The generosity of folks...

...always amazes me! A friend of the people whose upstairs I'm renting was cleaning out their rain gutters yesterday, and today he was back and offered to take me to the Altstadtfest in Saarbrücken. We had Kuchen und Kaffee at the Catholic Church, Basilika Sankt Johann, and then we walked along the Saar where he was telling me all of the names of the trees. I wish I would have had a notebook and camera with me! Anyway it was kind of funny because right now in my hometown they have the Strawberry Festival going on and the churches usually have their little tents set up where you can buy strawberry shortcake and other good treats. Today was very much like being at home, except I fortunately didn't have to deal with all of the little middle school kids pushing their way through the crowds to get to the carnival rides.

Another little thing I discovered was that if you order a package in Germany and you're not at home to get it, they will leave it at the neighbor's house! I've never had that happen in the USA - we would always have to drive out to FedEx or UPS at the airport or to the post office in our town to pick up a missed delivery. Nothing too exciting in the packages - just a couple of German books for my thesis work and a GRE test prep book. I just made myself sound like the most boring person in the world; to counter that, I present... photos from Paris! Disclaimer: I am not and I do not claim to be a photographer; furthermore, I am discovering that my camera is not a fan of situations where there isn't a great deal of light. Please enjoy the pictures despite these two factors, and know that I have great memories of Paris beyond these photos.

Click Here for Pictures!

(Link to copy and paste: http://www.flickr.com/photos/64017522@N03/sets/72157626831203145/with/5829976457/ )

These definitely aren't Blue Bus drivers...

One thing that always makes me smile on UM's campus is how nice the Blue Bus drivers are. I have literally been able to run across South University waving into the bus driver's mirror as they are parked in front of the UMMA and have them wait for me. Perhaps this is why it takes forever to get anywhere on UM's campus with the bus. Still, you can imagine my surprise yesterday when, after arriving only seconds after the SaarVV bus doors had closed, the bus driver shook his head at me, refusing any late entry. Even better was this morning when another young person had the EXACT same experience. Are they trying to teach us some kind of lesson about being on time? With all due respect to the SaarVV, I think that this particular government agency could use a lesson in its ability to keep a consistent schedule. The buses with the mean drivers were 2 minutes early, last week the bus that departs from right outside my work didn't even show up, and in general the last bus that should theoretically bring me to work on time never does because it's always 5+ minutes behind. AHHH! In general, though, the transport system here is very convenient and far superior to what Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County have. Then again, it's not a fair comparison due to tax structures, public priorities, etc.

In other news, I just wrote a letter in French! If I've experienced anything on this trip, it is realizing how much my 7ish years of studying French has really paid off. German is still a work in progress... I hope that the last 7 or so weeks here will yield even better results. One thing that I've noticed is that once I realize someone speaks English better than I speak German, it's hard to coax my mind into speaking German again. I'm not sure what that is - some kind of personal problem about them judging my German negatively? It's very silly, to be sure. I'm understanding almost everything now, though the local dialect is still sometimes challenging.

Now it's back to printing off tickets. This week we have Mahler's Symphony No. 3, with a second performance at the Arsenal in Metz. According to my French friend, the Arsenal was inaugurated with the help of Dmitri Shostakovich and the acoustics are quite good. But I think that I am going to stay in Saarbrücken this weekend and have a quiet weekend here.

Pictures from Paris are coming, I promise! I'm just struggling a bit with how to organize/arrange the album on Flickr. Bis später, alle!

A weekend in Metz!

These photos are from a couple of weekends ago. SNCF had a "Pass Pompidou" special where I was able to get train tickets for €1 each way - a great deal! A professor I met on the plane, Laetitia, gave a tour to me and Alexandra, another UM intern who is currently living in Stuttgart but came up to Saarbrücken for the weekend. She is a great travel buddy!

I also went to Paris this past weekend! But I am planning to upload photos from that trip to Flickr or another photo-sharing website that is more user-friendly than Blogger...

A view from the garden of a café where we stopped to grab something to drink that morning. It was actually a very slow-paced day, which was nice!

There is a story for this... I am pretty sure it has to do with a knight coming in and killing the dragon. And the dragon has a name like.. Graouilly or something! See, if I would have uploaded these that day, then I'd still remember.

Metz Cathedral...note the flying buttresses, a dead give away of the Gothic style...

And to think that they built this place in the 13th century... they're restoring the clocher right now.


Andd here we get to where the Germans came in during the 19th century and started changing things around, namely with the huge, medieval style doors, only remember that they were added in the 19th century.


Yeah, it's a huge cathedral...


