Posts Tagged ‘travel’

From garden-fest to work.

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005

The end of this year’s leisure season has come. The future months will show if it came just on time or too late… I am seriously behind schedule with my dissertation therefore having at least several weeks of highly concentrated work in front of me – including a disruption caused by our college’s conference in October.

To smoothen the switch I took a relatively early train from Buchholz to Berlin. The hope is that I will only need this day for going from feeding the washing machine, re-organizing my stuff, staring mindlessly into thin air, distributing and caressing birthday presents, updating and synchronizing my computers, eating homemade plum pie, feeling disoriented, going through accumulated mail and odd household jobs via the fearsome afraid-to-start-working procrastination to actual page-production mode. The updating-my-blog phase is now done with at least.

ICE 1 version 2.0.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

Finally. My biggest gripe with the German railway – there are no power plugs in the first generation of ICE trains – seems to be in the process of being removed. In a recent announcement the Deutsche Bahn has stated that the first train with a new interior design has entered service on the fith of August. The rest of the fleet will be upgraded until 2008. Marvellous news. They will switch the interior design to be similar to the design of the third generation ICE trains which is my favorite design in the last fifteen years or so: comfortable seats, enoughs plugs and a more open feel. I hate the old seats which have enormous unmovable armrests. Made me feel like sitting in a cage or in a surgery seat put into upright position. I will post a new entry as soon as I have entered the first of the renovated trains (the first one is ICE 787 running the route Hamburg to Munich).
Mehr Informationen und Bilder.

Unwetter und fliegende Zelte.

Monday, August 1st, 2005

Foto von unserem Platz in Montbrun an der Tarn - nach dem Unwetter wieder in Ordnungoh lala! ‘eute Abend ‘atten wir ein ge’öriges Unwetter! Sturmböen sind durch’s Tarn-Tal gefegt und haben das Zelt von Andi und Tini (inklusive Tini) fast in den Fluß gerissen. Von Ollis Zelt, dass ich mir für diesen Urlaub geliehen habe und das vorher noch unbenutzt war, sind zwei Bodenlaschen einfach abgerissen. Glückerlicherweise hatte ich vorher schon die gesamte Verspannung angebracht so dass das Zelt nicht auch davongeflogen ist. Vor diesem Ereignis war ich von dem Zelt ganz positiv eingenommen. Nun allerdings muss ich sagen, dass es wirklich zu riskant ist, mit billigen Zelten in den Urlaub zu fahren. Die Nähte und der Stoff (es sind auch noch zwei andere Teile etwas eingerissen) sind einfach nicht stabil genug, um widrigen Bedingungen, wie sie auch in nicht-extremen Klimazonen immer wieder vorkommen, zu widerstehen. Qualität ist gefragt – wenn wir nicht dagewesen wären und es gleichzeitig auch noch geregnet hätte, wäre es schon möglich gewesen, dass das Zelt samt Inhalt (das heisst auch diesem Laptop) völlig hinüber gewesen wäre. Gute Zelte und ordentliche Heringe sind also eine sinnvolle Investition. Auch sinnvoll ist es, bei auch nur ein bisschen zweifelhafter Wetterlage die gesamte Verspannung anzubringen und darauf zu achten, Heringe tatsächlich fest einzuschlagen.
Dank einer hilfsbereiten und mit Nähzeug ausgestatteten Bernerin hier auf dem Platz konnte ich Ollis Zelt immerhin wieder zusammengenähen – sollte besser halten als vorher…
Schon kurios: der Sturm kam von einen Moment auf den anderen und hörte nach ca. 3 min auch schon wieder auf – vorhersehbar war der hier unten im Tal nicht. Glücklicherweise ist hier auf dem Platz niemand körperlich zu Schaden gekommen. Einige Zelte und ein Wohnwagen allerdings sind hinüber.

Night, sky, creek and good food in store.

