Paris

My stay to date in Paris consisted mostly of roaming around the city, so I cannot really give an account of everything that has happened. Here are some notes instead.


The city was made for roaming. In almost a week here I did not see practically any ugly or characterless buildings. The streets reminded me of rooms in an old and comfortably cluttered apartment. I now understand the people that claim it is the most beautiful city in the world.


Beauty seems to lead to expensiveness, as maybe should have been expected. A pint of Guiness will run up to over 7 Euros.


My two favorite places thus far: 
- as cheesy as this sounds, almost all of the embankments of the Seine at night
- Rue de Mouffetard, just a very nice street
- Rue Oberkampf, this is the street we walked the most as it takes us from our apartment on Bld Menimontant to the center. It has a couple of bars and clubs and a decently priced creperie, where we get Nutella crepes at early hours in the morning.


Famous places that I didn't find so impressive:
- Champs Elysee, because it was overrun by tourists and reeked of militant consumerism
- Top of Monmartre at 3pm. My complaint here is similar to the one mentioned above, namely, too many herds of tourists. I suspect, however, that if one were to show up there very late at night, the view would be worth it. After having visited Monmartre, I understood the mixed feelings locals usually have towards tourists. In massive quantities the latter are quite an unbearable lot with their constant aimless wandering, eating, picture taking, nonsense foreign speech, and uncontrollably loud children.


Hence here are some nice non-touristy places I've seen:
- The west side of Montmartre (Rue Chevalier de la Barre, Passage Cottin, Rue Ramey). The residential areas of the hill are actually quite empty and charming. One might even glimpse a bit of the past in the old men playing boules or a woman out for a walk with her three cats.
- The Parc André-Citroën. It was strange visiting this place in the winter, with all of the trees bare and grey and all of the grassy surfaces dead, but the place is nonetheless full of many nooks and quiet corners. 
- Another nice park is located in the yard of the Rodin Museum.

In the event that I would be presumptuous enough to write an autobiography I would title it, with appropriate presumptuousness, "Walking in a Dream".

Lately I have been getting the feeling that this is precisely what I have been doing. Life this past month consisted of a stream of events that swept a complacent me away in the direction of the next day. A stream of readings about medieval society, summaries of said readings, lunches at the cafeteria with friends, more readings and summaries, some simple finite-state networks followed by a stream of movies and unpredictable weekends... oh, and of course a very consistent stream of rain water falling on the city throughout the month.

Out of this stream of events I was only able to fish out the following (mostly mundane) observations and memories:

- Cream cheese, a loaf of bread and fruit make for impressively simple and effective travel food. One needs no utensils to consume this food (unless you take a pineapple or a pomegranate as fruit), it is filling and relatively healthy.

- Book tickets a month in advance: early enough to be cheap, late enough to procrastinate with plans.

- Young couples on park alleys are much more dangerous to cyclists than cars. They have a tendency to try to take up the whole path just at the moment you are about to pass them. That alone, however, is not dangerous, just a nuisance. The problem arises when one rings one's bike's bell, thus shocking the love birds into reality and as a result causing them to dart in unpredictable directions in the most uncoordinated manner. Beware of couples in park alleys!

- Eat more. Getting blown off of a bike by the wind is becoming slightly embarrassing.

- If one falls off a bike, one should get up and look for one's glasses. Once they have been found, one can continue on his or her way.

- Sleeping 8 or 9 hours a day does not make one less sleepy. The more you have, the more you want.

- Some knowledge of music theory greatly helps when composing music.

- Bridges have a tendency to freeze over when the temperature drops below zero Celsius. Beware of bridges in winter.


It seems that this year Christmas will be white only online on most major websites. Talk about virtual reality replacing the real one!
I nonetheless wish everyone and anyone reading happy Holidays, whatever they may be. Considering that I am supposed to be on break from academics, I should be posting some more entries fairly soon, perhaps even still in the old year.

A good Weekend

I have been told brevity is the soul wit.
In an attempt to capture this soul, I will make the following entry very short.

This past weekend was phenomenal.
I want to thank all of the great people that came to my WG for some chess, checkers and cards on Friday night and drank all of my (glüh)wine. Special thanks to Stanislav for extracting boatloads of tangerine and orange juice (and thus showing us that tangerine juice is actually more "orange", than orange juice) and to Fiona for making some sort of glühwein-mold wine hybrid using cheap french red wine, tangerines and assorted spices found in my kitchen.
I want to thank all the sporty folks who I joined on a bike ride to Stein am Rhein on Saturday. It was a very pleasant ride with nice scenery (including a very impressive castle), a relaxed pace and some practical discoveries, such as the versatility and usefulness of cream cheese for meals without utensils.
I want to thank the inhabitants of WG 7 in Sonnenbühl Ost, who kindly invited a new acquaintance who was lost on the way to another party to share some great tea with them.
I want to thank Molly & Minions for cooking a kingly feast (both with respect to quantity and quality of the food) and for letting me consume a considerable portion of it despite showing up late. I would also like to thank them for (albeit unsuccessfully) trying to introduce my snobbish self to the film "Elf".
I want to thank Rajesh Bhatt and Rui Wang for being the social highlight of my otherwise reading-centered Sunday, explaining the concept of statistical entropy (Rui) and introducing me to the GEIL song (Rajesh). I would also like to thank Marc Novel for a pleasant conversation about logic and programming languages.
I want to thank my flatmates Inken and Claire as well as Jasmin for finishing the weekend "in style" by watching Tatort.
And lastly (but not leastly?) I would like to thank the weather gods for providing a quiet partially sunny day on Saturday and a warm sun-lit Sunday (that I was unable to take advantage of outdoors, unfortunately).

How I went to Bremen and discovered I am NOT to be trusted with letters

I wake up on a Tuesday, drag myself out of bed around ten and am given three envelopes. To my surprise I recognize these as letters containing postcards to my relatives that I dropped off in a mailbox in Bremen the day before on my way to the train that would take me to Konstanz. They were supposed to be at least half-way over the Atlantic ocean by now, and yet here they were, once again in my hands.

A friend told me that if I placed a postcard in an envelope, thus giving it the status of a letter, it would arrive at its destination much faster than a regular postcard would. I needed this increase in delivery speed because I was under pressure to produce some sort of paper trail to mark my year abroad. I had not exchanged any snail mail with my family since the beginning of mystay, hence they were getting a bit impatient about it. I decided that a weekend in Bremen was as good an excuse to start producing the paper trail as any.

One might wonder why I was in Bremen in the first place. A high school classmate of mine from Russia is studying on exchange in Tampere, Finland until the end of December. I had not seen him for four or almost five years, not counting the two days we hung out in Sweden in the beginning of October, and calculated, that this past weekend was our only chance to meet up before he disappeared again behind the "iron curtain" of the Russian border.

And so we decided to meet up half way, which for him meant flying south for a couple of hours and for me - riding a train north along the Rhine. This ride I undertook for the first time on Friday, boarding the train to Karlsruhe (no matter where I go from Konstanz, it always seems to start with the Karlsruhe train!),  changing there and continuing through places like Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Köln, Düsseldort, Dortmund, Hannover... over 8 hours in a train all-in-all.

Luckily for me I had books (I swear, I think I went through half of the Finite State Morphology textbook as a result of this journey), homework, Chopin and Queen along to keep me company. As if that was not enough, I completely accidentally ran into Fiona, a friend from the September course at Konstanz who was on her way to visit a friend in Bonn and happened to be taking the exact same trains as I (the saying "the world is small" should really be incorporated somewhere in the description of this blog). Thus the journey was really not as bad as I thought it might turn out to be.

However bearable or at times even pleasant, the ride was long, and I arrived in Bremen late Friday night, met up with my friend and headed over to a hostel where he had already checked us in. The whole time I could not help but notice how much colder it was in the North. Whereas in Konstanz I could get away with wearing a shirt, sweater and jacket, here I would need at least one more layer to barely stay warm. I was a bit apprehensive about spending most of the next day outside walking around the city.

