The Countdown

Officially 31 days until all my exams are over!

Status update:

I just got back from a mini-break on the Continent, where I got two countries for the price of one. I'll post pictures and stories from my adventures in Belgium and Holland soon. I managed to choose the luckiest time to be in Brussels!

Right now I'm studying for exams, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel! I'm planning a big trip to Warsaw after my finals are done in June, and I have a few cultural events to look forward to as well. Besides my visit to Poland, I'm going to see the Pixies in concert, Macbeth performed at the Globe Theater at midnight, and Elvis Costello live in Oxford. Can't wait!

I'm officially going to be in Washington, DC this summer. I have a part-time job working for the American University Admissions office and an environmental lobbying firm called Plug In America. My friends have moved into the new flat, and I can't wait to join them!

Look for more photos soon! I realize that I still have to post updates about the rest of my Eurotrip--- Rome and Paris will come eventually. Thanks for patience!

Happiness is a Warm Burrito...

After long last, London gets its very own Chipotle!

I realize this is a bit of a ridiculous post. Chipotle seems common in the States, seemingly unworthy of excitement or a blog post. To a 20 year old college student, self-exiled to another continent, THIS IS A BIG FREAKING DEAL.

Food in London is good. REALLY REALLY GOOD. I have had some of the most brilliant Thai, Fish and Chips, Indian, and Doner Kebab while in Europe, but there are several things that England does not get right.

Here's the countdown of my top foodie peeves...

3) American snack food: There are 3 supermarkets within a mile radius of my dorm, and each has a specific purpose. It's impossible to find what I want at a single store--- each has a different salty/crunchy snack. Sainsbury's has typical crisps and biscuits, but all British style/flavor. Marks and Sparks (Marks and Spencers) is the only place where I can find tortilla chips and pretzels. Fancy-schmancy Waitrose, the farthest of the three, is the only place where I can find popcorn. For some reason, it's not that popular here. FAIL.

2) Pizza: Most Europeans I talk to don't understand the difference between American pizza and London pizza. To them, my description of the perfect slice sounds disgusting and unhealthy. London pizza seems weak and overly-proper. Pizza is supposed to be eaten with your hands, not with knife and fork. It's supposed to have an actual crust, hearty enough to support mounds of toppings and cheese. It's supposed to be molten hot, just coming out of the oven, not tepid and congealing. Pizza Express is all fine and good, but I really prefer Pizza Regina or greek-style from Sudbury Pizza. (yes, Mom, I know you say it stinks now, but I still remember when it was good!)

1) Mexican food: Why bother? British chefs do a lot of things right, but Mexican is rarely one of them. 6,000 seems to large a divide for cuisine to bridge, and nothing I've had here rivals Mexican food I've had in the states. Heck, I can make better Mexican food than some of the restaurants in London. Whether it's sit-down or assembly-line take away, London can't compete.

All this leads to my utter excitement about finally getting a Chipotle, not just in the city of London itself, but 3 blocks away from my dorm. I even found a short-cut that puts me right next to the restaurant!

Tonight was the opening, and the small branch was packed with Americans--- I'm pretty sure every yank in London converged on the restaurant. Rumors of imminent arrival have been swirling since the fall, and I've been anxiously awaiting the opening of this beloved institution.

It was well worth the wait, after 4 months without this little slice of home. Happiness is a warm burrito, especially when eaten with friends. :)

Ich bin ein Berliner! Photos 2...

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe--- a really strong and disorienting memorial. You can walk through the cement blocks, arranged in a perfect grid. If there's no one in front of you, it seems like you're in it all by yourself, lost in a labyrinth of concrete. The memorial lends itself to a wide range of images--- some see the blocks as soldiers marching off, or as gravestones, or as bars marking out statistics on a graph...

TRABIS! Trabants were the standard car of East Berlin. It could take between 3 to 18 years to get one off the wait list. And teenagers complain about how hard it is to get a car *now*...
One of the last remaining stretches of the wall, near Checkpoint Charlie. Nearly got hit by a bus to get this shot!

One of the impossible chocolate confections at Fassbender and Rausch. They build four chocolate models for their windows every few weeks. This is the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial cathedral, and they also had chocolate models of the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag, and the Titanic. TALK ABOUT EPIC. The cool thing is the church actually looks like this...

