Edinburgh

Editor's Note: This is lengthy and internet is oddly harder to obtain when you're busy, even if you're in America. Also, I couldn't get all the pictures to load. A thousand apologies. 

On my last night in Edinburgh, I went to go see a comedian with Christine, Kerry, and a couple of people from the hostel. Being of Scottish heritage but born in Canada and currently residing in England, he had a, shall we say, unique perspective on the different societies that he had viewed. He was hilarious and I laughed so hard that I cried throughout much of the show. Just one of the positives of visiting Edinburgh during the Fringe Fest- the place was full of comedy, plays and other performing arts. The comedian remarked that arriving in Edinburgh is much more impressive when one arrived by train in Waverly Station. You get off the train and there are bagpipes and people dressed up for performances and tourists galore and then there's this castle- you're generally a little overwhelmed when you get off the train in Edinburgh.

I loved it there, despite the rain and cold that I will almost incessantly complain about when I talk about the city, having become very homesick for heat that hits you like a wall of boiling air and humidity, and near drought conditions. Neil Gaiman stuck it into my head that Oscar Wilde once said that if this is how the Scots treat their summers, they don't deserve one. I don't know that the Scots must have done to offend summer so, but the entire time I was there it felt more like January of perhaps a cold snap in March than early August.

Still, the hostel I was at was small and full of interesting, friends people. On my second night a group of four came in from London and I spent many of my nights listening to their conversations and easy friendship. As wonderful as it was to find new people to be friends with, that wonderfulness was exceeded by having more familiar faces to enjoy the city with. Christine returned from her visit with her family in Ireland and brought Kerry, a friend of hers and an acquaintance of mine, with her from the independent island off the British coast. Her friend Jesse also came to visit, taking the bus up from London where he had been studying this summer.

Together we took a walking tour of Edinburgh that I highly recommend if you have the means. We listened to the history of Scotland as told through the lens of its capital, walking up and down the Royal Mile, stopping by  the outside of the cathedral, John Knox's grave, the Grassmarket, Greyfriars Kirkyard, home to Greyfriars Bobby, walking past Fringe venues and ending up in the Princes Street Gardens. Did you know that James Clerk Maxwell was a Scotsman? Good, because if you did it would probably be because you learned his equations in E&M and I would fear for your state after enduring the merciless tyranny of physics. But there are plenty of other notable Scotsman besides William Wallace- Robert Burns, Ewan McGregor, Sean Connery, David Hume, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. JK Rowling has a small castle up there. I have also visited the Elephant Room, the café where she wrote the first three books of Harry Potter. Nerd moment of the trip completed.

I went back to the cathedral on my own for the Sunday morning service, taking communion in a huge circle by passing the loaf of bread and the cup of wine, each eating and drinking on their own before being blessed as a group by the priest. The choir sang an anthem, little bags were passed around for the offering, the priest preached a sermon on a letter of Paul and a gospel lesson about Jesus walking on water and Simon Peter sinking. Later, as I walked around, I noticed the lion and the unicorn protecting a shield as I'm used to seeing in Scotland and thistles in the decorations, proclaiming the national symbol of Scotland. 

The cathedral was interesting and historical. It was laid out in a Greek cross, the first church I had visited like that and the altar stood at the intersection of the arms of the cross with the congregation on either side coming together for communion. It's a different kind of space and coming forward for communion made me think about the service back in St. Mary's in Berlin, passing the peace to people whose language I didn't speak. Here, I walked to the heart of the church and circled around the altar and smiled and shook hands with kind Scots and thought about how far I'd been.

The last thing I did in Edinburgh was climb Arthur's Seat. It's a huge hill on the edge of town, a touch of the highlands for which my heart ached. We had climbed it earlier, Christine, Kerry, Jesse and I, and we had stopped by the small ruin of a chapel near the beginning of the climb. 

There's not much left of this chapel, just and entry way, two windows, an arch support and a couple of corners, but the space lends itself to an absolutely mystical quality. You can rebuilt the chapel in your mind and imagine the monks who must have come here, lighting torches or candles for late night vigils. The crag around you minds you of a faerie world where sprites and nymphs could come and infest the stone of a place meant for Someone else, packing the place with a meaning all to different from the one you're accustomed to assume. And if you let your thoughts run wild you can imagine a day when we've all but left these places, these cities and these cathedrals, when the grass will grow again in the wind-deposited dirt and the walls of all of these grand houses of God that I've seen time and again in my months abroad will be reduced to a doorway, two windows and a corner, blackbirds racing each other around the ruins.

I didn't revisit the chapel on my solitary hike up and we didn't stay long as a crew the first climb up. We were beat up the hill by a trio of middle aged men determined to scale the mountain quicker than the college kids in their prime. We stopped often to take pictures and be distracted by a man walking his cat along the heath at the bottom of the valley. We paused just before the final trek up to the rocky peak, collapsing on the oddly-well maintained grass to guess at the shapes hidden in the clouds, watching as the high wind demolished them, leaving us with new patterns. I paused to look out again at the sea the sneaks into Edinburgh when I climbed by myself, but only for the briefest of seconds before picking out another path among the rocks.

The climb up to the top of the seat is up uncovered rock, different from the steep slope of grass that came before. As a group we laughed, first following the chains and posts and then guessing at the easiest climb before stumbling up to the open vista of the crown of the hill. I meandered around when I returned by myself, not pausing at the top but instead selecting a hidden outcropping to sit and think and read. Leaves of Grass lay abandoned in the pocket of my pack. I broke out a collection of stories by Neil Gaiman and immersed myself in a world of wonder, feeling the wind blow my hair around for the last time. When we four had climbed the seat, we had found our way around to the tops of the rocks, laughing and taking pictures and waiting for a group of Spanish-speaking tourists to give up their place on the highest before giving up and climbing up there anyway, crowding around the back of the dulled peak of peaks.

