A Passage to India
Well, we all know where Columbus ended up when he tried to find one. Luckily, my friend Marietta actually made it to India, exchanging the colourful sights of Carnival in Mainz for those of Jaipur.
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Santa in Seoul.
After a couple of stressful weeks, I’m on my way to Australia, where I’ll be spending the next couple of hopefully far less stressful weeks.
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Eu vou tomar um porre de felicidade!
Vou sacudir, eu vou zoar toda a cidade… hope not too many in Rio will take the lyrics too literally this year :) Helau!
read onSalgueiro.
Angesichsts der Bilder vom Rosenmontagszug aus Mainz, Köln und Düsseldorf mag man das kaum glauben, aber Karneval wird in Brasilien tatsächlich noch etwas ernsthafter betrieben als hierzulande – allerdings auch etwas extatischer. Es gibt viele Vorurteile gegenüber dem Karneval in Brasilien – zu viel Sex, zu viele Drogen, zu viel Gewalt. Das meiste davon ist [...]
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Mona Lisa’s Lächeln
ist schon was besonderes. Auch wenn ich persönlich das Bild weniger beeindruckend finde, als manch anderen Schatz, den es im Louvre zu bewundern gibt, ist das Bild Leonardo da Vincis wohl immer noch die massenwirksamste Attraktion des Museums. Bis zu 65.000 Besucher sollen es sein, tagein, tagaus, die sie sehen wollen. Definitiv zuviele, zumindest nach [...]
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The way young housewifes bake.
Despite the title, no porn here, gentle readers. But have a look at the book on the left which I found in the “family library” of the happy couple whose wedding celebrations I attended in Bochum this weekend.
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King and Queen of… Sweden.
Finally a holiday experience that will impress my grandmother, who is, among many other things, fluent in all things concerning “European royalty.” Well, I suppose as fluent as reading women’s and celebrity magazines will get you in this respect. So on my way back to Stockholm airport, I saw a tall guy with an earpiece [...]
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The Need For Speed.
The German Embassy to the United States publishes a newsletter called TWIG (as in “This Week in Germany”), mainly aimed at the American public, that more often than not features little known gems, news that’s news only in the eyes of true connaisseurs – like you my gentle reades. Last Friday, TWIG published a story [...]
read on35 degrees
It’s -5 degrees at home. It’s snowing. In Rio, it’s 30 degrees. Sun’s shining. That’s about 1,5 degrees shift per hour for me until tomorrow evening.
read onCan’t Buy Me Lo-hove!
So it turns out, my vote was not needed. The Czech Eu referendum is over – 55% turnout, 77,33% said ‘yes’. Done. Welcome in the EU, guys! Nonetheless, judging from the opinions those (not too many) Czech people held whom I talked to in Praque, a lot of the 3,48 million votes in favour of [...]
read onI’m in Prague this weekend…
… and I really think I should be allowed to vote in the EU accession referendum the Czech Republic is holding today and tomorrow, given the apparent lack of any exitement for the community the people over here show quite visibly. I was wandering around the city all afternoon and late evening and all I [...]
read onGluecksbringende Schluepfer.
(Yes, there is a reason for this title.) I know it’s been a while but I went to Freedom for some days in order to drink almost all of the wine that is no longer being shipped to the US – although, let’s face it: The demographics of US consumption of expensive French wines make [...]
read onMy New Ralph Lauren Sweater.
So via Blogdex, I found this hilarious article published by USA today called “Ugly sentiments sting American tourists”. I suppose it was pretty tough to write this article. You can literally sense how the evident editorial intention to publish yet another “peaceful American tourists tortured to death by mad and naked European pacifists”-peace made the [...]
read onDon’t judge a book by it’s cover? Certainly not in Amsterdam.
You certainly know that the idea of not judging something/someone based on appearance is only partly useful. Covers usually do transmit a significant amount of information about the book’s content. But we also know that looks can deceive, especially concerning human beings. That’s why the headline of this entry can be quite handy: it reminds [...]
read onEnglish in Amsterdam
Let me briefly remind you of the fact that you will be socially slaughtered and then eaten (most likely without your consent) should you ever attempt to talk in English to a French person without any previous attempt to clarify whether he or she is able and willing to communicate in the aforementioned language (you [...]
read onTrains. Again.
As much as I like trains for sleeping reasons (see earlier entry), I hate their operating company, Deutsche Bahn AG. Not only are they about to increase prices for spontaneous travellers like me by I-don’t-know-how-many-thousand percent on Sunday but they are clearly conspiring against their customers. I am sure this has happened to all of [...]
read onI’m in Paris.
And since I am havnig such a good time and as the Bonn enrty got longer than expected, I am sorry to have to inform you that I will postpone this entry to another day. But as a teaser, I have a lot of things to talk about next week. Stay tuned.
read onBonn. It’s scary
Actually, I had written this entry right after the last one on tuesday. But somehow it got lost in the digital Nirwana. So here is a shortened version. Don’t bother to complain qbout spelling mistakes as I am currently in Paris, typing on a French keyboard. But you’re actually not entitled to that piece of [...]
read onGround Zero. Again.
Webcam viev of Ground Zero. I hate it to write entries twice. The first version of this one was killed in the lovely Apple Falgship Store in Soho earlier this afternoon by my failure to honour the subtle differences in operating OS X (Ctrl & C resp. V on a PC is Apple & C [...]
read onMe & NYC,
It’s sunday morning, and I am sitting in a coffee shop on Tompkin Square Park in New York’s East Village writing my first blog entry from abroad. Actually, there’s not a lot to be said as of yet. Yesterday night, I drank my first beer out of a paper bag, in the middle of Williamsburg [...]
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September 6, 1998,
is a day only very few people will be able to remember. I hardly could until I forced myself to. It was on that day, only three days after I first came to the United States, that I went up to the “Top of the World” as the visitor platform of the World Trade Centre [...]
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