The next morning we took a tram to the center of town and started out at the main city square. We first tried to have a look inside the Dom, but it was closed for service and we were told to come again at 14:00. We then tried the City Hall, but that turned out to be completely closed on weekends.

Nikita and the
Bremer Stadtmusikanten

As usual, my visit was about as planned as an improvisation comedian's routine. From that it follows that we didn't let these initial mishaps dampen our spirits and instead took some pictures with the Bremer Stadtmusikanten, then in front of the exuberantly decorated City Hall (that has SPQB engraved above one of its entrances... Senatus Populusque Bremensis) and after that with the Roland. We then listened to some fellow play a piano right in Roland's shadow.

That morning and in fact throughout my whole visit I kept noticing how much more clear and understandable the Bremers' German was. I have been told several times that in Konstanz and in general in the south the local accent strongly deviated from Hochdeutsch, but it never dawned on me how distinguishable this difference was until I heard the people in Bremen.

A street in the Schnoor district.

Once we were semi-done with the central square, we decided to visit Schnoor (the main museum and tourist district of the city) and then return to the Dom around 14:00 for a second attempt to get in that church.

We had read about at least three museums located in Schnoor: the Toy Museum (Spielzeugmuseum), Antiquity Museum (Antikenmuseum) and the House of Bremen History (Bremer Geschichtenhaus). They were our goals. As it turned out, they were hard to find ones too. The Schnoor consisted of several blocks of small Bauwerk houses all separated by tiny-tiny streets and alleys, some barely wide enough for two people to squeeze through.

We found it surprisingly difficult to orient ourselves in this labyrinth, walked around in circles for quite some time as a consequence and managed to wander past all of the museums at least once and even trespass (by mistake, of course) on some dude's property. This dude was very polite and understanding, however, and led us back out to the Schnoor.

Finally, we found the Toy museum. It turned out to be a small private collection (three one-room floors of old toys) located above a toy shop in one of the small old houses. The owner of the shop said her boss had started the museum when she realized there were toys she didn't want to part with.



As can be seen in the photographs of this museum, the majority of the collection was comprised of various sorts of Teddy Bears, dolls, trains and a plethora of various semi-broken toys. There was also a guitar with one half of her strings broken and the other half tuned to what sounded a bit like a pentatonic scale. And then on our way down we noticed a couple of African masks (at least I thought they were African, I'm sure some anthropologist would know for sure) hanging on the wall. Since this was clearly a place where one could touch everything, I took one off the wall and tried it on. It felt very cozy... just like the museum itself, the kind of a quaint place one would prefer to visit with a male friend, so as to avoid the exalted expressions of adoration which women for some reason are prone to produce when visiting such places.

We then wandered across the History Museum, where we were told again to come back at 14:00. From the museum staff we found out how to get to the Antikenmuseum and decided to pay it a visit in the free time that we had till 2 pm.

post-modernist stairs...

This Antikenmuseum was located in a street of small post-modernist houses and of course we had passed it by at least once before during our wanderings without noticing. It contained two rooms of (mostly) Athenian and Corinthian vases and a highly talkative ticket lady (who must have been by extension also a guide). We chatted with this lady perhaps longer than we spent actually looking at the vases. Our conversation (it was more of a lecture actually) wandered a bit, most of what was mentioned had to do with Olympic games, methods of producing vases and the difference in clay between different regions of Greece. Some other topics did remain in my mind though.

... and buildings

It turned out, the museum was originally a private collection and its owner, an archaeology enthusiast bent on digging out vases, was only eventually persuaded by friends to open the collection to the public. It also turned out that the lady herself was from Eastern Germany and remembered the Russian occupation troops as extremely polite, helpful but fearful people.

This fellow was just "chilling" in this position
in the cold for two days in a row.

At that point it was time to go to the Geschichtenhaus and we did so. There we were met by guides dressed in old-fashioned clothing who proceeded to give us an acted tour through the city's history. As a result of the tour my unflattering opinion of the Habsburg dynasty was strengthened, I realized that I didn't mind the taste of good coffee as much as I thought I did and learned that some of the most well-known characters in Bremen history were a poison-murderess and a tobacco swindler.


What amazed me in the two last museums was the amount of brochures and papers we kept being given. I believe at the end of the day I was carrying around a map of the center of Bremen (albeit a touristy one), a brochure from both the Antikenmuseum and Geschichtenhaus and several miscellaneous advertisements for events and places to visit in Bremen. All of this just for paying the entrance fees at each of the museums.

Inside the Dom

The end of saturday was uneventful: having arrived at the Dom too late, we missed opening hours by five minutes and were forced to return to the hostel. We then talked a lot about this and that, having decided to visit the Dom and the Weser Stadium the following day.

Bremen riverbank in the fog.

Sunday turned out to be considerably colder than Saturday and we only managed to see the Dom (a very nice piece of Gothic architecture), wander through a park and then trek over to the stadium. In addition to the cold by early afternoon the city was covered in fog. I tried to keep my spirits up by joking that this fog must be from Konstanz and it took one day for it to catch up to me in the north. Jokes do not generate warmth, however, and after braving the icy cold for several hours we retreated to the hostel and spent the rest of the evening talking.

Weser Stadium looks like a spaceship in the fog.

On Monday we got up around 8 am, headed to town, breakfasted on chocolate croissants and some delicious but alas indescribable cookies (sometimes I sincerely wish I was better at depicting food) . Nikita then took a tram to the airport while I found some postcards and then a post office. In said post office I dealt with the cards and put them in stamped envelopes, so as to send them out right before I got on my train. As the reader might remember, I was told letters go faster than postcards and seeing as my family was getting impatient, time was of the essence.

More foggy Bremen.

I then realized I had almost forgotten how properly to address a physical letter. Where does one put the destination address? Where does the return address go? I had no internet access, the post clerk was away from her desk and my train arrival time was getting nearer and nearer  the longer I pondered and scrambled around in my head for a solution.

Sometimes I think the quality of a decision is inversely proportional to the amount of time one spends panicking about it. When one deliberates in peace and quiet with no pressure, that is a whole different matter. However, when one is faced with a decision that needs to be made in anything similar to the "now or never" circumstances, it seems like the first gut instinct is the way to go and any further hesitation will only drift one in the direction of the worst decision possible.
I do not always subscribe to this theory, but sometimes it seems highly attractive.
Given that I had about 15 minutes till my train (even though the station was next door, I did not know exactly how far away the right platform was), I panicked and stalled, then decided to fill out the envelopes according to what I remembered of the American way of addressing letters. Naturally, I remembered it in reverse order and placed my German address as the destination and my relatives' American addresses as the return ones.

It should have come as no surprise to me then, when on Tuesday morning I received all three of the letters I sent from Bremen. At the time it did.

So cozy inside the mask...

Vocab

This might come as a surprise to some people, but the actual purpose of my year abroad is to learn German. This purpose is somewhat hard to trace in this blog so far and I think that if one was to base one's opinion only on reading my entries, one might think all I ever do is wander around cities and towns, try food of varying quality and find ways to mess up the logistics of my travel with differing degrees of creativity and success.

Well, this entry is addressing this misconception and I hope it does so well.

Below is a list of words and expressions that I have learned (well enough to write them all down in a post). Please note that quite a few things in this list, especially expressions, are definitely slang. I am well aware of the limits of their acceptable usage, but nevertheless count them as valuable acquisitions that widen my knowledge of German as a whole.
All entries are given with an English translation on the right of and a note of acknowledgement below the German expression.

der innere Schweinehund -- inner lazy person.
Thank you Rosie.

Kein Thema! -- No problem! (also Kein Ding! Kein Problem! Kein Stress!... the germans must love this expression).
Thanks to my roommate, Claire.


der Kater -- along with the traditional meaning of "male (tom)cat", this word also means "hangover"
Thanks to my other roommate, Janis, for using an idiosyncratic version of the word (Katerchen, aka minor hangover) and thus introducing me to the more conventional version.

