It doesn't matter what you wear/just as long as you are there.

While all you back home are enjoying your Memorial Day weekend and donning your white shoes, we in Germany have today off to celebrate Pentecost (Pfingsten, over here). This weekend has also been home to the Carnival of Cultures, a street festival celebrating all the different cultures that have their home in Berlin.

Yesterday was the high point of the festival, with a parade stretching through much of the southern part of the city and lasting most of the afternoon and into the evening. I got there early and saw the first thirty or so floats go by, most of them followed by people dancing and drumming in various kinds of native costume. There were also a few political groups, including Greenpeace, some of whose members were dressed up as polar bears and penguins, with signs reading, "Got an iceberg?" The weather wasn't very cooperative, though - it started raining about an hour and a half into the parade - and, annoyed with the stupid-people behavior of some of the other spectators in my general vicinity, I left and headed home. (The stupidity included a women who had brought two dogs with her and was trying vainly to stop them from wriggling at the loud drumming, two women scolding the first woman for bringing her dogs, a guy behind me who kept jabbing me in the shoulder and asking me if there were more floats coming, and various drunken loutishness).

Later that evening, though, I went back and met a few friends at a different part of the parade. At this point, the displays of people in native costume had mostly been replaced by floats blaring dance music. Audience participation seemed to be the rule; behind every float, there was a group of people who just danced along with the parade. My friends and I found a float we liked and followed it to the end of the route, then went back and did the same thing with another float - one of the last ones, as it turned out. It's actually not all that easy to dance and maintain a forward motion at the same time, but we managed, with a lot of head-bopping and various waving of arms. Then, as we were heading back to the U-Bahn, we got sucked into an improptu dance party in front of a restaurant that had opened its porch up and was blaring music out into the street. The deejay kept announcing that this would have to be the last song, or else the restaurant would get into trouble, and the crowd would roar imploringly, and he'd relent. We finally managed to disentagle ourselves after about an hour and head home.

Even after the nine months I've spent here, the Germans continue to surprise me. Scenes like the ones last night make me wish I'd been in Berlin for one of the Love Parades, when the city apparently really lets its hair down.

Tempus fugit.

As of today, it's been exactly one year since I graduated from college. And what a non-collegiate year it's been.

Best of luck to the class of 2007!

Lights! Action! Death! Screaming!

Last Saturday, the Staatsoper here in Berlin put on a production of Manon, and projected it live onto a big screen in the square next to the opera house. I was one of the twenty thousand people to show up and get the chance to stand for four hours, craning our necks to see the screen and read the supertitles. We were packed in pretty tightly (at about thirty minutes into the second half, the man standing behind me tapped at my shoulder and hissed that I needed to move back, he couldn't see any more. I was a little bewildered by the suggestion that I had moved forward at some point, since I thought that I hadn't had an opportunity to budge since intermission. Also, he was wearing a really stupid hat).

But, in general, people were pretty good sports and listened attentively. What I know about opera in general would have trouble filling a thimble, but I enjoyed the production. The cast seemed to be in good voice, especially the male lead, who was played by an understudy and clearly belting his heart out. He got a big roar at the end. Daniel Barenboim conducted, and during intermission he came to a window and waved, and we waved back and cheered for him. Various city bigwigs were also there, including mayor Klaus Wowereit, and there were stands selling beer and snacks.

We didn't have to pay anything to watch the opera, but there were raffle tickets for sale to help pay for the clean-up - the unlucky workers who would have to pick up the beer cups and napkins that people had left on the ground. (Digression: the Germans are much more environmentally conscious than most Americans in most ways, and it's something I admire about them. But they seem to have much fewer qualms about littering than we do, which I remember as one of the major evils that we were warned against in grade school. Most Americans I know will walk for a mile with a piece of garbage in hand, searching for a garbage can, rather than toss it on the ground). Anyway, littering bothers me, and I found myself having a typically American response to the idea of the raffle. Look at the European Way, I thought - everyone makes a mess, then gives money to a supervising organization, which then employs people to clean up the mess. Why doesn't everyone just keep their money and throw away their own goddamn garbage?

