7 posts tagged “animals”

This post is going to be all pictures, because there isn't really much to say about the content of those pictures.  That said, by the time I finish this post, I'm sure there will be plenty of text.  Like that.

And that.

And that.

Just kidding, but I do want to say two things:

1) Janice, if you're reading this, I just wrote you a post card, got interrupted before finishing it, forgot that I hadn't finished, and mailed it.  So sorry that it's weird and unsigned, among other things.

2) I shouldn't drink out of white mugs here.  The water is yellowish in both the kitchen and the bathroom, but there are fewer specks in the bathroom water.  Just a tip for y'all there.

Kreuz und Quer - my German frisbee team

(We won the Uni Tournament on Monday.  We were the only non-gym-class team there.  L to R: Back row: HaJu, Max, Ingrid, Moritz, Thomas.  Front row: Michaela, me, Wolle and Clemens)

Greg's newest beer glass

My newest beer glass - with bicycle bell!

A rather delicious slice of raspberry cake from "Sweet Cuisine"

All of the stuffed animals I somehow have here

(Xue, I sent the bunny baby home with my parents.  From L to R: Romero (from Ben), Admiral (from Betsy - I got him for Xmas and didn't want to abandon him in January), Monkey (from Luci and the Dans - a farewell present), Las Vegas (from Nagler - for my birthday), and Johann (my souvenir from Switzerland))

A really narrow alley!

The Oswaldstift kitty!

Grilling in the rain on the 4th of July

The weather clears up

The Finns get in on the action

Rachel & her very American apple pie

The "updated" Black Forest Cake I made for the other 4th of July party

(The update is twofold.  The first I think you can figure out for yourselves, but there are also about 2 teaspoons of ground chiles in that cake.  It was the perfect heat, I couldn't have wished for a better result)

The chemistry building cafeteria where this took place

Chiemsee

Ludwig II's Schloss Herrenchiemsee

The best fountain ever

And subsequent photos (the third one is Fraueninsel, another island in the Chiemsee)

In which Germany looks like Penobscot Bay

Renaissance Faire

In the longest castle in Europe

(no, seriously)

Dig the random small child playing on the ground (Germany in a nutshell)

Eight-year-old Greg would flip out!

(The Renaissance fair gave me a chance to tell Maya the "look what I shot" story)

What can I say? Fooses like dead stuff.

1)  The Circle of Life:  In a recent post, I discussed Obazta, a Bavarian cheese dish.  I promised that the next time I ate it, I would take a photo.  I ate it today, but I didn't have my camera.  Then, Jess sent me a photo of some Obazta we had in Bamberg.  That's Gretchen on the right.

See how it resembles a cartoon dead caterpillar?

2)  I have been making my way through "Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen", and the author at one point mentions the places she'd been in the United States: New York City (naturally) and Vinalhaven!  The same, 1200-person Vinalhaven that we can (theoretically?) see off in the distance when we visit the beautiful summer home of family friends on another island in Penobscot Bay.  In other news, I'm definitely translating that for my thesis.  *gulp*

3)  On Wednesday, I leave for Vienna for three days.  The plan is to get there around 4 pm, stay Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night, and then spend as much or as little of Saturday there as I want.  Hopefully I will not go crazy with solitude as I did in Switzerland.  I've gotten four guidebooks from the library, as well as the Rick Steeves' "Germany and Austria" that my Dad left here.  I think Rick Steves is kind of a stupid jerk, and normally I'd say that at least it was useful for the maps, but he draws his own, because he is kind of a stupid jerk.  So...I'm using it to get an overview before using the German-language guides for more specific items.  RS promotes this BS-type of "have-your-eyes-pass-over-everything-without-seeing-anything" tourism.  It's like, "Here is how to see everything "important" in a city in one day", and it's unfortunate.  It also makes him look dumb when he refers to anything in his best-selling guidebooks as "off the beaten path."  And lastly, today, I found this in the book (referring to cake shops): "Shops like this boast "K u. K" - good enough for the König und Kaiser (king and emperor, same guy)."  I am currently enrolled in a class for four hours a week about how König and Kaiser are not the same guy.  I am not going to get into why he's wrong, but what really gets me is that he made this fairly obivous error while saying something that had no other purpose but to make him look "smart".  Okay, I'm going to stop myself there.

