1 Year!

Hi,

I have trouble believing it, but, according to my calendar I arrived in Germany a full 13 months ago. I was meant to write a big retrospective piece on the anniversary, but (as usual) it slipped my mind, and here I am a month late.

When I arrived, I remember I had 2 days of sunny weather and then winter hit with a vengeance. So this year, the weather has definitely taken a turn about the same time. I took this photo in Berlin about a month ago, when it was still warm.

It was an omen of things to come. Last week we turned the central heating on in the flat, I take my jacket with me whenever I go outside, leaves are rapidly yellowing and disappearing. Xmas decorations are appearing shop windows, and at street festivals they are serving gluhwein (mulled wine).

Although it feels like this year has passed really quickly, when I think back to what it was like at the beginning, I realised that it has really been a long time. Those early days I was really completely clueless about everything - German, supermarkets, buses, Berlin, my project, Germans. I feel like the language thing is the biggest thing that's changed. I'm definitely not fluent, or even competent, but I can survive using just German now. When the German knows that my German is rubbish, and they are very patient, we can usually understand each other. Living with 4 Germans definitely helps (although soon to be 3 Germans and 1 American), at parties and things people tend to speak German. So yea German has gone from a 1/10 to maybe a 5.5/10, which is good enough for me at the moment.

In other news, I'm worried I may be becoming a little bit too German. The things that I scoffed at when I first got here now seem pretty normal, like the not-talking-to-people-at-the-busstop kind of culture. And before it was "Wow, beer is really good and cheap here", but now it's "Beer is really bad and expensive in NZ". And I get really annoyed when a bus is more than 2 minutes late, just like a German. I also was talking to someone (German) at work, and he said he went to England for 6 months, and when he came back, people would complement him on how good his German was because he had picked up an English accent in his German. So I hope that I don't talk funny in English now. I think I definitely talk slower, and don't use as much slang, because otherwise noone would understand anything I was talking about.

But you'll be able to find all of this out first hand in a couple of months - I've booked tickets for Christmas and New Years in lil old NZ - arrive on 18th December, leave 11th January. Will be great to see all of you again, and escape another white xmas!

And just to pad this out a bit, here are some random photos from the last few weeks:

TV Tower in Berlin.

7m high puppet in Berlin for Reinunfication Day

7m high puppet's feet

Heidelberg, a city in the South-West. Was there for a conference/meeting thing.

Hope you're all going well, send me an email or whatever to let me know what you're up to!

Adam

Recent news

Hi everyone.

For once I don't have to start off with an apology about forgetting to update for too long!

Last week, Sarah came to visit on her way from Holland to Czech Republic. We went for a paddle in a flatmate's canoe on the river. This is my flatmate Maraike, she came too.

We also went to my first ever football match. It was in the Olympia Stadium, with seats for 100,000 people it was a real experience. Luckily the people we went with in the end weren't supporting the home team. This was good because the guests won (3:2, all the goals in the second half). They really get into the supporting their team thing here, at least half the people were fully decked out in team colours with flags and stuff. I was totally wearing the wrong colours, though...

This weekend has been a bit more relaxed, I went to check out a big (>50,000 people) anti-nuclear protest in Berlin. 300 tractors had driven across the country for it. Lots of music and people with "Atomkraft? Nein danke!" [Nuclear power? No thanks!] stickers. I found it strange how everybody seemed to be pushing a slightly different agenda. Some people were saying it's not about the safety, it's about what you do with the waste. But then so many people had Cheronobyl (etc) signs. One guy had a very cryptic sign which said [Nuclear symbol] + CO2 = [Skull]. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't nuclear have pretty low CO2 emissions? Anyway, I'm not going to really give my opinion on the issues, because to be honest, I don't know. Both sides of the debate have so much propaganda out there I don't know who to believe.

Anyway I've gotta go, hope this finds you all well.

Adam

I'm alive!

I know it's almost been 2 months since my last update, but I am still alive! Bad friend/son/grandson/etc!

So I can't quite remember everything that's happened in those 2 months, I'll try to catch you up on the highlights. As a warm up, here are a couple of pictures from Berlin I took when Nicky and her Mum/Dave were visiting.

Cool sand sculpture competition. Really amazing.

Gedächtniskirche (memorial church - it's hard to see but it's only half a church because the other half was bombed) and its memorial thing. I think I've already posted a picture like this, but no complaining!

The next story is my knee. Most of you have already heard, probably, but just to get everyone up to speed: ~6 weeks ago I dislocated my knee cap playing volleyball at work. I've done this 2x before, so this makes number 3. After number 3, they recommend surgery to adjust the alignment of the kneecap to prevent the same thing happening a 4th time. So 3 weeks ago I had the op, spent a week in hospital, 1 week at home, and have been back at work for a week now. It's healing well, and should be running around in a month or so. Here's an MRI scan (from the side of the knee) that I think looks pretty cool.

And last weekend, after my compulsory 1 week at home, I got to go on our annual lab retreat where we all go away for the weekend and do team building stuff. Was good fun, if a little frustrating sometimes not being able to join in with all the sports. Here's the whole team (this is actually only half our lab, it was split into 2 weekends).

Hope you're all well, let me know what's up in your corner of the woods.

Adam

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.