OK, OK, I'm back. I haven't deserted you all, and nothing catastrophic happened. I just haven't been online much lately. I guess I should start up from Christmas:
Christmas in Germany is celebrated on the 24th, but since I spent it with a bunch of Americans, we decided to celebrate on both nights. So, on the 24th John, a girl named Aastin, and I went to Vanessa's studio and drank wine and ate cheese and chocolate while listening to Christmas music. As we were walking home aro und 4 am, John and I passed an underground (literally and figuratively) bar called Kontroll Punkt. To get in to this place you have to crawl through a basement window. Having done so, we found ourselves in a tiny, graffiti- and-flyer-encrusted room with a ceiling seven feet high at the most. We continued on to the music room (also about 7 ft of ceiling clearance ) and found a bunch of drunk punk rockers dancing around to bizarre German folk songs and the occasional American pop hit (think 'Barbie Girl'). The other great feature, besides the music, was what I have dubbed the Magic Swing. You sit on this thing for five minutes and feel pretty safe, but as soon a s you relax and lean back, i t dumps you on to the floor . We felt stupid when it happened to us, but over the course of the next few hours we realized that the club owners probably leave it up for entertainment value more than seating capacity. That thing must have tipped someone off every 20 minutes.
The 25th was supposed to be the big eating day, but of course we went through all the cheese the night before, and all the stores were closed, so we had to pool the contents of our refridgerators to come up with a meal. That meal ended up being a giant pot of mashed potatoes, a small vegetable stir fry , two bratwurst (which John ate because he refused to eat the stir fry after I put broccoli in it), lots of wine, and (after the wine) part of an eggplant fried Italian style in a giant puddle of olive oil. It was tasty, though.
The next day, John and I headed off to Prague. I have to admit, I liked it more this time around, but it's really a tired, dreary city in the winter, despite all the beautiful architecture. This wasn't really helped by the fact that we had to share the hostel dorm with 6 American college students, one of whom 'snored like an elephant being sodomized' as John so eloquently put it. They would all wake up each morning and spend an hour and a half going to and from the shower, squeaking the floorboards, and 'whispering' in a way that works for two people but sounds like a dull roar with 6. There are rules of hostel etiquette, and one of those is that when other people ar e sleeping in the room, you leave as quickly as possible because you WILL wake them no matter how quiet you try to be. So we spen t most of our time in Prague in a daze of fatigue and irritation, but it was nice anyway. We got a fresh snowfall on e afternoon, and it was beautiful. I've never seen a city freshly covered in snow like that. Of course it was ugly slush the next morning, but for a few hours it was gorgeous.
We got back from Prague on the evening of the 29th, and found my housemates discussing the idea of throwing our own New Years party. That sounded great, so we stocked up on Champagne and hoped for a crowd. Vanessa showed up about 8:30. No one else did. Ever. So John, Vanessa, Jörge and I all headed out to watch the fireworks at midnight.
Fireworks in Berlin are a serious business. Dozens of little Feuerwerk shops open up all over town for two or three days before New Years, and people are setting off explosions in the metro stations starting on the 30th. When we got to the Warschauer bridge near my house, we discovered that the better part of my neighborhood was there too, fireworks in hand. We didn't have any of our own , but we just stood around double-fisting our champagne and taking in the madness. It was complete smoky chaos for about 45 minutes. The air was filled with sparks and sulfur as people threw fireworks at passing trams, at police cars, at ambulances - it didn't really matter. I've never seen anything like it, and I'm told that my neighborhood is actually somewhat tame as these things go. Jörge described the scene in Kreuzberg (a nearby neighborhood) as 'civil war'...
The fireworks, by the way, led to some interesting discussions:
Kristal : I'm so excited to see all the craziness on New Years. I've never really seen fireworks up close before!
Jörge: What do you mean you haven't seen fireworks up close before?
Kristal: They're illegal in California. People sneak them over the border from Mexico sometimes, but even when that happens we have to keep things pretty tame so we don't get caught.
Jörge: Wait, your country allows fireARMS but not fireWORKS?
Of course, I explained about the whole California draught and the fire risk, but... even if that weren't the case they wouldn't allow anything like what goes on here .
Oh, and another funny thing: I met our upstairs neighbor yesterday. He is German, he's never been to America, and yet he speaks with a twang. I'm told he's (for what reason we aren't sure) totally obsessed with the South and listens to blues and bluegrass and funk all the time, but... it's the strangest thing. I don't even know where he COULD have picked the accent up. He speaks very good English, but he uses specifically southern idioms and pronounces a lot of words like he learned them while living in a shack in Alabama somewhere - I expect him to be barefoot , chewing on a piece of hay. I mean, yes, I only really recognize that accent and make that association because of movies I've seen, but that means he watched those same movies and said 'I want to sound like that guy! The hillbilly, yup, that's me!'
