Cosima Underwater

Guess what I sang under the shower this morning…
well… sort of… at least I tried

My mom and I ended the Christmas holidays in style, and went to a lavish production of Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Staatsoper Berlin. It has been quite a while, since I have been to any sort of concert, let alone an opera, so it was a special treat for me, and for my mom as well.

We enjoyed it so very much.

The audience was very international. Behind us people spoke Dutch, to the right of us Japanese, to the left French, and in front American and Spanish. And all of them seemed to enjoy themselves as much as we did, although not all of Papageno’s jokes were understood.

The production used beautiful stage sets based on designs by Karl Friedrich Schinkel from 1815. Schinkel was a Prussian architect who built several buildings in Berlin’s historic city center, most of them only a stone’s throw away from the Staatsoper, where we sat.

I had splashed out and had bought seats in one of the front rows. During most of the opera the singers stayed on the main stage behind the orchestra pit, but every so often they came to a narrow strip in front, and we could almost touch them. It was wonderful to hear them sing from up close and see the costumes in detail.

The highlight for me was the duet of the united Papagena and Papageno during which many little Papagenas and Papagenos came onto the stage.

The only sad thing for us was to see the sorry state the building is in. The walls and woodwork inside the audience hall looked old and worn, and according to newspaper articles I have read, the problems behind the stage are even greater. Until recently, a 130 million Euro renovation was planned, financed by the city of Berlin, the federal state of Germany, and private donations, but it all fell through because Berlin is essentially bankrupt and unable to pay its share. Papageno even altered a few sentences of his first aria to call attention to the opera’s plight. If anyone has 50 million Euros to spare, please call Berlin’s mayor for details…

Uff… I survived Christmas! I hope you did too ;).

We ate so much good food during the Christmas holidays, that we decided to burn off some calories by visiting recently reopened Bode Museum. The museum is located on Museumsinsel, a river island near Brandenburg Gate, where five renowned museums are located. The entire island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Among them is the Pergamon Museum, which hosts a complete Hellenistic Altar and the Gate of Ishtar of ancient Babylon.

The buildings on Museumsinsel where heavily damaged during the war. Although most of them were rebuild by the East German government, they needed extensive renovation after Germany’s reunification. One after the other, they are renovated and modernized, and every time a building on Museumsinsel is reopened, it is a major event for the city.

Earlier this year it was Bode Museum, which was originally opened in 1904. The museum’s focus is on Byzantine Art, and also hosts an extensive collection of sculptures and paintings from other periods, as well as a very interesting coin collection.

More photos from Bode-Museum and Museumsinsel on my flickr account

Christmas

Market and streets are deserted,
Quietly lighted is every house,
Deep in thought I walk through lanes,
Everything looks so festive.

In windows, women have faithfully
Decked out colorful toys,
Thousand children stand and gaze,
Are so very happy.

And I wander from the walls
Out to the open field,
Hallowed shine, holy tremour!
How wide and still is the world!

Stars high up turn their circles,
Out of snow’s solitude
It rises like a wonderful song –
Oh, time so full of grace!

Weihnachten

Markt und Straßen stehn verlassen,
Still erleuchtet jedes Haus,
Sinnend geh ich durch die Gassen,
Alles sieht so festlich aus.

An den Fenstern haben Frauen
Buntes Spielzeug fromm geschmückt,
Tausend Kindlein stehn und schauen,
Sind so wunderstill beglückt.

Und ich wandre aus den Mauern
Bis hinaus ins freie Feld,
Hehres Glänzen, heilges Schauern!
Wie so weit und still die Welt!

Sterne hoch die Kreise schlingen,
Aus des Schnees Einsamkeit
Steigts wie wunderbares Singen –
O du gnadenreiche Zeit!

by Joseph von Eichendorff
(translated by Cosima)

Stolen from Lime

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
Neither… I stick with coffee. The traditional winter drink in Germany is Glühwein, which gives glowing cheeks even in the most icy temperatures:

1 liter red wine, good quality otherwise you will get a terrible headache
one large organic orange
6 cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
mark of one vanilla bean

Add peel of orange and spices to wine in a pot. Heat gently to shortly under boiling point. Remove spices, add juice of orange, add sugar to taste, and serve.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
Santa gets a little help, all presents are wrapped.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
White lights, but the rest of the decoration is very colorful.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
No, it is not a tradition in Germany.

5. When do you put up your decorations?
We decorate the Christmas Tree on the afternoon of the 24^th.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?
Roasted goose with potato dumplings and red cabbage, to which we add kumquats.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child?
The whole family coming together and having a good time.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
I always knew. The Santas, who visited us looked too much like my uncle or my father.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
Yes, of course. After Santa leaves, we open the gifts.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree?
With a hodge-podge of inherited and bought ornaments, made of glass, wood, and straw.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
Absolutely love it. I hope we will get some on Christmas.

12. Can you ice skate?
I don’t know. I used to, but I haven’t tried in a long time. I can ski though.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift for Christmas?
No, I don’t. Gifts are very nice, but the whole family coming together is even nicer.

14 . What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you?
Being together with my family.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?
Baked apples. I also love jam-filled Lebkuchen cookies.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
I don’t have a favorite one. It’s the whole package.

17. What tops your tree?
A white and gold glass ornament which has a stylized apple at the bottom and a spike on top. I think, we inherited it from my great grandmother.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving?
I like both of them.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht! Alles schläft einsam wacht…
Silent Night, Holy Night…

20. Do you like Candy Canes?
Sure I do.

Yesterday, I had to do it. I didn’t want to, but there was no way around it. I had to go shopping. The Christmas madness is in full swing in Berlin, there are massive crowds in every shopping mall, department store, and even supermarket. I love to visit Berlin, but I am beginning to think that we should have invited the grandparents to come to Hong Kong. It would have been much more relaxed.

