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

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