Lost Carolinian

Christmas Markets

2011-11-30T02:20:00.001+01:00

I haven't had much to post about lately as I was busy working on a big presentation a couple of weeks ago and last week I just didn't do any thing of interest. Not much happened this past weekend either, but the Christmas Market opened, and it's rather quaint. The Christmas Market is just a bunch of stalls set up outside the town hall surrounding a massive Christmas tree. There's also a couple of reindeer.

The tree managed to get into the news lately though due to unusually strong winds on Sunday and Monday. This short video shows what happened. If the time on the video is correct, I was actually in the old town when it fell, but we had already left the Christmas Market by then as the stalls were closed. I saw it today, and it's now back up, if a bit shorter.

I guess another important thing that has happened recently is that my roommates moved out. It had come up early on that all of us had requested a room to ourselves, but none of us got one due to a shortage of student housing. Deciding that student housing wasn't really for them, and since they're all going to be in Tallinn for awhile to finish their degrees, they figured the best thing to do was to get an apartment elsewhere. Of course, moving made no sense for me since I only have a couple of weeks left, but I still got what I originally wanted, which is a room to myself. So close to the end of the semester, they're probably not going to move anyone else in before I leave. Although, it presents one problem in that they took all the best kitchen utensils with them.

Riga

2011-11-12T13:42:00.001+01:00

I've been meaning to go to Riga for awhile now, but never got around to it until last weekend. Riga is the capital of Latvia and is about a four hour bus ride from Tallinn. I went with Ruchira, who had been complaining that she hadn't done much traveling since coming to Estonia.

Like Tallinn, Riga has a fairly small and compact old town where most sites of interest are located.

The building in the foreground is the House of the Blackheads, a former merchant guild that also has a building in Tallinn. The original building was destroyed in WWII and the current building wasn't constructed until the 1990's. The church in the background is St. Peter's Church. While the exterior is much different, the interior is very reminiscent of Uppsala Cathedral as it's made out of brick.

This is the occupation museum. Ruchira came across something that said they want to move it because people think it's ugly, but I really like it. It just seems appropriate. The museum is about the Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet again occupations. WWII was hard on Latvia, as it lost over a quarter of its population due to deaths from war and people fleeing from the Soviets.

Just a mural I thought was nice. I don't know anymore about it.

I found this inside Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, and I thought it was an interesting little scene. Another thing I found funny was that they have two confessionals, one for Latvian speakers and another for Russian speakers. I guess it's not really confessing if the priest can't understand you.

This is the lawn in front of the presidential palace and history museum. The small white church is Our Lady of Sorrows and the steeple in the background belongs to the Cathedral. Unfortunately, it was covered in scaffolding, so I don't have a better picture of it.

Freedom Monument was built in 1935 to commemorate Latvia's fight for independence. The Soviets considered demolishing it, but never did. It eventually become a rallying point for the renewed independence movement during the 1980's.

That evening we went to a Latvian restaurant. While the food was good, it was cafeteria style, which I don't like, and we ended up seated near a table of very loud English men. Once we got back to the hostel we were staying out, I pretty much collapsed as we had been up since 4:30 that morning.

After a long sleep, we started out the next day by heading to the Latvian History Museum. This ended being kind of disappointing. While they had some interesting items in the museum, I feel like I didn't learn anything about Latvian history. For example, they had a room full of religious artworks, but they only had one sentence about the reformation. Nothing about what happened during the reformation or the people involved. Just that the reformation took place. The only figure they talked about was the last president of pre-WWII Latvia.

Having seen pretty much everything in the old town, we started wandering around the outskirts and came across Nativity Cathedral, the main Orthodox church. It had been bothering me that I hadn't seen one yet as I knew Latvia had a large Orthodox population. There are no Orthodox churches in the old town. It was an incredibly beautiful church, but I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside.

We then headed to the National Art Museum, which turned out to be really great. Most of the artwork was what one would expect in an art museum, lots of portraits of aristocrats and landscapes leading to more modern, abstract works. However, two painters I had never heard of before really stood out. One was Nicholas Roerich, a Russian painter that spent years traveling around Asia. The other was Kārlis Padegs, a controversial artist who juxtaposed images of frivolity with images of WWI. I had already determined I wanted to learn more about him when we learned that they had a special exhibition about him downstairs as it was the 100th anniversary of his birth.

After visiting the museum, it was getting a bit too late to visit anything else, but still a couple of hours before our bus left, so we wasted some time at a frozen yoghurt shop. One thing that stood out about Riga was that since it was a city larger than Tallinn in a country larger than Estonia, it had a few more amenities than Tallinn (i.e. frozen yoghurt). However, that also came with the problem that Riga was a surprisingly expensive city. It wasn't that much more expensive than Tallinn, but it was unexpected as Latvia hasn't been doing as well as Estonia, so I expected prices to be lower.

And that's pretty much it. In some ways the trip was a little disappointing. I would have liked to have learned more about the events and people that shaped Riga and Latvia. Still, it was very nice city, even if it was cold.

Narva Weekend

2011-11-02T00:20:00.002+01:00

As for what I did in Narva. When I arrived, Alena had bad news for me, there was no heat or hot water in her room. It had gone out the night before. I figured I would survive and was glad that I chose this weekend to start wearing long underwear. We also went by the reception and picked up some extra blankets. However, it ended up not being all that cold and by the following afternoon, the heat and hot water were back on.

It was rainy the next morning, so our first stop was the museum in Hermann Castle. I took this picture on Sunday when it wasn't rainy.

Alena standing in the cold in front of the castle. The Castle was built by the Danes in the 14th Century. The Danes later sold Narva to the Livonian Order, who built the tower in the middle. The tower was built because on the other side of the river, the Russians built this:

Ivangorod Fortress.

The two fortresses are directly across from each other. If this sounds like an unstable arrangement, it was. Ivangorod constantly changed hands between Russia and Sweden for the 125 years after it's construction in 1492 to 1617 when a peace treaty finally handed the fortress over to Sweden. Of course, the Russians took it back in 1704, along with most of Estonia. So for most of it's history, Ivangorod and Hermann were held by the same country (basically whoever controlled Narva at the time), making it kind of pointless to have two fortresses there. Ivangorod remained part of Russia when Estonia declared independence (the second time, not the first time).

Inside Hermann Castle was rather entertaining. The castle is a massive structure, but they don't have enough materials to make it one big history museum. So each floor has a different mini-museum going from the Estonian language, illegal fishing, Narva's history, chimney sweeps, puppets, Narva theater, and... seasons? I'm not really sure what was going on with the last one, it was all in Estonian. The Estonian language exhibit was actually really fascinating as it showed how the language has evolved over time such as examples of how the same piece of text would have been written 200, 500, or 1000 years ago as well as showing where some of the loanwords in Estonian came from.

The weather was still bad when we left Hermann, but we decided to continue on to the churches. This is the Orthodox church.

The inside of the Orthodox church.

The Lutheran church.

It was really dark inside the Lutheran church as it has not been fully restored. It definitely gave the church an odd feeling. Although the church isn't fully restored, the bell tower houses a small museum and a modern elevator.

This is the Swedish lion. A lion statue had been built here after a successful expulsion of the Russian army in 1700, but was torn down sometime later. When Estonia became independent, Sweden paid to have a new statue erected with "Sweden Remembers" written on the back. You may notice some white smudges on the statue. Some vandal had written "Peter the Great Remembers Too". As can be imagined, a statue commemorating Sweden's victory over Russia in a city made up of mostly ethnic-Russians is rather controversial.

This is the town hall and one of only four historic building still standing in the old town. The old town had been almost completely leveled during WWII. What had once been a beautiful Baroque city, was replaced with gray, concrete structures.

We ended our tour for the day there, after relaxing for bit, we went to get dinner. We wanted to eat at a Russian restaurant at the shopping center. Unfortunately we waited too long as the shopping center closed at 8pm. We eventually found a jazz club that was open, but there was almost no one there. We met up with one of Alena's friends who was an ethnic-Russian. She also spoke German and was very disappointed with my listening comprehension. Since she was a native of Narva, she could answer a question that had been bothering me. Despite the city being over 90% Russian-speaking, all signs and advertisements were in Estonian with very little Russian. The advertisements were especially puzzling as it would seem that business would want potential customers to be able to read their signs. Apparently by law, all advertisements in Estonia have to be in Estonian. They can have Russian translations, but the primary header has to be in Estonian.

The next day, the weather was much better. We thought about going to take a look at the beach, but discovered the bus only ran once an hour and Alena had to be back to do an interview that afternoon. So instead we went for a walk around the old industrial area. I've already talked about it a bit, so we'll move on.

This is an old cultural center, abandoned after independence. It is currently held by a private owner, but apparently the owner is content to just let it sit in disrepair. It has since become a home for stray cats. Along one of the walls, someone has written a rather specific message roughly translated from Russian as, "On April 12th, 2012, Stalin will inspect this building..." and I forgot the rest, but something bad would happen if he found it a poor condition. I'm not sure about the significance of April 12th.

We went walking along the river where a lot of men were out fishing and then stopped by a cafe before I had to catch the bus and Alena had to go to her interview. She was curious what I thought of Narva. The city definitely felt depressed. Not so much in the sense that there was crime and homeless people everywhere, but more that the city just felt empty. I think there are fewer restaurants in Narva, a city of over 60,000, than in Waynesville, a city of only 10,000. There was just nothing there, nothing happening. Despite the prevalence of Russian though, I never really felt like I was in a different country, as many told me it would be like. There were a few differences, but mostly small ones, like few establishments having bankcard readers that are so ubiquitous in Tallinn. Still, despite not being a tourist city, I'm really glad I went and found the whole trip really fascinating.

Narva

2011-10-29T00:46:00.000+02:00

I went to Narva for the weekend. To Estonians, this is something equivalent to saying "I went to Detroit for the weekend." When you make such a statement, the first question isn't "how was it?", rather it's "why?" Narva isn't exactly known as a travel destination. It's now more known as depressed industrial town. But to answer "why?", because my friend Alena is currently doing research out there and I thought it would be fun to see her.

That said, Narva is a fascinating city. Over 90% of the population are Russian-speakers, over half of whom are not Estonian citizens. Narva and the surrounding area were heavily industrialized during the Soviet era and as such many Russian workers came to live in the region. This became a major point of controversy after independence as many Estonians saw the presence of Russian workers as sign of occupation and that they didn't belong there. Therefore, many ethnic-Russians were not granted citizenship. While it's fairly easy to get Russian citizenship, as many have, a large portion of Narva's population has no official citizenship. Generally these are older people who have no interest in going anywhere, but there are a number of people that refuse on principal. They see it as humiliating that they cannot get citizenship in a country they may have spent their whole lives and have no desire to claim citizenship of a country in which they never lived. This is changing as the younger generation can speak Estonian and tends to opt for Estonian/EU citizenship. Also despite the problems of being a minority, most ethnic-Russians in Estonia are quick to say that they are different than other Russians and have no desire to live in Russia.

As a major industrial center, Narva was hit hard by the collapse in manufacturing that took place after independence. The picture above is of a now abandoned textile factory. The loss of jobs meant a loss of population and Narva has lost over a fifth of its population during the last 20 years. However, moving isn't an option for all due to linguistic barriers. Many of the former factory workers never learned Estonian as they grew up in a Russian-speaking city within the Russian-dominated USSR. At the time, Estonian was viewed as a strange language spoken by only a handful of people. Now it's the language of the majority, although it's still strange. Besides Narva and one other city that I know of, it would be virtually impossible to get a job in Estonia without knowing Estonian. So many former factory workers stay in Narva, hoping for better days. Also, national unemployment is around 13%, so there are obviously not many jobs to be had anywhere in Estonia.

Narva is also interesting because it sits right on the Russian border. I got this picture while in the tower of a medieval fortress. I'm sure the Russians loved that I was taking pictures of border control. Narva is separated by Russia by a river. On the other side of the river is the Ivangorod, a small town that used to something of a bedroom community of Narva. However, this became problematic when Estonia became independent as it could sometimes take hours or even days to get permission to cross the border. Crossing has since become more streamlined, allowing pedestrians to cross relatively quickly. However, this has presented its own problems as many products are cheaper in Russia than in Estonia. Smuggling Russian cigarettes is quite common.

Anyway, it's getting late and I've just realized that I haven't actually said anything about my weekend there. So I'll put that in my next update.

Estonian Dancing

2011-10-21T12:07:00.002+02:00

Wednesday morning I had my second interview with the deputy strategic director at the chancellery. His job mostly coordinating between the different ministries. I didn't learn much that I think would be of interest to people reading the blog. A lot of it was just confirmation of what I already knew and figuring out how the Estonian government operates. He mentioned though that in a warehouse somewhere there's boxes of materials for the introduction of the Euro in 2009, which of course never happened.

I forget when, but one evening Kadri told me about an Estonian folk dance club that met every other week. While she never went herself, she had friends that went and put me in touch with them. So Wednesday evening I met Kadri's friend Karmen and went to the dance with her. I was surprised to see such a young crowd there, including quite a few teenagers, which made it promising from the very beginning. Not least because younger people are more likely to know English.

It was helpful for me that teaching the dances was a rather wordless affair. The music would start and the instructor would take a partner and demonstrate the dance. People who knew the dance would join in and then everyone else joined in as they figured out the dance. There was only one or two dances where I really needed instruction, but once I realized what was going on, it was pretty easy. For the most part, the dances were very repetitive and the songs were long, so some of the simpler dances became a bit tedious after awhile. However, it made sense to do it this way as people new to the dance had to be able to learn just by watching and people were allowed to join in and drop out as they pleased. If the songs were short, it wouldn't allow some people enough time to learn the dance and join in.

Because of the way the dances were, I didn't really meet anyone. Unlike contra-dances where you have a couple of minutes to chat with your partner while you wait for the dance to start, with these dances, you typically grab a partner and jump right in. I also think a few of the older people were hesitant to talk to me because they weren't used to English. Still, it was a lot of fun (although my legs were definitely sore the next day) and I plan to go again. Karmen has given me the mission to drag Kadri to the next dance as well.

First Interview

2011-10-18T21:42:00.000+02:00

I finally had my first interview. It was with the research supervisor from Eesti Pank, the central bank of Estonia. It seems his job with Eesti Pank prior to the adoption of the Euro was to watch the inflation rate with hope that it would drop to the required level to join the Euro. There are three criteria for joining the Euro (other than being in the EU), low government debt, low budget deficit, and low inflation. Estonia was doing well with debt and deficit, but because it's a quickly expanding economy, inflation has been a problem. The recession starting in 2008 brought growth to a halt, and thus inflation was low, so Estonia was able to join the Euro.

As part of the argument for allowing Estonia to adopt the Euro, they claimed that inflation would stay low as prices were already relatively high compared to income. This hasn't happened. Estonia only stayed under target inflation for about eight months and now has the highest inflation in the Eurozone. This has been somewhat problematic as one of the biggest concerns about the Euro has been that stores would rise prices to take advantage of the confusion over the change in prices. However, the recent inflation has nothing to do with internal issues related to the Euro. It's largely caused by increasing oil prices, which Estonia imports and an increase in prices in imported Russian produce. Whether or not Estonia adopted the Euro, it would have experienced inflation.

Another thing I learned is that one problem they had to deal with was that there is also a target interest rate for adopting the Euro. However, Estonia had no interest rate as it has never issued a government bond. Government debt is only 6.6% of GDP, so they've never had need to issue bonds. So instead they had to make an estimate based on the interest rate of resident financial institutions. Luxembourg actually had a similar problem just before joining the Euro, so they started issuing bonds just so they would have an interest rate.

I have another interview tomorrow with someone that works for the State Chancellery. So we'll see what I learn there.

Roommate Rotation

2011-10-12T15:36:00.001+02:00

(From Rick, taken by Suguru)
Julius, Rick, David, myself, and the wall of cans.

David's internship ended last week, so he left to go visit Russia and then will go home to Spain. Before he left though, we made sure to finish the wall of cans on the shelf.

Before he left, we learned that Rick's new roommate would likely be a Turkish student who had problems with his previous room. He had temporarily moved into the Academic Hostel, which isn't as nice. We joked that we would just refer to him as New David. He had added Rick on Facebook we guessed to determine if him and Rick would get along, which added to more joking about ways we might scare him off.

New David moved his stuff in on Wednesday. I met him briefly, where he just asked me about the laundry room. I learned later from Rick that when New David first entered the room, he was already on the phone discussing moving to another room. He wanted to share a room with a friend and it just so happened that his friend's roommate wanted to move, so he was arranging that they would switch rooms. So New David only ended up living with us for one night.

It just so happened that he guy he wanted to switch rooms with was a friend of ours, Suguru, a Japanese student who took the above photograph. This, we were all happy about, and Suguru moved in on Friday. So Rick went through three roommates in one week.

Last I heard, New David is back in the Academic Hostel, albeit now living with his friend. The only room available was one shared with some Georgian guys. The Georgians have earned themselves quite a reputation in the dorm as nobody is willing to live with them as apparently they like playing football. At night. In their rooms.

Besides all the roommate stuff, a few other events have taken place. I went with Kadri again to the monthly comedy show. This time we brought Rick along as well as Christien, a Dutch student, and Jonathan, a Belgian... actually I'm not sure why he's here. After the show, we were a bit hungry so we found a pub that was still opened. I had my first good hamburger in a long time.

Saturday evening, I went to a show in Tallinn with an eclectic mix of performers, mostly being musicians and belly dancers. Jeana (whom I met on my previous trip to Tartu) had told me about it, as she would be performing a hula hoop dance there. I went, once again, with Kadri and Jonathan. Overall it was a fun evening. I thought Jeana did well, although she was frustrated that the space they gave her was too small so she was afraid of hitting people.

In terms of my research, I finally have some interviews lined up, The department wants me to do a presentation on Monday about my research, or rather what I want to do since I'm still just gathering information. The presentation would just be for the staff and would allow them to give some input and make suggestions. I've also started attending a class being given by Dr. Erik Reinert. It's a bit easier for me to attend as it's only 2.5 hours and touches on my subject a bit more, mostly by offering me critiques of neoclassical economics. It was within the framework of neoclassical economics that the idea of the Euro was formed, so it is interesting to see how the Euro is viewed by other schools of thought.

Tartu Again

2011-10-07T01:09:00.001+02:00

Finally getting a bit more caught up, this past weekend I was in Tartu in Southern Estonia. I use the term "weekend" loosely. Actually, I went to Tartu to attend a housewarming party on Thursday night. Verena, a German student whom I met during the summer school, had just moved to Tartu for some yearlong program. The party was 1920's theme. I hadn't exactly packed for my trip to Estonia planning to attend theme parties, so I just dressed nicely. I even thought about wearing a tie, but I couldn't remember where I put it, or if I had even brought one with me to Estonia.

I took the bus to Tartu and set out to find Witek, who was also now living in Tartu. He had given me rather vague instructions as to how to find his apartment. "Go along river to the centre". Two problems here, I couldn't see the river from the bus station and once I found the river, I didn't know where the center was. Luckily, Tartu is small, so I wasn't lost for long. Once I got to Witek's place we decided we should stop by a grocery store and pick something for the party. Alcohol seemed to be the best option, if it weren't for one problem, neither Witek nor I drink alcohol, so we had no idea what to get. We ended up buying some Pepsi and a cheap Spanish wine.

Verena really went all out with the party. She had pictures of vintage advertisements and portraits all over the place, a collection of vinyl records sitting out on display, and a projector showing Charlie Chaplin films set up in her bedroom. While I wasn't really matching the theme, there were quite a few people that really put a lot of thought into their outfits. Although one idea that had never occurred to me that occurred to everyone else, I could have gone to a secondhand store and picked up something old-fashion. Most exciting for me though was the music. While it wasn't exactly swing, it was close enough, so I got to dance a bit, which I hadn't gotten to do since summer school.

I met quite a few people at the party, most of whom were foreign students studying in Tartu. There were even a few familiar faces (other than Verena and Witek). Gerli, whom I went with on the island trip, and Aivar, who helped out at the summer school, were both there.

The next day, Witek and I decided to go around the city for a bit. I wanted to revisit the abandoned cathedral as I hadn't been able to explore it much on the previous trip to Tartu.

The cathedral had been abandoned when Tartu became a Lutheran city, although this doesn't really make sense to me. It seems that generally when a city converted, they would also convert the cathedral, so it just strikes me as odd that this didn't happen here. Since its abandonment, the cathedral's history can be summed up in a question. What to do with it? Several ideas were proposed, including an observatory and reopening it as a church. Finally, a section of it was turned into a library and later a museum.

It's probably worth mentioning that the weather was beautiful that day. It turns to rain off and on most days, but on that day, the sky was blue and it was surprisingly warm. It's also a bit prettier in Tartu right now as the leaves change colors than in Tallinn. Most of the trees in Tallinn are evergreens as it's farther north and the soil quality is poorer.

We then went to check out the museum. The museum was mostly a history of Tartu University. Tartu University was the first university in Estonia and has been important historically as the academic and nationalist center of Estonia. While parts of it were interesting, I was about to fall asleep the whole time I was there as we hadn't gotten back from the party the night before until 4am. Also, since I was sleeping in a strange place, I didn't sleep well and woke up at 9:30am. The one funny thing about the museum was its inconsistent translations. So everything was in Estonian and most displays had English translations. One room had Russian translations alongside the Estonian and English, but none of the other rooms did. One display was in Estonian, Finnish, and German, with no English. Another display was only in Estonian and Swedish.

We then visited the botanical gardens where I discovered that flowers in Estonia don't so much wilt as give up.

I also learned that pot plants are legal.

Afterwards, I met up with a new friend whom I had met at the party, Jeana. She is an American PhD student studying folklore. The folklore at Tartu department was having a party for a professor who was a promoter of Seto culture, which she invited me to as she thought I'd be interested in the music. The best example I could find of Seto music is this video. There is a lead singer who sings a line, then the line is repeated by a chorus. Improvisation is a big part of Seto music, so the lead singer is free to make up lyrics which the chorus then repeats. One feature I find fascinating is that the chorus generally starts singing before the lead singer has finished the line. While there was some singing, the party was surprisingly formal, which made it a bit awkward, especially as everything said was in Estonian, so we had no idea what was happening.

It was a great trip, hopefully I can make my way back to Tartu for another visit before I leave Estonia.

Dinner

2011-10-03T02:52:00.001+02:00

Trying to get one update in before I go to Tartu (update: totally failed). Last weekend Ruchira and I decided to visit another history museum. This one covers Estonia's history during the 20th Century.

But first, we visited the World War II memorial. For the most part, there is not much evidence that Estonia was once part of the Soviet Union. However, I think this memorial is the most Soviet looking structure in Tallinn. The memorial has fallen into some disrepair with graffiti and cracked stone tiles everywhere. While it may seem odd to not preserve a memorial, it is also a remnant of the Soviet occupation, so at best Estonians have mixed feelings about it.

Next door to it is the museum. Apparently not many foreign tourists visit as there was very little English in the museum. Instead we were given a booklet with translations of the displays. As fascinating as I found it all, it was strange to go around the museum with my nose in this booklet, trying to figure out which passages corresponded to which displays. It didn't help that there really wasn't all that much to look at. There were plenty of pictures, but very few items on display. Regardless, we ended up staying there until they kicked us out.

The museum is situated on the grounds of an old manor, so there's nice park around it. I found a map to see if there might be anything else of interest around. It mentioned that there were some Soviet statues on display behind the museum, so we went to take a look.

To say they were "on display" is to use the term loosely. The statues were certainly there to look at, but the only one standing was Lenin. There were more statues like this lining the back wall of the building.

Ruchira and Lenin.

This one I found interesting because it reminded me of a famous National Geographic cover.

(I forgot where I found this image)

I imagine there were many copies of Stalin statues, so it may not be the same one, but it certainly looks the same.

Once we finished up at the museum, we made our why to Dr. Rainer Kattel's house as he had invited all the visiting researchers to his place for dinner. For such a small gathering, it was an incredibly diverse group of people: Dr. Kattel and his wife from Estonia, of course, Dr. Carlota Perez from Venezuela, Aziz from Uzbekistan, Ruchira from India, myself from the US, and one other guy for whom I feel really badly because I forgot his name from South Africa. Dr. Perez had been teaching the class that I had attended only the once, so she jokingly berated me for abandoning her. Excluding Kattel's wife (whose name I also forgot), we all had backgrounds in economics, so the conversation tended to dwell on the economic problems in each of our individual countries and various issues pertaining to Estonia. Besides the conversation, the food was also great. Dr. Kattel and his wife had gotten fresh bread and vegetables from the market earlier that day and had made a middle eastern dish with lamb wrapped in grape leaves. We had homemade cheesecake for dessert.

Not really anything else to say. We had a great evening, and then went home and slept.

Classes Start

2011-09-27T00:41:00.000+02:00

Things have kind of picked up a bit the last couple of weeks as classes finally started up. They had a meeting with all the PhD students and those here for research earlier in the month. I was hoping to get to meet some of the other students, but one guy spoke the entire meeting and then everyone went to their classes. I did meet one of the other visiting researchers though, Ruchira from India.

