Fish with Whiskey

On Saturday, after living in our new Wohnung for about 5 or 6 weeks, Andy and I finally got around to having a flat-warming party.

I may have ended the invitation with: Please respect our culture, and remember that the traditional housewarming gift of Australia is the presentation of small live kitten(s) to the Man of the House.

Which explains this:

and this…

 and even this:

 but does lead to some confusion when considering this:

 and also this:

EXCELLENT!…. It all gave me great amusement, especially the way everyone solemnly presented their cat related items to the HausMann! I should note that the mouse is actually a cat toy, which is filled with catnip, so presumably we can just put it outside for a few hours and the kittens will come to us?

In a similar vein, Marta, Magda and Kris also gave us some cat grass (photo now with bonus fingerpuppet!):

(Cat grass in a CAT POT!!, very good show!)

Here’s what was in the kitten bag- hopefully not at all related to cats (although there were questions of what we would do with all the acquired felines):

All in all I was very very impressed by the commitment to the theme, and it was a generally lovely evening.

(We had a Macca! (+ TWO Sabines!))

Thanks to everyone for coming- and thank you for all the (generally hilarious) gifts… and for all the delicious food that was also brought along- cherry pie and pasta salad and orange and poppy seed muffins and…the much alcohol including Aussie wine and Polish mead!

This post, powered by Ditsch. For all your recommended daily intake of saturated fats, and so much more:

Last weekend we went to an art gallery, called the ‘me Collectors Room’ in Berlin. We actually planned to visit a couple of galleries- but the majority of places we saw in the area were more ‘private spaces for selling (overpriced?) art’ as opposed to perusal places. And the other legitimate location was in the process of moving premises. The Cheek!

But it was a sunny day, so the wandering around didn’t do us any harm

Some may even suggest that it was TOO sunny.

It’s Berlin- so there’s plenty of free art everywhere, but I’m still super glad we committed the 3 or 4 euros to get into the gallery.
It was… strange.
In an awesome way!

I think this guy, situated at the entrance, set the scene for the ‘things to come’ rather well.

Does it seem somewhat politically incorrect that he has part of one of his feathered friends stuffed in his hat?

Naturally, it is quite difficult for one to pull one’s gaze from a stuffed bird in a hat, but of course, the gallery owners had considered that….

Behold!

I guess someone else has the rest of the giraffe?

And what followed was much to the same theme: a presentation of oddities collected from around the world, with a particular focus on life, death, bones and religion:

Note the top of her stomach lying in the background.

This was quite beautiful. It is made of skulls. Hundreds of tiny little mouse skulls.

And for the Harry Potter generation:

A Bezoar!

This fellow, or dame- as she is a Japanese Siren, is made with real fish.. and also, for that added touch of credibility, real claws and teeth.

I feel like this is famous? Have I seen it before? Anyone?

Feathers curling back into a pit of quills.

This was absolutely amazing. He’s covered with millions of tiny seed beads. I wish I’d thought to get a photo from the back, because the red veins all shot out from his spinal cord in a very beautiful way.

Good vs. Evil chess set. Ghandi, Superman, a native american, a firefighter etc. vs Hitler, Stalin, Old father time, Cleopatra/Delilah and so on. Quite cool.

This was also amazing- A human figure in a glass cabinet lying on an old mirror. The figure is made from dust and hair. But of course!

This also feels somewhat familliar.. but maybe it just feels Chas Adams-y? I really like the overall effect.

And here’s us at The End.
There was some other super cool things, including a layered Monty Python-esque animation showing the seven vices. Here’s a still (or a picture- I think they may have been originally as shown below) I stole from the Interweb:

http://slowmuse.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pieter_bruegel_the_elder-_the_seven_deadly_sins_or_the_seven_vices_-_avarice.jpg

I would really recommend it if you’re looking for less ‘classical’ and more ‘curio’. Quite the cool experience!

And some more art on the way home:

Complete with cockroach.

(Next time, more exultation!, more head tilt, less clothes).

In what I can only assume is a snub at Certain People for trying to break my Spring is Coming Spirit (‘Spring doesn’t start until the 20th of the month ChickenCounter’), the 2nd and 3rd of March were, at least at intervals, gloriously sunny.

