So I've started vaguelly blogging at a new location - icanhaskitten.com. I'm doing so because, well, I got a kitten. Her name is Audrey, and she is adorable, so I'm trying to remember to take lots of pictures of her and then upload them, along with other posts just updating on the cat situation. It's not the most exciting of blogs by a long shot, but I'm enjoying it so far. Feel free to visit - I'll be posting there a lot more often than here.
Or at least, they do in guidebooks. I got snookered twice today: the Natural History Museum's dinosaur section is closed for renovations (and the remainder, while not bad, was comparable to the Harvard Peabody Museum's natural history section, minus the glass flowers - ok, but nothing to write home about), and the Currywurst Museum, which I was really excited about, does not seem to actually exist. The latter is the bigger letdown: I have fallen madly in love with currywurst, and the idea of going to a currywurst museum was simply mindblowing. I was going to buy at least one t-shirt. Maybe 2, if they were cool enough. But alas, no such luck. So now I sit in the hotel room, and curse the currywurst museum gods for abandoning me.
Well, not entirely, but I went to the Jewish Museum here today. My initial plan was to go to Checkpoint Charlie first, but that was a mob scene. I'd actually attempted to go to Another Country, an English language second-hand bookstore with a great sci-fi selection, but they were closed - I'll make another run by there Monday or Tuesday. It's hard to resist visiting a place that sounds like a geek-expat version of Isotope/Borderlands.
Anyway - ended up spending the whole afternoon at the Jewish Museum. It was a good museum - the temporary exhibit on the exodus of German Jews in the '30s was heartbreaking and wonderful at the same time. My highlights there were a great mishmash of film clips featuring German Jewish exiles in Hollywood and a video clip from a man who escaped in the mid-'30s, quoting what he said to his friends as he left: "If I ever come back, I'm bringing a gun." I'll admit to a weakness for that sort of defiance, especially in the context of Jews and Nazi Germany: if there ever was a government worth taking up arms against, it was that one. What made that quote so truly great, though, was that he *did*: he came back to Berlin in '45 as a captain in the US army.
The Jewish Museum proper wasn't as great. It was much more crowded, and the crowd wasn't quite as somber as at the Jewish museums in Prague. I felt uncomfortable, though I probably shouldn't have - it's just that there I was, a Jew by the standards of the Nuremberg Laws, surrounded by Germans, in a museum about the Jews of Germany, who were killed or driven off by Germans 75-65 years ago. The history material was fantastic, with some very detailed information on individual German Jews of note over the last 800 years. But the section on the Holocaust felt...I dunno, brief. They did have a collection of books containing the names of every German Jew who died from individual cities, which was heartbreaking to flip through, seeing the names of people born in 1933 who died at Auschwitz a mere 10 years later... It's stating the obvious to say that the Holocaust is depressing, but it really, really is. I guess the approach they've taken with the museum, to make it more of a celebration of German Jewry throughout history than just a funereal mourning of its extinction, but part of me wants to shove German faces into the Holocaust, wants to make 100% sure that there's no way they can ignore their history. That's not fair, though. I know it isn't. I just get angry.
On brighter notes: currywurst is just f'n awesome. I could eat that stuff forever. It's simple as hell: pork sausage, cut up, covered in ketchup with a ton of curry powder mixed in. But it's *yummy*. Really yummy. That was lunch today, and will probably be lunch the next couple days. I admit to weenieing out a bit tonight for dinner: I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. Well, hey. It's a couple blocks from my hotel, and I had a feeling everyone there would be fluent in English, and, frankly, I get homesick for English. I ended up with a waitress from Miami, and saw half the waitstaff jump up on a counter and dance along to "YMCA". Which was strange. But hey.
Now I need to figure out what to do the next two days - a few places I'm interested in going are closed tomorrow, and most of them are closed on Monday, so I'll have to juggle things around a bit to make sure I have enough to do both days. And maybe tomorrow, I'll brave a non-English-speaking restaurant for dinner again. Or I'll just go back to the Hard Rock. I'm lame, but they did have an awfully good steak.
Go get 'em. I've started commenting them up and should get that done sometime. Other observations from my first 30 hours in Berlin:
That's about it for now. Still wonky time-wise - I slept 10 hours last night, but I think my jetlag is enhanced by my cultural disconnect: like I said, it's just impossible for me to really feel like I've got things under control when I don't speak the language. It's intimidating, and frustrating, because I really did try to bone up for this, but none of it stuck. None. Zilch. I'll have to take this into consideration before any future solo trips to non-English speaking places.
Yes, I know, it's been...well, over a year since I last posted. I think I may have actually been in Paris then. In which case I've managed to have consecutive posts from different places in Europe with an entire year in the States in between. I rule.
Anyway - I'm sitting in Frankfurt airport as we speak, waiting for my connecting flight to Berlin in a few hours. I'm bored. But at least they have wi-fi this time - when I was here just about three years ago, they had "wi-fi", btu it consisted entirely of an airport webpage. Now there's real net access. I'm happier.
