2004-09-06 20:30

Oh dear

The drawback of youth hostels is of course the possibility of encoutering youths. Last night's Saxony-Anholt Loud Jocks' Society was pretty bad, but tonight's coachload of feral French childrens is a lot worse.

2004-09-06 17:45

Dinosaurs!

Lebende Fossilien sind heute lebende Tier und Pflanzen, die sich seit Jahrmillionen �berhaupt nicht oder nur sehr wenig ver�ndert haben. Diese Formen sind geeignet, wichtig Fragen der Evolution klaren zu helfen.

Living fossils are plants and animals living today which have stayed unchanged, or changed only very little, through millions of years. These forms are geeignet to help clarify important questions about evolution.

[Museum of Naturkunde, Berlin, which's captioning lacked Englisch in no small abundance.]

(The point of the above is not accuracy but that I could read it on the spot with my mini dictionary languishing in the gardrob, and this wasn't an isolated example. A very learnable language, your German, and the German attitude to foreigners is much like that of my fellow (Anglo-)Englisches - we're pretty relaxed about twistnings perpetrated on our Glorious Tongue, and we will not hesitate to reply in the Englische in turn. The woman in the local G�stewhatsit has apparently decided that we are best treated as more than usually dim childrens, and tends to carry on a conversation with us in German in which she is typically the only participant, didn't you, eh? My sentences are not at their best when composed in real time, yet, for sure.)

The Natural History's world-renowned reconstructed Brachiosauras brancai is 11,72 m high. I grew up in London, so I do tend to judge a Natural History Museum by its opening salvo of dinosauruses, so the counts for a lot with me. And they have an Archeopteryx, which is like a birdosaur, only with even more -osaur, which is pretty cool.

2004-09-05 19:20

Belrin basketry bonanza

I've got Ethnological Overload after the that such museum in Berlin. In three hours I hardly dented it, and I had to speed up at the end. They have, among other things, a better selection of Californian Native-American basketry than the Museum of Man in San Diego, and they do Plains, Prairie, Northern, Southwest and et cetera in frankly overwhelming extent.

Like the Old Mastur museum the other day, though, it was pretty much empty of punters, although the extensive collection of intrusive staff is some kind of compensation, at least in terms of head count.

Probably the sullenest Gardrob babushka I've ever come across (including post-Soviet Latvian models, and that's no small accomplishment) gave me a (German only) hard time, and in fact as a general rule I have been Englisched here a whole lot less than in Sweden, and my German is very conspicuously barely rudimentary. Let's put that down to generosity to the learner, then, isn't it?

2004-09-05 10:44

Nota Bene (Tyska seder och bruk)

German wimmins wear their beweddning rings on the ring fingers of their right hands. (Englisch wimmins, of course, wear them on the left hand.)

2004-09-04 18:57

Don't tell anyone I said this, whatever you do

You can keep a secret, can't you Interweb? Course you can!

Lately a disloyal and gratuitously retrospectively counterfactual thought has cropped up, quite unbidden, among my thinknings, and it is this: If I had started learning German when I started learning Swedish, I would probably know an awful lot of German by now.

2004-09-04 18:40

Tanz Tanz Aftermath

Oh dear. Never mind missing breakfast, we missed the conventional bourgeois lunch slot too.

The most pressing item of business ("agendum") was to find a Geldautomat ("cash machine"/"ATM") since Germany (like Japan, once again) is firmly a cash society and nonetheless keeps its sources of cash well hidden from any passing silly Englisch.

But one German phrase I do know is "Wo gibt es einen Geldautomat?" and it was just this question I put to a person indulging in a quiet smokening outside the Kaisermarkt. The answer duly came, not altogether unreasonably, in German, and I duly failed to make head or tail of it, so we switched to Englisch. (We have a great respect for the old workhorses at this 'bladet, for sure.)

Anyway, the tube stays up all night tonight so I don't have to, which is a relief, for sure. And all plans for a side trip to Dresden for the weekend have formally been abandoned - it's officially Berlin all the way, Varied Reader, and other ways are ways in which I would not wish to have it.

2004-09-04 13:34

Tanzing for the Tube

M�chten Sie tanzen, German girl, German girl,
M�chten Sie tanzen ein kleine mitt me?

The sky's full of stars tonight, German girl, German girl;
The gleam in your eyes is all I want to see.

- Folkvisa (Fragment)

So, during the week the U-Bahn (tube) stops running at around midnight. But is starts up again at about 4am. What, then, to do on a Thursday night out?

1. Back with the pumpkins? (Nein danke!)
2. A nice night-time walkning? (Hmmm.)
3. Mach Tanzen!

Oh my poor feets! (Which had, after all, been hitting the Glorious History and Cultual all day. The museum, which's name I neglect, with all the Old Paintnings, is amazing. For want of time I only really did the 17th century Dutch oil paintnings, because this is the most rock and roll of all paintning, and they have a boggleworthy collection of it.)

2004-09-03 20:41

Behold the healing power of sausage!

