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.

An update

Oh dear, I see that it's been three weeks since my last post. I've gotta get better at this!

Firstly, due to popular demand, I'll tell you something about what I do at work. OK, so I'm working (doing my PhD studies, with a "scholarship" thing) at the Max Planck (pronounced plunk) Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology. This is one of nearly 80 MPIs in the world (mostly Germany). In ours there are ~400 people, including me. The annual budget of these places all together is ~3.2 billion NZ$, and they are the place to do research (not just science) in Germany.

I'm working on a project involving an algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is a model organism for plants. Like people use mice to research human diseases, people also use this algae to research plant stuff, because an algae is easier to work with.

DNA is the information carried in an organism. It is the "blue print" that tells the cell if it's a dog, oak tree or worm. The information in DNA is written in a 4 letter "alphabet". In the DNA, there are sequences which describe a protein. Proteins are the things that actually do stuff in a cell, the DNA just carries the information. Proteins are not made from DNA, they are made from an intermediate thing, called RNA, which is pretty much a disposable copy of DNA. Now we get to my project, I am measuring how much RNA for every protein is produced under different conditions (like, dark, light, really light, starving, hot, cold, etc). Phew that was actually really hard to write, I hope some of it makes sense.

The annual Baumbluetenfest (blossum festival) has been on here for the last 2 weeks. You wouldn't guess it from the name, but it's the second biggest Volksfest in Germany, second only to the infamous Oktoberfest! The difference is, Oktoberfest is all about beer, Baumbluetenfest is all about wine, specifically fruit wine. It can get very roudy at night, but the 2 times I was there, the hoards of cops kept everything pretty civilised.

Here are some pictures I took in Berlin today.

Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche - half was destroyed in the war, this half has been preserved as a memorial.

This angry looking baby was on a statue of Alexander van Humboldt, I think.

Berliner Dom, lamppost and Fernsehturm.

Berliner Dom again.

And that's all I've got for ya, thanks for reading, I hope everything is good back home.

Adam

Hamburg

I decided weeks ago I needed to go on a trip somewhere for the long Easter weekend, but couldn't make up my mind where. Living in the middle of Europe, it's a pretty hard decision, with so many famous places so close. In the end I decided to go somewhere in Germany because I'm embarrassed about how little I've seen of this country I'm living in. In the end, I settled on Hamburg, because I have some friends there with a comfy couch.

In Hamburg, the weather was amazing! For the 4 days I was there, I only put a sweatshirt on once, the rest of the time, I was walking around in a tshirt. The weather in Potsdam has turned too; green, sunny, warm! But Hamburg is a really nice city, quite a bit more open than Berlin, lots of big old (not actually very old, though, most of Hamburg burnt down ~100 years ago) merchant buildings, and heaps of water everywhere. The port is the 2nd biggest in Europe, even though it's 80km to the sea! There are lots of canals and lakes in the city too - the city has more bridges than Venice, even. In the city though, the highlight was probably St Nikolai church. It was bombed in the war, and hasn't been rebuilt. The bits that remain have been preserved as a monument. The tower is still ok, and we went up it for a fantastic view of the city. Unfortunately I left my camera in Potsdam, so have no photos of the whole weekend...

What Hamburg is famous for it's red light district called Reeperbahn. Kinda strangely, it's also the place to go for drinks at night. The drinks were soo cheap it was unbelievable, 50c shots and 1 euro beers. We intended to just go for a bit to see what it was all about, but the atmosphere was really great, so we had to stay an extra couple of hours. On Sunday mornings the fish market opens at 5am, so the traditional way to have a good Saturday night is to enjoy "the Kiez" until then, stumble down to the fish market, buy some fish, go home and cook it for breakfast. Yum... We took the shortcut version, and fitted a few hours of sleep in between. The fish market was very cool, again a very nice, friendly atmosphere, and stalls selling everything, including live guinea pigs.

Sunday we went to Florian's parent's place in Bremen for a bike ride. A very European bike ride. We rode along an asphalt path (as crowded as tour de France, almost) for a couple of hours to a Bier Garten where we had a Weissbier, then rode home. I didn't think it was possible, but even wearing (SPF5) sunblock, my arms were a little bit pink that evening! Aaah and that evening we had New Zealand lamb for dinner!!! It was great, tasted exactly like back home.

This is getting pretty long, so I'd better speed up a bit! We also went to Stade for a day, which is a really cute little town built in the middle ages, I think. It has narrow cobbled streets, houses that are sometimes 20 degrees off straight, and a canal. And I also went for a tourist trip on the Hamburg harbour on a boat. The commentary was in German, but I was stoked that I could understand some of what they were saying. Very big port!

And that was Hamburg, got back to Potsdam about 2am Tuesday morning, exhausted, but had a very good time. It was the perfect break, now I have to persuade my brain that it's no longer holidays and I need to do some work!

Thanks for reading, hope this finds you all well. I love hearing what's happening back home, so send me an email or something if you've got anything exciting (or not so exciting) to report!

Adam

Another update

As usual, I have to apologise for being so slack in staying in touch. Excuse 1: Nothing very exciting has happened in the last 2 and a bit weeks. Excuse 2: I've been real busy at work. The two excuses are probably very closely linked.

I did have a free Sunday a week or 2 ago, and went to see the East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin wall that has been preserved, and decorated/graffitied/painted soon after the wall fell. Now, after 20 years, most (perhaps all?) of the paintings still visible have been restored, or painted fresh. Still, lots of them still look like they did 20 years ago. The

re's lots of new graffiti on top, I saw one tag dated the day before I was there, so it's definitely an evolving thing. Here are some pictures I took:

This is a very famous one, a Trabi (iconic East German car) breaking through the wall.

This one says something like "many small people in many small places doing many small things can change the face of the world"

No more wars. No more walls. A united world.

And this is in a different part of Berlin, showing how the wall looked when it was still in use. I thought it was an amazing contrast.

Back in Potsdam, after quite a few false starts, I'm hopeful that spring is here to stay. It was so warm today some people ate lunch outside, some even not wearing jackets! Buds are starting to burst, and a few bulbs starting to flower (see picture). I've really been hanging out for some sun, so it's great.

Hope you are all good, let me know what's up back home!

Adam