Monday, January 10, 2005
Music: LSO to chill out by...
Grabbed tix to a Sunday Night concert at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra. They played Schumann's Violin Concerto which was so pleasant that Marc nearly fell asleep to it (had it not been for a well timed interjection of the timpani), Mahler's Fourth. It was an excellent concert, and post our visit to Berlin's Jewish Museum it had me thinking about what German-Jewish influences pervaded Mahler's works... Wagner and Hitler may have hated it, but the audience at the Barbican loved it...
Berlin, Berlin
Have made mental note to write more about Berlin experiences, and will continue to do so in the next week or so. I was too tired to write on the plane home as had spent a full day shopping for new clothes and food and then had to deal with the infamous 10pm plane trip out of Berlin. The flight was fine but it was late, and everybody is crowded and you always have to push and shove before getting on... Just the usual inconveniences of flying budget really... Being a non-EU citizen they like to stamp your passport - on the exact page that they stamped your arrival too - which I have not experienced in France, Belgium or Italy... It all takes time...
The Shopping
We had bought so much that I bought an extra cheap suitcase back. It almost made the flight back home - half the handle broke off and had to wrestle with it a bit from there. For a brief moment I thought about kicking cheap half-handled luggage down a flight of stairs but thought that would not be a good look at Luton Station just before midnight...
Shopping at small stores in Berlin was great... but some of the larger stores such as Peek and Cloppenburg had interesting payment issues in that they only took American Express and then forced you to queue twice - once to pay in cash and the second time to get it (ever so slowly) in a bag. Still they had good discounts on the ground floor so everyone put up with it... The other option was to shop somewhere else, which is what the sales assistant told one man who complained saying he had never seen such a shambolic system... It was almost like being in London!
Actually Credit Cards were not that all that popular at shops and restaurants... Which is interesting since in London you can throw twenty cards in to pay a bill and nobody cares...
Our hotel was just around the corner from Ka De We so we visited there a few times and on our last day did some shopping at the Food Hall which was so much fun I just wanted to look at everything there - including the dried pasta - since it is all very smartly packaged. In the end bought chocolates for the office which have gone down very well and a welcome change from the leftover tin of liquorice allsorts...
The Language...
Marc can speak German. I cannot. And I still cannot. But I can recognise a few more words now and by the end of the week however my pronunciation improved enough to be able to say the usual stock phrases and read things out loud. My biggest problem was the "EIs" and the "IEs" since they are the reverse of how you pronounce things in English. A few times Marc suggested that when attempting to speak German I shouldn't always speak as if I am addressing storm troopers at a Nuremberg rally as well...
Grabbed tix to a Sunday Night concert at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra. They played Schumann's Violin Concerto which was so pleasant that Marc nearly fell asleep to it (had it not been for a well timed interjection of the timpani), Mahler's Fourth. It was an excellent concert, and post our visit to Berlin's Jewish Museum it had me thinking about what German-Jewish influences pervaded Mahler's works... Wagner and Hitler may have hated it, but the audience at the Barbican loved it...
Berlin, Berlin
Have made mental note to write more about Berlin experiences, and will continue to do so in the next week or so. I was too tired to write on the plane home as had spent a full day shopping for new clothes and food and then had to deal with the infamous 10pm plane trip out of Berlin. The flight was fine but it was late, and everybody is crowded and you always have to push and shove before getting on... Just the usual inconveniences of flying budget really... Being a non-EU citizen they like to stamp your passport - on the exact page that they stamped your arrival too - which I have not experienced in France, Belgium or Italy... It all takes time...
The Shopping
We had bought so much that I bought an extra cheap suitcase back. It almost made the flight back home - half the handle broke off and had to wrestle with it a bit from there. For a brief moment I thought about kicking cheap half-handled luggage down a flight of stairs but thought that would not be a good look at Luton Station just before midnight...
Shopping at small stores in Berlin was great... but some of the larger stores such as Peek and Cloppenburg had interesting payment issues in that they only took American Express and then forced you to queue twice - once to pay in cash and the second time to get it (ever so slowly) in a bag. Still they had good discounts on the ground floor so everyone put up with it... The other option was to shop somewhere else, which is what the sales assistant told one man who complained saying he had never seen such a shambolic system... It was almost like being in London!
Actually Credit Cards were not that all that popular at shops and restaurants... Which is interesting since in London you can throw twenty cards in to pay a bill and nobody cares...
Our hotel was just around the corner from Ka De We so we visited there a few times and on our last day did some shopping at the Food Hall which was so much fun I just wanted to look at everything there - including the dried pasta - since it is all very smartly packaged. In the end bought chocolates for the office which have gone down very well and a welcome change from the leftover tin of liquorice allsorts...
The Language...
Marc can speak German. I cannot. And I still cannot. But I can recognise a few more words now and by the end of the week however my pronunciation improved enough to be able to say the usual stock phrases and read things out loud. My biggest problem was the "EIs" and the "IEs" since they are the reverse of how you pronounce things in English. A few times Marc suggested that when attempting to speak German I shouldn't always speak as if I am addressing storm troopers at a Nuremberg rally as well...
