University, Train Transit, and Journalistic Experiments

For the first time in a while I woke up early enough to attend a Tuesday morning class, and I've felt chipper ever since. It turned out that one of my bicycle tires was flat when I was about to roll it out the door; so instead I took the U-Bahn.

It's been a decade since I regularly went that route. So the time travel was engrossing: the train arrival clocks have changed (now e.g. 4' instead of 4 Min, if I recall correctly), and maybe the voices of the announcers, but the stations look roughly the same and the train wagons themselves are still the same old model. Of course I feel different from the twenty-something I was then, in good ways as well as in being a little less fresh and — for lack of a better word — dewy.

On the trip home I wandered past the fields of the Domäne Dahlem farm with its horses in one pasture and pigs in a smaller enclosure, down the budding lilac bushes of the Schorlemer Allee past the stepped façade of Podbielskiallee station, and down into the Breitenbachplatz station. Then I went by the florist's in the train station where I stepped out and bought grape hyacinths, which are now separated and repotted in my room.

Later I watched a press conference for the Berlin Film Festival, and started setting up an editorial plan. This year I found out too late about the press accreditation deadline, but either way I'd feel more comfortable having a proven track record in reporting on the film festival before asking for accreditation.

To me the most essential question so far is why under 40% of directors who submit films to the festival are women. But I've also been reading background material on former Berlinale director Alfred Bauer.

Right now the big, most urgent topic in Berlin is, of course, this week's strike of a large German rail worker union, the longest strike in the history of the Deutsche Bahn. The S-Bahn and wider regional trains have not been running. This affects me not at all personally as I rarely use them. But it does interest me what corporations like the DB should and can now afford to offer employees who are stricken by inflation and by staffing shortages that intensify their task load.

I read about the union's arguments in Tuesday's taz newspaper, a little, but don't remember the details precisely. Whereas on television today, the Tagesschau coverage seemed more geared toward the perspective of consumers who are affected by the strike — whether private travellers or German businesses who rely on freight transport by rail and who will apparently lose out on $1 billion of revenue —, ignoring the perspective of the strikers.

To me, buying newspapers and reading them cover to cover (unless they infuriate me, like the second issue of Die Welt that I tried to read) is still not the most exciting way to learn more about the German journalism scene. And as the taz costs under 3€, which feels highly inexpensive as opposed e.g. to Die Zeit, it's not like I'm contributing hugely to the economic model. But after doing so off and on over the past year, it does offer a slightly better orientation.

Besides buying the taz, I also finally fetched groceries at the nearest zero-waste shop again: walnuts to serve to guests, chocolate, freeze-dried strawberries to make my morning bowls of yoghurt or oats more interesting, and so on and so forth.

And I've been doing considerable Greek homework for university, as well as a little reading out of paper books and book research.

So altogether I've been feeling quite virtuous.

Ghosts of Yesteryear

The past week has been quiet. After recovering from a stomach upset that was a fairly effective way to lose weight but made it difficult to eat much for a few days, I've mostly been indoors researching the non-fiction book I started last year.

As part of the research I fetched out the silver cutlery that Opa had bought, and that we only use for guests occasionally, as well as a linen tablecloth and napkin, which after ironing I could put together into a table setting according to a turn-of-the-century cookbook. Then I took a handful of photos for my fairly bulging archive for the book itself...

Watching the beginning of the black-and-white silent film Mickey, an American production that was the highest-grossing film of 1918, was more of a 'trip.' After apparent animal cruelty and allusions to corporal punishment were interspersed with the intended comedy and the romantic plot, I figured that sometimes it's better to leave the past in the past.

All four siblings were in Berlin today. So we chatted, sang the songs that we're laboriously learning in four-part harmony together with our mother ("As With Gladness Men of Old" has been the easiest to learn so far, whereas Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus" is still an ordeal), and ate take-out Indian food for dinner. And my godfather came to visit, and a friend of the family!

It's hovering around -1°C and the pavements are wet, but if I were to go outdoors and seek out a little nature again it might be worthwhile despite the month. Yellow flowers that aren't quite like forsythia blossoms have already appeared in the allotment gardens, and clumps of snowdrops have been multiplying in a local park. Not to mention the leftover autumn berries: I thought I spotted deep red barberries, looking orphaned on their leafless twigs, as well as lurking Oregon grapes and the unmissable droplets of white and pink snowberries.

Last week I sent off two job applications. Then I checked to see if the old TestDaF certification I received over 10 years ago can still be verified by the institute where I wrote it. (The institute quickly wrote back; they can't verify it.) Which means that I'll need to do the certification all over again to attend university in November. O tempora, o mores.

I'm also 'doodling' on the piano more regularly. The Bach-Busoni chaconne, the few songs I know for Epiphany, a stray Édith Piaf arrangement ... It adds another dimension to playing the chaconne that I've now read a little about Busoni and seen his grave and learned that he lived in Berlin for a while; I always pictured him working away in a plastered house, wreathed by the ghosts of the Renaissance and Baroque past, in an Italian city like Florence.