I learnt today that when the rest of the world uses the phrase “lucked out”, they mean exactly the opposite of what Australians mean when they do. For verification, check The American-Australian Slang Dictionary, and compare the entries in The Free Dictionary and usingenglish.com with the Macquarie Dictionary Book of Slang (unfortunately not online):

luck-out
verb to run out of luck; to have bad luck.

So there you have it.

On another note: Best. Pun. Ever.

… his name is Eric, and I’ve been spending all day, every day with him the last few months:

Hot:
spring weather
longer days
no more exams
looking for PhD positions

Not:
painting the apartment
out-of-focus photographs
writing seminar summaries
broken CD-ROM drives
not updating a blog for months

Meanwhile, spoken Dutch makes me giggle. Dertien minuten later liet de aanvaller zijn tweede doelpunt aantekene. *giggle*

… and that’s all I’m going to say on that topic.

Here’s a belated Christmas present to any readers… a new entry. I believe I may be outdoing my previous achievements at non-updating. In my defence, since my last entry my time has been almost continuously filled with uni work, and I can’t imagine many of you would find long entries about my studies scintillatingly engaging.

But given the opportunity of the Christmas break, there are a few things I should record. Not least of course, Christmas. Saarbrücken had its version of a Christkindlmarkt throughout December, and a less-kitch more-craft Weinachtsmarkt on the first weekend. On the weekend of the 16th/17th, L trained up from her exchange in Lyon to visit, and on the Sunday we went to Strasbourg to be tourists (and investigate the sprawling Marche du Noel). Photos (naturally) at the usual place.

And then on the 22nd, lectures finished for two weeks, giving me (or so I thought) some precious time to recover from the hard work, and an opportunity to get a head start on a few assignments before lectures begin again. Not so. It seems all our lecturers also saw this as an opportunity to do more work before lectures begin again, and dealt out assignments correspondingly. But I’m not writing to complain about my work… I did after all get a bit of a break. After opening all the Christmas mail on the 22nd, R and I caught a train to some of my relatives for 4 days of Christmas food, relaxing, a little laid-back sightseeing and more Christmas food; and following this we moved on to Berlin to visit J and U (and family), see some of the sights (R had never been) and to celebrate New Years Eve.

We were greeted in Berlin with a layer of fresh snow, and some flakes still gently falling from the sky… perhaps not strictly speaking a “White Christmas”, but certainly better than nothing! After that first day though the snow melted away and the weather became a bit more mild (give or take some rain), which we were quite glad of during our sightseeing.

Having weighed up the excitement of the Brandenburger Tor party against the prospect of being crammed into the “Party Meile” with one million other people, we decided to wander past the Party Meile early-ish in the evening to see how it was, and make a last-minute decision. At 7:30 there were no real crowds to speak of (at least, nothing unpleasant), three stages with live music and a festival atmosphere (complete with blinking party hats) in between, so we determined to come back later on (since the prospect of 5 hours outdoors didn’t really appeal!) Although at 10:30 there were considerably more people - in fact the Brandenburger Tor gates were closed at various points because of overcrowding - the crowd at the Siegessäule end was quite bearable, and so we got to see the famous fireworks after all. Well, the famous fireworks and lots and lots of private ones - most of them only confirming that the Australian ban on private fireworks is a very sensible idea… alcohol and gunpowder is not a good mixture! And since (in theory) fireworks weren’t allowed inside the Party Meile zone, everyone was just setting off their fireworks around the perimeter before entering the party… lighting little whirlygigs and throwing them into the bushes at the side of the road, or setting off rockets at dangerous angles… the Aussie bushfire season is bad enough, thankyou very much! (According to official reports, the fire brigade was called out 1800 times that night.)

Once again, photos where you’ve come to expect them.

On Monday lectures start again, so I fear we may be in for another little stretch of “nothing to report”. But at least y’all know I’m still alive, and still (occasionally) capable of something exciting!

