Category: Travel

Disc golf in Berlin, circa 2010

Late October looking for somewhere to throw disc in Volkspark Rehberge, where I’d heard there was a course but couldn’t find anything. Eventually I found two practice holes about 100m apart from each other. It made a good course in itself if you didn’t mind throwing back and forth. At one point I ventured toward the corner of the park and launched the disc from a mound in which some kind of plaque was planted, a trio of old men on a nearby bench staring as if to say “was zum Teufel macht er da?” Our subsequent walk up the ridge followed a path to a beautiful fountain — a monument to the founders of Volkspark Rehberge.

Beyond that there was a slope that — had it been part of a course — would have surely been considered among the most beautiful fairways in European disc golf. Sadly, there was no pin in sight.

But with a green like that, who needs an actual basket?

Bright and stormy

After hijacking my own blog with some civic discussions and brief peeks into how money controls even the smallest governmental bodies here in America, I wanted to get back to my roots and look at a few photographs Jennifer took on a recent trip to Boston and Providence.

Statue in downtown Boston. In the first one it looks like the lady is crying out in pain at the bird pooping in her eye socket, or maybe even tilting her head back in an orgiastic gasp of pleasure. The next one looks like Statue’s been caught reveling in the streams of bird shit and has gotten all defensive about the intrusion of privacy. But after a moment I realized it’s probably two different statues, because how could a statue lower its head, change its expression and maybe even switch its gender?

Bikers in Boston Common. Yesterday I saw a biker on 43rd in Kansas City near Brainblow Blvd. almost get run off the road by an aggressive lane-switching car. Shit like that makes me want to start a biker vigilante campaign — follow people like that driver home and, I don’t know, talk to them about safe driving + sharing the road. It’s a slow process but I think the more bikers you see on the road the more drivers will learn to live with it and even think about taking part themselves. In the meantime, honk if you’re an asshole.

A nice image from our hurricane party at the Hollenbecks’ in Providence, Rhode Island, the night Irene blew through town in its weakened but still blustery state. Providence was spared damage beyond a lot of downed limbs and power lines, but our power went out at 9 that morning and for a while sitting in bed listening to the gusts of wind looking out the window at the bending trees and swinging power lines there was a brief sense of oh man here it comes. The night before I sat at the computer and listened to this song and earlier that day Brian and his friends in the Fox Point Rounders finished their bluegrass set in a flurry with a rousing rendition of “Goodnight Irene” while people scattered from the farmer’s market to avoid the sudden downpour. We drank a lot of dark ‘n’ stormies over the weekend, which is dark rum and Gosling’s ginger beer garnished with lime. And we lit a lot of candles. As a wise hurricane survivor once said: You never know how many candles you have until a hurricane hits and you start looking in closets and drawers and find out you have a lot candles.

The rest of the photos Jenn took in Boston and Providence are here. Stop back next week for more fresh material here on the modern day lucubrations.

“Tu mesma és tua vida”



Don’t try to build in the space you suppose
Is future, Lydia, and don’t promise yourself
Tomorrow. Quit hoping and be who you are
Today. You alone are your life.
Don’t plot your destiny, for you are not future.
Between the cup you empty and the same cup
Refilled, who knows whether your fortune
Won’t interpose the abyss?

Poem by Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa) from the collection “A Little Larger Than The Universe,” which I read in one sitting in a garden that I can’t recall the name of and can no longer find on the map. All I remember is a pond, some trees and a lot of large geese walking by my bench. I took the picture at the Carmo Convent ruins in Lisbon, which was destroyed by the great earthquake of 1755 and only partially rebuilt, creating an unusually intact complex of ruins. I’m not sure who Lydia is but I felt like Mr. Reis was speaking to me. I was facing another round of goodbyes and didn’t see any point in pretending there would always be another hang with friends whenever I liked; a wedding or reunion that would magically take place once everyone got caught up or settled in. Wait around too long and you’ll wind up as withered as the Peruvian mummy in the Carmo Convent museum. She’s a beaut, all right, but no one I’d trade places with.

