Sometimes things are that much better when you stumble on them by surprise. While we were traveling recently, S’s friend Ricardo took us along a walk near Lugano to a little town called Gandria. We got there in the middle of a local concert by a mandolin group. It was very cool, and that much more so because we just happened on it. Take a look:
Gruppo Mandolinistico Gandria
At the time, I thought the song was some Viennese waltz, but I have since learned that it is Sobre las Olas (Above the Waves) by Juventino Rosas. For the whole story of our trip to CH, venture to the home of the Super Babe.
I have been neglecting the blog once again, but when you see this video that I have compiled from all the traveling recently, you will understand. Ahh, all these places!
The “longest beer garden in the world” is happening right now just down the street from our house! It’s the International Berlin Beer Festival, going on from Friday until today. We really hadn’t heard about it but we decided to walk back from downtown after seeing Transformers yesterday, and, well… you just don’t miss a mile of beer. We’ll probably take a little more time to check it out today, but we took a little video yesterday and I thought I would share. Brings back memories of Radio Daze at the Oktoberfest in Nashville!
We took another video of the band doing that classic German biergarten tune “Take Me Home, Country Road.” To which I link you without further description, here.
The Band Director Guy recently posted about mashups, which are songs pieced together from the audio of two different songs… often very different songs. He gave a couple good examples — I particularly liked the JayZ/Verve mashup of Dirt of your Shoulders/Bittersweet Symphony (on YouTube) and also had to give classic props to the Justin Timberlake/Sugar Hill Gang mashup Rock your body/Rappers Delight (Radio Blog). In his comments I offered up When I’m 25 or 64 done by Jonathan Coulton.
Thanks for posting that stuff, BDG! They really cracked me up. Listening to them reminded me of a different kind of music mixup where a band plays covers in a completely different style from the original. There’s one band called Hayseed Dixie that plays bluegrass covers of metal tunes. My buddy Eric from grad school used to play one of their CDs during poker nights. And I recently discovered another one (which you can hear in the youtube box below) called Beatallica. They play Beatles tunes with somewhat modified lyrics… and in the style of Metallica, of course.
It’s funny… I wanted to make a CD of them for Eric to hear when we went to Hugo and Isa’s wedding last weekend. I forgot to make the CD but when I mentioned the name of the band he had already heard of them. How is it that some people are always in the know about cool/weird stuff like this and where do I sign up?!
Hey Dude
EDIT: Good point from Mike in the comments. And I don’t have to break the Metallica theme to bring you some Richard Cheese.
No we aren’t going to Africa, at least not yet. But I wanted to share a link to John August’s blog with a movie clip from his trip to Malawi. It’s only thirty seconds but it’s riveting. Maybe that’s because Lucy and I just watched Blood Diamond on DVD this weekend, but it’s also because the kids singing in this clip are just great.
Click on the link above to go see the blog entry and I will feel less guilty for putting up the movie directly.
I’ve only learned one “cuss word” since I have been in Germany — Scheisse, which means shit. Or does it? I am starting to think that’s a poor translation. It’s in the printed dictionary, it’s online, but it just doesn’t fit what I see on the streets of Berlin. I have noticed for a while now that Scheisse is much more casual than shit in English, and I now have a perfect example.
Last week I was waiting for my train in one of the S-Bahn stations, can’t remember which. On the opposite side of the platform, the train in the opposite direction was getting ready to leave. I heard the familiar Nach Westend, einsteigen bitte (towards Westend, get on board please) and then a few seconds later zurückbleiben, bitte (stand back, please, meaning the train is about to leave). At that point, I hear a girl about 10 years old running up the steps.
Poor girl doesn’t make it on time. The little light above the door comes on and the three notes sound “doo deee doo” letting you know the door is about to close. She arrives right as the door is closing.
She is a fraction of a second late, the doors closing as she runs up to the train. She pounds her little fist once on the window and yells “NEIN! SCHEISSE!”