Chill, mal, Alter! -- Relax, man/dude/bro! (literal translation of Alter is more like "old man")
Thanks to the next door neighbors Tillman and Andre along with countless other people who use the word "Alter" every day.


Wie läuft's? -- yet another slang expression to ask how someone is doing.
Thanks to Lukas Kawerau for using it for the first time in front of me.


Haudegen, Lehen(swesen), Ross, Fahne, Festung -- All very useful and current vocab from my medieval history class (the geeks among you can plug these words into Leo and see what they mean).

genau die Geschichte -- precisely (more colloquial version of the ubiquitous "genau")
Thanks to an anonymous worker at the Rechnenzentrum


Maultaschen -- A local version of dumplings, with minced pork and spinach inside. They, along with pasta, potatoes, onions and cheap bread constitute most of my diet :)

P.S.
I will be editing this post and adding more stuff as the year progresses.

Londinium II

My second raid on London I had to do alone, because Caity was stuck in the dorm reading all the plays of Shakespeare and writing a short story about mice fooling drunk cats. It was a Sunday and I was hoping to get into Westminster Abbey for service. This way I could have a chance to appreciate how live music sounds in that church (always nice) for free (also not bad). My mother pulled off a trick like that when she was in London and her description made me look forward to the experience. Little did I know what was awaiting me. I am getting ahead of myself, however, and should tell the story properly from start to finish.

I got off-peak tickets only for the train to and from London for 16 pounds because I was running a bit low on money. "I'll walk around, get some exercise and maybe see something small and unexpected and be able to stop to investigate it" - I told myself. Upon receiving the tickets I put them in a back pocket of my jeans.

I started the day by walking to Buckingham Palace from Victoria Station, thus having an opportunity to view the royal residence from a different angle. Right before the Queen's Gallery and the back entrance to the Palace there is a underground pedestrian pass. As I descended into it I was met with a strong smell of cheap beer and unwashed human. On the floor of the pass lay two matresses, one of them was occupied by what looked like a pile of rags with a weathered red face slightly protruding from under it. I had heard of the growing wealth disparity in Britain, so I naturally saw some symbolism in a beggar living almost at the doorstep of Buckhingham.

As I emerged from this underpass, I was greeted by a egyptian-style building that houses the Queen's Gallery. I didn't have money to go inside the gallery, so I just walked around some of the halls and browsed the collection of postcards in the museum shop. Having found some very authoritative-looking columns and no interesting postcards, I continued on my way, went around the front entrance to the Palace, cut through Hyde Park and found myself in Kensington Gardens.

Caity said  somewhere in these gardens there was a monument to Peter Pan, who allegedly lived in the area. I wasn't particularly interested in a specific goal, however, I just wanted to roam around a grassy area, and Kensington Gardens proved to be exactly the right place for it. It is what in Russia would be called an "English park" with well-tended lawns and sparingly placed trees and bushes.

From the Gardens I saw a tall gilded spire and navigated to where it stood. I came out of the park onto a sqare with a quite sizeable monument to king Albert, that for some reason reminded me of Charlemagne's reliquary in Aachen. Perhaps it was all the gold on the sculptures.

Across the street from this monument was the Albert Hall and some very neat brick buildings. The English like their brick, I have to say, just like they like their classical/empire architecture. I made a semi-circle around the Hall and started meandering through the area behind it, heading gradually in the direction of Westminster Abbey, where I was planning to catch the 3 pm service.

After walking through some extremely posh-looking neighborhoods I happened to pass what I at first took to be a Greek Orthdox church. I stopped and read the sign on it: Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition - Dioceze of Surozh. I had stumbled upon a Russian Orthodox church! And the main cathedral in London, at that! I of course walked in and for the first time had a chance to see how a romanesque basilica looked as an Orthodox church. My impression was that it was looked less unusual inside than outside.

As I continued to probe my way towards Westminster, I found myself once again at the entrance to Hyde Park. This time I encountered some cavalry Guards on their huge black horses and with slightly ridiculous-looking plumed helmets on their heads. They were peacefully trotting in the direction of Buckingham Palace and, seeing as that was approximately where I was headed too, I attempted to keep pace with their column for a s long as I could. In the process I discovered that an average horses's walking speed is roughly equivalent to a brisk stride for me. Upon reaching the Palace, the troops and I parted: they turned left in the direction of Traffalgar square and I branched off right towards Westminster.

Visiting one church made me late for service in another. I missed the 3 o'clock one at Westminster by an hour and was told by the gatekeeper that there wouldn't be any until 6 pm. Not too much disappointed by this, I decided to hit the road to see the Globe Theater before the service.
As I crossed the Westminster Bridge I saw a demonstration against some health-care reform. "I really should read more newspapers" - I tell myself sometimes.

I then raided the nearby McDonald's bathroom, despite some authoritative signs prohibiting non-customers entrance, and continued along the southern bank of the Thames, a touristy and bustling part of town. There I finally bought a proper map of London along with a candy bar to eat. Food slips my mind sometimes, to be honest, and then reminds of the necessity of its intake in the most inconvenient places.

I made it finally to the Globe, a well-kept-looking bauwerk rotunda, overshadowed by neighboring modern glass giants. Entrance was 12 pounds, I dared not spend that much on a building where I didn't plan to live, so I moped around a bit in the lobby (I seemed to do that a lot during this trip), overheard the ticket sellers discussing their personal finances and went back out onto the windy esplanade.

Having taken the Millenium Pedestrian Bridge to the other side of the river, I strode my way back to Westminster past an imperial river-front, an obelisk 'acquired' from some egyptian tomb (I found it amusing how certain objects and symbols keep getting recycled by humans with power) and erected to honor queen Victoria.

This time I was fifteen minutes early for the 6 pm service and queued up along with a multitude of other foreigners at the entrance. Before we were let in, a slightly desperate-looking priest warned us that this was in fact a service, not a tour, and asked all those planning to take pictures or walk around to come back the day after for an offical tour. Some of the more honest in the queue left. I stayed.

We were then shuffled past the graves of some prime ministers and kings into the central part of the cathedral, where the naves intersect with the transcept. The cathedral was lit only on the ground level and so the gothic roof with its branching arches was full of shadow, increasing the impression of being in a forest. I thought it was a very majestic place, which made what follow the more painful.

For in this majestic place assembled a bunch of foreingers, not all christian and definitely mostly not aglican and these presumptuous people, instead of hearing the beautiful sound of a well-trained choir singing hymns, were asked to sing said hymns themselves, as well as listen to a sermon about life being a pilgrimage. I hope no one will get offended by what will follow. I tried to record only my observations and opinions and this is by no means a reflection on the overal state of the Anglican Church or Christianity of today.

Singing, of course, was a complete disaster. A catholic spanish couple next to me mumbled something very approximately in tune under their breath. A young fellow across the aisle refrained from singing at all. I tried to listen to the first verse and then emulate the melody in it when the second verse was sung. Not having any practice in this tradition, I naturally failed a lot and had to occasionally descend into mumbling and humming, much like my Spanish neighbors. A quick look around the church confirmed my guess that the majority of the 'parish' was experiencing the same problems. One or two actual anglicans with trained voices led the chorus, but they were the meager spots of knowledge in a sea of complete and natural ignorance and incompetence.

After we had butchered a couple of hymns, the nun who led the service read us a sermon based on some passage from the Bible about life being a voyage in an almost tear-inducingly powerless voice. She also thought it relevant to mention then that the abbey had always been a center of pilgrimage in England and that its founder (Edward the Confessor), whose day of birth or death was soon, was also keen on such religious journeys. I believe there was something more to her sermon, but I don't remember it anymore. When she was done, we were asked to torture several other hymns before being ushered out of the cathedral, so that the next group could be let in to, presumably, do the same thing.

I walked out of the Cathedral not very pleased with myself for botching an important to someone else ritual as a result of my desire to be a sly tourist. I then trekked over to Victoria station where I discovered that I had lost my return ticket to Brighton with 4 minutes till the earliest train. I was so upset by this, that without a second thought, purchased a one-way ticket for a ridiculous 22 pounds, missing my train by a minute. As I was waiting for the next train the second thought did arrive at my brain and I realized that I could have saved 4 pounds by buying another off-peak 2-way ticket. I swore a bit to myself at such a ridiculous price arrangement and at my own poor panic-influenced decision-making and boarded a train heading South.