Wednesday, July 27th, 2005

Currently, I am waiting for Tini to return with a key for the car, in which my bluetooth dongle is lying safely kept away from my hands. It might be considered to be a downside to have to check your mail while you’re on vacation, however, it also makes you reconsider the advantages and disadvantages of modern technology from a different angle to be writing an entry for your blog while sitting under a sky full of stars, hinting at the existence of the milkyway, after having eat excellent french food with a decent Pinot Noir that has been made only a few miles away in Beaune. I think I like that. And right now, it doesn’t feel to much like an intrusion of bad high tech into a relaxed camping setting. The keys are back…

Nature, Norway & no news.

Thursday, June 30th, 2005

I am sorry to tell you that for the next two weeks I probably won’t be able to post entries to this blog. I will leave Oslo for Kristiansand tomorrow. Starting there, the Bornholdt familiy and yours truly will travel up the west coast of Norway for the next two weeks. I am looking forward to do some hiking, having good food, playing board and card games, reading novels, and working a tiny bit on my dissertation. And all of this offline. :)

Bicycles for everyone.

Monday, May 23rd, 2005

You might think that this is an utopian program. You’re wrong. If you would have been to Copenhagen you might know that you just need a 20 Kroner (about three Euros) coin to get yourself a public bicycle. What is even better, you will get the coin back when you reattach the bike to one of the many stations in central Copenhagen. This is what we love about Scandinavia. The bikes are, of course, not high-tech or as speedy as the DB bikes in Berlin, Frankfurt, and in other major German cities. But they are free and you don’t need a mobile phone and a credit card to use them. We had a nice time riding with the bikes through Copenhagen, looking at the sea, visiting the Experimentarium and exploring the different bros of Copenhagen.

Picking up the threads.

Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

There is a lot of stuff that should have been posted here. I’ve seen several movies – the new Woody Allen Melinda and Melinda, Willenbrock starring the down-to-reality Axel Prahl, and Million Dollar Baby by and with Clint Eastwood. All of these movies are worth a visit. Another thing which is always worth a visit is the beautiful city of Hamburg. I was lucky and had the opportunity to be there last weekend. The weather was absolutely perfect. I visited several friends, strolled along the Elbe, met Kerstin who was able to leave Kopenhagen for the weekend, together went to and enjoyed Anja’s, Anke’s and Heike’s 90th birthday, made a gorgeous two hour revival bicycle tour through the spring-blossoming western vicinity of Buchholz, spent a few hours in a school sports hall watching kids play handball, and did my share of sauna-ing. Perfect weekend, indeed.

Last Saturday, I went to a party in Tini’s and Andi’s house in Kreuzberg (happy birthday Tini!) which had a pretty scary motto: Pimp your Kopf. Inspired by the idea Marc gave me, I took out scissors and cardboard paper to cut myself a Mitra. Mitra? Yup, and thats why I was greeted by a crowd of drunken Erasmus students shouting “Paparazzi!” It took me more than a few minutes before I overcame my confusion about the fact that I did not carry any cameras with me but people still kept on saying “Paparazzi!” to me and enjoyed themselves tremendously. Could they interpret the white hat as a cook’s hat, perhaps the cook of the excellent Italian restaurant here in Prenzlauer Berg that is called Paparazzi? Finally, I figured it out: they were saying “Papa Ratzi!” – and quite correctly they did. After this obstacle to mental relaxation on the part of yours truly was overcome, the same had a very good time…

Well fed and educated.

Friday, April 1st, 2005

Back again from the land of classic profiles. We had a great time, met many nice people, saw a few piles of stone, and got to know quite a few new and delicious dishes and beverages. Want to hear an anecdote? Let me think… Kerstin made an observation that has good anecdotal value: Here in Germany, dogs usually do live their lives accompanying the humans they belong to. They walk around with them, they sleep in the same houses, they eat food that is served them personally. In Greece, there is not only a human population in settlements, there is also an almost independant population of dogs. They hang out with other dogs, they eat with them, sleep in packs, trot along the trottoir with other dogs and generally ignore humans (except for trying to pay attention to cars and other dangers). Funny to watch them be dogs that are different from local dogs. Doggier, I would say. I also felt less threatened by those dogs and I saw fewer piles of dog shit in Athens than here in Berlin.