The next day we had some meetings with the faculty just to get familiar with the department. Ruchira and several others talked me into attending a class being given by Carlota Perez, a professor well known in the field of technology and development. The class that evening was mainly an outline of concept of technological paradigm shifts, wherein every 40 to 60 years there is a major change in technology that reverberates through society. It was an interesting class, however, I couldn't commit to continued attendance as it had virtually no connection to my research and it met for four hours every evening for the next two weeks.

Later that week, the department gave an honorary doctorate to György Jenei, an academic and former politician who was involved in opening the Hungarian-Austrian border, the first hole in the iron curtain. He gave a speech about what he did, but over a week after the fact, I don't remember much of it.

Since Ruchira had only arrived a few days earlier, so I figured it was a good excuse as any to go to Kompressor, a fantastic pancake restaurant in the old town. She also wanted to visit one of the history museums, so we stop by there as well as a few other sites she hadn't seen yet. The history museum we visited was one that I had been to during my previous trip to Tallinn back in 2005. All I remember from it was that it was tiny, consisting of one large room and a smaller room showing a history film from the Soviet Era. I was greatly surprised to find that it had been completely redone in the last 6 years. They had expanded the museum into some of the adjoining rooms as well opened up an entire lower floor, more than doubling the floor space. Almost everything was brand new (excluding the artifacts on display) with interactive displays and an updated film about Estonian history. We ended up spending a lot of time there.

We eventually made it to Kompressor where it so happened we ran into Anna Lisa (with whom I spent Independence and Iceland Day) and one of her friends that had just arrived. It seems I always run into people I know at Kompressor, of course, Tallinn isn't that big of a city. I often see the same people around town although I don't know them.

Also earlier this month, an Estonian friend, Kadri, invited me to an English-language comedy show being held at a pub. It was nothing big, just a jam-packed pub with a handful of comedians each doing 15 to 30 minute sets. Only one of them was Estonian, the others were ex-pats from English-speaking countries. It made for an odd mix of jokes, as I didn't get many of the Estonian political jokes (one guy did impressions of Estonian politicians), while my friend was lost on jokes that only made sense to native English-speakers or Americans, such as one that involved bears and picnic baskets. She knew of Yogi Bear, but not well enough to get the reference. They do this comedy show once a month, so I'm hoping I can go again.

Back in the apartment my roommates and I have started a small art project. We had been collecting cans so that we could take them back to the store to get a refund, however, we ended up stacking up them up on this shelf and now we're trying to see if we can fill the entire shelf up to the ceiling. We found that the distance between the shelf and the ceiling is almost exactly 5 half liter beer cans and 2 soda cans. Unfortunately, my consumption of soda isn't keeping up with my roommates' beer consumption, so we have a few unfinished stacks. I'm thinking we should sell it as art. The current asking price is 5 Euros (the approximate refund value of the cans at 8 cents each). Any bidders?

Helsinki

2011-09-19T17:46:00.001+02:00

Keeping up with my usual tardiness, the weekend before last, I went to Helsinki to visit Jenni and her boyfriend Tommi. While I had been to Helsinki before, I wanted to visit again now that I knew someone that lived there.

Getting to Helsinki from Tallinn is just a 2 and a half hour ferry ride. I had heard that it was possible to see both Tallinn and Helsinki from the ferry once it reached the middle of the Gulf of Finland. To find out, I spent most of the ride on the optimistically named sundeck watching Tallinn slowly disappear to the south and searching for Helsinki to the north. About 70 minutes into the trip I spotted what was definitely Helsinki. I may have seen it earlier, but not knowing exactly where Helsinki would appear on the horizon, it was difficult to distinguish distant buildings from distant ships. After 90 minutes I lost sight of Tallinn and after 110 minutes I lost sight of the TV tower that stands just outside the city.

The old town of Tallinn as seen from the harbor.Jenni met me when I arrived in Helsinki and we immediately set out to explore the city.

One of our first stops was Helsinki Cathedral. I find it to be a very interesting and unique cathedral as it was built in that period between Gothic and Neo-Gothic. Much like the outside, the inside is also stark white.

This was probably the only major change to Helsinki since my last visit. This is the new music center, which opened about a week earlier.

I don't think I knew what this building was when I first visit Helsinki, but thanks to Jenni, I now know that it's the parliament building. I kind of like it as it's quite an imposing structure.

We spent much of the afternoon at the history museum, which I hadn't been able to visit on my previous trips. One great part about the museum was that the "prehistory" section went up to 1300 AD. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire took place centuries before "history" came to Finland. There was also a map in this section that showed where archeologists have found ancient fishing villages. Thanks to the land rise, the villages are now nowhere near the coast.

The rest of the museum was pretty standard, old religious icons, paintings of the aristocracy along with some of their furniture, and tidbits of information about Finland's history under Sweden and Russia. And then out of no where, an exhibit on doll houses. There was also an exhibit on the Sami and items used by Finnish farmers in the past. This just left me thinking of how miserable it must of been to live in Finland prior to the 20th Century. While all the Nordic countries (except for Estonia) extend far into the north, Finland doesn't extend as far south as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. It's southernmost point is roughly the same as the southernmost point of Greenland.

After getting a late lunch, we met up with Tommi, and after hanging out in the apartment for a bit, we went for a short walk around the neighbor. Jenni and Tommi live near a small amusement park, where there is a free observation tower.

I tried getting some pictures, but most of them didn't come out very good due to rain on the windows and glare from the sun. The ride to the top of the observation tower was apparently quite exciting for Tommi as he's afraid of heights, which works out nicely for him as it's the only free "ride" in the park.

I should mention, I had never met Tommi before, so I wasn't sure how we would get along. However, I soon learned that he's quite a film buff, having a large DVD collection, and while I don't consider myself a film buff, I like to talk about movies, so we got along pretty well. At some point it came up that I had never seen "A Streetcar Named Desire", which Jenni would not hear of, so we ended up watching it that night. Other than being a great movie, I had fun trying to follow the Finnish subtitles, looking for words that I recognized thanks to Estonian.

Getting a pretty late start on the next day, Jenni and I went to visit the Orthodox church. Tommi had to meet his sister for lunch, so he didn't join us.

The church was built when Finland was part of Russia. While the Finns largely remained Lutheran, there was an Orthodox Russian minority in Helsinki. I really like Orthodox churches largely because their aesthetic is so different from the Catholic and Lutheran churches I'm used to seeing. The biggest difference is that they don't have pews, as people were expected to stand during the service (there was some sitting available, but not for everyone). They tend to be more compact, and square in shape. The artwork is also stylistically different and the churches tend to be heavily decorated.

After walking around the downtown area and getting lunch, we made our way to the harbor where I caught the next ferry to Tallinn. While I enjoyed the trip and visiting Jenni and Tommi, I got to thinking later about why Tallinn seems to be a much more tourist friendly city than Helsinki. It would that Helsinki would have an advantage as it's larger, the capital of a larger country, and wealthier. What Helsinki is missing though is history. Unlike virtually every other European capital, Helsinki has no old town. Up until the 19th Century, Helsinki was a fishing village of about 4,000 people. It wasn't until the Russians moved the capital there that Helsinki became an important city. The Russians felt that Turku, the original capital, was too Swedish.

Once I made it back to my dorm, I learned that I had forgotten to tell my roommates I was going to Helsinki for the weekend. Oops.

Euros in Estonia

2011-09-05T14:27:00.003+02:00

Since I'm in Estonia to do research, I figure I should talk a little about it. Although, much of what I'm about to post probably won't end up in my final paper as it really isn't part of my research, just something I found interesting.

I've ended up spending most of the afternoon reading about Euro coins and banknotes. Most of you know that all Euro coins have a national side, representing the country they were produced for. Since Estonia only recently adopted the Euro, I imagine most people have not seen an Estonian Euro coin.

(From the ECB)

It's not terribly exciting, but now you know. While some countries change up the design on each coin, all Estonian coins have the same map. This coin caused a small amount of controversy as a Russian lawyer claimed that the borders on the coin didn't match with the actual Estonian-Russian border. The Russian government was quick to dismiss this claim, which kind of makes me wonder what this lawyer hoped to gain from making this claim. Intriguingly, there was a counter-claim made by the Seto people who thought that the map should include parts of Russia. The Seto are an ethnic minority related to Estonians whose traditional lands got split when Estonia became independent. They want the border to be returned to where it was prior to Soviet Occupation, wherein their lands were all within Estonia.

(From Wikimedia)

This map shows the regions that became part of Russia. While Estonia briefly claimed these territories, it seems that they have largely dropped these claims, perhaps because the population in these regions are over 90% Russian. Last year, a town in one of these regions petitioned Moscow to be allowed to break off and join Estonia. This was mostly done for publicity though, to call attention to what they felt was unfair treatment.

While Euro banknotes don't include any designs on them to signify which nation they are for as the coins do, I learned today that you can determine where a banknote is from based on the letter before the serial number. Each country gets its own letter, so all Estonian banknotes have "D" before the serial number. Or rather, they would have a "D" if any existed. Because Estonia is so small, they have decided it would be too costly to produce their own banknotes and instead use banknotes from Finland and Germany. Checking my own wallet, I found I have one banknote from Germany, Finland, and Spain each. Apparently Malta has produced its own Euro banknotes despite having a third of the population of Estonia, but maybe they don't produce banknotes regularly.

Iceland Day

2011-09-04T13:15:00.006+02:00

Two weeks afterwards, I'm finally getting around to Iceland Day. There's not much to really say about it, I just wanted to share some of the musicians I heard. Click on the musicians' or bands' name to hear an example of their music.

Iceland Day was celebrated on August 21st, the day after Independence Day, as Iceland was the first country to recognize Estonian independence. The actual date that Iceland did this was after the 21st, but that's not important. As far as I can tell, this is not an annual event, but rather a one time event.

I saw four musical acts that day. They were performing in courtyards all over the old town. These courtyards were packed. For the first act I went to see, Snorri Helgason, the courtyard was so packed that I couldn't even see him. Regardless I could hear him, which is the important part. Snorri Helgason plays some nice acoustic guitar with very soft vocals. The song I linked to is in Icelandic, but most of his songs appear to be in English.

Since I knew it would get crowded, I left a bit early to get to the next performance, For a Minor Reflection.

For a Minor Reflection is an instrumental group, which despite lacking a vocalist, cover a pretty wide range of music. They go from ambient to a hard indie rock, while the song I linked to is more chamber pop. So if you don't like "Dansi Dans", try another one of their songs.

Next was Lay Low, who has a country/blues sound. They make a lot of use of slide guitar in their recordings, but they didn't have a slide guitar live. The singer is also a really great guitarist, which is better showcased in "Please Don't Hate Me".

Just to give you an idea of how crowded these courtyards got. I was supposed to meet my friend Anna Lisa in this crowd, but we waited until after the performance to find each other.

Last was Hjaltalín, a chamber pop group that I was initially very excited about, but we ended up sitting in a bad location, behind the speakers and fairly close to the drummer, so the drums drowned everything out.

Afterwards, we went to eat at Hell Hunt, which sounds like a rough place, but is actually Estonian for "Gentle Wolf". It's just an old pub with decent food. Not much else to say about the day. It was really great getting to see all these musicians and the weather was nice, so overall just a very pleasant day.

On a more recent note, I decided to get out of the room for a bit and went to see "Cowboys and Aliens". Like the Nordic countries, they don't dub movies, so it's in the original English with subtitles. They don't dub partially because the low number of Estonian-speakers makes it a big expense with little return. Another problem is that there's a large Russian-speaking population, so even if it were dubbed, it wouldn't be accessible to much of the population. As such, the movie had two sets of subtitles, Estonian and Russian. It's a fun movie, pretty silly and cliched at times, but I they did a good job at explaining why the aliens were there and why a bunch of cowboys would be in any position to actually win a fight with them.

Errata

2011-08-27T12:16:00.002+02:00

Just some random stuff I've been meaning to post. I've also been meaning to post about Iceland Day, but I'll cover that later.

My roommate moved in earlier this week as did David roommate. My roommate is Julius (Finnish) who his here to do his Bachelor's in business administration. The reason he came to study in Estonia instead of staying in Finland is because classes here are in English whereas business classes in Finland would generally be in Finnish. David's roommate, Rick (Dutch) is here to do his Master's in industrial engineering. While Julius is young, he has lived on his own for the last year or two, which makes things better. So far we all get along pretty well.

Today I decided to conduct a taste test. There's an Estonian brand of soda called Kelluke that tastes like Sprite, so I wanted to compare the two. Rick helped me out by pouring the drinks into cups without me seeing. Kelluke is sweeter than Sprite and less carbonated. Sprite has a more bitter flavor to it. I couldn't really say which I like better, but Kelluke is cheaper, so I'll keep buying it. Right now I'm drinking a combination of Kelluke and Sprite from what was left over.

Doing laundry here has been surprisingly interesting. To get into the laundry room, I have to use my keycard, but first it has to be activated to keep people from over using it. I can do laundry four times a month, and then I have to reactivate it for the next month. Before getting my card activated, I went to go see where the laundry room was. I found it (in the parking garage), and of course, I couldn't get in, so I went back to the stairwell to re-enter the building, and it wouldn't let me in. I had to leave through the parking garage entrance and walk back to the main entrance. When I went to the housing office, I told them about my problem with getting back into the building, as I didn't want to have to carry my laundry all around the parking garage. As it turns out, activating my card for the laundry room also activates my card for the stairwell entrance. So I can't use that entrance unless I have permission to use the laundry room. I then asked how the four times a month rule works. Simply having the card only let me in four times is of course no good, as that would mean I'd be stuck in the laundry room the whole time, even longer if all the machines were already in use. Working for just four days out of the month also won't work because I might go check the laundry room, see all the machines are in use, and decide to wait until the next day to do laundry. So what they do is keep a record of how often the laundry room has been accessed, and then periodically check to see who's been using it. If I just went in once that day, then they determine that I probably didn't actually do any laundry, and that day doesn't count, but if they see I was in and out throughout the day, then they count that day. Also, while the labels on the washing machines are in English, the dryers are not. One is in Estonian and two are in Swedish.

While I haven't been studying much Estonian lately, I have learned a few new things about the language. After a month of living here, I learned the words for push and pull, lükka and tõmba. Usually these are two of the first words I learn, but I never saw them until I had to go to the migration office, and I haven't seen them again since. Estonians appear to rarely label things. I didn't know the word for exit until I asked somebody, it's väljapääs.

I mentioned before that verbs have two infinitives in Estonian, which one you use depends on the preceding verb. This seemed rather odd, until I realized we do something very similar in English. Generally, infinitives are written with "to" preceding it. However, following certain helping verbs, "to" is omitted. "I need to run" vs. "I must run". Both sentences mean basically the same thing, but the infinitive is different. We never think about it, but I imagine that a foreigner might get confused.

Words such as adverbs and prepositions tend to change meaning based on where they are in the sentence. Generally the meaning is similar, but a good example that could lead to confusing is "ära" which can either mean "don't" or "away". So "Ära lähme" means "Don't go", and "Lähme ära" means "Go away".

Vabaduse Laul

2011-08-24T12:04:00.010+02:00

After a couple of quiet weeks, Estonia celebrated 20 years of independence on Saturday. Estonia actually celebrates two independence days. August 20th commemorates the end of communist rule in Estonia. The other day, in February commemorates when Estonia declared independence from Russia back in 1918. This was a big event for Estonia, not only being 20 years of freedom, but also Tallinn is the this year's European Capital of Culture.

As part of the celebration they held a concert at the Song Festival Grounds. The concert was mostly made up of Estonian acts, but there were a number of musicians from other countries. While at the concert I ran into Birgit, the woman that managed the summer school, and Anna Lisa, who was a student at the summer school. I ended up spending most of my time there with Anna Lisa as we both wanted to get close to the stage.

Someone on Youtube has put up videos from the concert. Click on the name of the musicians if you want to see their performance.

I missed the first act, but I did see Kimmo Pohjonen. He is a Finnish musician and from what I read, what he's doing here is a revival of accordion wrestling. Traditionally, wrestlers in Finland would compete as accordion music played. It was odd, but entertaining.

Next up was Brainstorm, a Latvian band that once performed at Eurovision. The video is of them performing the song they competed with. They finished third.

They were followed by an Estonian act, Ewert & the Two Dragons. I thought the song in the video was pretty cool. It's a retelling of the song "Jolene" from the perspective of the guy, who ends up rejecting Jolene.

Some of the other acts were Vaiko Eplik, a male pop singer who sings in Estonian, Iiris, a female pop singer with an adorable voice, Chalice, who sings Estonian ballads, and Dagö, an Estonian rock band. Malcolm Lincoln, Estonian's 2010 Eurovision entry, also performed, but there's no video up yet. Besides they didn't perform their Eurovision song.

The act that seemed to excite the crowd the most was Kerli, Estonia's most popular pop star. She is often compared to Lady Gaga with her dance music and strange outfits.

Kerli was followed by some more patriotic songs. This man and patriotically-dressed little girl led a song where they would sing a line which the crowd would repeat. Unfortunately I can't find any information on the song or its importance, but it must be important because it went on for 12 minutes.

The final performance of the night was by Sinead O'Connor (I couldn't find a better video). It was kind of strange, having an Irish singer headline an Estonian national event, but apparently she had performed in Estonia fairly soon after its independence, so they wanted her return.

Of course, music wasn't the only thing at this event. There was a speech by the president, which at first surprised me, because, to me, it didn't seem like the kind of event such a politically important person would come to. However, It was in the capital of Estonia and this was the big Independence Day event, even being broadcasted on television. It's just very different being in such a small country. It's also very different in that many of the people speaking at the event remembered independence, so they weren't speaking about history and the ideals of their forefathers, but about their own experiences. One exception was a speech by a guy whose birthday was August 20th, 1991. He of course didn't remember independence, but it was actually a really great speech. His father had been imprisoned for distributing literature that was banned during the Soviet Era.

Around 11pm, they did a countdown. I learned later, the reason for this was that Estonia declared independence on August 20th at 11:02pm. They then shot off a bunch of fireworks.

At midnight, they did an official start for Iceland Day. Iceland had been the first country to recognize Estonian independence, so to honor this, several musicians and other artists were invited to Estonia. As part of the official opening the president of Iceland came and gave a speech. So on the same day I saw two former Eurovision entries, I saw two heads of state.

The president of Iceland (left) and the president of Estonia (right). My friend Laura, got to meet the president of Iceland recently as well, which she talks about on her blog.

It's very different celebrating independence in a country that is not only so small, but also one where independence is such a recent memory. They don't really show the same kind of patriotism as in the US, but I think that's more due to anti-nationalist sentiments that are pervasive in Europe. Also unlike the US, instead it setting its own path, Estonia looks to the rest of Europe for inspiration as it tries to shape a European identity. I think another big difference is that Estonia didn't gain its independence militarily, so there is no jingoistic rhetoric. There also hasn't been enough time for the leaders of the independence movement to gain a kind of legendary status. Even reading about independence, no individuals really stand out. They tend to treat events leading to independence as a collective action of the whole populace.

Everyone is gone!

2011-08-19T13:17:00.006+02:00

Once summer school ended and the trip was over, pretty much everyone left. It's been a quiet couple of weeks, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy. I finally got a bank account set up and I'm working on my work permit now.

I moved into a new place closer to the University of Technology. The housing office was closed when I arrived, but they had left the key to my room at the academic hostel next door. I ask for my key, and a woman at the desk reached into a drawer and handed me one. There was no other information, just a key. I had never been told what room I had or anything, just the building. So I figured I'd just try my luck, and went there, but I couldn't get into the building. I went back to the hostel and they let me check my e-mail to see if maybe they had sent me information, but nothing. Eventually I noticed a number on the key and asked some guys I saw if the number was a room in the building. They said no and told me to check another building, which I couldn't get into either. I went back to the hostel, where there was now another woman at the desk. In a last ditch effort to find more information I asked if they still had the envelope that my key came in. The woman reached into the drawer and pulled out on envelope that still had a key inside. The previous woman had just given me a random key. In the envelope was the information I needed and got into my room without further problems.

Unfortunately, I did not get my own room as I had been hoping. They had too many international students apply for housing this semester. However, I haven't had a roommate yet, he should arrive next week. The room is part of a suite, so I share a kitchen and bathroom with another double. There is currently a Spanish engineering student, David, living in the other room. He has been very nice and helpful. He is here for an internship, designing small RC helicopters for research purposes.

I'm a 20 minute bus ride from the city center, and since it's summer, it's pretty quiet here. There's really not much around either other than some small grocers. After some wandering I found a pizza place, but it's a pretty good walk to get there.

I am close to the university library/Borg Cube. The building is really nice inside, but it's easy to tell that it's fairly new because the selection is pretty limited.

On the other side of my building there's another spaceship. This is just an art piece. I'm not really sure why it's there.

I'm also seemingly surrounded by parks, although some of these parks come across less as parks and more as well-tended forests. Just south of me is a wooded area that is nice to walk through, but I imagine its easy to get lost as there are many criss-crossing trails. I walked around them one day and found what appeared to be an abandoned ski jump.

The professor who is overseeing my work is Dr. Rainer Kattel. I met with him last week. We didn't talk about my research too much, just introductions really. He said that there are some other international grad students coming over to do research, so he plans for us to get together once we're all here.

I was in the grocery store the other day, and came across mushrooms flavored chips. At first I didn't even considered them until I realized that I probably won't come across these anywhere else, so I should try them at least once. They actually weren't too bad. Mushrooms really don't have that strong of a flavor, but you can definitely taste them. I ended up finishing bag fairly quickly, but more out of the idea that I didn't want to find out was stale mushroom chips tasted like. Food goes stale here really quickly. I miss living in Denver.

Islands (Part 3)

2011-08-13T13:09:00.013+02:00

Our third day was bit of a free day, so we didn't very much. We woke up late and caught the ferry to Hiiumaa, the second largest island. Once we got to the cabins we'd be staying at that night, we rented some bikes and came across a deserted beach.

Olga and Gerli like to do posed shots, so they ask me to take this one of them jumping along with Rosa.

The water was crystal clear and there were schools of tiny fish swimming around everywhere along with a bunch of jellyfish. The jellyfish in the Baltic don't sting, but we didn't know this at the time, so we tried to avoid them.

On the way back I tried my hand at taking photos while riding a bike. This was the best one.

At one point in the road, there were two ways of getting back to the campground and I decided to try the other route to see who would get back first. As soon as I hit the other trail, I saw this:

So my trip was ill-fated from the very beginning and I got back last.

That evening, I was playing guitar again when I looked up and exclaimed in the middle of a song, "hey, it's someone we know". It was Simone. He was originally supposed to come with us, but had some things to take care of, so decided to meet us later. Olga and Gerli had given us a schedule before the trip, so he knew where we'd be. When asked how he got there, he said it hitchhiked... to an island. There was more to it, but I like the idea of him hitchhiking the entire way.

The next day started with another tour. This time, it was a nature tour. Our guide didn't speak much English, but Olga and Gerli translated a bit, plus she spoke some German and Finnish. Our first stop was an abandoned radar installation. Hiiumaa was the most northwesterly corner of the USSR on the Baltic, which made it an important spot for monitoring traffic around the Baltic Sea. There were only a few concrete structures remaining.

Near the abandoned base was a rock covered beach where we looked for lucky stones.

(Picture by Olga, I think)

Lucky stones are rocks with holes going through them. Once we found one, we were supposed to run a piece of yarn through it and wear it as a necklace. The first rock I found, the one that I'm holding, was somewhat unsuitable for this.

We then visited two lighthouses. The first was Ristna Lighthouse. Our guide said it was designed by Eiffel, but I can found no evidence that this is true. What is true was that it was built in France and shipped to Estonia, in parts of course.

The other lighthouse was Kõpu Lighthouse. This one is quite a bit older and has been in use for almost 500 years. While enjoying the view from the top, I met another person I knew. Egert, one of my contacts at the University of Technology where I'll be doing my research, just happened to be taking his own vacation to the islands and wound up there at the same time as us.

We then went on a hike where our guide pointed out interesting plants or important landmarks, such as the remains of a soviet spoon factory. The factory made spoons for the Soviet army and only spoons. There was also the site of this old church. Our guide said that seven churches have been built on this peninsula and all have burned down.

This is our guide showing off an edible mushroom. Standing beside her is Simone, I figured I should include this picture since I have no other photos of him. Our guide definitely a bit of a hippie, as besides having us wear lucky stones, she also showed us how to make talismans, took us to see a sacred tree, and had us participate in tree communing exercise which was essentially tree hugging.

Not much happened on the last day, it also didn't help that I wasn't feeling well. We went to Kärdla, the largest city on Hiiumaa with almost 4,000 people. There wasn't much to see there, so we caught a ferry back to the mainland.

What was nice though was Haapsalu, the city we came to once back on the mainland. It was actually a really nice port city. This is the old train station which is now a museum. Hopefully I can go back to Haapsalu sometime.

Islands (Part 2)

2011-08-10T14:25:00.010+02:00

Our second day largely consisted of a guided tour of Saaremaa (which I just learned means "island land"). We started in the largest city on the island, Kuressaare, with its 15,000 inhabitants.