I left the last of my locks on a iron hook up on Arthur's Seat, the hefty one I had bought for five euro in Paris. I hadn't needed it in the hostel and wouldn't need it for our one night in Dublin before flying from there to Chicago to Charlotte. I can remember the jokes the group told as we picked our way down the rocks and flew down the hill before, but as I walked back by myself I turned a corner I hadn't seen before and walked down a stair step of rocks and trickling water. I walked through grass and by thistles, purple and green and perfect as I tugged my jacket closer against the wind.

On our way out of the city the next morning we sat on the top of the double-decker bus to the Edinburgh airport and Kerry cut off the conversation for a few moments so she could say her goodbyes to Edinburgh. I had been woken up that morning by a goodbye- Brooke, the Australian nurse from my room, had left the hostel group early to get on a plane for a night in London, despite the riots, before leaving out on a tour of the continent. We had said multiple goodbyes to the people in the hostel before walking in the rain to the bus station. Through all of this, I had never thought of saying goodbye to the city. Faced with the thought of leaving, I found my mind distracting itself from the idea. I don't do goodbyes. I was glad when Kerry finished hers and Christine and I discussed plans for surprising Pam when we returned to the States for her birthday.

I sat in an aisle seat on the plane. Given a window, I'll stare out at the ground, memorizing the place I've been from the air before it disappears in the clouds. With that moment taken away, I think I'll keep long montage of pictures taken from the upper floors of castles and cathedrals and hills looking over the cities I've seen in my mind as my memorization of Europe. I'll begin in Prague and I'll end at Arthur's Seat and I'll think of all the things I've left. And all the things I've gained.

London

Do you know what the best thing about getting off the train in London was?

English.

Goodness, I love English.

Not the English, in particular, but I love the language with which they carry out their business. You might not know it, but two months spent in countries where everything primarily happened in a language you didn't quite understand wears on a person. All the signs were in English first in London. The announcements were in English. I could talk to anyone I wanted to. Really, the first couple of hours in London were almost joyous, basking in the beauty of my home language. And English isn't even that pretty. But I had missed its primary presence in my life.

I honestly can't tell you much about the places I visited in London or the things I did there. Life was pretty humdrum. I developed a walk down to the Millenium Bridge and over near the Globe and along the Thames for a good bit. I walked down on my first evening to St. Paul's, just to see how far I could go. The next day, I went farther, looking into getting tickets for a show at the Globe. I wandered around London for a bit then, getting over to Westminster and then Buckingham Palace. I loved the gardens around Buckingham, sitting and watching the people and the birds for hours in an unusually pleasant British afternoon.

My favorite things about London were the things I geeked out about (about which I geeked? Grammatically correct sentences are difficult to come by). The Milennium Bridge was in the background of a scene in Love Actually, I walked by 10 Downing Street, I walked by the Old Bailey and down Fleet Street, I looked up Baker Street and Portabello Road, I figured out that you could watch live video of people crossing Abbey Road, I discovered a TARDIS in the British Library and I saw a play at the Globe. Shakespeare's Globe. The noise my enthusiasm makes is "Eeeeeee!!!"

The play at the Globe might actually take the cake as my favorite thing about London. I was hoping they'd have a Shakespearan play that wasn't sold out that Christine and I could go to, but all of the evening shows and most of the afternoon shows were already sold out for about the next week as far as standing room tickets were concerned. The really pleasant man at the ticket office said that they had spots open for the midnight showing of Doctor Faustus on Saturday night. I'm a Marlowe fan as well as a Shakespeare fan, and Christine wasn't opposed to seeing a play about a man who sells his soul to the devil at midnight, so the tickets were cheerily bought and the plans laid.

We walked my usual walk down across the Millenium Bridge and over to the Globe around eleven thirty, still amazed at the way the light had lingered throughout the long summer days. We showed our tickets at the door and found our way into the theater and around the already gathered crowd to a spot by the stage on the side. Sure, we would miss some of the action of the play, but having stood through a few operas in our time, we understood the wonderful luxury of leaning. I took half a dozen bad pictures of the stage and the room and admired the zodiac on the ceiling as people gasped occassionally at the monster that would peek over the upper balcony. We were joined on our side of the stage by two young men of Ireland and we passed the remaining time before the beginning of the play exchanging stories of visitng London and talking over half-remembered summaries of the action of the story we were about to watch unfold.

The play started with loud drumbeats and music and prologue from a sole actor. Then we dove into Faustus' story and I was as fascinated as ever, listening and watching the listing of studies at which Faustus had excelled, internally waiting for the second when Mestophales would show up, because every play becomes exponentially more itneresting when there's a demon around. Show up he did, though inexpertly conjured, and I spent most of the rest of the first act watching closely the exchanges between Faustus and Mestophales, borderline impatient when other actors took up the stage.

Intermission came and, as the Globe has free wifi, Christine went out to look up some information on the play and I sunk down, leaning against the stage and talking about actuarial things with one of the Irishmen as that was his intended career. Funny the things you remember about people you meet momentarily. The conversation ended rather abruptly when Christine came back towards the end of intermission with a revelation, walking quickly over to our guarded spot by the stage, and announcing, "It's Rory."

