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).
Friday, November 25, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. |
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... |
 |
| ... 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. |
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. |
 |
| Weser Stadium looks like a spaceship in the fog. |
 |
| More foggy Bremen. |
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... |
Friday, November 4, 2011
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.
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.
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