TNUA Summer Concert

Sololos: I terribly regret having gone to the wrong classroom for rehearsals for this piece. This was an incredibly interesting piece, with patterns replaying themselves in different ways each time, and I only wish I had more opportunities to see how much chance can play in redefining and reshaping the structure of this work.

May: Somehow I found the use of a remix of Bach's St. John's Passion confusing, partly because I could understand the text being sung: suffering of Christ used to depict the blossoming May?

Just Do It:
I'm not going to gratify Hugo with any sort of in-depth comments in a public space. Suffice it to say that he could only pull it off in a school environment, where any (dare I say) shock value is superseded by cheap laughs from the audience in seeing their friends and classmates in (dare I say again) compromising positions.

Second half: I'm confused...


-- from NK Wang's iPad

Interlude: When shit happens...

... it comes by the truckload. Or in my case, by train and airplane.

Here's a breakdown of the past 16 hours:

1. 5/22 night. The City Night Line train should have left Heidelberg at 23:34. Instead it was 170 minutes late when I arrived at Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof. Sometime near 1:30 it briefly became a 120 minute delay, and I rushed to the platform, only to see it become 180 minutes just 10 minutes later. Someone else who was waiting for another ICE to Frankfurt said that this was one of the jokes of some famous German comedian: Deutsche Bahn is the most wonderful and considerate company in the world. You only need to pay for a 2 hour journey, and they will automatically give your 4 hours!

2. 5/23 morning. When the CNL arrived at Berlin, they somehow managed to shave off a good two hours off the delay, so it was less than one hour late coming into Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Because of this, I could only get a 25% refund... into a German bank account! Can someone lend me their account?

3. I still had quite an amount of time to kill before my flight, so I took my suitcase to the locker room. Turns out the locker I chose was broken, and I had to wait a good 20 minutes to get someone to help me get my €4 back. He said that when I retrieved my luggage in the afternoon, I should also let them know, since the locker still said that I owed €4. In hindsight I should have just paid another €4 when I retrieved my luggage at around 3 in the afternoon, because I had to wait for another half hour for someone to get a master key and open the lock.

4. 5/23 afternoon. I thought I fully deserved the €5 shower at the train station after all I had been through the previous night, but it turns out I was wrong. When I finally got to Tegel it was just after 4:30, and theoretically I had just enough time to complete all the check-in and boarding procedures. That is, unless you manage to run into the airline staff's coffee break... so even though there were only two people ahead of me in the line, I had to wait more than half an hour while the person in charge of the economy class check-in went off for her break, and the one in charge of business class just sat there chatting and laughing on the phone. I finally went and asked just how long it would be before I could check-in, and she then told me I had passed my check-in time 20 minutes ago. Of course, by this time (5:00, my flight was supposed to be 5:25) the economy class lady still hadn't come back. So I had to spend another €132 to reschedule my flight for tomorrow.

5. Right now I'm at the Grand Hostel Berlin again. The hostel is really excellent and clean, and all the staff speak excellent English; if anyone wants to come to Berlin I would highly recommend this place. But even so, I would much rather be on the plane right now, if only because of the €132 I had to spend. After breakfast tomorrow (and I am going to fully stuff my €5 worth of breakfast buffet!) I will head straight out to Tegel and wait out the five hours there.

I wish I could be like Douglas Adams and dream up the entire Hitchhiker's series while lying drunk on a road in Berlin. I just don't have that talent... nor the aptitude for getting drunk...

-- from NK Wang's iPad

Location:Tempelhofer Ufer,Berlin,Germany

Heidelberg, Eberbach, et cetera (Part 1)

Wednesday noon I took the ICE from Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Mannheim, and then a local train to Heidelberg. Unbelievably (at least at that time, although I knew later that this was quite normal), the ICE was 20 minutes late, and I missed my original connection at Mannheim.













Unbelievably, for the first leg of my ICE trip I shared a compartment with a baroque violist who was just returning to Hannover from a tour in London. We talked quite a lot about the baroque performance scene right now, and how groups like L'Arpeggiata are "corrupting" the HIP (historically-informed performance) concept with actual "hip" and populist elements.