Ten seconds of backstory on this: David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who (the longest running sci-fi series if you count all its reincarnations, beating out Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, and Stargate SG-1- end nerd aside), went to stage acting and has been in some plays at the Globe. He's also doing Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate, who played Donna, this summer and I think I might actually have died of happiness if I had seen that, a combination of two of my favorite British actors starring in my favorite Shakespearean play. But, pushing all that away, I had wondered if other actors from Doctor Who got into acting on the London stage in the off-season and Christine and I had both thought that Mestophales looked familiar, though we hadn't guessed from where.

So the second half of the play for me was spent geeking out at the fact that Arthur Davrill who plays Rory Williams on Doctor Who was less than a foot away from me at certain points. The real testament to how awesome an event this was is the fact that I ran over to Starbucks the next day to tell as many of my friends as possible what had occured and to enjoy their reactions of text-based exclamations. Beyond the fan-girl moment though, I was rather enthralled by the rest of the play, watching Faustus bother the Pope and kings alike, staring breathless at his final soliloquoy as the last hour of his life chimes away. It's a wonderful play, if I may recommend some English reading for everyone, and the story itself is fascinating to me.

The ideas we discussed in my freshman English class floated around my head as we walked back in the late London night. I almost think I could have stayed in that moment forever, walking slowly back with my head on ideas of grace and decisions and worthiness and my feet on familiar pavingstones. I caught glimpses of stars as we walked again over the bridge and I love that our minds can consider ideas as big as they are, that we can sit back and think on all of these wonderful concepts.

In a way, it was just another way of basking in the wonder of English, of being able to think and express myself in my language again. It's difficult to be percieved as intelligent when you don't speak language. I think of that, of my own bias against people who I'm sure are every bit as reasonable as I am looking ridiculous as they try to express themselves in a language not their own. I loved London, visiting Westminster and St. Paul's for evensong services, listening to sermons and reflections that, for the first time since Florence, I understood.

Beautiful understanding.

Madrid, Seville and Barcelona

OK, so I have to be honest, Spain is a blur for me. This is what I get for waiting for so long to blog about the places. I could go look back at my journal but that would take some time and then I'd spend at solid hour reading and writing and reading and thinking and searching for reasons, missing the seasons, the autumn, the spring, the summer, the snow... You get the picture. It's much safer to sally onward without the journal. And honestly, now that I'm sitting comfortably on a bench by the Thames on a sunny day in London, I have little desire to travel back to a place where I sweat through my clothes on a daily basis and began every conversation with an awkward attempt at breaking the language barrier.

Not that Spain wasn't wonderful. After a few comfortable days in Barcelona pretending this was just a normal summer (sleeping in, watching TV, bumming around in my pajamas and occasionally venturing out into the city for nourishment), we travelled on to Madrid to visit Christine's friend Meredith who I had met once or twice. Meredith retrieved us from the train station, let us stay in her apartment and acted as a tour guide around the city. It's interesting and wonderful at the same time seeing a place through someone else's eyes, not having to figure out every detail on your own, being guided through streets another person knows familiarly. We walked by the Imperial Palace, the Puerta del Sol, through gardens and around streets. Madrid is primarily a city in which people live, its sights a lovely break from the incessant babble of tourists that had been Rome. From trying sangrea to playing British Trivial Pursuit to eating tappas and visiting a piano bar, Madrid was a wonderful time to be had with friends, another nice entry in the saga of the attempt at a regular summer.






Then we went on Seville, a city I have to admit I'm in love with, though I can't quite explain why. It was a bit difficult finding our hostel, but Meredith came with us again and guided us around the city. We walked down by the cathedral and over by the university, exploring a place that I vaguely knew from visiting my senior year of high school. It might just be the nostalgia that I love, but walking again through the cathedral and over to the Torro del Oro sealed the city in a happy memory. That and the random things that make me smile, like Seville organges hanging from trees in squares to finding Amistad street on a trip over to the train station.

Of course, the best thing about Seville was that Pam was there. She arrived the day after we did, running with her duffle bag to hug me in the train station under the huge departures/arrivals board. It's wonderful to actually see good friends, to have them around to share the hours of your time, to have a fresh ear to talk to, a familiar change in dynamics. It was a great moment, having all three mermaids united, laughing over strings of incomprehensible inside jokes.





So together we walked around the city, waited on train tickets and enjoyed the end of our time in Seville. We took a train back to Barcelona and again made our way around town, Pam taking time to shop with Christine and wander to La Sagrada Famillia and down to the seashore with me. I took a morning to myself to walk around the Gothic quarter, enjoying the feeling of being transported back to another place and time before rejoining the group for dinner.

Thus Spain passed pleasantly by, if you can call hours spent in ridiculous heat pleasant. I can. I saw churches and earned myself weeks of reading- Spanish cathedrals have distinct choirs and peculiarities in style whose interpretations are much more manageable now that I've grown accustomed to the space in this particular kind of church. Christine spent time with friends, absorbing the Spanish culture and venturing around. Pam glued us all together and helped the time pass easily by. A cheerful Spanish blur.

Honestly, you can't deny the cuteness of this picture. 

Roman Table of Contents

Editor's note- I wrote this in the Roman airport. Life gets cheerier, I promise. 


People talk about how something feels like a month ago and it was just yesterday. This unidentifiable sensation is increased tenfold when you are living out of a backpack that is only slightly less crammed with clothes and books than your days are with sights and scenes. To counteract this feeling, a person may think that their only chance is to rid their days of these masses of activities, but this solution becomes tiresome within a few days of its enactment, and so a return to the hustle and bustle of a traveller in a city is required. A routine is formed and then, just as quickly, the restless need to break a routine returns, so that one is grateful for the call of the train station or airport that carries oneself to new lands and experiences, escaping the familiar unfamiliarity of a foreign country and language.