First stop, Kuressaare Castle. It was built in the 13th Century for the bishop as at the time Saaremaa was a bishopric. The castle also housed exhibits about the island, including its history and nature. Unfortunately, we kind of had to rush through as we had a lot planned for the day. We went up onto the walls, but the view wasn't terribly interesting as the castle is quite a ways from the city and the bastions around the castle were currently under reconstruction.

We spent a little bit of time walking around the city, but there really wasn't much there. This picture is of the town hall.

Along the north coast of the island are some cliffs. This was apparently a popular spot to make sacrifices prior to Christianity, but even afterwards, it was common for brewers to pour some beer off the cliffs for good luck. There was really nice trail that went along the cliffs, but I had to cut that hike short as we went to the next location.

This is one of the oldest churches on the island. Originally Catholic, it was whitewashed during the Reformation, although some of the artwork has since been restored.

(From Wikipedia as I couldn't take pictures inside)
Among the restored artwork is this triskelion which is a common ancient symbol throughout Europe. What is unique about this one though is that one of the legs is broken. The theory is that to ancient Estonians, the triskelion represented the continuous cycle of time. However, on Saaremaa, time once stopped, which is why one leg is broken. I will explain more later.

Windmills were once common on Saaremaa, but these are among the few that still exist, but no longer operate. I found myself fascinated by how these two different times of windmills worked. The smaller one set on top of a pivot so that the entire structure could be turned to face the wind (It's been pointed out that there's a problem with perspective in the picture as the smaller windmill was closer to the camera, making it appear larger). The larger one was a Dutch-style windmill where only the top part moved. The wheel on the back is actually a lock that would sit on a corner and hold the top into place. Since the body of the windmill is an octagon, it could locked in eight fixed positions, whereas the smaller windmill could be turned to face any position. So the larger windmill is digital and the smaller windmill is analog.

This is Kaali Crater and the reason time stopped on Saaremaa. Several thousand years ago, Saaremaa was struck by a meteorite, making it the only populated area to suffer such a catastrophe. Other than possibly killing a few people, the event likely through up enough dirt and smoke that the sun was blotted out for several days, so thus time stopped. Unfortunately, very little is known about the impact. It is estimated the the impact took place between 4,000 and 7,000 years ago, weighed between 400 and 10,000 tons, and struck at a velocity between 15 and 45 km/s. Essentially, all that says is a large, fast-moving object hit Earth a long time ago.

It is not entirely known how deep the crater is. For one, the water level is constantly changing based on the amount of rain. However, it is surprisingly deep given its size. At one point, a nobleman wanted to build a gazebo in the middle of the crater and had his servants throw large rocks into the crater to form an island he could build on. He gave up on the project after several days of watching rocks sink into nothingness. Another attempt to drain the crater also proved fruitless as the large amount of mud in the crater simply clogged the pumps.

We finished off the day with a visit to the sauna. It was kind of nice to enjoy a sauna with only a handful of people instead of nearly twenty.

Islands (Part 1)

2011-08-09T12:21:00.009+02:00

Last week was mostly spent visiting the Estonian islands. It was a fairly small group which became even smaller as one person was busy with... something and would join us later and another person just didn't show up at all. So in total there were four students, two organizers, and one driver for the first couple of days.

(Picture from Tallinn Summer School)
Our first stop, after a short ferry ride, was Muhu, the third largest island and has a population of less than 2,000. And yes, even the Estonians think Muhu is a funny name. The first place we visited was an ostrich farm. In this picture from left to right, Olga (Estonian), Adrienn (Hungarian), Rosa (Finnish), an ostrich (Avian), Gerli (Estonian), Darrell (American), and Sabine (German). I'm looking away as I was watching the ostrich. In an earlier picture, we had been standing too close to the fence and an ostrich tried to grab Rosa's glasses.

It seemed that the ostrich farm was more a tourist attraction than a farm and set up like a small petting zoo. They had a few other animals as well, such as emus, rheas, kangaroos, and some very small ponies.

A more interesting stop was to a traditional farm. Our guide was an exception to what I had discovered on previous tours, he didn't speak English well, but he kept it short and simple instead of droning on and constantly repeating himself as other guides had done. It also helped that he was funny and rather animated. The orange hat that he is wearing is a traditional hat wore by men on Muhu.

Overall, there really wasn't anything all that unique to farm life on Muhu, however, I found this well fascinating. Instead of pulley system used on pretty much every well I've ever seen, they used a lever system to lower the bucket in. The bucket is not attached to a rope, but rather a long stick. The well is about 11 meters deep, so the stick is a bit less than that. Our guide said there is another well on the island that is 20 meters deep, so the lever is also much taller.

This statue is of Juhan Smuul, a writer from Muhu. This statue was originally Tallinn, however, it was torn down after independence as he had been a communist. The people of Muhu still liked him though, so they had the statue brought to the island. In the process of being torn down, the statue lost one of its fingers, the one pointing down, so it was replaced with a finger from a statue of Lenin.

We then left Muhu to go to the larger island of Saaremaa, where we would stay for the night. We stayed in a cabin at a campground right next to the beach. The plan had been to go swimming, but it had been cold and rainy all day, so having brought my guitar along, I stayed up and played silly songs for everyone.

Although, we quickly determined that swimming at this beach might not be possible. If you look at the above photo, you may see a dark shape near the horizon. That's a person walking in ankle deep water. The next day when we did go into the water, we never got past knee deep before we turned around because it was getting dark. Basically, the water around the island is incredibly shallow. This is important when thinking about the land rise. While Saaremaa only gains 2mm in elevation every year, it will only be a few decades before everything between where I was and where that man was walking, will be dry land. This is problematic for the people of Saaremaa and Muhu as their two islands are slowing growing together and it seems that neither side likes the idea of this.

So that was the first day. I need to meet with some people today, but hopefully I'll have time to post more later this evening.

Floods!

2011-08-07T16:22:00.005+02:00

As promised, I have a few more pictures of the flood, and a little bit more information about. Flooding is an annual occurrence in this part of Tallinn. Once a summer, there is a big rain shower, and area next to the harbor floods. However, just one block south on Narva Mnt, you wouldn't even know part of the city was flooded, well, until you tried going to Rimi (a grocery store) or the harbor and saw this:

Another entertaining sight in this picture, the IT Buss.

These guys decided to enjoy a canoeing trip done the street. You can see on the metal doors that the water was already starting to recede. It had more or less stopped raining by 1pm. I went out again around 6pm, by which time most streets were re-opened. By the next morning, I could hardly tell there had been any flooding except for a local furniture store that had taken everything it could off the floor and put it on top of tables and in the display windows.

The street just north of the university changes in elevation, so by the evening, part of the road was not flooded, but quickly got deep. While standing around taking pictures, I heard a car coming down the road really quickly. There was a large group of people standing on the other side of the road right where this car hit the water and made a huge splash. I figured it was one of their friends trying to splash them. However, it turned out to be some old woman who just had no idea the road ahead was flooded. Soon after hitting the water, she reversed her car, made a u-turn, and got out of there.

Overall, the response to the flood was pretty orderly. Once it had stopped raining, I saw buildings with hoses coming out of the basement windows as they pumped water out. Some roads were roped off, but I would see a few large vehicles continue down the flooded roads. Also, that canoe was not the only boat I saw on the streets that day. It seems that everyone here just accepts the fact that the city will flood every year. I finally decided on the reason for their rather subdued response, the land rise.

Basically, during the Ice Age, the whole Nordic region was covered by glaciers, which are heavy. The glaciers pushed the land down, but now that they are gone, the land is rising back up.

(From Wikipedia)

This is what the Baltic Sea region looked like 8,000 years ago. Around Estonia, the elevation changes by about 2mm annually. In a hundred years or so, flooding won't be problem anymore because this part of the city will be at a higher elevation. That's why they haven't done anything about the annual floods, the problem will eventually take care of itself.

I'll talk more about the land rise in my posts about the islands as the subject came up surprisingly often.

Summer School Closing

2011-08-07T15:07:00.005+02:00

I'm finally back from my trip to the islands. I decided to take a break the last couple of days and get settled in my new place. So I'm a little behind, so I might do a couple of posts today.

About a week ago was the closing event for summer school. It was kind of odd because there were all these people I had never seen before. Apparently only about half the students had participated in any of the extra events up to this point, so they were the only ones I knew.

The big thing for me was that earlier in the week I had participated in traditional Estonian dance lessons. We had only three days to learn a ten minute routine. I was hoping by now there would be a video up of the performance, but right now I can only find pictures.

(Picture from Tallinn Summer School)

Three days was definitely not enough time to learn this dance. While it wasn't that difficult, other than being kind of exhausting, it was a performance dance. I'm used to it not really mattering what I do, as long as I get back to the right spot on time, however, with a performance, what you do matters a bit more. My partner for this dance was Heather, who had virtually no experience with dancing before this.

(Picture from Tallinn Summer School)

The hardest part were two lifts. This is the second, and probably easiest of the two. I was actually really happy this worked as during one of practice runs, Heather's shoulder went straight into my chin. Heather is also rather small, which made this much easier. I should note, I didn't even realize that Bart and Bojana switched parts until I saw this photo.

(Photo by Witek)

I just wanted to share this photo as it's probably the only non-awkward photo of me dancing.

During the closing event they also showed short films made by students taking the summer film class. They can all be seen here: Tallinn Summer School Youtube. The first one this link leads to, "The Cowboyboots", is by my friend Rosa. As part of the film, they had to show different locations throughout Tallinn, and I thought she found a rather creative way of doing this. I think all the films are good, but I might find them more interesting because I know the people who made and acted in them.

It ended up raining really heavily that evening, so I didn't do anything afterwards. Although the heavy rain did make for an interesting Saturday.

Catching Up

2011-07-30T11:18:00.009+02:00

It appears that my excitement was undue. Apparently this is "normal" flooding, so I will continue with some stuff that happened the last couple of days that I hadn't post about early.

Thursday of last week, we went to the Art Museum of Estonia. It was actually a very large and interesting collection, although our guided tour was a bit lacking. A problem I've noticed largely with tour guides that don't speak English well is that dwell on minute that no one cares about on top of constantly pausing to search for words. It seems that they would want to keep it short, but no, they trudge on, eventually losing everyone's attention.

On the top floor, they had contemporary art, much of which was interactive. My favorite was the one above. You could pick a location in Tallinn from the computer and a picture of that location would appear on the screen. Then you could draw on the screen with a laser pointer.

(Picture by Marko)

There was a dance party after the museum visit. The theme was Grease, so the dance teacher, Chris (Australian), had taught a group a dance from the movie. After the performance, a few of us decided to do a swing dance. By a few of us, I mean Chris and I. It appeared that no other guys there could dance. With each song, we would grab someone new to dance, most of whom had never danced swing before. I had fun trying to get Jenni to dance as she was noticeably getting frustrated by my persistence. I eventually did get her to dance a waltz with me while on the trip to Tartu.

On Monday we took a bicycle tour of the city. While it was pleasant, it was also a bit frustrating because we kept flying by all this nice scenery that would have been great to take a picture of, and stopping at places that weren't that photogenic.

I did get to see this thing roll down a hill though. There's a person inside it.

One day this week, I went with a couple of friends to a bookstore to find children's books in Estonian. Jenni got the "The Little Prince", but I decided to pick up an even simpler book called "Siil Udus" or "Hedgehog in the Fog". It's based on a short children's film from Russia. So far I've only translated the first three sentences. We also got dinner at a Thai/India restaurant which was not only an odd mix, but the quality of the service did not match the cheapness of the prices, even by Estonian standards. So we just felt out of place all around.

On Wednesday we went to Texas, a Tex-Mex restaurant and bar. I thought it would be fun, but they won't let us in because Jenni was only 19. It was 8:45 and after 9pm, they don't let anyone under 21 in, even though 18 is the legal drinking age and we were only there to eat. I thought it was a joke at first. We ended up eating at a really great pizza place instead, Pizza Grande. We also ate at Pizza Grande Thursday night too. I now refuse to go to Texas because I thought that was a really crappy thing they did to us.

After eating at Pizza Grande again, I was told about an open-mic at an Irish pub. We went, but it was basically one guy running the show, who played about ten songs before letting anyone else on stage. It seemed that there weren't many English speakers in the crowd as few people showed any reactions to the songs I played.

Friday was closing events for the summer school, but I'm waiting for them to post pictures before I talk about it. I'm visiting the islands around Estonia next week, so there probably won't be any updates here until next Friday. I also have some more pictures of the flooding to share.

Some Excitement

2011-07-30T09:51:00.005+02:00

Yesterday was the last day of summer school, and my next trip isn't until tomorrow. So I slept in late today. When I finally got and passed by a window, I saw this:

It had been raining all night, but I didn't realize it had been this much.

The flooding seems to be just along the streets that run along the north shore. Although I don't really know as I can only see what I can see from the dormitory.

This is out in front of the dormitory. I don't think I'm going anywhere today. It supposed to stop raining this afternoon, so it shouldn't get any worse. However, I was supposed to go to bank today, and I don't expect that the waters will have receded by the time it closes.

South Estonia

2011-07-29T13:47:00.010+02:00

A lot has happened the last couple of weeks, but I'll start with last weekends trip to Tartu. Tartu is in the south of Estonia, and is the second largest city with a little over 100,000 people. It is mostly known for its university.

It happened that this weekend coincided with the Hanseatic Days festival, so there were huge crowds of people and vendors selling various crafts.

There was also a stage where they played traditional music and dances. The little kids were great to watch as conveyed total seriousness with little understanding of what they were doing. It was also funny that the boys and girls never looked at each other as they danced.

We took a short guided tour of the city. We stopped at this church which had been damaged during WWII and was abandoned during the Soviet era. It was only recently restored, which is something that is more obvious when looking at the interior, but you had to pay to take pictures inside. They did not fully restore it though as they mostly wanted to keep it as it was, but still be able to use it as a church. As such, some of the columns are new, but some are old, there's no altar piece and many of the statues are missing.

We also visited this old cathedral that was in much worse condition. It had been abandoned centuries ago after Estonia became Lutheran. However, one section had been restored and was used as the university library. It is now a museum.

The rest of the time there I sent going around the market with Heather (American) and looked for souvenirs and watched a few of the traditional dance performances.

Afterwards, we went to a lake. This time the water was rather comfortable, so I spent most of the time in the water, not taking pictures. Also this time, I managed to get into the sauna early, before it got crowded. The most fun though, was this giant swing that had at the place we were staying the night. It was a large platform that we could swing back and forth in a surprising large arc. We had to hold on pretty tightly. A few people tried jumping off while it was moving, but they always misjudged how high up they were, which made for some rough landings. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it as it was getting dark by this point.

The next day, we went to another national park for a short walk. Here we say the largest sandstone cliff in the Baltics. The guide said it was the most visited spot in southern Estonia, with over 400,000 visitors every year.

Afterwards we went to another lake to swim some more, but I didn't feel like swimming even though I was told the water was even warmer than the last lake. Instead I wanted to take some pictures, but none of them turned out very well, so here's a picture of Jenni watching some ducks.

Overall, I think we did a lot less this trip than on the other trip, but I thought it was much more fun. The water was actually warm enough to swim in, the place we stayed was great, and we just had fun hanging out.

North Estonia

2011-07-22T12:45:00.015+02:00

This past weekend we took a trip along the north coast of Estonia to visit a few locations. Our first stop was an old oil shale mine. I found this hilarious as the firs time I told Cliff (a petroleum engineering student at the School of Mines) that I was going to Estonia he told me that Estonia was the only country to get most of its energy from oil shale.

I believe the mine was still in operation as late as 2001. In any case, all the equipment still worked. So while our tour guide told us about the mine, a former miner was taking great joy in showing off all the equipment and how it worked. We even got to ride the old train they used to move workers through the mines. It was incredibly tiny and we really had to squeeze in there. Unfortunately, it was really dark in the mine, so I was unable to get a picture of it.

What was great about it was that it didn't feel like a museum at all. The mine was left exactly like it was when it was still in operation. Old equipment was strewn about and there were no barriers to keep people from touching the machinery.

(Picture by Elena)
For lunch we ate in the mine. The meal was simple, chicken and potato stew, cole slaw, and bread. I thought it was great, but not everyone seemed to agree with me.

(Picture by Elena)
We then visited Rakvere Castle. While the outside looks like ruins, for the most part the interior is pretty well maintained.

(Picture by Elena)
The interior court hosted quite a few activities for such as horse-riding, archery, jousting (without the horse), and various things for kids to play to with.

It seems that liability concerns are not a big issue here as the first thing our tour guide did was show us how gunpowder was made and then lit it on fire. He then took us to a room with a bunch a weapons we could take off display and play with.

(Picture by Mustafa)
Here is our guide using me to demonstrate why war axes had such long handles. The weapons were of course not real or particularly sharp, but they were made of metal and many of them were quite heavy. It was a lot of fun though to actually handle the weapons and seeing how they worked as opposed to viewing them as they sat a display case.

(Picture by Elena)
After we left the castle, we went to the guesthouses where we would be spending the night. Nearby there was a beach, which while pretty was not a good place to swim. According to the people that swam, it was incredibly cold and no one stayed in long. The shore was also very rocky, so it wasn't even pleasant to walk barefoot.

There was a sauna at the guesthouse, but it was full by the time I got back there, so instead it was requested that I get my guitar out. Birgit (the woman running the program) had asked me to bring it after my performance at the international event. So I ended up playing guitar all evening and never got into the sauna.

The next day we took a tour of some Estonian manors where our guide was this adorable old Estonian woman. She spoke English very well, but was constantly telling jokes that made no sense. Also, when she got to a place where she was supposed to give some spiel, she wouldn't wait for everyone to gather together, she would just start speaking.

(Picture by Elena)
Because Estonia was never an independent country until the 20th Century, there are no massive palaces, just manors like this one that were owned by minor lords or used as vacation homes by the major lords.

I believe most of the furniture in the manors was not original, but it was still great as we allowed to use the furniture, such as sitting in the chairs or playing the pianos. The only thing we were told not to do was try on any of the clothes in the dressing room, but we were still allowed to take them off the rack and look at them.

(Picture from Elena)
Darius (Lithuanian) and Elena are shown here enjoying some of the more interesting furniture we came across. One really cool item that one of the manors had was what they called the "juke box". It was a giant music box which contain a drum and some other instruments that would all play after cranking the handle a few times. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it as my camera batteries were dead by this point in the trip.

(Picture by Elena)
Our last stop was the Oandu forest which is part of the first national park ever established in the USSR. Not much happened here, just a simple 4.5 kilometer hike through the woods. We had a guide, but after awhile we were so spread out along the trail that it was kind of pointless and I rarely heard what he said. I still thought it was interesting as it was a very open forest so I could still see quite far though the trees.

The trip went surprising well for a group of 55 people. We never had to wait for anyone and nobody got lost or caused trouble. I think the big difference here as opposed to similar trips with college-aged students is that the people here aren't just here for the "study abroad experience" they're here because they're really interested in Estonia. I never heard anyone complain about being bored or uninterested it what we were doing. The main complaints were from people with claustrophobia not liking the mines and about the mosquitoes in Oandu forest. One woman told me she counted 43 mosquitoes on herself. I had two. I'm started to become very disconcerted by the fact that mosquitoes don't like me.

I think that's enough, I'm leaving for another trip tomorrow. This time to south Estonia.

Overwhelmed

2011-07-19T14:35:00.005+02:00

Jane recently criticized my blog as being too serious. Part of the reason for this is that it's my writing style, I post about what I find interesting, not necessarily about what's happening. I also don't care to post too much personal information. However, the main problem is that if I actually posted about everything I'm doing here and all the fun I've had just hanging out with friends, I would never sleep as I would be up every night writing blog posts.

I finally got some free time today as today's event got cancelled due to poor weather. It feels like the last few days I've been constantly doing something. I'm either in class, at an event, or doing something with friends. It doesn't help that I have a lot that I need to take care of, such as getting a visa and preparing Peace Corps materials.

We went on a trip this weekend along the north coast, but I will recount that trip in another post, right now I'll just share some general things that have happened.

I've gone on several excursions now to the Old Town as it's within walking distance. We went to a restaurant that served a huge variety of pancakes which was great aside from the fact that we lost Katarzyna (a Polish student whom I call Kate) on the way there. We've since learned to watch for her and Witek as they have a habit of falling behind the rest of the group. They also bicker like an old married couple, so it's fun to have them around. It's also good to have Witek around because I can always count on him understanding my jokes as sometimes my sarcasm gets lost in translation.

I got lunch with Jane and Jenni on Friday and we went to the Maritime Festival that was taking place that day (which is why there's a giant ship behind them). We were supposed to meet some friends there which was frustrating as it was rather crowded and there was some miscommunication. I think we spent more time looking for each other than actually enjoying the festival.

That evening there was an international event where everyone was supposed to present something from their country. I brought my travel guitar (which Mom got for me) and played "Wagon Wheel" and "The BBQ Song" as a representative of North Carolina.

(Photo by Jane)
Unfortunately the room had bad acoustics and there were no microphones I could use, so I don't think many people heard the lyrics. Regardless the event was fun and there was a lot great food available from various countries. I even got to participate in a traditional Estonian dance.

Afterwards we had a going away party for Jane as she was only staying for the first week. We went to a large pub with had themed rooms, so we ended seated inside a giant barrel. We are all sad that Jane left, her enthusiasm for being here was kind of contagious, but I'll probably see her again when I go to Ukraine in March.

Skipping over the weekend for now, on Monday we had Estonian movie night where they showed five Estonian films. They were a good mix of films representing different themes and time periods in Estonia. I watched three of them.

"Taarka" was a movie about a Seto woman (Seto is a minority group within Estonia) who lived during the late 19th-early 20th Century. It seemed that the movie was mostly a way to present Seto traditional music as there's a lot of singing.

"Names in Marble" was a movie about the Estonian War of Independence in 1918. While a very patriotic film, the main characters of the film were university students that had no idea what they were doing and were constantly making mistakes. They were certainly nothing like the traditional American unstoppable war hero, but they showed persistence despite their inexperience.

"The Last Relic" I found particularly interesting not because it was a great movie but because it was from 1969, when Estonia was part of the USSR. The movie is a very basic medieval adventure story with the cliche romance between a princess and a heroic common man. However, it was fun to watch for soviet themes. When the hero first introduces himself, he states that he's a "free man", neither peasant nor nobility. One of the songs includes the lyrics, "there will be no slaves, there will be no noblemen". The monks are fools, the nobility are effeminate and brash, and the head priest and mother superior are conniving schemers. At the end, the peasants rise up against the local convent that thrives off of the taxes they pay and are shown destroying religious statues and a relic before burning the convent. The final song states, "the last relic must be destroyed".

What was great about seeing the films was noticing how easy it was for me to pick out words that I knew after only one week of study, even in "Taarka" which turned out to not even be in Estonian, but Seto. Needless to say, the languages are very similar. I of course don't know enough to make out entire sentences, but being able to pick out individual words is good as that was a major problem I had when learning Swedish. Even if I knew the words, I didn't understand them when spoken.

Despite the odd logic, it really hasn't been that hard to learn Estonian so far. What has been helpful is that it contains a large number German loanwords that I recognize. I mentioned before that there are a lot of question words. Now that I've learned more, I want to show an example of how the question words work. So like in English, Estonia uses the following:
Kes = Who
Kelle = Whose
Keda = Whom

However, Estonian also has individual words for:
Kelles = In whom
Kellest = From whom
Kellel = Who has (kind of, it's hard to explain)
Kellele = To whom
Kellena = As whom
Kellega = With whom
Kelleta = Without whom

There are several more variations on "who", but I don't know how to use them yet. Now imagine similar constructions for all other question words.

I've also learned that Finnish is a far more absurd language than Estonian. In some cases, they don't even use question words, rather the indication that there's a question is a suffix added to whatever is being called into question. Finnish also doesn't use many loanwords, so while the rest of the world says "photograph", Finns say "valokuvaaja". Instead of "January", they say "tammikuu". Unlike the French, Finns actually use their own words as the rules of the language make it difficult fit in foreign words. For reasons I don't yet understand, Estonian is a bit more receptive to foreign words than Finnish, but nothing like English.

One last note, the correct pronunciation of Nikon is "NEE-kon" not "NI-kon". Please learn my mistakes.

Yes, Pictures

2011-07-15T20:27:00.009+02:00

I'm going on a trip this weekend, so I'm going to try to keep this post short and just give you a few pictures of Tallinn.

This my dormitory. Despite its appearance, I think it's nicer than the brand new building I was living in in Denver. It's much better insulated and I can't hear every sound that happens in the next room. Also, the elevator hasn't broken down yet. The main problem is that there's no oven or microwave in the kitchen.

Another intriguing issue is that we've been leaving the door to the porch open to cool off the kitchen as there's no air conditioning, but when nobody is no the kitchen, sparrows fly in and search for food. It's kind of cute.

Here are a few of my friends that went to explore the old city with me. From left to right, Mustafa (Turkish), Jenni (Finnish), Jane (Ukrainian), Elena (Italian), Witek (Polish). I found out recently that Witek also received the Estophilus scholarship.

St. Olaf's Church was at one time the tallest building in the world, but several lightening strikes and rebuildings later, it is shorter than it once was. There is a viewing platform 60 m (200 ft) up, from which several of the following photos were taken.