Dreams of public transit, part 32

The other night I was riding on a tram somewhere in Greece, and I was just about to fall asleep when I looked behind me and saw a lady checking tickets. The other passengers held out their tickets and IDs but she didn’t even look at them, just walked by each person nodding and smiling. When she got to me I pulled out a pile of expired tickets and she said something I didn’t understand. Just then we pulled up to the next stop and she asked if I would like to step out to get some coffee. I couldn’t tell if I was being fined or not, but I went along anyway. She linked arms with me and we walked to an ice cream parlor (instead of a coffee shop, as initially suggested). I told her it was my treat and we spent a good half hour deciding what to get from the hundreds of unlabeled flavors presented in the glass case. I asked if she always went out for ice cream with fare jumpers and she said she only stopped passengers on trams that were headed to the airport, or to the sea. She mentioned going to the theater next but by that point I was concerned I would be missed at home. When I told her I had to leave she didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do — I’d purchased my freedom with the price of the ice cream cone.

Teufelsberger Schloss

Though it has likely been observed and pointed out thousands of times already, it nonetheless bears repeating: the former allied spy station on top of the Teufelsberg looks like a giant cock-and-balls.

The remains of the station sit atop an 80-meter-high rubble hill in Berlin’s Grunewald forest, beneath which is buried the foundation of a Nazi officers school designed by Albert Speer. At the risk of mixing bodily metaphors, it’s hard not to wonder if the outpost’s phallic shape was designed as something of a middle finger to the Soviet forces on the other side of the city.

Sneaking into the Teufelsberg and climbing the radar towers has become something of a rite of passage for young Berliners, and a few years ago Jenny and I roamed around the premises until she got spooked by the howling sounds of the wind billowing through the torn fabric. On our visit last month we didn’t feel like trespassing, opting instead to just bask in the ballsy brilliance of this most peculiar cold-war monument.

No one seems to know what the future holds for the site, after attempts to develop it into a luxury hotel and a transcendental meditation center have long since been scrapped. Meanwhile the allure of the place only grows — an elegantly decaying fortress on the hill that is easily one of the most unusual erections in Europe.

Easter with Bonga

Jennifer and I got to Lisbon on Easter Sunday. We thought everything would be closed but there were several discount shoe stores doing a brisk business and a guy in a three-piece suit levitating above Rua Augusta.

That night we checked into This is Lisbon (awkwardly but not inaccurately referred to on their website as a “charm hostel”) where we were treated to (paid a nominal fee for) a dinner of traditional dishes and a performance of Brazilian music by a trio of guys the hostel employees were friends with. After the concert we talked with the musicians for a while and wound up accompanying them to a bar in the Alfama neighborhood, a labyrinthine remnant of Moorish times and one of the only areas in the city to survive the 1755 earthquake.

We stopped outside a door where a few people were smoking cigarettes but that was otherwise unremarkable. After Gonzalo pounded on the door a visibly drunken woman opened the door and ushered us in to a packed, steamy room where people were drinking and dancing to the sounds of some of the happiest, most uplifting music I ever heard. Two guys playing guitar and singing, another playing bass and a fourth playing percussion, if I remember correctly.

After they were finished the singer told me it was the music of Bonga, an Angolan who came to Portugal as a track star in the sixties but later turned to music, which got him in trouble with the Portuguese regime at that time. The next week I found a copy of his album Angola 74 at the Thieves Market, and was able to identify the song I heard as a cover of his song “Marika.” When you listen to it you might be able to get a taste of what for me was one of the most enjoyable Easters since the good Lord rose from the grave.

Postcards from Europaplatz

Monday mornings I teach lessons at an office park in Erfurt that always seems to be covered in fog or frost. To get there you have to ride all the way to Europaplatz, the end station on tram lines #1 and #3. Going to work at an office complex in a foggy valley at the end of a small East German city probably sounds depressing, but I enjoy it. The free coffee helps. And also knowing that even though I start at 8:00 on Monday morning, my work week there lasts only a few hours.

Across from the building I work in is a field, and on the other end of that field is a McDonalds. The McDonalds is just off a highway exit and seems fairly inaccessible by foot unless you go crashing directly through the field — a misty, frosted terrain full of burger wrappers and what look like tumbleweeds. I was pretty hungry one day and thought about making the trek, but the idea of stumbling into the foggy wilderness to get to the golden arches seemed too obvious and poignant a symbol for a lost American boy trying to get home. In those conditions the giant “M” might as well have stood for “Mirage.” So, I turned around, caught the tram back into town, and ate at the McDonalds in the central train station instead.