I had to buy many things in a limited time, as I was meeting friends for dinner and decided to go to one of the department stores. German department stores are slightly different from the ones in the US and Great Britain, in that they offer a wider variety of products. Usually, they have a supermarket in the cellar and a self-serve restaurant on top and anything you can possibly imagine in between. On my way to buy PJs for my son, I passed iguanas in the pet section and live flies to feed them with, oil paint in art supplies, sledges in the sport section, and vacuum cleaners in household items. If you need to buy a lot of very different items in a hurry, they are the perfect place to shop. Unfortunately, that also makes them the perfect place to hunt for Christmas presents. The number of people inside the store was incredible.

I went to Karstadt am Hermannplatz, which belongs to Germany’s largest department store chain, which also owns Europe’s largest department store KaDeWe at Berlin’s Kudamm. I don’t want to know what’s going on there at the moment… nervous Christmas shoppers together with thousands of tourists… a volatile mix.

The department store I went to has an interesting history. When Karstadt am Hermannplatz was opened in 1929, it was the most modern department store in Europe, and Berliners from all over town came to admire and shop there. The timing of the opening wasn’t exactly fortunate though. The company had to battle hard to survive the world economic crisis. Marvelously, the building survived the heavy air bombardment during World War II, only to be destroyed by members of the Waffen SS shortly before the end of the war. They didn’t want the Russian army to get to the food supplies that were warehoused inside.

After the war, the department store was rebuild at a much smaller scale, and the original Art Deco architecture was replaced with 1950s functional design. The ugliness was topped by a 1970s extension, which looked like a bunker. Fortunately, the building was renovated and extended in 1990, and received a new façade.

I bought PJs for my son, and then went to women’s lingerie, which now includes a separate section with products from a line called Mae B. I could already see that items were much racier than the ones in the cotton aisle where I was standing. But I just needed to have a closer look. There was leather, latex, and barely there lingerie, and the right kind of shoes and boots to complement the outfits. All kind of sex toys were displayed on a table in the middle of the room. The fitting room was double the size of the ones one is used to normally, and had a red, pink, and gold decor.

I told you… you can get almost anything in a German department store.

Our flight from Hong Kong to Berlin included a change of planes in Moscow. I would have loved to stay longer as I have never been to Russia, but we discovered that visas are ridiculously expensive and take a long time to be issued. So all we had this time was a really tight 30 minute transfer at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.

It was just enough time to notice that the immigration booths are of the same design as the ones that were used at the East-West German border controls, when the wall was still standing… metal containers with imitation wood counters and mirrors at the ceiling. It has been almost twenty years since I last saw them at Berlin-Friedrichstrasse, but the unpleasant experience of these border crossings seems to be burnt into my memory forever.

On the way into the plane, I grabbed a Russian tabloid newspaper, and later had a Russian Pepsi. I hope we get the real Russian experience… Red Square and all on the way back.

Today, we traveled half-way around the world – from Hong Kong over Moscow to Berlin – to spend Christmas with the rest of our family. The journey took us fifteen hours by plane. It leaves me in awe and a little troubled at the same time, that we traveled 5,500 miles in such a short time. One day, when my son is a little older I would like to do the journey by train, to see all the places in between, and experience the distance for real.

When I look at the world map below, I feel so small. So many countries, cities… six billion people on a vast planet.

It makes blogging all the more special. To come to know people in far away places and also close to home, who I would have never met otherwise, that’s a special treat.

I had hoped that my beta blogger troubles were a thing of the past, but several commentators have told me that it is very hard/impossible to leave comments on my blog (Thank you for telling me!). I suspect that it has something to do with my blog using beta blogger, and not recognizing old-version commentators as registered.

I have therefore switched on the anonymous comment feature, so that anyone who wants to is able to comment. Please don’t forget to also put your screen name into your comment, so that I know who has visited.

…And to the person from Nepal, who had left sixty spam messages the last time I had turned on the anonymous comment feature: Please have mercy… it’s Christmas… I don’t want to spend hours deleting spam messages again!

A while ago, we went to have a look at one of Hong Kong’s new tourist attraction the Ngong Ping Skyrail. It is a cable car line starting at Tung Chung, near Hong Kong’s Airport, and climbing to the Tian Tan Buddha Statue in the Mountains of Lantau Island. It used to be quite a long and complicated trip to get to the Buddha from Hong Kong’s city center, but since the cable car line has opened earlier this year, it is an easy ride away.

On my first visit to the Buddha shortly after I arrived in Hong Kong in the 1990s, I had to take the ferry from Hong Kong’s Central Pier to Mui Wo, a small sea-side village on Lantau Island. Then a bus, who had seen better days, drove us along the beach-dotted coast of Western Lantau and up into the mountains. Driving on the narrow-winding mountain road was a hair-raising experience. The occasional cow, taking a rest in the middle of the road, added extra spice to the ride.

This time, we went during the weekend, and as expected lots of other people had the same idea for an outing. The wait at the base station of the cable car wasn’t too long, but the crowds at the top took some of the magic out of the experience. I also didn’t like the new “Ngong Ping Village”, next to the cable car station, which had the flair of a theme park with souvenir shops, restaurants, and a performance stage.

Thankfully, the Buddha and the Monastery haven’t changed. Should you ever come to visit, I would recommend making a bee-line around the “authentic” Nong Ping Village and heading straight for the Po Lin Monastery, where it is possible to observe worshippers at the Temple and have a meal at the Monastery’s vegetarian restaurant, before burning some calories by climbing the steps to the great Buddha.

More photos of Buddha are on my flickr account.