Archive for June, 2009
berlin buildings 101
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
Berlin is a mishmash of different architectural styles, but several neighborhoods have distinctive old apartment buildings with courtyards and reddish tile roofs. Prenzlauerberg, where I live, is one of these sections of the city. Another such area is Friedrichshain. The buildings were once used as cheap housing for the working class. They are generally five to six floors tall, some forming complete squares of their own, and others shaped like horseshoes. Sometimes a road or railway cuts through a row of them, leaving a row of flat, windowless edges that were obviously once connecting to another building, but now are the perfect display areas for spectacular graffiti.
Here and there, an old building has been replaced by a new one for whatever reason. The old buildings are generally more desirable, because they often have beautiful, original wooden floors, generously high ceilings, and are often more ornate and interesting. Sometimes there is interesting moulding or unusual architectural details. You can really see a difference when an old and new building stand side by side, because the new building has another entire floor despite the fact that the buildings are the same height:
There is also a difference between the lower floors and the upper floors. The first floor in an old building has higher ceilings than all the other floors, which is nice, but you tend to not get any sunshine down there. The top floors are often renovated and feature spectacular-looking terraces, huge windows, or other envious things.
Not every area, of course, has buildings of this type. I was recently on the top of a tall building at Alexanderplatz, the “downtown” of former East Berlin. If you look to the Northwest, you see a sea of these old, stone buildings with courtyards. If you look East, you see this:
Wouldn’t you love to live here,? Actually, this building (in the foreground) appears to be abandoned. It’s probably unsafe. Maybe there’s asbestos. Maybe it’s better to live in West Berlin. There, you find areas where the buildings look more like this:
school
Friday, June 26th, 2009
I have been going to German class for four months in the same place: a high school about ten minutes by bike to the west. It’s on the other side of where the wall once was. At first I had difficulty finding the right address, because the building says “Gymnasium” on it. It goes to show how little German I understood then.
The building is very, very orange.
Did I mention that it is orange? Also, its curvaceous orange surfaces beg to be cleaned.
Graffiti is obligatory in Berlin. Think nothing of it.
My class is in a different building, plain and white, with extra classrooms. It’s just to the right of the above photo. Sorry, it didn’t make it into the image.
This is inside, where we spent our class breaks chatting and drinking coffee when the weather was cold or rainy or both. There is a tiny cafeteria. It’s not always this dark; the high schoolers were doing some sort of multimedia presentation/performance that required that all the windows be covered with dark fabric.
The architect in our class said that this building is in some of his architecture books. I can’t seem to find out a thing about it on the internet. It’s called “Diesterweg Gymnasium.”
Last but not least, my classroom. There you see Hici, my teacher, perhaps the best teacher in the whole, wide world. We love her. The chalkboard is also incredible. The whole apparatus moves up and down on the wall, helpful for teachers of various heights, and the “wings” on the sides are on hinges, allowing for even more surface area.
As you can see, we have been brainstorming ideas for our “Traumurlaub,” or “dream vacation.” We got heavily sidetracked talking about Bazaars in the middle east. According to Hici, you must visit the “Beyoglu Pazar” in Taksim (Istanbul.) Her head is in the clouds because she is moving to Lebanon in five weeks, where she will live in a villa overlooking the sea and teach small children how to speak German. We will miss her…
something I painted recently
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
I was going to paint a whole series of little canvasses with “homesteads” on them. I am not sure why I started thinking of this, but each one was going to be a different sort of homestead. For example:
a) the burning homestead.
b) the pioneer homestead: perhaps a little vulnerable, but with the promise of a better life. All alone in a new world.
c) the abandoned homestead: where did the inhabitants go, and why?
d) the modern homestead: perhaps being encroached upon by housing developments.
There could be others, nostalgic, frightening, etc. The idea was make quick paintings, capturing a lot of different emotions through the same subject.
I’ve only made two. I stopped painting because I ran out of blue. You can do a lot with just a few colors of paint, but you really do need the three primaries. Hopefully I shall continue when I can afford some cerulean or ultramarine.
Here is a pretty stormy scene.
A "squat" at the airport
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Last weekend someone planned a huge protest at the Tempelhof airport. 10,000 people were expected to attend.