After he got off at Braunschweig, the latter part of my journey was shared with two businessmen and an old grandmother, and it was only then did I start to feel just how bad my German is. Oh well, I still have time to learn.

My first night in Heidelberg was spent drinking with Gesa and a bunch of her friends from Heidelberg's Sinology department, after a brief tour of the department office and library and some falafels. I have absolutely no idea exactly how much I drunk — it was at least two beers, three shots of some kind of 44% herbal liqueur (out of these small bottles looking like single serving Tabasco, and we had to beat on the tables with them upside down before we threw the caps away and drank the whole goddamn thing in one mouthful — Tim said it was like 高粱 but I think it was a hundred times worse), maybe a half liter of red wine and about three or four cigarettes. I wasn't really stone drunk, but I was crazy enough to do this in the bathroom:







That's Tim coming in on the left and going like 啥洨. Naturally a massive hangover the next morning...

The next day Gesa and I followed her father to one of his field trips with his students to some Roman-era ruins in the Eberbach area. But we got off the train one station too late, and since the next train back was an hour later, we had to walk half an hour back. Nevertheless it was very pleasant, and even though it was hot, it was nothing like the sticky humidity of Taiwan at this season.




























The fields all along the way were filled with rapeseed plants. After about half an hour we arrived at Neckarburken, where the ruins of a Roman bath house (I think) were located. Prof. Stupperich of course spoke to his students in German, and although I could grasp quite a bit of it, I still couldn't catch the whole gist.



























That footbridge is, of course, Roman. We also visited a museum dedicated to the ruins of a military barracks and a fortress, located strangely halfway up a hill and not on the top.




























What is great with having an archaeology professor as a tour guide, is that you get to know the stories behind the buildings, how they were built, and what is actually "authentic" and what is only made to seem like it. A few snapshots from the villages we passed on our way back to Eberbach:







This is a particularly large house; typical of its time, the bottom is made from stone, to withstand floods, while the top is made of wood. Sometimes if the family was exceptionally rich, more than one story would be made out of stone.







The church in one of the village centers. This is the Protestant end (where both Lutheran and Calvinist denominations worship), but the church is split in the middle, with a wall dividing the Protestant and Catholic congregations. According to Prof. Stupperich, many churches in this area were divided in this manner upon orders from the local prince.













Medieval buildings in the town center.

Back onto the Philosopher's Path in Heidelberg!
-- from NK Wang's iPad

Location:Heidelberg, Eberbach

Day 2 in Berlin

Some things to consider:

1. This is a city I would definitely want to return to; no, I think I would NEED to return to.
2. U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems beat London's Underground hands down.
3. What the hell is the matter with my luggage? Just take a look:



No clothes! Or at least, everything that I actually NEED is buried under tea and instant coffee. There is a certain dance theory professor in Taipei who is going to pay through the nose for all that instant coffee!

I took the easy way out of the tourist's job and took a guided free (sic) walking tour through the city center. The tour only passed by the Wall, the faux Checkpoint Charlie, and ended on the Museum Island; the guide was actually quite good, very humorous, and I got to try out my German in translating a bit of Heine at a memorial.

All things aside, the Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate offers quite a lot of opportunities to play with lines and light:





































Our wonderful guide: (he said the tour was basically free and that he worked solely for tips, I gave him €10, but he really did such a fantastic job I really think he deserved more)




Later on I returned to the wall to see the Topography of Terror exhibit there, and also took a few more snapshots of the Wall and the fake Checkpoint:






















The east side of the Wall is almost bare, while the west side is covered with graffiti - don't know if the graffiti here is "authentic" though.

Also, the American Checkpoint Charlie now flanked by McDonalds, oh the irony; further down the road is a Starbucks:




Also, a free Ai Weiwei banner in front of one of the museums:




Just another testament to the significance of Berlin in the human pursuit of freedom.