There is something unique about this representation of Jesus being condemned to death... If I'm not mistaken, I believe that Laetitia said that Adam was the figure on the right helping to punish Jesus, which is still quite unique.


Stained glass windows from a very long time ago... some of them were actually blown up during the war, so Marc Chagall came and designed new ones. You can't really go wrong - medieval windows that have been there forever or great art from Chagall! At another site in Metz, there is a church with windows from Jean Cocteau, strangely enough (he directed La Belle et La Bête, a surrealist film version of The Beauty and the Beast).


View from the other side of the cathedral - the sun had a weird effect on my camera, but it looks kind of cool.

Temple Neuf de Metz (built by the Germans)

Side tributary of the Moselle

Metz theater / opera

A cool view from under a bridge along the river

Statue of Paul Verlaine - I also saw an original manuscript of "Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit" in the church where he was baptized! Amazing.

Park near L'Arsenal, where the festival is having a concert this week

Four periods of architecture in one place!

A sun dial, whose story Laetitia didn't really know...

Laetitia and I in front of the Centre Pompidou - Metz


Me, Alexandra (another UM intern), and Laetitia


"Échos" The mirror installation by Daniel Buren - looking out at the actual city of Metz


Reflection (the "echo") of Metz


Looking down from the third floor into the Centre Pompidou Metz

Christihimmelfahrt and other experiences in Germany

Yesterday was a holiday in Germany, Christihimmelfahrt, which I think is equivalent to the Day of Jesus's Ascension to Heaven. One of my coworkers took me to a barbecue at her friend's house. It was really, really fun, there was great food, funny and intelligent people -- I just really felt at home and welcomed. A bit of Saarländischer fun, there is this word 'schwenken' or 'Schwenker' in noun form. And 'Schwenker' can have three meanings (hopefully I don't screw this up!) -- the person who is doing the grilling, the grill itself, or the meat that is being grilled. I also noticed a really interesting feature of the fast conversation yesterday, which was that people stopped talking in complete sentences and started saying things like, 'mir verstehen das nicht.' I can't even translate what that would be in English because the actual sentence in German would be more like 'Ich verstehe das nicht' which means 'I don't understand that.' (Again, someone let me know if I'm wrong on this point) But this didn't just happen once, it happened over and over again. They also told me at this barbecue that in Saarland, until a woman is 70 years old, she is 'es Dagmar' or 'es Kathrin' and after she turns 70 she becomes 'die Dagmar' or 'die Kathrin' -- 'es' is a netuer 3rd-person pronoun ('it') while 'die' is a feminine definite article ('the'). I don't know whether or not they were serious, but it was funny and interesting nonetheless...

And then yesterday evening, I went to schwenken with some students that I have met through an American friend at the Universität des Saarlandes (University of Saarland). It was really great - the conversation kept drifting freely between English, French, and German, depending on whom I was talking with. It's really weird because I'm finding that once I know someone in a particular language, I prefer to stick with that language. For example, there was a French gal, but we were talking mostly in German at first, and then when I found out she was French, we started speaking French a bit, but then it just felt forced... I can't describe WHY exactly. Anyway, there were like 30 people at this schwenken / schwenker / whatever, and I may go with some of them to the pool later today if the weather gets nicer.

Currently, I don't have much to do at work so I'm just posting this quick update from here. I'm going to Metz with one of the other UM interns this weekend, and a prof I met on the plane from Rome to Frankfurt is going to give us a little walking tour of the city. It should be pretty wonderful - I was only there for the Centre Pompidou before, but I saw Metz through one of the enormous windows at the end of the exhibition wings, and it's a gorgeous city. There are actually €2 roundtrip tickets from anywhere in Lorraine (right over the border from Saarland) to Metz using the TER regional train system, so we'll definitely be taking advantage of that! I also booked some cheap TGV tickets for next week that were on special, and I'm going to talk with some of the students I met last night at the Uni to see if they have any pointers on where to stay...or hopefully someone has a friend there!

Coke tastes so much better in Europe

because it contains real sugar. No corn syrup. If you're in the United States, you can experience the difference in flavor by trying coke bottled at one of Coke's plants in Southeastern Pennsylvania (I think that's where it is, at least). Another great thing that I discovered... you pay like € 0,49 for a can of coke AT THE GROCERY STORE here, but then you get €0,15 of it back. That means that you only pay €0,34 which converts to about $0.50. That's not a bad deal - it tastes better AND it's cheaper, as long as you take your cans and bottles back. So remember future travelers to Germany that between €0,08 and €0,50 of whatever you're paying for beverage is a deposit that you should redeem by being kind to the Earth and taking your bottles back!