EDIT: Ok, the last post was the one saying comments weren't working from the day before my birthday in '05. That was probably made from San Francisco, possibly Boston. Comments still aren't working, for what it's worth - I could rename the comments script back to the original name and have it work again, but then I'd get flooded with comment spam again. If I actually get back to blogging in any meaningful sense, I'll go get some sort of passkey system to keep those buggers out, but for now, it's probably not worth it. More babble below - I moved it to the extended entry in case there's still anyone out there subscribing to my RSS feed, so as not to dump a giant megapost on them out of the blue.
Continue reading "Ah, Airports."I know - I got hit by a really nasty spam invasion last week, while I was avoiding email in my quest for a peaceful Christmas. Dreamhost, my provider, was forced to disable the comments script due to the load it was putting on the server. I can not blame them in the least. I'm going to be upgrading MT soon and switching over to some sort of authentication-required system for comments in the future, so that I no longer have to deal with spamstorms. But for now - no comments. Sorry!
I was going to write a quick thing about eating at a restaurant next door to where Moliere lived, or about how the French really like their beef rare, but I just spent an hour - and I am not exaggerating - waiting for my check. I asked for it four times - four times! - and NEVER got it. What the hell? I know that French service is legendarily bad, but this was just absurd. I walked out - I did leave something approximating what I think the cost of the meal was, but I didn't want to sit there all goddamn night waiting for some pissant waiter to remember that he wanted to get paid tonight. Honestly, I should have just walked out without paying a cent. Damn, that really irritated me.
Thank you, Google, for letting me translate my subject line and include the appropriate accents! Anyway - still a bit jet lagged, though it's just that sort of stuffed head feeling, so I took it pretty easy so far today. I got moving at around 10:00am, after managing to sleep from around 11pm to 8am (with a 1.5 hour nap around 5pm). I grabbed a croissant from the continental breakfast at my hotel, and went wandering.
Like I said, I'm staying near the Louvre and Notre Dame - 19 Rue du Pont Neuf, more specifically. That puts me a block and a half from the Seine, right at the western tip of Ile de la Cite. So I walked on over there, and then around the island. Notre Dame is much more impressive than I expected - it's huge and gorgeous. However, here I discovered an annoyance at being an English-speaking tourist in France: all the signs are in French. I know, I know, fairly obvious thing to expect, but in Prague, the signs were multilingual almost everywhere. Here? The best I've encountered was at the Museum of the Middle Ages, where the title of each display was translated, but nothing else. Not the end of the world, obviously, but it makes me wish I'd boned up on French more before coming here: my three years of middle school and high school French are, not surprisingly, not good for much more than being able to say "Bonjour" and "Merci" with a decent accent. Which has actually gotten me into trouble as well - at lunch today, the waiter took the fact that I accepted a French menu and asked for a table for one in French to mean that, well, I spoke French. I'm still not entirely sure what he asked me after I finished dessert - I know coffee was mentioned, but there were a lot of other words that I didn't get at all. Ah well.
So yeah, after Notre Dame, I crossed over to the Left Bank and meandered around the Latin Quarter for a couple hours. It reminded me of the Nove Mesto in Prague, and probably similar neighborhoods in every other European city: gobs of restaurants, tourist-targeted boutiques, and the like. More Thai places than I expected, though. I went for French food for lunch - honestly, do you think I'm going to eat Asian food when I've got bonafide French food all around me? After lunch, I went to the aforementioned Museum of the Middle Ages, which is housed in a medieval building and the remains of a Roman-era bath. It was pretty nifty - the highlights for me were the architecture in general, the Roman artifacts, some embroidered silks from the Arab world of the 8th-11th century, and, of course, "The Lady and the Unicorn", the multi-part tapestry from the 15th century that's the museum's main calling-card. It's also the title and basis for Oberlin grad Tracy Chevalier's most recent book - her first was "The Girl with the Pearl Earring." She seems to have developed a thing for writing novels based on works of art. Sort of. Anyway - it was pretty impressive. Gigantic and old, still very vibrant.
I was planning to head down to the Museum of Natural History after that, but realized that I was, well, getting tired. So instead I did bookstores. Shakespeare & Co., famous both for being named after Sylvia Beach's original store, which closed during World War II, and for being the setting for the beginning of "Before Sunset", was not very impressive. Selection was so-so, prices were high. But it did seem to be staffed entirely by cute British girls, so I still give it a thumbs up. Yes, I'm easily swayed by cute British girls. I don't deny this. The Abbey Bookshop, another English language store in the Latin Quarter, was pretty fun - it's tiny, with books strewn all over the place. It took me a while to realize that there was at least some modicum of organization to the place, and even longer to realize that half the shelves were sliding shelves, with new books on the sliding shelves and used books behind them. I picked up a couple battered le Carre novels there, and almost grabbed a copy of Thomas Pynchon's "V", but I've already got "Gravity's Rainbow" with me, and I still haven't finished that - I'm banned from buying any more Pynchon until I actually get that book done.
