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green_amber.. no I didn't go to a BDSM goth unlaut-heavy-metal club in Kreuzberg, but boy I might as well have..
My legs are COVERED in giant mozquito bites from the Biergarten in the Tiergarten night - also with huge black bruises (from swiping at mossies? from banging into suitcases in a fury at Heathrow? who knows). My back hurts from the weird single beds in my guesthaus, my wasp stung right arm (from the Turkish restaurant meal night - not their fault, Berlin was plagued with wasps, the wee shites)is only just beginning to stop looking red, angry and inflamed, and I slept for FOURTEEN HOURS last night, having become so cumulatively exhausted by yesterday that I couldn't even follow the plot of Harry Potter, let alone make sense of any more panels on "Post-Hegelian Con/Fusion in Inter(Sex) Policies: Embodied or Gendered Epistemologies?". I ended up coming home 2 days early, hence via Heathrow (nightmare), Woking (no coach tickets left to Southampton) and rail from there (gedrunken students verdamnt). I somehow ate nothing between 9am and 7.30pm that day, at which point I downed a roll, a coffee, and unwisely, two glasses of Riesling and did most of the above travelling, thankfully, in a three-valium haze - it was a miracle I didn't end up in Kowloon really. It was an experience, it was really was. (And I broke my comfy walking shoes..)
Despite all this I had a really great time in Berlin:)
I had no idea how BIG the place was. Eight times the size of Paris, said guide book; nonsense, said the locals. Oh well. I hadn't perceived of Berlin as a city on water (ie, the kind I like) but it is; riverside restaurants, boating lakes in the gigantic parks, bateau-mouche tours (we stole the Paris word - never did find out the German) and most peculiarly, fake sandy beaches and deckchairs wherever you went in bar/cafe land. Gloriously comfortable slouchcouches (pig-German for sofa, and my favourite new word) outside every cafe, on trailers parked on the road if necessary. And, oh god, the food - chanterelles were in season, and half the restaurants had special chanterelle menus. Chanterelle soup with dumplings - divine. Wiener shnitzel, hot and golden-puffed from the pan. Paper-thin fresh made tarte flambe (again what in german? flammekuchen?) with sour cream and bacon, or chanterelles and rocket and parmesan. The ubiquitous just-fried potato fritters, with the even more ubiquitous apple sauce. Potatoes , a lot -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ang_grr would have been very happy. Berries, himbeers, erdbeers, the inevitable kaffe and kuchen - my favourite was the blueberry torte in the famous Cafe Einstein. And if we'd had time, Turkish and Japanese and Thai and you name it, best restaurant culture I've seen since, ooh, Chicago? I suppose I should have cooed over the beer but I'm not that way inclined - I did get excited at the availability of Austrian reds though.
Yes I (we) did give an actual paper, at an actual conference. My co-presenters were American , Canadian and Puerto Rican, so they had an excuse for being punch-drunk with lack of sleep and jet lag; I had just got up up ridiculously early, and was still recovering from Teledu:). Afterwards, we went shopping for Goth shoes and kitscherama, and lay around Andrea's luscious hotel room, making up ever sillier German word trafficjams and reading out the madly and maddeningly more-postmodern-than-thou titles from the Giant Read Me (sorry, conference programme book). Eventually Andrea fell asleep in the middle of reading out the German word for nostril.
There were 3,000 people attending the Law and Society conference, and 40 concurrent streams, and it was more like a cross between Glastonbury and the World SFcon than any law conference I've ever been to. There were people I knew there from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Strathclyde, LOndon, Sydney and Vancouver but most of them I never found. There was a massage and a beer tent for heavens sake!
