Real Life: Berlin

Looking through some old stuff I found this photo I took about eight years ago in Berlin:

Real Life-Instructions (Jan 2001), originally uploaded by Peder with a D.

It reads:

REAL LIFE … Instructions

You should / not

1. Burn your passport
2. Destroy geography
3. Accept statelessness
   
4. Reject citizenship
5. Jump national borders
6. Abolish nations
7. Ignore continents
8. Dissolve cities
9. Abandon republics
10. Separate yourself !

I assume it’s a list of things not do do, or maybe it’s being ironic with the whole “should / not” thing.  Do I have a choice?  Also, notice it’s right outside a bus stop, imagine reading that everyday you head into work.  Heavy.

—

In random unrelated news, I was talking to my buddy last night as we were listening to the new Kings of Leon album.  I like it, but he says he misses the more guitar-centric riffs of they’re first albums.  “This album is a lot more polished than their previous efforts,” I offered.  “More singer-centric.”  He agreed, but like many indie rock purists, claimed the polished sound wasn’t what he wanted to hear.  Then, when the chorus started to hit on “Use Somebody” I had to pause and kind of laugh, “I guess the guitar build up is pretty cliched by this point,” I said.  “Yeah,” he says, “it really hit it’s peak with ‘Sister Christian.'”

That was the song I was listening to when writing this post.  “We’re lucky to bring them back, and please welcome right now, Night Ranger, with their new single … all right!”

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New German Class

Last night I started teaching a new group of German students with the Germanic-American Institute. Check out the stories of some of the people in the class:

• One young woman met a German while working together on an organic farm in Wales. Next summer she’ll be moving to Germany to spend four years with him working on an organic farming compound.
• One middle-aged man recently inherited his father’s birth home in northern Bavaria. It’s located in a small, rural village of 1,200 which he visits twice a year.
• A middle-aged woman will be traveling to Germany with her husband next summer. She’s only ever studied the language as a high school student in the early 1970s. Now she wants to get better so she can impress her husband who blends well in Spanish-speaking countries with a similar educational history.
• A middle-aged man is planning a trip next year to Germany to gather info on his family’s lineage. He has records of his great, great … great grandfather born in 1718, and records on his mom’s side that date back to the 1500s.
• A young woman recently married a German man and wants to learn the language of her new family. In September she was married on his family’s massive vineyard on the shores of the Rhine River.

Isn’t that awesome?!