On the way there I saw this juxtaposition of buildings — a boxy modern structure behind a timbered house. Not a bad summing up of the architectural coexistence of the middle ages and the DDR.

And to close, a more classic shot — the Cathedral Square at a moment of extreme fog and sun, birds flying over the monument and a line of people at the Thüringer Rostbratwurst stand.

Brocken Harz club

Charging to the top of the Brocken / Where what once was broken / Can be forgotten

This fragment is my contribution to the wealth of literature about Germany’s most mysterious mountaintop, the Brocken. Most mentions include depictions of the witches’ revelry on Walpurgisnacht, such as in Goethe’s “Faust,” but I didn’t see any witches myself. Just a bunch of tourists stumbling through the freezing fog.

Jenn and I decided to visit the peak on my 30th birthday, ascending via narrow-gauge steam railway, a 19 km ride from Wernigerode that took almost two hours. Most of the journey offered clear views of the surroundings, but when we got to the top we found we couldn’t see anything. The red-and-white television tower — home of a Soviet spy station in the cold war times — was almost completely hidden from view, which was amusing considering you can usually see the thing from dozens of miles away.

Instead of scenes from Goethe’s Faust, I reflected on Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus,” which I finished reading last month. The book contains very little overt occultism, instead raising some disturbing questions about the artistic process. Must one really sell one’s soul to complete a work of true genius? Such is the case for Mann’s composer character Adrian, whose speech at the end is so tragic and ridiculous it makes the preceding 500 pages well worth it.

Me? I’d rather be a minor poet, slugging Hasseroder Pils from the platform of the rickety old train, speeding toward a dinner of farmer’s potatoes and bacon in a cosy restaurant near the town’s famous rathaus.

Thanks everyone for the kind birthday wishes (especially Private Cho calling from the Korean Border!) and I will be in touch with more e-mails and posts soon. In the meantime, you can see more pictures of the journey here.

Tear them down and paint them over

Though Berlin natives and resident ex-pats often write it off as a schmaltzy tourist attraction that hasn’t held up over the years, The East Side Gallery is still a lively, colorful representation of the city’s divided history. Last week Jennifer put together a slideshow of some of the paintings, which were created by artists from all over the world. As she said on her website:

The photographs displayed in the slideshow are not a complete representation of each section of the gallery, but instead a selection of a few personal favorites, chosen because of a particular composition or color pattern. The former presence of the wall, mentally and socially, becomes less and less apparent over time…

It’s neat to look at this over 20 years after the wall came down, especially in light of the revolutions currently taking place in the Arab world. It’s as if the same peaceful populist spirit that brought the iron curtain down has shifted to the Mideast, and I’ve noticed that people here share the excitement and are paying close attention, as are so many others around the world.

Hope this brightens your Monday, and more later in the week.

Sketches from the morning commute

* * *

After leaving the party we turn the corner to Schlesisches Tor and hear what sounds like a live gypsy band with horns and drums and everything. Inside the station, a full-blown cabaret is underway, the likes of which Berlin hasn’t seen since 1929. People lock arms and dance jigs and hoist their beers and clap in rhythm, all at 2:30 in the morning. But by the time I’ve bought a beer at the station shop, the music has already stopped. Cops pile out of paddy-wagons on either side of the station, and as the crowd boos and begins to disperse a girl hands out fliers.

* * *

On the way to catch the 4:45 a.m. train to Erfurt, I walk by the Trinkteuffel, the Kreuzberg corner bar where the patrons sit and drink their beers with the same casual nature you’d expect at a nice Sunday afternoon cafe. Further down the street I see a man slipping all over the ice, which is pretty thick at the moment. He’s having a hard time keeping his balance, and I feel sorry for him until I notice he’s just really, really wasted.

* * *

Still dark outside, and it looks like I’m the only one awake on this ride to Alexanderplatz. Everyone else is sprawled out on the benches with their eyes shut and their mouths open. When the U-Bahn turns a corner, however, I catch a glimpse of at least one other awake soul — a girl a few cars down waving her arms in half-windmills and tossing her pink-streaked hair from side to side. Nobody bothers to tell her she’s no longer at the dance club. But, nobody seems to mind.