No one raises an eyebrow.
Maybe the translation Scheisse=shit is not wrong, but there’s some context there that’s not coming through. It goes to show how hard it is to capture one word in one language using just one word in another. The upshot of all this is that the only bad word I know is one that little girls can shout in crowded train stations. This is not acceptable.
I had another set of shifts at work last week… this time the afternoon block from 3 pm – 11 pm. Not as strange as the night shift, but still weird. It takes about 45 minutes and two trains to get back from work, but because of construction on the rail lines one night it was four trains and an hour, and Friday night it was three different trains and a bus connection in the rain. I’m looking forward to a little more normal schedule this week. The good part about the shifts was that I got more experience helping to “run the show” and at times it was fun.
There’s a lot of tedious stuff like waiting for different systems to warm up, keeping temperatures in their proper ranges, and waiting for different automated measurements to finish. But there’s also interesting little problems to solve here and there. At some point the machine was crashing over and over because one of the power supplies was going outside it’s normal current limits. There’s actually these screens full of little green lights and when something goes wrong one of them turns red and you check the name and try to figure out what the hell it is. We finally decided with some help from the expert-on-call (which means some poor guy got a call from us at his house) that it was getting messed up by lightning strikes near the electrical station which were sending noise down the line. Who knows if that was right, but after the storm passed it stopped happening so we moved on with business. You have to consider a lot of random stuff and be creative sometimes. That balances out the tedious screen-staring that is part of the job, too.
If there was an explanation for this picture that made me seem not so much like a dork I would happily give it to you. Let’s just say I miss our cat. We didn’t bring her along to Europe. She’s in a super cat-friendly house, though, so I can’t be too sad.
If this blog were a house plant, it would have died from neglect weeks ago! But it’s not so it lingers on. Lots going on with travel in the past few weeks, and hopefully I will get a chance to comment on it (though Lucy has done a great job on her blog recounting our adventures).
For now, just a couple of pictures. I have now seen the two Parthenons of the world.
Athens
Nashville
Now, I am willing to give Athens some credit for originality, but damn, take some pride in your place. You’ve had like 5,000 years to get a roofer in there.
My first “shifts” at work were this week. Being on shift there means being a part of a two-man crew that sits in the control room and runs the show. I was on the night shift this week (11pm – 7am), but because of the holiday today (Ascension Day) I ended up only having two shifts for the whole week. I remember that BDG had night shifts at a real factory job for a whole summer… much props. I can imagine getting used to sleeping in the day, but when your family and friends (and therefore the weekend activities) are on a normal schedule, I don’t know how you get adjusted.
The actual work itself was pretty boring. The system is not ready to do anything cool, and no one is around at night to make changes. We basically did “conditioning” on the electron gun which is just turning the power and the magnets on and off slowly over and over. And there is a computer program that pretty much handles that automatically.
It was interesting, though, to have the backwards schedule for a couple of days. The walk from the subway station to work was very dark and a little scary. I usually take this little shortcut through the woods to save an extra 20 seconds on the walk in, but I couldn’t even see the little trail so I stuck with the sidewalk. All the sidestreets and the woods were very dark. I kept thinking about Hansel and Gretel for some reason and wondering if that was one of those fairy tales where they changed the ending to something nice because the original Brothers Grimm version just scared the shit out of little kids. Not that getting abandoned by your parents in the woods and having to throw some crazy old lady into the fire because she’s trying to cook you is all warm and cuddly, either, but maybe that just goes to show how really dark the story was in the first place. As you can see, I had lots of time to think about important things.
Coming home was weird, too. I came back on the train around 8:30 so it was full of people going to work. I’m sure they would not have guessed that I was actually coming back from working. The bad part was coming back to an empty house (S. was already at work). Going to sleep was pretty easy for me… I was worn out. But waking up to an empty apartment in the middle of the afternoon is very weird. Next time I am on morning shift, and I think I will enjoy that a little more.