Urban life, rural life, and piles of stone.

Friday, March 18th, 2005

Kerstin and I are leaving Berlin today. We are going to make a trip to Greece to visit Eleni (and Tom!) lasting until the end of this month. Therefore you are probably not going to see any new entries before the beginning of April (when I will be quite busy because of the upcoming conference in Darmstadt). Ah, Greece. Never been there before. Just finished reading Mary Beard’s The Parthenon – a very accessible and entertaining cultural history of the most famous building in the Acropolis, and of the conflicts concerning it’s material and symbolic heritage. However, we won’t be visiting too many ruins. Things that seem to be more interesting to me are everyday life, hiking in spring-enlivened nature, getting to know Athens, and, of course, eating lots of good food.

Conservatism and critique.

Saturday, December 11th, 2004

This week we talked about Richard Sennett‘s Corrosion of Character in our seminar on the diagnosis of capitalism in the 21st century. It has been a while since I last read Corrosion of Character, and over the course of the last years I seem to have forgotten some of the central arguments he made and some of the terms into which he molds his critique. Here, I want to focus on two terms in particular:

drift. I think this term describes the feeling many people experience living their lives without a firm anchor very well. Some kind of unknown but forceful current takes you into a direction, carrying you to a place that is not known, and, although appearing on the horizon, might never be reached because the currents have changed again, taking you to through murky waters to some other place. Will I be working in Berlin or in Darmstadt in 2006? Or maybe in some other city or even some other country? How long will I be there, what will I have to do there, whom will I (still) know and work with? What will my perspective be then? Will it actually be connected to what I am doing today, or will I have to work in a different sector? I will surely try to row and set sail to get to particular places, and I may know how to hold a certain course. But I am not sure if the drift will bring me to where I will go, or if it is me, and I know that the drift will have a much stronger influence on other people than it has on me.

corrosion. I realized how well this term works today, especially if one imagines the corrosion of character as the corrosion of a car’s body: it will begin slowly, eating away the metal structure under the finish. After a while the finish cracks, the fabric of the masks we want to wear and play with (comp. Sennett The Fall of Public Man) becomes threadbare, making it hard to maintain the images we want to create of ourselves. If the corrosion proceeds the structure itself becomes more and more fragile, and finally prone to collapse. Such an imperiled character might not have the strength to build up enough resistance to the forces of a capitalist economy that pushes and tears in several different directions.

In the discussion it also became very clear that Sennett is not formulating his critique from a postmodernist perspective. He wants to argue for a stabilization of characters, for anchoring them in some firm ground, for providing them with a coherent narrative that enables them to formulate their own desires, norms and positions; he does not argue for an urban guerilla that is always changing it’s shape, that is radically localized and fluent, appearing at unpredictable times and locations. I think that there are some convincing reasons for doing this, for taking this conservative position – a position that is probably based on his conception of the antique greek polis as he develops it in Stone and Flesh and some of his other works. The postmodern position probably also has its place. However, to me it also seems to be an elitist and group specific perspective: it relies on a group of actors who have to be highly qualified, highly mobile, independent, skilled with modern technologies and generally living a life-style that by its definition is restricted to a small minority of the population (a group, it might be added, that also relies on distinction from “the rest” of the population to a very high degree, even if it may sympathize with the poor, the homeless, and the disadvantaged.)

Just in time.

Sunday, December 5th, 2004

When I arrived in Torp Airport thursday afternoon, the world was blanketed under snow and the twigs of the trees were collecting frost out of the air. On Friday the temperatures slowly began to rise, and Kerstin bought her new skis. Yesterday the temperatures were slightly above zero; Kerstin and I went out to actually do some skiing. Today it is even warmer, though it should still be possible to do some nordic skiing around Sognsvann, where Kerstin is living. The forecasts say that for the next few days the temperatures will stay above zero – I must say that I would have been disappointed if I would have arrived on a day when the snow was already melting, somehow that just takes the beauty away…

You can call me Confusious.

