Monday, December 30, 2013

Don't Let the Things You Hold Onto Ever Outnumber the Things You Let Go

Because it's apparently becoming something of a tradition with me to end the year with a song from Josh Ritter – still one of my very favorite songwriters after all these years – I leave you with these lyrics from the ever-wise Josh:

Don't let the things you hold onto ever outnumber the things you let go.
Don't let the things you remember ever outnumber the things you live for.



Sunday, December 29, 2013

Books: a Year in Review

I don't know precisely why, but I've been feeling inspired to write a "top 5 books I read this year" type post – maybe because this year I went on a finally-reading-some-of-those-classics kick, so for once I feel like I have something of substance to say about literature?

Anyhow. Here are five books that had an impact on my year:


• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

I'd have to say I had a complicated relationship with this book. The concept is fascinating (the real-life memoir of a professor of literature in revolutionary Iran who meets in secret with a select few of her students to read banned Western classics) but the execution is a bit muddy, and at times it really drags. I kept putting it aside, then coming back to it months later.

Ultimately, though, this inspired me to pick up many other books, classics I'd never read (The Great Gatsby, Jane Austen, Henry James...) and to look at others I had read before in a new light. Reading these works along with Nafisi felt a bit like being in a college English course again, and I really miss that. So kudos to her for getting me to think about "great" literature again.

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I admit it – I'm one of those few girls who just never got into Austen as a teenager. The early 19th century is not really my thing. It was Nafisi who pushed me to finally give Austen a try (Persuasion, then Pride and Prejudice) and...I enjoyed it! I find it funny that in essence nothing "happens" in Austen's books (sample plot point in Persuasion: the protagonist goes to visit her sister; this event lasts about 100 pages), and yet I found myself engrossed. It helped that I had a fantastic annotated version of Pride and Prejudice that explained all those little cultural details that would usually go over the head of a modern reader, so I learned a great deal by reading it.

And I'm glad to have finally read this classic, the book that spawned pretty much every romantic comedy ever. I actually enjoyed it enough that I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a modern update (they were going to be theater folks, with Darcy and Bingley as big-city actors coming to a small town just for the summer stock season!) but then I realized everyone's doing it and dropped the idea. But it says a lot about how evocative the scenario is that people are still being inspired to do remakes.

• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

As an extension of the above-mentioned classics kick, I ended up finally picking up this classic-of-the-modern-age. For some reason, somewhere along the way I'd picked up the impression that Holden Caulfield was an unlikable, obnoxious narrator and that I'd have to force my way through this book someday just for the sake of having read it, but wouldn't enjoy it at all.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I think I sympathized even more with Holden than I would have if I'd read this as a teenager. His disillusionment with the world and lonely confusion rang far more true for me now than it would have when I was a teenager and still quite an idealist. I loved the book, and it (unsurprisingly) reminded me of a more modern take in the same genre, Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," which I read last year and became an instant favorite.

• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Just because I've been catching up on the classics doesn't mean I can't still enjoy the occasional YA fantasy novel! I will defend to the end that "children's" literature quite often grapples with the deepest questions of all. I beg your leave to quote the great Philip Pullman on this point:

"One mistake that adults used to make about children's books, is to think that children's books deal with trivial things. Little things that please little minds, and little concerns about little people. And, so, nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the contrary, it's been my observation that a lot of highly praised adult books, or highly successful adult books, in recent years have dealt with the trivial things. Such as "Does my bun look big in this?" or "Will my favorite football team win the cup?" and "Oh dear, my girlfriend's left me, whatever am I going to do?". Whereas the children's books have dealt with ultimate questions: "Where do we come from?," "What's the nature of being a human being?," "What must I do to be good?" These are profound questions, very deeply important questions. And they're being dealt with. Largely, not in the books that adults read, but in the books that children read." (quote drawn from a "Harry Potter and Me" transcript)

Seraphina is a story set in a wonderfully creative world of dragons and quirky saints, but it's also a story of a girl taking up her fantasy-novel-hero role despite her many fears and insecurities, an in-depth look at both the brave, heroic image the world sees and the mess of confusion that often exists inside. Also, the author's conception of these dragons-who-live-among-humans (they're sort of like Vulcans – or Sherlock Holmes – in that they can mimic human emotion, but they don't really get it) is just stunning.

