Yes NYC!

Due to the great demand, here are the highlights of the two students’ recommendations for life (see previous article). The whole theory of them is rather complex, so I will try to summarize as good as I can. Note the German translations, they will give you the right “feel”:

1) Theoretically, it doesn’t matter whether you study Mathematics, Physics or Medicine.

2) You can always do sculpture (”Bildhauerei”) in your spare time.

3) Religion is really sooo important (”einfach total wichtig”). Be active in at least one church (”Gemeinde”) and, if possible, have a good-looking brother who is a priest.

4) Note: It is “Ich ging in ein CAFE (long “e”), um einen KAFFEE (short “e”) zu trinken” and not vice versa as the people in Innsbruck say. But besides this, Innsbruck is quite ok (especially if you are active in a church there).

I also forgot to dedicate the previous article to our linguist friends who have a well-known affinity to unicorns (especially the “possible world semanticists” among them). I would hereby like to do so.

And yes, this should definitely not be the last article in this blog … we’ll try to think about something better.

Jet lag can be a mean thing if mixed together with the unicorn song (my favorite NYC art stars music video): awake at 3:30 am and cannot get the refrain out of my head. Who needs hallucinogen drugs, try this instead: watch the video after your arrival (meaning: after not having slept for the entire flight plus a succeeding enjoyable 5 hour trip with the German railway (the usual mess with delayed connecting trains). On the train trip, you cannot not sleep either, because you are traveling with a bad cold, because after NYC you are not used to all the smoke in IC/EC trains any more, or because the conversation of two 21 year old female “Lehramt” (teaching) students about things you should and should not do in life is more interesting. In my case the 3 things came right together, but now it is 4:00 am and I am so much rewarded by the joy of writing this article. In case you want to know some of the recommendations of the two 21 year olds, email me!

That’s how we celebrated Christmas - using a box instead of a tree and watching the Yule Log burn. Actually the Christmas Box is an ideas that we got form a Christmas CD that we bought at the Merry Shitmas show, which is by the way, being condemned by the Catholic League. What a great PR stunt! (In Munich the Werkstattkino uses the worst Catholic critiques of 70s splatter and softporn movies as advertisements.)

Actually we opened our presents on Christmas Eve as we do in Germany after going for dinner and before seeing Chris Washburne and the SYOTOS Band doing a great set of Latin Jazz (plus some Miles Davis) at Smoke.

We had planned to do a Jewish-styled Christmas Day, eating Chinese Food and going to the movies (there is a Woody Allen special running at the film forum) but unfortunately Rosy got fever and had to stay in bed until her departure today. So we took the shuttle to the airport today, almost getting stuck in the traffic jams surrounding the James-Brown-farewell in Harlem.
Now I’m here alone until Sunday (we had to take separate flights as plans changed and Rosy Visa expires tomorrow, so I will have to celebrate New Year’s Eve alone in the air - sniff). I’m using the time to get up-to-date with my pictures and here are some more recent ones including a visit to the UN, one to the Morgan Library (seeing a not to exciting Bob Dylan show and some nice drawings by Saul Steinberg) and our bad-timed attempt to see the Christmas decorations in the windows last Saturday. We gave up on that after being pushed along by a huge crowd.

We are little behind with blogging, sorry. This is because the end of our stay is approaching soon, which urges us to do even more, if this is possible at all. We have been to Jessica Delfino’s Merry Shitmas Show last week with a Christmas Market where they sold self-made gifts like a gorgeous shiny black Xmas stocking with a white scull on it. The performers were great and by now we know the crowd there quite well from several other East Village shows. We have also been to the MoMA once more with our friend Krzysztof and two Australian friends of him. Yesterday evening we went to see the movie “Night at the Museum” which is about the Museum of Natural History two streets away from our house. Plot: the entire museum comes alive each night including the dinos, Theo Roosevelt, the African mammals, and the cave man, etc. and the poor new night warden has to handle them all. It was a lot of fun, after having seen the exhibits ourselves! I have to hurry, since we are about to leave for some Indian food in Murry Hill (also called “Curry Hill” because of all the Indian Restaurants there).

Our friend Alexander is member of the Big Apple Chorus that sings barbershop harmony. Yesterday we used the last chance to see him sing at the Christmas Tree at the South Street Seaport. It was a fun event where great a Capella singing of well known songs was combined with show elements. Here are some more pictures from the Seaport.