This is the upper town where the wealthy people once lived. The church to the left is Orthodox, the church to the right is Catholic, while the church I'm taking the picture from is Lutheran. Estonia was not an independent country until the 20th century, so whatever rulers it happen to have during previous centuries would bring their own religions.

This is the lower town where the poor people lived. Today it doesn't look much different than the upper town.

This is the new central district of Tallinn. Hotell Viru in the center of the image was the only hotel open to foreigners with Estonia was part of the USSR.

Finally, this is the view from my window. This picture was taken around 10:30pm.

Estonian: First Lessons

2011-07-12T18:29:00.003+02:00

Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language. What this basically means is that Estonian is not Indo-European like most European languages. So while English and Russian are vastly different languages, there are some basic logical similarities between the two because they are Indo-European. This is not true of English and Estonian. Also unlike Indo-European, Finno-Ugric is a very small language group, so there are very few languages like Estonian. It has some similarities with Finnish and a few lesser known languages.

Estonian is kind of absurd. It does not distinguish gender with pronouns, so every he, she, and it are just "ta". This part I like. It has no future tense, which actually isn't that weird because it's possible to speak English without ever using the future tense. It has two infinitive forms for every verb, which no one has properly explained to me how one uses them differently. Similarly, every pronoun has two forms that can be used interchangeably. For example, for "I" one could say "ma" or "mina", it doesn't really matter which. It contains an impressive number of vowel sounds, most of which I don't know how to pronounce. However, what most would consider the most intimidating feature are the 14 cases. This means, depending on how the word is used, there are 14 ways of spelling the word. German, which is often considered a hard language, only has 4 cases.

Most of the words and phrases we've learned in class have been pretty straightforward. "Tere" is "Hello", "Nägemist" is "Good bye", "Tänan" is "Thank you", etc. Even the phrase, "my name is..." is easy to learn, "minu nimi on..."

However, after awhile it starts getting odd. To say, "I am from America", one does not use the word "from", instead there is a case ending "-st", so it is "Ma olen Ameerikast". Using the wrong case ending completely changes the sentence. If one were to say, "Ma olen Ameerikas" instead, they would be saying "I am in America". Or you could end up with more absurd sentences like "Ma olen Ameerikaks", "I am becoming America".

What is currently the biggest unforeseen challenge of learning Estonian is the number of question words. It's much like how in English there is who, whom, and whose. Now imagine that instead of just 3, there are 14 potential variants for all question words.

Outside of Estonian, since I found out that I'm going to Ukraine, I've been having fun learning a few Russian words from Helen. She knows very limited English, so we have fun trying to communicate. It doesn't help that the only Russian phrases I've memorized so far are "how are you?", "thank you", and "sea gull". We found out though that Elena (the Italian student in my suite) is studying to be an Italian/English/Russian interpreter, so we've been helping her practice for her future career.

Sorry there's been no pictures thus far. My next update should have some.

Travel and First Days

2011-07-11T07:58:00.005+02:00

My itinerary going from Denver to Tallinn was Denver-Charlotte-Home-Charlotte-NYC-Reykjavik-Helsinki-Tallinn. Needless to say, I have spent much of the last couple of weeks traveling. The final leg, Helsinki to Tallinn, was done by ferry as it was cheaper to fly to Helsinki then take the ferry than to fly directly to Tallinn.

I made two fairly important mistakes during this trip. First, I forgot to write down which buses I needed to take to get from the airport to the ferry in Helsinki. Second, I forgot to write down the address of the place I'd be staying for rest of this month. Somehow it worked out though. The bus from the airport dropped me off right next to a bus stop for the ferry bus. The dorm I'm staying in is only half a mile from the ferry port in Tallinn, so I found the street I needed to be on and just walked down it until I saw a building that looked like a dormitory. It was only then that I got lost. The building is oddly-shaped and the rooms oddly-numbered, I'm in 77B3. So I couldn't find my room and had to go back to the front desk for directions.

The building is divided into suites, with two rooms (each with two people) sharing a bathroom and four rooms sharing a kitchen. I had the room to myself the first night, but I met a Turkish student (I believe his name is spelled Mustafa) who was staying in the same suite. He is taking the intermediate Estonian course and had been here a couple of years ago for the beginner course. Because of this, he knew both where our classes would be as well as where the nearest grocery store is.

I didn't do much the next morning. After sleeping close to 12 hours, I discovered I had a cold and decided to rest until I had to go over to the university for registration. Afterwards, I met a Ukrainian student, Jane (Anglicization of her real name), who just moved into our suite. As most of you know, I'm going to Ukraine for the Peace Corps next year to assist in NGO development. Jane just happened to have worked for an NGO in Kiev. So talking to her has been really informative.

By this point there were four people in our suite, as a Russian student, Helen, had also moved in. The four of us to decided to walk down to beach. Helen doesn't speak hardly any English, so Jane had to act as a translator during the walk. It was interesting to hear Jane's perspective on Estonia as she gushed about how nice the city was, e.g. smooth roads, bike lanes, etc. Any American coming to Tallinn would think it a rather poor city, but Jane saw it as relatively wealthy. Of course, this doesn't exactly leave me brimming with confidence about what kind of conditions I'll be living in when I get to Ukraine.

When we got back from the beach, the other members of our suite had moved in. My roommate is an Austrian, Alexander. The others are a Polish student, Witek, an Italian student, Elena, and another Austrian student, whose name I have forgotten. We sat around the dinner table chatting that evening. We all seem to get along very well, although I feel sorry for Helen as she's the only one that doesn't know English, and Jane is the only other fluent Russian speaker. As it stands, all four of the men are studying Estonian, while the women are either studying Russian or photography.

How Big is Estonia?

2011-07-08T19:56:00.002+02:00

I leave for Estonia later today, so I figured it was time to restart this blog. For those unaware, I received two scholarships. One is for doing research in Estonia and the second is for Estonian language and culture classes. My classes start Monday. My research is on why Estonia chose to adopt the Euro this year.

I don't have time to post a lot about my plans and so forth, but I did make a list of places with populations greater than Estonia's.

Phoenix, just the city
Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, but not Staten Island
New York City in 1870
Idaho
Guiyang, the 28th largest city in China
Kawasaki, Japan
Gwangju, South Korea
Perth, Australia
London in 1821
Qatar
Goa
Every province in China
Charlotte metropolitan area
Tijuana, Mexico
Montreal, Canada
Hamburg, Germany

Feel free to add more.

Home Again

2009-10-03T22:43:00.007+02:00

After three months, I'm finally back in the States. It was probably a good time to leave as it was starting to get cold and the heating system wasn't complete yet. My last few days in Reuden weren't terribly eventful, but there are few things I wanted to share.

I thought this was kind of funny. I was looking out my window and noticed that every single door was open. Isn't there some saying about living in a barn and closing doors?

I mentioned before that we went to a neighbor's house and took all their old roof tiles. It was a good few hours of work loading them all into the trailer and then moving them into storage. I estimated that in that pile there are over 10,000 tiles.

Verena wanted me to take this picture. It's the end of the outhouse. I mentioned it before, but I didn't describe it very well. As you can see, it wasn't a stand alone outhouse, but was stuck between the stables and the workshop. I didn't think to ask what they plan to do with it now.

Finally, a picture of Emil. I believe he's about six months old. I was kind of sad that I had to leave before he ever learned to do much more than sit up and eat food.

The last few days were kind of quiet. Marco had decided to go home to finish his thesis and Rene had left to spend a few days in Berlin. I thought I wouldn't get a chance to see Rene before I left. However, I went to Berlin the day before my flight to stay at Michel and Verena's apartment again. When I got off the train, Rene was waiting for me at the station. He had called the farm to tell them he was coming back and they told him that I would be at the train station soon. So he waited for me at the station. We chatted for a bit before he had to go catch his own train.

I spent my last evening in Berlin just kind of wandering around and getting horribly lost on the subway. Nice way to spend my last night in Germany.

The election is over

2009-09-28T17:47:00.002+02:00

Sunday was a quiet day here as half the people living here are registered to vote in Berlin, so they were gone for the day. Anna was out on a trip, so she wasn't here until later in the evening. So for most of the day it was just Verena, Emil, and I. After Verena got back from voting and I jokingly said that I was thinking of going over there and seeing if they would let me vote. Verena said they didn't check IDs, so I could try, but I would need to know the name of someone that wasn't going to vote. Since Anna hadn't voted yet, Verena thought I could say I was her, but I figured they would know something was wrong if I went there and said my name was "Anna".

Apparently, Germans weren't very excited about this election as it had the lowest voter turn-out for a Bundestag election since democracy was restored, 71%. The two largest parties, CDU and SPD, currently have few differences between and appear stagnant. This lead to them both losing votes to smaller parties.

The good news is the Grand Coalition is over. Despite the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) losing votes, due to an oddity in the German election system, they were able to pick more seats. In the German system, each constituency votes for a single candidate who will represent them. Once these are in place, additional seats are giving to all parties that got more than 5% of the vote until all parties have approximately the same share of seats as votes. However, CDU/CSU won so many constituencies, that their share of seats (38%) exceeds their share of the vote (34%). These are called "overhang seats".

Of course, having just 38% of the Bundestag does not give CDU/CSU control, so they will be forming a coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), with whom they have a more friendly relationship. While the share of votes for CDU, CSU, and FDP combined is less than 50%, thanks to the overhang seats, they have majority in the Bundestag.

The election was a major defeat for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which lost nearly a third of its support. However, no longer tied to the unpopular Grand Coalition, SPD is now the main opposition and is in a better position to revamp its image and distance itself from the CDU.

FDP, Die Linke, and Die Grünen all made gains thanks to the unpopularity of CDU/CSU and SPD. FDP was probably the biggest winner, increasing it's share of the vote by 50%, from 10% to 15%. Die Linke remains largely an East German party, but nearly doubled its share of votes in West Germany. Die Grünen, only saw modest gains across the board, but it was still its best result ever.

As for the smaller parties, none of them had much success. The Pirate Party displaced the Nazis as the largest, unrepresented party. I find a bit of humor in Pirates beating Nazis. Actually, the Pirate Party managed to get 2% of the vote, which is spectacular for a party that was unheard of only a few months ago and didn't even run in one state. However, it remains to be seen if they having staying power or if they were merely this election's most popular protest vote.

Anyway, this will probably be my last update from Germany as I will be returning home on Wednesday. Whee!

German Parties (The Little Ones)

2009-09-26T14:02:00.012+02:00

Along with the six big parties, there are numerous smaller parties which have had little to no success. Despite this, their campaign signs are everywhere. There are two ways one of these parties could get a seat, one is to get enough in a single district that one of their candidates gets a seat, or to get more than 5% of the overall vote. As it stands, none of these parties have really popular candidates and the latest polls show all that even if all the smaller parties were combined they would barely pass 5%.

Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) National Democratic Party

Return instead of Entry - Basically, "foreigners, go home!"

Probably the largest party not in the Bundestag, NPD is the modern successor of the Nazi Party. While they deny any connection, they are fervently xenophobic and unabashedly racist. They were recently in the news for criticizing CDU for appointing a black politician to a ministry position. And by criticize, I mean they put up posters telling him to go back to Africa, referred to him as a "token *expletive*", and had party members protest in black-face and afro wigs. In a bizarre twist, they have been gaining support among Palestinian and Iranian immigrants because of NPD's criticism of Israel.

Deutsche Volksunion (DVU) German People's Union

On top - Low wages, gas extortion, job cuts, (we've) had it!

DVU and NPD are sister parties, similar to the CDU and CSU. DVU exists only in Brandenburg and runs joint campaigns with NPD during federal elections. Because of this, I haven't seen any NPD posters in Calau, only DVU. DVU isn't quite as extreme as NPD and is largely dependent on the party's founder for survival. The picture above illustrates something I've noticed about poster placement. The more controversial a party, the higher up it is posted. This is to keep people from tearing them down. I came across an NPD poster in Bernburg that had been tore to shreds as it had been posted within arms reach.

Freie Wähler (FW) Free Voters
The bottom poster in the picture above is for a FW candidate. FW is a loose collection of independents who share no common ideology. Due to the German electoral system it is very difficult to get elected as an independent. To get around this, independents formed a "party", as a way of collectively pooling their support to allow a few of them to get seats. This creates odd situations though where there might be one very popular candidate who gets a lot of votes for FW, thus allowing other candidates to get seats who may not have that much support.

Piratenpartei Pirate Party

For free knowledge and free education

Piraten is a new party in Germany, related to the relatively successful Piratpartiet in Sweden. Piratpartiet was new when I lived in Sweden and was largely just a protest party for university students upset by new laws on file-sharing. Since then it has expanded its platform to include reform of copyright and privacy laws, government transparency, and greater access to information. It has since managed to get one member elected to the European Parliament. Piraten is unlikely to be as successful as its Swedish counterpart, as they were virtually unknown until a few months ago. However, I have met a number of people considering voting for them.

Marxistisch-Leninistische Partei Deutschlands (MLPD) Marxist-Leninist Party

Be done with crisis chaos! Forward to true socialism!

MLPD was the largest far-left party in West Germany, which isn't saying much. Despite the name, MLPD was critical of the USSR and Communist East Germany. Although, they still support a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" which is kind of what led to the problems they criticized the USSR for.

Die Tierschutzpartei The Animal Welfare Party

Global warming. Save, what is to save!

Basically PETA if it ever tried to form a political party. It advocate animal rights, environmental protection, and vegetarianism. It got over 0.2% of the vote last election, which is actually better than MLPD, which is pretty sad all around.

Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei (ÖDP) Ecological Democratic Party

Avoid dividing the world

ÖDP was formed after a split in die Grünen over "right to life" issues. As such, ÖDP is a bit more conservative and pretty much only popular in Southern Bavaria. Despite having never won a seat in any federal or state election, it has successfully lobbied for various changes in the German government. Ironically, none of these reforms had anything to do with ecological issues.

Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (BüSo) Civil Rights Movement Solidarity

Europe's future lies in Africa

I was so confused by BüSo posters because they seemed to have nothing to do with Germany or any current issues. As I have since found out, it's part of the LaRouche Movement. LaRouche and his followers have this odd obsession with massive infrastructure projects. The above poster is calling for investment in Africa, which to them means covering Africa in high-speed railroads.

Die Republikaner (REP) The Republicans

The Indians could not stop immigrants! Today they live on reservations!

In case you couldn't tell, REP is an xenophobic party. They're a somewhat difficult party to pin down as while they share many beliefs with the Neo-Nazi parties, they don't carry the same fascist undertones and also refuse to work with NPD and DVU. From what I can tell, unlike NPD that wants to create a highly-organized society free of foreigners, REP wants to create a more traditional society free of foreigners. An subtle but important difference.

The election is tomorrow. I hope you are all as excited as I am.

German Parties (The Big Ones)

2009-09-24T16:17:00.018+02:00

On September 27th, Germany will hold its national election. This year has been called Germany's Super Election Year, with the national election, the EU election, five state elections, and presidential election all happening in the same year. For the past four years, the German government has been ruled by a grand coalition between the two largest parties, CDU and SPD, as the last election produced no other viable coalitions. CDU and SPD don't agree on a lot, so the government has avoided addressing any controversial issues and been rather unresponsive. The hope is that this election will bring about an end to the Grand Coalition, and allow a more natural coalition to take power.

As it stands, there are currently 6 parties in the German Bundestag, and as much as many smaller parties may hope, this situation does not appear likely to change. So in this post I will present the six main parties as well as some of their campaign posters that I've seen around Germany lately.

Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) Christian Democratic Union

We Have the Strength

We Elect the Chancellor

CDU is currently the leading coalition partner, with their party leader, Angela Merkel, serving as Chancellor. CDU looks set to remain the leading party in power after this election thanks partially to the popularity of Merkel. CDU is the leading conservative party in Germany, although, they're not stirctly "Christian" as the name would imply. Christian Democracy is more a political ideology that extols traditional values and is popular in Catholic countries. CDU is also known for its support of liberal economic policies and European integration. However, it has been quiet on most issues this election. Merkel has been seen as handling the economic crisis very well, so they appear to be coasting on that success. One of my favorite aspects of CDU is that their party color is black, which is probably the boldest color any party could use.

Christlich Soziale Union (CSU) Christian Social Union

Quite simply: who wants a stronger Bavaria, vote CSU

With both votes CSU: For Bavaria. For our Chancellor. - "Both votes" refers to an oddity of the German electoral system where you vote for the party and candidate separately.

You might notice something strange about these posters. First, why do they care so much about Bavaria? Second, why do they support Merkel, CDU party leader? CSU is CDU's sister party which operates only in Bavaria. Other than its unabashed support of Bavaria and being slightly more conservative, it is virtually indistinguishable from CDU. At the federal level, the parties are referred to as one faction, CDU/CSU or simply The Union. Because of its singular focus on Bavaria, the party is incredibly popular there and has been the ruling party of the Bavarian government since 1949. In 2008, CSU received its worst result ever, only receiving 43% in a six-party race. This "poor" showing though is because of a maverick CSU member, Gabriele Pauli, who ran as an independent. She's rather famous in Germany for advocating turning marriage into a seven-year renewable contract, which is brilliant.

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) Social Democratic Party

Because health should not be a luxury product / Because clean energy is the future

Historically, SPD and CDU have been the two largest parties in German, constantly fighting for dominance. The current situation has been a disaster for SPD. As the junior partner in the coalition, SPD has been unable to take any credit for the successes of the government, nor criticize the failures of the government. This election will likely see support for SPD drop to its lowest level ever. SDP has also been hurt by the formation of Die Linke, which has attracted former-SDP voters who feel SDP has abandoned the welfare state in favor of neo-liberal policies. The best situation for SDP right now would actually be to leave the Grand Coalition and take its place as the leading opposition party, which will allow it to refresh its image and start regaining voters.

Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) Free Democratic Party

Strengthen freedom, protect civil rights

More net (income) from gross (income)

FDP is a bro-business party. It is also socially liberal (for one, it supports gay marriage), but it rarely campaigns on these issues. This is the party that CDU would most like to be in a coalition in, so there's a lot of hope among CDU supporters and everyone tired of the Grand Coalition that FDP does well. Currently polls show FDP getting its best result ever, but it may not be enough. Most of its support comes from the wealthy and business-owners. I have not seen a single FDP poster in Calau, likely because Calau is on of the poorest cities in Germany.

Die Grünen The Greens

Growth through education / Jobs Jobs Jobs

This one is probably the most obvious, Die Grünen is the environmentalist party. Die Grünen is probably the most powerful green party in the world, having a great deal of power in many Germany cities. The popularity of Die Grünen is not surprising to me. Germans by-and-large are very interested in the outdoors and thus protecting what little nature they have left. Wind power is popular, many houses have solar panels, and organic products are common. Like FDP, Die Grünen will likely see its best result ever this election. As the campaign posters show, die Grünen is focusing on the creation of "green jobs".

Die Linke The Left

Tax wealth!

More money for education, not for banks!

I always found the simplicity of of "Die Linke" entertaining. Also, the little arrow on the "I" is a nice touch. Anyway, Die Linke was created rather recently from a combination of the reformed East German Communist Party and former SPD members against Agenda 2010, a series of reforms that they believed were harmful to workers and the unemployed. Because of this, there's a great deal of animosity between Die Linke and SPD, and SPD's refusal to work with them was what lead to the current Grand Coalition. Despite its associations with Communist East Germany, Die Linke is pro-democracy, as all the Communist hardliners were forced out prior to German Reunification. Even so, Die Linke remains largely an East German party, receiving only around 5% in West Germany last election, but over 20% in East Germany. Die Linke remains very controversial, but will continue to gain support if SPD doesn't reform its image.

So those are the major parties in Germany. Next time, the minor parties!

München

2009-09-23T14:06:00.013+02:00

This past weekend I went to Munich to visit Malte. Malte is actually from Bonn, but recently got a new job in Munich and moved before I had a chance to visit him in his hometown. So by the time I arrived, he had only been in Munich two weeks and was still learning about the city himself.

Malte is currently living in a guest house his employer has for temporary workers and interns, so when I arrived in Munich the first we had to do was go look at an apartment. Munich is the most expensive city in Germany, so finding an apartment at an affordable price is quite difficult and there's a lot of competition. Kind of an odd thing to do when visiting a friend, but it was his first chance to look at apartments since he arrived in Munich, and I found it kind of fun. We ended up visiting 5 apartments while I was there, my favorite being one directly above a grocery store.

On Saturday we went on a walk around the city. Our first stop was of course the old town. We actually managed to arrive at the city hall just as the Glockenspiel was playing.

This was one of the first places we visited. I like that the clock is off-center. We climbed the tower to get a view of the city.

The city hall.

One of the many churches. I didn't actually learn any of the names. Malte didn't seem very interested in looking at churches, so we didn't visit many.

From there we made our way to the Isar River. Our route was a bit haphazard as we stopped to look at any interesting buildings along the way, such as the Landtag and a protestant church (that was completely empty). I was also on a mission to photograph as many campaign posters as possible, which I will post later.

We eventually found ourselves in the English Garden. Where we wondered around a bit before taking a short break next to the Chinese Tower.

According to Malte, it was first built in the 18th Century following the design of a a much taller pagoda in London. The one standing today is not the original, which leaves me wondering, why didn't they try making it taller than the one in London?

We then headed to the Pinakothek art museums. However, when we arrived we discovered that on Sundays, they cost only one Euro to visit, so we decided to wait until Sunday to visit.

There are three Pinakothek museums, the old, new, and modern. The picture above is the old one. You might be able to see that part of the upper-story is just plain brick. This section was destroyed during WWII, and when they rebuilt they decided to leave a visible reminder of the war. The New Pinakothek was actually totally destroyed and an entirely new building was put in its place.

I forgot to mention earlier, but Saturday was the first day of Oktoberfest. So all day we were surrounded by men in Lederhosen and women in Dirndls. So we headed to where the festivities were taking place to see what was happening. We didn't go inside the beer halls as there were lines to get in and since I wasn't going to be drinking, it didn't seem like a good use of our time.

Instead we wandered around the festival grounds. It was basically a big carnival with rides, snack vendors, games, and ponies. Of course, I did have to question their logic in combining a festival all about drinking beer with something like this:

When we arrived it was seven o'clock and there were already people passed out. I saw one guy try to sit down on a guardrail, fall over backwards, but continued to type a text message while flat on his back. At the subway station, there were people in standing at every door to help drunk people on the train.

The next morning we decided to take advantage of the one Euro museum tickets. Along the way, we came across an interesting sight.

Going through the English Garden is a very fast-flowing man-made river called the Eisbach. I can find no explanation as to why the river is so fast, but because of its speed and some ingenuity on the part of the surfer-community there is a continuous wave. Surfing here is dangerous and is technically not allowed, but this has never been enforced. To keep it safe, the surfers take turns on the wave, so there only one person on the wave at a time, and once he falls, the next person jumps in.

The first museum we visited was the Bavarian National Museum. The museum is mostly a collection of art, religious artifacts, and few everyday items from Bavarian history. What I found most fascinating and unique was the huge collection of nativity scenes. These were not just the little ones that people often put in their house, but massive ones, often with dozens of individual people and animals, all highly detailed.

Although, sometimes they were a little off, as this one appears to be depicting Jesus' birth on a Norwegian Fjord.

Tired of looking at old stuff, we then headed to the Modern Pinakothek. It had a really nice collection, including pieces from Picasso and Dali.

Afterwards we got dinner at a Korean diner. Malte had been wanting to go there and figured it would be best to go with me as I would know the menu and could recommend something. I was reluctant to go at first, but decided I shouldn't keep Malte from trying something new. After having not eaten any Korean food in about a year, I found I enjoyed it a lot more. Being there also reminded me of a lot of the little things I had forgotten about Korean dining, such as using metal chopsticks and metal cups (which they didn't have here), being served soup while it was still boiling hot (which they didn't do here), and all the random side dishes that would come with the meal (which they also didn't have here). They did, however, provide me with a big bowl of rice with my kimchichiggae, which was much appreciated.

So I had a good time in Munich with Malte. It would have been nice to have visited him in Bonn where he would have been more familiar with the sights. We ended up wasting a lot of time, but my primary reason for going was to see him, so I didn't really mind. Besides, now he knows a lot more about Munich, so any future visitors will have a better tour.

On the farm

2009-09-22T15:43:00.004+02:00

There have been some big projects going on at the farm lately. First was the installation of a new heating system, which will also work as the water heater. I haven't done much with this project, my biggest contribution being helping mix the cement used at the base of the chimney. Building the chimney and putting in the pipes has been mostly Michel's and Verena's project.

Another big project has been installing the new sewer system, which I think I mentioned before. At the moment we putting in the pipes, which left our yard looking like this for a few days:

The ditches seen here have since been filled in, however, there's still a ditch cutting through the barn and into the garden.

I wasn't planning to share this picture, until I realized I hadn't mention this yet. This of a shed that was built between two of the barns. It was rather poorly constructed and ugly, but now it has a new floor, roof, and doors and looks much better.