4)  On...Thursday? I went to the Trinity Church (Dreieinigkeitskirche) on Gesandtenstr. (here in R'burg) and climbed up into the steeple, as it is open for a nominal fee during the summer.  Here are a few photos from the visit (click to embiggen):

The organ pipes

The sanctuary

More or less the money shot

(The rest of the photos are also in the "photos" section of the blog.

5)  This weekend I went to Aschaffenburg, which is near Frankfurt right on the Hessen border.  Our friend Regina's parents and brother live there, so five of us went to visit and stayed with her and her family.  The biggest deal in Aschaffenburg is the castle, which is quite large and is red.

See how it's refreshingly different?

This is the tiniest garden

The castle grounds extend (or seem to extend) around the bank of the Main a little bit.

Ludwig's Pompejanum

This is a replica of a temple from Pompeii.  King Ludwig I (who was not a kaiser!) built a lot of neat stuff, in fact, he paid for the spires on the Regensburg cathedral!  (Tangent: last week I went into an antique shop and saw a postcard of the cathedral in the early 1800s before it had the spires.  It was pretty funny looking.  I should go back and buy that.)

We also walked around the shopping area of the downtown a little, looking for a mothers day gift for Regina to buy for her brother to give to her mom.  Hah.  Unfortunately, my camera died right before I was able to take a photo of a giant knife that served as the sign for a kitchen store.  I was able to take one photo in the toy store:

I am obsessed with wooden toy food

We didn't do that much else, though we had two GREAT homemade dinners at Regina's parents house.  Homemade sauerkraut is about the best thing ever.

We went for a walk through the neighborhood and into the hills on Sunday before we left:

My ideal house

The view

6)  On Saturday night we went to a party at Regina's friend's house to watch this truly bizarre event called "Eurovision".  Basically, a bunch of european nations hold American Idol-like singing contests, and each country's national winner performs at Eurovision.  Then, all the countries vote (they're not allowed to vote for themselves), and the winner is decided by popular vote.  The reality of the matter is that every single act is more outlandish than the next, and in the end, everyone votes for countries to which a) they have current or former political ties, or b) they feel bad about exacting a genocide on.  Evidence:  All of the former Yugoslavia voted for Serbia, most of the former East bloc voted for either Russia or Ukraine, and Turkey voted for Armenia.  Germany had a really classy jazz performance, and if it had actually been about talent, they would've won.  France also had a great show, including a stuffed animal cat sewn to one of the singer's shirts.  He occaisionally sung to it.  The best, however, hands down, was the Ukraine group, headed by a drag queen dressed like a disco ball. The link is to a *highly* recommended video.

The following cat was not interested in the competition:

Mildy surly cat

The cat did find time to meddle in our game of Werewolf, which is basically a children's camp game.  Americans mostly know it as "Mafia".  The Germans had a handful of great twists on it, though.  The game is this:  Everyone in the group is assigned via secret slips of paper to be either a "dorfbewohner" (villager) or a "werwolf" (werewolf).  There are about two werewolves for every four villagers.  There also needs to be a moderator, who oversees the game.  The moderator declares it "night" and then tells the werewolves to open their eyes and see who their partner(s) is.  Then they silently agree by pointing which villager they want to eat, and then they "sleep" again.  The moderator then tells the group who got killed.  Then the entire group discusses who they think the werewolves could be and decides by show of hands who they want to sacrifice for the public good.  The challenge is to keep suspicion away from yourself and identify the right werewolves based on aural clues and pop-psychology.  Either they villagers win by killing all the werewolves, or the opposite situation comes to pass.  Here are the twists:  There is a hunter villager, who can take someone with them if they are killed, thus complicating "revenge for finger pointing" killings by the werewolves.  There is an oracle villager who can as the moderator every round about the werewolf status of ONE other player.  The rub is that nobody knows you're the oracle, so you have to convince the group who to kill without sounding like you're passing the blame.  The last twist, which was great, was having a "Romeo and Juliet."  Two players are secretly chosen by the moderator at the behest of a villager designated "cupid", and then they identify each other by "waking up" during the night when directed by the moderator.  They do not know if their partner is a werewolf or not, but if one of them dies, both of them do, so they have to defend each other from the torch-waving villagers.  It was pretty great.