People examining the memorial to the Nazi book burning. Students burned 20,000 volumes in Bebelplatz, including many works by Jewish authors. The memorial is composed of white bookshelves in a recessed room. Unlike some other memorials that are more symbolic, this one reflects exactly what was lost--- there are enough shelves in the underground room to hold 20,000 volumes. There are also plaques around the square that list a quote by Heinrich Heine in 1820 (more than 100 years before the burning)--- "That was just the beginning. Where you start by burning books, you end by burning people."

Another memorial off of Bebelplatz. The Neue Wache has been a memorial to protest many things, including WWII, Bolshevism, and Fascism. Today it is dedicated to all victims of War and Tyranny. The artist, Käthe Kollwitz, lost her son to WWI and her grandson to WWII. The sculpture is beautiful up close, both elegant and understated in grief. I think that it makes the work, titled Mother with her Dead Son, more powerful. The woman is not lost to the passion of grief--- rather, she is lost in the memories of her lost child, remembering little fingers and little toes, holding and comforting him when he was small. Definitely one of the most powerful sculptures I've ever seen.

I really like the fact that Berlin is a city that remembers--- everything holds significance in a different way, from the artistic to the symbolic to the literal.

Me, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. The men who started it all!

Straddling the divide! Much like the Patriot Trail in Boston, you can follow a brick line in the tarmac that follows the old line of the wall. Careful, though, because it strays out into the middle of the street quite often...
View from the Reichstag dome, looking West.

View of the Brandenburger Tor from the Reichstag dome.
Photo from the collection at the Dokumentations Zentrum Museum. It must be particularly awful to build your own prison...

One of the stories highlighted at the Checkpoint Charlie museum. This man had his West Berlin girlfriend make an American military uniform and smuggle it through the wall. He imitated an American soldier so well, with salute and all, that he walked right through the checkpoint. I thought that the Checkpoint Charlie museum was going to be super-touristy and fake, much like the Spy Museum in D.C. It was actually created in 1948 to raise awareness about the division between East and West Berlin. The museum documents what happened post-1945, the division of the city, building the wall, and the means people used to escape.
This was my favorite thing to see in Berlin. It's a stretch of the original wall (several hundred meters, in fact) that was originally decorated in 1990. Over the last 20 years a lot of the murals suffered from decay or additional grafitti, so a lot of the original artists came back to recreate their works. I loved the color and the message of peace and hope. Our tour guide said that Berliners like to express themselves through a wide range of mediums (graffiti/street art, tattoos/piercings/clothes, murals, music) because they were denied the right for so long. These murals also show how Berlin served as a beacon of hope for other peoples suffering tyranny--- if Berlin could gain freedom from the Soviet Union, other peoples, communities, and nations could shake off repression as well.

A famous mural, titled "Kiss of Brotherhood: Lord! Help me to survive this fatal love!", that depicts an interesting greeting between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker.

This was my favorite mural, just for it's simple message. It honors the victims, the dead, while showing the pointless nature of the wall. Creation and destruction were caused by the same thing--- what was the point?

Ich bin ein Berliner! Photos...

Kurt's amazing dinner from Gugelhof in Kollwitzplatz... Germans like their meat!

A picture of the Amplemann, who lives in the cross walks. He's a traditional symbol of East Berlin that was adopted during the Cold War. The Amplemann so popular, in fact, that it was adopted in West Berlin lights as well...
The television tower at Alexanderplatz. Built to be a symbol of communist industry and technology, it became known as the Pope's Revenge. When the sun strikes the metallic ball during the day, a large cross can be seen reflecting off the panels. Reaaaaally pissed off the atheist leaders of the GDR.
Brandenburger Tor. A friend shared an interesting fact with me--- today, the statue of Victory looks towards the East. After the Russians captured Berlin and divided Germany, they rotated the statue so it looked the other way, symbolizing the Soviet Union's "victory" over the West. The statue was only corrected after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany.
The American Embassy at Paris Platz. This is right next to the French Embassy, the Adlon Hotel (where Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the balcony), and the DZ Bank, which was designed by Frank Gehry. The Gehry building is fairly nondescript on the inside, but it apparently has a huge metallic fish on the inside--- the government didn't want an extravagant building to distract from the majesty of the Gate, so Gehry had to express his creativity inside.