• Sunshine by Robin McKinley

I knew Robin McKinley is an amazing writer, but I guess I'd forgotten just how much so, until I picked up this book, on the strength of the fact that about a gazillion people had recommended it.

This is a vampire novel. Vampire novels are definitely not my thing. But this is a fantastic story. The narrative voice is long-winded and confusing, the ending leaves pretty much every single plot thread that you really wanted to know about unresolved, and no, there's no sequel in the works. And yet, it's so engrossing and original, you can't help loving it desperately, warts and all.


And here are the honorable mentions:

• Maurice by E.M. Forster

This would be up there in the top five if only I'd actually read it... Alas, I've only seen the movie (fantastic!) and when I went to the used bookstore hoping to pick up the book itself, they didn't have it, so I got E.M. Forster's "A Room with a View" instead. (Also good.) But wow, what a story. Just wow.

• Emma (Jane Austen) / The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) / The Casual Vacancy
(J.K. Rowling)

Think these three novels don't have much in common? I beg to differ.

The first two I also saw in movie form (this was before I got on my Austen kick later in the year) because they happened to be lying around in the cottage we rented for a group hiking trip to Wales.

Watching them back to back, I was struck by how they essentially told a story of the same stripe (women trying to navigate their path through an extremely rigid and judgmental society) but with the fundamental difference that Austen's take on the subject matter is essentially sunny (literally – in Jane Austen's England, apparently the sun is always shining and there are non-stop picnics), while Wharton's is more realistic/tragic. Or compare Austen's Pride and Prejudice with Wharton's The House of Mirth: Elizabeth Bennet wants something greater than a humdrum marriage of convenience, and she wins her Mr Darcy. Lily Bart (SPOILER ALERT!) wants something much the same, and ends up socially ruined, then dead.

A few months later, when I read The Casual Vacancy (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling's first "grown-up" book), I was struck with the thought that this book is, in a sense, a continuation of those themes, simply in a modern-day setting – it's still about the tragic struggle against restrictive social circumstances. (At least, to my mind the particular female character I'm thinking of here amounts to the book's main plot line, though it's a book of many interwoven plots.) To draw that line from turn-of-the-19th-century Austen to turn-of-the-20th-century Wharton to turn-of-the-21st-century Rowling was fascinating.

• Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford

Again, can't count it because I watched it rather than read it, but I was noticing the other day (probably because of reading A Room with a View, set in a similar era) how much the characters from Parade's End have stuck with me. I'm starting to think the Edwardian era/early 20th century must have been a fascinating time – in some ways already surprisingly modern, or at least in the process of a massive breaking-away from tradition (women's suffrage movement well underway, etc.), yet still lacking that massive push toward modernity that, for better or worse, the two world wars would end up bringing.

An Acceleration of Pastries

I just learned that, at least in the Rhineland region of Germany, the word "Gebäck" (pastry) is only used for some sorts of pastry; Danish-type pastries that have fruit or filling on top (previously known to me as "Plunder," as in "Puddingplunder," "Kirschplunder," etc.) are regionally known instead as a "Teilchen" – a word that literally just means "small piece" ("Teil" = part, "-chen" = diminutive ending).

The reason this is funny, though, is that the word "Teilchen" in its more common usage means "particle" (think about it, "part" plus diminutive suffix "-cle") – as in particle physics or particle accelerator. The German word for particle accelerator, in fact is "Teilchenbeschleuniger" (particle + accelerator).

So I hope you're all with me now in picturing a massive, ultra-high-tech machine for accelerating pastries to very high speeds!

Friday, December 27, 2013

Naaa?

 I'm visiting my friend Lisa right now, and we got on the topic of the German "Na?"