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve disappeared for the last few weeks. Answer: I have been doing lots of running around (and some travelling). At the end of September, I visited family in Munich, managing at the same time to fit in some sightseeing (and of course Oktoberfest). We didn’t get inside the tents at the big O, since it appears they fill rather early in the day, and once you leave they won’t let you back in (if it’s full). We also spent quite some time wandering around trying to find a seat in the beer gardens outside the tents, since the Rules say that they’re not allowed to serve you a beer unless you have a seat. But eventually we found a seat and a beer (and a couple of Aussie soldiers on leave from Iraq). Was also rather impressed by the Olympic Park in Munich, possibly partly because my comparison is Homebush (100km out of town, and therefore deserted). Lots of greenery, nice lakes, stadiums (stadia?) etc that were in constant use, and lots and lots of people wandering around and making use of the public areas. Mind you, this is 15 minutes out of town on the U-bahn, instead of (see Sydney) over an hour, give or take a few train changes. (High-density living. Heh.)

Upon returning to Saarbrücken, I had a day to unpack, do laundry, clean up, etc, and then the following Monday I took receipt of R at the station, who has arrived after the usual 20+ hours on a plane plus train plus whatever to write a PhD at uni. Since then, we have: opened a bank account, signed a lease, registered at the town hall, enrolled at uni (a process taking several days and uncountably many secretaries, until we asked the International Office who told us what to write in which box and then took the form and enrolled us), bought kitchen appliances and a washing machine, and spent half a fortune at Ikea (the apartment is pretty large, but somewhat empty. Sans kitchen. Or ceiling lights.) Nice big strong men will come tomorrow and carry everything up the stairs. (We hope that’s what they mean by “delivery”. I don’t like the idea of us carrying it all upstairs ourselves.)

This last weekend, because R had been noticing the distinct lack of a holiday between submitting her masters thesis (the previous Friday) and starting her PhD thesis (last Monday), we spent two nights in a little town called Bacharach in the middle Rhine valley, which has as its main attractive features that it is surrounded by vineyards and small wineries, and that the youth hostel is housed in the (somewhat rebuilt) ruins of the castle. Saturday and Sunday were then spent variously tasting wines, eating lots of very good food, visiting the Federweisser festival, and walking up and down and up and down the track to the youth hostel. On Sunday we took one of the cruise ships along the Rhine to St. Goar, where we then looked at the ruins of Burg Rheinfels, the largest castle on the Middle Rhine, as well as the Teddy Bear And Doll Museum. We then bought some bottles (of various things we had tasted or drunk with a meal throughout the weekend), and caught the train home.

This coming Monday, lectures start at uni. I have also in between all this been chasing up some seminars (after learning my lesson last semester by missing out on one), and juggling a timetable together so I can pick my subjects next week. Once that is over, life might take on a slightly more normal pace again, and people who try to catch me might actually have a chance again…

The following is not news to my regular readers, but I thought it worth mentioning:

www.ormond.unimelb.edu.au/footer/employment/opportunities.shtml

As far as I’m concerned, a good friend has found a satisfactory way to extricate himself from a situation that had been causing him a great deal of unhappiness for quite some time. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Looking forward, I am quite pleased to see quite a number of confirmed engagements on www.auschoir.org/ which have immediately made their way into my calendar, and they should just as immediately find their way into yours.

And now, as promised, knitting. I haven’t blogged about knitting for rather a while, since I haven’t been making any progress worth blogging about. But last night I knocked off most of the backlog of episodes of the Enough Rope podcast (abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/podcast.xml) and before I knew it I had finished another ball of wool and the scarf was as long as I am. So I decided to cast off and call it finished. (All of 5 months behind schedule. With that kind of record I could tender for government contracts.)

Now, I had already decided what to do with the leftover wool (and in fact ensured there would be leftover wool to do this with): namely, www.knitty.com/issuespring06/PATTtopi.html Current progress:

And now that iTunes 7 provides gapless playback, I can finally enjoy all my Bach mp3s without artificial gaps between movements. So I shall return to my Bach.