* * *

At the back of the tram to Europaplatz, the teenage Mutti watches over the stroller while Papa strides toward the ticket machine in the front car, taking his hands out of the pockets of his black hoodie to steady himself against the swaying of the tram.

* * *

On a cold Friday afternoon on Kotbusser Dam, a girl with frizzy hair and a red-and-white jacket juggles juggling pins at the stoplight. She drops them several times but still has the nerve to jog between the cars and wave a change basket before the light changes. Nobody obliges, and I wonder if anyone else is missing the fire-breather who set up shop there last week.

* * *

Just before dawn along the cobblestone street to Südplatz, a lady in high leather boots, a ski coat and jewelry shuts the car door and steps toward the door of her building. I’m on my way out the door to work and she’s just arriving home. I know where you’re going and you know where I’ve been.

* * *

At Mehringdamm an old man in a long black coat tries to step out of the U-Bahn just as the red lights flash and atonal bleeps sound in alert. The doors close halfway on him, but he manages to free himself by prying them back open with long, spindly fingers, gasping as he steps out into the station. His face is as pale as Nosferatu, and we can’t help but think we might have just witnessed something release itself from the underworld.

* * *

A few minutes until 6 outside Leipzig Central Station, and dozens of bakery employees in red jackets huddle in clusters and smoke cigarettes outside the exits, puffing with the urgency of people who think they might be smoking the last cigarettes of their lives.

* * *

Here comes a headache, I think as I watch a trio of guys lug instruments and a mobile p.a. onto our midnight car to Kotti. But once they start playing — saxophone, melodica and beats — everyone starts clapping and singing along to “Hit the Road Jack.” Even the sullen kid across from me puts down his book and lets out a tiny smile. When someone shouts for an encore the band launches into the first few bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And when the train lurches and pulls everyone into each other, the dancing kids do their best to keep their beers from spilling.

* * *

On the morning commute, I being to realize I’m the only one on the U-Bahn not wearing a black top and blue jeans. After a few stops I start to feel like a corduroy-clad crasher of their impromptu denim convention. The jeans themselves come in all varieties: The man on my right has opted for dark and distressed, while the woman beside him sports a lighter shade of stonewashed.

* * *

Riding though the Saale in January, I see for the first time the cupolas of churches and houses of a hillside village built around a valley waterway. I marvel at how closely the buildings are intertwined with the river until I realize that it isn’t supposed to be this way; that the town is half-flooded.

* * *

As the tram nears a stop, a young couple embraces in what looks like a very passionate farewell. When the doors open, the man behind them waits calmly for the couple to finish instead of pushing his way past. It looks like they are saying goodbye for a long time, he probably thinks. But when their lingering kiss finally ends, they join hands and walk off the tram together.

* * *

Author’s note:

As a journeyman English teacher, I do a lot of transit riding. In fact, yesterday I had to get up before 5 to catch a train to the central German city of Erfurt, where I teach three classes at Siemens. I teach at different schools and businesses in Leipzig, and before moving here I had to race all over Berlin to take class, meet friends, and collect various visa papers and stamps. I can barely sit down without expecting the scenery out the window to begin moving at any moment.

What makes the commute interesting is not just the time I get to sleep, read or stare out the window, it’s the fellow passengers and people I observe along the way. The other day I compiled this little people-watching catalog from my rides to and from class these last few months. I was going to upload this from the train for extra style points but the connection on “das Internet Stick” was too slow.

This one goes out to all of my fellow U-bahn Ratzen and tram travelers, and to especially to Jenny, who has a long voyage ahead of her tomorrow to get back to her man. I welcome any feedback or and it would be extra fun if anyone wants to chime in with their own transit observations in the comments. Love, LW

The Kreuzberger Garbagegoyle

Berlin is a land of many visual wonders, perhaps none quite as simultaneously functional and artistic as this sculptural garbage can in the middle of Lausitzer Platz. We found this guy in the park where several dozen kids were playing on the swings and jungle gym. None of them went anywhere close to it, though, which probably explains why he looks so bored and lonely, snow dusting his nose and gaping mouth reeking faintly of yesterday’s stale wine and cigarettes.

Poor chap.