Because of this, and also because a certain someone had to digest his magnificently large weekend helpings of sausages and Ditsch, we went a-walkin’.

There’s a park that bounds the Havel river just near the Potsdam Hbf, and it’s filled with plants and and children and ducks and play equipment and sculptures…

Also hipsters:

… And tricksy trees that look suspiciously like wattle from a distance:

 Although the hat and scarf are a bit of a give away that we are not in the Sunny Southern Hemisphere.

… We saw people fishing:

 .. and a giant throne, clearly designed for posing:

… and did I mention the playgrounds?

 Successful Vitamin D conversion!

Several weeks ago now, the lovely Mercedes took us to see Orpheus in der Unterwelt.

When we were growing up, my sister was obsessed with Greek mythology, so I felt pretty well acquainted with the concept of Orpheus: a man with a musical talent, who manages to woe the King and Queen of the underworld into giving him back his dead wife.

Of course he screws it up, and loses his wife forever.

Happy endings are for Disney.

In any case, this was.. not that Orpheus.

But it was absolutely fantastic. It’s technically an ‘opera bouffon’, and played out very much as the name suggests- with a mixture of the operatic and the slapstick/farce.

It began with a man (Orpheus) and woman (Eurydice) stuck in a loveless marriage.

(Note- I couldn’t take any photos, but all the ones below are taken with the same main cast, scenery and costumes)

She’s busy having an affair with a Shepherd, who, naturally, is actually Pluto, the god of the underworld.

Also naturally, he has a slightly unnerving cohort of flower girls, who enjoy bobbing their heads up and down like one of those puppy things you see in car windows.

Anyway,Pluto decides he wants to keep his girl with him, so must fake his own death, in the hope that she will then kill herself and they can be together forever in the underworld.

Of course being a God, said DeathFaking is massively overdramatic.

But seems to be successful. Eurycides heads into the underworld.

Orpheus is pretty pleased that his wife has gone, but ‘Public Opinion’ (appearing as a personification), tells him that it’s really quite improper to be so content, and that he should go to Jupiter and demand his wife back

Jupiter has just been partying with his own gaggle of awesomely dressed lasses, but after a brief interlude into his life: which included the delightful song Juno, you know I love you (Juno being pronounced more like Yuno in Deutsche).. he and his Possie hop on a plane (insert a reference to Berlin’s airport, which has been ‘in the process of being built’ for a very long time), and head to der Unterwelt.

Which was one of our favourite parts: you had the plane flying around the stage, with a can-can/conga line of girls trailing around it singing ‘Fahren wir ins Unterwelt’ (I think)- all to the tune, as Mercedes pointed out, of ‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’  (see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSDov-KlwTE).

 Meanwhile, Eurycides is frolicking around with this dude- I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure who he was:

But he’s also in love with her.

And then Jupiter see’s here, and also decides he’d like to ‘get better acquainted’. Because of the awkward situation with Juno, he disguises himself as a fly, and zooms around the stage singing a love song consisting mostly of Buzzing.

She’s pretty convinced, so she puts on her own fly costume.

 Which, with a bit more dancing, basically brought us to the end of the tale.

One of my favourite parts was the ‘Galop Infernal’, which is consisted of all the girls Can-can-ing around the stage for 15 minutes- the score for Galop is what we traditionally know as can-can music. (I couldn’t find any photos of this scene from our performance online)

All in all, it was a really fabulous night! We have to go to many more of these things, especially as our German gradually improves and we can appreciate the wordplay on top of the physical humour and general spectacle of it all!

It’s the 24th of Feb., and the weather forecast to the end of the month looks relatively mild. Mild of course means in the high minuses (or low minuses? I’m not sure how counting negatives really works)… and seems at this time of year to come with the disgustingness of Sleet- the worst infliction of the heavens’ upon the people.

Snow is cold, sure, but most of the stuff this winter has been fluffy and delicate, and dancey (I think I’ve already abused Tchaikovsky enough previously in creating this image.. so if you’re not getting the image you must go and scold your parents for raising you in a deprived environment featuring an absence of ‘Fantasia’.. and then go and watch Fantasia… obviously).

Sleet is more of a ‘going straight for the eyes with tiny pinpricks of frozen pain’ type of monster.