My Lonely Planet is a bit sniffy about the food in Germany, but I happen to like Central Yoorpean cooking. Eschewing, then, all recommended Thai and Italian restaurants, I have eaten and enjoyed: Eisbein (pork knuckle slowly boiled tender loveliness, served with Sauerkraut) and Blot- und Leberwurst (blood and liver sausages, the latter only slightly reminiscent of blood pudding, served with Sauerkraut).

(I like, you will have anticipated, also Sauerkraut.)

Also, why don't we have Apfelsaftschorl (appel juice and soda) in Blighty? It's fantastic when it's hot and you want a soft drink but do not especially want to marinade in sugar solution.

2004-09-03 10:19

Puntnings, Gherkins and Wald.

The local wald (the Spreewald) is vair vair flat, like all the countryside near Berlin, and the best way to see it is undoubtedly by a puntning.

It is not, I suspect, especially reminiscent of puntnings in Oxbridge in En-ger-lund, although I did that only once and so long ago that I even neglect which campus. We took a two-hour touriste tour, and the punteur occasionally stopped by canal-side shopping stands to buy the many gherkins and beers that we needed.

More like Venice, then, although I lacked the time and the requisite wimminly company to upgrade from the standard waterbus (vaporetti?) when I was out there.

Inevitably, there is a Spreewald town - where we were fortunate enough to stop for half an hour to have the opportunity to buy gherkins and beer - called the Venice of the Spreewald. Presumably because it had a bridge, which are otherwise by no means common.

It was here that my invariable request for hefeweizen was countered by "Hell, dunkel oder kristal?", (the so-called Spreewald gambit). "Hell", happily, played back into the main line of the opening, and the transition to the middle game continued in familiar fashion.

2004-09-02 20:50

Weizen shine

The bier out here is very nice;
The pils is good, and oh! that Wei�!

Weissbeer, or weizen, is made like bier only with a something else in place of one of the usual somethings. There are generally two (2) kinds on offer: Hefeweizen (cloudy) and Kristalweizen (allegedly clear). I like Hefeweizen. I like it a lot. I like it so much, that I haven't tried the Kristal yet.

It's a bit like Hoegaarden, and clearly related, but it's not as spiced up and fragrent, and there is no native/non-native isogloss in pronunciation. (If you pronounce "Hoegaarten" correctly in Blighty anything result, but bier is by no means the most likely.)

2004-09-02 10:10

Resadikter

I. Picasso und sein Zeit

Picasso is Pacissimo,
Giacommetti
does knobbly spaghetti,
And Klee is twee.

II. When are a nu couch�'s legs not a nu couch�'s legs?

Is anything else akimbo, ever,
except legs, especially of nus couch�s?
A door can only ever be ajar
A nutcracker's legs can do no more than spread.
The wings of birds or arms of corkscrews spread
When from each other they should chance to spray.
The art's declined of late, though, sad to say -
nu or not, I've no akimbo today.

III. (After Burns)

German girls, Teutonic lasses,
To you we'll gladly raise our glasses!
No loveliness compares with thine,
To you we'll gladly raise a stein!

2004-09-01 09:16

There's even a sugar museum (no thanks)

What Berlin reminds me most of is Japan. The metro runs everywhere, and to timetable, and the broad avenues lined with flats is what it is, I think.

The bus stops all have timetables (to which the buses really do run) and maps, with current location indicated, and the free-standing street signs tell you what range of house numbers is coming up. (No, that's not very Japanese, I admit.)

And the rents are outrageously good value by Engleesh standards, also, as well.

However, all this comes at a price: Ich habe zuviel gegessen (oh, my poor overburdened stomach) and today I am going to a museum full of prehistoric curiosit�s, although I rilly want to dive in and out of the Egyptian museum, even if I see nothing except Nefertiti. (Multi-day museum passes, isn't it? There's a lot of museums.)

2004-08-30 19:16

Berlin mir gef�lt

Hello Interweb! I am in a vair cheap but perfectly functional hostel in Kreuzberg in Berlin in Germany. It is all sehr gut, as we say in Germany, apart from the location of the "y" and "z" keys on this keyboard.

Beer is cheap and good (or was 'till we switched from Hefeweizen to the slightly odd Jener, Schnitzels are abundant, and my extensive knowledge of German is not completely useless even when I'm sober. What with all the excitement of Central Yoorp being folded back into the great Yoorpean Onion, it has perhaps been overlooked just how Mitteeleurop�isch our sausage-eating friends can be when they want, which they seem to do, and who wouldn't?

Kreuzberg is cool. It's the HQ of the ethnic Turkish population, and you can eat a good dinner of Snitzel and beer at a table outside a g�ststatte, while the winos sit quietly on park benches nearby, and childrens of various colours play cheerfully on and off bikes in and around the park.

The Pergamon museum has a whole bunch of stuff on a monumental scale, but I prefer by far the reconstructed endearingly blue Babylonian Ishtar Gate to the eponymous over-elaborated marble frieze frenzy. This 'bladet salutates the persons who put the much-needed zig in ziggurat.

Oh, and currywurst, yum yum. We like the currywurst, for sure.