The Flaming Teabags



“The Flaming Teabags,” (or for you Germans, die Flammende Teebeutel) sounds like the name of a band. And perhaps it is. Or has been. Or could be. It’s also a parlour trick perfected by Till, which James documented one winter night at our flat. Note to viewers — and I mean this — do not try this yourself. Till has a touch that I’ve found myself unable to replicate, much to the detriment of the kitchen table.

Restoring Schönholz


A few weeks ago I finally went to visit the Soviet Memorial in the Schönholzer Heide in the northeast of Berlin. I first saw the landmark in the film “The Lives of Others” during the scene where the main character and his dissident friend seek out a spot to stroll and talk unobserved. I’ve been wanting to visit ever since.

Approaching the snow-covered obelisk and mourning Mother Russia statue on that gray winter afternoon proved every bit as cinematic as the scene in the film. Unfortunately you couldn’t get closer than 100 yards of the memorial because of the construction fences all around it. Stacks of tiles and scattered port-a-potties stood guard around Mother Russia, and the sign said restoration would be taking place until 2012.

Even from that distance, the Schönholzer memorial has a completely different atmosphere than the tank in the Tiergarten or the mighty monument in Treptow, which features a giant statue of a soldier crushing a swastika under a sword while rescuing an orphan child. The main statue at Schönholz is of a kneeling woman cradling her fallen son on her lap. It expresses loss and solemnity — intimations only amplified by the vacant, snow-covered surroundings that afternoon.

We walked around the perimeter but could see very little over the foreboding border wall, which still had the hooks for the banners and flags that must have once decorated it on ceremonious occasions. I wanted to sneak in, but since there are over 1,000 soldiers buried there, one must enter the place with a level of respect that is difficult to achieve when trespassing.

Still, I’d come a long way, and I didn’t think getting a closer look would cause any real harm as long as I was careful. Just outside the marble gates I found a gap in the fence wide enough to step through. I took a few steps and looked around before beating a hasty retreat, like a mouse scurrying back into its hole after getting the sudden sensation it isn’t safe. I peeked back around the construction trailer into the center courtyard. Now or never. I started back in only to look up and see this…

…a definite sign I should go no further.

So I went home. Like everyone else, I’ll just have to come back after the restoration is finished.

I suspect some of the drab, overgrown quality that attracts me to the place will be scrubbed away in the restoration process. Still, the Schönholzer Heide has been through a lot in the last 100 years, serving as a forest grounds, amusement park, internment camp, and today, a sled-friendly park sprinkled with monuments like the Soviet Memorial. It deserves to be seen in a new light.

Oranienstraße im Flammen

Here in Germany, they call New Year’s Eve “Silvester,” named after Sylvester I, who was Pope from 31 January 314 to 31 December 335. Each December 31 they celebrate the old Roman’s legacy — and the new year — by blowing up everything in sight (see my post from two weeks ago).

Below is yet another fireworks video, this time depicting a Silvester street scene on Oranienstraße, near Oranienplatz. We narrowly dodged a few rockets fired from the Kreuzberg Sportwettenbruecke, and thankfully managed to steer clear of the Mercedes that caught on fire over on Koepenickerstraße.

At midnight, under the relative shelter of the awning at the Santa Maria Mexican Diner, we sipped our beers and watched the city spark itself into a jubilant chaos. Rockets, flare guns, and sparklers, shot off by people on the streets and leaning out of upper-story windows. Quite noisy and fantastic. The only thing more impressive was the mess it left the next day.

‘Like hell comin’ out of the pavement’

I don’t upload a lot of things to YouTube, but it seems like when I do it’s always something about fireworks. Like this pyramid-of-snakes burning ritual in the parking lot at Herbert’s Mart strip mall, located squarely in the middle of Wayne County, Mississippi. While working in the fireworks stand there, Brian and I befriended a local high school graduate named Tom. Due to his athletic and amorous pursuits in and Waynesboro — most specifically that very strip mall parking lot in which we sat and drank beer — Tom had been dubbed “The King of Herbert’s Mart” by his peers. A widely recruited placekicker who was injured early in his senior season, Tom spent most of his time drinking beer, getting in fights, cruising the strip and fixing cars at WalMart. He was a welcoming and friendly guy, and told some amazing stories about life in Wayne County, which he called “The Land of Dreams.” I’ll share more about him another time. For now, some footage of the aforementioned smoldering snakepile, with commentary by the King of Herbet’s Mart himself…

Reichenberger Gasbeleuchtung

Walking down Reichenberger Straße, Adam and Rasto fall into a debate about whether the lamps are gas or electric. Adam says they are gas, and Rasto doesn’t believe him.