My second day in London, though it began so well, ended on this unfortunate note.

Londinium I

 I originally had no idea how far away from London in fact the city of Brighton was. I guess that was not such good planning on my part, but I don't regret this because I got to stay and hang out with a friend, as opposed to being stuck in a hostel in London alone. In fact, I felt like the two days that I spent just walking around London gave me a fair impression of what the main tourist attractions in the center of town looked like. This impression is something that I can further build on if I find myself in the city once more.

Caity and I calculated that the best ticket for us would be an all-day off-peak rail, tube and bus pass for 19 pounds. Off-peak meant we had to travel to London after 10 am and head back to Brighton no sooner than 7 or 7:30 pm (I don't remember exactly anymore). In exchange for that we could use any tube trains or buses during the day inside zone 1. This restriction didn't bother us because all the attractions were located in that zone.

 Our first destination was the Sherlock Holmes Museum. We got there from Victoria Station using the Tube. Despite it being "off-peak" the stations and trains were quite full and I was reminded of the good old days when I had to shove my way into a subway train in Moscow. There was something different this time: unusually shaped doors. For some reason in the Tube some trains (I only took one, so cannot speak for all of them) have very low slanting roofs and the doors follow the roof contour, yielding something like this as a result. While this looks cool and extraordinary, it seems quite impractical in the case of much human traffic, because the people left standing next to the entrance have to always be aware of their head (or neck in the case of very tall individuals) getting hit by a closing door. Then, after the doors have closed, they are stuck in a slightly ridiculous posture with head and shoulders bent into the car, following the shape of the doors.

221 Baker Street

At the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, 221 Baker Street did not exist in reality. This address, I believe, was specifically created for the Sherlock Holmes Museum later. The museum itself was primarily an example of a mid or late nineteenth century interior with the majority of the house consisting of a staircase trunk, with a couple of rooms strung around it on every floor (of which there were at least 4), like leaves or some hollow kind of fruit.

Touristy Picture, courtesy of anonymous Schweitzer

We were greeted on the first floor by a sly-looking old man wearing an ascot who, upon hearing that we were from Boston, remarked on the high quality of tea parties in that city. We chuckled at the "compliment" and Caity proceeded to persuade me to be in a touristy picture, holding a pipe and wearing Holmes's hat on my head (can be seen left). We had some Swiss people, speaking their incomprehensible dialect of German, take said touristy picture.
 
We then went up the staircase to higher floors where we encountered some wax figures depicting some of Holmes's famous cases. Likely an influence of the nearby Madamme Tussaud's, these figures seemed strange to me in a victorian house.We looked at them for a bit, then bummed around the expectedly overpriced museum shop and set out to the Brittish Museum via Regent's Park.

Madamme Tussaud's influence

This is a rare picture of me smiling at a dog

In Regent's park we went along the pond for a while, I fooled a swan into nibbling on my hand by presenting it as if I had bread to give (there was an enourmous number of hungry and hence almost tame water foul there). Then we passed Regent's college, a very posh looking place with a gatekeeper and ID check at the entrance. After that we found ourselves suddenly on the outskirts of the park and not being content with that, ventured back in, made a loop back to the college, and as a result discovered a charming rose garden with an abundance of different species of the flower. Not being a big flower-lover, I can't say I appreciated this find as much as Caity.

Making friends with the swans.
Caity's camera died shortly after this picture, so the rest
of the day was only documented in written form.

After that we exited Regent's Park for the second time and for good. We then turned our steps in the direction of the Brittish Museum, picking up a sandwich per person from Pret a Manger. We arrived at the museum sometime around two or three o'clock, and roamed through the classical antiquity and european section until its closing sometime around five.

I remember finally seeing the barelief "The Battle of the Centaurs against the Lapiths" live after bumping into photographs of it in several books. I was also surprised to discover that heart-shaped ornaments dated to as far back as the 18th or 17th century. I always thought that symbol was invented fairly recently. The last thing I remembered from the visit was us being rushed out by the museum personell through a very impressive quasi-two storey library room built in classical style and containing various rarities besides books. As we were leaving, I gathered from a sign that this room was the orininal museum and the rest of the complex was built around it in order to house more exhibits.

I also (a bit later) made a list of things to see when (or if?) I come back. These include, but are not limited to, the reading room and the egyptian and babylonian sections.

After we were kicked out of the museum (I lived to see the day when I had to leave a museum against my will!) stumbled on St. Paul because the bus that was supposed to take us directly to it happened to unexpectedly end for some mysterious reason at a stop one block away from the church. We were able to find it because one of the steeples was visible from the stop, otherwise considerable wandering would have ensued.I cannot say much about St. Paul's other that it is impressive and that I had the cheesy song 'Feed the Birds' from the movie Mary Poppins stuck in my head the whole time we were around it. Oh, and there was a monument in front of it to a queen Anne, and we could not figure out when she lived or why the monument was erected.

We then bused over to Traffalgar Square, saw the Nelson Collumn, the Olympic Games Countdown Machine (not its official name!) and lots of yet mor classical empire style buildings, seemingly a staple of London architecture.

As it was getting late, we quickly marched to Buckingham Palace, glanced at it from a respectable distance, and discussed what it would be like to throw parties in there. We then walked over to the Parliament Building and Big Ben, the latter turning out much shorter and less impressive than I had imagined from postcards and movies. The amount of detail in the decorations of both buildings was astounding, however. When a nation dedicates so much attention to beautifying their parliament, that says something, I think.

Naturally after seeing the Parliament, we walked around the very well-lit Westminster Abbey. I don't think I have anything of note to contribute to the plethora of different things said and written about the place, so I will limit myself to a dry but sincere "very impressive".

At this point it was eight o'clock and we decided that was a good time to head home. Having trudged to Victoria Station, we boarded a train to Brighton... and fell asleep. I did so somewhat too blissfully and with too much commitment, because I remember being somewhat amazed at being woken up by Caity, who was beginning to suspect that our train had arrived at it's final destination. Our car was indeed suspiciously empty and not moving at all. Unfortunately, it was dark outside and hard to tell what station we were at exactly. I used this as an excuse to attempt to make a case for going back to sleep, but then somehow Caity won (I was not awake enough to remember) and before I realized completely what was going on, we were standing on what looked like the platform of Brighton Station. Luckily for us, there was a train headed to Falmer (our home station) in 3 minutes, so we made it. By Jove, what would have happened, if my arguments had prevailed?

Thus ended the day of my first visit to London.

The 100-Acre Wood or My First Hitchhike

I will start with an explanation of why this trip happened in the first place. One of my favorite books in childhood was Winnie the Pooh, the Russian version of it especially, since my dad read that to us regularly before we went to bed. I was never really attached to the movies or the English version because both of these I encountered later in life and by then I had a very set image of what the 100-Acre Wood and all of its inhabitants looked like (and as a result was not fully satisfied by the traditional illustrations or the imagery of the cartoons). I am, however, digressing from my main point which is that for me Winnie the Pooh is a great bright part of childhood.

It is not surprising then, that I was very pleased to find out from Caity, whose dorm I was staying at, that Ashdown Forest, the place that inspired the 100 Acre Wood, was within a two-hour bus ride from us. We decided to visit it during my stay.

On the day that we were planning to set out, Caity had class until 11 am, so we decided to take a bus that left around noon. Then we were going to change buses in a town called Hayward's Heath and ride to somewhere called Wych Cross.

Our troubles started when the first bus was 12 minutes late, making us miss our connection by 5 minutes. At that point we were not too worried about the matter and waited for a little under an hour on the soft lawn of a nearby hospital. We ate the provisions prepared for the day and talked about storytelling.