Oh, forgot to mention - while heading from the museum to the bookstores, I found myself in what seems like the comic book district for Paris. I'm not kidding - like five comic book stores all on the same street. It was kind of odd. I didn't buy anything, but I did browse for a while.
After that, I stumbled on back to the hotel and fell over. Which is where I am now - horizontal on the bed with laptop. I took some pictures today - it was sunny in the morning and Notre Dame does allow flash photography - though not as many as I probably should have. I'm going to be heading out to eat this evening, but other than that, I'm probably done for the day. Tomorrow's going to be busy - I'm heading to Versailles.
So I am in Paris. I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to go, so, well, I did. Decent package deal got me here - connecting through Chicago, but I not only had extra legroom (thank you, frequent flyer status on United!) but an empty seat next to me (I had the window seat, the aisle seat was empty - perfect!) on the Chicago->Paris leg made it all ok. I even slept some on the plane, though not as much as I would have liked. I'm staying in central Paris, near the Louvre and Notre Dame. It's a strange neighborhood - kinda upscale, kinda tourist-trash all at the same time. My hotel room is fine - no clock and, more weirdly, there's no shower curtain and the shower itself consists of a handheld spray thingie, but other than that, no complaints in the least. I've got Internet access, obviously.
I just got back from going out to eat. I had duck confit, and it was, unsurprisingly, very, very good. I followed the main course up with creme brulee for desert - also very good, and a very large serving - honestly, I doubt I'll need much for dinner, especially since I doubt I'll be awake very late. But while I was eating, a cat tried to eat my creme brulee. No, seriously. It jumped up on my bench and started settling into my jacket. I shooed it out of my jacket, and it proceeded to take another leap onto the table and began sniffing at my dessert. I persuaded it to move on, but I wasn't really sure what the proper etiquette is in that situation. The cat obviously lived at the restaurant - was I going to offend someone if I pushed it? I dunno. Funny little experience.
I'm expecting a decent number of those for the next week, 'til I head home - this is my first time out of the country on my own, let alone in a place where I don't speak the language. Honestly, I felt more comfortable as an English speaker in Prague than I do in Paris. I think I need to grab a little English-French dictionary to carry around, just so I can translate menus.
More later. Much later, probably. I don't have a digital camera this trip, but I do have two disposable cameras. Once I get home, I'll post pictures. Until then, you'll have to be content with my rambling. =)
Ok, my affection for pandas is not exactly news. I've always had a thing for 'em - the first time I remember ever being allowed to watch TV after 8pm (though this might be with the exception of the Red Sox in '86 - I can't remember which actually came first) was an episode of Nova about, you guessed it, pandas. I've had multiple stuffed pandas over the years, and Mom gave me a really fantastic framed picture of a panda a few years ago - it's actually the only thing I've gotten around to hanging in the new apartment yet (gotta do some work making sure everything's lined up properly for the Transmet pages, and I still need to get those photos of Prague I bought in '04 framed...). And more recently...well, you've seen the baby panda in tupperware.
But, in the last 24 hours, two friends have sent me further panda material (thanks, Laurie and Rachel!). First, there's a bit from the Onion, which I really can't do justice describing, and second, there's panda-themed t-shirts. Here's the image from them:
That's right. It's a panda in Godzilla/King Kong mode. Aw yeah.
I've gone into a classical music phase, it seems. Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" was the beginning, followed by a return to Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9". But now I've gone and splurged - downloaded a full set of all 9 Beethoven symphonies and a Rachmaninov collection. Next up: Bach.
My car hasn't been broken into for a week now - new record! Though a friend who works at Isotope, a block away, had his car broken into a couple nights ago. But in the end, I'm ok with break-ins, job bullshit, and pretty much anything else that can go wrong. Do you know why?
That's why. Baby pandas in tupperware make it all better.
My car got broken into AGAIN. I am NOT making this up. Around the corner from where it happened on Sunday night, three doors down from my apartment. LESS THAN 48 HOURS AFTER REPLACING THE WINDOW. This time, the jackass (and I am convinced it's the same fuckhead) took the iPod power thingie and the cable for connecting the iPod to the stereo. Nothing else. This complete asshole has cost me $400 now (once I get the window replaced again) in less than 100 hours. This is unbelievable. I made a police report this time, but it's not like they can do anything. This total fucker is going to end up making me move my car into a garage, costing me a hefty chunk of change every month and eliminating a lot of convenience for me. AND HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE A BUCK OFF ME. This is just fucking obscene.
I am very, very angry right now, in case you couldn't tell. I'm semiseriously considering staying up all night, hiding up on the roof, looking down on the street, watching to see if someone tries to break into someone else's car, and calling the police immediately if I do see it. Arrrrrgh.
Well, this is the strangest one I have. I'll wake up partway through the night, convinced I have houseguests. So I'll get up, turn on a light in the rest of the apartment, put on a shirt, shut my bedroom door, etc... This happens maybe once every two weeks or so, when I go to bed early, generally. Very strange.
Didn't happen - couldn't get the time off. So I'm home, even though I found a round-trip flight (direct flight, too!) for $557. Ah well.
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