***
After I returned home, Ge. and I went shopping and brought back, amongst other things, chocolate-covered popsicles. And he made ice cream milkshakes with seasonal strawberries and peaches. I tried a recipe from The Naked Chef: tagliatelle with zucchini, lemon and basil. I did not, sadly, hand-make the tagliatelle.
***
The FIFA World Cup is afoot, but I don't think I have watched a whole game yet. The best ones I partly watched were Spain vs. Portugal yesterday, and today's Argentina vs. Iceland, which was also a corker. I liked the thoughtful approach that Spain and Iceland had.
In Canada I never knew when the World Cup was happening. But I do like the general celebration here, and the internationalism. On Friday, the public viewing amenities were packed outside restaurants and bars — roaring televised crowds and pontificating commentators, groups of engaged fans talking and watching large screens in agog clusters, drinks in tall glasses, strings of flags from dozens of nationalities fluttering over the sidewalk. The faces of German's best and brightest soccer stars are plastered on billboards for a large sports apparel company, all along the Alexanderplatz train platform that I use to get home. A few German-Turkish fans seem to be celebrating Germany enthusiastically, too; Turkey isn't in the tournament, as far as I know.
Today the restaurant terraces were emptier. But plastic leis in Germany's red, gold and black were sold outside a dollar store. People walked by at the concert in Argentinian team jerseys with Messi's 10 on the back. A black SUV parked near the Mall of Berlin had German flags beside the windshield. A display board near Potsdamer Platz mentioned that traffic was shut off around the Street of the 17th of June, for the huge fan area near Brandenburg Gate, which I believe can hold over a million people. (The area will open tomorrow for our game vs. Mexico.) And I heard a few howls of euphoria coming from the street beneath our apartment when Denmark scored against Peru this evening.
***
In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and before the concert today, I have been re-reading a story in modern Greek and remembering with increasing vividness how much and why I regretted it before. As a fishmonger might become an expert in several variants of fish stink the more often he is around fish that meets the date of expiry, I feel that my amateur attempts at writing fiction have made me an expert in several variants of writing that stinks. I've learned by doing. And I feel that my expertise is pertinent here.
Also, I've struggled with another page or so of the astrophysics book, which was about calculating properties of different depths of stars that have radiative cores and convective envelopes. But I had an easier time with the Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary that I quoted from in the last blog entry. Aristotle's Politics I haven't continued yet after my singleminded immersions into Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Wolff's Fire and Fury (good companion reads), but I have slipped Tariq Ali's Dilemmas of Lenin into the work bag and hope to read it after Voltaire. The Voltaire is an abridged translation, so I won't count it as part of my paper-books-read-this-year tally, which is doing well. On Friday I roamed a bookshop I'd never been in before, and ended up splurging on a black leather-bound, gilt-edged 19th-century edition of Montaigne's essays, fourth volume. I feel that I should read it soon, as well, but perhaps not in trains for fear of damaging it.
But I wish to relax tomorrow. I feel overstimulated, hypercritical, and a little grumpy, likely because of the long walks to and from the concert, the excitement of the concert itself and of the World Cup, and the shopping and cooking on top of that. I played the piano — Spanish Dances by Granados — but not long enough to mellow me. On Monday I'll take part in a meeting at 9:45 a.m., which (I've just realized) means that I must be at work earlier. But I'll also be confronting the bad showing I'll have made in the World Cup office betting pool that a human resources colleague has set up — I thought Peru and Spain would win their games, and would never have dreamed that Iceland would tie Argentina. After reading the American statistician Nate Silver's website, it looks like my predictions for tomorrow were also way off. My bad World Cup guesses are the least of my worries, and in fact the resulting discussions should be quite fun.
***
Having gone on at self-indulgent length, I think I'll stop here.
After I returned home, Ge. and I went shopping and brought back, amongst other things, chocolate-covered popsicles. And he made ice cream milkshakes with seasonal strawberries and peaches. I tried a recipe from The Naked Chef: tagliatelle with zucchini, lemon and basil. I did not, sadly, hand-make the tagliatelle.
***
The FIFA World Cup is afoot, but I don't think I have watched a whole game yet. The best ones I partly watched were Spain vs. Portugal yesterday, and today's Argentina vs. Iceland, which was also a corker. I liked the thoughtful approach that Spain and Iceland had.
In Canada I never knew when the World Cup was happening. But I do like the general celebration here, and the internationalism. On Friday, the public viewing amenities were packed outside restaurants and bars — roaring televised crowds and pontificating commentators, groups of engaged fans talking and watching large screens in agog clusters, drinks in tall glasses, strings of flags from dozens of nationalities fluttering over the sidewalk. The faces of German's best and brightest soccer stars are plastered on billboards for a large sports apparel company, all along the Alexanderplatz train platform that I use to get home. A few German-Turkish fans seem to be celebrating Germany enthusiastically, too; Turkey isn't in the tournament, as far as I know.
Today the restaurant terraces were emptier. But plastic leis in Germany's red, gold and black were sold outside a dollar store. People walked by at the concert in Argentinian team jerseys with Messi's 10 on the back. A black SUV parked near the Mall of Berlin had German flags beside the windshield. A display board near Potsdamer Platz mentioned that traffic was shut off around the Street of the 17th of June, for the huge fan area near Brandenburg Gate, which I believe can hold over a million people. (The area will open tomorrow for our game vs. Mexico.) And I heard a few howls of euphoria coming from the street beneath our apartment when Denmark scored against Peru this evening.
***
In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and before the concert today, I have been re-reading a story in modern Greek and remembering with increasing vividness how much and why I regretted it before. As a fishmonger might become an expert in several variants of fish stink the more often he is around fish that meets the date of expiry, I feel that my amateur attempts at writing fiction have made me an expert in several variants of writing that stinks. I've learned by doing. And I feel that my expertise is pertinent here.
Also, I've struggled with another page or so of the astrophysics book, which was about calculating properties of different depths of stars that have radiative cores and convective envelopes. But I had an easier time with the Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary that I quoted from in the last blog entry. Aristotle's Politics I haven't continued yet after my singleminded immersions into Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Wolff's Fire and Fury (good companion reads), but I have slipped Tariq Ali's Dilemmas of Lenin into the work bag and hope to read it after Voltaire. The Voltaire is an abridged translation, so I won't count it as part of my paper-books-read-this-year tally, which is doing well. On Friday I roamed a bookshop I'd never been in before, and ended up splurging on a black leather-bound, gilt-edged 19th-century edition of Montaigne's essays, fourth volume. I feel that I should read it soon, as well, but perhaps not in trains for fear of damaging it.
But I wish to relax tomorrow. I feel overstimulated, hypercritical, and a little grumpy, likely because of the long walks to and from the concert, the excitement of the concert itself and of the World Cup, and the shopping and cooking on top of that. I played the piano — Spanish Dances by Granados — but not long enough to mellow me. On Monday I'll take part in a meeting at 9:45 a.m., which (I've just realized) means that I must be at work earlier. But I'll also be confronting the bad showing I'll have made in the World Cup office betting pool that a human resources colleague has set up — I thought Peru and Spain would win their games, and would never have dreamed that Iceland would tie Argentina. After reading the American statistician Nate Silver's website, it looks like my predictions for tomorrow were also way off. My bad World Cup guesses are the least of my worries, and in fact the resulting discussions should be quite fun.
***
Having gone on at self-indulgent length, I think I'll stop here.
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