In short, I am ready to leave Italy.

I realize that I am travelling in the summer and that the heat and the tourists are the most serious deterring factors to a desire to say, but cost is also a serious competitor. Italy is expensive. Leaving Italy has turned out to be more expensive than intended, due to the difficulty of getting to the Rome airport from the center of town. But you sigh and pay more because you know that you're still saving in the long run, given the prices of the trains and the expense of staying another night in an over-priced hostel. And all this time, as you're considering all these factors, you know that really, it's time to move on.

Ten days doesn't seem like a substantial amount of time. Take away a travel day and a recovery day (I'm finding them more and more necessary), and you've got eight left. Factor in two touristy days (they're required in a city that has an independent country inside of it) and you're down to six. Given that the beach is a (totally more than an hour but they tell you that it is a half hour train ride from town, it is required that you spend a few days there, cutting the total to four days, one of which must be taken up with laundry and other chores. And if a friend suggests that you go to Pompeii for a day, how can you refuse? So two days out of the ten spent in Rome were spent doing what I came to do. Maybe I need to change my definition of what I came to do.

But a substantial amount happened in this insubstantial amount of time and thus my time in Rome will be broken into four parts (excluding, of course, the obligatory church posts):

1) Ancient Rome- the Forum, Palatine Hill, the Colosseum and the Pantheon
2) Vatican City- The Vatican Museum, St. Peter's and the Night Walk Around Rome
3) The Beach
4) The Adventures of My Time After the Beach (including Corpus Christi)

Pompeii was an true adventure of its own, full of the charm of dead people, stray dogs, possible peril, confusion, trains and the Italian police, not necessarily in that order, and a story of that magnitude, of course, deserves its own post.

So please excuse the possibly prolific amount of writing that induces a substantial amount of reading over the next couple days. When your days are full, it becomes difficult to make your blog that way as well.

Vienna

I love Vienna. I love Austria. I'm almost afraid to close my eyes as the train flies by the darkening countryside because it may be another almost-decade before I see it again. I have an odd attachment to the place.

 And you can see mountains from Vienna, just off in the distance, like I can back home. If you ever ask me about home when I'm in Chapel Hill, the conversation is guaranteed to contain the sentence, "I miss my mountains." I don't miss being in the mountains, though I enjoy it there as well. I miss my constant guardians, the beauty of my landscape, the silent wonder of my home. I miss my mountains.

But for maybe a week, I could pretend like I didn't have to.

I love the white buildings on the streets off of Stephansplatz, the beauty of Stephansdom, the grand feel of the Straatsoper, the regal feel of the Schonbrunn, the amazing works and grounds of the Belvedere. I love the street musicians and the street performers, the revolving door of fellow travelers we met at our hostel (though, admittedly, not unique to Vienna, but forever associated with its beauty in my mind), the vendors at the Naschmarkt, the characters brought to life on the stage at the opera. I am entranced with the city. I can't believe a day was sufficient before when a week will hardly do now.

So, a brief summary of my time here, with stories:

After a nine hour long train ride and one of our less successful transportation attempts (we got off a stop too early from the train [though, in our defense, the ticket was confusing and in German] but successfully found our hostel from the Ubahn station), we discovered the wonders of Turkish food and Christine introduced me the wonders of gelato. I'd make this into a recurring theme throughout this story, but suffice it to say we ate a lot of Turkish food, gelato, hot dogs (which really equal awesome sausages in baguettes) and drank a lot of coffee for a week.

Our first real day in town was Ascension Day, the 40th day after Easter when Jesus peaced out on the disciples to go chill in heaven. The shops were all closed in the old city by Stephansplatz, so we wandered down the Danube for a while before splitting. I went to go see Stephansdom while Christine went to go find internet to look up musical festivals and the like (Vienna has many options for musical festivals and the like). That evening, I ended up in Peterskirche, though those stories belong, in all their full glory, in another post.

The next day brought more walking through town as shops reopened and everything flooded with tourists. We sat in coffee shops and enjoyed the atmosphere and wonderful weather before going to the opera in the evening. That is also a story with a separate post, though, needless to say, I loved the opera and headed back the next day for another go 'round.



Saturday brought the wonders and smells of the Naschmarkt. There's fruit and fish and spices and pastries and so much food and jewelry stands and antique stands and things-that-should-be-antiques-but-are-really-not-worth-the-money-you'll-pay-for-them-because-they'll-have-to-be-restored-to-be-worth-anything stands and bags and dresses and instruments and restaurants and so much sensory overload.








The afternoon had to be spent in recovery in order to process everything from the smells and the sights and the people and the longer-than-expected walk before going to my second opera. Eugen Onegin is now on my list of books to read as I am now in love with the story thanks to the opera.










Sunday, which was yesterday, I went to church in Stephansdom. It was confirmation Sunday, which meant that the service that I walked into at 10, I walked out of at 12:15. A coffee shop to collect my thoughts and then off to the Belvedere with Christine.

I didn't know I had been here before. Maybe the art didn't make much of an impression on me. The grounds, however, did. I'm pretty sure I stood in the exact same spot and took the exact same picture before looking on my camera and thinking that I'd seen this somewhere before. Then I realized that it's in a small frame of mine on my bookshelf back home.

Then, since we can't live at the Belvedere and the opera started unfortunately early (darn you, Wagner, and your long operas!), we made our way back to the hostel. Sunday evening, dull though it often is, has a long tale of its own, telling stories and watching games of pool and singing along to Journey and the Jackson 5 with momentary friends. Sunday night was the kind of night that writers steal as inspiration for the starting scenes of their stories. Good stories, too.