But anyway, like I said, I enjoyed the evening, and wobbled away from the square with stiff legs but a sense of contentment when the last bows were finished. And then I went dancing, just to continue the musical feel of the evening.

In which we shed fifteen years and whine our heads off.

It's raining again.
I know it's good for farmers,
but I think it sucks.

To the transporter room!

So, today is my sister Annie's 21st birthday. It's times like these when I wish that someone would hurry up and invent the teletransporter they use on Star Trek. It would be so handy (once they'd worked out the safety kinks) to just be able to beam over to Chicago and rematerialize in my mother's living room. Annie and I could head to a classy bar, get a picture of her triumphantly flashing her I.D. at the bouncer, and catch up over a few of the fruity cocktails she likes.

Because the great scientific minds are worrying about other things these days, my birthday greetings will have to be made via my stubborn phone here, where apparently the loved ones at home can only get a vague impression of what I'm saying (Happy Earth Day!). And a post on my blog where I get to mention how awesome she is. Which she is. Happy Birthday, sis.

What year is this again?

So I just booked a ticket to Ireland for the week in July between my last day at school and my flight home, and the e-mail notice informed me that my ticket would be mailed to my mother's address in Chicago, which I'd given them as my credit card billing address.

A paper ticket? Who does that?

(Updated 5-15-2007: And then they sent me an e-ticket after all. I'm confused.)

Nuts.

I feel like I just got over the cold I had a month ago, the one that came to Switzerland with my mother and me and led to a lot of concerned "hmm"ing on her part, and now I've got that familiar scratchy-throat feeling again.

Of course it's my fault - we had two weeks of beautiful weather here in Berlin, the kind of weather that makes me joyfully stick my boots away in my closet and wear my sandals everywhere. I was especially glad about open-toe season because, about a month and a half ago, my left boot started to come apart at the sole. Being too cheap to buy new boots, I applied some duct tape (thank you, Garrison Keillor) and hoped that its adhesive power would last until warmer weather (it actually was quite effective, provided I was careful not to step in any puddles). So I was happy to switch to the Birkenstocks, and when it turned chilly and rainy again earlier this week, I refused to accept it or don reasonable footwear. Ergo, sniffles.

I also think this sickness has something to do with meat. I've started eating a little meat here in Berlin - not a whole lot, maybe once or twice a week. But I think I'm going to get back on the vegetarian bandwagon in California. It's healthier, and the only meat I eat here is pretty much döner and wurst, which aren't really available (at least in the same form) elsewhere.

An Americana miss list

English. English, English everywhere.
The New York Times.
Bagels with cream cheese from the place up near North and Clybourn.
The wrap I used to get at school, with Provolone, mustard, lettuce, tomato and pickles.
Watching television with my sister or roommates (am I looking forward to catching reruns of "House" this summer? Is that even a question I have to answer?)
Walking along Lake Michigan in the summer and nearly getting run over by a biker or roller blader every few minutes.
The way you can hear the "Caution, the doors are about to close!" message from the train station right next to my mother's building, even though she lives on the thirty-first floor.
National Public Radio.
Exchanging "excuse me"s with people when we accidentally bump into each other on the street (Germans generally don't; they just give you a "why are you in my *way*?" glare and keep walking).
The grid system.
Having random older women call me "honey" or "sweetheart"

And finally, in Bill Bryson's Lost Continent, where he talks about a road trip he made across the U.S. in the late 80s and the stupidity, ugliness and general excess he found everywhere, he mentions a man he meets at Mark Twain's home in Hannibal, Missouri. The man, Bryson says, spoke to him "with the instant friendliness that Americans adopt with strangers. It is their most becoming trait."

It's a beautiful day for the revolution.