7)  One more photo from Regensburg:

Haidplatz

The truth of the matter is that I did not take as exhaustive notes on my trip to the north as I did on my trip to Switzerland.  Thus, this entry is likely to be unimpressive and uninformative.  But at least it's free, right?

I left for Berlin at 7:20 am on Easter Sunday.  I never knew this before, but Easter Sunday, being the end of lent, is apparently cause for much drinking in Germany.  Between 6:30 and 7:15, no less than two people dropped and broke beer bottles in the lobby of the Regensburg train station.  Speaking of unimpressive.

I was treated to some lovely former-GDR landscape on my trip to Berlin, and arrived at 1:06, approximately.  I have yet to draw any conclusions about what's different in the East vs. the West.  There do seem to be more abandoned lots covered in graffitti in the former East, but it doesn't really seem conclusive.  I don't really have a point here.

Upon arriving in Berlin, I was pleased to see the train station properly attired in bunny-related photography.  I hope they know how much I appreciated it.  I got to Jess' boyfriend's apartment around 1:30, and after looking through a few guidebooks, Jess and I set out to see the Sammlung Berggruen, which neither of us have ever heard of.  It was one of the more impressive and smallest museums I've ever been to, housing dozens of paintings by Picasso, Klee and Matisse on three floors.  Though it was a pleasure to discover Klee, I was most impressed with the Picassos.  The man did paintings in every style imaginable, and he was good at all of them.  It's so funny that he's only associated with cubism.  I definitely recommend it if you're in Berlin, just don't cross the line on the floor or the alarms will go off.  A concept too difficult for many patrons, it seemed.

After the gallery, we toured the exterior of Schloss Charlottenburg before heading out to the extremely tiny Schönefeld Airport to pick up Gretchen, who was flying in from Barcelona.  We traveled back to Mitte in an S-bahn car with this totally cool wallpaper:

oh my!

For dinner we went out to the restaurant down the street from the apartment that had a big "50% off" sign in front of it.  The restaurant's actual name, I'm pretty sure, was "Barbeque", and it was a Mexican restaurant, with one big exception.  Reading down the menu, Gretchen exclaimed "There's kangaroo in this salad!", and sure enough, one of the salads on the menu contained strips of kangaroo meat.  The funniest part was that it wasn't even a "kangaroo salad", it was called "Salat con Carne" or something like that.  While we pondered the possibility that "känguru" was a false cognate, someone removed all doubt by discovering the "Australian specialties" on the back of the menu.  Gretchen and Jess both ordered kangaroo dishes, but I went with a quesadilla.  Their version of a quesadilla was more like sloppy-joe in a tortilla with cheese on the outside.  They're not so good at Mexican here.  Of course I tried some kangaroo, which tasted a lot like steak, but a lot tougher.  I thought it was gross.  Either way, we spent the whole meal laughing almost non-stop.

The next morning we arose at 8:30, and hit the snooze button, an event which repeated itself numerous times until we got up around 10.  Among other things not worth mentioning, we went to Alexanderplatz, thus achieving my goal for the trip.  "Alex" was a great source of pride to East Berlin, and is/was home to the Fernsehturm, my second favorite tower in Germany.  (the first being the one lending its name to my dorm).  There was a little Easter market on Alexanderplatz, where I passed up the most beautiful cotton candy in the world.  Make a note.  In fact, tell my dentist.

Wish You Were Here

It also came in green/white.

We also saw a very tiny baby goat:

goat-tocks!

All-in-all, a succesful stop.

From there we walked toward Museum Island, intending to go to the Pergamon.  On the way, Gretchen and I had our picture taken with the Marx & Engels statue near Alexanderplatz (I'm waiting for Jess to email it to me).  We also saw the Neptunbrunnen ("Neptune Fountain"), which was not un-neat:

Oooh, look at me! I control the oceans!

On the way to the Pergamon, however, we got [even more] distracted by not one, not two, but THREE neat things.  First, a book sale at Humbolt University, where Jess bought a bunch of East German educational texts, one about religion.  Second, the artists' market just down the street from Humbolt.  It was a row of booths inhabited by artists selling their handywork.  Most tempting were the hand-painted silk scarves, and the coin pendants, which were actual world coins that had been modified with a jewelers saw.  Having always collected foreign coins, it was too much to see THE Finnish polar bear coin made into a necklace that I couldn't afford.  I did end up finding a really beautiful pendant for 6 euro, which of course refuses to be photographed.  It's a big metal oval (maybe 4 x 3 cm) that is slightly domed, and on the convex surface it's crackly-gold-leafed, and on top of the gold leaf, there is a tree trunk painted in brown and black enamel.  Then, instead of the leaves being painted on, they're actually very small green glass chips, making it slightly 3D.  It's pretty great.  I bought some cotton yarn to crochet a chain for it.