Our next problem arose on the second bus. As it turned out, Wych Cross was not a bus stop name, but the name of an intersection or a town. We realized this too late and had to get off one stop further away from our destination. We tried hiking our way back, but ended up on some golf course and some private property. It was my first time walking around an actual golf course and I have to say I now understand the appeal of the sport: one gets to wander through neat slightly wooded grasslands without dedicating too much energy or concentration to the sport at hand. This is indeed perfect for business meetings. Caity and I were not there, however, to discuss the faltering economy or a competitor's sudden rise in sales or whether it was worth buying a Ferrari online. We needed Pooh's wood, so we trudged past the golfers onto some seemingly less used path.

Caity Standing in front of
the boyscout camp sign.

This took us to a campsite, where we asked for some directions and Caity posed for a picture with the boyscout signs. The people in the camp office said we were some 6 km or so away from our goal, that we needed to head a bit south-east in order to hit the road that led to Pooh's wood and that we could use their grounds to cut a corner. We thanked them for everything and proceeded to walk, wondering how it happened that we were so far away from our destination.

On the way I noticed that the landscape around us was indeed very similar to what I had imagined of the 100 Acre Wood. The ground we were walking through was mostly sand and as a result the forest consisted primarily of pine trees. Aside from the fact that pine trees are mentioned in several places in Winnie the Pooh, I must mention that pine forests are my favorite kind in general. They usually feature little undergrowth and so one can see further. The pine trees themselves with their long bare trunks and rooflike tops, form a natural collonade and leave one the impression of being in a cathedral.

Another detail that I picked up on was the abundance of ferns. In Winnie the Pooh they (and the fog) were the scenery for the chapter in which Tigger got unbounced. I felt a bit like Rabbit, walking through them and being slightly lost. I mentioned ferns to Caity, who remarked that for her the word was a bit bothersome from a philological standpoint. She pointed out that it can be used as both a countable and an uncountable noun.

After about half an hour we arrived at the Ashdown Forest visitor center (or at least one of them) that was fortunately still open (by then we had been wandering for almost two hours and it was 4 pm). There we confirmed that we were indeed considerably far away from the Pooh Walks (as they were called in the park) and it would take at least an hour to get there. The last bus from Wych Cross left shortly before 7 pm, which meant that we actually had about 15 minutes to spend  on site before we had to head back. We decided, however, that it would be silly to turn back now, after we had spent so much time shaking in buses and trespassing on golf courts and boyscout camps.

The long winding road...

We thanked the lady at the visitors center and set out to Pooh's wood. The road we walked on was a narrow cement country road with cars speeding by at 40 mph all the time. We saw some fields and forests and hills and even a mansion or two in the distance. The sun was getting lower and lower as we walked on and on. Caity was nervous, not without reason, about us getting hit by a passing car. I was getting nervous, also not without reason, about missing the bus.


Finally, after more than an hour and after scaling a considerable hill, we found ourselves at the start of the trail. At this point Caity had the idea that we could walk the trail quickly, then attempt to hitchhike back to the bus stop. This way we would get what we came here for as well as avoid yet another hour of walking.

We started out on the trail but soon disovered that the hilltop where it started, was covered in little paths leading here and there. Because nothing on the spot was marked and we only had a map from the visitor's center as a guide, we soon found ourselves walking on a horse path seemingly leading in the right direction, but in no way resembling a trail. This path led us to the "Enchanted Place", where we saw the Milne Memorial and confirmed that we had not been on the trail till that point and as a result had missed the Heffalump Trap and the Lone Pine. We retraced our steps towards these attractions and came across a very cozy and unique place. The Lone Pine was a shorter-than-usual tree, whose branches for some unknown reason all split at the very top of the tree and formed a wide cover, very much like a roof. This canopy stretched over a small sand pit in the side of the hill, creating a protected look-out point over the valley below. "This was worth it" - I thought to myself at the time.

The horse path that we mistook for the Pooh Trail

Lone Pine and Heffalump Trap at last!

This we thought were Roo's Sandpits.
They were not marked, so I guess we will never know for sure...

We then tried to find the Sand Pits, and seemed to have succeeded in this, though, because nothing was marked, we could never be sure. At that moment I noted that the environment we were in had significantly changed compared to that of our starting point. The sky was now cloudier, the sun much lower and the wind much stronger than over by the golf course. There were still pine trees around, but now they grew scarce and the ground was primarily covered in thistle bushes. This was the first time that I saw Eeyore's food up close and I must confirm that it is as pringly and inedible as described by Milne.

From the hilltop we looked over the hillside that was the inspiration for Eeyore's Sad and Lonely Place. It didn't look that cheerful: lone pine trees here and there with grass and thistles as undergrowth. Especially in the occasional light of the setting sun this did indeed seem quite depressing. It is also possible that our impressions of the place reflected our own worries about the journey home. In any case, we didn't linger there long and headed to the road that would take us back to Wych Cross.

One final glance at the setting sun from the 100-Acre Wood.

This was the first attempt at hitchhiking for both of us, so we were slightly on edge as we strode down the steep hill and waved down cars. The first 6 vehicles passes us by: a woman with a polite smile in a van, an old lady in an old car, a man driving a Smart car that would not have fit us all, a volvo driver who even signaled with his blinker that he didn't want to stop, and a couple of others who I have forgotten now.

Just as I had given up hope and Caity started describing the type of driver that would in fact pick up two young people on an evening road, a white ford pulled over and a round-faced glasses-wearing gentleman said he would give us a lift. This was an unexpected turn of events for me (I had given up hope) and I struggled to find a suitable topic for conversation as we whizzed along the streets past hedges and oncoming traffic at what I thought were impressive speeds. I told the man about our bad luck that day, he asked where I was from. He was incredulous when I named the USA.

-  You don't sound it - he responded.
 - What do I sound like? - I asked.
 - I would place you somewhere in Mid-Germany - he said.
 -  Really?
-  Yes. I work at a school, you see. We have German exchange students teaching there every year and you sound exactly like them.

We continued to talk about this and that. Caity put in a couple of words and our driver said she definitely sounded American. He himself, as it turned out, worked in a school several towns over managing their budget and was staying at a hotel in Wych Cross, hence could give us the ride. We were at our bus stop in no time (as was mentioned earlier, he drove fast), thus ended our first hitchhike. Not a bad experience overall: we saved lots of time and energy, I was told to my face that I have an accent, we "drove" a car through Britain (as opposed to a bus or train). I have to say that I'm a fan of this style of driving, where only commited people actually get a license and a car (both harder to attain in Europe than in the US) and these commited people speed like maniacs down small streets in small maneuverable vehicles. I have yet to see an accident during my stay and at the same time this kind of driving seems way more fun to me.

The rest of the journey home was uneventfiul: all the busses were on time and empty (on time because they were empty), we got home around 10, consumed some frozen pizza (it's surprising how unfilling it is on both sides of the ocean) and went to bed.

By jove, what a day!

P.S.
All pictures in this (and all other posts about the UK) are courtesy of Caity Gebhard. I am very grateful for her having a camera around and not being shy to use it.

First police call

Today was my first morning back from visiting friends in Sweden and the UK (more about that in posts to come). I woke up, went for a run, after that started to make breakfast and roaming around the flat, noting things that had changed in my absence or needed cleaning/buying. I happened to look out of my window and notice a man lying under a bench on the grass in the courtyard outside. He wasn't moving and his jacket was undone.

Considering that it was Saturday morning, the first thought that popped into my head was that he had had a "fun" Friday night and had now been lying out in the cold for at least several hours (it was +7 C, not a very good sleeping temperature). I came down to wake him up and see if he needed any help getting home.

At first the man didn't respond at all when I addressed him. When I had tapped him on the shoulder a couple of times, he finally said something very slurred that sounded more like a moan than anything else. I tried tapping again and asking his name, but got the same response as an answer. Having thus confirmed that my knowledge of drunk german was not sufficient to handle the situation and after consulting a bit with some neighbors I dialled 110 and was connected to a dispatcher.