Yes, I’m still alive! Contrary to what a more-than-a-month-long silence on the blog front might suggest. I’ve just been busy, doing things that take lots of time but aren’t interesting enough to blog about. Like exams. And work. And visiting friends in Höchstädt, which, despite being interesting per se, does not make for much interesting blogging.

But now I’ve finally done something worthy of a nice lengthy update. And to make sure I didn’t leave anything out, I even took notes as I was doing it. On the back of a postcard-sized advertisement for the 22e Foire Internationale du Livre Ancien (or, if you prefer, since Brussels is officialy bilingual, the 22ste Internationale Beurs van het Oude Boeks). For the tourists, it’s also written in English: the 22nd International Antiquarian Book Fair. This has its pros (since I speak neither French nor Dutch), and also its cons (since it doesn’t leave much space for my scrawled notes). Nevertheless, here goes.

First, a small disclaimer. Belgium doesn’t exist. Therefore, the two days I think I spent in Brussels, I actually spent in a special pod beneath EuroDisney, and the memories I’m about to relate aren’t actual real memories, but fake ones implanted by the New World Order to make me think I actually visited Belgium.

The Netherlands do exist. Despite many offers of substances intended to produce the contrary effect, my memories of Amsterdam are real.

I left Germany on the 7:30am commuter bus to Luxembourg on the 23rd. From there, a nice “Belgian” InterCity express train (fake, of course, as opposed to a real German InterCityExpress train) went to Brussels. Since I’ve done the Saarbrücken-Luxembourg trip a few times now, and since it’s almost entirely Autobahn, and since it was 7:30am, I slept through that bit. In Brussels I found my youth hostel, and then went for a bit of a wander, using “looking for lunch” as a suitable excuse to get nice and lost in the cobblestoned lanes and discover the city.

One of my first observations in Brussels is that Belgium seems to be at the economical end of the kissing-as-greeting scale. In Saarbrücken, Lorraine, and most of the Rheinland, the custom is two kisses - right cheek, then left cheek. Switzerland go the whole hog with three - right, left, right. In Brussels it’s just the single peck. (This is more important than it seems. One kiss too many, and suddenly you’re invading someone’s personal space, and it gets awkward. One kiss too few, and you’re being rude.)

Having found a nice cafe that happily sold me a Sandwich with fromage and jambon (or kaas and ham, if you prefer), and a witbier (or a biere blanc, if you prefer), and seen the Grand Place (or the Grote Markt, if you prefer), I decided to find the Mont d’Art (Kunstberg), since near that was the Muziekinstrumentenmuseum (Musée des instruments de musique). (er, Musical Instrument Museum.) This was rather an amazing collection of all sorts of instruments, from traditional folk instruments to modern “art music” instruments to mechanical instruments to electronic instruments. I saw all manner of bagpipes, jew’s harps, flutes, pianos, harpsichords, spinets, a glass harmonica, barrel organs, self-playing violins, pocket violins, Adolphe Sax’s Saxophone (and various other things he invented that didn’t catch on to the same extent), many “serpents”, a theremin, a Ondes Martenot, pianolas, and much more. Visitors were given headphones that played some music featuring the instrument you were currently looking at, wherever you were in the exhibition. Unfortunately the text was all in both Dutch and French but not English, so I had to struggle to either make out some of the French meaning, or convert Dutch sufficiently into German for it to make sense. After a while I gave up and just listened to the music.

That evening I patronised a small jazz cafe that I had discovered on my earlier wandering-the-small-lanes-getting-lost adventure. This bar was sort of the same size and setup as Bennets Lane in Melbourne, for those of my loyal readers who are familiar with the establishment. There I drank some other Belgian beers (of course) while listening to a small swing quartet. ‘Twas muchly pleasant.

Of course it goes without saying that in all this wandering your humble narrator never wandered past a waffle stand without stopping and eating one. Yum.

