Living in a Wintery City

Although I have never lived anywhere with a proper winter, I always assumed I would love it.  I do.  I wish I could live somewhere that is this cold all year.  There are a lot of advantages: you never have to worry about keeping your lawn green, cut or weed-free, and yet, it's still beautiful.  People don't worry so much about what they look like - everyone looks like a 300 pound bear when they are wearing their winter clothes, so whether you do Pilates every morning, or eat pie, no one knows.  In fact, the pie helps keep you warm.  People drink a lot of hot wine to keep warm.  Here it's called Glühwein, but it is basically mulled wine + anise + cardamom.  People eat a lot of cookies and cakes in the cold weather, which means that I get to bake all the time.  People here own their own ice skates; I wish I had ice skates - and knew how to skate - and play hockey.  In the winter, young children are picked up by their parents with sleds.  Two or three small children climb on the sled and the parents just pull them home.  There is a really good coffee shop near our apartment where a lot of parents go.  The other day M saw multiple parents park their strollers, with kids inside, out on the sidewalk while the parents went in and got coffee.  It is nice that people aren't worried about child-snatchers here.  Obviously there are downsides to everything about Winter, but it's still the best season.

M likes to look super cool when waiting for a train.

But the other day he made really some delicious Murgh Palak:

I have been taking some pictures of Weinachtsmärkte (Christmas markets), unfortunately my camera is not very good in low lighting, so you all'll have to make do.  Weinachtsmärkte are set up from the end of November thru the first week of January and consist of booths where people sell handmade winter things, Bratwursts, Glühwein, and there are carollers, pony rides, loads of Christmas lights, and games for kids.

We tried (and loved) roasted chestnuts (Kastanien).

what google translate is for.

The "awful" german language is actually quite entertaining. Go to google translate, paste

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch

Select from German to German, and hit "Listen." Voila, instant beatbox. Here is the original, thanks to Stafan:

http://gizmodo.com/5701485/how-to-make-google-translate-your-own-personal-beat-boxer

Our german classes are ending for the Weihnachts break. This is Christmas. We learned a lot of stuff, like past tense! This is important for when your friend says, what did you do this weekend? Then you don't have to say, I am going to the movies. I went!

Actually, I did go to the movies lately, to see Harry Potter. Surprisingly, dim memories of the book were enough to let me understand the movie even though it was dubbed into German. I learned how to say magic, "zauber." It was very educational.

We also went to KaDeWe the other day. That stands for Kaufhaus des Westens, or Department Store of the West. As far as I can tell it was basically built to rub it in the face of the east germans that the west was way better. It's practically (though I think not actually) within sight of the wall.

And it snowed! I know you guys in Oregon got a bunch of snow too, but I bet you didn't get -10 deg. C. I think we will have that tomorrow. Woo!

Jazzmusik

Last night we went out to a jazz club with our friend Noah. He plays guitar, and he came to Berlin from Israel hoping to make it pay. On Tuesdays this club has a jam session, and it was packed. There wasn't even room to lift your beer bottle up to your mouth to drink! The music was really great though. A lot of musicians there know each other already, but quite a few of them are new each week and everyone takes turns and lets the others on stage. There were a lot of people from America there too, mostly from New Orleans and Georgia. And on their year abroad from college. Those are the ones to watch out for.

Anyway, here's Noah playing guitar, shot from my iphone in a tiny dark room.

Can you see all the cigarette smoke too? There is no law in Berlin about which buildings you can smoke inside of, so it's up to business owners. We secondhand smoked until the wee hours...I think we got home around 3. Noah didn't make it to his German class this morning--I guess he stayed out a lot longer than we did. I guess a lot of the guys at the club don't have day jobs. My day job was a little tough today, but it was worth it.

Here's to next Tuesday!

What is that spinning thing?

It makes a strange noise.

Deutsche Kurse

Yesterday I started learning German again, and I remembered how weird it is. The verbs go in all kinds of strange places! Like, you might say to someone, "You can go swimming," but I have to say "Du kannst schwimmen gehen." It gets even more confusing when you have compound sentences.

Now Triffid is in two German classes! She is going to catch up to me pretty fast. We are both in classes at my institute and she also has her group at the Volkshochschule, which is a long way to say community college.

back!

We did so much lately! And I didn't blog any of it, so now I will make up for all that.

What first? Well, we went to a softball tournament in Bochum which is in the west near the Holland border. Bochum is a nice enough town, but no one really likes it there because it used to be a coal mining city. Not only are there no coal jobs left, but the whole area was smashed to bits in the war (worse even than Berlin, if that's imaginable) and so there is a lot of pretty bleak 50s and 60s era architecture. But, as typical for Germany, we had clear cold blue fall days and a lot of games.

You nay have read in the paper about the 20th anniversary of the Einheit, re-unification. We went to a celebration in front of the Brandenburg gate.

That was nice, but there were a lot of speeches and so on and I think the crowd was really more interested in the fireworks. That was fun.

What else? We went to an art opening in Kreuzberg. The advertisement said it was exploring the boundaries between natural and not natural, which I think this artist took to mean "natural and creepily unnatural". Yes, it is a dress made of bones:

There were a lot of other really great things there, like this papier-mache sculpture:

But some of it, I didn't really understand. I'm not sure anyone understood this piece, which seemed to consist simply of a pile of dirt. And before you criticize me for having two wines, one is Triffid's!

Speaking of art, there is a cafe in Prenzlauerberg that is sort of like the Missouri Lounge... but with giant fire sculptures in back! There is a welding studio there where artists work on their sculptures and you can go around and look at all their work between sipping a beer near the firepits in the yard. It's a lot of fun. Here are some pictures of the art, a little out of focus because the camera doesn't do too well in the dark. Looks a lot like Burning Man, huh?

Also, we had our first dinner party at our house! That was super fun. It was a potluck with all Triffid's friends from German class. They all brought stuff from their country. We had chinese dumplings, spanish tortilla, sangria, israeli cake, and moroccan chicken. It was delicious!

SO! what's new with you all?

it's out of controooool

Remember the tomato plant that had to be tied to a string from the upper balcony? Now it is almost touching the upper balcony. It's taking over! Here I am, worried.