-- from NK Wang's iPad

Location:Berlin

Maruzio Pollini plays Schubert and Chopin at Berlin Philharmonie

And the main highlight of my trip to Germany is over on the first day... Although hearing Pollini play in the great hall of the Berlin Philharmonie (as opposed to the smaller stage nearby) is an event in itself, I have to say that I sort of doubt whether today's performance was worth the €36 I paid for the ticket, much less to say the plane ticket all the way from Taiwan. The first half of the program consisted solely of Schubert's most celebrated B flat major sonata (could someone fill me in on which number it is?), and although Pollini's touch in the slow movement was absolutely flawless, he had a tendency to rush when playing in faster passages, to the point that one feels he's muddling his sentences. Somehow this all made a bit more sense in the second half of the concert: actually on the program were the C-sharp minor prelude, Ballade No.4, the Barcarole and Berceuse, and Scherzo No.2, plus a total of three encores: a nocturne in D-flat major, the Revolutionary Etude, and Ballad No.1. My companion said she thought Pollini was "slippery", particularly in the later half of the program after Ballade No.4; I'm more of the opinion that it was mostly because of the acoustics of the place (we were sitting at the back of section C, near the back wall and at a slant toward the stage), but quite possibly Pollini's tendency to rush today may have also played a part. In the end it was a mixed bag; but judging from the nearly 10 curtain calls the audience gave him, he still has his star power!

Oh, and even in a venue like the Berlin Philharmonie, and even with an arguably more "educated" German audience, there are still lots of people who clap in between movements, and even more people making an awful shhing sound. Frankly, I think the shhing is much more rude than clapping at the wrong time. So for those who say Taiwanese audiences are unsophisticated idiots who have no idea of how to attend a classical concert and follow its rituals, I'd say their argument is to a degree moot.


-- from NK Wang's iPad

Location:Berlin

輔大成績單

考試科目	分數	最低錄取標準
A: 國文測驗	72
B: 英文測驗	86
C: 中英翻譯	70
D: 術科測驗暨口試	89
總成績	317.00	245.00
1.      總成績公式：(A×25%+B×25%+C×25%+D×25%)×4 2.      備註：＊表違規扣分 ＃表缺考 Ｎ表初試不合格

囧 這樣只有探花  好爛啊啊啊

Ben Laden est mort - Bin Laden ist tot - Bin Laden is dead

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead

The way Obama handled this was considerably better than how Dubyah Bush's administration proclaimed the capture of Saddam Hussein:

If there is to be mass celebration of the death or capture of a figure loathed by the American administration, the White House should in no way condone it by letting it happen inside the White House itself! 

A rational voice from the BBC's live feed:

 0531: Justin King in New York, US writes: "Good news, bad reaction. While I am very pleased to hear that Bin Laden is no longer living and I understand that many may feel that this symbolises a sort of closure to 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, I can't help but feel a little disgusted by the cheering mob jumping around outside the White House. As the world celebrates this occasion let's not forget that even killing a killer is an ugly business and we could be recognising Bin Laden's demise in a more dignified way." Have Your Say

Officials have also been quoted that Bin Laden's body will be buried according to Islamic tradition, which is at the very least a better attempt that Saddam Hussein's horrendously botched execution.

But what I immediately started wondering when I saw this piece of news was: 1. If Bin Laden was merely a figurehead since 2009, with Ayman al-Zawahiri really in charge, what is the significance of this kill? 2. If he was indeed (forgive my terrible comparison) al-Qaeda's Dalai Lama or Pope, what kind of revenge attacks will be awaiting, assuming that there are still others in the chain of command (eg. al-Zawahiri) who are active and have access to the outside world?

大提琴備用絃統計

	Larsen	Pirastro Permanent Tungsten	Helicore	Jargar	Pirastro  Aricore	André’s  Gut  strings	Unopened Piastro  Aricore	Unopened Gamut Gut Heavy Gauge	Sum
C	0	1	2	0	1	1	0	0	5
G	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	2
D	2	0	0	2	1	1	1	1	8
A	2	0	0	0	1	1	2	1	7

這是怎樣  我是跟G絃有仇嗎？