Sinterklaas!

Today is Saint Nicholas Day (Sinterklaas in Dutch)!

The picture I'm using for today is of the Sinterklaas's arrival in Amsterdam, about two weeks ago. The story is that Sinterklaas arrives from Spain on a steam ship. This steam ship actually comes in along the Amstel, so we could see the entrance from our apartment. We went outside early and took in the atmosphere.. tons of kids dressed up as the Sint or as Zwarte Piets (his small black-faced assistants).. There were Zwarte Piets on rollerblades appearing on bridges and such (causing the kids to shout and point sporadically) for a few minutes before the boat parade.. which consisted of several decked-out boats full of Zwarte Piets and bands, and then finally Sinterklaas's boat.

The boat parade went downtown, and Sinterklaas alighted at the Maritime Museum, where he got onto a white horse and rode around the city in a three-hour parade. I met up with the parade at the end point, in Leidseplein. The parade on land was even more impressive than by boat. It took at least an hour to go by, possibly more like two hours, and there were tons of floats and Zwarte Piets handing out spiced cookies and candies. Sinterklaas rode up in his white horse and then dismounted and went up to the balcony of a theater in the square, and he gave an address to all the children gathered. And this is where I took today's picture.

Of course the whole point of Sinterklaas is to get presents, right? To that end, Dutch children put out shoes by the chimney on the night of December 5th, and they wake up on December 6th with gifts (each with a poem to the recipient, from Sinterklaas) in the shoes. Casey's department had a Sinterklaas party last week. In this instance, the gifts were the slightly minor side effect of some very funny poems and bizarre wrapping.

Also, on Saturday, I saw our neighbor's kids dressed up and parading around the sidewalk.. The oldest one was dressed as Sinterklaas, and he had a trail of five or six Zwarte Piets. I think these kids were not actually wearing black face, but there definitely were some at the parade who were. People seem to be trying to make it more PC these days, by saying that they're just black from all the soot in the chimneys, but it's pretty clear that those are not the real roots of the legend. It is interesting to see this -- I can't imagine parents putting their children in black face in the states. Obviously when the US adopted Sinterklaas as Santa Claus, they changed the Piets to ethnically generic elves. I'm curious to see how the legend evolves in the Netherlands.

Thanksgiving

Almost every year of my life, I have spent Thanksgiving with the Andersons. So when I found out that the daughter of the family (who is between my brother and me in age) would be in Heidelberg, Germany, for the year, I knew it was fated that we would spend Thanksgiving together.

Thursday morning, Casey and I loaded ourselves and our assorted food products onto the train and headed off for a four-day weekend in Germany.

The photo for today is taken from the Philosophers' Way in Heidelberg, looking down on the medeival part of the city and the castle (the Romans settled on the other side of the river, where we were standing). As always, you can click on the photo to see a larger version. We spent all day Friday walking around Heidelberg. The city is very picturesque, and it also has what I think is my favorite pedestrian street yet--Hauptstrasse, with the perfect amount of bustle and noise without actual crowding or blockage of store windows to look in. Excellent!

The aquaduct-looking structure to the left is actually the base of a public park, which used to be the castle's former gardens. The weather was perfect for us to walk around, enjoying the hillsides (quite a change from flat Amsterdam).

Saturday we took a train to two nearby smaller towns along the Neckar River in what is sometimes called the "castle district" of Germany. I'll try to post photos from there soon.

Martinmas

Today was Saint Martin's Day, when Dutch children make paper lanterns and walk around to their neighbors singing songs in exchange for candy. It's like Halloween (which is not celebrated here), only sweeter. Unfortunately, we were under the impression that it was a tradition only in the northern part of the country, so we were unprepared when kids rang our doorbell expecting candy. So we closed our curtains and hid from them. Then later I snuck out to the balcony and took a few pictures.

The photo for today is of three celebrants with their lanterns and parents. One of the parents has a bike. I brightened the photo a bit and changed the contrast, which introduced a graininess, but I actually kind of like the graininess with the surreal point of view and the very long shadows. Like for all photos on this blog, clicking on the photo will take you to a larger version.