The following day I decided to address a deficiency in my appreciation of the Beer-Waffles-Chocolate Belgian trio, and so I made my way at 10am to the Grote Markt (Grand Place) to visit the Musée du Cacao et du Chocolat (Museum van cacao en chocolade). Here we were introduced to the process by which the ingredients of chocolate are extracted from the cocoa bean, the history of the discovery of chocolate and its introduction to Europe, the chocolate traditions in Europe, as well as a live demonstration of how pralines are made, an exhibition of busts carved out of solid chocolate and clothes and hats made from chocolate sheets, and an extensive collection of crockery for the serving of chocolate - a “chocolate service” in the sense of “tea service”.

Of course, a visit to the capital city of a monarchy necessitates a visit to the royal palace. As additional incentive, the guidebook I had dangled the carrot of an archaeological dig beneath the palace to expose the medieval castle and palace that had stood on the same place before the current palace. So I duly trudged up the hill to the hill and followed the red carpet (for the tourists) through the rooms on exhibition. After I had asked the waiter in the Parc de Bruxelles (Warandepark) “ou est le Ancien Palais” in my best broken French, I somehow managed to extract from his reply that he figured it was probably “sur le Place Royale”, but he didn’t know exactly where. (Amazing how much context can help.) And he also suggested I should ask one of the palace guards. So I thanked him, and feeling rather proud of my foreign-language abilities, tried my best “ou est” on the palace guard, who managed to completely burst my bubble with a long stream of French that I couldn’t decipher at all. Luckily he spoke almost perfect English and kindly pointed me in the right direction.

Following my underground explorations, I also visited the toy museum, and the comic book museum. The toy museum, although being packed with kindergarten classes, made for a rather pleasant change in that visitors were allowed to touch and play with many of the exhibits! And the comic book museum was very impressive, exhibiting the history of Belgian comics, the production of comic books in general, the flourishing of Belgian comics under Nazi occupation (during which of course American comics were unavailable), and the evolution into both animated comics and the various modern styles.

After dinner I caught the train out to the Atomium, since I had been advised by a friend that this was spectacular at night. This advice turned out to be rather misleading, since one can enter the Atomium and actually climb up into into the spheres, but only until 6pm; and although the newly-polished spheres reflected the setting sun rather beautifully, since the Atomium is more or less surrounded by parkland, once the sun has set there’s not much for them to reflect. Nevertheless, a rather cool structure, with an interesting history - it was built for the International Exhibition in 1958, and intended to be dismantled afterwards, but the Belgian people liked it so much that they left it up, and in fact most recently restored (IE, polished) it. Interestingly, it’s described everywhere as a “single molecule of an iron crystal”, which would send a certain high school chemistry teacher of mine into spasming fits, since iron does not form molecules! The term I think they’re looking for is a “unit cell”… but I guess that doesn’t sound as catchy in advertisements.

The following morning, I checked out of my nice Hostelling International hostel and caught the InterCity train to Amsterdam. At 2pm I arrived at my not-Hostelling International hostel in Amsterdam - dingy, dirty, ten bunk beds to a room, one small toilet, one small shower. Crawling with British backpackers, since (as a nice English guy in the Brussels hostel explained to me) Monday was the last bank holiday in England until Christmas. What better to do on your long weekend than go to Amsterdam and get stoned? Well, I guess.

Having arrived in Amsterdam, I noticed an advertisement at the hostel front desk for a free 3-hour walking tour, leaving the main station at 3pm. I promptly dumped my bags in the locker and joined this tour, which turned out to be the smartest thing I did all weekend - not only because it was a very nice, informative, entertaining tour (I can recommend it to anyone, and tentatively also their equivalents in Berlin and Munich), but also because I met a few other Aussie backpackers with whom I promptly exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet up again later that weekend.

