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?