Which of course has only been possible through the Learning of Many (small and large) Lessons, including:

1) Don’t wear earrings when it’s minus 10, the metal conducts all the heat from delicate earlobes
2) Australian shoes are made for gripping sand and dust, but are not match for ice, salt and cobblestones.
3) Ich bin Heiss actually translates as ‘I am horny’. It’s probably more appropriate to tell the old women on the overheated bus that you’re slightly warm (I think- Mir ist heiss: which is more ‘it feels warm to me‘.. I guess that makes sense).

and so on.

I will also comment that the cold weather has made it possible to appreciate the German diet- Andy is incapable of exiting the apartment on any day without at least one sausage under his belt, or, alternatively, the promise of Ditsch (super-oily german pizza fast-food chain) in the very near future.

Nothing like a tummy filled with fat and carbs for braving a -11 day!

On that -11 day, when we were back in Golm- Tegan came upon a frozen puddle, and got very excited by it. Andy stood back while she spent several minutes trying to crack the ice by the very-safe ‘jumping method’.

If only I’d know what was just around the corner:

Frozen lake!!!!

Andy would not let me jump on this one. I did do a heel strike, but it made an ominous cracking sound, and although I think it was too far frozen to give at all, I quickly stopped trying to test it…really very unscientific of me.

You can see the frozen plants under the water… poor plants!, and this tree was actually half frozen into the lake

Winter is somewhat sepia-toned…

We had a bit of a walk into Golm village, the duration of which seemed infinitely longer than the time taken for -11 cold to conduct through the Aussie-winter soles of my boots and turn all my toes to ice.

But it was very picturesque.

I’m not sure if you can see easily from this picture, but the bush to the left is absolutely FILLED with hundreds of tiny birds that seem to be omnipresent here. You can see at least 10 of them sitting on the top, but the hedge is somewhat hollow, and there must have been at least 40 or 50 constantly flitting and chirping.. very sweet.

Lichen wins at winter:

How the birds keep warm:

And a church.

I will admit now, that -11 was the coldest we got this year, and I think it’s actually been a pretty mild winter- with all the colder stretches punctuated with warmer, snow-melting days.

If we were Real Men, next winter we’d take on Russia.
Probably feeling pretty ok with current level of manliness though…

Complete with Andy modelling…

(*warning: rather dry post for those not caring about the intimacies of our living space)

Welcome to the visual tour of our new Wohnung:

You come into the apartment, to the Flur… you can see in this photo the front door handle sticking out to the very right hand side. The current view is through to the kitchen, with the photographer’s back to the bathroom.

I’m kinda in love with that little chest of drawers, which we also got from the Spanish people. The shoe rack and big corner plant are from the Kaufland, and the shelfy thing that the plant is sitting on, and the baskety things that the ivy is in we found on the side of the road.

Germans seem to really embrace this ‘trash is treasure’ concept: unwanted items are put outside for others to pick up.

Last night I saw one of those portable clothes racks and the night before a pair or rollerskates!

Going into the kitchen:

(here you can see the edges of the door again to the right of the picture, going into the Flur).

I think we still need a microwave. Note the three bins: one for Restmull, one for plastic and one for paper. We are such good little Germans!

Also, my basil is dying again. I think maybe this time it had too much water? Possibly the worst plant scientist ever.

The photographer’s back is currently facing the Wohnzimmer, so let’s do a 180 turn (and stand on a chair):

Note that the art installation has now moved. Also the bucket is full of curtains that we haven’t worked out how to put up yet. 

Sofa bed- Ikea, little pink foot-rest- side of road, everything else-Spanish people.

Here’s the other side, with the table and Andy’s reading chair (both Ikea). The viewpoint for the previous photo standing on top of that chair to the far right. Clearly this photo was taken a couple of days ago when our apartment was cleaner. 

This is the view from the door. Andy insisted on having a second bookcase, despite us only owning about 8 books.

We are very german, and have to single matresses in a 200 cm by 180 cm frame. Oh so Practisch. Mostly because the supercheap bedframe only came in 140 cm or 180 and not 160- and it is nigh on impossible to buy 180 cm.

But it does mean I can have a firmer bed than Andy, and there is less night-time inadvertent face-punching.