Just as with Worldcons, it took me till the last day to work out how to make the conference work for me: sit drinking coffee in one spot, and everyone you've ever known will come by and say hi; walk from your hotel via the riverbank, not noisy Friedrichstrasse. I got lost, endlessly; one day I walked cheerfully for twenty mintes in the absolute wrong direction before even realising it. My comrades were still happily waiting when I arrived for lunch 45 minutes late :) It had that healthy outdoors blitz spirit, and I went to the panel on feminist implications of search engines and got invited to conferences in Montreal, Yale and the Basque country, so hell, my time was Not A Waste :)
Berlin isn't loveable - too big, too rough in places - but it's endlessly dynamic and fascinating (even in the rain!). The old Jewish area is now an arty radicalised cafe area, with bits reminding me of the graffitoed squatting Berlin of Run Lola Run. Other parts are like a Hapsburg Harrogate, curving Georgian crescents that rekinded me of Edinburgh and Bath, neo classical architecture - how was all this not carpet-bombed flat? My bateau mouche trip finally showed me the contrast of West Berlin (we were at Humboldt U in the picturesque former East, with most of our wanderings in Mitte ie "centre ville" but still former Eastern bloc in the main.) The West was a wonderland of glass and bizarre modern buildings, a pregnant oyster here, a Jimmy Carter smile there.
We were staying a stone's throw from Checkpoint Charlie but I never did get to the museum. maybe next time. In fact my culture hopping was restricted to the outside of the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial - neither, to my relief, made me cry. And though I went to PostdamerPlatz, I didn't see German Legoland either (sorry,lostcarpark!) I did instead however see Harry Potter and the OOTP in (a) German and (b) with the 20 mins 3D at the end , and GOD, it was fab!! She says smugly - as it's only getting to the UK IMAX es in August I believe..:)
My legs are COVERED in giant mozquito bites from the Biergarten in the Tiergarten night - also with huge black bruises (from swiping at mossies? from banging into suitcases in a fury at Heathrow? who knows). My back hurts from the weird single beds in my guesthaus, my wasp stung right arm (from the Turkish restaurant meal night - not their fault, Berlin was plagued with wasps, the wee shites)is only just beginning to stop looking red, angry and inflamed, and I slept for FOURTEEN HOURS last night, having become so cumulatively exhausted by yesterday that I couldn't even follow the plot of Harry Potter, let alone make sense of any more panels on "Post-Hegelian Con/Fusion in Inter(Sex) Policies: Embodied or Gendered Epistemologies?". I ended up coming home 2 days early, hence via Heathrow (nightmare), Woking (no coach tickets left to Southampton) and rail from there (gedrunken students verdamnt). I somehow ate nothing between 9am and 7.30pm that day, at which point I downed a roll, a coffee, and unwisely, two glasses of Riesling and did most of the above travelling, thankfully, in a three-valium haze - it was a miracle I didn't end up in Kowloon really. It was an experience, it was really was. (And I broke my comfy walking shoes..)
Despite all this I had a really great time in Berlin:)
I had no idea how BIG the place was. Eight times the size of Paris, said guide book; nonsense, said the locals. Oh well. I hadn't perceived of Berlin as a city on water (ie, the kind I like) but it is; riverside restaurants, boating lakes in the gigantic parks, bateau-mouche tours (we stole the Paris word - never did find out the German) and most peculiarly, fake sandy beaches and deckchairs wherever you went in bar/cafe land. Gloriously comfortable slouchcouches (pig-German for sofa, and my favourite new word) outside every cafe, on trailers parked on the road if necessary. And, oh god, the food - chanterelles were in season, and half the restaurants had special chanterelle menus. Chanterelle soup with dumplings - divine. Wiener shnitzel, hot and golden-puffed from the pan. Paper-thin fresh made tarte flambe (again what in german? flammekuchen?) with sour cream and bacon, or chanterelles and rocket and parmesan. The ubiquitous just-fried potato fritters, with the even more ubiquitous apple sauce. Potatoes , a lot -
ang_grr would have been very happy. Berries, himbeers, erdbeers, the inevitable kaffe and kuchen - my favourite was the blueberry torte in the famous Cafe Einstein. And if we'd had time, Turkish and Japanese and Thai and you name it, best restaurant culture I've seen since, ooh, Chicago? I suppose I should have cooed over the beer but I'm not that way inclined - I did get excited at the availability of Austrian reds though.Yes I (we) did give an actual paper, at an actual conference. My co-presenters were American , Canadian and Puerto Rican, so they had an excuse for being punch-drunk with lack of sleep and jet lag; I had just got up up ridiculously early, and was still recovering from Teledu:). Afterwards, we went shopping for Goth shoes and kitscherama, and lay around Andrea's luscious hotel room, making up ever sillier German word trafficjams and reading out the madly and maddeningly more-postmodern-than-thou titles from the Giant Read Me (sorry, conference programme book). Eventually Andrea fell asleep in the middle of reading out the German word for nostril.
