Posts Tagged ‘holiday’
greeting cards
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
I’ve been wanting to make some greeting card designs, and this one has been on the back burner for a long time. I had a whole series of these dinosaur Christmas cards, but never did anything with them. The stripes are a new addition. They liven things up a bit, I think!
A New Year, and calendars
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
I realize that 2010 has been here for a few days now, but hey, there are still 360 days to go! I’m grateful that the print shop did such a nice job with the color, I didn’t have to alter anything at all.
I have put some here on my brand-spanking-new Etsy Shop. Click the link or the photo.
And happy new year to all! 2010 is going to be a good year, I can feel it.
Is it really december?
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
I’m back! Here’s a little sketch from home. (I was too busy dozing in front of that woodstove with that cat on my lap to get much done in the last few weeks, but now I’m back at it.)
Also while I was in the US I sent out a bunch of samples, and yesterday got my first encouraging reply postcard back from an American publisher!
Karnival des Kultures
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Greetings, everyone.
Last weekend was the “Karnival des Kultures.” I’m not sure exactly what the whole three-day festival is about, but Sunday there was a big parade through Kreutzberg. I only caught the tail end of it, but there were floats going by with different musicians on each one, and the people of Berlin seemed to be following along and dancing behind their float of choice.
The crowd kind of reminded me of India. Except for the Techno, of course.
There was another parade the day before for kids, but even so there were lots of them around. This little person had the best view of the crowd:
The street was lined with temporary food stalls and vendors selling everything from crêpes to the obligatory bratwurst-in-a-bun. These Turkish guys were making some really good-looking falafel:
The restaurants on the street were all open as well, cashing in on the crowds of hungry, beer-drinking visitors. Here is a photo taken by me as I hide behind a pole and some shrubbery so the people in the café wouldn’t notice me.
I think some of them noticed anyway.
Incidentally, isn’t that a cool light-post? During the parade, people were climbing up on them for a better view.
Things wound down and the street was a disaster, covered with bottles, confetti, trash and broken glass. There’s always broken glass on the street in Berlin. Always. It’s bad for bicycle tires, but ironically considered a sign of good luck.
2009!
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Happy New Year, everyone! (or “Sylvester,” as it is called here. Who knew?) I hope my belated greetings find everyone well. I promise, I have some Christmas presents and cards etc. on their way, but they’re just going to be terribly late, I’m afraid.
New Year’s eve was spent downtown in the “Times Square” of Berlin—actually not very Square-like at all, the festive location is a long street that runs between the Brandenburger Gate and a tall statue of a winged being, a monument that I don’t happen to know the name of. The boulevard goes through the center of a large forest-like park called “Tiergarten,” or “animal garden” in good old English. This is the exact same street that was completely full of people when our Presidential hopeful Barack Obama spoke in Berlin.
We started off via U-bahn (subway) at Potsdamer Platz and followed the old wall’s path toward the park. Everything had been cordoned off by police. It was already too crowded with people for any more to fit, so the police directed us further and further down the park so as to avoid a stampede. We wound our way through the park, around icy ponds and patches of thick trees, until we came out to the street itself. There were fireworks going off all around us at intervals, including most amusingly a couple of police shooting bottle rockets outside the door of their police van. I never thought I’d see the day…
The boulevard was lined in Christmas-market fashion with little booths selling beer, pretzels, hot spiced wine (nice on a cold evening. You have to pay for the mugs when you get the drink, sometimes a few Euros, and then you get the money back when you return the mug. “Pfand,” this is called, and it applies to most bottles of water, drinks, etc at the store as well. Germany is serious about recycling.)
Also in evidence were stands selling cheap champagne bottles, noisemakers, flashing LED lights to decorate yourself with, gummy candies in bulk, even gloves and fur hats for people who felt that they were not dressed properly to stand outside all evening.
It was really cold, but without a thermometer I can’t tell you how cold it was. Probably not that bad; I’ve become something of a wimp. We headed “downstream” toward the more crowded end of the street, untill we reached a ferris wheel that marked the end of free movement and the edge of an extremely dense crowd. Signs warned us not to go further. Achtung, achtung!
On the stage (a large TV screen showed us) a show was in full swing, offering the latest local pop talents. Some were better than others, but most I felt a bit sorry for. The back-up dancers in particular reminded me of childhood days in neon spandex at “Dance Dimensions,” and their attempts at pop-star sassiness were undermined because of their need to not freeze to death. All in all the songs were manufactured junky pop, probably thought up by some corporate director somewhere rather than by the poor singers themselves, and didn’t manage to capture the crowd’s enthusiasm.
The other unfortunate part of the story is that they were quite obviously lip-synching, which was made clear by mistakes. For example, someone might do a little dance move, wave their arms in the air, and forget that the voice keeps going even though they have taken the microphone far away from their mouth. Or, worst of all, they might keep singing along as their song fades out, allowing the crowd to hear the true tone of their voice, unrefined by high-tech sound equipment, and decidedly off-key. This happened with one girl, and the entire crowd erupted in laughter. She looked a bit embarrassed, but she covered nicely and went into her next song cheerfully, so all in all she did well considering how the odds were stacked against her. It made me quite glad I didn’t have to be up there.