So then Monday, today, the Mozart House, one of his apartments, listening to excerpts from his works and wondering about life in the musical scene in Vienna in the 19th century. It was here that Mozart composed the Marriage of Figaro, which floated around my head throughout the afternoon as we walked around the Imperial Palace, wondering about the life of the emperors and empresses, wandering up hills and around mazes.

I've had many moments in Vienna when I wondered if this was real life, like the actors around me aren't just putting on a grand play for my benefit. As an example, on Sunday night I came back to our room in the hostel to find one of our long-standing acquaintances, a girl attending a psychology conference, sitting at the small table in the room, staring into the eyes of one of the new additions to the room, a young man from South America who spoke English through a thick accent. As I quietly backed out of the room and shut the door, he said, "Maybe in another life..." and she replied, "Well, that's all we have..."

I would love to have another life where walking up and down these streets was a daily routine, where two nights at the opera isn't an absurdity, where I could explore the hills at the Schonbrunn and stare out over the city each and every day. Mozart called this place the best in the world and, though I haven't been far, I'm quite inclined to agree.

Marienkirche

Every time I go into a city, I have a list of at least two churches, most time three or four, that I want to see or that interested me when I looked at the city. Of course, you have your run-of-the-mill gorgeous cathedral, like Prague Cathedral or the Berliner Dom, but I also try to pick churches that are interesting for historical or architectural reasons. St. Mary's in Berlin is like that. It's got this mural around the inside called the Dance of Death, dating from the 15th century, recently recovered under centuries of paint. It dates from the time of the Plague and it shows people from all walks of life "dancing with death, moving at a slow and dignified gait."  I'm kinda fascinated with the whole thing, so I figured I'd look for it.

I searched for it after I found the Berliner Dom, looking at my directions and my map and figuring out that it was on the same street as the Dom. I walked up and down the street, consulting my handwritten instructions to turn right after the river. Running out of time and frustrated, I walked towards the square where I was going to meet up with Christine again, thinking I had time at least to check out one of the churches surrounding the fountain.

I walked into the one with an open door, thinking I could glance around for a bit. It was literally less than two minutes from my intended destination and I had at least twenty to poke around. As I walked in, I noticed that they had this plastic protection over the walls. I also noticed a sign that said that an organ concert started five minutes ago and I couldn't go in without paying. It wasn't much, but I didn't have the time to wait for an organ concert to finish. As I turned to go, thinking that I'd catch up on my writing as I waited, I noticed a skeleton on the wall in a white cloak, talking to a bishop or a duke or someone else like that.

Exactly like this picture I had looked at of the Dance of Death. In Marienkirche. In Berlin.

Well, goodness.

I looked around for a while outside, taking pictures of the tower with its late add-ons and baroque dome, convincing myself that I'd return sometime soon.

I came back on Sunday morning because I had already seen the Berliner Dom and a smaller church could be nice. I left extraordinarily early got to town extraordinarily early and sat in the nave of the church for a good half an hour or forty-five minutes before the service began. I got to listen to the choir practice. It's funny how choirs everywhere have the same quirks. I could tell what the director wanted them to do differently from the way he stopped them and the way his words affected the way they sang. All choirs have the same laugh, too, so I could tell the director had made some joke about churches or singing in general. It was almost fun, guessing what these German people were talking about in their different language.

I started writing in my journal, trying to note the structure of the nave (there's this awkward section of pews that's sideways- they were moved after WWII when the pulpit was moved to the second pillar) and the decorations. Marienkirche actually weathered the war quite well and artifacts from other churches that weren't so fortunate were moved here. Soon the church started to fill with people and I guiltily put away the camera with which I couldn't bring myself to take pictures. The normal members of the congregation sat near the front. Another church surveyor, like me, sat near the back of the sideways section, staring around the church when the organ and choir started.

I jumped to put my notebook up when the music started. Choirs are meant for a space like this, with the glorious echoing. It's wonderful and beautiful and I almost think that every stone used in a building such as this were worth it, if just to be able to hear this song, sung this way, just to hear the way the notes from the organ bounce around the sanctuary, following us in worship.

It was also wonderful to have a bulletin with music and words. I don't speak any German, but you can recognize the order of service and guess when the words make up the Apostle's Creed or the Lord's Prayer. They're pretty universal. I mean, you never know what you're missing in translation, but it's pretty easy to find God the Father, Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, plus the Holy Spirit among all of the other words I can't identify. It made mumbling along much easier. They also sang a hymn based on Matthew 7, which I knew! It was even the same tune, just in German.

There was a baptism of a young girl, maybe in the upper elementary grades. I was very confused as the pastors left the chancel to talk to the congregation. I even got a little nervous- what could they make us do? What sort of things happened in services when I wasn't paying attention? But they just talked to the girl and her family, and then the whole family walked up to the chancel to stand behind and support her as she got baptized. It was really wonderful to see. It's a good bit different from infant baptism, though they used the same amount of water from the font.

As the service progressed, I was feeling pretty confident, even though I understood not a word of the sermon, and felt good enough to walk up for communion. I would feel like I was cheating if I took it at a Catholic church, but a Protestant church should be fine, yeah? So I walked up to the front of the church with the rest of the masses and they had us form a circle. I watched as the head pastor along with two associates, one of whom was a woman, made their way around the circle, offering first the little circular wafers and second the glass of wine. I was super thankful when the person in front of me dipped the wafter in the wine, taking communion by intinction rather than sipping from the cup. I don't think my little Methodist soul could have stood that much difference in one morning. I like my grape juice.