It took some time and repetitions, but he finally understood what and where was going on and said he'd send out something or someone (I didn't quite catch it, but assumed he meant a police car with at least an officer) to us right away. This "right away" proved to be around 5 minutes, though to me it seemed much longer because I was standing over an unconscious human and could not come up with a productive thing to do. One feeble attempt at lifting him was made, but that failed miserably as he had turned into a bag of bones with no muscules providing support whatsoever.

When the policemen arrived, they turned out to me one tall man and one much shorter woman (I remember wondering who plays the "bad cop" in this team). I explained the situation to them, they tried, this time successfully, to get the man to sit up. In the process it was revealed that he had on him an empty bottle of beer and a half-empty bottle of some 40-proof schnapps. The unlucky fellow had been mixing alcohol.

The officers thanked me for the call and said they needed my assistance no further. I went back home and had breakfast. I then looked out of my window and saw that both the man and the police were gone. Here's to hoping all went well for the poor geezer!

It's a long way to London Town

I profusely apologize to my readers for not updating this page for almost a month. Some sort of lame writer's block (lame because I'm not really a writer and hence shouldn't have such problems) took over and its evil spirit kept me away from the blog.
I am, however, back and have quite a bit to tell. The next couple of entries I will post as I write them, which means some of the events described will be out of chronological order. To alleviate this problem, dates of the events will be mentioned in every post.

I am currently writing this out of a computer classroom in a University of Sussex dorm and thus I will start with the story of how I arrived at this location and what things are like here. As I am reluctant to purchase a camera of my own (I think it will be too much hassle trying not to lose it and also a hindrance to interacting with people, a challenge for me on its own), and my friend's camera died during the first day of my stay, this blog entry along with some private notes and memories are all that will remain from the trip.

In the morning of October 5th (a Wednesday) I flew with RyanAir from Baden Airpark to London Stansted Airport. In order to save money, however, I took a train from Konstanz to Karlsruhe the night before and had to spend about 7 hours at the latter's main train station. This stretch of time was actually welcome, because a lot had accumulated on my mind over the past three weeks or so and I had no real opportunity to mill it all over until that night. I also managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep on a stone bench, an extremely cheap and dry croissant from some eatery, two cheeseburgers from McDonnalds (compensation for using their wireless). Overall, putting aside a sore neck and a slightly chilled shoulder (both were fine the next day), it was not as bad as I had expected.

The bus express that was to take me from the train station to the airport was half an hour late, but luckily, there was still enough time to register for my flight. Honestly, I have no idea how I managed to get my backpack through as carry-on luggage. RyanAir has a very strict cabin baggage policy that only allows bags of certain dimensions to be taken on the plane. My guess is that this is to prevent people from taking suitcases with them and not checking them in as baggage to avoid fees. There was an evaluation box set up in front of check-in that allowed one to test if one's carry-on met the dimension requirements. My backpack barely fit into this box all on its own. Then there was the sleeping bag attached to it that did not fit at all. I guess what saved me was that the weight was under 10 kilograms and that seemed to be what was being checked most stringently.

It was my first RyanAir flight but I have to say there was nothing special about it. I chatted with an old German couple headed to London for a pan-England tour ending at York. I listened to Credence Clearwater Revival for about 30 minutes. I stared at the yellow seat in front of me. That was it. The plane set wheel in Stansted and I was on British soil.

I will now digress slightly to say a couple of words about how small I think the world is. Because this particular trip was organized slightly haphazardly and I didn't advertise it as much or as well to my fellow exchange students in Konstanz, I was to undertake my journeys alone. To my surprise and joy, however, I discovered that Susan, a South-African girl from my September orientation was on my train to Karlsruhe and Mikolt, a fellow fencer and also someone I knew from the orientation program, was on the same plane to London. Hurray to my friends being everywhere I go!

I originally was going to take a train from Stansted to Brighton. Upon talking to the ticket sellers, however, I discovered that it would be almost two times cheaper to take a bus to Victoria Station and from there to Brighton. I decided to do that.
The bus I took from Stansted to Victoria came equipped with wireless (very useful for notifying friends about changes in travel plans), seat-belts (apparently, it's law in Brittain to wear them in buses) and a driver possessing a very Brittish sense of humor. He started out by describing one of the stickers on the windows as a "hammer, but not really a hammer... Noone really knows what it is, so I just call it that.", then proceeded to mention a phone number that we could text with our opinion of his driving. He asked that if we had something good to say about him, his name was Paul, if not - Roger.

The passengers on the bus were not quite so jolly. There was an old couple behind me who were arguing about everything possible and mentioning divorce from time to time. Then there was a man who started talking into his phone to some Steve on the other end. There happened to be a Steve on the bus, who, having heard his name, thought he was being addressed and was very put out once he found out this was not the case. He complained for at least twenty minutes about how people answer their phones too loudly in public transportation or how that they answer them at all, or that there are too many Steves roaming the country... I didn't quite understand, because he spoke cockney. Overall, I have yet to hear English used to produce so much miserable and grumbling talk as on that bus ride. Luckily for me, my iPod still had some battery left, so after a while I drowned all of this noise in Dire Straits.

The traffic in London was quite insane and so I got to Victoria station just in time for my connection to Brighton, not with 55 minutes to spare, as the lady that sold me the ticket said. After that it took a more than an hour to get out of London onto the highway headed south.

The long time I spent busing around London let me make some first observations of the city. First of all, it's big and busy, much busier than I thought it would be. The traffic is comparable, I think, to that of New York City, with constant congestion and chaos reigning the streets. The same can be said about the plethora of shops and human characters crowding the streets with their bright (and not so bright) colors.
Secondly, the architecture is almost uniformly of classical (often) empire style. This left me with a feeling of cold grandeur associated with the city in general, similar to the feeling I got from the bus tours of Berlin that I went on between in 2004 and 2006. Another thing I noticed were the rows of townhouses marching along the side streets somewhere into the innards of the megapolis. Their monotonous uniformity made one think of a drearily industrial dystopia.

I didn't really get to see the countryside because in Britain, just like in the US (and perhaps every country that has them), the highways were almost always enveloped in a sheath of trees. In addition, it was four in the afternoon and the day, being cloudy, was starting to turn into night.
I arrived at Brighton Coach Station shortly after half past four and was greeted by chilly wind and rain from the sea and my friend, Caity.

We went to the university of Sussex, a 30 minute bus ride north of the city, deposited my backpack and sleeping bag there, and came back for a short introductory tour of the city. I will give more details about Brighton in a future blog post. For now it will suffice to say that we stumbled around for a bit, mostly looking for cheap dinner. We ended up settling for a 7 pound all-you-can-eat buffet at some Italian place in the center of town, then stuffed ourselves with impressively tasteless pizza and pasta along with some decent salads and boiled eggs. We then went home, to bed.

Thus, after spending 20 hours on the road and using 3 forms of transportation (4, if one counts walking), I began my stay in the UK.

Another one bites... my leg! (updated)

I was originally planning to write a post about my September course and the marvelously eccentric teacher administering it, but it seems that some local stinging fauna took a fancy to my legs and now I will have to write about that.

On Friday afternoon along with a bunch of international students I played some soccer. As is to be expected from someone who is out of shape (which I am at the moment), I woke up a bit sore the next morning, my legs covered with minuscule cuts, scrapes and insect bites. I went about the business of the day, took part in a tour of the center of town with other students from my language orientation course, napped on a grassy bank of the Rhine and then helped my roommates set up for a party that we were throwing.

The party was a blast, thanks to all who came. Unfortunately, midway through it my left leg started hurting right above the ankle in a way similar to how a pulled muscle would. At first we speculated that this was indeed the reason for the pain and that some soccer injury was to blame. This theory, however, had a couple of flaws. I could not come up with any recollection of a collision or movement that would have caused such a trauma. Usually one remembers such moments, even if the pain recedes temporarily afterwards during play. I, however, did not recall any particular pain in that muscle until Saturday evening. This in itself was also strange because, from what I know, athletic traumas manifest themselves normally within hours of occurring, usually when one is done with the sport and the adrenalin level drops. What kind of pulled muscle decides to start hurting more than 24 hours after it has been pulled?