The Tempelhof Airport (that’s Flughafen over in these parts) consists of an enormous and impressive building complex with a limestone façade, built in the late 1920’s-early 1930’s. It’s most famous for the Berlin Airlift, the lifeline that kept west Berliners alive and functioning from 1948-1949. It’s weird to think of how different things are only 60 years later. To me WWII-related things seem like ancient history, but I know that there are plenty of people who must remember these events vividly. I was wishing I could go inside and see more of the architecture, but it has been closed since 2008. Now the city is busy trying to figure out what to do with the space, since it’s a big patch of real estate and located close to the middle of the city.
Some of these development plans do not please the local residents. The airport is in the neighborhood of Neuköln, one of the areas in Berlin with the cheapest rent. People fear that if big, expensive development projects move in, the inexpensive housing will evaporate. Hence the protest.
The event was described as a “squat,” which to me somehow suggested that people would be sitting around on the runways and refusing to move. I couldn’t imagine 10,000 people doing this. So when Saturday came, I banded up with a group of friends and headed off to check it out.
Naturally, every policeman in the city knew about the plan to protest, and no squatting of any sort was tolerated. I’m pretty sure nobody even thought about jumping over the fence, what with the police in their riot gear, vicious dogs, and fences decorated with razor wire. People just kind of wandered aimlessly around the perimeter and took photos of the cops (who looked almost like astronauts, they had so much armor on.) Since it was a nice day, it didn’t take long at all before people set up impromptu music concerts and picnics in the nearby park.
Later, there was a more organized protest-parade, but it was completely benign. I took a video, please forgive how blurry it is… I was trying to make sure I didn’t walk into someone’s nightstick.
new illustrations
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Here are some things I have been working on today.
First, we have this:
Now, I’m not totally sure what’s going on in this picture, but it seems like the kid on the left is saying something, but the kid on the right isn’t listening because she is either a) daydreaming about a fire-breathing beast, b) having a vision of a fire-breathing beast, or c) seeing an actual, fire-breathing beast. I am voting for either a) or b) because she expresses no fear.
The other kid is more paleontological than cryptozoological, which doesn’t make much sense with the dragon in the picture, so maybe that was not the best choice in headgear? But his dinosaur-hat was the inspiration for the whole scene, so I will let it be.
Next, we have an underwater scene:
Here we see Urashima Taro heading down to the underwater palace through a kelp forest, not because kelp is mentioned in the story, but because I like kelp forests and they seem like they would be cool places to swim around through.
I actually painted this back in March or something, but at the time I thought it was horrible, sent it to the back of some folder, and tried to forget about it. Today I found it again, added some strategic black outline, and decided that it isn’t really so bad, it just looks a bit crappy in real life because the paper was not watercolor paper and it got all wrinkly. I’ve decided to be positive; maybe it adds a bit of watery waviness?
That’s all, folks.
the park got a little wild
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
The park has become increasingly lush recently, to the point of resembling the sort of overgrown english country garden that I imagine exists in the english countryside. The grass is now so tall that small dogs can easily disappear inside of it, and the flower beds have become tangles of roses, thistles and vines.
Not everyone seems to be pleased by the state of the park, however, because when I was walking the dog today I noticed a GARDENING CREW, hacking and trimming away, chopping all the beautiful weeds until everything is orderly and boring. Humph.
Of course, the park couldn’t all be tackled at once so I grabbed a camera to document the profligacy before it disappeared.
It’s so nice to have a short depth of field sometimes…
There was some sort of bee visiting these flowers, but she was too quick for me and escaped from the picture.
Now why would you look at something like this and think “this should be mowed”?
Granola
Monday, June 15th, 2009
Browsing the cereal section of the grocery store is an underwhelming experience. Sure, there are the usual flakes and grains, but the boxes are small and lacking in variety. Muesli variations abound, but somehow the cold, uncooked grain with milk just never made me feel satisfied in the morning. Chewing uncooked oats makes me feel like a bovine, ovine, or other four-legged beast of burden.
Cooked oatmeal was the obvious alternative, and at 35 cents per bag, the economic choice.
