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.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, November 25, 2011
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).
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).
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.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. |
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.
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