Despite these doubts that night I put some ice on the leg before I went to bed, still thinking that perhaps this will help. In the morning on Sunday I saw that this didn't help and also noticed that there was something that looked like a big insect bite, red, itchy and slightly disgusting-looking. "This looks less and less like a pulled muscle and more like an infection/allergy caused by a bite" - I thought to myself and, after doing some superficial post-party cleaning followed by breakfast, headed over to the hospital around 1 pm.

To be honest, I was not expecting to have to have dealings with German doctors this early on in the year and was feeling a bit nervous trekking over to the Krankenhaus and trying to explain my problem to its personnel. Most likely because of this (and a lack of signs) it took me some time to find the actual emergency section. The waiting room was a mildly lit lobby at the corner of two converging corridors with one ceiling tile missing and some inconsequential decorations on its walls. I remember only noticing a child's drawing on one of the cabinets that showed a brown horse with a red cross on its side. I suspect this must have been the child's idea of an ancient ambulance (red cross included). I sat in this room for about 10 minutes before realizing that in fact I should come into the office and let someone know I needed help. My only excuse for this forgetfulness is that I was listening to some Andrew Bird and, not having to stand on my leg, was fairly content with my situation.

Fortunately for me, the lady at the reception desk was good at following my slow-paced somewhat awkward mixture of languages. She explained that the doctor was currently out on lunch break and that I would have to register for an appointment later in the day. I'm guessing this was because my problem did not require an immediate remedy of some sort. I signed up for a slot at 16:00, went back home and tried to understand my finances. After epicly failing at that for a couple of hours, I came back to the hospital, was taken to a room and told to wait for the doctor there.

Shortly a tall man in his late forties hurried in. He had nothing in his hands, no stethoscope or clipboard, and he was not wearing a white coat. He patiently listened to my staggering attempt at describing my problem in German, quickly decided that it would be more expedient to speak in English and for the remainder of our fairly short conversation stuck to that language. He passed his hand over the swollen areas a couple of times, observed the bite and pointed out that I had a very similar one on my other leg which for some reason was only itchy. Then he quickly said something about an oil bandage to the nurse, who proceeded to put some yellow liquid on the swollen leg and then a bandage over it. I was amazed to discover that the pain disappeared almost right away and I could walk with only a minor discomfort. As the nurse was bandaging my leg, the doctor scribbled some barely legible names of dermatologists as a prescription and handed me over the sheet with their names, saying I should contact one of them asap for further treatment. This being done, the doctor said he had work to do and left.

I chuckled to myself, because in the US it would unthinkable for a doctor to tell his patients he had to leave an appointment due to ongoing work. "I am your work!" - an american patient would claim, I think. I didn't claim so, however, and proceeded to leave the premises. The whole transaction took less than 20 minutes and my second trip to the hospital overall lasted exactly one hour. German efficiency for the win!

My next stop on this road of illness is the office of one of the dermatologists in town. At this point, I'm almost looking forward to it.

***Update***

This comes somewhat late as I will describe here events that happened this past Monday.
As per the advice of the doctor in the Emergency Room of the hospital, I called up one of the dermatologists on Monday before my classes started. I was planning to schedule an appointment, but the lady on the other end of the line said: "Come on over now, there is almost no line." I realized that my German was not good enough to argue for an appointment. I tried it in English, but the connection was too bad for the lady to understand anything, so I gave up and decided to ask my teacher if I could leave class for a couple of hours.

Because my teacher is a cool guy, he let me go, albeit after giving a lecture to all of us on healthcare in Germany that took almost an hour. My desire to learn new words and laugh at some cheesy jokes overpowered my reason and when I finally left the University on a bus headed for the center of town, I was sure that I would have to spend hours in line. Waiting was not that big of a problem, I then thought, because I happened to have a book (in German) with me that I had been trying to finish for an embarrassingly long time and a big line would mean an opportunity to further that goal. It also meant I could stay out of class for longer, but I think some people that know me will argue that I do not treat that as necessarily a good thing.

The dermatologist I was to see had his office in one of the very fancy old buildings on the north waterfront exactly where the lake becomes the Rhine (very reasonably called Seestraße). I found his house without a problem, climbed a flight or two of wide stone stairs, walked on a floor paved with simple mosaic patterns and entered a waiting room. I do not remember now what the exact color of the walls was (either salad green or orange), but it reflected the morning sunlight very well that day and the room was neither overpoweringly bright, nor gloomy.

To match the atmosphere in the room, the lady at the front desk was cheerful and understanding. She recognized me as someone who called earlier when I was only half-way done with the description of my problem, added me to the list of patients, told me where to go. As expected, the line was indeed considerable at that time: 6 or 7 people of all ages needed to have their skin looked at for one reason or another. I took out my book and consumed a chapter before being called into the doctor's office. While I waited for the doctor to come I observed that the room was not much different from doctor's offices in the US: bandages, pills and obscure utensils filled the cabinets on one wall, various informational and space-filling posters lined the other.

After about five minutes, a tall thin lady walked in briskly, shook my hand and introduced herself (I forgot the name, I'm afraid, I'm bad with names). I gave her a description of my problem, then, on her request, took off the bandage I was given the day before in the ER. She quickly glanced over the bite and the leg (which, by the way, had become bright yellow as a result of the ointment used by the emergency staff), passed her fingers over it just like the hospital doctor had done the day before. Her conclusion, however, was a bit different.

"It's not an allergy" - she said - "because if it was, you would be having reactions and itching all over your body, not just the area of the bite."
She then proceeded to say that in fact, the problem was due to a peculiarity of circulation in the legs. Blood there has a harder time (because of gravity) moving up into the body than coming down into the leg itself. A regular bite always causes some blood to accumulate around it. In a leg, however, this blood doesn't always get a chance to disperse and keeps accumulating further. This leads to swelling and that in turn - to pain and decreased muscle elasticity. The doctor said this was exactly what happened to me and that the restrictive bandage originally helped by containing the swelling.

She recommended that I keep the leg up while sitting for a couple of days and avoid standing for prolonged periods of time. When I asked about sports and dancing, she said: "You are young, play football, go to clubs and enjoy yourself! All will be fine."
I was very pleased to hear such a prescription and left the doctor's office in good spirits. As with the hospital visit the day before, the whole interaction took less than fifteen minutes. Overall, I have to say I'm impressed so far by the way doctors operate in Germany. Compared to the ones in the US, they are fast, efficient, and to the point. In the US, most of the doctor's I've been to tend to introduce small talk, jokes etc into the conversation and try to give the impression that they do not have any other appointments. A German doctor, on the other hand, broadcasts the message: "I am here to help as many people as possible. Tell me what's wrong, I will do my best to provide you a remedy. As soon as we are done, however, I must leave, I have 50 more patients waiting to be helped." This message, while it might seem a bit dehumanizing, is, I think, a very practical and useful one. I'd rather be treated this way. This is, of course, just an impression and one based on only two experiences.

P.S.
It is now Saturday as I write this and the leg is fine. Thank you all who inquired about it this week :)

Weekend (Continued or 'Part 2')

N.B.
Some of my descriptions in this entry (and most likely future ones too) will include references to areas and streets that I'm guessing might be obscure to some readers. To provide some context, here (make sure to click out of the pop-up ad) is a fairly good map of Konstanz with all the areas as well as the streets marked. I will try to re-post it occasionally or add it as a "useful link" to the blog page.

Saturday
That day I had to wake up relatively early because there was talk of a used bike fair in a certain veloshop 5 minutes away from my dorm starting at ten. It must be said that in Konstanz, a city where it takes at most half an hour to get to the historical center on foot from even the farthest corners of town, one should most definitely have a bike. It's usefulness increases if one takes into account that practically all of the city center is a car-free zone and that so many streets have designated bicycle lanes.
All of this meant that if I was to enjoy any freedom and efficiency in my movement around the city, I was to get a bicycle somehow.