Most recently, we collected roof tiles. Most older buildings in East German have ceramic roof tiles, but at some time the roof tiles at the farm were replaced with cheaper shingles. Everyone wants to replace the shingles, but the tiles are expensive, so whenever they hear about a house being torn down or a roof being replaced, they go see if the roof tiles are still good and ask for them. Luckily for us, someone in Reuden decided to put a new roof on his house and let us take the old tiles. To get them down, we formed a chain, where one or two persons at the top would remove the tiles and pass them down along the chain to the final person that would set them down in a trailer. The tiles weren't heavy, but consistently having to stretch up to get the tile from the person above me and then leaning down to pass it to the person below me was a bit straining.

Bernburg Drive-By

2009-09-17T10:40:00.002+02:00

Sometime last week, Rene invited me to go along with him to Bernburg. Rene went to college in Bernburg was going back to visit his friends and go kayaking. We got there late Saturday and left late on Sunday and in between, we spent the whole time constantly moving by one form of transportation or another. This also meant that despite how nice Bernburg was, I was unable to find time to take any pictures.

We arrived in Bernburg on Saturday and met several of his friends for dinner. I have found that it's easier for me to speak German with people I've just met as the conversations tend to be simpler. Once I know someone fairly well, I tend to want to talk about things I don't know how to say in German, like asking more specific questions about what they study or where they work. So it was good practice for me to meet some new people.

We wanted to start out early on Sunday, as we knew it would be a long day and we had to catch the train at 7pm. However, our plans were thwarted when it started raining. We decided to wait it out, which probably delayed our start by over an hour. We debated changing plans, but it eventually stopped raining and we continued.

The first thing we had to do was get bikes. As Rene and I were just visiting, we didn't have bikes, so we were going to borrow some, but we had to get there first. We didn't have enough time to walk, so I ended up having to ride on the bar between the handlebars and the saddle while one of Rene's friends pedaled. This was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever had and is not one I care to repeat. Even though I wasn't the one pedaling, I was still exhausted by the experience as I had to sit so stiffly to keep from falling off or getting on the other guys way.

Eventually, I got my own bike, which was a bit mismatched with the others as it was more of a bike for going on a brief pleasant ride through the city, and not one of the more sporty bikes the others had. Two people offered to switch with me, but I turned them down because I figured it wouldn't be much of a difference.

The ride to where we would be kayaking was about 15 kilometers, about 10 miles. It could have been a pleasant ride, but the weather was never on our side, being both rainy and windy. During the ride I talked a bit with Rene's friends Martina and Eva. Martina was quite eager to practice English with me, and I had kind of upset her during dinner the previous day because I refused to speak English. During the ride though, I spoke English as trying to speak in German would have just added to the number of distractions I had. She had recently spent four months in Poland, so we talked a lot about learning languages.

Eventually reaching the river, we received our kayaks, which were similar to the two-person kayaks Anne and I used in Lübbenau. Martina and I decided to ride together, and since I did such a poor job at steering the first time, Martina would sit in the back and steer. This turned out to be a bad idea as we soon found that I actually weighed more than her (it's rare that I weigh more than someone) and this made it difficult to keep the kayak straight. However, the river was wide and by the time we realized what was going on, we decided it wasn't worth stopping to fix it.

The trip was far more pleasant than the Lübbenau trip. First of all, there was only one person in the group that had done a lot of kayaking, so we kept a pretty leisurely pace. Also, the trip lasted only two hours, so I wasn't exhausted by the end. We were also lucky in that as soon as we got out of our boats, we heard a loud thunderclap. Had we taken any longer, we would have been caught in a downpour, but as it was, we managed to wait out the storm in a cafe without getting too wet.

Since we had gotten delayed both by the rain earlier in the day and by the later storm, the bike ride back had to be unstop. I was feeling pretty good after kayaking, but after halfway through the bike ride back, I really started to fade and was soon very far behind. I accounted it to the fact that I wasn't used to riding such long distances, however, once back the city, I switched bikes with Eva and realized that her bike was in fact much better than the one I had been given.

We arrived at the train station with just enough time to spare. Some of Rene's friends would also be riding back with us. Not all the way to Reuden, but their stops were along the way. We got what was called a Schoenes-Wochenende ticket, which is a flat rate ticket that can be used by up to five people. Once our group had dwindled down to just Rene and me, Rene found someone waiting to buy a ticket at a place we had to switch trains and told him he could join us and if someone came to check tickets, we would say he was with us. Rene said that when he lived in Berlin, he used to get on trains without buying a ticket and would then go around the train asking people if they bought the Schoenes-Wochenende ticket and if he could join them. He always found someone before an officer showed up.

While I enjoyed the trip, I was disappointed that I didn't really get to see the city because of how quickly we always had to move. It didn't really have the quaintness of cities like Würzburg or Tübingen, but you could tell it was an old city with a lot of history. It would be nice to see again.

Live Update

2009-09-07T14:46:00.002+02:00

Once I finish the post, you'll be totally up-to-date on everything that has happened. I think this is the first time in the history of this blog that I'm not at least a week behind.

Soon after I got back from Tübingen, we went for a swim at a nearby lake. Marco and Rene wanted to see if they could swim across it, so we dropped them off on one-side of the lake with nothing but their speedos and drove to a beach on the other side to wait for them.

I had swam here before and that time, the water was freezing. This time the water wasn't too bad, but it was windy, close to sunset, and we were in the shade. Not a terribly good combination, so I didn't stay in the water too long. We spent most of our time standing on the shore with binoculars looking for Marco and Rene.

We followed them with binoculars for awhile, but as the moved closer to our side, they disappeared behind some water plants. I went to see if I could relocate them from a different angle, but was only able to find Marco. I got a little worried so I went back to the others only to find Rene was already there. He had gotten out of the water while we couldn't see him and walked the rest of the way. Marco managed to swim the whole width in one hour and twenty minutes.

Marco is always experimenting with foods in the kitchen. His most recent experiment was making juice from vogelbeeren, which may or may not be poisonous. Once getting it down to juice form, he asked me to try it, warning me that it was very bitter. It turned out to be one of the worst things I've ever tasted, somewhat akin to stomach bile. He later had me try another sip with a healthy amount of sugar added, but it was still pretty questionable.

On Saturday, I cooked. We rarely have meals with meat as for one, it's not something grown on the farm, and also because Michel and Verena just don't eat much meat, they don't cook it. Marco knows though that he can get me to cook meat, but wanted to do something simple. My first thought was burritos, as all we would really need to do was cook the meat and chop up a few other items that people could add themselves. It ended up not being that easy because we had to make our own tortillas. Marco pretty much took care of the tortillas himself and they turned out really well.

Anne and Verena are experimenting with the idea of putting in their own kind of sewage system, using a small pond filled with water plants and so forth to filter and clean the water. It wouldn't be potable, but still, it's a neat project and a bit forward-thinking as there is concern that the government will cease maintenance of the current sewage system due to the declining population.

I bring this up because yesterday we went out to clandestinely collect water plants that could be used for this sewage system. I say "clandestinely" because it's apparently illegal to just go and harvest them, but out here, getting in trouble for such things is unlikely. It was quite muddy work, as we had to dig down into the creek and try to get the roots of the plants. I was spared from the muddiest work as they unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) didn't have any rubber boots I could wear. Still my hands, arms, and pants got fairly muddy and there was one incident where I was throwing the plants into the van and some mud splattered back on my face. I joked with Anne afterwards that this was exactly what I expected Germany would be like.

Tübingen

2009-09-05T15:52:00.013+02:00

I arrived in Tübingen Thursday morning. Lisa met me at the train station and showed me where I'd be staying, but as she needed to work, I was on my own most of the day. Tübingen is a small city so there isn't much to see, but what they have is very nice.

The town hall

The square next to the town hall

I eventually made my way to the castle, which itself wasn't terribly interesting. It's seems to be mainly used as the meeting place for many archeological and historical organizations. Tübingen is a university city, so this isn't too out of place. The one nice thing about castles though is that they're built up high.

View to the south east

View to the north

I met Lisa and her boyfriend, Stefan, for dinner. They wanted me to try a traditional Swabian dish, so I got maultaschen. They're basically really big ravioli. They were created to get around the Catholic rules about eating meat on Friday. Apparently simply hiding the meat in a pouch is good enough.

The next day Lisa still had to work, so I went to the Ritter Sport factory. Ritter Sport is a German chocolate company, which prides itself on making square-shaped bars. The factory is not in Tübingen, but in a neighboring village, Waldenbuch. It's actually kind of an odd sight as the factory is basically right in the middle of this quaint little village. So right across the street from a row of small German cottages, is an industrial complex. Then there's this piece of aggressively modern architecture.

This is the Ritter Museum. The museum is divided into two sections, one is an exhibit about Ritter Sport, chocolate, and the making of chocolate bars. The other section is a modern art museum. I went to the art museum first and while it was a really good exhibit, I was totally perplexed as to why it was there. Lisa later explained it to me, it's because of Ritter Sport's obsession with squares. The art on display was by François Morellet, whose art makes heavy use of geometric shapes, like squares. This also explains the building itself (it's a giant square).

The other part of the museum is aimed more at kids, the main feature being a work station where kids get to see how to make chocolate. However, this section also includes an outlet store where they sell broken, but otherwise good, chocolate. I bought a kilo for 5.90 Euros.

That evening, I went with Lisa, Stefan, and some of their friends on a boat ride on the Neckar. I was worried about my camera, so I didn't take it with me, but here's a picture I took of the Neckar the day before.

Isn't that lovely? I can't remember the name of the type of boat we used, but it was kind of like a gondola wherein we had to use a long pole to push the boat along the river. It's quite tiring work, so we took turns. There's a good risk of falling into the water if you're the one with the pole and you don't know what you're doing, so I wasn't very enthusiastic about trying it out. However, after watching everyone else do it, I thought I should try. Then the person I was supposed to go after fell into the water. So I decided against trying. Luckily for her, her boyfriend was carrying extra clothes, so she had something dry she could switch into.

Finally the weekend, Lisa wasn't working, so I went with her and Stefan to Liechtenstein.

This is not the country, but rather a small castle built by the Duke of Württemburg. It is called Liechtenstein due to the lightly-colored stones used to build it. We went on a tour of the castle, where unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures. Also, they didn't offer the tour in English, but they did have an English pamphlet that I could use to follow along. I found that if I read the pamphlet really quickly upon entering a new room, I could figure out what the guide was talking about. It was a neat little castle though as it seemed to be more of a glorified hunting lodge, with a drinking hall filled with hunting trophies and paintings about hunting and drinking.

Afterwards, we went to a nearby cave. There wasn't nothing very notable about other than it was fairly large.

The last day, a friend of Stefan took us to Lake Constance. There we visited the Blumeninsel, Flower Island. The island had been bought by a former Swedish prince who lost his title when he married without the consent of the King of Sweden. I guess moving to an island on the German-Swiss border was the next logical course of action. He turned the island into a massive garden.

Lake Constance, in case you wanted to know what it looked like.

I think this was part of the "Italian Garden".

We eventually left the island and went to visit the city of Konstanz (this causes me some confusion, as in English the lake is called Constance, so it's seems it should be Konstanz in German. But in German Konstanz only refers to the city, they call the lake Bodensee). Our main goal was to get food, but we did enjoy a few of the sites on the way.

A church we came across. Probably no the best shot, but I like this picture because it shows the contrast between the pale clean walls and the colorful region around the clock.

And that was the end of my trip. The next morning I had a 9-hour train ride to Reuden. I didn't get a reserved seat, so I was concerned I might have to move around a bit, but I got lucky as I found a reserved seat that no one showed up to claim. I had to switch trains in Berlin, which itself isn't terribly important, but when it arrived in Calau, I found that Anne had been on the train as well. She had gone up to Berlin that morning to defend her thesis and just happened to catch the same train.

Return to Würzburg

2009-09-03T10:08:00.003+02:00

As mentioned before, I went to visit Ralph in Würzburg. I had visited Würzburg before and thought it was a really nice city, so I was excited to get to visit it again. Also, because I had visited the city before, I didn't take many pictures. Sorry.

This was probably one of my most relaxing trips as we didn't do very much. The first evening, I just hung-out with Ralph and his girlfriend, Katrien, by the river.

The next morning, Ralph had to work, but only a few hours, so I went to visit an exhibition on the rebuilding of Würzburg and the rest of Bavaria after World War II. While it was a large exhibition, it wasn't terribly memorable. It seemed more of a nostalgia museum with a lot of "do you remember when..." kind of displays.

Once Ralph got off work, we went back to the river to rest and read for a bit. Ralph is an archeology student and there was an article in a recent National Geographic he wanted to read. I flipped through one of his National Geographics and commented on how much work it must be to translate all the articles for different countries. Ralph then pointed out that few of the articles are actually translated. There are articles that only appear in the German version. Even when the same basic article might appear, they'll often use different writers. So the German version is not a direct translation of the English version, but rather a completely different article using the same information.

The next morning, Katrien took us to a forest where she used to work. To teach kids about nature, they had lined the trail through the forest with interactive displays and it had been Katrien's job to maintain the exhibits and lead students through the forest. It actually seemed really well done, with lots of different kinds of displays and information about the forest.

That night, I went with Ralph to a going away party for someone who lived on the floor below him. While he was friends with some of the people in the apartment, he didn't seem to know the girl that was moving out very well nor her friends, so it was a bit awkward as I was expecting him to introduce me to people, but he didn't know many of them himself. After awhile, some guys started playing guitars, but were apparently too loud as an old woman in the building came up to complain. I wish I understood what she said, because she didn't just say, "be quiet or I'll call the police", she stood at the door and lectured us for a quite awhile. After that, they decided to move the party elsewhere, and Ralph and I called it a night.

The next day we visited the castle and chapel up on the hill across the river. I did take some pictures, but they didn't come out very well as it was rainy, and most of them were exactly the same as the ones I took the first time I visited. However, there was one new thing I noticed this time that I didn't the first time. On the way to the chapel, they have a series of statues representing the Stations of the Cross. There was something odd about them, maybe you can figure it out.

The guy on the right is supposed to be a Roman soldier. Doesn't look very Roman does he? In the past, historical accuracy wasn't terribly important, so it was common to show historical figures wearing contemporary clothing. It's hard to say whether this was done due to ignorance or if they simply didn't care. It isn't until the Enlightenment and the subsequent obsession with Greek and Roman history that attempts at historical accuracy seem to be made.

We spent most of the rest of the evening chatting and playing games at Katrien's place. Katrien is studying literature and lives across the street from a used book store, so she has a huge book collection. I was surprised to see Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" on her bookshelf and asked her about it. She said that it was rather rare in Germany as the book hadn't been printed in German since about the 1980's, so she could only find the English version. We later visited the used book store and asked Katrien to tell me if she find any good German books as I didn't know any German authors. The one book she recommended was "Draußen vor der Tür". However, she had three copies of it already, so she just gave me one.

Ralph and I eventually went back to his place. There we fired up our computers and went through our music folders. Both Ralph and I collect large amounts of music and since we live in different countries, we tend to come across bands the other has never heard of. So we set about exchange music we thought the other might like. In the end, I think we both ended up with about 40 new albums to enjoy.

Anyway, I don't want to leave you with virtually no pictures of Würzburg as it is a great city, so here's one picture that actually turned out pretty well.

Uppsala Friends

2009-08-31T22:16:00.001+02:00

For those wondering why I haven’t called or been in contact much this past week or so, it’s because I’ve been traveling and haven’t had much internet access. However, before we get to that, let’s start a few days earlier.

We’ve had a number of visitors come to Hof Morgengruen, however this weekend was going to be first where I actually knew the visitors. On Thursday, August 20th, Berit arrived. Berit is a friend of Anne and myself whom we meet in Uppsala.

Sometime during her visit, the subject of contra-dancing came up. I had mentioned it before to Anne and she was curious about it. So I got to work making an easy dance pattern. The dancers were Anne, Marco, Berit, and myself. It’s difficult to explain certain concepts of the dance with only four people, but it’s all that’s needed for the most basic steps. I taught them some of the most common moves like circle left, balance, and swing. We then went through the pattern I made a couple of times. We considered setting it to music once everyone got an idea of what to do, but Marco didn’t seem interested in continuing and Anne and Berit just seemed really confused.

Friday evening, Lisa arrived, another friend from Uppsala. We decided to have a cookout and spend the evening sitting by the campfire. Unfortunately it started raining, but fortunately we had finished grilling, so we just moved all the food inside.

Saturday we went on a bike ride through the surrounding countryside. Michel has a hobby of taking old or broken bikes and fixing them up in his spare time. So we had plenty of bikes for everyone.

On one of the higher hills Brandenburg, there is a lookout tower with a nice view of the region. When we stopped to go to the tower, we just left our bikes at the bottom of the hill. Most of the bikes didn’t have locks, but we weren’t concerned with anyone stealing them way out here. However, Berit was in the habit of locking up bikes and just happened to be on a bike with a lock. It wasn’t until she locked it that she realized she didn’t have a key. So Anne went to a nearby house and asked for some tools to cut the lock. Marco took the job of actually cutting the lock, which he did expertly.

The next morning, Anne took out everything that could be considered breakfast food and set it on the table, so it was a long breakfast. I spent the rest of the morning packing as Lisa was giving me a ride to Wuerzburg.

Basically, what we had worked out was, Lisa would be driving to Reuden, so if I wanted to visit Tuebingen, where she lived, I could take a ride with her. However, the timing was a bit inconvenient as she was going back to work and would be busy all week. Instead she would take me as far as Wuerzburg to stay with Ralph, yet another friend from Uppsala. Ralph was on summer vacation and only working a part-time job, so I could visit with him during the weekdays, and then take the train from Wuerzburg to Tuebingen closer to the weekend.

This led to my first time on the Autobahn. While I had taken some trips in the van, we never went very far. The Autobahn is of course well known for its lack of speed limits. In recent years, as roads have gotten more crowded, speed limits have started going up. However, the idea of “speed limit” is a bit different in Germany. In the stretches we went through that had speed limits, it was usually set to 130 km/h (over 80 mph), but would drop to 110 km/h (almost 70 mph) on particularly bad sections. Lisa asked me what the speed limits were in the US and I told her the highest in North Carolina was 70 mph. She thought that was really slow. I later learned that at driving schools in Germany they have students drive at speeds up to 180 km/h (over 112 mph), because on the Autobahn, that’s a speed you need to be comfortable at.

Mehr Berlin

2009-08-23T08:19:00.006+02:00

The next morning was kind of a museum morning. I visited the Holocaust Museum, which I mentioned earlier, then I went to a photography exhibit by Herlinda Koelbl. The whole exhibit was interesting, but one section I liked in particular was the pictures of German politicians. She would take a photo of them every year, generally using the same shot, so the displays showed how they changed over the years.

I then went to the Hamburger Bahnhof, which is now a contemporary art museum. I was actually kind of annoyed by the museum because it was incredibly poorly designed. I first rode right past it on my bike as there was no sign. I only found the museum because I eventually came across a sign for the parking lot. However, then I couldn't find the entrance. After wandering around the building for awhile, I found what appeared to be the entrance and went in. The layout inside seemed just as confused. I went through one section and suddenly found myself back at the entrance. I couldn't believe that was all, so I search around and find that the rest of the museum was on the other side of the gift shop. When I left, I'm pretty sure I missed a section, but I was already so frustrated with the place, I didn't want to search for it.

That night I decided to go to a concert at the Kulturbrauerei. It was quite a few hours away, but wanted to find the place and see if I could get a ticket. I got there around 6:30pm and was told I couldn't buy a ticket until 8pm, so I wondered around for a bit to see if I could find something to do. As I was waiting for a light to change, a lady came up to ask directions. I, of course, didn't know, but I had a map. Seeing as I wasn't doing anything, I decided to go along with her and help her out.

She was trying to find an art gallery where a friend of hers was opening an exhibition. We eventually found the place and while the art wasn't that interesting, I did spend some time talking to the other people there. I ended up meeting an American who had been living in Berlin for the last 11 years, but had visited the US last summer and just happened to have spent a few days in Waynesville.

I then headed back to the Kulturbrauerei and bought a ticket for the concert. I was there fairly early, so the place was kind of empty. A bit bored, I decided to start a conversation with these two girls. We ended up talking in English when they found out I was American as one of the girls seemed quite excited to have a chance to practice her English. She obviously had studied a lot as she spoke with a British accent instead of a German one. When I told her this, she said, "I would hope so". I wasn't really sure how to take this, so I just left it at that.

The format of the concert was a kind of "Battle of the Bands" except all the bands had a different style, so it was kind of odd. The first act was My Baby is from Nashville, a country-western band from Berlin. They weren't great, but they were entertaining. Next was Mina Maze who sang a few cute songs. Third was Benjamin Rose who sang with an R&B style and was quite good at it. Last was Vember, a rock band that actually sang in German. Acoustic group, MissinCat also played, but they weren't part of the contest.

They were going announce the winner of the contest after MissinCat performed, but after watching a five band concert I was pretty well exhausted and had a long bike ride ahead of me. So I left early.

On my last day in Berlin, I went to visit a flea market in Mauerpark. I was looking for used books as it's hard to find good German books for cheap in the US, but quite easy in Germany. It was actually really nice as not all the booths were just selling old junk, like so many flea markets in the US do, but there were also people selling jewelry and artwork they had made. Although there was still plenty of junk, like a basket full of partially used rolls of tape.

While I was looking mostly for books, which I found a few, I noticed a lot of people were selling DVDs, so I started looking through those for German movies. However, in the entire flea market, I did not find a single German movie. I have three theories: one, Germans are more likely to hold on to German movies and thus not resell them, two, fewer German DVDs are made so there isn't an excess of them that ends up on the secondary market, three, Germans are also looking for German movies so they get bought up quickly.

I took some time to visit the rest of Mauerpark before I left. The park gets its name because there's a wall there (Mauer means Wall), however I don't think it was part of the Berlin Wall. Instead it just appears to be wall where graffiti is permitted.

While I did see some people using spray paint, I liked that this guy was using a roller. I heard that a roller for street art is unique to Berlin, but I'm not really sure if that's true. Although it makes sense as most graffiti needs to be done quickly which is why spray paint and stencils are popular. However, street artist in Berlin can be a bit more relaxed as they always had a rather large canvas where graffiti was permitted, the Berlin Wall. Of course, the east side of the Wall stayed cleaned, but the west side ended almost completely covered. The street artists in West Berlin were allowed to use the Berlin Wall because it was East German property, so the police in West Berlin could not arrest them for defacement of property, and the police in East Berlin were on the other side of the wall and couldn't see what was happening.

Also while I was there, this band was performing. The guy with the saxophone was quite entertaining. I sat and watched them for a while before leaving Berlin and returning to Reuden.

Wir gehen nach Berlin

2009-08-20T09:20:00.008+02:00

Michel and Verena have an apartment in Berlin that Michel mostly uses when he has classes in Berlin. Since it is now summer vacation, no one is staying there, so they invited me to stay there a few days if I wanted to visit Berlin. So I took them up on their offer last week.

The apartment is near Tiergarten, a massive park. So after getting settled in, I went to visit Tiergarten.

The primary landmark of Tiergarten is Siegessäule. Originally commissioned to commemorate the Danish-Prussian War, it was no completed until after the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany, making it the first national monument of Germany.

It was originally built closer to the center of Berlin, however, the Nazis had it moved as part of a plan to redesign Berlin. They also made it taller. You may notice that the column has four parts. the lowest part was added by the Nazis. Moving it to the center of a park ultimately saved Siegessäule from being bombed during WWII.

Just under the statue, there's a viewing area.

Can you identify the Reichstag, the TV tower and Berliner Dom in this photo?

After wandering around Tiergarten for a bit, I went back to apartment and started working out where various places were and how to get there. Soon after I got back, Michel's and Verena's apartmentmate, Pauline, showed up. Pauline is a French student currently doing an internship in Berlin. She speaks fluent French and German, but wasn't comfortable with English, so we talked in German. We made dinner together and sat and talked most of the evening. Fortunately, she knew enough English that if I didn't know the German word, I could just say the English word and she knew what I meant.

The next morning, Pauline left to visit some friends in Cologne, so she let me borrow her bike so I could get around the city more easily. At first, I found the idea of biking around such a big city intimidating, but Berlin is surprisingly easy to get around by bike. When I went to Prague, there was a company that offered free tours, and I found they also were in Berlin, so I decided to start my day with that as I knew they would point out things that I wouldn't have found on my own.

One place we visited was the Holocaust memorial. It is a strange place with big gray blocks of various heights all around. Underneath there is a really good museum which I visited the next day.

This is the French Church. To example why it's in Berlin requires a bit of a history lesson. After the Reformation there is the 30 Years' War between the Catholics and the Protestants (and a little Catholics versus Catholics and Protestants versus Protestants happening as well). During the course of this war, Berlin was ransacked twice and in between the ransackings, the plague showed up. So after the 30 Years' War, Berlin is almost completely depopulated. So Berlin needed people. At the same time, French Huguenots were being persecuted by the Catholics in charge of France. The leaders of Berlin, being Protestant, decided to invite the Huguenots to come repopulate Berlin. Across from the French Church is the German Church which looks exactly the same except for one detail, it's slightly bigger.

The World War I Memorial. The statue is of a mother cradling her dead son, based on a painting by a woman who lost both her son and husband during the war. The light from above is an open skylight which allows the elements, such as rain and snow, to fall on the statue.

