The Coming of Winter

The Reichstag at night, seat of the German Parliament

It's been quite a month here in Berlin. I would like to apologize for how overdue this blog is, but I've been occupied these past couple of weeks, and I don't mean that my room has been filled with people living in tents and banging on drums. Just this week I submitted an application for a scholarship from the DAAD: Deutsche Akademsiche Austausch Dienst, the "German Academic Exchange Service." Although the economic crisis has made scholarships like this more competitive than ever, I still hope that I will catch a break and get a chance to return to academia. It would allow me to pursue an MA in European-American Studies at Universität Regensburg, which is an internationally accredited degree program examining the relationship between the named continents from an interdisciplinary perspective, principally historical, political, literary, and social. Regensburg is a city of 150,000 (30,000 of whom are students) located in north-central Bavaria on the Danube river. The city is one of the best-preserved in Europe; it was relatively undamaged during WWII and it's medieval town-center is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The cities icons are it's Gothic cathedral and medieval stone bridge. In spite of it's quaint setting, the university has a reputation of being very welcoming to international students, part of a larger project by the state of Bavaria to gain more international recognition for its institutions of higher education.

"There is a life after the Euro!" The Greek-centered crisis
in the European Union leaves many Germans wanting to
return to the Deutsche Mark on the anniversary of
German reunification

This has also been a month of milestones. Caiomhe took her first steps which I was privileged enough to witness, and now she is assuredly but cautiously walking all over the place. It was also recently the 50th anniversary of the Cold War standoff that saw American and Soviet tanks lining up only a couple hundred meters across from one another at Check Point Charlie, an event preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unification Day also came to pass this last month, a national holiday that is no where near as big a deal as our 4th of July. When I went out take part in the festivities, I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the celebrating or lack thereof. Germans are still fairly uncomfortable with any expression of nationalist pride, and the holiday itself is a compromise. The day the wall actually came down, November 9th, also happens to share the date of Kristallnacht "The Night of Broken Glass" which resulted in the ransacking of Jewish homes and businesses, as well as the burning of Synagogues across Germany and Austria. Therefore, the day of formal unification, which happened on October 3rd the following year, was chosen. Rather than a day of barbecuing and fireworks, it is mostly a day people spend quietly with their family and friends. There were some food/drink stands as well as a stage with music around around the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate in the afternoon, but the mood was still pretty reserved. By the time night came, it was all over, so I walked around and took a few pictures of Berlin at night. In another big milestone yesterday, Ireland took the Guiness Book of World Records title for having the most people dressed up as Leprechauns in one place at one time, reclaiming the title from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and beating their count of 224 with a crowd of 246. Maeve called me to ask if there was any reporting on Irish radio of the official visit to Berlin, the preparation for which she has been working on for sometime. I unfortunately had to tell her that the live coverage of the Leprechaun story seemed to be overshadowing it, eliciting some weary laughter from her end of the line. 

A contradiction on four wheels: a Mini-Cooper SUV

Here are some other amusing stories from the past month. In Sweden, a moose was stuck in a tree after it got drunk eating the fermented apples that were still clinging to its branches and had to be removed by members of the local fire department. This is about as exciting as life gets in Sweden, once a land of fearsome vikings, now known for modular furniture and generous maternity leave. Here in Berlin, I came across another interesting animal-related story. When riding on the U-Bahn (subway), you can stare at other passengers, which is quite normal and disconcerting for people who aren't used to it, or you can look at the Berliner Fenster, meaning "The Berlin Window." It is a screen in the subway car that has a slide show of short news summaries covering headlines, sports, entertainment, the weather, and also includes a daily cartoon from around the world, a quote of the day, and advertisements. I probably average more than an hour a day on the U-bahn so I consider myself to be a Fenster connoisseur. This past week they had a slide about a local resident/weirdo who has been walking around with a goddamn parrot on his shoulder for 30 years. The last line of the story read "women may have come and gone, but the parrot has stayed with him." Really, a guy who constantly has a big, mean, squawking bird on his shoulder can't hold on to a girlfriend? It would be hard to get through an intimate evening with your feathered friend constantly whistling and butting in asking for crackers. I would like to see profiles on the women who actual gave this Jack Hanna wannabe a shot. My first instinct would be cat-ladies, but I think there would be too much conflict between the animals. Second guess would be a girl with dreadlocks and Birkenstock sandals, but the bird would probably start tearing away at her hair in an attempt to build a nest out of it. The only possible explanation would be a woman resembling the Chiquita banana lady, except for she has a bowl full of birdseed on her head instead of fruit. I think the true test of a man's appeal to the opposite sex would be if he could get women with a parrot on his shoulder, but I don't even know if a Jude Law or a George Clooney would be up to the task. Johnny Depp might be able to because of the success of those cheesy "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, but then we just get back to the question of what kind of women would feel comfortable with the possibility of being exposed to bird lice. 


The days are getting colder and shorter, about 40 in the day and freezing at night. This means that one of my favorite Berlin activities is becoming increasingly difficult to attend, Mauerpark Karaoke. As you may remember from a previous post, Mauerpark or "wall park" sits on the former border of East/West Berlin and used to have the wall going right through it. On the outside of the stadium there is an outdoor theater capable of holding a couple thousand people, and on Sunday afternoon it is full of spectators for karaoke. The size of the audience, although friendly, means that the people who sing are (with some occasionally painful exceptions) pretty good. Others include stag or hen parties from England, and the singer has often been up for a day or two and is a few hours from crashing. There is one man who is a fixture of this Sunday afternoon ritual, a resident of Berlin named Detlef. He is a short, stout man known for his thick grey beard, usually clad in some kind of hokey-looking sweater. Every week he is met with thunderous applause as he sings the same song, "My Way" in German. I took a video of his performance a few weeks ago but am having trouble uploading it so I will attach a link to one of his YouTube videos instead (yes he has several). At the beginning of the video he says, "in daily life I actually have little contact with people, there I keep mostly to myself, and meeting new people and relations between people are something that isn't really in me. So it is something I can do better in performing before people." I encourage you to watch the entire video as he gets more and more into his performance as the song builds.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5CNW5RBirE