1. Do not attempt to cross Unter den Linden in the middle of Gay Pride. You are likely to get run over by someone wearing nothing but peacock feathers, and if they miss you the army of street cleaners following behind to expunge every trace of the parade's existence will definitely take you out.
2. Berlin food is frickin' awesome. If given the opportunity, make sure you order the traditional local winter stodge meal of gigantic pig's knuckle with sauerkraut and potatoes. If it is 35 degrees C and everyone else in the restaurant is looking at you funny as they nibble their salad, hold your head high; it's not like you look like a tourist, after all.
3. Germany makes a lot more sense once you realise that it has been ruled by a succession of Mad Lord Snapcases for approximately four hundred years.
4. Should this require illustration, make sure you visit Potsdam, where the Park of Lunacy (TM) built by Frederick 'Fruitcake' the Great, where you can't take five steps without tripping over a palace, will soon put you on the right track.
5. Should it be 35 degrees outside, make sure you go to the Pergamon Museum first, so you can check out the Totally Awesome Altar before eight million screeching school tours descend, and make it out of the Babylon: Myth und Wahrheit und WTF were they Thinking? exhibition with a few hours to recover your sanity.
6. Marduk dragons are awesome. I want one.
7. The Bode-Museum is a cool, calm, collected and generally fabulous place to sit and sip coffee, because the eight million screeching school tours haven't found it yet.
8. These will make you sad and are really nicely done: the Holocaust memorial, which is like a cross between a maze and a library of giant concrete books, which start small and sun-warmed at the outside and then become tall and cool and monolithic in the middle. They're in a grid shape so you can see all the way along each aisle, and it feels like you're the only person in the world until suddenly a little kid flashes past you, or you come across somebody random standing round the corner.
The little brass cobbles with names outside the homes of people who were taken away. The Empty Library on Bebelplatz which marks the spot where the Nazis burned the books, which is a room with walls made of empty bookshelves, underground in the middle of the square with a glass roof you can look down through.
9. The Communists have the best little green men.
10. Have I mentioned the food? Kaffee und Kuchen. Schnitzel of multifarious kinds. Long lazy Sunday morning brunches which start with eggs and bacon and end with chocolate pudding and jelly.
11. Should you be loitering around the Brandenburg Gate on a weekday, go into the entrance hall of the boring, concrete-fronted DZ Bank building and stare in awe at the insane architecture inside. The Norman Foster cupola on top of the Reichstag is pretty cool as well, if you can be arsed to queue long enough to get in.
12. Do not attempt to find your way around the Deutsches Historisches Museum in chronological order following the numbered signs unless you are extremely good at Sudoku.
|
Your Thinking is Abstract and Sequential |
 The more facts you have, the easier it is for you to learn. You need to figure things out for yourself and consider all possibilities. You tend to become an expert in the subjects that you study. It's difficult for you to work with people who know less than you do. You aren't a very patient teacher, and you don't like convincing people that you're right. |
or at least solemn ones.
So I spent a lovely morning lounging on my balcony and finally (finally!!!) finished Consider Phlebas, which I enjoyed very much, largely because of Iain M Banks' use of the word 'mug' which cracks me up each and every time. But, y'know, not to be too spoileriffic but the ending doesn't leave you skipping through the park from the sheer joy of being alive, exactly.
And then I went to the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn with Mum to see To Kill A Mockingbird, acted entirely by lawyers and directed by the blonde one out of Blake's 7. Which was really very good, especially since the actors weren't pros and despite the rather ropy Southern accents. (Amazingly to me, there were people in the audience who didn't know which way the verdict was going to go o.O) The kid who played Scout was *awesome*, as was the Sheriff, and now I know what Scout's fancy-dress ham costume was supposed to look like (I always wondered ^_^). But, again, skipping through the park from the sheer joy nuh-uh.
And then on the bus on the way home I thought I'd amuse myself with a little light entertainment, except I picked season 2 episode 4 of Jericho, and WTF PEOPLE HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF FORESHADOWING?? A little dramatic signalling would have prepared me better for that one @.@ Also, you get really funny looks on the bus when you had the volume set for TV conversation and suddenly they're getting noise pollution from your little tinny shotgun blasts. Not that it wasn't nice for something to happen in a TV show that wasn't totally predictable for once, but I think that was about my pain tolerance for the day.
*stomps off to watch Chocolat*
On the eighth day of May, my work ethic gave to me:
Fifty-two emails
Eighteen spreadsheets
Five presentations
Three enormous transactions at less than three days' notice each
Two client visits
One clunky Java-based database interface
No sandwiches (because the client didn't want lunch and so we were all too polite)
And a partridge in a pear tree.
*crawls into bed to die*
So this is all her fault, because she got me going about Newspeak last week (despite the fact that I haven't read 1984 for yonks), and then this week I was poking about in her extensive Georgette Heyer collection and went off on one about literary slang.
From Frederica, by Georgette Heyer, set 1818:
"Oh, don't fly off the hooks again - you can have no notion how bracket-faced you look when you get into one of your pelters! Console yourself with my assurance that if Buxted had left you purse-pinched I should have felt myself obliged to let you hang on my sleeve."
From A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, set about ten years later than now, whenever now may be, although there aren't really enough computers to get away with that for much longer:
'We came at last to a sort of village, and just outside this village was a small sort of a cottage on its own with a bit of garden. The Luna was well up now, and we could viddy this cottage fine and clear as I eased up and put the brake on, the other three giggling like bezoomny, and we could viddy the name on the gate of this cottage veshch was HOME, a gloomy sort of a name.'
And they're both using it for approximately the same purpose as far as I can see, which is to make the dialogue sound vernacular, as if you're reading a transcript of someone talking instead of an authorial account. I'm not sure also whether there's an intention to create verfremdungseffekt, to remind you that you're reading fiction and not living in the world of the book. You wouldn't think that would be Heyer's idea, at least, since she's writing a Regency romance, but I'm not sure that it doesn't emphasise the fantasy/daydream element of the books - makes them feel more like a fairytale (or at least, distances them further back in subjective time).
I certainly find it helps me enjoy her books, because it puts me in the right frame of mind to ignore the aspects of Regency culture and romance novels that would otherwise make me want to punch the male protagonist every fifteen pages. ^_^ Alternatively, they're both just authors who adore playing with language (has anyone ever read Burgess' Mozart and the Wolf Gang? One of those books (like the Baroque Cycle) that seem specifically designed to remind you that compared to the author you're really quite dumb.)
And if you cared enough to read that, here is an English to Nadsat translator which has been amusing me immensely for the past half hour. Feed it dialogue.
all the world's a stage,
and all the chellovecks and cheenas merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances,
and odin chelloveck in his raz fillies many parts,
his acts being seven ages.
This is my summer holiday.
The Telegraph the clear winner I feel.
The Guardian's effort is at least topical but hardly on a par with their occasional reports from the island of San Serif.
The Indy just doesn't get it, sadly.
And I tried the Daily Mail but I couldn't find an article that didn't appear to be a spoof.
For the real classics, have a look at this lot.
Conversation at the coffee machine this morning. One of my Sales colleagues bumps into one of our lawyers, not normally known for his melodramatic tendencies, in the coffee queue.
Sales Guy: "I don't think we need to meet later anymore, do we?"
Lawyer: ".....Are you dumping me??"
*pause*
Sales Guy: "Well, if you wanted dinner-"
Lawyer: "And I was going to put out as well!"
*pause*
Sales Guy: *slightly bemused* "See you at three then, darling."
*exeunt omnes*
and would collect if only I had the money, or a flat larger than a shoebox.