After the tour I went to the German History Museum to see an exhibit about the Berlin Wall I had been told about. Just outside the main exhibit in the courtyard was an art exhibit. A bunch of Berlin artist were giving a section of the Berlin Wall and asked to make some kind of art of it representing their feelings about the wall. Two of my favorites: one artist built a facsimile of an electric chair, with the piece of the wall strapped down in it. The other artist made a bunch of holes in their block and placed hammers and sickles in the holes as though they had been used to destroy it. Another memorable one was a block given to a minimalist artist who simply polished it.

The main exhibit was photographs of the events leading up to the reunification of Germany, from images of the deterioration of East Germany, to the growing protests against communist rule, the riots in Dresden, the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and finally the change over from communist to capitalist economy and democracy.

They also included a few images from anti-communist movements in other countries around the same time, such as the the first free election in Poland (another example of the communist regime being totally out of touch, the communist leaders assumed they were still popular enough to win, instead they won only one seat out of the 161 that were up for election). While I expected to see pictures from other Eastern European countries, I was surprised to see images from Tienanmen Square. I always thought of the events of Tienanmen Square as something independent and not part of a larger anti-communist movement. At the time though, the events were very much on minds of protesters in Eastern Europe. The Tienanmen Square Massacre took place only a few months prior to many of the events that led to democracy in Eastern Europe, so there was the constant fear that the government would use the "Chinese Solution".

All about Dresden

2009-08-17T14:07:00.008+02:00

Earlier this month I went with Anne to visit her sister, Ria, in Dresden. Ria is a student at a university there and had just finished her final exam when we arrived.

One of the first places we visited was the Frauenkirche, a Lutheran church. The church was badly damaged during WWII and was left as just a pile of rubble until reunification.

Hofkirche. I believe it is the cathedral of Dresden.

I got to take pictures inside this church, unlike Frauenkirche.

Next to Hofkirche is Fürstenzug. It is a display of all the former rulers of Saxony. Apparently it is either the largest or longest porcelain artwork in the world. This picture doesn't even show all of it. There are 35 rulers on it, this picture is missing 9 of them.

We then went to yet another church, Kreuzkirche, the main Catholic church. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of it. The interior was quite interesting though. The church had been destroyed and rebuilt quite a few times, most recently during WWII. Unlike Frauenkirche, Kreuzkirche was rebuilt during communist-rule, and as such, was rebuilt rather cheaply so the walls are just covered textured stucco. The texture and gray color of the stucco made it look like the church was made of wool.

We went into the clock tower to get a nice view of Dresden.

We also visited this place which I don't actually remembered what it was called, but apparently it was for receiving important guests.

We then headed back to Ria's place to drop off our stuff. While there, we watched an episode of Tintin, Tim und Struppi in German. It was kind of odd as Tintin has a lower voice in German than in English, so he seems less boyish.

We went to Neustadt, the New City, to get dinner. Neustadt was across the river, and from where we were, it was fastest to take a ferry rather than the bridge. There is definitely a very large and pervasive Goth subculture in Dresden. I saw many people dressed in all black and many shops that catered to that kind of clientèle. There was even a second-hand store that only sold Gothic apparel.

The next day we visited the Neustadt again as well as some small castles, but they weren't particularly notable. Ria and Anne then went to go see Harry Potter. I decided not to go along as I wanted to see more of the city. Also, the movie was dubbed in German, which I have trouble following without also German subtitles.

I had been told to visit the Treasury, however, on my arrive I discovered it was sold-out. I didn't know museums could do that. Instead I visited two art museums, one of which was a exhibition of artwork from students of the art academy in Dresden. The other art museum was quite interesting as it had a few interactive pieces that would move when you pressed a button.

After some wandering, I found myself at the Stadtmuseum, the City Museum. It, of course, had a very good exhibit on the history of Dresden, but also had a special exhibit on Dresden during the change over from communism to democracy. It had quite an interesting arrangement where it would show a piece of government propaganda about how great life in Dresden was beside a photo of the deteriorating city or protests.

What also struck me about the exhibit was that it showed just how out of touch the rulers of Eastern Europe had become. There was a case of several East Germans breaking into the West German Embassy in Prague. It was decided to allow them to go to West Germany, but East the German government decided to shame them by having them travel in open-air train cars and parade them around East German as traitors. However, instead of crowds showing up to jeer them, the crowds cheered and congratulated them on finding a way out. When the train made a brief stop at the Dresden train station, a massive riot broke out as people tried to board the train. The riot lasted 3 days and it is believed over 20,000 people were there.

One of my favorite displays was of a newspaper headline from shortly after an East German election declaring that over 98% of voters supported communism. This was only 6 months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

By the time I left the museum, Harry Potter was over, so Anne and I said goodbye to Ria and went back to Reuden.

Kayaking on the Spree!

2009-08-11T22:43:00.002+02:00

I need to get this posted before I head to Berlin and get way behind again.

Two Saturdays ago, I went with Anne to meet some of her friends to go kayaking in Lübbenau. Lübbenau is located along the Spree River and has tons of canals passing through it. As such it's very popular place for tourist to go kayaking or canoeing. I didn't take my camera for fear of getting it wet or worse, so these pictures are courtesy of one of Anne's friends, I think his name was Stephen.

Anne and I getting ready to set out.

Our view for most of the trip. Seeing as we were kayaking on canals, the water was rather calm. I still got completely soaked though as I never figured out how to maneuver the paddle without it splashing or dripping water on me. Actually, Anne and I had a lot of problems in that neither of us had ever gone kayaking. All the other kayaks had at least one person that knew what they were doing. We eventually got steering under control, but after a few hours we were still lagging behind as we were both worn out. Still, I really enjoyed it and hope I can go again.

After the kayaking, everyone went back to Reuden with us, so I think there were 14 or 15 people there. It was also decided that this day I would make BBQ. When I first got to Reuden, I played the "BBQ Song", which I learned thanks to Joseph. So everyone was curious what North Carolina BBQ was like. So I pestered Mom about getting the recipe for BBQ sauce and set about getting it all together.

I was actually kind of stressed out about the whole thing I didn't have as much time as I thought I would. I didn't realize that kayaking and cooking BBQ would take place on the same day. Luckily, we ended up having a very late dinner, so I was able to get it all prepared. I had also decided to make the sauce the day before, so it was ready. I believe it turned out alright. Some people liked it, others thought there was too much vinegar.

This isn't the first time I've cooked since I got to Germany. I generally like to avoid cooking, I find cooking for other people stressful. One day, Verena wanted to show me how to use the Thermamix, which is the most absurd pieces of kitchen equipment I've ever come across. Basically it's a heated blender with a scale. She wanted to make ice cream, which required only sugar, yoghurt, and frozen strawberries. We managed to mess up even this simple recipe because we didn't have the Thermamix level, so the scale was off and we used way too much sugar.

The second time I cooked was after finding some very ripe bananas that were turning black. After lamenting that I would have eaten them had I known they were there, I said they might be good for banana pudding. Anne had no idea what I was talking about, so I set about finding a recipe, and make it for dessert that evening. In the course of finding the recipe, I also discovered it's a Southern recipe. I never really thought of banana pudding as a regional food, but apparently it is.

Now, it's finally my turn to shower. Sharing a bathroom with 6 other people can be a hassle sometimes.

Luckau and more

2009-08-08T11:29:00.009+02:00

As I was writing yesterday's update I suddenly remembered a trip we took right after I got back from Prague. Quite a bit happened, so I decided it should get a separate post.

Some background, this area is a coal mining region, or was, doesn't seem to be much mining happening now. It's not the kind of mining where they dig a big hole, but instead completely strip the land. So when the mines close up shop, the region is left with a barren landscape. General practice is to reclaim the land by planting trees and so forth. However, at one nearby mine, an environmentalist group decided to buy the land. They've replanted much of the land, but a sizable portion they are leaving untouched and allowing natural succession to take its course. There is a small educational facility on the land, so we headed out to visit this.

On the way, we took a detour to visit Luckau. Luckau is just a nearby small town, but appears to be popular with tourists. We went to the church first.

Of course, it wasn't a massive cathedral, but in a way I like these little churches better. They seem a bit more inviting as they are often still in use as churches.

One neat feature of this church is this double-spiral staircase. It's actually two separate staircases.

We then visited the disproportionately large tower of this rather small church. The upper levels of the tower appeared to be almost haphazardly built. Each staircase was of a different length and grade, and scattered about depending on where they could fit them between the beams.

Once at the top, we enjoyed this lovely view.

The church I was at earlier.

We then headed over to the old mining area. There was a small museum we visited which had information on the local environment, about the group that bought the land, what they were doing with the land, what they were doing in other places, and the history of local area.

One part I found particularly interesting was a display on the villages that were removed to make way for the mines. The mines were created during the 70's and 80's, so under East German rule. The displays included pictures and information on the people that lived in the villages. Anne told me that Reuden was also going to be demolished to make way for another mine, but the East German government collapsed before the plans were realized. After unification, expansion of the mines more or less stopped.

Another detail that struck me was the depopulation of the region. The information on the villages showed historic populations and every single one was declining in population. Of course, the example is a bit bias, the villages wouldn't have been demolished if they growing, economically important sites. However, a lot of information about the local environment alluded to the fact that the environment has been improving as people left East Germany.

Unification has encouraged immigration to more prosperous regions in West Germany and since 2005 the overall population of Germany has been in decline. However, depopulation in East Germany started long before unification. Since the 1960's, the population of East Germany has gone from 17 million to 14 million. This means there are a lot of formerly populated areas now being reclaimed by nature. In the past few years, a small number of wolves have settled in Brandenburg.

We wandered around the grounds for a bit, but there wasn't much of interest. So we went to Wasserschloss.

Wasserschloss is just an old castle that's been converted into a hotel. We couldn't go in, but there was a nice park with a pond nearby.

Next to the castle was this old brewery, which I thought was pretty cool.

The Update

2009-08-07T09:53:00.006+02:00

It's been over two weeks since I left Prague, and I haven't been able to provide much of any posts about recent events, so I'll go though the last few weeks rather quickly.

Apparently everyone was gone while I was in Vienna and Prague, so nothing got done. That meant there was plenty of grouting for me to do. So for those first few days, that's pretty much what I did.

At some point, Rene stopped by with his daughter, Alba, to visit the farm for a few days. Rene lives here, but has been on vacation the last few weeks so this was the first time I met him. Alba is only 5 years old and rather shy, so she didn't say much, although she did sing rather loudly while taking a bath. One of the nights they were here, Marco noticed there were tons of mosquitoes in the kitchen, far more than he was willing to live with. So he brought out the heavy equipment, a vacuum cleaner. Using the hose attachment, we went all along the walls and ceiling. At the same time, Alba had been left in the kitchen, and sat at the table and watched with a great deal of confusion as Marco and I vacuumed the walls.

By the time we finished the grouting on the front of the house, Marco had gotten the mower working. The place had not been mowed in quite some time, so the grass was rather high. Marco and I took turns mowing and collecting the clumps of cut grass the mower left behind. Anne and Verena are going to use the clumps of grass for hay, but I don't know what they plan to feed as they have no animals yet.

Once we finished mowing, Michel's friend Benjamin and his wife Ariane showed up with their three kids. Their kids were less shy than Alba, but all attempts to get the oldest one to practice her English with me were unsuccessful.

Their youngest kid was just learning to speak, which made him very easy to understand. One night we were sitting around a campfire and he decided to stand on my foot. He looked at me and said, "Mama", I responded, "Ich bin Darrell", to which he yelled, "Nein!" The next day, he walked up to me holding a small bottle. I asked, "was ist das?" He looked down at it for a moment, then looked back up and yelled, "Das!"

Soon after Benjamin, Ariane and their kids showed up, a few more of Michel's and Benjamin's friends turned up, turning the field behind the house into an impromptu campground.

For one night, there were fifteen people here (including babies and children), with only one bathroom. Anne and Verena joked about giving their guests shovels and making them build an outhouse. Speaking of which, one of the guests did help us with a problem we had. We like to eat outside when we can, but if we had anything sweet, tons of wasps would show up. The wasps weren't terribly aggressive, but still, we knew they could sting if they wanted. Our guest decided to make a trap for them. He partially filled a soda bottle with sugar water, hung it upside down, and put a hole in the bottom. The wasps flew into the hole to get the sugar, but couldn't get back out. Within a couple of hours, we had caught well over a dozen wasps.

Back to work on the farm, when we had finished mowing, I was put to work on a few minor tasks, which included planting some radishes. A few days afterwards Anne came and told me that they were starting to sprout and she noticed that I had planted them in a perfect row, so maybe I would be allowed to stay in Germany.

While doing work in the garden, it was decided that we try to level out the ground a bit as there were a much of holes and hills which made it difficult to go around with a wheelbarrow. So we found one area that was higher up than the rest and decided to move the dirt from there to other parts of the garden. We soon found why it was higher up, it had been used as a dump. Most of what we found wasn't too bad, it was mostly old building materials, although we did find a few bones, from an animal, not a human. Still, we had to sift through the dirt and remove many of the foreign items as they weren't terribly conducive to the healthy growth of a garden.

Throughout all of this, the population of the farm continued to wax and wane between 5 and 15 people. When there were a lot of people, any reason to leave for a bit was welcomed. So one morning I went with Anne on a bike. She was working on some environmental education project and wanted to scope out good sites. I went along and grabbed a few pictures.

One place we visited was this old bakehouse. Along time ago, it was very costly and time consuming to get a fire big enough and hot enough to bake bread in, so the village had a collective bakehouse that was used by everyone. People would visit once a week and bake whatever needed to be baked.

This area is apparently the ideal environment for growing sunflowers, as I see fields of them everywhere.

Sometime during the trip, Anne pointed out a wind turbine and said that when it was built, it was the tallest in the world. When we got back, we checked to see what was the tallest one now. Apparently it is still the tallest. It makes sense that the tallest wind turbine would be in a rural area, but I'm surprised to find myself just a short bike ride away from it.

So that isn't everything, but there are a few events I wanted to do separate posts on, but now I'm only a week behind instead of two or three.

Prague 2

2009-07-30T16:35:00.005+02:00

The day after that rather long tour, I decided to visit a bunch of museums and churches that were pointed out to me, but we didn't have time to visit. At most of these places, I wasn't allowed to take pictures, so I have very few from this day.

My first stop was a small art gallery I happened across when I got lost the day before. It contained a lot of interesting contemporary art, such as a large model of a gun with a bunch of thermoses shaped like bullets next to it. My favorite was a mounted deer's head that had no bones or stuffing in it, so it just hung limp on the wall.

Next up was the Museum of Communism. The focus was almost exclusively on the Czech Republic under communism, but still fascinating. I didn't know much Czech history before this trip, so I definitely enjoyed it. I'm going to include of bunch of Wikipedia links here instead writing out everything I learned. Probably the first major event after Soviet occupation was the Prague Spring, a period of liberalization where the Czechoslovak government decided to grant citizens greater freedoms. This lasted about 8 months before the Warsaw Pact invaded and replaced the government with hardliners. One detail that the Wikipedia article appears to omit, just before the invasion, the citizens of Czechoslovakia destroyed all street signs and any signs with city names on them and re-named every city after President Dubcek. This was done to confuse the invaders and delayed the capture of Prague for several days. Shortly after these events, two students, Jan Palach and Jan Zajic, committed self-immolation in protest against the invasion. Both are now greatly revered in Czech society.

Another major event was the Velvet Revolution when the communist regime was overthrown rather quickly with very little violence. An Eastern European maxim I'm rather fond of is that the fall of communism took 10 years in Poland, 10 months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany, and 10 Days Czechoslovakia.

One non-Czech story they did share was that of a German pilot, Mathias Rust, who flew a Cessna from Finland, through Soviet air defenses, and landed on a bridge next to the Kremlin during the waning days of the Soviet Union. I highly recommend you read the Wikipedia article.

After that, I visited the Mucha museum. Alfons Mucha was a famous Czech Art Nouveau artist. Even if you don't know the name, it's very likely you've seen reproductions of his work as he was very influential in his day.

I then went to the National Museum. I was hoping it would be a history or art museum, but it was mostly science stuff, with very little English. The archeological section was good though, even if signs were only sporadically translated.

The most interest thing I found were these instruments made by a Czech rocket scientist.

Outside the museum is Wenceslas Square, the site of many large demostrations during the Velvet Revolution.

I was pretty exhausted after all this, so I decided to head to the old town square and rest for bit and join a ghost tour later in the evening. This plan was aborted when a massive storm started. I had some shelter as I was sitting under some trees. Two girls were sitting under a tree next to me. They had been making sketches of the surrounding buildings, but they put their stuff away when it started raining. Hoping they might be locals, I asked them if they thought it would stop soon. Unfortunately, they weren't locals and had no idea. After awhile the rain subsided and we decided to explore the city together. They were university students from Moscow. They had just started a trip around European. We didn't much more than walk and talk. I believe they just liked the opportunity to practice English. Around 9pm, another downpour started and we decided it wasn't going to let up and called it a day.

The next day, it rained the entire time, which went against everything I was told about Prague weather. So I sought out more indoor activities. I originally had planned to visit the Jewish Quarter again as I wanted to see the synagogues as I've never been in one. Unfortunately, it was Saturday and I hadn't thought about the fact that they would be closed to tourists due to the Sabbath. Instead I went to Prague Castle and bought a ticket that gave me access to many buildings, galleries, and exhibits there.

As it was Saturday and rainy, most of the places were packed. However, I found that the art galleries were mostly empty, so I could escape the crowds. Also the collections were really nice. There was a museum about the history of Prague Castle that was almost too detailed. Sorry, but I don't care about the burial practices of Czech royalty during the Baroque period all that much.

Afterwards, I went sought out an old library at a monastery I had been told was really nice. It turned out to be a disappointment as visitors weren't allowed in the nicer rooms. We could only walk up and down one narrow hallway and peer into them.

I forget how, but I ended up at the Museum of Design. They had a collection of items that had been confiscated from Czech Jews during WWII. While the Czech government attempts to return any items it can to families, many items have not been returned either because the previous owners are unknown, or the family they belonged to was killed during the Holocaust.

Finally, as I left the Museum of Design, it stopped raining. Now without rain pouring down on me, I decided to seek out the Franz Kafka museum that had so far eluded me. I didn't want to go in, it would be closed by the time I got there, I just wanted to get a certain picture.

Yep, that's the one. There was a couple there looking at the statue when I arrived. The husband seemed much more amused by the statue than his wife. As he was busy taking photos, she was slowly walking away, presumably hoping that he would soon follow.

Since the rain had stopped, I went to join a ghost tour, basically the same as the walking tour I had taken before, but at night and with ghost stories. Our tour guide was a rather silly Scottish guy. None of the stories were particularly memorable, but it was fun little tour.

And that is all. The next morning I caught a train back to Reuden and discovered that Anne and Verena had put the hammock to other uses.

Prague, finally

2009-07-29T19:10:00.011+02:00

So finally, I get to posting about Prague. It's been kind of annoying me that I haven't finished posting about my trip to Vienna and Prague because so much has been happening here lately.

Anyway, Rudi had to start work July 15th, meaning it was time for me to leave Vienna. There was a cheap bus that went from Vienna to Prague that I would take. The main problem though was finding it. The bus pick up was close to a subway station, but not within visual distance. Finding it was farther confounded because none of the local area maps at the station had "ihr seid hier" signs on them. Which wouldn't have been much of a problem if it wasn't for the fact that the station was surround by a circular road, so no matter where I stood I was on the same road, thus making it rather hard to tell which direction I should go. On top of that, there was construction happening, so getting around the station quickly proved difficult.

I eventually did find the bus though, which was fortunately running late. I ended up seated next to a Bosnian girl who was studying in Vienna and traveling to Prague to visit a friend. She told me a little bit about the Bosnian War, but I didn't question her too much about it. One thing she told me was that for a long time the area she was in was very much dependent on food relief provided by the US. However, the food relief packages often contained canned food from WWII which they ate anyway and peanut butter which older Bosnians had no idea what to do with.

After arriving in Prague, we parted ways and I went to find some money which I needed to get on the subway to get to the hostel. I was hoping to exchange some money, but there were no exchange places at the bus station. So I found an ATM and withdrew 1,000 Czech Crowns, about $40. The ATM provided me with a single 1,000 Crowns note. A bit of an annoyance as the only way for me to get change was to buy a 20 Crown drink from a vendor and I knew they wouldn't be happy having to provide change for such a large note. Of course, the vendor wasn't, but took the note anyway as it was all I had.

The hostel was really nice. I was staying in an 8-person room with its own bathroom, there was a restaurant with good food, use of the computers was free, the entire place was really clean, and they even had a pool. All for only $10 a night.

After getting my stuff into my room, I took a short tour of the immediate area. I eventually ended up in a massive park. The park had everything, fields for playing soccer, a huge playground for kids, a dog park, an impromptu skate park, a great view of the city, and this thing:

It moves in case you were wondering.

The aforementioned great view.

The next morning, I joined a free walking tour that started from my hostel. I figured it would be a good way to start my trip as they would probably give me a quick overview of all the sites of the city that I could go back later and visit. I was not disappointed.

My tour guide was Justin. He was great fun and very excited to tell us about the history of Prague. He was an American, so while we were walking to another site, I asked him how he got a job in Prague. He said that he was only able to get a work visa because his parents were British, so he had EU citizenship. They actually had a shortage of tour guides because they were unable to hire Americans. We continued talking and we realized we both went to the University of Richmond. He was two years behind me, so I was in Sweden his first year, and then I was never on campus my final year, so we never met.

Our first stop was the town square, which was the location of this church. The extra turrets on the spires make me think that the church is budding and the turrets will break-off, float away, and grow new churches.

Next was the astrological clock. The clock itself is pretty amazing. As well as telling the time, in two different formats no less, it told which star sign we were currently under, the phase of the moon, and the time of sunrise and moonrise.

We then made are way to the Jewish Quarter where this statue of Franz Kafka is located. The statue is based on a story he wrote about meeting a man with no face, hands, or feet, lost in Prague. He decided to help the man by climbing on his shoulders and giving him directions.

This is the Old New Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe still in use. The name is actually a mistranslation of the Hebrew phrase meaning "on condition". The synagogue was built out of stones from the former temple in Jerusalem with the condition that, should the temple be rebuilt, they would have to be returned.

We visited a few more sites and eventually came to Prague Castle.

Getting a closer picture of the cathedral in the middle of Prague Castle was difficult, so I'll just use this one to point out a little detail. The cathedral you see is St. Vitus Cathedral, started in 1344, finished 1929. You may notice one of the spires is not like the others. Over the long construction process, many styles came and went. The base of the tower was built in the Gothic style, but by the time that got to the spire, Baroque was the style of choice. Where it gets weirder is that the Baroque spire is actually older than the other two. The other two spires are Neo-Gothic. The building process took so long that the style they started with was back in style by the time they finished.

Another detail you probably won't see in other cathedrals, an Art Nouveau stained-glass window designed by Alfons Mucha.

And that was more or less the end of the tour. It was around dinner time by now, so I sought out a restaurant we had passed earlier. It was called Bohemian Bagel and apparently catered to tourist and ex-pats as its menu was decidedly not Czech. I had glanced at the menu and saw "pulled pork", so I wanted to investigate further. After getting horribly lost, I finally made my way to the restaurant and ordered the pulled pork. It was pretty good, the only oddities being that it was served on a baguette and was topped with green peppers.

I got back to my hostel rather late and found no one in room. I thought maybe I had gotten the room to myself, but it was too good to be true. Just at 10pm, a group of 6 British students showed up. While I was disappointed, they were friendly and we stayed up chatting for a bit.

Alright, I think I might be able to finish Prague with one more post and be done with this.

Wien 3

2009-07-27T11:10:00.009+02:00

Rudi constantly lamented the fact that other than Stephansdom and parts of the Hofburg, the majority of Vienna is not all that old, mostly being built towards the end 19th Century. So it doesn't make Vienna appear all that historical, but architecture is uniform and...

Ahh! Borg Cube! No wait, that's the modern art museum. Oddly enough, they had an exhibition of artwork by former students of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. So I traveled all the way to Austria to see art from North Carolina. This was my last stop for that day, I really should have put this in my last post.

The next day, we got up eary to visit Schloss Schönbrunn.

Unlike the Hofburg which originally served as a fortified castle, Schönbrunn was a palace from the very beginning. We took a tour of the palace which Rudi seemed rather disappointed by as there wasn't really anything special about it. It was just another Baroque palace in a city filled with palaces. The main detail that struck me though were the parts decorated by Emperor Franz Joseph. He was not obsessed with the opulent decor that many royals used to display their wealth. So the rooms he had decorated were more austere and simple than in many palaces I've seen.

Behind Schönbrunn is a massive garden, which now hosts a zoo, and the Gloriette, seen on the hill overlooking the garden. The Belvedere, which I visited earlier, was the model for Schönbrunn. The Belvedere has two main building, a one-story villa that serves as the entrances, and then the main palace which is up on a hill. That was the original plan for Schönbrunn. That's right, what is now considered the palace was just supposed to be the entrance to an even bigger palace. However, they ran out of money before the main palace could be constructed, so instead they built the Gloriette.