My friend, Maggie, posted really cool pictures from Saarbrücken, specifically our trip to the Völklinger Hütte and in particular our visit to the street art exhibit that is being housed there. It was a great time, and you can check it out at this link: http://mcease.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/saarbrucken/ -- Imagine seeing THIS going up around you near the end of the 19th century...wow!

This is a brief and somewhat pointless update (except for the pictures), but I need to get to bed now. Good night!

Wow...

Well my day was filled with a lot of stress about preparing for the Vienna Philharmonic's first concert as well as a swanky Galadiner with celebrity chef Johann Lafer. Well, apparently he's a celebrity TV chef here. And then I came home with this really nice person that I've met while here - he's an older guy, with a daughter who ended up studying in Texas when she did an exchange in the USA. But he also happens to know a few different people in Michigan, and so we've been talking about Michigan and he has been telling me everything I need to know about Deutschland. After grabbing a Döner Kebap (delicious) and throwing on my suit, I went downstairs to ride with the family who owns the house where I'm renting.

The wife and I began walking down the street because there was a mass earlier this evening, and her husband is the cantor at the church. Then, I see a really cool car pull up -- it's the husband. And it wasn't just any cool car; oh no, it was a Ferrari! Needless to say, it was a very quick ride to the concert hall...

Before the concert, I worked the ticket booth for a bit, which was fun. I really love the customer service aspect of the job, though the language barrier is often challenging. It's definitely getting better, though. Another part of this job that I love is getting to do awesome things like...walk on stage and give Daniele Gatti (director of the French National Orchestra) a present from the music festival for his work with the Vienna Philharmonic. And that's totally disregarding the fact that I did that after sitting through an amazing (free!) performance of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mahler's 9th symphony.

Wow! That's were the title of this blog post comes in. I will not soon forget this evening and I was very conscious of the great opportunity that I have right now all throughout the concert. I think sometimes during the difficult moments, such as the stressful preparations earlier today, it's easy to take great things for granted. But then sometimes we have these little realizations of how great something really is and it brings us back into the moment to appreciate, remember, and reflect. I hope I keep having those moments during my time here.

Centre Pompidou - Metz (and other updates)

Yesterday after other plans to travel to Düsseldorf/Köln (Cologne) fell through, I decided that I needed to do SOMETHING exciting this weekend. My solution was that I would go to the new Centre Pompidou in Metz, France, which is literally an hour away by train (which seemed to go a lot faster than the LIRR or MetroNorth in NY). Well, first I had to take a 20-min bus ride to France, and then a 40-minute train ride to Metz. It was really enjoyable, though, and it ended up being €7,50 less than I thought it would be, which was a big plus! Also, the Centre Pompidou had free admission for folks under 26. I was very happy about that, and the fact that I literally could walk 5 minutes from the train station directly to the Centre Pompidou. This was particularly important because I slept in until about 11 am today before realizing that I needed to put clothes away, do dishes, do a little grocery shopping - blah blah blah. I was worried because I arrived at the museum at 3:30 pm and I was afraid that 4.5 hours wouldn't be enough (the museum closed at 8), but I finished at about 7 pm. The exhibition was called "Masterpieces?" and it toyed with the notion of what it means to have a masterpiece as well as various examples of "masterpieces" of modern art. Represented were some of the very well-known names - Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Duchamp, Dali - and the not-as-widely-but-also-impressive folks - Delaunay, Tinguely, de Staël. The works all made me think a lot about the usual things I've been interested in with art...separation/integration of art from/with society; what we can consider to be "art" in the first place ("tout est art"?); ideas of originality, "high" versus "low"... I realize these are all very broad questions, but my notebook is a better place for the more specific musings than here on the blog. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera! This seems to be a common them, so I will just start keeping it in my backpack as a habit. I DID take pictures on my Blackberry, but now I have to figure out how to get those from my Blackberry onto my Mac (two things that usually don't go together).

Before I forget, some excitement on the bus ride back from France - this girl was cussing out some guys who were harassing her. They were all drunk (they were drinking beers on the bus, which I guess isn't a crime here or at least not as big of a deal as in the USA because people drink EVERYWHERE!) and every French cuss word that I've ever learned and then some came out of her mouth. It freaked me out enough that my RA instincts kicked in and I dialed the police line...but maybe they saw me because they calmed right down mid-call. The police strolled up in a van after we arrived and one of the drunk girls promptly went over and talked to them.

For the rest of the night, I'm probably going to send some e-mails, read, and then go to bed...yes, I'm boring, but I do eventually have to go back to my life in the USA, so I need to accomplish some things on that front. Gute Nacht!