Then, after everyone had been served, the pastor said something and people around the circle grabbed the hands of the person next to them. We had already passed the peace, but I smiled and held the hands of the two men on either side of me, knowing that they would have no idea what I was saying but glad they were welcoming me into their circle. Maybe we were blessed or maybe we were sent out with a good word, but we passed smiles around the circle. Then one of the children broke the moment and we all walked back to our seats.

I walked out of the church after the postlude, quite happy with my first service overseas. I dunno, there's something wonderful about not understanding a word that was said and yet, feeling like I'm a part of something. I mean, knock ritual and tradition all you want, but it's extraordinarily comforting. It's wonderful to have universal aspects to the church. As much as well disagree, it's good to know that there's still something there. Music, though goodness knows no one agrees on one kind, even within one congregation. Baptism, though it often has a differently weighted importance. Communion, though what it really means can be different for each creed.

And, of course, if we forget, there's always death on the way out of the church. We might not agree on where everyone ends up afterwards, but we all know how everyone leaves this space we share. It's a good reminder, every now and then.

Berliner Dom

I wasn't originally going to go inside of the Berlin Cathedral. It's an impressive building, sure, and I loved taking pictures of it and just sitting in front of it, but the man behind the desk at the hostel had assured me that it was just like any other cathedral. He suggested several other places to go besides. It wasn't until I saw the people walking around the top of the dome that I decided that I needed to go in. It wasn't very expensive either, plus seeing the inside now freed up my Sunday morning as I had planned to go to service in this "Protestant St. Peter's."

Just like any other cathedral, the Berliner Dom has a lot of history. The first structure on this site was a chapel dedicated to St. Erasmus (who wrote Praise of Folly, which I wrote a paper on in my only English class in college, and made a copy of the Bible that scholars used for centuries, which I read about in my only book on New Testament textual criticism) in (wait for it...) 1465. 1465. That's a couple of decades before Columbus sailed over to America. Just to throw that into perspective there. Then, about three hundred years after that, they tore the chapel down to build a new cathedral in 1747. That cathedral was renovated in 1822 in the neoclassical style (to celebrate Prussia's uniting the Lutheran and Reformed communities). Next, Emperor Wilhelm II tore down that cathedral to build a new one in the baroque and renaissance styles that was finished in 1905, which was bombed during World War II and has since been renovated to show a simpler style, re-opening in 1993. And if you think that's a ridiculous amount of history, you should see the cathedral museum on the way up to the top of the dome. Ridiculous.

So the outside's deinitely impressive, with all these angels and then there are the fathers of the Protestant church (there's a lot of Luther) and there's Jesus, welcoming you in, and these gold inlay signs... it's a sight to see.

Inside, it's what I've come to expect from the older Catholic cathedrals I've visited- ornamentation, a decorated pulpit not in the center of the chancel, a crypt and a lot of biblical people looking down at you. Instead of the Latin or Greek church fathers, though, you have Protestant Reformers staring down at you. It's a little bit of a different experience.

Why hello there.

Whenever people ask me what brings me to whichever city I happen to be in, I say travel unless I want to get into a discussion about religion and the church. There are many questions tied up in studying sacred architecture. I'm always afriad of Why do we need cathedrals? I'm always tempted to brush it aside as a power and pride thing, ostensibly insiting that people are trying to display the glory of God in a building, the same way Handel or Beethoven would try to display it in a composition. It's easier to do when it's a Catholic church because I'm not Catholic. It almost makes me curl up in a ball of ignorance and guilt when I think that I had assumed that Protestants of any kind wouldn't spend their time building these ornate buildings. And yet here we are, Luther and Calvin glaring down at me from the heights of the cathedral.

You might think I'm being dramatic, but really. They're staring. It's impolite. 

Maybe to escape it all, I climbed up the stairs, my original purpose in buying a ticket. It's not a bad climb, though it was lengthy. I loved the view of Berlin from the top, though, so I'd consider it worth the time and effort. From there you could see the spires of other churches, the tops of other buildings, distant smoke stacks, tiny ant people in the park. From one side, an angel appeared to conduct a band on the bridge far below. From another, the angel sang out proclamations to the lady sitting in the middle of the giant heart I hadn't seen before.

Climbing back down led to staircase after staircase and I ended up in the crypt, which, ironically, is right by the bathrooms. I dunno, I just feel like we shouldn't be waving the dullness of everyday living, breathing, existence in the face of our dead. I also feel like you shouldn't have a bathroom right beside a crypt of the honored dead, like kings and queens and war heroes. I mean, what kind of message does that send, especially to vindictive ghosts?

I liked the crypt, though. It was quiet and respectful. It's easy to mourn someone else's loss. I paused for a long time in front of the tiny caskets and pondered over the paired tombs of husbands and wives. The best part of the crypt, though, was its focus on promises. Following the main path will lead you from the entrance to either the exit, the tomb of an emperor, or a marble statue of a young man sitting on a marble bench in front of a cross draped with a white cloth.

On the bench beside the young man were the words Er ist nich hier, Er ist auferstanden. He is not here. He is risen.

I like it when I leave a church pensive. I like that the building has given me something to think about or turn over in my head. It gives me different ideas about the structure and purpose of a church, though, when the most meaningful places were the metal walkway high above the sanctuary and the cold crypt far below it.

St. Hedwig's Cathedral

St. Hedwig's was a serendipitous mistake on a sunny afternoon in Berlin. We had sat in front of the much larger, much more impressive Berliner Dom basking in the peaceful rest only soft grass in the sun can provide before walking around and exploring the other fancy looking buildings around. We ended up in a plaza where the cathedral was slightly tucked away behind the construction work on another building. Admittedly, the domed building with its white columns doesn't scream cathedral like you expect in Europe.