"Na?" (often stretched out into "Naaa?") is a sort of word/sound/interjection, an all-purpose greeting-noise-to-make-when-you-see-a-friend (this applies only to our generation, not to older Germans). It's kind of annoying, actually, because it's a question that has no real answer – all you can really do is respond back with another, "Na?" So the entire exchange goes like this, devoid of any content:

Person A: "Naaa?"
Person B: "Naaa?"

Lisa quite insightfully pointed out, though, that this is just the same as "How are you?" in English – it's (usually) not really a question that you ask because you're looking for an answer, it's just something you say in greeting.

This is a helpful thing to have pointed out, because Germans often complain that Americans are so superficial, they ask you how you are and then they're not even interested in hearing your answer! So next time I hear that complaint, I'll be able to explain it better by comparing it to the German "Naaa?" – it's not a question, but a greeting.

(Heading back downstairs after this conversation, Lisa suggested we test out the theory that "Na?" is only ever answered with another "Na?" So when we arrived in the kitchen, Lisa went "Na?" and her brother immediately looked up from the table and said, "Na?" And of course then we both fell about laughing, while everyone else looked baffled.)

Then her dad started telling me about the typical greeting exchanges people have in the local dialect here, with its syllables-clipped-off economy of speech. They apparently run something like this (roughly translated):

"How're things?"
"Good."
"Wife?"
"Good."
"Car."
"Runs."

Ha! This amuses me, because it's exactly like the exchanges people have in Senegal (and I think a lot of other parts of Africa), where you run through this whole litany of how's the wife, how's the family, how's the job, but it's not about asking for an informational answer (people just want to hear each other confirm that the social order as they know it is still in place, as far as I can tell) and the answer is always, "good, good, good." (Or in Senegal, "ça va, ça va, ça va.")

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Also, Lisa's parents were telling me about a new film, and how they heard a review of it on the radio. The reviewer played a sound clip from the film, then said, "Wie ihr hört, ist das wieder der Ben Kingsley" ("As you can hear, that's Ben Kingsley again").

...But this is hilarious, because of course they were playing the German dubbed version of the movie. (All movies here get dubbed.) So it wasn't Ben Kingsley at all, but the German actor who did his role in the dubbed version. But the thing is, each of the really big-name actors always gets done by the same German voice actor – so there's one guy who's always the voice of Brad Pitt, say. Or someone who's always the voice of Ben Kingsley. And because this is the case, a German listener can actually tell that that's Ben Kingsley – even though in point of fact it's not – because they recognize the voice of the guy who always dubs his roles.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Language Ragbag Addendum

Two more linguistic things that tickled my fancy:


• I'm staying with a friend's family for Christmas (again, I don't actually celebrate Christmas, but apparently I celebrate "German Christmas") and today we were talking about the local Christmas market. The dad of the family mentioned that they strew straw about on the ground in the Christmas market, in and around the vendors' stalls. He reflected quite seriously, "Da hat man ein ganz anderes Gehgefühl." ("That makes for a very different feeling-of-walking.")

"Gehgefühl" – a specific way that it feels when you walk. One of my new favorite words!


• The same friend's father described his home office as "immer ganz messyhaft" – "always very messy," but by borrowing the English adjective "messy" and tacking on the German adjective ending "-haft" (something like "-ful"), so together I guess you'd say it comes out as "messyful."

!!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Old Year, New Growth

When my neighbor moved away this summer, she left me a houseplant. A sadly leggy, overgrown houseplant absolutely bursting out of the tiny pot it had probably been growing in for years:


I did some research (hello, people on YouTube who make videos documenting everything they do! thank you!) and decided drastic measures were in order – I would chop the plant down entirely, replant the stalk, and just have to hope it had enough energy stored up to grow back. Here it is just prior to repotting, in all its straggly glory:


When I pulled it out of the pot...it turned out there was basically no dirt left. The whole thing in there was roots, roots circled around and around themselves, with nowhere else to go:


This is where the drastic measures came in – I chopped the plant to pieces. Based on the advice I'd garnered, I tried a few different things: repotting the bottom piece of the stalk (the one with the roots); planting the other chopped-up sections of the stalk in the hope they might also regrow; and placing the top piece of the plant in water. This was in late August:


Then nearly two months passed with no sign of life. I know the guy in the one YouTube video had said nothing happened until well after he'd given up hope...but still, I gave up hope. Then one day – two little green nubs on the original stalk! By late October, this was going on:


 By a week or so into November, I decided it was time to clean house. The bottom piece of the stalk – the one with the benefit of roots – was doing well, but there didn't seem to be anything going on with the other sections, and the top bit I'd put in water had died off entirely.

