid of the Polish language.
From Warsaw, we took a train to Krakow, where we spent about 10 minutes wandering down a dark and deserted street, trying to locate the hostel we'd made a reservation at, before a woman drove up and escorted us into the not-yet-open hostel, which was so not-yet-open that the power had gone out. We waited with her in the dark until someone came to fix it, and then she wandered off, leaving us alone. The only other guests at the hostel were a couple of Japanese men, and when the power went out again the next night, I learned that there are Never Power Outages in Japan.
Krakow, aside from the infant hostel, was a generally appealing town, but not as much to my liking as Warsaw. Krakow has the requisite castles and cathedrals to really scoop up all the tourists, us among them, but it seemed much more like a small wonderland ushering in visitors than a real town with regular people living in it. Of course, we didn't venture out into the suburbs, we didn't see the blue-collar workers in the pollution-factories on the edge of town; we ate at the cute little restaurants and cut through the crowds to see Krakow's extremely famous and apparently extremely holy Wawel Cathedral.

This castle complex sits on a hill, and medieval Krakow culture centered around it. The Old Town of Krakow was down the hill to the north, while the newer (and relatively untouched) Jewish quarter was down the hill to the south. Several synagogues were left standing in Krakow, though they're now surrounded by Turkish fast-food restaurants and, again, cheap clothiers with fake fur hanging in their front windows.
Krakow's Old Town was, to me, pretty basic, replete with cobblestoned streets and a central square full of pedestrians and those people that are covered in metallic paint and stand really still in order to be given money by tourists. When we were there, they were preparing for the New Year's Eve celebration, so the stage and the hundreds of waiting partiers were taking up quite a lot of space, but we still got this picture of the Town Hall tower with a strange, enormous metal head in front of it.

The city was full, of course, of fireworks and M80s, like any sizable city probably was on New Year's. We stayed away from the central square for midnight, as I'm not too keen on being in a crush of tall, drunk Poles, and the next morning we got on the train to Wroclaw.
Wroclaw is a university town, but I saw more churches than university buildings or students. It was the smallest of the towns we visited, but it had the most beautiful market square of all of them.

Just outside the frame of this picture was a commemorative whipping post. What?!
Wroclaw was beautiful and cut by a river, and one of the small islands was so full of churches that I don't know how they filled them all! Of course, it's Poland. They're devoutly Catholic, and though there were plenty of statues of Pope John Paul II around, I was expecting more. Even in Krakow there weren't a large number of them; surprising, since he was a local boy.
Wroclaw was charming, but the most interesting sight in the city was located just a few blocks from the train station, and on our way out, Brad snapped a shot of it.

Especially take note of the baby carriage in the background, falling into the crumbling sidewalk. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out if this was a monument of hope or commemorating something awful. I still don't know.
And now, we're back in Berlin, where I feel like my German must be getting better because I was so relieved to see German on the signs and hear it in the trains. Polish is so difficult. It has a completely phonetic alphabet and yet I still can't pronounce anything correctly. If the attendant at the Wroclaw train station hadn't spoken Russian, we may still have been sitting in Wroclaw right now.
So, welcome back to my blog in Berlin and to the New Year! Hope the holidays treated everyone well, and that anyone living in sub-zero temperatures has a nice warm house to go back to. Happy New Year.