Inside, though, you get the story of the cathedral. It's the seat of the archibishop in Berlin and the church that was built on this spot in the 18th century was the first Catholic church allowed in Prussia after the Protestant Reformation. Like many other churches in Berlin, St. Hedwig's sustained damage during the war, burning in an air raid in 1943. The structure seen today was constructed in 1952-1963 and it doesn't pay tribute to any previous styles of building. There's a skylight at the top and windows in the walls, but no pictures in the stained glass and no candeliers for lighting- just these odd orbs of light on strings hanging down from the ceiling. The altar is in the center of the room, surrounded by pews and the additional chapels are down a staircase right in front of the altar.

Downstairs, they have a chapel for St. Hedwig, of course- her relics are kept here in the cathedral that honors her name. St. Hedwig has little or nothing to do with the more famous (I think) snowy white owl, but she did go barefoot in the winter and donate to the poor a lot, so she's solid in my book. There remains of Bernhard Lichtenberg are in the crypt as well. Father Litchenberg was persecuted by the government after praying for Jewish families in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. The chapels are good and quiet, each with a different purpose and atmosphere. On the whole, though, the entire cathedral was rather deserted. I don't think St. Hedwig's is on a list of cathedrals to visit in Berlin.

Upstairs, there was a little nook that had a statue of Mary and two candelabras, full of votive candles.

I lit mine for the women in the park in front of the Berliner Dom, who each told a different story of a different country's unrest or tragedy that brought them to the streets of Berlin. One of them had wandered over to St. Hedwig's and sat just outside of the door, rocking her baby. I know that handing them a euro coin won't make their lives any better, but one of the reasons I still believe in the church is that it still does good deeds. Maybe the euro I put in for my candle will sneak into a fund for the people on the streets of Berlin.

The smoke didn't drift up to the bulbs they had for lighting in the sanctuary, but they caught my eye anyway. Looking around the room, you'd almost forget that this cathedral belonged to a religion millenias old. I thought of the places the women had claimed to be from. Libya. Egypt. Afghanistan. A modern church for modern problems, centuries old.

Berlin: A Map's Story

Berlin is a city.

I mean, clearly, Berlin is a city, but I mean that Berlin is what I think of when I think of a city- fancy buildings, sprawling streets, trains, trams, buses, graffiti, advertisements, museums, churches, restaurants and shops, but mostly people. People in the train station coming and going and shopping and sitting. People on the bus, standing and talking and sweating in the unexpected heat. People in the hostel making friends, getting ready to go out, talking over ideas and projects, focusing on their computers, focusing on each other, playing games, cooking, eating, drinking, laughing, listening. People painting, people dancing, people playing songs in bands, on their own, over speakers, to themselves. People talking. People listening. People acting. People watching. People.

My story of Berlin is mostly a story of a map. I didn't notice it when we checked into our hostel in east Berlin, but there was a book of maps big enough to be a place mat sitting on the counter. After being on a train and (successfully, again, I might add) finding our way to the hostel via public transportation, I wasn't really noticing much. We spent the evening eating dinner and then chilling in the common area, where I got a couple of posts done and listened to the conversations of the groups of people going out. Even before I got my map, I spent a good couple of minutes being distracted by the map of the trains in the lounge hostel where the most available plug was. It is a thing of beauty, I think, this crazy, almost unreadable map of stations and colored lines.

Click here to go to a clearer version of the chaos.

We didn't even get a map to head back to the train station to buy our tickets to Vienna the next day. We had gotten burned a little by the price of tickets from Prague to Berlin and were determined to book ahead, so we walked back to the train station (it's really not that bad of a walk), got tickets and walked back, stopping by a market on the way back (where I bought a watermelon slice and proceeded to eat it all the way home). It wasn't until I stood at the counter finishing my watermelon that a guy from our room tore one of the maps off the stack and brought it over to show Christine where a huge flea market would be on Sunday.

I started to pour over the map the second Christine left it in my hands. Already in red were circled our hostel location, the location of the market north of us in Maurpark and a section of town southwest from us where the longest intact piece of the Berlin Wall stood.

Berlin is huge. It's hard to know where to even start in this city. I had a couple of churches in mind (I ended up going to St. Hedwig's, the Berliner Dom, Marienkirche and Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, as a reference for future posts), but nothing much else other than that and that, my friends, is not the best of plans. The best of plans is to have an idea of a few things you'd like to see, leaving a lot of time open for the adventures that life can bring you but still giving structure to your day. I sat and stared at my new map for extended periods of time while Christine went up to the room intending to nap.

The guy behind the desk noticed my apparent fascination with the piece of paper in front of me and began to help. This man requires a little bit of description. He's tall and balding, with Latin American skin, a German accent and an interesting personality. The first time I encountered him I was sitting with my bare feet up on a coffee table in the lounge by reception, typing away on my computer, trying to figure a plan for the day. He walked by on his way to the smoking area in the fire escape and went to tickle my feet. I immediately put them down, because he's an adult that works at the hostel and your feet don't belong on tables, etc. He smiled at me from behind John Lennon sunglasses and told me to put my feet back up. "No, you know, it's fine. I do it at my house all the time. Now, this, this is not my house and maybe you don't want to put your feet up because they just cleaned and maybe you want to eat something here and feet are not clean, but no, it is fine, just go ahead and put your feet up. It's just that I like to meet new people, when I see people here, to avoid late night phone calls, you know. All of you, you will go out tonight and I don't expect you back before five tomorrow morning, and you will be laying here on these couches and I just like to see who will be here tomorrow morning. So," he finished, gesturing for me to put my feet back up.