So, all right, one plant sacrificed and one plant gained, that's still a success. But when I went to pull the other pieces of stalk out of their pot, lo and behold – one of them had rooted! I'd thought that scraggly bit at the top was just the top getting distorted as the stalk dried out, but apparently it was actually the beginnings of new growth. Look! Roots:


In the final tally, one plant sacrificed and two plants gained. This picture is from mid-December, and they're both doing great:


Moral of the story, if there is one: Plants are resilient and awesome.

Other moral of the story: Repot your plants! Don't make the poor things exist in a space many sizes too small.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Language Ragbag

Every now and then I put together a "ragbag" post of all the bits and pieces that have caught my interest enough to jot down, but which don't really make for a full post alone. In this case, they're all language-related bits and pieces, either things I find amusing about German, or differences I find intriguing between German and English. Here we go!


• "Zusammen oder getrennt?" ("Together or separately?")

This is the standard question asked when a group of people goes to pay at the end of a meal, because in Germany, it's standard for the server to split the bill and for each person to pay separately – so convenient!

But also, as a French colleague recently pointed out, it makes for this awkward moment right after the question is asked, where you don't want to be the one to say "getrennt, bitte" because it kind of makes you sound cheap or overly obsessed with paying only exactly your own part...even though it's normal to do it that way here.

Do Germans feel awkwardness in that moment? I assume not, since they grow up with this.

(This conversation came up because, at the Middle Eastern place where my office-share colleagues and I often have lunch, there's one server who really loves languages, and likes to address us each in our own language. Then he learned that my French colleague is half Italian, so he tries to speak Italian to him. The colleague sort of gently complained to me, "He always asks me how to say things in Italian that you don't actually say in Italian." (Like "together or separately," which you wouldn't ask in Italy, where, as in the US, you get one bill and figure out among yourselves how best to cover each person's part.))


• "to go" – phrase that has become standard usage in German. As in, "Einen Kaffee to go, bitte." I guess it's understandable, since the equivalent would be the mouthful "zum Mitnehmen."


• "house-warming Party" is apparently now also in usage in German! A student of mine (middle-aged, intermediate English level) got invited to a younger cousin's "house-warming Party" (instead of the usual German "Einweihungsparty") and wanted to know what that means. Then she kept forgetting exactly what the word was and referring to it with slight variations. ("What was it? A house-heating party?")


• "Es weihnachtet!" – the same French colleague as above pointed out how lovely it is German the way you can create new forms of almost any word. "Weihnachten" (noun) means Christmas, and while "weihnachten" (verb) maybe doesn't technically exist as a word in the dictionary, lots of people would say it, and everyone would understand. "Es weihnachtet" is like, it's getting Christmas-y, it feels like Christmas, we're in a Christmas mood. But how lovely to be able to look around as a few flakes of snow start to drift down and declare the equivalent of "It's christmasing!"


• Another wonderful not-quite-real word:

The adjective "fremd" means "foreign" or "stranger," or also just "other/external/something that's not our own." So a "Fremdnetzwerk" would be a computer network outside my own company, say, but also "fremdgehen" (literally "to go foreign/other") means to cheat on your partner.

So, one day at the office one guy had made other plans and thus wouldn't be joining the rest of us for lunch as usual. Another colleague commented, "Er ist heute Fremdesser" – he's a "foreign eater," i.e., eating elsewhere and not with us!


• "jein" – this semi-made-up is a combination of "ja" and "nein," and does in fact mean the same as saying, "Well, yes and no..." Yes, people really say this.