Friday, October 15th, 2004

No, this is not the first sentence of a novel that I am writing. Though it would actually be a good first sentence. Why would I like this sentence but still not use it in a novel? Well, the first person who guesses correctly will be invited to a free beverage of her or his choice!

Instead of a famous novel I present you with a short anecdote from the daily affairs of yours truly. Currently I am in Oslo – in the train from the airport to Oslo, to be exact – and sitting in this train comes as a surprise to me. This morning I thought that I would instead be sitting in a train from the airport Berlin Schönefeld to my humble apartment in Prenzlauer Berg right now. Well, it seems that I got something about the today’s date wrong. As the check-in lady of Norwegian told me with a hearty laugh, my flight will be leaving tomorrow, not today. Seems I got something wrong about today’s date and the date written on my ticket. Fine, this is funny, and I like a good laugh. However, if the lady would have known how I came to Oslo she might have been even more amused, more amused by the exact same amount that I have been more frustrated…
The thing is, when I sat in the train to Berlin Schönefeld Thursday last week, I was a bit less relaxed than I am now, and would most certainly have refrained from writing down anecdotes. I was quite anxious instead. The Tram had been late before I entered the S-Bahn to the airport. The S-Bahn was delayed even more. Minutes were passing quite quickly, the train finally arrived, I was running to the airport with a big load on my back, arrived 30 minutes before take-off, and they did not let me check in anymore. No hearty laughs there. So, last week, I missed the flight that I was supposed to have taken. (I had to pay the full price for a new ticket the following day – Norwegian might be a cheap airline, but it certainly is not a very flexible airline.) This week I am a day to early. *sighs* What does this tell me? Traveling by train is better than traveling by plane. Another possible conclusion would be that it be more comfortable if I knew when to be where and what to do there instead of just drifting through life.

Refreshing.

Saturday, September 18th, 2004

Last weekend I’ve been to my homestead Buchholz, where we had our annual graduation meeting (Abitreffen) – this time with the participation of two of our former teachers, which was really nice. After the meeting we spread out into the Buchholzer Stadtfest, trying to make the best of bad DJs and lackluster dance settings, and succeeding. After that I spent a few days in Kiel. The weather was most excellent: lots of wind and sun, and a short thunderstorm, all very matching to the coastal city style. The German Historian’s Conference was taking place there too, so I took the opportunity and listened to a few talks. Historians seem to be a bit older on average that sociologists, at least those that go to the biannual conferences of their respective discipline. Even more striking, though not particularly surprising, is that historians actually wear their name badges the whole time. Nerdy historians.

Closing book covers.

Friday, August 20th, 2004

Ah well, summertime is reading time. Especially when you are travelling, and most particularly when you are on the deck of a ferry slowly shipping you from Frederikshavn to Oslo, and the weather is fine. Under these circumstances I was finally able to finish some readings which I have begun a significant amount of time ago.
Even before entering the ferry I was able to finish reading The Human Stain by Philip Roth. That was a good book, and, as everybody says, his language is well crafted. I might want to add to that this praise is especially justified because it is crafty without being overly concerned with displaying craftiness. Nonetheless, I wasn’t really gripped by this novel playing in a college setting. It seems I did not really connect to the characters in this book. Even though I do work in such a setting.

In contrast, I was gripped by several of the short stories in the collection of Dostoevsky‘s early stories which I read over the course of the last year or so. The story which I read on the ferry is called A Little Hero. It has a touching romantic ending, and it is both lighthearted and enlightening. A story of the first awakening of love in a boy’s heart.

After finishing this classic work, I embarked on making myself to the spoon – as we say in German. To the spoon? How? By reading the most recent pocket book by Max Goldt: Wenn man einen weißen Anzug anhat. People who know Max Goldt know that the spoonishness doesn’t stem from carrying around a book written by a bad author, instead the spoonishness manifests itself in spontaneous laughing attacks suffered by its readership – evoking raised eyebrows and whatnot in listening range of the poor reader a.k.a. spoon.

