Coco's Friseur

Seeing as the summer semester in Konstanz had its kick off yesterday, I thought it fitting to get back into the blogosphere with less geeky posts than this.

A week ago I went to get a haircut. Being a student means one a) has limited finances and b) doesn't worry about one's looks the same way as some of the more respectable classes in society do (that is not to say one doesn't worry about one's looks at all, it's just that on average one's worries can be satisfied without the help of a high-class haircut). Considering these two things I went to the cheapest barber in town, Coco's Friseur. In case some of my readers are actually from the area, here is a GoogleMaps link showing its location.

In this establishment one can get quite a presentable haircut for only 5 euros, if one asks for a "dry" one. Since a "wet" haircut is essentially just getting your hair washed before getting it cut, I don't see the point in spending more money on it instead of washing one's hair at home right before hitting up the barbers.

The downside to Coco's being so cheap is that it is insanely popular. Out of the two times that I have been there, the wait always exceeded an hour.
This was one of the two times, so I did not at all regret bringing my a notebook with me along with a tome of Oscar Wilde.

I did, however, have time to make some observations in the place during those almost two hours that I spent there.

Observation 1:
It is amazing what ladies from the older generation want done with their hair. Almost every one of them wanted her hair redyed, recurled, rewashed and God knows what else. Almost every one of them had a head covered in rollers or tin foil at some point during her stay. I suspect (though I have no conclusive proof, I wish someone would do a study), they were the ultimate cause of the long wait times.

Observation 2:
The behavior of the older gentlemen complimented that of the ladies in a strangely gallant way. Their hair situation seemed to be the opposite of the ladies: most of their heads possessed only a fraction of that which originally covered them completely I am sure (or else there was a whole generation of bald young men, but I have never encountered any supporting evidence for this). And yet these fellows braved hours of stupefying wait while the ladies beautified themselves endlessly only to sit themselves in a barber's chair and ask for their sole remaining lock of hair to be shortened by one centimeter.

At the time I found the whole picture slightly annoying. The next day I thought it touching.

Observation 3 (unrelated):
I never really noticed until last Tuesday how strange a conversation between a barber and their client appears to an on-looker. Somehow one forgets that normally one converses with a barber through the mirror in front of one's chair. To someone looking from the side (as I was doing for a good portion of the day), the picture is reminiscent of a Duo Interp skit, where both of the participants cannot make direct eye contact and so are staring and making faces at the space in front of them, pretending that their partner right there too. Seeing barbers and their clients perform this was a bit unusual to me, for some reason.

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...

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.

Weekend (part 1)

I personally always lumped Fridays with weekends. In fact, if I were to have the power to pass any one law for the whole planet, it would be to institute 3 day weekends. Seeing as I don't have this power yet, I will instead describe the weekend starting with what happened on Friday.

Friday
I woke up at the ripe hour of eleven in the morning to a drizzle slightly knocking on my window. I got up and decided to give the oatmeal that I purchased the day before a shot. I made it the usual way: two to one ratio of water to oats, then an addition of honey (kindly lent by Jannis) once the porridge was out of the pot. It tasted pretty much the same as the Quaker oatmeal I'd been eating all summer. I found this encouraging, because it meant that for 35 Eurocents I had breakfast meals for as long as half a kilo of oats lasted.

After this reassuring meal I wrote and read till about four, then borrowed a bike from Jannis (the constant borrowing seems to be a thing these past couple of days) and pedaled up the hill to see the University.

I suspect that the architects of Uni Konstanz decided to compensate for the relative simplicity of the town's geography by creating something that was actually challenging to navigate. I have to admit, they succeeded. The University of Konstanz, at least upon first inspection, seems to house all of its departments in one giant building complex. I wouldn't be surprised if one could visit all of them without ever having to go outdoors.

My agenda was much humbler: I only wanted to find the linguistics department, since I would probably be spending considerable time in it and would prefer to know how to there ahead of time. According to some information that I gathered online before my arrival, linguistics was on the second floor of building G. I had with me a plan of the university very thoughtfully provided by the International Programs office in one of their bulky packages that I got before my departure. I studied this plan for a couple of minutes, then decided to wing it based on an approximation of where I thought G was.

This was a mistake and I paid for it by having to meander in loops through corridors with pipes, wires and armature hanging down from the ceilings, balconies with life-size statuettes of falcons or hawks, closed cafeterias and complex systems of terraces and stairs. I also passed some rooms called "Buchbereich" that looked like mini libraries and had extensive lists of items one was prohibited to bring into them (one might think one was entering some sort or temple of knowledge because the lists made it seem that one could come in only if one left practically all of one's worldly possessions behind).
One increasingly annoying recurring theme in this first round of wandering was that instead of building  G I kept running into M. No matter where I started and how many different floors I traversed, I always ended up somewhere in building M. I learned by heart that it was the biology department and that it had a stuffed animals exhibit that contained a fairly large fox. I would rather have known the most efficient route to G.

After some time I got fed up with this loop and decided to first go outside, then enter the labyrinth from some other point and in that way break out of whatever passage system I was stuck in. Just to be fair, I decided to go into the first door I encountered while outside. But this ruse didn't work: I entered a basement full of white walls and machinery and after some wandering around discovered that (surprise!) I was again in building M. At this point I'd been walking for at least half an hour and really wanted to end the tour.

I pulled out the plan and consulted it again before attempting one last time to reach building G. Now, however, I had a better understanding of how the real buildings correlated with the rectangles shown on my map and also realized that if one were to start at the main entrance, there were signs to all of the buildings that made life much easier. Thus I was finally was able to find G, see some classrooms, yet another Buchbereich and some posters about current (and not so current: there was an ad for a computational linguistics workshop from 2009) events, courses and research at the department.

This being done, I left that maze without delay and rode down the opposite hillside from the one I went up earlier in the day. I soon reached a town called Egg that naturally looked nothing like an egg and from there followed a picturesque alley lined with old trees that took me to the entrance to the isle of Mainau. Because there was a fee for admission to the island (and I didn't want to pay it), I turned back, retraced my steps to Egg and from there took small streets to the adjacent towns of Allmannsdorf and Staad. From there I biked to the Rheinbrücke and home through Sonnenbühlstraße. On the way I saw loads of other cyclists, two breweries (on a stretch of at most 1,5 kilometers), a ferry and a casino. These, I observed, seem to be legal in the city (unlike in the US, where gambling is confined to certain districts) but tastefully few and unobtrusive (unlike Moscow, as I remember it, with practically a one-to-one ratio of grocery shops and huge neon gaming signs).

I came back home for a very short while, then left again for the now almost traditional Hafenhalle meet up with the folks from the LEI programme. There I heard that a pub-crawl was happening the day after. More on that in my next entry.