But the novelty of cooking oatmeal at 7:30 am every day began to wear off. What I needed was something quick and accessible, but not so crunch-less* as Muesli. (Sorry, Muesli fans, maybe I’m not making this correctly? Is there some vital step I’m missing?) What I needed… was granola.
But where can you find granola in Germany? Probably somewhere. Just not at any of my local grocery stores. Oats, honey, nuts and dried fruit in hand, I set out to make my own.
My recipe called for a) One vanilla bean, b) Dried cherries. c) Maple syrup. d) Pecans. I’m sure granola including those items would be far superior to mine, but when a single vanilla bean costs the same amount as a box of cereal, it’s hard to justify. And don’t even get me started on how expensive dried cherries and maple syrup are. As for pecans, let’s just say Berliners haven’t heard of ‘em. They must not grow very well in Europe.
Here’s how it turned out:
Crunchy and delicious. It was so good that it magically disappeared faster than I could have anticipated. Somehow I suspect that I wasn’t the only one involved in the consumption. Even though I blatantly disregarded many aspects of the recipe, it turned out fine anyhow. There is, however, one direction involving the words “parchment paper” I wish I had followed. The proof is firmly attached to my baking sheet:
*is there a word in the English language that adequately describes the texture of chewing on uncooked, rolled oats?
Döner macht schöner!
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
I have mentioned Döner before. They are the burrito (or maybe the hamburger) of Berlin—available around every corner, usually 24 hours a day, and 99% of the time for 2.50€.
Our friends introduced us what claims to be (and probably is) the original Döner shop: these are the ones who invented the iconic Turkish-German hybrid-sandwich.
We happened to be in that neck of the woods (ok, that’s kind of a stretch—we walked about 40 minutes out of our way to get there) yesterday, and stopped in for lunch.
Here I was beside the counter (to the left), causing a disturbance by fumbling with my camera while several people wanted to order. Not long after this photo I dropped my wallet and spilled change all over the floor, dropped my coat in some sauce while trying to pick everything up, and, nearly forgot that I needed to pay.
But everyone forgave me, because they were all tourists too. We ended up sitting at a table next to some people speaking Japanese. I swear, these days in Berlin I hear just as much English spoken as German.
Incidentally, the title of this post is a phrase my crazy German teacher says whenever someone mentions Döner. “Döner makes beautifuller*” I don’t know if it’s supposed to mean they make YOU more beautiful, or just the world in general. It’s open to interpretation, I guess.
It’s called “Hasir Restaurant,” in case anyone reading this is geographically capable of stopping by. There are actually two versions of “Hasir Restaurant” right beside each other. I’m not sure what that’s about.
*I am aware that this is not a word in English, but opted to invent for a more literal translation.
Another picture
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
I saw this while walking around the intersection at Eberdswalder Straße. I’ve been working illustrations for a little story that takes place there, and was looking around for reference. It’s not too far from here, maybe a 15-minute walk or one stop on the U-Bahn.
I thought it was cute, although probably a bummer for the kid who no longer has rain boots:
just a picture…
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
The other night, as I mentioned, I was having fun at 2 am trying to get back on the Night Bus. While that might not have seemed like the best thing at first, I did also get to stop in a park (this was during the final 30 minutes by foot across Prenz’lberg.) This park is noteworthy because it has a pond, and the pond was full of frogs singing their little froggy hearts out. It’s cool how they sing in waves. One frog will start, followed by the others, until there’s a whole chorus ranging from deep croaks to high-pitched peeps. And then as suddenly as they started, they’ll fall silent again.
There’s also a marvelous/spectacular/wonderful rose garden in the park, and all the roses are busy in full bloom. They smelled even better at night. Or maybe I was imagining things.
Here is one that has been in a little cup on my table. It is still looking pretty good, even though it’s been a while since it was cut. Maybe it’s lasting so long because I put it in my watercolor paint water, because it seemed wasteful to dump it out. It was barely cloudy. Have I accidentally discovered the secret to extra-long-lasting cut flowers? The flower doesn’t actually have that many leaves. I kind of embellished. It also is lacking its cup in this picture. But I didn’t feel like painting a cup, so we can pretend that it’s still happily growing outside…