After the tour, I decided to pass up the 20€ one-beer-and-one-tequila-at-each-pub pub crawl, and just went for a wander around town. This, unfortunately, didn’t leave me with a particularly positive impression of Amsterdam - in fact, the central district is not so much a city, more a theme park of sex and drugs for tourists. For good measure, I visited the “erotic museum”, which was rather a disappointment, but at least I tried somehow to engage with that side of Amsterdam. (On Monday morning I did consider that simply asking one of the “women” for her prices wouldn’t really have done any harm, and might have satisfied some curiosity, but by that point it was too late.) Of course, photos of the women is strictly banned, and the women give you a very stern evil eye if you even walk past them carrying a camera in view. Once the camera is in the bag, however, their attitude changes completely. Rather amusing. The official Guide to Amsterdam has a section written by the police, warning (among the usual things like pickpockets and don’t-fall-in-the-canals) that “if you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you that they are not always women”. Indeed. In fact I did see a few where I had my doubts… although according to our tour guide there is a “blue light” district alongside the red light district where women-that-are-not-women advertise themselves as such; I did not however encounter this district. One final remark on the women: every so often you see one of their little rooms empty, with the red and UV lights turned off, and a small sign on the glass or above the door saying “kammer verhuur” (”room for let”) which suggests to me that the people doing the best out of all this must be the owners of these rooms, who get to charge the women extraordinary amounts to rent the space, but don’t have to put their bodies on the line in quite the same way to earn the money.

On Saturday I decided I had seen about as much of that side of Amsterdam as I needed to, so I set out to find the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum. Having purchased tickets for these in advance at the tourist bureau, I waltzed right past the long ticket queues with a big grin on my face and was let in straight away. The Rijksmuseum unfortunately is currently being renovated, so only a small part of it was open to the public, but I’m not entirely certain I could have lasted three or four times as much museum as was still open, and I think that the exhibitions they had selected to show was somewhat distilled Rijksmuseum, the best without all the filler, so to speak. The Van Gogh Museum presented a huge collection of Van Gogh art, in chronological order, so one could see his initial progress (since he was self-taught), the effects of various influences on his art at different periods, and the progress of his mental illness until his suicide. Very interesting. The Van Gogh Museum also had a decent collection of lithographs and traditional Japanese art, both of which were large influences on Van Gogh.

My wandering to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum had taken me through some more pleasant parts of Amsterdam, so I was a little more positively disposed towards the town than I had been the previous night. I ate a rather late lunch in a park near the museums, and headed back to town to inspect some of the Uit Markt festival, the annual festival marking the official launching Amsterdam’s cultural season. The festival of free concerts, exhibitions and theatre had been opened the previous night, and would conclude with the Koniglijk Concertgebouw Orkest performing Mahler’s first Symphony (and thus the official opening of the cultural season). In a place near my hostel there was a stage featuring near-continuous jazz bands, and not too far from that was Het Bethanienklooster, with another stage (and one-hour queues), and a Sousterrain (cellar) containing a “jazz lounge”. In this context, “jazz lounge” consists of a bar, a dance floor, a DJ spinning groovy tunes, candelabras with candles, and bean bags.

Having established that my new friends from Perth (with funny Perth accents) were still “shagged out” from the previous night’s pub crawl and wanted to postpone seeing the Anne Frank Huis (and also any tentative jazz lounge-ing) until the following day, I thought I’d try my luck in the queue for the stage in the Bethanienklooster, where I got to chatting to a group of girls from Germany (Freiberg in fact, right near Crimmitschau where I was at the start of the month for a family gathering) who were enjoying their last real holidays before they had to get stuck into their Abitur. The band we ended up seeing after an hour of waiting was rather disappointing to say the least, and they turfed us out right afterwards so the people who had spent that hour waiting outside could get a turn, so the girls suggested they wanted to see something on the main stage at the Koniglijk Paleis (that is, the former town hall) and would I like to come. Well, I had no better plans, and considering I met them in the queue for a jazz band their tastes couldn’t be too awful, so I figured why not. Being half an hour early, we got to see probably a hundred thousand Dutch people in the square enjoying Sing-A-Long Musicals, where a hyperactive Master of Ceremonies presented one Dutch musicals star after another singing the Big Hits of musicals - Memory from Cats, Tomorrow from Annie, half of The Wiz, etc - of course, all in Dutch. With surtitles so you could sing along. In Dutch. This little exercise left me with severe trouble keeping a straight face (particularly as the surtitles finished “tomorrow’s only a day away” with “ander daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag” - although I might have remembered one or two “a”s too few). But finally the musicals stars finished the grand finale from The Wiz and all traipsed offstage, and the wild, arm-waving, loud-singing Dutch people transformed into nice orderly queueing people waiting their turn to leave, and we managed to find some decent seats. The band we had come to see turned out to be the Blue Man Group, who were very entertaining. After all that entertainment I wandered back to my hostel. Thus the first day of Amsterdam.