“Gaslamps have a certain sound,” Rasto says. He stops next to one of them to listen. “It sounds like gas,” he says skeptically.

We walk another block.

“If it’s gas, you should be able to make them turn on or off by kicking them,” Rasto says. He kicks a dark lamppost and watches it come on. He kicks another one and nothing happens. “It could be gas,” he says.

We keep on walking.

Adam then points out that gas lamps give off a warmer, more amber color. Rasto agrees and goes in for a closer look, stepping on top of a snow-covered bicycle to hoist himself halfway up the lamppost. He shakes the pole and watches the lamp-light flicker, his eyes lighting up with this brightness of his discovery.

And he yells:

“It’s fucking GAS!”

(photo of the Gaslaternen Freilichtmuseum in the Tiergarten, which we visited last week. More Berliner gaslamp history here.)

Schneeballkerzenlicht

For some reason yesterday I decided to carry a snowball with me onto the U-Bahn on my one-stop ride from Bülowstraße to Gleisdreieck. There were security agents in the neighboring car, and though at least one of them noticed that I was packing cold (so to speak), she probably saw I was wearing dress pants and with a lady and decided I didn’t pose any serious threat. After we got off I threw the snowball at the tail end of the U-Bahn as it sped down the tracks, but I missed.

The inspiration, I suspect, was watching San Diego’s Philip Rivers torch the Kansas City Chiefs the week before. He has a really fluid, unusual release, more like a freestyle swim stroke than the traditional QB chop. If you could throw a snowball like Philip Rivers throws touchdowns I bet you could do a lot of damage in a snowball fight.

Speaking of snowball fights, there is an unusually large one looming on the New Years horizon here in Kreuzberg. Each year the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln face off in an epic snow-down in Görlitzer Park, just a few blocks from where we are staying. You can see a great video of it below.

The coming battle may help explain why I’ve seen so many youths walking around lobbing snowballs at unarmed and unsuspecting motorists and cyclists. They are just training for the big showdown.

Adding to the martial ambience, an early-arriving pallet of New Years feuerwerk must have fallen into the wrong hands, because the Turkish kids around Adalbertstrasse have been blowing these things up at all hours of the night. The piled-up snow and apartment buildings muffle and reflect the sound so that it sounds more like heavy artillery than the bang of a firecracker. Once in a while our heater chimes in with a clicking noise that sounds almost like the rattle of distant machine gun fire.

In short, anyone who thinks Berlin is still a demilitarized city probably either isn’t paying attention or does not live in and around SO-36.

But amid the darkness and violence of the German winter there is also light.

Last week at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Jenn and I were walking around the courtyard when a man asked for a light. He didn’t look like the type who usually asks for such things, and sure enough he carried my lighter over to the staircase where his son was waiting. Together they had erected a pyramid of snowballs on the concrete bannister of the steps. The man removed the top snowball, lit a tea light, and put the lid back on. The snowball lantern gave off a nice glow, and we all stood around it and stared at it for a while. The light probably only accounts for half a percent of the ambient light you see in this photo.

But, a little bit of Schneeballkerzenlicht goes a long way.

The drunken postcard

I made this at a print-your-own-postcard booth at Berlin’s Museum for Communication. The other available stamps were something like butterflies or flaming skulls, so there was little artistic decision involved except to keep inserting the card over and over, like a carnival punch card totaling up a few too many. I like the way the bottlenecks look almost like slanted steeples with a little cross on the top, somewhere between a hangover and morning mass. Reminds me of a line from Kerouac’s “Windblown World”: ”no one has consciously realized the tremendous significance of American weekends, from proud sartorial Saturday night with its millions of premonitions of triumph and happiness, to dark Sunday night with its sweet and terrified loneliness.”

Maybe not, Jack. But they would if they tried my new line of postcards. With Drunken Postcards, you can write anyone you want exactly what you’ve been wanting to say to them, without fear of reprobation. How? Easy. They’re written in disappearing ink, and never delivered. Like the opposite of Facebook, with the same exact color scheme. Old-fashioned and untraceable except for that stack of empties next to your notebook.

