Hello again from Berlin in winter, where you can have any weather you want, as long as it's gray. Seriously, this is not a good place to be if you have Seasonal Affective Disorder.
It's been three weeks since my last update. My aspiration had been to post something every other week, but sometimes life just isn't that exciting. We've been living a very everyday kind of domestic life these last three weeks - which was our plan; after all, you cant just be a tourist for 4.5 months. Well, maybe I can, but not the whole family :-) So, with that in mind, here are the latest highlights...
Elly on the swing; I promise, the swing did not clock Aidan in the head on the return
Aidan's Uebernachtung
Aidan has now settled into his school, and he is completely immersed in the German-speaking environment. How immersed? So immersed in the language that he's started playing in German at home. Bear in mind, this is the child who just uttered his first complete, unprompted German sentence only last month:
This video is probably only interesting for grandmothers, aunts, and linguists
School has been great for him. The highlight so far has been his Uebernachtung, German for sleepover. We dropped him off one Thursday morning. The teachers took the kids first to Potsdam to the see a dinosaur exhibit at the Biosphaere, and then back to the school for a sleepover in their classroom. When Aidan first heard about this he had no interest at all, but by the time it came around he was ready and eager. We spent the evening catching some live music at a local bar, and despite our vigilantly monitoring our cellphones for a "He's unhappy, come get him!" phone call, it never came. We picked him up the next day at noon, and he'd had a great time.
(In May, after we return home, the class will be going off on a five-day trip. Five days, no parents, just the kids and the teachers. I have no idea how much they pay their teachers here, but it must be good.)
"Touch My Monkey!"
As mentioned in my last update, Aidan now has a German babysitter. On her first day watching him, Jen and I attended a free concert at the Universitaete der Kunste, an arts university across the street. It was an excellent concert, but I couldn't help laughing at the guy who introduced it:
Okay, so it wasn't actually Dieter from Sprockets, but it was exactly the kind of black-turtleneck artsy German caricature that Mike Myers was parodying. Ah, for the days when he was still funny...
Speaking of the arts, one big event in Berlin of late was the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival. It's one of the biggest film festivals in the world, and Jen, being a film scholar these days, took full advantage, seeing 5 films over its two week span. I joined her to see one, Deutschland '09, a collection of 13 short films on the state of Germany today, by prominent German directors. It was pretty cool, and now I can say I've attended a film festival. We caught no glimpses of Brangelina, but the local press was so excited about all the celebrities that watching the news was almost like watching CNN.
Aidan didn't actually attend a movie, but he loved the Berlinale bear
Museum musings
I continue to get my culture fix a couple of times a week. I've now visited most of the major galleries and sights that I've wanted to see in Berlin. Mostly they've been good, with lots of excellent modern art. A few have been less impressive, one in particular as noted on my miscellaneous rants page. But that's the exception. The rest have been uniformly good. I finally had the chance to check out the Reichstag building, with its architecturally impressive dome:
Nice picture, too bad about the jerk with the camera...
Last week I took in the more somber aspects of Berlin art, culture and history. I started with this stretch of the Berlin Wall:
This was a striking sight for me, as it's the first stretch I've seen that isn't painted with some form of artwork.
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On the left is the famous East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the wall, and the one most well known for artists having used it for their own representations of what the wall meant; on the right is a segment that has been uprooted and relocated near the city center. These are interesting in themselves, but the stretch I saw last week is much more representative of how it looked when it served as a border - cold, imposing, forbidding, ominous.
Near to this stretch of the Wall is a war memorial, where they have on display a screened-off basement that has an unexploded allied bomb from WWII:
This is defused and preserved as a historical artifact. However, even now, 60+ years later, it is not unusual for allied bombs to be discovered around Germany.
Finally, this week I checked out the Topography of Terror and the Jewish Museum. The Topography of Terror is an outdoor installation, tracing the rise of the Nazis. The Jewish Museum traces a thousand years of history of Jews in Germany - culminating, of course, in the brutal history of the 20th century. I have some side thoughts on this experience on my miscellaneous rants page (see Museum crowds). However, those thoughts aside, this was pretty stirring. The building for the Jewish Museum is another example of interesting architecture in Berlin. I don't enjoy the luxury of a helicopter, so I'll use an image I found on the web:
It's designed to disorient, and that's what it accomplishes. My mood was somber as I walked through, following the extended stories of persecution and marginalization. Afterward I also took some time to walk by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:
On this day I was immersed in history. But one thing seemed to tie together the past and the present - the metal detector and x-ray machine at the entrance to the Jewish Museum, and the police stationed outside. There's also a synagogue down the street from us, which has police permanently stationed outside. And so as I walked though this thing that people want to call history, my mind could never quite escape the fact that even though it's history, it's clearly not yet in the past.
So, that was my last few weeks of artistic and cultural enrichment. At some point I want to try to tie together my thoughts on this city, but right now I'm still trying to figure it out.
"Heist, Heist Baby"
So, one last Berlin note before I end. It turns out that we are living in a crime ridden neighborhood of Berlin. First it was a major art heist two streets over from us, and then more recently a jewel heist at KaDeWe, the snootiest department store in town (and the largest in Europe). We, of course, also have much priceless art:
Hopefully we can keep it safe from the great criminal masterminds of Europe!
That's all I have for now, so I'll sign off with a few more videos of Aidan:
A decidedly muted, a cappella rendition of his ABCs
Breakin' 2: Aidan Boogaloo
Bye for now, from our happy home in the decidedly complex metropolis of Berlin...