ritas kleine welt

the evening began with me starting to bother birgit with caps from starsky&hutch. she didn't complain. or, if she did, she didn't present a convincing front to the world in general and me in particular. and before you know it, one thing lead to another and we started fiddling around with the stills, tapping into each our creative sides.

we only got to meet a couple of times during my last visit to wales one year ago. but we clicked instantly and had a couple of animated conversations. this is how i will remember duncan tanner:

you are sorely missed!

birgit and i went for a walk through berlin on friday afternoon in order to secure some tickets for the world premiere of the restored metropolis. (we were short of ten people in front of us when the box office closed. dang!) on our way to the friedrichstadtpalast, we crossed one of the many bridges across the river spree. this is what we saw...

1) finished marking the first-years' exams

2) made someone laugh

3) eating my first kimchi

instead of just counting off the different stations of my life in the past 365 days, let me just show you, what i did on the occassion. spanning from one new year's eve to another, it seems like most of my activities have been taped either by night or underground with an equal lack of proper light.

five days away from christmas, in christian parley on the fourth sunday in advent, i thought i should finally get into the spirit of the season and make a day of it. so in the order of appearance, here's what i did today.

monday just after i had finished teaching the second round of shakespeare's lusty world of sonnets, i was on my way to berlin to celebrate 20 years of the opening of the iron curtain together with birgit and christoph. at first it was wet. and then there were lots of people. and then we had a hunch that the people in front of their tellies saw much much much more and also heard what was being said. but still it was great fun! it's not every day that a nation gets to celebrate its freedom and invite the whole world to the party.

and then, shortly after midnight, christoph found himself in the arms of two obliging ladies who wished him a happy birthday.

before you continue with the content behind the cut, please, take the time to re-watch the original broadcast of the tagesschau with a very happy anchorman announcing the opening of the east-german borders.

on 9 october, 1989, the prayers for peace began in the nikolaikirche in leipzig. thousands of leipzigers had begun gathering each monday to pray for a peaceful solution to the bubbling conflicts in what was to become the final year of the GDR. for his level-headed guidance and the repeated call for, 'keine gewalt!' (no violence!), the reverend christian führer was later awarded the augsburger peace prize. yesterday, twenty years after the first monday prayers, he repeated the reading of the sermon on the mount. guests of honour were the german president, horst köhler, saxony's prime minister, stanislaw tillich, leipzig's mayor, burkhard jung. but no one received a greater cheer of welcome than germany's former foreign minister, hans-dietrich genscher. the people of leipzig welcomed him with standing ovations.

following the shapes of autumn, here are the colours that go along with them. please keep in mind that these pictures were taken with a hand-held camera whilst creeping and crawling through the underbrush in one of the largest, uninterrupted woods in germany. there was just no way i would have managed to log a tripod through these woods. except for hurling it at wild boars, it wouldn't have helped much anyway, as i was nearly lying on my stomach during most of these pictures.

s. and i went exploring the city on foot yesterday. why? because it was sunny and because it was open house/construction site/tunnel day. at the future tube stop 'bayrischer bahnhof', the construction site opened their gates to the public so that people could get a first look. s. and i climbed down a couple of steep steps into the deep bowels of leipzig (cue: inevitable comment about the föhrer-bonker) and walk back out in what will eventually become the tracks. naturally, all above and below ground was documented by my trusty camera.

edit: now complete with video

my first week back from the yookay and it was pretty much a story of success, though not fortune and riches. how could it? i'm making a living in accademia where the money well has usually run dry three semesters ago. but! andrea and i have struggled, read and tied knots into our two brains -- and won in the end. we've read an entire book by foucault and still managed to talk intelligently about it -- and then denounce a great deal of his ideas as pure crap. (there just went my last 5%-likelihood of ever attaining something akin to a carreer in university circles.)

to conclude this series, here is the fourth part from my four-days visit to london last week. there are tons more pictures, of course, but you can only so often look at jude law before you get bored. that's you. not me. i could never get bored with looking at the pretty boy.

and now to the main attractions: hamlet, jude law, hamlet, the wyndham's theatre, jude law, upcoming new actors who look like cute little hobbits, jude law. have i mentioned lately, that we went to london last week in order to see jude law in hamlet -- playing hamlet?

btw. pretty boy may attrackt very low expectations, due to the very common opinion of, 'how often have you seen film actors successfully take the stage?' (::cough:: tom cruise ::cough::) but jude law aced it! and i knew he would because he had played on a stage before. successfully, may i add. he may attrackt loads of negative press and, well, in some of the cases he deserves it! you just don't go around bonking and impregnating everything that's gets in your path. but that certainly doesn't take away the fact that he's a bloody brilliant actor. angry!hamlet was quite a treat. like being dipped in chocolate and then eaten alive.

this morning for something different, but not so unexpected. here are my three chaplin moments during the last week. the first one was meeting little chuckles on leicester square where some nearly 30 years ago they unveiled a sculplure of the little fellow -- which looks nothing like his real-life counterpart, except for the mustache. the second chaplin-moment was finding a poster advert for victoria chaplin and her husband's invisible circus. and the third moment was paying a little visit to the duke of york's theatre in the west end (just around the corner from the wyndham's). here ickle chuckles played billy the page boy in the gillette adaptation of sherlock holmes. -- my three comrades, mary, ellie and alex bore these moments of spontaneous public fangirling like brave soldiers.