He stood across from me at the bar and started to circle places. "This line is where the Berlin wall was. Basically, you have the East Berlin here, then the French, British and American sectors." He pointed them out on the map. "Now, here, this is your base in East Berlin. This place," he drew a pie piece east of our hostel, "You want to go here. It is nice shopping, you know, where everyone fancy," he did a dance that I assume signified 'fancy,' "wants to go, but also very interesting. And so, Addie Jo," he had a very intentional way of saying my name, "Next question." I hadn't asked one in the first place.

For a good fifteen minutes, he pointed out places on my map, circling and outlining locations in black marker. As Christine said, he doesn't hear a word you say, but he's got a lot to say. I left still a little overwhelmed but more prepared to deal with the mass of opportunities that is Berlin.

My good friend.

Back in the room, Christine was getting ready to go art exploring with one of the guys from the hostel. I'm good at tagging along, so we walked down the roads and ended up at this graffiti covered-old building. Now, graffiti-covered describes much of Berlin, and old building describes much of Europe, so I know I'm not being very specific, but this graffitti-covered old building wins, as far as I'm concerned. Inside, as you climb the stairs through this mess of art and writing, you come to exhibits and exhibitions, artists selling their work and blasting their music from rooms that they are clearly living in. Every once in a while, a jar or a basket would ask for a donation, but it was free, just wandering up and down the floors of what might have been an office building or an apartment building or who knows what else. I wish I had marked it on my map.

Saturday brought a train trip down to Alexanderplatz and museum island. I was constantly folding and unfolding my map, checking the train stops and the streets. Christine and I wandered through festivals and shopping centers before coming to the grassy area in front of the Berliner Dom. We spent a good quarter of an hour in the sun, listening to the bells chime less and less, dying away as the passing of the hour got farther away in time. We found a book sale, almost got run over by a bike tour (BIKES- THEY'RE EVERYWHERE IN BERLIN AND THEY ALWAYS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE) and split as when I went to go visit my churches.

The Berliner Dom in the sun. Quite nice.

I climbed the two hundred and some ridiculous number of stairs up to the top of the Berliner Dom to see the city from there. I listened to a band on the bridge and counted the steeples in the skyline. Some of my favorite pictures from Berlin are from here.

Reflection of one of the domes of the Dom in a nearby office building

Watching the city

Hey, look, there's a band!

I swear, this is a lion with headphones on. On the Berliner Dom.

You know, just a field. Better from above, though.

Then Christine and I adventured to a new part of town to watch performance art. Basically, there were these moveable wooden stations that had speakers on them that played repeating random noises, a sound like clicking for a while and then a sound like drops clinking against a pipe. In the discussion beforehand, one of the panelists had said that the whole experiences was like an experiment in being free. Freedom, she said, might not be something that we either have or don't have, but more like something that we practice having. And I could kinda see that. As the performers moved, they didn't move with any kind of rhythm I could here. They used and changed the space, regardless of what it seemed like they should be doing. Thought provoking for someone who spent the last eight years practicing being in time with a perpetual drumbeat. I spent a couple of minutes before and after the performance recreasing my map so the train lines showed on top, checking to see if there was a station closer to where we were.

Sunday brought a church service in Marienkirche, where there was a baptism and communion, which ended with me holding hands with two people I've never met before speaking a language I don't speak but with whom I broke bread and drank wine and it just kinda gave you hope for the Church universal.

Christine and I spent the afternoon in Maurpark at the flea market circled on my map. It is something to see. I didn't take pictures of the market itself, but there was a sizeable crowd by the stage and plenty of people walking from stall to stall, browsing and haggling, speaking French and English just as much as German.

Not entirely representative of the many people in love with this place.

As for me, I saw my first real life rat, bought a bag (not from the same place) and listened to German kids sing along to American songs. We walked over to a coffee shop and met another guy from the hostel, who's writting a book on Americans teaching English in Berlin. After a couple of hours of work on blog posts (these suckers take more research than you think), we split and walked over to a poetry reading.

Let me pause and recap. By this point in my trip in Berlin I have:
a) been to an art exhibition in an abandoned building
b) been to a performance in a converted sewage processing plant
c) been to a huge flea market
d) been to a poetry reading. A POETRY READING.

I would like to note that all of these things were entirely unplanned by me.



And then today, after a quick trip over to the Turkish place down the street, we rode the trains out to the Berlin Wall, circled in red, where I couldn't help but take pictures of the murals that dominate it now.

Then we took trains over to the Brandenburg Gate, which used to be the entrance to the city and is right by where the American embassy is. Happy Memorial Day, home!

And tourists. Gotta love the tourists.

Right down the road is the Holocaust Mahnmal, which I am unsure about.

There were, prior to this shot, French children running up and down the aisles.

And then another train ride over to the Zoo, down the road from where is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.The rest of the evening was spent walking around the old American sector of Berlin, consulting my security blanket of a map, turning it around to read street names and folding it to look at the tiny unlabeled icons representing who knows how many other features of Berlin I wouldn't get around to seeing.

Though there was a statue enjoying himself...

Dance off with skateboards.

Again, the people here really made it happen. From the four girls in our room who went out every night, tighter than the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, to the man at the desk, to the author in making, our hostel provided us with all sorts of people to meet, acquaint ourselves with and share our experience of this city. I can't say I'm sad to leave though- a skylight that lets me see a few stars at night is not enough to deter me any longer from Vienna. Wish me luck on the nine hours of a train ride to Austria tomorrow!