My only problem was lack of finances. I was not willing to spend anything more than one hundred euros on the two-wheel wonder and that put me in a very low-end bracket of buyers (decent new bikes being all around 400 euro). As of yet I haven't surmounted the challenge of acquiring some mildly respectable velocipede for the much less respectable price I have to offer. I hope sometime in the foreseeable future I will prevail.

I digress, however, and forget that on Saturday morning I was much less aware of these impediments in my way and actually hoped to purchase a bicycle by the end of the day. For that reason I got up at 8, made myself breakfast (oatmeal, of course!) and was going to sit down and read for a bit before heading out. This plan had to be abandoned because Jannis woke up around the same time and invited me to go to the farmer's market. I could not pass up such an opportunity and promptly set out with him to a street a couple of blocks to the east, where we were greeted by all sorts of fantastic-smelling produce and slightly old-fashioned people.

I noticed one slight difference between the market I found myself at and the ones I was used to. Every food group was almost evenly represented, with vegetables and fruit making up less of the overall offerings. In Massachusetts (maybe I went to the wrong farmer's markets?), one could usually find more fruit and veggies than anything else. Here there were a couple of solid-looking meat, fish and bread stands and one fellow was selling marinaded/pickled foods, mostly olives and pastes.

I bought myself half a kilo of plums, a loaf of ciabatta bread, 500 grams of German honey. After I deposited all of these treasures at home I headed over to the bike shop. Surprisingly enough, given my luck with locating places in Konstanz thus far, I barely found it. In addition to this, upon arriving I was told that there was no used bike sale that day. I was instead directed to a fellow named Paul 200 meters down the road who, I was told, sold used bikes all the time. I followed the directions given and arrived at a small yard just off the street in front of a yellow house, filled with antique cars and bicycles. "This doesn't look very promising, all of these must cost a fortune" - I said to myself and asked for Paul. I was told to wait a bit and Paul did appear shortly. He looked a bit pensive when he heard my price,  took me to some back storage room of his house and showed me a couple of bikes, none of which were to my liking. I know I shouldn't be picky in my situation, but I didn't really want to choose between an overweight mountain bike with no lights or fenders and a purple female-frame bike with a seat that was too low. I told Paul I might come back on Monday. Sadly, I didn't get a chance to follow up on that (but I'm getting ahead of myself again!). I then went home, feeling a bit defeated and did something utterly unmemorable like folding laundry or reviewing my documents or staring at a (Facebook) wall.

In the evening there was once more a gathering at Hafen Halle, this time for a Pub-Crawl in Konstanz. Parts of that night are to this day somewhat hazy in my memory, but I remember going to Klimerkasten, Casba, Shooters (never have the drink called Picasso in there, it's a waste of your time/money) and, finally, Shamrock, an irish pub. I remember having a great time, drinking beer, discussing whales, universal truth and lost friends. The locations of all of these places I remember only very approximately. If you were to ask me to take a group of tourists to these places, I don't think I couldn't.
I also do not remember when I fell asleep that night, but I do know that it was in my room and that it was dark outside.

Sunday (the day I almost got lost)
I woke up at around 11 again ('rise and shine' for me seems to be stably oscillating between 8 and 11), performed an inspection of the room and myself and discovered that I had drunk half of the water I prepared the night before, that my head was still in one piece, there was a very small cut on my left thumb and some muscles in my left knee felt extremely sore. I limped to the kitchen, brewed myself some Earl Grey (I'm sure that if I were ever to meet an earl who happened to be named 'Grey' we'd be really good friends, there's just too many good emotions associated for me with the name). I then tried to go online, but spent almost 10 minutes blankly staring at my Facebook newsfeed, as if expecting it to explode with updates (on a Sunday morning!). When this naturally didn't happen, I tried to write a bit, but had trouble concentrating, so as a result spent over four hours on an entry, taking frequent breaks to chat on Facebook, watch videos of German comedians (thanks, Jannis!) and stare at the walls of my room (my favorite pastime). Around 5 I headed over to Shamrock to watch what was left of a game of hurling that started at 4:30 with whoever of the international students showed up. I assumed this would also be good exercise for my knee, get some blood circulating in there, etc.

As I mentioned, I did not remember where any of the pubs were so it took me over half an hour of trial and error to locate Shamrock. Luckily for me, the game was still on when I did finally find the place and friends from Ireland, Czech Republic and America were sitting there. I joined, got a Guiness (pricey stuff in Germany, I later discovered) and saw Kilkenny beat Tipperary and reclaim the Irish national hurling championship title again, as I was informed by the Irish present, after winning it consistently for at least the past decade.

After the game ended, we proceeded to use the white paper place mats on our tables to first list all 32 Irish counties, then all 50 US states. I think when we did a tally, we ended up one short on the number of counties and 2 over on the number of States. I was never strong in arithmetic, however, so I could have been wrong. I left around half past 8.

Two memorable things happened on my way home. First of all, I came close to actually being lost. I took some of the winding streets in the center of town to get to Paradies, from where I planned to take the pedestrian bridge over to my side of the river and follow Markgrafen Straße home. However, I missed the street that led directly to the pedestrian bridge and made a right turn several streets later onto Brüelstraße. When I later that evening (already at home) consulted a map of Konstanz I understood that this was in fact a decent way to get home by itself (passing the Paradies dorms and crossing the Rhein via another bridge). At the time, however, as far as I could tell in the dark and rain, I was bearing too much to the left. At some point I even suspected I was headed for the Swiss countryside. While on any other day this prospect would not have daunted me, at 9pm on a rainy Sunday night before my first Sprachkurs lesson the last place I would have seen myself heading were the fields of Switzerland. So I ultimately retraced my steps to the right street, took the pedestrian bridge across and was home shortly before 10. I then frantically ate some plums (see below why), brushed my teeth, wrote this entry and went to bed.

The second memorable occurrence during this walk home was my first attempt at ordering a Döner. I had been meaning to do this for a couple of days and this was my chance: all of the other stores were closed, I hadn't eaten properly since breakfast, the weather outside was miserable. I walked into a place called, I think, Paradies Pizza and started figuring out their menu. I have an inexplicably serious weakness when it comes to fast food menus: for some strange reason (perhaps it's lack of practice or just some idiosyncrasy of my reading skills) I can never order anything from a fast food joint properly and manage to botch up the simplest requests. When I go to restaurants and even plain eateries or coffee shops, all works out well. And yet a trip to McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts is always a nightmare of misunderstandings, duplicate orders or mixed up combos and it's always because I didn't understand what an item on the menu says. I had hoped this would be different in Germany, but I apparently was wrong.

The menu at Paradies Pizza contained the usual extensive list of various types of foods offered by the place. I found the Döner section, reviewed all the choices available, but could not understand all of the ingredients mentioned in descriptions of items. All the while the picture next to the Döner helpfully illustrated the product by showing a picture of a flatbread filled with various food stuffs. I tried asking the fellow at the counter which Döner he would recommend, but he didn't understand me. I assumed this was because I made a mistake somewhere in my German and asked him in English, but he still didn't understand me. I then decided to go with something simple and ordered the first item on the list called a 'Döner Box'. As I was waiting for it to be prepared, I kept wondering why 'Box' was in the name and speculated that maybe this was because the flatbread was made to look like a box or perhaps I got several minidöners in one box... To my horror, however, the fellow at the counter took a chinese-food-style take-out box and filled it with meat shavings and french fries, then topped all of this fatty 'goodness' with something similar to ranch cheese and handed the whole mess to me.

I was starving, so I swallowed all of it on the way home, but the following questions kept bothering me: "Since when is a meal prepared with no vegetables or fruit and this amount of fat and cholesterol instead? Why is such an item on the menu of any self-respecting eatery? And finally, how on earth did I end up with this abomination of a meal when I had so much else to choose from??"

I was so unimpressed with carbs and meat by the time I got home, that I required some other kind of food to settle my mind and stomach. Luckily, I had a considerable supply of plums from the day before and proceeded to blissfully consume a couple. Someone won't be ordering from fast food places for a while.