Not convinced? I can hardly blame you. I do, however, have an experiment which you are welcome to try at home — something I hit on entirely by accident last month while writing a stack of postcards that I’ve yet to buy postage for. If you want to dream about someone, write them a (real) postcard just before you go to sleep. Does it work? It did for me, but I’m curious what kind of results others come up with.

Flights resume at Tempelhof?

For a few minutes last Sunday, it appeared as if Tempelhof Airport had been reopened for flights. The silhouette of a jet plane soared through the sky, acrobatically weaving between and flocks of birds and Drachenflieger*.

Tempelhof Airfield is the decommissioned city airport and site of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949.  These days Tempelhof is more Seurat painting than former airstrip, having been turned into a massive park grounds following years of civic discussion and city planning. While studying in Berlin in 2008, my brother James wrote his final paper about the future of the airport, which officially closed in Halloween of that year.

Meanwhile, the plane had arched one last time around the structure itself before crashing softly into the grass, just meters away from the couple operating it by remote control.

Still, a glorious flight.

*the German word for kite, literally translating to “dragon-fliers.”

(music plucked from some strumming in my flat on Saturday night after seeing Jenn off to her flight to London at Schoenfeld)


The musical German language

German has not traditionally been regarded as the most euphonious language. I’ve heard people refer to it as harsh, guttural, and “a good language to yell at someone in” (true, although I think it’s a great language to talk to cats in as well). Most likely these people probably just aren’t listening to the right person speak German — or better yet, sing it.

Compiled here are 20 of my favorite German-language tracks from the past 40 years, ranging from hip-hop to prog to dance pop and indie rock. I think this playlist provides an idea of the diversity and versatility of the language, as well as the broad range of musicians in Germany, many of whom which are still performing.

This list is by no means a definitive representation of recent German music, and the main thing these songs have in common (aside from the language) is that they are all personal favorites. Many of these songs were passed on to me by various friends throughout the years, and this mix is dedicated to them. Please feel free to chime in with your own favorite German-language songs, and perhaps I can post an even more eclectic sampling in the next few months.

Enjoy the mix, and Liebe Grüße aus Berlin.

LW

Back in business

Where you been?

It’s a question I’ve gotten a lot in the past several months. People pulling up my old blog on their browsers only to find stagnant posts quietly filling up with spam comments. Ever since I started working on kcfreepress last year I let my own blog drift until I finally had enough of the web in general and decided to get into the alternate career options of fireworks selling, editing manuscripts and teaching English.

But I’m not going to lie. I miss blogging. Posting. Writing. Whatever you want to call it. Keeping a blog kept me connected to Kansas City and the places I traveled in between. The challenge of coming up with interesting material was always made easier and more fun by having other friends’ posts to link to and comments + art + music to share.

That dialogue is what’s inspired me to open up this site on WordPress. It will serve as a portfolio of sorts but mostly a blog including the usual observations, photos, conversations, inanities, links, things of that sort. Longer essays and published pieces will be viewable in the “writing” tab on the main page, which I’ll link to when something new goes up.

In the meantime, Jennifer and I have moved back to Germany while I do my teacher certification course and some freelance work. Been fun so far, and there’s lots of creative types here in Berlin. Already met one guy near the Admiralbruecke who was up for some harping. You can view our somewhat one-sided duet below. Cheers and thanks for checking out the new site. LW

To Germany

Jenny and I are headed to Berlin, Germany next week.  The move is a step toward something different, not better or worse, though we hope for the best.  I will be taking a class through the month of November to become certified to teach English as a second language abroad through a program called CELTA, which stands for the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults.  Jenny will be continuing her photography through new and similar means as she practiced in Kansas City.  We both view this move as a progression, and a step toward honing our creative impulses into a logical outcome.  Me with my writing and Jenny with her photographs.  Feel free to drop us a line or an email at lucashwetzel(at)gmail.com and jennywetz(at)gmail.com.  We will also have an online number (local to KC) that we can send you via email.  We want to extend a warm thank you to all of our friends in the Kansas City and Lawrence area.  We would not be what we are without your encouragement.