Hurricane Festival

Hi all,

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the NZ embassy here in Berlin saying that I should be very careful about swine flu - I should keep my personal hygiene up, and avoid large gatherings of people. So me and 3 other people from work (Kate the Aussie, Dietrich and Christin the Germans) decided Hurricane festival sounded like the perfect place to go. Three days of camping with 60,000 other people doesn't count, does it?

The 60+ bands playing over the weekend included Kraftwerk, Faith No More, The Wombats, Moby, Lily Allen, Pixies, Kings of Leon, Franz Ferdinand. They were all very cool, Kraftwerk was definitely a highlight - and a bit bizarre, these 60 year old men standing perfectly still on stage in fluorescent lycra playing their keyboards. The Wombats were very good too, the crowd was really dancing pretty much for the whole set. Kings of Leon were good, but I dunno, they didn't have great stage presence I thought, they weren't much better than a CD. Pixies, on the other hand, were really fantastic.

The weather for the whole weekend was a pretty strange - it would be really sunny and hot 1 minute, then you would see these dark clouds roll in and it would rain and be really cold for half an hour, and repeat. But it was all good, better than being constantly too hot or too cold, I suppose!

Pixies playing in the sun.

Dark clouds rolling in...

... and then it rains! The people dressed in bear suits were in the middle of a soccer match and looked pretty soggy 10 minutes later.

Thanks for reading, let me know what's up where ever you all are now. I've finally invested 14 euros and got skype working (adam.idoine), add me if you've got skype.

Adam

Olympia Stadion, Teufelsberg and Karneval der Kulturen

Every time I catch a train to Berlin, at one stop they say "XXX stop, please exit here for Olympia Stadion". I always think it sounds interesting, but always have somewhere else to be. Last weekend I took the chance to check out what this stadium is all about. As is becoming a theme, I forgot my camera, but it would've been pretty hard to capture the place in photos. It was built for the 1936 olympics, and was intended to rival the colosseum. I haven't seen the colosseum, but I imagine this stadium doesn't fall far short of its goal. It was also really interesting to see the approach that was taken to the whole olympic thing - it seems like it was much more war-like, with statues of warriors and that kind of stuff everywhere. Heaps of links to Roman gladiator kind of culture. Quite a contrast to the "fair play" kind of ideas associated with the olympics these days.

From the stadium, I set out to find a hill called Teufelsberg. Teufelsberg is the biggest hill in Berlin (115m). On top there is a old US spy station used in the cold war to monitor, um..., something. Now it's all abandoned with broken windows and holes in the fence surrounding it. There's also a pretty exciting looking dirt bike track going down the mountain, and in winter there's a small skiing area. You have to be careful of wild pigs apparently, too. But none of that is what makes this hill interesting. What I found fascinating was that there's a nazi military school underneath this mountain. And on top of the school is 12 million cubic meters of rubble from the second WW. That's right, the highest hill in Berlin is completely man-made. There are trees and dirt and stuff now, but there are still bricks and concrete sticking up out of the dirt everywhere. Apparently, most cities in Germany have hills like this, Berlin has several.

This weekend, I went to the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures) in Berlin. This is a big (~2 million visitors) parade and party all weekend celebrating the diversity of different cultures in Berlin. Berlin is definitely very diverse - the parade yesterday went for 9 hours! Here are some (quite poor) pictures from there:

Can't remember what culture these people were, maybe from Peru I think.

Actually representing a culture was kind of optional, most floats were just people having fun playing music, beating drums, dancing, or whatever.

Yes, and here you have the culture of assorted animals.

Just to make you feel a little better about the horrible weather I hear you've been having in NZ lately,  just after the parade, it started pissing down like a tropical monsoon. We managed to find a spot under a bridge, and wait it out, then it was all on again.

Huddled under the bridge.

And I happened to be standing in this torrent of water. At least only my feet got wet.

That's all the news I've got at the moment, hope you are all well, looking forward to hearing from you.