On the second day, I had planned a few small independent photography galleries, as well as the Pianola Museum, all of which had pressed brochures into my hand as I was wandering through the market that accompanied the UIT Markt. The two photography galleries were very cool; their somewhat postmodern, abstract focus was a nice balance to all the Rembrandt and Van Gogh I had seen the previous day. Also, finding the galleries took me through other nicer parts of Amsterdam, so that by now I wasn’t feeling at all negative towards the place, rather just a little amused at all the prostitutes, and the “coffeeshops” (ahem) and the blokes on the street who would approach you asking “cocaine? ecstasy?”. So I had lunch and then a coffee in a nice cafe on a tree-lined canal among 17th century canal houses, and wandered a bit to find the Pianola Museum. Unfortunately this mission ended in disaster: although the pianola museum advertises its opening times as Zondag 2pm-5pm, at 2:30pm on Sunday the doors were most definitely closed, the lights were off, and both ringing the doorbell and phoning the number on the pamphlet achieved nothing. So, rather dispirited, I decided to head back to the Uit Markt and at least enjoy that. On the way to cheer myself up a little I bought some souvenir handmade Edam from a cheese shop guarded by a lithe black cat. Most food shops and cafes in Amsterdam have a cat: they’re there to hunt the rats and mice that live in the damp cellars on account of the canals and the high water table (like most of the Netherlands, Amsterdam is below sea level).

My total lack of Dutch notwithstanding, I was drawn to the Amsterdam Marionettentheater who were offering De Toverfluit (the Magic Flute), since Mozart’s 250 years old and all (though you wouldn’t really know it in Amsterdam, since Rembrandt is 400 years old this year). Performances in the Uit Markt festival seemed to be limited to strictly 25 minutes, so we just got the first 25 minutes of de Toverfluit (along with the suggestion to return later in the year when we could pay to see the whole thing); although this was story-wise a little odd, it was still a very entertaining performance. After that I got in touch with the Perth friends again, and we decided to head down to the Anne Frank Huis. (Late in the afternoon, since the pre-booked-to-avoid-queues tickets were only valid after 5pm.) Seeing the house in which the Franks and another family hid for years was rather a moving experience, and it was very well presented: with videos of interviews with Otto Frank (the only one who survived the war) and various of his staff, photos of the original furnishings (Otto requested that it remained unfurnished after his death), Anne Frank’s original diaries (one diary and two school notebooks), et cetera. Quite a sobering experience. Of course, at the exit you could buy the Extra Special Edition Hardcover Only Available At The Anne Frank House Museum In Amsterdam Edition Of Anne Frank’s Diary for 45€. I didn’t.

Following this, we went back to the stage in front of the Paleis to see the Concertgebouw Orchestra play Mahler, where I was tapped on the shoulder with a “I thought it was you!” by none other than BA., who sends his greetings to everyone who is probably wondering why they haven’t heard from him for ages. He and his boyfriend went back home to Utrecht right after the concert, since he was recovering from illness, so my Perth friends and I went to a pub for a few drinks and a chat to wind down. The following morning I checked out of the hotel and caught my InterCityExpressInternational back home. (Home, where I am quite relieved to pay less than half as much for groceries and bread and basic things than I was paying in Amsterdam. Eek!)