And now, I am reading Krokodil im Nacken by Klaus Kordon. A book about a man who wanted to flee from the German Democratic Republic with his family. Much of the story is set in East Berlin, which makes the book an interesting read for me. I will tell you more when I am done reading it (which might take a while, since it has almost 800 pages… ).

Getting reorganized.

Monday, August 2nd, 2004

Yesterday evening I arrived back in Berlin after a 12 hour trip from Darmstadt via Leipzig to Berlin – there have been quite a few traffic jams on the autobahn. Makes one remember quite vividly, why traveling by train is a Good Thing. There was a lot of comment spam – most of it generated yesterday though, so I hope it hasn’t been indexed by search engines yet. Now I have to rent an apartment for when we visit my brother’s wedding, organize other stuff concerning the wedding, write a few mails regarding college seminar organization, try to find somebody to rent the free room in our apartment to from now to September, get my article published, try to get my diploma published, and, of course, work on my dissertation, i.e. read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and analyze my recordings.

The college’s workshop was excellent, we managed to get quite some stuff accomplished for the people who presented their material, though we had a hard time agreeing on the procedures for the conference we will host in 2005. The chalet was wonderful and the view we had from there magnificent. I am also pleased to report that my knees managed to cope with the downhill part of the one hiking tour that we made on our free day.

Been busy, having visitors.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

Last week I had a presentation at the post-grad college (which went reasonably well, as I might discuss in more detail in another post), over the weekend I’ve been in Hamburg, and yesterday I came back together with my mom, whose Windows machine I am currently de-sassering… Soon!

Jolly good.

Thursday, April 29th, 2004

Nobody told me that the rapeseed fields would be full of blossoms already. An unexpected shock. The bright yellow of the rapeseed blossoms is particularly pleasant when seen together with meadows full of thickly orange-yellow dandelions. This makes the train ride an experience to be enjoyed even more than usual. The only side effect of this sight that is not 100% good might be the fact that concentrating on the papers which I have to grade is not really made easier when your view tends to wander out of the window…

Man glaubt es nicht.

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004

Wie schwer es ist, ein Surf&Rail Ticket zu bekommen, wenn eine der Verbindungen zu den typischen Pendlerzeiten sein sollte. Doch heute ist’s mir gelungen! Ich bin also von Mittwoch bis nächste Woche Freitag in Darmstadt. Hoffen wir mal auf einen schönen ersten Mai in Südhessen…

No elks, only eggs.

Wednesday, April 14th, 2004

Back home now. We did not see any elks in Sweden, though the area where we were surely felt like this would be more than a remote possibility. However, we heard that five elks have been shot there recently, so the chances to see one were somewhat smaller. In addition, the terrain is well wooded and heavily hill-ed which made our field-of-elk-detecting-vision small.
I want to emphasize that we did not go to Sweden to see elks though, and, furthermore, that I fulfill my duty in the distinction business by telling you that I disapprove of elk sticker and memorabilia in almost any form.
I hope that I soon find a slide scanner to batch scan the pictures I took there and post them on the net, but I fear finding and getting access to one will take me at least two weeks from today. Perhaps Kerstin will be faster than that and present a few movie clips of our trip.

Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2004

This is where I am these days. Leaving Darmstadt last Friday I went northwards with my brother and his fiancee to celebrate my mum’s birthday this weekend. Since the semester is over now, I took the chance to stay in the vicinity of Hamburg for a few days and visit some dear friends whom I have not seen in a while. Internet connection time is scarce therefore, time for writing blog entries even more so, which is why you haven’t read any news for a while. Not that I don’t have anything to tell! I’ve seen Lost in Translation, Mystic River, and (on DVD) Baise Moi, and I want to write at least short reviews for them all, so keep a look-out.