• "Planungssicherheit" – this came up in a translation I did (about the history of Berlin nightlife and how it's changed over the decades) and oh my goodness, what a German word.

"Planung" just means "planning" and "Sicherheit" means security, so "Planungssicherheit" is like a secure, stable situation, a situation in which it's possible to plan ahead. Because Germans don't just plan, they also plan to plan.


• "Indian Summer" – sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine that bugs me to no end. It's a classic case of "I do not think that word means what you think it means," where German borrows a phrase but borrows it wrong, so then you've got all these people saying something, in English, which they think is English, but is really not. In this case – I think because the kind of brilliant fall colors we get in the northeastern US don't exist here, and thus are a foreign concept that needs to be labeled with its own term – Germans have taken the American term "Indian summer" (i.e., a period of unseasonably warm weather that occurs after fall has already started) and apply it to all of American-style fall, with its changing leaves and all the other trappings that are a part of every year's autumn. Whenever a German eagerly tells me, "We're going to the US to see the Indian summer!" I cringe and try really hard to bite my tongue.


• I find it fascinating that what in English is called the "Middle East," in German is the "Naher Osten" ("Near East"). Because, if you think about it, geographically it really is a lot nearer!


• Also, I've been thinking lately about the subtle difference between the words "any" and "every" (and their related words, like "anywhere" and "everywhere," "anyone" and "everyone").

What "subtle difference" I imagine (/pretend) I hear you ask? What could be more different than "any" (pick one out of all the things) and "every" (have all the things)?

Well, in German – as was driven home to me while trying to teach this difference to a student of mine – there is no difference. "Überall" means both "everywhere" and "anywhere." "Jeder" means both "everyone" and "anyone." "Alles" means "everything" and also "anything."

My student is very intelligent and speaks very good English, but as a German speaker, she just couldn't get the difference between "everything" ("I'm so hungry, I'm going to eat everything in the fridge") and "anything" ("I'm not picky, I'll eat anything.") In German, both those sentences would be "Ich esse alles."


• Not actually a language thing, but I'll toss it into the ragbag, since it's something I was thinking about recently: It seems all Germans have electric toothbrushes. They're not something for people particularly concerned about dental health, or people particularly nuts about electronic gadgetry, or any other specific subset. They're just what everyone has. Personally, I think it's some kind of dentists' cabal, because even American friends of mine here have ended up bullied into buying an electric toothbrush by their dentists.

This is not because Germans are unusually concerned with dental hygiene (they don't even floss!) so I have to conclude this is truly just the German obsession with gadgets rearing its head once again. (Come on, a people who have a device in their kitchens for adding carbonation to tap water, to make their own sparkling water? Of course they're going to have an electric toothbrush.)


• An American friend was visiting here, learning some German, and pointed out (this is the kind of thing you don't notice anymore, once you know the language) just how hilarious the German word for "dinner" – "Abendessen" – is. Because it literally means "evening food." Lunch is the same – "Mittagessen," or "midday food."

But what takes the cake is the word for "breakfast": "Frühstück," or literally "early piece."

Ah, endless fun with deconstructing German words! (Though let's not forget to examine "breakfast," which literally is the meal in which you break the fast you have kept over the night while you were sleeping.)


• "hinterherhinken" is just generally an awesome-looking word. It means "to lag behind."


• I only just found out that "Dutzend" ("dozen"), unlike in English, is an archaic word that people don't really use anymore in German, a quaint-sounding measurement like "Zentner" ("hundredweight"). My personal theory about this is that "dozen" is still normal in English because it's standard for us to buy eggs by the dozen, and it's fallen out of usage in German because eggs here are bought in sets of ten!


• I also find it fascinating and strange that in German, while an adult has a "Schlafzimmer" (bedroom), a child has a "Kinderzimmer" (literally "child's room"). I guess it makes sense, since children also spend a lot of time playing in their rooms, not just sleeping?

Similarly, an adult's birthday party is a "Geburtstagsfeier" ("birthday party") but a child's birthday party is a "Kindergeburtstag" ("child's birthday"). Why aren't children allowed to have parties??