This seems to be a theme throughout the city, running out of money. Stephansdom was supposed to have two spires, but they ran out of money and just built a hut where one of the spires was supposed to be. The Hofburg was supposed to be symmetrical, but they ran out of money and just left the rest as a garden. It would seem that the people running an empire would have been better planners when it came these massive projects.

This is the view from the Gloriette. I don't have good photos of the Gloriette, but I should mentioned, it was built at a time when everyone was seemingly obsessed with Roman history as it is covered with Roman mythological art and symbols. Perhaps not a strange thing to have at an imperial palace in Europe, but then there's this...

These are some Roman ruins in the garden. Or rather, fake Roman ruins.

After our visit of the palace, we went to meet some of Rudi's friends for lunch at an Asian buffet. They had fun trying to teach me Osterreichisch, Austrian German. After lunch, we got ice cream at an amazing eiscafe which I don't remember the name of, but it was really good.

At this point, I was pretty worn out, so we decided to do something that didn't require too much energy. There was an open-air cinema that Rudi wanted to visit, but had not the chance before. They showed a different movie every night. Mostly old classic films. The night we went they were showing "The Raven" with Vincent Price and a very young Jack Nicholson. It was a rather cute film which was only loosely based on the based on the Edgar Allen Poe's poem. One strange detail though, they showed the film without German subtitles. I assume that most people in Vienna understand English, but not everyone, and even for those that did understand, having subtitles may have been helpful.

Anyway, that's more or less the end of my time in Vienna. Next up, Prague.

Wien 2

2009-07-25T11:50:00.009+02:00

When I last wrote, we had just stop by to see Stephansdom on our way to get lunch with Claudia. So we got lunch at a restaurant serving a bunch of traditional Austrian cusines. I was told beforehand that I needed to try Kaiserschmarrn, so we had that for dessert. I was also told I needed to try Sachertorte, but that was much too expensive.

Vienna is pretty densely packed city, so the streets are generally flanked by solid walls of 5-story buildings. However, this street was a little bit different. You should be able to see the trees in this photo. It's the location of the Hundertwasserhaus.

It was built by Austrian artist Hundertwasser whose work is known for its bold colors, playful designs, and use of plant life. He built a number of buildings throughout Austria and Germany as well as a winery in Napa Valley.

After spending all this time walking past densely packed building, we came to this, the Belvedere. It was built by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who served as a military commander for the Austrian Empire. He became incredibly wealthy after a successful campaign against the Ottoman Empire. We decided not to go in, instead we just wandered around the garden for awhile.

One of our last stops, the Soviet War Memorial, to all the Soviet soldiers that died liberating Vienna during WWII. Actually, the fountain is not part of the memorial, it was already there before WWII. Just the statue and the columns in the background are the memorial. It seems odd that a democracy would have a Soviet memorial, but it was actually part of an agreement. Like Germany, Austria was divided up after WWII. Unlike Germany, the Soviets agreed to withdraw from Austria in exchange for various items, such as the creation of this memorial.

The next day, Rudi was busy as he had new furniture arriving, so I went out exploring on my own. My first destination was Hofburg, a massive palace in the middle of Vienna which houses a number of museums and other important structures including the Spanish Riding School. I wanted to visit the National Library which contains a number of small museums including an Esperanto museum, but unfortunately, it was closed on Mondays. Fortunately though, the Treasury was opened. The treasury contained a large collection of royal items from not only from Austrian royalty, but also French and Burgundy thanks to Napoleon.

It also housed a number of religious relics, including a piece of the Cross and the Spear of Destiny. It is generally held now that the spear was made a good 700 years after Christ's death, but it does have a nice golden band around it.

One item of interest to me were these Roman ruins just beside the Hofburg. I had no idea that the Romans ever settled this area. Although it is apparently well-known that the Romans lived here, these particular ruins were not discovered until the installation of the subway system in this area. What makes it so odd though is that the ruins are only a meter below street level. It seems that anyone digging a hole in the area would have eventually found them, but they weren't uncovered until fairly recently.

I would like to continue working on this post, but I think it's getting long and I need to get back to work. They having me mowing a large section of the farm that hasn't been mowed in a long time, so I'm discovering all this interesting plant life, and then cutting it all down.

Zug nach Wien

2009-07-22T12:38:00.012+02:00

One thing I wanted to do while visiting Germany was to visit my friend, Rudi, in Vienna. I was planning to wait until August to visit, but then Rudi got a job, so it was decided that I should visit before he starts work. This led to me making last minute plans to take the train down to Vienna and to also visit Prague, as it was on the way.

First stop was meeting Rudi in Vienna after about 10 hours worth of train riding. Rudi's apartment is in a great location. It's right in the middle of the city, so it's within easy walking distance of most notable locations. There was also a nice pizzeria and a small grocer across the street. The only problem being, he's on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator. Although he has a nice view, I think.

It was evening by the time I arrived, so we took an evening tour of the city. It was a bit too dark for photos, although I did get at least one nice shot.

Despite its appearance, it's not a catherdal, it is the Votiv Church. Also despite its appearance, it's not Gothic, but rather Neo-Gothic, as it was built around the 1880's, like much of Vienna. The church was built as a gift to God for saving Emperor Franz Joseph from an assassination attempt.

The next morning we took another tour of the city, this time in daylight so that I could get better pictures. We walked past the city hall and the parliament building, where Rudi pointed out an interesting detail. Pictures don't really show it, but just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

City Hall

Parliament

The most obvious detail is that they're built in completely different styles despite having been built around the same time, but less obvious is that the city hall is larger than the parliament building. The city hall was built at a time when Vienna was the capital of an extensive empire and the city itself was larger. The parliament building was similarly built at a time when Vienna was the capital of an empire and therefore didn't have much use for democratic institutions

We then headed over to the Museum Quartier, which is an area where a bunch of museum have been built very conveniently close together.

Rudi with an elephant in front of the Natual History Museum. We didn't go in, I just wanted a picture of Rudi with an elephant. We instead went to visit one of the smaller art museums where one of Rudi's friends, Maryam, worked. The museum had a large exhibit on portrait photography, which I have to say was the best photography exhibit I've ever seen. Afterwards I talked to Maryam. She is Iranian, and English is not a course they offer at schools in Iran, so I had to talk to her in German. I think she was amused.

Afterwards, we walked towards the center of Vienna, where we would meet another of Rudi's friends, Claudia, for lunch. I had actually met Claudia before as she came to visit Rudi when we were both in Uppsala.

The center of Vienna is of course where all the expensive shops are.

It is also where the catherdal, Stephansdom, is located. There you see one of the towers. Of course, most large catherdals have two. Stephansdom does as well, but there's a problem.

Stephansdom was never completed. So instead of a majestic spire, the second tower is topped with a small hut to protect the bell. The hut is so small that ringing the bell too often would damage it, so the bell in that tower is only rung once or twice a year.

Stephansdom was also damaged during World War Two. Structurally, it was unharmed, but fire destoryed the interior as well as many of the stained glass windows and blackened the facade. The cathedral is currently undergoing restoration, as you can see from the one turrent in the background that is gleaming white.

I think this post is probably long enough. I'll post more about Vienna later.

Deutsche Wörter

2009-07-09T19:22:00.011+02:00

Since one of my reasons for coming to Germany was to learn German, I feel like I should update on my progress. After one week, most of my conversations are in English, but I've been learning many useful words for living on a farm:
Eimer = Bucket
Stemmeisen = Crowbar
Schubkarre = Wheel barrow
Ziegel = Brick
Rostige Nägel = Rusty Nails
Schraubenzieher = Screwdriver
Gießkanne = Watering can
Schnecke = Snail
Nacktschnecke = Slug (literally, naked snail)

One thing we did in the German class at ABTech was make up compound words for words we didn't know, so I've tired that. First, I called the dishwasher "der Tellerwascher", but it's actually "die Spülmaschine". Second, I called a lampshade "ein Leichtschirm", but it's actually "ein Lampenschirm".

I have even tried making up words. We have been knocking off all the old mortar between the bricks on the facade of the house, which creates a lot of dust, which we have spent the last couple of days covered in. So one day I declared, "wir sind Staubmacher!" "We are dust-makers!"

Anne has been a good teacher. She has been very good at figuring out phrases that I will understand and has been using German more and more as I get more comfortable. I still rely a lot on context though to figure out what's happening, so one day when Anne wearing an apron and told me I needed to move my laundry because it was raining, I was totally lost as I expected her to say something about food.

Currently, we have a Spanish guy visiting, Luis. Before he came, everyone told me he spoke very "interesting" German and would be hard to understand. However, I've found him to be the easiest to understand because he speaks slowly and uses simple words.

Anyway, here a few more pictures from the farm I wanted to share:

Anne on der Klavier (piano). This is Verena's piano. I forget who, but someone said that Verena was bringing culture to Reuden when she brought the piano. It might be the only one in Reuden.

This is an unfinished room. The floor needs to be redone as currently it's just the arches holding up the cellar. Makes it hard to set stuff down, but on the plus side ever chair is a rocking chair!

They are keeping some of the neighbor's sheep on the property as they're not using it yet.

And finally, a pony with a rather tragic body size to leg length ratio.

Hof Morgengrün

2009-07-04T22:04:00.008+02:00

So some details on the farm. The place was originally not a farm at all and has gone under a number of changes, which makes the interior interesting. In the residence, to get to Anne's room, you have to either go through the bathroom or Verena and Michel's room. The rooms seemed to have been built at different times, so they don't match and the floors are uneven.

The building was originally a restaurant with a small dance hall and farm. During Communist rule it was turned into a post office and tailor shop, and the owner rented the farm buildings. It was the only building in the village that had a telephone. After unification, the post office was closed as the new government didn't like having a private residence being used as a post office.

After the post office was closed, it mostly sat unused. Anne and Verena were able to buy it very cheaply as it was on the verge of being abandoned and required a lot of repairs. They bought it in September 2008, and have done a good job at fixing up the residence. There are four completed bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The cellar and the attic still need some work and there's one other room that's incomplete. In that room they decided to experiment with using loam as insulation, but now they have mushrooms growing on the walls. Also, the floor is incomplete, and appears wavy as it's just the top of the arches holding up the cellar.

This is Anne in the Kitchen. When they bought the place there was nothing in it, no cabinets, no oven, no floor. They were very lucky when someone Michel knew was moving. They figured whoever moved into their apartment after them wouldn't want their old kitchen stuff, so they sold it all to Michel for 200 Euros. This included cabinets, an oven, a dishwasher, a sink, and a refrigerator.

This is the farm section, which we are currently working on. Hiding behind the large green door is the original "bathroom". I would call it an outhouse, but it's attached to the building, so I don't know. I spent much of my third day here removing old rusty nails and other bits of metal from the brick walls.

Most of the floors are dirt, so we are working on covering them with old bricks. I helped with this floor. We used sand to level out the ground for laying bricks on. My job was carting over the sand and bricks as needed.

This is the dance hall. As you can tell, it requires a lot of work. One problem though is that doing so will take a lot of money. Anne and Verena have applied for some program where the government will give them matching funds to whatever they plan to use for repairs. Unfortunately, their request has not be approved yet, and they can't use any of the money they plan to use for repairs until it has been either been approved or denied. So basically, we can only do repairs that require no money for now.

This is part of the garden. They are currently experimenting with what plants can and can't grow here, so they have a little bit of everything: radishes, tomatoes, sunflowers, potatoes, etc. Right beside the garden is my favorite place to be:

First Day in Reuden

2009-07-04T08:50:00.003+02:00

The flight over was fairly uneventful, so everything went smoothly. I ended up seated next to a girl going to visit her grandfather in Berlin and a denim designer going to a trade show, also in Berlin. The girl was traveling with her sister, who was very excited to see that I had Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail in German, so I let her borrow it during the flight.

Berlin Tegel airport is incredibly small. Part of this is because Berlin has two airports, the other part being despite Berlin being the largest city in Germany it's kind of isolated, so the main airports are in West Germany. So basically, I walked off the plane, right to passport control, which was just a booth beside baggage claim, then found Anne just a few seconds later, and hopped on a bus waiting right beside the airport.

We eventually switched to a train, and Anne and I talked as the scenery became more rural. I should probably note for those that don't know, Anne is a friend of mine that I met while studying in Uppsala. She actually attended a different university, but we had mutual friends so we ended up going on many trips together.

The train took us to Calau, where Marco picked us up in a van once used by a plumber and still had all the ads on the sides. Marco is a university student and is staying at the farm to help him concentrate on studying for his finals. He also helps out on the farm and bakes a lot.

When we got to the farm, I met Verena, Michel, and Emil. Verena is Anne's friend with whom she bought the farm, Michel is her boyfriend, and Emil is their son. Emil is only three months old, but seems to understand that I'm different as he always stares at me when I talk in English.

That first day was spent mostly with sleeping and eating. I got there in time for lunch, took a long nap, and then woke up for dinner. After dinner, they requested that I play guitar. Another person that stays here, Renee, has a small classical guitar, but he is currently out of town. As they had referred to the dinner as a "BBQ" I felt obliged to play the "BBQ Song" to teach them what BBQ really was.

I think that's enough for one post. I have some pictures of the farm and the village that I share in another post. So far, I really enjoy it here. It's a beautiful area and the farm is very quaint, although it needs a lot of work.

To my faithful readers

2009-07-01T03:19:00.004+02:00

It appears I left my last post with a bit of a cliffhanger. So I'll summarize my last days in Korea very quickly.

*Shared an apartment with my boss's father, who spoke no English.
*Had a lovely going away party.
*Got tons of goodbye letters from my students.
*Met my replacement, and then immediately sold my guitar to him.
*Almost got cheated out of one million Won.
*Took part in a pretty shady deal that involved me withdrawing three million Won from an ATM.
*Arrived in Seattle before I left Busan, thanks International Dateline!

Now that I finally finished my account of my year in Korea, I can begin my next trip, Germany!

As most of my readers know, I will be spending the next three months in Germany, helping my friend Anne with her endeavor to turn her farm into some kind of youth hostel campground. I will be living in the tiny village of Reuden. Here's a picture of the entirety of Reuden:

The red triangle off to the left side is where I'll be staying. For those curious about its location, I should note that there are at least six places in Germany called Reuden. The Reuden I'm going to is a district of Calau, a small town in Brandenburg. Here's a map:

Can you find Reuden? You can click on the map to make it larger. As you should be able to tell, I'll be fairly close to Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and Poland.

I should finish packing now.

Guess where I am

2008-09-25T22:35:00.002+02:00

Those of you that have Facebook accounts probably already know, but I decided to make it a surprise for my parents and didn't tell them that I would be leaving Korea on September 20th.

For everyone wondering how I got to leave early, here's what happened. My contract was supposed to end on October 12th. When I was coming over here, one of my flights was overbooked so I had received flight vouchers. I had planned to use these for a trip to Japan, but due to a misunderstanding, I ended up having to cancel that trip. This left me with $750 worth of vouchers that would expire on October 9th, so I wanted to find a way to use them.

Somehow, perhaps from my burning desire to get out of this country, the idea struck to ask if I could leave a couple of weeks early so that I could visit Celeste and then use the vouchers to fly home. My boss would like the idea because the flight (which he would be paying for) to California was cheaper than flying me back home. So assuming we found a replacement, I would be leaving on October 1st.

After a month or so of uncertainty, Dan convinced two of his friends to come over here, one of whom would be my replacement. With this, I figured everything was squared away and went ahead and used a voucher to book a flight from Sacramento to Asheville. I began to get worried though as September approached and my flight from Korea to Sacramento still had not been booked. For various reasons, it was taking Dan's friends a long time to get their needed documents together. My flight would not be booked until their flight was booked.

On September 9th, with just one class that day, Stacy wanted to tell me something. Dan's friends would not be arriving until mid-October. This was quickly followed by "but" there was a couple arriving in two days and one of them would be my replacement. Since the school didn't want to pay for having more teachers than they needed and there was limited space in the apartment building, they wanted me to move out as soon as possible. We decided tentatively on September 20th and I went home to think about it.

I called Celeste as soon as I could to let her know that I was not only coming early, but that since I had already booked my flight home, I would be staying with her for over two weeks instead of one week. It was also during this conversation that we decided not to tell our parents. Since the date for my arrival in Asheville hadn't changed, there was no need to give them advanced warnining. I posted it on Facebook though to let anyone in the Bay Area know that I would be around.

Changing my leaving date had some interesting effects. First, the good effect was that now me leaving early was suddenly me helping the school instead of me just trying to get out of Korea. However, two other things have resulted from this that aren't quite as good. For one, I suddenly had one weekend to get ready to leave instead of three. Luckily it was a holiday, so I had four days. The other thing was, they wanted the new teachers to be with the other teachers so that they could get help finding their way around and so forth and there were no open apartments. So since I was having to pack up anyway, they asked me to move into my boss's father's apartment for a few days. So after packing everything up, I was carted over there, and this is what I was met with:

More later.

Gyeongju, where kings go to die

2008-09-16T18:39:00.017+02:00

Gyeongju is the ancient capital of Korea. I had heard all year about how lovely it was but due to various occurances such as bad weather, old teachers leaving, new teachers coming, and the perptual "let's go next weekend!" I finally gave up and went to Gyeongju on my own, twice.

One thing that I had been told before I went was that it was a great place to bike around which was something I really looked forward to. I got to Gyeongju with no problems and rented a bike for only 5,000 won. As soon as I got the bike, I hopped on and started going without bothering to consult my map. Once I was outside the downtown area, I came across these burial mounds. They remind me of the burial mounds in Uppsala. In fact, they're more or less exactly the same.

They were surrounded by pools with massive waterlilies.

Now consulting the map, I realized I had no idea where I was. There were a lot of sites to the east, so I just went east until I came across the most vague "you are here" signs ever.

So now I knew I was in a historical area! So I explored.

I eventually did come across something that was on my map, an ancient astronomical obseratory.

I have no idea how this observatory worked. It looks like an oversized oven to me. As an aside, I like taking pictures of Koreans taking pictures. They never just stand in front of the camera, say "kimchi", and move on. They always have to get the perfect pose.

When I walked up the observatory and got ready to take a picture, a woman ran up to me yelling, "ticket!" I had walked right by the ticket office and hadn't even notice. I was a bit upset about having to buy a ticket to see just one little thing, but it turned out to only cost 500 won (50 cents).

I biked around a few more burial mounds.

I then visited an old Confucian school. Not much to see here.

In the entryway of the Confucian school, an old woman was selling peppers.

I forgot what this place is called, but it is lovely. I think it's the site of one of the old palaces.

There was a nice pond beside it which I walked around.

After a rather long bike ride past some farms, I came to... this. I don't actually know what it is.

I've noticed at a lot of Buddhist sites, there is a place where people have made piles of rocks. When Yunita was here, I asked her why because she is Buddhist. She said, "because it's fun". Thanks Yunita.

After this I cycled back to the bus terminal. On the way, I noticed a lot of shops selling Gyeongju Bread. I have never heard about Gyeongju having special bread, so I bought a box. They were just little bit-sized rolls filled with red bean paste. Not bad.

The bus ride back was very strange for me. Although I got on the bus at a stop near my apartment, the bus back went nowhere near my apartment. In fact, it went so far off that I had no idea where I was. I kept seeing Ulsan city buses, but I didn't recognize any of the numbers nor did I recognize any of the buildings we passed. Eventually, the bus did circle back to the main bus terminal, but I was really starting to freak out as it took nearly twice as long for me to get back as to go to Gyeongju.

Two weeks later, I decided to make another trip to Gyeongju to see Bulguksa Temple. On the bus ride up, I kept looking over the maps, trying to decide if it was close enough to bike to or if I should take the bus. I eventually decided that just the experience of the bike ride would be worth it, just to say I did it.

As I went to rent a bike, came across a sign that said that Bulguksa was 16 km (10 miles) away. So I knew what I was getting into. I went to the place where I got my bike the first time and pulled out a 5,000 note, but the lady said 7,000 won. I got out 2,000 more and made a comment, mostly to myself as I doubted she would understand, that it must be higher because it's Saturday (my last trip was on a Sunday). She then said something I didn't understand and gave me the 2,000 won back. So I have no idea what happened, but I saved 2,000 won!

Most of the trip to the Bulguksa would be on a bike path along a highway, so I figured it would be clear, smooth, and quick. It wasn't. The path was brick with trees along the side so the tree roots would push up the bricks making little hills. Sometimes the trees were staggered so that I would have to swirve around them like on a shalom. The bus stops would often take up the entire sidewalk and bike path, so I would have to stop, wait for traffic to clear up, bring my bike down from a surprisingly high curb, run it past the bus stop, and back onto the bike path. I had to do the same thing twice when I came across cars parked on the sidewalk. For the most part it went smoothly though until the last 2 km or so, which were up a steep hill, as that's where they like building temples.

By the time I got the temple entrance I was exhausted. I went to a giftshop to buy a drink. The shopkeeper could obviously tell I was tired and sweaty and so jokingly said "2,500 won". A lady who was with him laughed and smacked him on the arm. He then lowered the price to a more reasonable 1,500 won. I probably only remember this because not a word of English was said, but I knew perfectly what was going on.

So here is Bulguksa Temple.

On the grounds inside the temple. We weren't supposed to take pictures inside the shrines. So I don't have any pictures of them.

While I was there, a bunch of monks showed up. They were going around with cameras and cell phones just like all the other tourists.

Fittingly, right beside this door was a sign that said off limits. I certainly wouldn't open that door if those two guys were behind it.

The trip back was much easier as it was mostly downhill. I don't think I pedaled for the first 2 km (over a mile). It still took a long time. Overall, I covered 32 km, 20 miles, in under 3 hours. Not exactly a record setting pace, but I was proud I did it. Although, I would never do it again and would not recommend anyone else doing it.

At the end of my trip, I stopped by some more burial mounds. These mounds were set up more like a park.

They were nice to walk around. They even had ambient music coming from speakers along the paths. In one of the mounds, there is an opening where they had done some excavation that people can go into. They have displays of some of things they found in the mound.

And then I went home, jiggity jig.

The Olympics and More

2008-09-10T03:59:00.002+02:00

To catch you all up on some non-travel related stuff, another random entry post.

So about a month ago, there were the Olympics, I'm sure most of you heard about it. Anyway, it created a great subject matter for the kids. Korea was doing well, so I would ask them what sports Korea was good at and which they were bad at, who were the famous Korean athletes, and so forth. Archery seems to be the big sport in Korea and they won quite a few medals. During one of the archery competitions, it started to rain and Korea lost to China. There was a rumor that China had caused it to rain so that they could beat Korea. When I asked the students what event they liked to watch the most, almost all said swimming. Korea has their own swimming star, Park Taehwan, he was only in two events, but he got gold and silver, losing to Micheal Phelps in his second event.

When I asked to students to tell me what the medals were, most classes knew gold and silver. As for the the third medal, the first response from every single class was "ddong", the Korean word for "poop". Korean humor is rather scatological.

On to other sports, I randomly ran into Thomas the other day as he was on his way to a baseball game in Busan and he invited me along. I mentioned before, in Korea, teams aren't named after their hometowns, but their sponsor, so I watched Lotte vs. Samsung. While it's comparable to NASCAR in that regard, I was surprised when I heard people start chanting "Lotte!" They also had different cheers for all the well-known batters, which I don't know if they do that in the US. Right before the last inning, they hand out trash bags to everyone in the stadium to get people to clean up. There was one home run while I was there and Lotte won.

The last few weeks, there has been a lot changes to the foreign teacher staff. As I mentioned before, a few teachers left before the summer holiday, but their replacements didn't come until later.

So the first new teachers, who arrived about a month ago, are Brett and Josephine. They're from England, specifically a city called Corby. Despite the city's small size, about 50,000 people, it is consider one of the worst cities in England due to high crime rates, unemployment, and lack of certain amenities, such as a hospital. It holds the dubious distinction of being the largest city in Europe without a train station.

Brett and Josephine spent two years teaching in China, the last year of which was spent in Sichuan. They were two weeks away from leaving when the earthquake hit. Brett was out on a scooter at the time and said the road was moving back and forth almost six feet. I haven't ask them many other details.

There's a new Robert from Vancouver. I haven't spent much time with him, but he's fun to hang out with when I get the chance.

Just a few days ago, Zach from Las Vegas arrived. I really haven't spent any time with him. The fact he's from Las Vegas is all I know. There are two more teachers arriving on Thursday, but I'm going to be so busy the next few days, I might not know anymore about them than what I know about Zach.

Now for Jeju (the rest, the west)

2008-08-31T16:37:00.003+02:00

The next day started with a tour of a tea plantation, which wasn't terribly interesting, so we'll move on. We then went to Sanbangsan, a mountain with a small Buddhist Shrine.

There are two little temples at the base of the mountain.

A look inside one of the temples.

A statue of Buddha with babies. I like the one poking his bellybutton.

A short hike up the mountain leads to this shrine built into the mountain.

What I think is one of the odder attractions at Jeju is this obviously non-Korean ship. It is a replica of a Dutch ship that wrecked near Jeju in 1653. At the time, Korea was completely closed off the foreigners so the arrival of these Dutch seamen caused quite a stir. They were forbidden from leaving Korea, but after 13 years, several of them escaped, including Hendrick Hamel who was the first Westerner to write about Korea.

