we got some of you by six hours, the rest of you by nine.

If you can imagine a cross between a Boy Scout Cookout and tailgating at a Patriots game, you can begin to understand the scene that Jenks and I walked up on Monday afternoon. Christmas day was the Bird's first annual Christmas Pig Roast.
Cooking across the street in Mauer Park (for lack of permits to do sidewalk cooking) the staff of the Bird set it up right- homestyle potato salad, seasonal eggnog, and of course, plenty of pork.
Lots of holiday cheer abounded, pool was played and I believe that we heard Johnny Cash's Christmas album nowhere short of 12 times. A good Christmas for sure. We snapped a bunch of photos of the event, but no shot was quite like this one. Disturbing? Yes. Hilarious? Hell, yes.
For those taking notes at home, that is the other contributor to this blog in the yellow jersey, and our friend Stefan, one of the head cooks at the Bird. It must be noted that Stefan is one of Jenks' favorite Germans, and by no accident, one of her main sources of food in this country.


In addition to massive amounts of food, Christmas brought along the winter weather. Thanks to global warming (I guess...) the weather this December had been pretty mild, so far. Tuesday afternoon the temperature dropped to 0° (that's centigrade, now) and yesterday marked the first snowfall this season. Although the winter may not be as long as Vermont's, I have been told that it can get just as nastly cold. Damn.

A great Christmas present came yesterday from the German government in the form of permission to stay. Page 13 of my passport is now emblazoned with the right to reside in Germany for two years. Step one down. Next? Finding a job. I never thought scoring a Visa would easier than securing employment. Double damn.

Jenks has been a bit under the weather this week. A doggie cold of some sort. She is doing much better today, back to that habit of begging tableside at every meal.

Finally, in the Observations and Notes on German Culture section of the blog I have two entries:
1. The medicine here is weak. Cold medicines and cough syrups don't stand up to their American counterparts. The German drug store is the Apotheke, where white coated professionals recommend medicinal options based on your symptoms. A sort of intermediate step between the sick and the doctors. Unfortunately, you have to pay for this advice, as they seem to roll it into the price of the drugs. From what I can tell, there are no over-the-counter drugs here in Germany, only behind-the-counter ones.

2. During the week between Christmas and New Years, Germany is crazy about fireworks. Seemingly abandoned storefronts have come alive for the one-week legal sale of fireworks. In the last couple of days, our neighborhood has sounded like New Hampshire in July. Friends tell me that this a build-up to New Years (Silvester, here) when the city sounds like Beirut. We are steering clear of the Brandenburg gate on Sunday night, but Jenks and I will join Suzanne at work to ring in the New Year.

Fröhliche Weihnachten aus Deutschland!

liebe,
sue, nick und der jenks.

drei Monate in Berlin

This week Berlin and us turned three months old together. Since we didn't get a chance to get on the holiday card/what we did this year tip, lets go with a quick rundown of the state of the Hauptstaat, here in b-lin.
Considering how long and how short we've been here, things are good. We are in the second level of language class. Sue is the star of the class, hands down. My German is coming along, albeit a bit slower. I have accepted the fact that I am a total idiot in this language, and will continue to be so for the next whenever. The hope is, at some point, things will break and I will be able to shakeout a reasonably coherent and somewhat intelligent sentence to a real German. In the meanwhile I have been perfecting my in-the-store German and my in-the-restaurant vocabulary.
Half of us have secured jobs. Sue has been working like crazy at her job, covering just about every shift, since the rest of the staff scurried home for the holidays. She is currently in the 4th day of a 17 day straight work marathon! I am arbietslos, but have put in applications for a handful of jobs and am waiting to hear back. For now, I am working as a hausfrau and a dog-walker. The dogwalker job is a bit more fun the first, but neither of them actually pay, since my dogwalking business only has one client - us.
The Jenks is officially the Queen of Berlin. She runs this town. She goes everywhere and does what she wants. Any particular day will find her riding the U-Bahn, going to a restaurant, shopping with us in a store, or sleeping underneath a barstool. She also has been getting cuter, way cuter. In the next week or so we are going to head to a vet to grab her EU pet passport. I still think its hilarious that she will be an EU citizen before I will.



Speaking of deportation, I have another meeting this Thursday with the foreign nationals office. Pending any criminal activity on my behalf between now and then, my permit will be extended for another three months. In other residency news, Sue is the real deal. This week she got her German Social Security card. She has an ever-growing collection of official German and EU documents. Did I mention that I am incredible envious? Well I am. I asked for an EU passport for Christmas, but unless Nikolaus pulls something pretty ridiculous off, it looks like I will need to continue my visit to the foreign nationals office every 90 days. Damn single citizenship.


Monday we head to Suzanne's work for a Christmas day dinner. They are roasting a pig in the park across the street. It promises to be pretty insane. On the menu- roasted pig, bock beer and gluhwein. That should do. Expect a full report and photos in Tuesday's blog.