The third distraction was the "Museum Insel" market, which usually only happens on the weekends.  It was a long stretch of flea-market style booths.  Jess found this crazy book called something like "The World in Pictures" from 1927, which is this large, thin book, and on every page there are two topics, and three photos and captions related to those topics.  What makes it truly bizarre is the topics, and their juxtaposition.  For instance, there is one page where the top three photos are "Japanese Film Beauties", and the bottom three are "German Canoe Champions".  They also have like, cactuses, horse breeds, Javanese weaving techniques, tribes of East Africa, German runners, mother animals with baby animals...it just goes on and on.  She also bought a beer stein that has a bicycle bell built into the little silver cap on top of it.  Again, bizarre.  I bought a gift for Greg that shall remain a surprise.  Yipes, that reminds me, I need to send some postcards!  Drop me a line if I've promised you one and not delivered, or just if you want one.

Eventually we did get to the Pergamon, which is more impressive than interesting.  Except for the multiple-stories-tall-ruins-of-the-ancient-world-reconstructed-indoors-in-Berlin, the museum is pretty standard for a museum of that type.  I hate to say it, but the amount that my feet hurt is the clearest memory I can salvage.  I'm glad we went, though, the temple altar and city gates were pretty neat.

"Istar" Gate from Babylon (with Jess in yellow)

After the museum, we had about an hour before we had to meet Sebastian at Potsdamer Platz, so we headed over there early to go up to the viewing deck of the Chrysler building.  That's a good hidden jewel to know in Berlin.  It's cool because you can see the MASSIVE Sony center from above, as well as the Reichstag, Tiergarten, Siegesäule, and Holocaust Memorial.

(The big flowery thing is the roof of the Sony Center, which covers an outdoor courtyard.  Near the center of the second photo you can see the life-size Lego giraffe there.  Beyond it in the first and second photos is the Tiergarten.  The Siegesäule is the golden angel that you really can't see in the first photo, though it's there.  The flat-looking area in the center of the third photo is the Holocaust Memorial (close up photo).  There are a few more photos in the "Photos" section)

We soon started to freeze at the top of the building, and went back down to have dinner.  I had potato pancakes with applesauce.  Good stuff, that.

COMING SOON:

• Marianna and Gretchen travel to Rügen
• MARIANNA STARTS THE SEMESTER ON MONDAY! OHMYGOD!  (I'm a little nervous)
  

Well, let's us just not talk about my five attempts to get a cell phone.  I have one now.  I had a different one yesterday.  Scheissegal.

I've discovered the best snack in the world.  A [soft] pretzel with butter.  So good.  So, so good.  I thought I had nothing to write about today, but coming back from the bus (from my second trip to the Uni today), the sun was shining, it was warm, and there was a guy playing "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose" (I'm sure Mark will tell me the real name of the song) and pronouncing all the words all German-like.  In about half an hour, I am going to get my hair cut at the salon three doors down from my building, because I'm exceedingly lazy.

I think I'm friends with the guy at the cell phone store at this point.

my mp3 player and "handy"

ETA:  I would much rather have a red cell phone (as I now do) than one with a camera.  Not only is it just plain sweet, but now it matches my mp3 player.  drool.

One last thing!

Serious plans are being made to visit the giant bunnies in Eberswalde, and perhaps buy one.  It'll only cost us like 25 Euro each...but we're not sure we could go through with eating him at the end of the semester, cause he can't come on the plane.  Or can he.  He probably can.

Though blogging has made obsolete the postcard-exchanging process, Janie and I have still been sending them to each other, with statements like "I'm talking to you on Skype right now" and "I'd feel silly talking about my life or asking about yours".  I figured there might be a few members of my family who'd appreciate the image on Janie's postcard, though.

Doggiefaces

And who are those members of my family?  My aunt and uncle, and my cousins Stewart and Bonnie:

Stewart & Bonnie

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