Ich bin ein Berliner!

Germany has never been the vacation destination of my dreams. Italy, southern France, Greece, Morocco... Germany doesn't really fit on that list very well.

UNTIL NOW.

I have some good friends who LOVE Germany. LOVELOVELOVE Germany, so I decided to give it a go. Heck, I like learning about the Cold War and I like curry wurst, so why not?

BEST DECISION EVER!!!!! I love Germany now, too.

Berlin kicked off the first leg of Eurotrip 2010. We had 3 days/4 nights in the city before hopping off to our next destination. I'd say that we managed to see most, if not all, of the important memorials, museums, and landmarks of the city. From the Brandenburg Tor to Alexanderplatz, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Cathedral to the East Side Gallery, Potsdamer Platz to Museuminsel, and everything in between.

My comrade-in-arms (Kurt, a friend from AU who is studying in the UK this semester) and I were based out of the East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. The area is full of cool restaurants, including the Prater Beer Garden (the oldest in Berlin) and Konnopke's Imbiss, which is a tiny shack under the U-Bahn tracks that serves AMAZING currywurst. SERIOUSLY.

I learned a few german words and had some adventures with pronunciation. Ausgang, brötchen, and garten are random bits I picked up (they mean exit, bread roll, and garden respectively). It took me a while to realize that ß replaces a double s--- I sound preeeeeetty stupid saying staße (pronounced strasse) with a B! It also took me a little while to realize that ö is pronounced like "er", so brötchen is pronounced "brertken". I really liked figuring out German, though--- I always want to study the language of the city I'm in. For a few weeks, I really wanted to study Danish--- no lie.

Anyway, photo proof to come! Took A LOT of pictures on my trip, so I'll be sure to throw some up on the good ol' blog.

My, that's creative!

I'm going skiing in Les Arcs, France, next week, so I bought some new winter clothes. My favorite piece of kit is my new hat...It's a little too small (because my head is the size of a watermelon), so I decided to knit an earwarmer/headband to fit underneath. One of my friends gave me the most amazing yarn for Christmas--- it's made out of bamboo, is incredibly soft, and turned out to be the perfect color for my new project.

Problem was, I didn't have the right size needles for this new project. Almost all of my knitting supplies are back in Massachusetts. I came up with a creative solution, though.

CHOPSTICKS!

That's right, I'm knitting with chopsticks. I think that they work quite well.

Here's the work in progress...

Cable patterns are awesome because they look really difficult but are actually quite easy to knit up.

Musical Stylings of Sweden... First Aid Kit and The Tiny

Over the past couple of months I've developed a taste for Swedish folk music. I know, it's very eclectic of me, but with musicians like First Aid Kit, how can anyone resist?

Like 98% of their fans, I discovered First Aid Kit through their youtube cover of Tiger Mountain Peasant Song by the Fleet Foxes. WATCH IT. This song is full of awesome, especially with the resounding harmonies and the tranquillity of the Swedish forest. This song was my gateway drug into the rest of their catalogue, which includes the Drunken Trees EP and their new cd, The Big Black and the Blue. Other favorites include their latest single, I Met Up With the King and You're Not Coming Home Tonight.

Seeing First Aid Kit live was one of my top things to do in London, since I knew they rarely made it to the States. Luckily I bought tickets early to guarantee that I would actually go to the show on Thursday, March 4. The venue, Union Chapel in Islington, blew my mind. The club is a converted church--- the audience sits in old pews, flickering candles line the balcony rail, and colored spotlights create stained glass behind the stage.

Union Chapel was the perfect venue for First Aid Kit and their support band, the Tiny. Both bands combine resounding harmonies, old soul lyrics, and acoustic instruments like cellos, harps, and musical saws. The amazing acoustics 0f the church let the music resound and expand up into the vaulted ceiling.

This was one of the best concerts I've ever seen--- Klara and Joanna Söderberg actually sound better live and unedited than on their produced albums. Not many bands can claim that. The best moments were when they unplugged their guitar and stepped away from the microphones--- the audience sat in rapt attention, letting the music fill their souls.

And now, for visual aids...

The Tiny, who also hail from Sweden.
Playing the musical saw... Kristi and I were both quite impressed.
My concert buddy...
First Aid Kit.