In brief numbers:
Number of waffles eaten: uncountable
Number of comics seen: similarly uncountable
Number of languages inadequately spoken: 2
Number of chocolatiers spotted: approximately one per street corner
Number of Hercule Poirots spotted: none.
Number of musical instruments seen: several hundred
Number of countries visited: 3, not counting Germany (Luxembourg to Brussels via France. Not sure why.)
Number of museums: around ten (I’m not usually a museums kind of traveller, but they were too tempting!)

Photos, of course, as always, are here.

Two other pieces of news bear mentioning, before I finish this up and go to bed.

On the day before I left to go travelling, I bought myself a secondhand bike I had found through Findling (the local variety of Trading Post, if you like). Here it is, in all its glory:

The other piece of news is that while I was away, my bed sprouted a new railing and a new ladder that is almost more stairs than ladder. Again, the illustration:

Okay, I think that’s all for now… that took rather longer to write than I had expected! High time for bed, methinks. G’nite all!

Yay! As of yesterday I am officially a whole year older than I was two days ago.

I notice that I haven’t updated here in a while. (more than a month in fact.) So it’s about time. Since the last posting, I have:
- gone to Kaiserslautern to watch the soccerroos play
- eaten quiche Lorraine in Lorraine
- been too busy with uni to blog.

So there.

So, the 25th was a public holiday. And since Thursday public holidays tend to mean that Friday’s lectures are cancelled, and since I don’t have any classes on Mondays anyway, that meant I got a super-duper long weekend. And since we’re getting towards the business-end of semester now, I thought I’d take the opportunity of a bit of a trip, before I could no longer afford to take the time away from study, and while I had a 5-day weekend.

The destination? Well, it was pretty obvious - there was one city which houses a rather large proportion of all the people I’d promised to visit, one city for which, I must admit, I have developed somewhat of an affection over my past few visits: Berlin. So, armed with my brand new (in fact, still “provisional - present this receipt with some photo ID”) BahnCard, I trundled down to the Bahn “service centre” at the station to put together some travel plans. Of course, these days that could all happen automatically over the Internet, but I wanted actual advice from a human, because I wanted to try something different - night trains! Yes sirree, the plan was to leave Saarbrücken Thursday evening (leaving Thursday free to do all the uni work I would otherwise have done on the weekend), and arrive in Berlin Friday morning, then leave Berlin Monday evening and return to Saarbrücken Tuesday morning, just in time for class. The nice service center person worked it all out for me, reserved seats on trains that required reservations, printed out the itinerary, and off I went.

Several days later (on the Thursday evening, to be precise), I discovered a few things about night trains. The first is that you don’t actually get all that much Ruhe in a Ruhesessel. (Meh. Next time I’ll go with a bed.) The second is that Berlin is not really far enough away to make a night train worthwhile - a day train would take around 6 or 7 hours, and although the night train travels somewhat more slowly and even spends some time just standing still (to help you sleep, i believe), what with changing trains and etc there were still only 6 or 7 hours during which I could have slept (ignoring the discomfort of the Unruhesessel).

Never mind, I’m young, the ol’ body’s been through worse, it’ll recover. (It did.)

Regarding catching up with people: I successfully made my way through the entire list. Stayed with J and U (such generous people!); had a fun dinner with J, U and K, and also a great night out with K and her somewhat-local friends (even if I piked on the dancing); saw the Da Vinci Code (Originalversion! such new-fangled amazement has yet to come to Saarbrücken), and later had brunch, with C and his various local and somewhat-local friends; and had coffee and a good yarn with T.

Regarding sightseeing: well, you know, there’s no end of things to do in Berlin. Highlights include: the Helmut Newton exhibition at the Museum for Photography (thanks I for the tip); finally making it inside the Reichstag building (the rain drove the crowds away); and lots of just random wandering. Photos here, here, and here.

The reason why I’m only blogging this more than a week later: I’ve had the sniffles the past week or so. Well, more than the sniffles - a decent, full-blown cold. This past weekend was spent almost entirely on trying to avoid any exertion, to try and recover as quickly as possible. I’m much better now, but not quite 100% yet. So that’s my excuse. Now, I should head back to the aforementioned business end of semester. Tschau!