There were 3,000 people attending the Law and Society conference, and 40 concurrent streams, and it was more like a cross between Glastonbury and the World SFcon than any law conference I've ever been to. There were people I knew there from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Strathclyde, LOndon, Sydney and Vancouver but most of them I never found. There was a massage and a beer tent for heavens sake!
Just as with Worldcons, it took me till the last day to work out how to make the conference work for me: sit drinking coffee in one spot, and everyone you've ever known will come by and say hi; walk from your hotel via the riverbank, not noisy Friedrichstrasse. I got lost, endlessly; one day I walked cheerfully for twenty mintes in the absolute wrong direction before even realising it. My comrades were still happily waiting when I arrived for lunch 45 minutes late :) It had that healthy outdoors blitz spirit, and I went to the panel on feminist implications of search engines and got invited to conferences in Montreal, Yale and the Basque country, so hell, my time was Not A Waste :)
Berlin isn't loveable - too big, too rough in places - but it's endlessly dynamic and fascinating (even in the rain!). The old Jewish area is now an arty radicalised cafe area, with bits reminding me of the graffitoed squatting Berlin of Run Lola Run. Other parts are like a Hapsburg Harrogate, curving Georgian crescents that rekinded me of Edinburgh and Bath, neo classical architecture - how was all this not carpet-bombed flat? My bateau mouche trip finally showed me the contrast of West Berlin (we were at Humboldt U in the picturesque former East, with most of our wanderings in Mitte ie "centre ville" but still former Eastern bloc in the main.) The West was a wonderland of glass and bizarre modern buildings, a pregnant oyster here, a Jimmy Carter smile there.
We were staying a stone's throw from Checkpoint Charlie but I never did get to the museum. maybe next time. In fact my culture hopping was restricted to the outside of the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial - neither, to my relief, made me cry. And though I went to PostdamerPlatz, I didn't see German Legoland either (sorry,
lostcarpark!) I did instead however see Harry Potter and the OOTP in (a) German and (b) with the 20 mins 3D at the end , and GOD, it was fab!! She says smugly - as it's only getting to the UK IMAX es in August I believe..:)
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 10:57 pm (UTC)They rebuilt it all.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 11:15 pm (UTC)It got a lot more flattened than London did. They did do things like pack the interior of the Pergamon with earth to try to protect those built exhibits they couldn't move, and the larger structures did stand up remarkably well. But take the Dom - the cathedral - that has bomb damage down in the crypt.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 11:20 pm (UTC)Sometimes buildings got lucky. In the cathedral in Freiburg, there's a wonderful aerial photograph taken just after an RAF bombing raid. You can see this row of bomb craters, flattened buildings radiating out from each, with one single gap in it. At the centre of the gap? The cathedral's tower. Somehow, that bomb missed, or failed to go off, or whatever.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 11:23 pm (UTC)The modern building point is fascinating. But it didn' stop WG !
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 04:54 pm (UTC)But I still have more than 600 pages to go. :)
Kowloon...rhymes with Moon
Date: 2007-07-30 12:59 am (UTC)Enjoyed reading the description of your conference travels. Thanjk U!
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 04:52 pm (UTC)> Post-Hegelian Con/Fusion in Inter(Sex) Policies: Embodied or Gendered Epistemologies?
If you academic types stopped supporting postmodernism it'd go away. Ideally.
> flammekuchen?
Near enough and one of the few good things about German food IMHO - although down in Bavaria they are very, very good at roast duck...
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 05:56 pm (UTC)One of the things I like about my neighborhood here in Seattle is that it reminds me a little of Berlin, partly because of the canal.