Today we learned that in Germany, instead of wishing someone "Happy New Year," you wish them "einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr" (a good slide in the New Year). Crazy language.
Anyways, Fröhlische Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr !

editors note: I just saw that 'Groundhog Day' will be on tv tomorrow night. I will not miss that.

today i got...

the best t shirt ever!!!

i always wanted one of those tuxedo t shirts, but this one wins the prize.

nothing like having a green tie and a fake gun.

Jackie 0 Magik Marker No Cry

Today is cold and rainy in Berlin , giving us the perfect opportunity to do some housecleaning of backlogged photos from the last few weeks.


Two Fridays ago we went to see a double bill of Jackie O Motherfucker and Magik Markers at West Berlin, in Berlin. The club was pretty randomly located- a rooftop warehouse space right outside the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station. The club was no bigger than Pure Pop and the stage was made out of stacked Becks crates and plywood sheets (!). The venue seems to be home to some of the more experimental/underground shows coming through the city.
JOMF went on first. Nick and I began to immediately salivate over the lead guitarist's (who strangely resembled Vermont Todd) Jazzmaster. mmm....yummy. The singer spent most of the set hiding underneath a blanket with a microphone. Texturally it was soothing and pleasant, the perfect hideaway from the Berlin cold and rain. Going into the show I thought it would be a lot noisier, but instead it had a very mellow folk vibe. The two guitarists formed some really great fingerpicking-style build ups together.
Often I have a hard time at these free-form-improv-noise concerts. The too hip for though feeling of the crowd compounded by drama club-esque onstage movements of some band members usually just ends up pissing me off. That said, JOMF produced more of a soundtrack for me. Making me think of long drives I haven't yet taken - somewhere orange and open.

Next was Magik Markers. I bought "I trust my guitar etc..." a while ago when the hype around them was at a peak. Then, during one of Nick and I's many great purges, I sold it on ebay for 4xs the price. I have always wanted to see this band live, wondering if the reviews would stack up against the performance. They were only two people this night. guitar (abuse) and drums.
Pete Nolan, the drummer, was the highlight for me, mixing breakneck pace and stop-start jazzy bits throughout their 35 minute performance.
Singer/guitarrista Elisa Ambrogio was not too brutal with her guitar, and seemed to be really focused on the lyrical side. It has been a while since I have heard feedback like that, and me likey-likey.
-sue
On thursday Sue had to work so I went to the 4 Women No Cry Vol. 2 record release party solo. The show featured performances by the album's four contributors, Austria's Dorit Chrysler, Japan's Mico, Barcelona's Iris and Berlin's Monotekktoni. Iris started things off with her bedroom breakbeats. During her set she sang live and was accompanied by her laptop. There is something about not controlling anything live during an electonic show that bothers me. Kind of like a electro minimalist karaoke of sorts.
Thereminist Dorit Chrysler came up next and baffled many with her use of this non-traditional instrument. I was nervous that seeing a thereminist live might be kind of a one-trick-pony but it turned out to be pretty substantive. She ran her instrument through a string of effects and loops that created a foundation of sound over which she sang and played.
Mico was the last and best performer I saw that night. She sourced some nice lo-fi dub step beats from her laptop while triggering and tweaking noises from standalone sampler, and singing and rapping over it all. In her multitasking she proved to be the most hardworking of all the performers that night. Overall, it was a nice small live electronic show from four upcoming female artists from separate parts of the world.
-n.
Coming up saturday- J Mascis and Sonic Youth.

Und noch viel mehr

I've always wondered where commercial jingles come from. My high school friend Ryan once told me that his grandfather, a composer and jazz saxophonist, used to write jingles to earn extra cash in between gigs. For those of you who lived in Southern New England in the mid 80's, his works include the Dave Dinger Ford jingle ("Come to Dave Dinger Ford, in Braintree, in Braintree") and the New England telephone theme ("We're the one for you New England, New England telephone"). I was reminded of this story recently as myself and the rest of Deutschland have been taken by storm by a commercial for MediaMarkt.

One of things I have learned since moving here is that Germans wholly obsessed with pigs, especially with portraying them as cute, little animals. This commercial is no exception. The text of the ad translates roughly to "So cheap, and still so much more." I cannot tell you how popular this commercial is in this country. Television, radio, print and billboards- this ad is everywhere! The other day, I even heard strangers on the street reciting its all-too-familiar chorus.

After a little research, Sue found out that the jingle based on a song called "Der König von Deutschland" by Rio Reiser, a 1980s German popstar. The song was the title track on the debut solo album for the former Ton Steine Scherben singer.

Sau sau sau...

Hühnchen Gemuse Suppe mit Siemens Handy

So, I am officially a human idiot. This weekend I dropped our mobile phone in a bowl of chicken vegetable soup. I towel dried the phone and let it sit for a while on the radiator, but, as you can probably guess, it still smelled like soup.
I then went to the store and swapped out the SIM card and bought this new phone at right. My friend told me that there is an ad campaign for Nokia in France that shows a guy French man pulling his Nokia Mobile out of a cup tea and making a call. I think that I should be all set with this new one.
My penance for this act is twofold. One, I had pay for a new phone.
Two, I had to endure the public embarrassment of trying to explain what happened at the phone store, using only my first grade German.
They laughed. I am still ashamed.
-nicholas.