Because May 1st is a national holiday here in Germany, I had Monday and Tuesday off this week. Since 1987, the year when a May 1st demostration for workers' rights in Kreuzberg, the off-beat, heavily Turkish area I've mentioned here a few times, turned into a riot, there's been a tradition of marching, demonstrating, shouting communist slogans, and throwing stones at the police on the same date.

My original plan for that day was to lie low and avoid the area. However, when I was talking to a long-term resident of Berlin early Tuesday, she told me that the May 1st chaos has calmed down in recent years, since the residents of the street most involved, Oranienstrasse, decided to try to avoid the worst of the bother by throwing a street party. "Besides," she said, "if there is trouble, it probably won't happen until after dark."

I was wearing (purely coincidentally) a red sweater with a hole in the back of the collar that I hadn't noticed until I left the apartment. The sweater was the deciding factor, I think; I figured that I was wearing a properly communist color and looking scruffy enough to pass as a member of the proletariat. So, off I went.

Most of the street was, in fact, taken up with stands selling food and drinks. The Turkish population of the neighborhood was heavily represented, but there were also people selling samosas and burritos. Interspersed with the food stands were people handing out information on various political causes; the main liberal party in Germany had a stand, as did the Turkish Communist Party. It was a gloriously sunny day, not too hot, and people were strolling along the street or sitting and having picnics. I spent a really nice hour there, where everything that people like about Kreuzberg seemed to be on display: its multiculturalism, its liberalism, and its laid-back air (I bought a soda out of a green garbage bin that someone had filled with ice).

A little later, I wandered down to the big sqaure where a communist demonstration was taking place. The demonstrators had stretched an enormous banner over the street announcing, in Turkish and German, that there would be no end to global exploitation and oppression of workers without a revolution. As I got there, a young man with an extremely shrill voice was lining people up for their march and denouncing American imperialism. Some of the demostrators were carrying flags with the hammer and sickle or pictures of Mao. Even here, though, people didn't seem to be all that worked up; there was a lot of playful shoving and people taking pictures of their friends with cell phone cameras. The whole demonstration seemed somehow quaint, in a weird way. As a member of the post-Cold War generation, I'm used to thinking of communism as consigned to history's pile of Good Ideas That Don't Work, so the sight of people proposing it as a solution for the world's evils was oddly old-fashioned, as if a modern physician were to suddenly start talking about putting a sick person's humors back into balance.

I left soon after the demonstrators started their march. I did, however, check in with the radio from time to time during the afternoon, and the reporters there kept saying that the demonstration was "still" going peacefully. It wasn't until after sunset that a few stones were thrown and a few trash cans set on fire, but all the violence seems to have been pretty quickly contained by the police. The attitude of the news I head the next day was a quiet sigh of relief that things hadn't been worse - although, as the newspaper I read rather dryly pointed out, most other Western cities would be freaking out at the idea of flaming trash cans and battles between demonstrators and police. The fact that Berliners were relieved that the violence was minimal - almost perfuntory, really - tells you something about the history of their city.

But, like I said, I missed that part. Like a good little capitalist, I was home early, mending my sweater.

Little boy, you're a man - little man, you're a king

The Germans have a special word for a song that gets stuck in your head; they call it an "ear worm," which is one of my favorite expressions ever, much better than "a song that gets stuck in your head."

I mention it because I've been going back and forth between two ear worms in the course of the past week. One of them is the opening dance number to West Side Story - I alluded to it in a conversation, and suddenly I had the Jets leaping about in my head.

The other is the new(ish) Scissors Sisters single, "She's My Man," a song I really like but can never remember the words to, so the snippit in my head begins with the last part of a sentence before the inner diva starts to bellow out the chorus: . . . "backseat of her riverboat 'cause SHE'S MY MAN . . . "

This is probably how surreal art is created - smash the two songs together, and you get gang members doing ballet on a boat in the middle of the river.