Next year, I will be prepared for Saint Martin's Day. A candy-buying reminder is already on my Google calendar.

Where was I?

On my way to the grocery store today, I saw my breath, for the first time since I've been here. This made me reflect on the passage of time and, then, on how I haven't written anything in my blog for a while.

So, Berlin. In general we felt like we were in Chicago for most of the time that we were in Berlin. Of course the comparison is not complete; Berlin didn't invent the skyscraper, and Chicago wasn't Hitler's vision of the capital of a new continent. But at least superficially, it works for us. There's a similar mix of modern and old buildings, similar scale of both city and the buildings therein, and similar commercial history. And they're both flat cities with parks and well-preserved sight lines to interesting buildings.

The photo I chose for today is of the Berliner Dom, a cathedral on the eastern side of the city. It was built around the turn of the century and then almost immediately hit by bombs in WWII, and it took until 1993 -- after German reunification -- to finish restoration.

Behind the church on the left is the TV tower built in the late 60s by the (communist) GDR. The pink splotches are remnants of the World Cup (held throughout Germany this summer); the sphere was decorated to look like a pink soccer ball.

This was our last day in Berlin. We rented bikes and went around the city and through Tiergarten. "Tier" means "animal," and it is right next to the zoo, but Tiergarten itself is a huge wooded park in the center of the city. It felt more like a state park in the US than like a city park, except that you'd occasionally cross a bridge that had some cool sculptures at each end, or some monument in a clearing.

The day after we left was the anniversary of reunification. We saw the city well on its way getting ready for the holiday, closing off streets and setting up for festivals.

last Saturday

Our friends from Chicago had a wedding to go to in France, and they wanted to see one other (new-to-them) European city while they were on the continent. I told them I'd try to meet them wherever, and when they finally decided on Berlin, Casey was so excited that he blew off his thesis for a weekend and came along. Myself, I was excited to get to use the German I'd learned in high school and college, and curious to see how much of it I'd retained, and of course the history is unique.

The train ride (my first international one) was easy. Only 6.5 hours, and we didn't even have to change trains. Casey implied I was paranoid when I packed little bags of pistachios and arare, but I was vindicated when they announced that the bistro car was out of order. We got reading done on the train -- a borrowed Berlin guidebook, some German romantic literature, and some historical fiction involving Leibniz and Queen Sophie-Charlotte of Brandenburg (all very topical).

Taking the train in, we went through Spandau, where Nazis were imprisoned after the war. The train then went through the western part of Berlin, which is mostly modern and sort of Chicago-looking. Then, in the middle of a large business center, there's a bombed-out church (kept as a reminder of horrors of war). I heard someone gasp when the church came into view. Then the train rode through Tiergarten, and we could look out at the zoo and at kids playing in the park.

Our first destination in Berlin? A bomb shelter. Actually, first Casey got some currywurst, but then we went to a museum called "The Story of Berlin," which was in the same building as a 1970s bomb shelter. The photo for today was taken inside the shelter; it's a row of bunks. The shelter is interesting -- the main purpose is to keep people (~3500 of them) alive for two weeks. Most of the space is taken up by bunks. Oxygen is kept at a low level, so that people will be tired and sleep a lot. Each person is alotted ~2 liters of water per day (from a well 30 m deep). There are no showers. And all the food is a canned breadlike substance, which is high in calories and requires minimal preparation.

The museum itself was also interesting. It started with the first mention of Berlin in some commerce record in the 1200s. I was most interested to see what a German museum would say about the events leading up to World War II, and they were ultimately presented without any excuses. The Allies were never mentioned with negative epithets, and by the same token the economic downturn in the 30s was mentioned but not dwelt on. I don't think they even mentioned the effect of the Treaty of Versailles on German morale, which is often cited in history classes in the US as at least part of the reason that Germans began to feel isolated from the rest of the world.