• Probably one of the worst words in all existence: "Lebensabschnittsgefährte." This means, not kidding you here at all, "my significant other during this segment of my life." Seriously, could there be anything worse than introducing your partner as "this is the person I'm not going to spend the rest of my life with"??


 • Somehow it took me until this year (after 7+ years in Germany...) to notice that when people talk about that week between Christmas and New Year's, they say "zwischen den Jahren" – "between the years."

As in, hey, I'm visiting my family for Christmas, but I'm back in Berlin after that, so let's meet up between the years.

How strange and sweet.


• And did you know that German fairy tales end not with "And they lived happily ever after" but with a phrase that means, "And if they haven't died, they're still alive today"?

Isn't that strange and...fittingly German?


~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Also, rants I will spare you, by simply alluding to them in passing and thus heading myself off from working up to a full rant about them:


• People who are rude should not be librarians. Thus Germans, or at least Berliners (I know, I know, there are other parts of the country where people are somewhat friendly to each other), should not be librarians.

Librarians – though I know this might be hard to spot – are there to help people find books. Not to bite their heads off, or to sigh and look put out when they dare to ask a question. And I say this based not on one experience at one library, but on seven years' worth of frustration!


• German theater is crap. I'm sorry, I was trying to keep an open mind, but it really is just crap. (I say this as a person who spent years working in theater, and years writing plays, and who's been going to plays for as long as I can remember or possibly even before.)

Running around screaming, throwing things and trying to be as shocking and/or incomprehensible as possible is not theater. That's just crap. Call me old-fashioned (apparently I am old-fashioned, at least over here) but I prefer a play that actually has characters. Who interact with each other. About subject matter.

(A German acquaintance who seems to have similar taste to me told me about a couple of theaters in Berlin that still put on older works – you know, from the days when playwrights actually wrote plays – so maybe I'll check out those.)

And don't even get me started about the specific theater I recently attended that prompted this rant, where they didn't even open the doors to let the audience from the lobby into the theater until 5 minutes after the scheduled starting time; my friends and I (understandably, I feel) took this as our cue to go to the bathroom a last time, while the rest of the audience was filing into the theater. Two minutes later, when we entered the theater, the woman working the door hissed at us, "Wir warten allen schon!" ("We're all wait already!") Then, once all the audience was seated and the actors in place, the same woman realized she'd left the house lights on and had to walk back through the entire audience to go turn them off so the play could start.

Sigh.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~


And on that grinchly note...  Happy solstice! Happy darkest day and longest night of the year! I'm off to re-read John Donne's marvelously depressive reflection on this darkest moment of the year, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," in which he describes all the ways in which the world is dark and dead, then says, "yet all these seem to laugh/Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph."

John Donne, master poet of the 17th century and original emo kid.

Seriously, this is one of my favorite points in the year, this day of deepest, deepest dark, from which it can only grow lighter again. I love that so many cultures have holidays around now that celebrate light and life and greenery. I love that Christmas is pagan even though it doesn't realize it is. I love that today in Berlin the sun set at 3:54 pm.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Sächsische Schweiz, Böhmische Schweiz

A couple weeks ago, I did a weekend-away-to-nature in Bad Schandau, a small town in a region of Germany called the Sächsische Schweiz. (Literally translates as "Saxony Switzerland" – because everything around these parts that's even vaguely hilly tends to get labeled "[fill in the blank] Switzerland.") It's a landscape of sandstone cut through by the Elbe River, very close to the Czech border.

I took a train from Berlin to Bad Schandau, where I disembarked and caught a ferry from the train station on one side of the river to the downtown on the other. Yes – I took a ferry as a normal link in the public transportation network! Sometimes I really love Germany.

There, I stayed in a youth hostel in a tiny, tiny village outside of Bad Schandau. During the days, I hiked in the intriguing landscape around there (pictures below) and in the evenings I caught up on a ton of reading, writing and sleep. Man, I should do this more often.

When I checked out of the hostel the last morning, the friendly older guy at the reception asked where I was headed next and I rather effusively told him I was going to Děčín, the closest city in the Czech Republic, which is just 15 minutes away by train – because how could I not, when it's right there??