Christmas in Germany is celebrated on the 24th, but since I spent it with a bunch of Americans, we decided to celebrate on both nights. So, on the 24th John, a girl named Aastin, and I went to Vanessa's studio and drank wine and ate cheese and chocolate while listening to Christmas music. As we were walking home aro und 4 am, John and I passed an underground (literally and figuratively) bar called Kontroll Punkt. To get in to this place you have to crawl through a basement window. Having done so, we found ourselves in a tiny, graffiti- and-flyer-encrusted room with a ceiling seven feet high at the most. We continued on to the music room (also about 7 ft of ceiling clearance ) and found a bunch of drunk punk rockers dancing around to bizarre German folk songs and the occasional American pop hit (think 'Barbie Girl'). The other great feature, besides the music, was what I have dubbed the Magic Swing. You sit on this thing for five minutes and feel pretty safe, but as soon a s you relax and lean back, i t dumps you on to the floor . We felt stupid when it happened to us, but over the course of the next few hours we realized that the club owners probably leave it up for entertainment value more than seating capacity. That thing must have tipped someone off every 20 minutes.
The 25th was supposed to be the big eating day, but of course we went through all the cheese the night before, and all the stores were closed, so we had to pool the contents of our refridgerators to come up with a meal. That meal ended up being a giant pot of mashed potatoes, a small vegetable stir fry , two bratwurst (which John ate because he refused to eat the stir fry after I put broccoli in it), lots of wine, and (after the wine) part of an eggplant fried Italian style in a giant puddle of olive oil. It was tasty, though.
The next day, John and I headed off to Prague. I have to admit, I liked it more this time around, but it's really a tired, dreary city in the winter, despite all the beautiful architecture. This wasn't really helped by the fact that we had to share the hostel dorm with 6 American college students, one of whom 'snored like an elephant being sodomized' as John so eloquently put it. They would all wake up each morning and spend an hour and a half going to and from the shower, squeaking the floorboards, and 'whispering' in a way that works for two people but sounds like a dull roar with 6. There are rules of hostel etiquette, and one of those is that when other people ar e sleeping in the room, you leave as quickly as possible because you WILL wake them no matter how quiet you try to be. So we spen t most of our time in Prague in a daze of fatigue and irritation, but it was nice anyway. We got a fresh snowfall on e afternoon, and it was beautiful. I've never seen a city freshly covered in snow like that. Of course it was ugly slush the next morning, but for a few hours it was gorgeous.
We got back from Prague on the evening of the 29th, and found my housemates discussing the idea of throwing our own New Years party. That sounded great, so we stocked up on Champagne and hoped for a crowd. Vanessa showed up about 8:30. No one else did. Ever. So John, Vanessa, Jörge and I all headed out to watch the fireworks at midnight.
Fireworks in Berlin are a serious business. Dozens of little Feuerwerk shops open up all over town for two or three days before New Years, and people are setting off explosions in the metro stations starting on the 30th. When we got to the Warschauer bridge near my house, we discovered that the better part of my neighborhood was there too, fireworks in hand. We didn't have any of our own , but we just stood around double-fisting our champagne and taking in the madness. It was complete smoky chaos for about 45 minutes. The air was filled with sparks and sulfur as people threw fireworks at passing trams, at police cars, at ambulances - it didn't really matter. I've never seen anything like it, and I'm told that my neighborhood is actually somewhat tame as these things go. Jörge described the scene in Kreuzberg (a nearby neighborhood) as 'civil war'...
The fireworks, by the way, led to some interesting discussions:
Kristal : I'm so excited to see all the craziness on New Years. I've never really seen fireworks up close before!
Jörge: What do you mean you haven't seen fireworks up close before?
Kristal: They're illegal in California. People sneak them over the border from Mexico sometimes, but even when that happens we have to keep things pretty tame so we don't get caught.
Jörge: Wait, your country allows fireARMS but not fireWORKS?
Of course, I explained about the whole California draught and the fire risk, but... even if that weren't the case they wouldn't allow anything like what goes on here .
Oh, and another funny thing: I met our upstairs neighbor yesterday. He is German, he's never been to America, and yet he speaks with a twang. I'm told he's (for what reason we aren't sure) totally obsessed with the South and listens to blues and bluegrass and funk all the time, but... it's the strangest thing. I don't even know where he COULD have picked the accent up. He speaks very good English, but he uses specifically southern idioms and pronounces a lot of words like he learned them while living in a shack in Alabama somewhere - I expect him to be barefoot , chewing on a piece of hay. I mean, yes, I only really recognize that accent and make that association because of movies I've seen, but that means he watched those same movies and said 'I want to sound like that guy! The hillbilly, yup, that's me!'
posted by Kristal at 4:27 AM
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