Next stop was Jusangjeollidae, basically a shoreline consisting of rock formations reminiscent of Giant's Causeway in Ireland.

We were supposed to go to another shoreline where we were allowed to walk along the rocks, but the surf was too rough that day, so instead we went to what turned out to be my favorite part of the trip.

This is Yakcheonsa, the single-largest Buddhist temple I've ever been to. Most places I've visited are more like complexes with a bunch of little temples.

The interior was fantastic, especially this massive statue of Buddha.

Three floors of the temple were open, so I was able to get some shots from higher up.

Yet another rocky shore. This area was called Oedolgae.

Along the hiking trail around Oedolgae, we came across this exercise equipment and started playing with it. Not shown was this spinning platform that I spent some time getting dizzy on. Yunita made a video of it, so I'm hoping that will show up on Youtube or something soon.

We then visited two waterfalls.

Cheonjiyeon...

and Jeongbang. Jeongbang is interesting as it basically goes directly to the sea.

This is water from Jeongbang going out to see, plus people playing in the water.

Yunita, out among the rocks.

After our tour, we went to the teddy bear museum as Yunita was very keen on going. I, unfortunately, had used up my memory card, so I have no pictures from the museum, but it was rather entertaining. Most of the displays were set-ups of teddy bears recreating storybook or historical scenes or works of art. The oddest possibly being a recreation of a World War II battle.

And that was pretty much it. The next morning, we had to get up bright and early for our flight back to Busan. If you want to see more pictures from Jeju, check out my Picasa Web Album.

Now for Jeju (first the east)

2008-08-25T06:19:00.008+02:00

So about three weeks ago now, I was in Jeju. Jeju is a small island just south of Korea that is a major tourist destination. Mostly Koreans go there, but apparently it attracts tourist from Japan and China as well.

I had heard interesting stories about the ferry to Jeju, so we opted to fly instead, which was cheap, so whatever. There was a bit of an issue with Yunita, because it took her so long to make her arrangements to come to Korea, she had to book a separate flight and hotel, as the flight and guest house I booked for Rudi and me were full. Luckily though, Yunita's flight was just 10 minutes later and she was able to quickly find a place to stay.

The guest house Rudi and I were staying at was owned by an incredibly friendly couple. They even picked us up from the airport. Also being picked up from the airport the same time as us was a Canadian couple who were working in Gwangju. The guy who picked us up must have thought it would be nice to play some English radio for us. However, the English radio stations are for teaching English, so during the car ride we got to enjoy a slow monotonous version of Phil Collins' "Take a Look at Me Now" followed by a line by line explanation of the song.

The guest house we stayed at was really nice. It felt like an actual house, just with more people.

This is Rudi using the computer and the kitchen. You can't really see it in this picture, but that wall was covered with maps and information about how to get around Jeju.

Our first night in Jeju was a bit odd. We went into the city by cab, and figured the driver would take us to a place with plenty of restaurants. Instead we ended pretty far from any eating establishments and spent a good time walking. Eventually we made it to a place with restaurants and went to a place with galbi. However, the staff there was a little too attentive, which made me really uncomfortable. We then went to a cafe with computers at most of the tables (for you Richmond people, it looked like those group study areas in Booker with the computers). Later that night, as Rudi and I were going to bed, we left the window open to let in a cool breeze and a rooster started crowing. I should also note that wandering around that night was the first time I had seen stars since coming to Korea. How sad is that?

The next day, we started early, we joined a tour set-up by our guest house that would take us to many of the sites on the east side of the island.

Our first stop was Sangumburi Crater. This is an old volcanic crater, presumably no longer active.

Here's the crater. Not terribly interesting, but it was a really pretty area.

Case in point, this.

I also liked this restroom sign I saw there.

Next we went to a traditional village. Now is the time I should introduce Mickey. Mickey was our tour guide. He didn't speak English very well, but he made up for it by, well, not speaking English very well. He gave us a little tour around the traditional village which went very quickly as it mostly consisted of him telling us something we only half-understood, awkwardly pausing as he thought of something else to say, but giving up and just moving on to the next thing. He was really funny, energetic, and nice though, so he was still a great guide. My favorite saying of his was whenever we were getting off the bus to see a new site he would say, "make good memory!"

Here's a picture of that traditional village.

A ddong pig. I won't tell you want this pig was used for, but it involves waste management.

After that, we went to hike around a scenic area. Really, I have no idea why we were there other than it was pretty.

Yunita and Rudi along the path.

The water was beautiful, and very tempting as it was horrifically hot out, but I didn't feel like getting my head dashed in on the rocks.

Some interesting rocks.

This is Sunrise Peak, an old volcano crater on the extreme eastern side of the island, hence the name.

Before ascending Sunrise Peak, we visited this little cove.

Since Jeju was a volcanic island, it is covered with volcanic rocks which aren't terribly good for farming, so most food came from the sea. Traditionally, the women of Jeju would go diving for whatever the sea floor had to offer, however, as there are now more readily-available sources of food, the tradition is dying off, leaving just a handful of old women that still do it.

A nice stone path leading up Sunrise Peak.

Most of the people on the tour didn't bother climbing Sunrise Peak as it was horrifically hot that day. I think you can see a few sweat stains on my shirt.

Thankfully, this was followed by a tour of the largest lava tube in the world, where it was nice and cool.

It's very difficult taking pictures in a cave without a flash. The lava tube was created, of course, by a lava flow following an eruption. It goes on for 7km or so, although only the first 1km is open to the public.

At the end of the public section is this lava column, created by another flow of lava coming through an opening from above and hardening as it falls into the lower tube. It's apparently the largest lava column in the world.

That was the end of the tour for that day. One of the great things about the tour was that at the end, they didn't just drop us off at some random location, they asked everyone where they wanted to go, and if they couldn't take us there, they'd take us as close as possible. Unfortunately for Rudi, me, and the Canadian couple we met the previous day, there was a bit of a miscommunication and we didn't get dropped off where we had hope, which began another search for dinner. We passed by a few places, but they didn't look very good. After awhile, one of us, I forget who, mentioned a pizza place we had passed, and we realized then that we all wanted to go there, but none of us wanted to admit to not wanting to get Korean food. So we got pizza. The best part was the advertisements for their pizzas, "Garlic Pizza for Women", "Sausage Pizza for Men and Kids". I understand just as much as you do.

After stumbling around lost for awhile, we found a bus stop and headed back to the guest house exhausted.

Final Trip to Seoul

2008-08-15T13:52:00.017+02:00

So I mentioned in my last post I went up to Seoul to meet up with Rudi and Yunita. This was actually my third trip to Seoul, somehow I neglected to ever make a post about my second trip. It was a good trip, so I might throw in some pictures from then too.

First day in Seoul, I met up with Yunita and Rudi at the hostel. Yunita rented a cell phone for the stay, so I had a way of contacting her. Yunita and Rudi brought me gifts from Australia and Austria, mostly consisting of chocolate, including Nutella. We then met up with some other friends and had dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant.

The next time, our first mission was to find the US military base and try to book a tour to the DMZ. The tour was fully booked, but we did spend some time looking at the War Memorial.

It was really hard getting a picture of this statue without it looking like either the one guy's head was missing or that they were kissing.

We then did a walk through Itaewon, the foreigners' area of Seoul, and headed downtown to see Namdaemun and the market. Namdaemun was Korea's National Treason No. 1, but back in February, an arsonist burnt it down. My first trip to Seoul was in January, but I missed out on seeing it.

This is what the Namdaemun site currently looks like.

It was a rainy day, so the market was pretty empty, but here's a picture I got of it on a nice sunny day in May.

Also from May, Thomas trying on a pair of pants at the market. There's no changing rooms, so you have to make do.

We then headed up to Cheonggyecheon, a stream that has been turned into a really long and narrow park.

Yunita and Rudi at the beginning of the stream.

Yunita crossing the stream.

After walking down the stream a good distance, we went to get dinner with one of Rudi's friends. On the way to dinner, we got to enjoy the wonders of a diagonal crosswalk.

After dinner, we enjoyed a Korean concoction known as a Bingsu.

It's basically ice cream, fruits, and a type of Japanese sweet bean on top of shaved ice.

The next day we went to the National Museum with Yunita's friend Junseot.

And here they all are.

The museum was massive, definitely the best I've been to in Korea. It had a lot of neat items from Korean and general Asian history.

The only musical instrument I know of that could double as a sled.

This a coffin made of two massive clay pots. I thought it was a nifty idea.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but this painting was amazingly detailed.

A pretty gong.

So after our trip to the museum, it was time for me to get back to Ulsan as I had to teach a few days before heading to Jeju.

So the past month...

2008-08-05T17:23:00.005+02:00

As I mentioned in my last post almost a month ago, things looked like they were getting interesting, and interesting they have been. Since July 25th, I've been constantly busy. Things have finally quieted down and I haven't gotten used to it yet. I spent a good chunk of July fretting over Yunita and Rudi's visit and now that that has come and gone, I don't know what to do with myself. Since so much has happened, I'll just make a quick overview of everything that has happened the last month and post more in-depth stuff later.

Yunita and Rudi's visit went really well. I spent a few days in Seoul and in Jeju with them. They didn't spend much time in Ulsan, which is just as well, although I had wanted to take them to Gyeongju. I've been trying to go to Gyeongju for two months now. It's kind of sad.

At work, thinks have been entertaining, well, entertaining to me. Welsh Dan was put on a perpetual "starting at the new school next week" schedule, where he just had review classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This went on for three or four weeks. He finally had his first day at the new school this week. I haven't asked him about it yet.

In another strange arrangement, Shane and Melinda left two weeks before their replacements arrived. They worked at the Okdong school with two other foreigner, meaning the number of foreign teachers was halved for two weeks. They somehow managed. In any case, Shane and Melinda's going away party was fantastic and turned into an impromptu all-day affair. We started off at a nice restaurant off in the countryside, walked around a bamboo forest, and ended up at a this really cool little Korean restaurant place.

Not much new happening with the students. Since it's summer holidays, a few of my favorite students have gone to study English in other countries for a few weeks. I got one new student, a girl named Bluegun. I asked her how she got her name, but she had difficulty explaining. I had one odd discussion where it was decided that when we die, we don't go to Heaven, we go to Singapore.

One odd incident I've been facing is that in one of my classes, my students like me to sit down. However, one of the students doesn't like that I cross my legs when I sit and tries to get me uncross my legs. She is too young to explain why she doesn't like it, so I asked a Korean teacher about it. She said that Korean children are told not to cross their legs as they believe it restricts blood flow to one of the legs and will cause it to not grow as fast as the other leg.

I've made three trips to Busan, which I will show some more pictures of later, I just wanted to show off these guys. While in a souvenir shop with Caroline, I came across these two little guys and couldn't pass them up.

I haven't come up with names for them yet. Most souvenirs I've bought I plan to give as gifts, but these guys I'm keeping.

One thing that got me really excited was one day when I was heading to work, I saw a big banner over a store front declaring that Krispy Kreme was coming to Ulsan. I told Mom about it, and she told me she remembers when they first opened a store in Greensboro. It's pretty crazy to think about that what was once a small chain of North Carolina doughnut shops now has a shop in Ulsan. It is now open, but long lines have dissuaded me from going in.

This picture was actually taken in Busan. There's a surprising lack of Korean on Krispy Kreme storefronts, which makes it hard to show this as a Korean Krispy Kreme. One thing that annoys me with Korean Krispy Kreme is that they don't sell milk.

On the American beef fiasco front, I see no signs of it passing. Just today, I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with a picture of cow with crazy eyes on it. At the Busan Modern Art Museum, they had a statue of mad cow cloaked in an American flag. Some teachers working in Gwangju told me there are protests all the time, although I haven't seen any in Ulsan. Any place that serves beef now has one of these stickers in their window.

At McDonald's, they have a big display explaining where they get their beef from. Also, the paper mats in their trays have a picture of packaged Australian ground beef.

Anyway, I'll save my tells of my trip to Seoul and Jeju for my next posts.

Now it gets interesting

2008-07-09T18:26:00.003+02:00

Life here is getting a bit more interesting. They're starting to having soccer games at the nearby stadium again, so I got to attend a soccer match. It wasn't a regular season game, so the crowd was rather small. I went with a few of the other teachers, including Paul, who I thought had already headed to back to New Zealand. He is in New Zealand now, but will be back before I leave Korea. It was a null point game until the Hyundai Tigers got a goal during the four minutes the ref added to the end of the game. Most sports teams in Korea are named after corporate sponsors rather than cities, the "Ulsan" team is Hyundai. I thought this was rather odd until I thought about NASCAR.

Other than the soccer match, most of my weekend plans have been getting ruined lately. Thomas and I were going to go to Gyeongju two Saturdays ago, but it rained all day. This past weekend, I was going to go to Busan with Welsh Dan, but then the new teacher showed up and took over my weekend. Wendy, who has been working at my school the last few months has gone back to New Zealand, so we got a new teacher to replace her. The new teacher, Caroline, arrived Saturday morning, so I did the nice thing, and went and got lunch with her, Shane, and Melinda. By the time we got back, Dan and I decided it was too late to go to Busan and decided we would go on Sunday. However, Sunday morning I got a call from Stacy, she wanted to take us and the new teacher out to lunch, so no trip to Busan again. This coming weekend both Thomas and Dan will be busy so I'm a bit miffed about what to do.

Despite ruining my weekend plans, Caroline has been great. She came here with a good deal of experience, having taught in Japan before and as a high school history and economics teacher in the US. New York Dan at first refused to meet her, but even he was eventually won over by her.

Caroline is the first change in a series of many changes. Next week, Welsh Dan will be starting working part-time at a new school, the thing is, there's no students. He'll just be there twice a week and advertising. While the job sounds easy, but boring, the new school is way on the outskirts of Ulsan and will take over an hour for him to get out there.

In two weeks, Shane and Melinda are leaving and in three weeks, New York Dan is leaving. So there will be three new teachers all at once. From what I've heard, they're all Canadian.

Also, coming up soon is summer vacation. Two of my friends I met in Sweden, Rudi and Yunita, will be coming to visit Korea. I'm hoping to go to Jeju Island with the two of them. Jeju Island is a small island pretty far south of Korea that is rather tropical. It's a major tourism destination for Koreans, kind of like a Korean Hawaii.

Another bit of fun from last weekend, since we couldn't go to Busan on Saturday, Welsh Dan talked me into going down to a nearby playground with a soccer field to kick a ball around. One of the goals was free, so we switched off playing goalie. I was a very poor match for Dan. As goalie, Dan missed more often than I effectively blocked. As the shooter, my kicks had absolutely no force behind them, and were easy to block. After some time of this, a group of Korean boys asked us to play with them. I mostly just stayed off to the side and passed the ball if it ever got to me. Dan did a bit more, but despite being a good player, didn't have the stamina to keep up with a bunch of adolescent boys. The game didn't last long as it was sweltering hot and everyone quickly got tired.

One final bit of news, it seems that Welsh Dan has talked two of his friends into coming to Korea, one of which will be my replacement. Assuming all goes to plan, I will arrive in California on October 1st and, because of time zones changes, 10 minutes before I leave Korea.

Extinct Animals of Korea

2008-06-26T18:34:00.013+02:00

I noticed that one of my classes was getting rather bored with their book, so I started thinking of something they could do to as a break from the book but still practice their English. After reading a chapter about dinosaurs I got an idea. The next class, I drew an animal I called the Sharkosaurus on the board. Basically a shark with big legs. I wrote six questions about the Sharkosaurus and had the class help me answer them. Then I gave each of the students their own piece of paper and told them to make their own animal. They had to draw a picture and answer these six questions:
1. Where did it live?
2. What did it eat?
3. How did it move?
4. When did it live?
5. Why did it go extinct?
6. Something unique about the animal.
I was rather pleased with their creations, so I decided to share them here. The papers have not been corrected as during the class I had them write their answers on the board and corrected them then. Click on the pictures if you have difficulty reading them.

I like the use of "extinct" as a verb.

Apparently the way I write "q" is confusing to students. I usually add a little curl on the end of the tail. They often accuse me of having written a "g" which might explain "unigue".

I like how this creature requires the use of all three third-person singular pronouns.

This student doesn't like going to academies.

This animal is very happy.

Do ducks have belly buttons? Also, "mouse" is a common misspelling of "mouth".

You might think this student doesn't like me, but actually she was just lazy. What it ate and why it went extinct are the same as what I had written on the board for the Sharkosaurus.

What this animal ate and why it went extinct is probably the best thing that came out of this project.

Oh... well...

Lina and Diana are two students in the class. Point 5 got cut off in the picture, it should say "skin to heart so it did". I hope that clears up any confusion.

In other news, I finally got around to watching a Korean movie last night. Maybe I should have gone with a more traditional movie, but a movie called "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" is hard to pass up. It was rather cute regardless, although I had no idea what was going on at the end.

It's a street in a strange world, maybe it's the third world

2008-06-05T18:54:00.002+02:00

I've been watching a rather interesting event unfold here in Korea the past few weeks. Some time ago it was announced that Korea would restart imports of US beef. This has unleashed a torrent of idiocy as Koreans protest "crazy cow meat". The reasons for opposing US beef are built on some of the flimsiest foundations I've ever heard. There have only ever been three cases of cows or humans contracting mad cow disease in the US. In a nation of 300 million that consumes 28 billion pounds of beef a year, that's an incredibly small number of cases.

Most Koreans I've talked to ignore this and come up with reasons as to why Koreans would be more susceptible to mad cow disease ranging from completely unsubstantiated claims to the patently false. My favorite reason is that Koreans are somehow genetic predisposed to contracting mad cow disease since they've never gotten it before. Another is the fear of the US shipping over beef that is more than 30 months old. This completely ignores the fact that the age of the beef has nothing to do with whether or not it carries mad cow disease that the fact that Americans consume the vast majority of beef more than 30 months old and very little is shipped overseas.

Two years ago, Japan restarted imports of US beef. There weren't massive protests and the reputations of political leaders weren't destroyed. The comparison of the reaction of the Japanese and Koreans to US beef brings up something I've been thinking about for awhile. Korea is not a first world country.

Everyone has probably heard stories of people completely misunderstanding technology in various third world countries, such as the rumors of there being a phone number that if one answered a call from it. These things seem silly to a person in a first world country, but they still persist. I see this same mindset in the protests against US beef. They use arguments laced with pseudo-science that make little sense to anyone but themselves.

One could simply mark this up as thinly-veiled anti-American attitudes seeking a cause to rally behind, but such pseudo-science isn't uncommon here. One of the more famous Korean beliefs is fan death. Fan death happens when someone leaves a fan on while they sleep and the fan somehow sucks the oxygen out of the room and the person suffocates. If told that fan death is never reported outside of Korea, Koreans simply say that they must be genetically more susceptible to it. For this reason, all fans in Korea have a timer on them to make sure the turn off before killing anyone.

Today, I was presented with another wonderful example of pseudo-science. When I was correcting a students diary, I read about her doctor visit where she found how tall she would grow. The doctor had her place her right foot in some machine and told her that she would grow to be 160 cm. She wants to be taller though, so the doctor told she should jump rope more often and consume more milk and cheese.

I tried maintaining an open-mind about Korea when I first got here as we tend to notice things when we're in a new environment that we would otherwise ignore in a familiar environment. However, the longer I've been here, the more I realize there are certain things I'd never have to put up with in a first world country. Koreans seem to have no concern for their environment. This actually a really odd dichotomy as, when there was a massive oil spill last year, it seemed like every Korean spent at least a day helping the clean up, but they think nothing of throwing trash on the ground. Also, I've never heard of people dealing with questionable things about the paychecks or getting paid on time except in the absolute worst jobs in the US, here it is the norm.

On a lighter note, that I think only two of you will get, we're having a game day next week and they want me to come up with some true/false questions. The first one that came to mind was, "there are five lights".

New teacher, new food, new game, new computer

2008-05-12T11:18:00.003+02:00

It's been almost a month since my last update. I can never seem to find time for updating lately. Quite a bit has happened in the month too, so I really should have been updating.

We got a new foreign teacher at my school a few weeks ago. He is from Wales and has quite the accent. His name is also Dan, which creates some confusion, but I usually refer to him as Dan of Wales. The students seem to like him, but his accent gives them some trouble. Also, he's not very familiar with American lexicon which is what the books teach, so that leads to confusion. One of the teachers ask him to try speaking with an American accent, which makes me want to switch to using a more Southern accent just to mess with them.

It's interesting having a new teacher around as I see make many of the same mistakes I did, such as the confusion with the class diaries or forgetting when classes are supposed to end. It's also fun to watch make new and original mistakes. His most memorable having nothing to do with school. He decided that he would go running every morning, and there's a nice park across the road. He went running around the park and made a wrong turn on the way back. He ran for 20 minutes before realizing he had gone the wrong way. He had to get a taxi to get back.

We had a going away party for Paul, although he's still in Ulsan just not working at YES. We went to some traditional Korean restaurant where we had a variety of interesting dishes. The one most familiar to Americans was the chicken gizzards, which I don't think I've had before. There were also quail eggs, which aren't that strange, and are really good. Then there was the silkworm pupae, which are rather popular in Korea, so I've seen them around, but had never eaten one before. They tasted a bit like walnuts, but otherwise were not pleasant. The kimchi they served was mixed with ketchup I think, which I thought was great. There was one dish that took awhile to identify. After a few false leads, for awhile we thought it was a kind of seafood, one of the Korean teachers said that her grandmother used to go out into the garden and collect these. This is how we figured out that they were slugs. They were cooked and covered in sauce, so it wasn't bad. I ate three. For dessert was apple pieces covered in a kind of mayonnaise dressing, which is a strange mixture.

After dinner we played a card game called Go Stop. There are 48 standard cards, plus however many jokers you want to use. There are 12 groups of cards, 4 cards to a group, identified by the type of plant in the background. Each group has two "junk" cards and two special cards, except for one group that has 3 "junk" cards and one special. There are three types of special cards, bright, animal, and banner. Various combinations of these cards are worth different points. It's an incredibly complex game, but I find it really interesting. The Korean teachers thought I picked it up really quickly, although I lost, so I don't know.

I finally got a new computer. I decided I was tired of dealing with my old computers problems. Claiss helped me order it and set it up. To my surprise, the computer arrived the next day and the postage was only $5. I guess next day delivery isn't an issue in a country smaller than North Carolina. One other surprise was that the keyboard has Korean characters on it. I didn't think about this when I ordered it. It still has the basic English keyboard, but beside the English characters are the Korean characters. So far the computer has been really nice. It runs much better and faster than my old computer.

Six Months

2008-04-15T05:58:00.002+02:00

As of April 11th, I've been in Korea for six months. This means I'm halfway through my stay here. I feel like I should say more, but really, that's all it means.

I still haven't gotten a new computer. I managed to get my current computer to turn on and haven't turned it off. I've also been trying to avoid doing the things that caused it to shut down randomly. It's still not an ideal situation, so I will be getting a new computer soon, in fact, I've already picked out a replacement. The one thing holding me back is that the price of the computer I'm looking to get has been dropping ever since I found it. There's also the chance a new computer will come along that is better.

Two weekends ago, I went with Robert and his friend, Julli, to hike up Munsu Mountain, which is fairly close to our apartment. Robert told me it would just be an hour hike and none of the mountains looked particularly big, so I didn't take any water or food. It ended up being a two hour hike straight up the side of the mountain. It also wasn't a particularly scenic hike as the view was mostly of the area surround Ulsan (which isn't the most beautiful place), there were high tension power lines going across the trail, and at the top of the mountain there was a radio tower. Perhaps the best part of the hike was that there was a guy with a cooler selling popsicles at the time of the mountain. Near the top of the mountain was a Buddhist temple that was seemingly stuck to the side of the mountain. It was surprising crowded, which left me wondering if all these people had climbed the mountain or was there another way up.

On Saturday, I was flipping through channels and saw a NASCAR race was on. I had discovered that they showed reruns of NASCAR last season, but they had changed the time, so it was only by chance that I found it again. Joseph was online, so I told him I was watching the Martinsville race, which he told me was two weeks ago. It isn't as bad as when I found that they show Project Runway in Korea and when I asked Robert how far behind I was, he told me the season had been over for several weeks. Now that I think of it, that's quite the combination of shows to be watching.

I had an interesting dinner on Friday. On some days, my schedule works out that I have an extended break, so I go get something to eat. Three students from one of my better classes saw me leaving the building and decided to follow me. I went to a nearby Korean diner and they sat down at my table. So I ordered my meal and told them to order whatever they wanted and I would pay. They just got some snack food, so it wasn't expensive. I was amused that they tried to speak English the whole time, even when talking to each other. As my German professor once pointed out, one of the reasons he only spoke German in class was that it conditions the students to only talk to him in German even in informal settings.

My dinner with them actually answered something I had been wondering about recently. Last week, I suddenly became aware that, although there were many siblings at the academy, I hadn't seen any twins. Nor could I remember seeing twins anywhere else. As it turned out, one of the students, a girl, had a twin brother (who is also one of my students). So while not identical twins, it was nice to know there were twins. I now know of six siblings at the academy (I know there are many more) and every time I find out about them, I'm always surprised I didn't notice earlier as they look so much alike. In some cases, they even speak English the same way (using the same phrases, intonations, and mistakes).