(Some people climb mountains "because they're there." Apparently I go to other countries because they're there.)

I've lived in Europe a while now, but I don't think I'll ever get over how fantastic it is to be able to just pop over the border into another country for the day or even the afternoon.

I don't think the hostel guy quite got the appeal, though, seeing as he lives 15 minutes away from the Czech Republic all the time. Yeah, I go over there to go shopping, he said. At Tesco, for vegetables and stuff.

Ah yes, border-hopping shoppers are everywhere in Europe.

As for me, I hadn't been to the Czech Republic since my one and only trip there when I was 19, so I was seriously excited. And that excitement approximately quadrupled when I discovered I would be traveling there on the cutest little old single-car train! (Again, see pictures below.)

Border crossing buildings, former checkpoints (rendered obsolete by the Schengen Agreement that opened many of Europe's internal borders), tax-free shops with big signs, Czech gas station, roadside currency exchange place, stalls selling tourist bric-a-brac... And all this seen while I was still in Germany, because for a tiny stretch the border jogs and follows the river, so I was in a train traveling along one bank of the river, still in Germany, but looking across at the road along the other side of the river, which was already in the Czech Republic.

I said "Děkuji" (dyeh-KOO-yeh, "thank you") when I got off the train, and the nice Czech conductor smiled and said something I didn't understand in the least, but presumably meant "You're welcome." (Or maybe it meant, "Please, tourist, don't even try." But at least he smiled when he said it!)

I spent the afternoon walking in the woods outside of town (saying "dobrý den" to the people I passed and getting the same in response, fantastic!) then checking out a bit of Děčín's castle and downtown. Then, when I was too cold to stand it anymore, I repaired to a café to catch up on my travel journal and drink very strong Czech beer.

I arrived back at the station to find that the train did not go when I thought it did, and since it's winter and the days are very short, it was already dark out, in a not extremely populated neighborhood, so I was pretty much stuck in the station until the next train.

I looked around, eying the slightly tough-looking guys hanging around, contemplating the possibility of buying a coffee to have an excuse to sit down at some seats by a bakery inside the semi-cold of the station building – but then I would have to sit down near the slightly tough guys, since that's where the seats were. Luckily...

...there was also a restaurant in the train station. I pulled the door open cautiously, not even sure if it was open, and inside found a different world: an explosion of Christmas decorations, music blasting, the staff all young and laughing and seeming to be having a riotously good time back in the kitchen. I bought coffee (and then also tea, when the train was late arriving) with my leftover Czech change and spent a surprisingly pleasant couple hours, considering that I was killing time in the train station. And thinking, in Germany, it wouldn't be this pleasant. In another country, it might be pleasant, but it wouldn't be this cheap. Or laidback.

Then I got my full moon walk after all (it had been cloudy the night before, when I was out in the middle of the countryside and it ought to have been perfect for full moon viewing), strolling up and down the platform, waiting for the train. As I wandered back and forth, I sang Marketa Irglova songs to myself because she's the only Czech singer I really know, and I'm kind of a dork like that.

So. In summary, not only did I get to do some wonderful hiking in two different countries, I also devoured nearly all of a 400-page novel, did a bunch of my own writing and even caught up on sleep, because really what else is there to do at a hostel in the middle of nowhere, after the sun sets at 4:30 p.m.?

All signs suggest I should do this more often. 


Pictures! Click on the image to go to the album.

Sächsische Schweiz

Monday, December 2, 2013

A Song for Syria: Kap Writes Milo

My friend Kap (the one who took me with her to Senegal last year) wrote an article about my friend Milo (the one who wrote a wrote a beautiful song out of his frustrations with the situation in his home country of Syria) for the Exberliner, Berlin's English-language magazine. It addresses the wider issues of Syrian refugees in Germany, as well as Milo's specific story.

Here's the article. I'm super proud of them both!

(Oh, and that "dinner party in Prenzlauer Berg" where Kap and Milo first met? Yeah, that was my dinner party. I feel kind of famous now!)