There was something idiotic about the level that technology has brought us to. There we were, watching a TV broadcast of people a block away pretending to sing to pre-recorded songs that relied on vocoders to get the singers’ voices in tune. Whatever happened to live entertainment?
Our feet were slowly turning into foot-shaped ice lumps, so at about twenty till midnight we bolted and started going in the opposite direction: like trout migrating upstream, it was a fight most of the way, but eventually things started clearing out. We had just come to a nice clear spot with a view down the boulevard when we heard voices all around rise up in the countdown, and a few seconds later the sky erupted in fireworks.
Meanwhile, something was going on at that winged statue I mentioned earlier (I really ought to look up what it’s called) and it looked like warfare: fireworks were shooting off in every direction, emergency vehicles were parked haphazardly amidst the litter of thousands of burnt firecrackers, and the air was perfumed with a strong scent of sulphur. This seemed pretty out of control/awesome to us, what with people shooting rockets off the tops of ambulances and all, and I felt compelled to duck and run across the area to safety on the other side because the air was punctuated with so many loud and ominous explosions. We did take some pictures to try to capture the spirit. Remember, too, that there is an actual street running around the monument, where some traffic was flowing despite the flaming rockets that kept hitting cars.
Well, we were pretty much human popsicles by that point, and we made a dash for the nearby Bellevue train station, and as we walked we marveled at the echo of explosions going on all around us. Really, big fireworks were going on all over Berlin to such an extent that you couldn’t look in a direction and not see some flashes of sparks, and the sounds of the explosions merged into a single, steady rumble. The only place I had seen such a fireworks free-for-all was in Thailand on Loi Krathong (also known as Diwali ) and since Berlin is a bigger city than Chiang Mai, the scale was a lot bigger here.
This last photo is from the next morning, the first day of 2009 when you could see quite a mess on every street corner and square in the city: broken shells, burnt paper, plastic wrappers, and plenty of broken beer and Champagne bottles. All of Berlin became a house party that night. I am not sure who is responsible for cleaning up the mess, but a few days later it snowed so everything got buried in a layer of pristine white. Perhaps it’ll re-surface in spring.
While I’m at it…
Monday, January 5th, 2009
I might as well post a few more Christmas market and holiday decoration photos, since they’re so very merry and all, and the season for these things is ending. These photos were at Alexanderplatz, right in my part of town, where that giant TV tower stands.
Alexanderplatz is in East Berlin, and even though it is surrounded by more picturesque neighborhoods of older buildings, for some reason this area was razed and hideous soviet block-style buildings were erected. Someone told me that there used to be a predominately Jewish neighborhood there, and this explains its transformation, but I should probably verify that fact before I pass it on.
I’ve noticed that I tend to avoid putting up pictures of the architectural atrocities, simply because I am not so tempted to photograph hideous things. It might seem like East Berlin is a little more elegant than it actually is. It gets more extreme the further East you go; once when we went to the very edge of the city to visit some bureaucratic office, I thought for a moment I was actually in some gloomy suburb of Moscow amidst large, dark blocks of offices and abandoned apartment buildings with broken windows and graffiti. I was only in Moscow a couple days, but I remember some areas felt a little bleak.
At the Christmas market there was a more sculptural reminder of the Communist past. This worker looked to me like she just planted a whole bunch of Christmas trees:
Frohe Weihnachten!
Monday, January 5th, 2009
We stayed in Berlin until the 23rd of December, waiting for our long-lost shipment of boxes from America to arrive. Its arrival was much anticipated, not only because we were being charged for it to be held during all the bureaucratic haggling, but also because it would relieve us from our boredom in our empty, internet-less apartment, which until then consisted of two rooms large and empty enough to echo. Happily, the stuff arrived and we were able to take off for Siegen the next morning, and were picked up at the Siegen train station at noon on Christmas eve.
[note: Siegen is not to be confused with Ziegen, which means “goat”, or zeigen, which means “to show.” Heh heh.]
Christmas eve is when most of the Christmas activities take place. In the evening there was a traditional and very German dinner served, including the small roll-like loaves I may have mentioned called Brötchen, sausages, potato salad, hardboiled eggs, and the usual assortment of pickles and mustards. We also had a spread made of seasoned raw beef with onions that I admit I was insecure about eating, but I was mollified by Germany’s stringent food regulations, and it turned out to be not bad.
It was then time to open Christmas presents. I still think it’s more fun to do it on Christmas morning, but who am I to correct the Germans on Christmas traditions? Opening presents is fun pretty much whenever you do it, and the Germans do offer several big advantages: the official holiday where the Christkind brings you gifts is three days (Dec. 24-26th) and St. Nick actually passes by early on the 6th of December to fill shoes with chocolate. So in December the family gatherings, good meals and copious amounts of Chocolate just seem to keep coming. Just looking at this photo might cause cavities:
As a nod to one of my favorite Christmas activities, we “kids” went for a long hike to explore the surrounding woods, and managed to see a deer that took off as soon as we approached it. There was no snow, but lots of frost in the shady spots:
The forest is not particularly wild, and there are plenty of hunter’s platforms which may explain the shy behavior of the deer. We also found a big, round pit in the ground surrounded by old broken logs which turned out to be a bomb crater from the war. While we were poking around, someone’s dog suddenly came rushing over to us, so I snapped a photo of it, only to be dazzled by the result. How did this happen?