After that we went to Unsilent Night, an event that the artist Phil Kline has been doing for the last 15 years. He made tapes with ambient sounds that include bells and Christmas-like sounds and asked people to bring boom boxes and come to Washington Square park. He distributed the tapes and asked all to press play at the same time. Several hundred people came and we walked between the quiet music to the East Village for an hour with the police closing of the crossings. It was a very nice atmosphere with the tracks fitting perfectly together and making one body of sound. It was also nice that people of every age went along and onlookers always asked what was going on.

On and with all this we missed Santacon - a day of people dressing up as Santas and going from one bar to the next and drinking. But here is a picture from flickr (by urbanblitz):

45 Artists worked for two months to make an extraordinary exhibit with wall paintings and installations that is only open for three days in a five story building in NoLita. On Monday all of the art will be sealed in behind new interior walls of a house that will be sold as condos.

To see this show I had to stand in line for 2 1/2 hours outside the building on Spring Street (Rosy gave up) with a line that got longer and longer behind me. It seems that the Wooster Collective who organized this had really brought together the right people at the right place.

Here are my pictures and hundreds more on flickr.

At Robert de Niro’s Appartment just around the corner from where we live. We just came along on our way home when we saw a bunch of journalists and passers-by standing in front of the building - we asked them and they told us that they are inside at de Niro’s.

At about eight, when we left home, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of J.F. Kennedy, came out of the San Remo just in the moment when we came around the corner (almost ran into her arms) … also lots of cameras flashing etc. but no security or anything. Plus they didn’t climb into a limo, but just walked away - walked, imagine!!

Now only 3 weeks are left and I feel torn between New York and Munich already, although looking forward to seeing all of you again very much, because what I really missed most here was family and friends. Makes me think about what I will miss most about NYC. Hard question, because there’s just so much, but I’ll try:

• art: constantly discovering fantastic art museums, exhibitions, events (there’s really no end to this here)
• variety of excellent and very authentic ethnic food: my favorites being Russian, Thai, Pakistani, Chinese, Cuban
• fantastic boroughs to discover: go there and walk around in a different world, my favorites: China Town, Lower East Side, East Village, Meat Packing, and Greenwich Village
• the smell of the sea, being in a big harbor city, Fire Island, Coney Island, and NY’s many beautiful bridges
• the Upper West Side which has been our home for 3 months, it is definitely a great borough to live in, I would like to move here again!
• the openness of the New Yorker’s, very friendly and helpful people that are so easy to get in a conversation with
• NYC is a shopping paradise, my favorites being probably Beacon’s Closet and Buffalo Exchange in Williamsburg, Century 21, DSW (a huge!! shoe shop), Urban Outfitters and several small boutiques in downtown
• the view from skyscrapers over the city, the view from Brooklyn and Queens on Manhattan, the great views we had on the circle boat trip
• it’s so easy to find funny things and inspiration for fiction writing, it’s a dream: just go outside, watch, and take notes
• many beautiful, cosy, and very bohemian cafes where you can hang out with a “laaaatee” (meaning “caffe latte”, as they call latte macchiato here) and pumpkin muffin or apple turnover or walnut and banana loaf or … yummy!

Yesterday we thought about what we will probably miss most of New York. One thing is certainly the encounters with very different people. Yesterday a guy looking like Keith Richards was carrying a bag with music coming out of it at the corner of our street. He stopped at the red light and started dancing to Latin rhythms. Then there was the one guy collecting bottles who had a really fanciful decorated shopping cart with a lot of toy animals that he must have found. And in the evening it took us five minutes to convince an old jewish lady in the subway that she was in an express train where she didn’t want to be. So that’s only one day but so many people you wouldn’t see in Munich.
Recently we went to a diner around the corner (the one with the German speaking waiter). When I ordered Chicken and liver from the daily specials, the waiter, an oldish woman, answered in German with prussian accent: “DAS würde ich Ihnen nicht empfehlen. Ich sage Ihnen mal was Sie nehmen sollen: Hier die Nudeln oder den Hamburger”. I must say I was quite taken aback. Not only that she spoke German but that she made it unmistakably clear that my choice would not be accepted. Of course I took the noodles.

Later she told us that she was from Ostpreussen and had come to New York in the 50s. She was glad to speak German and asked a lot of questions, telling us repeatedly to come back.

There’s still so much to catch up with from last weekend. We went to Flushing in Queens, which has been recommended to us (”you will get out of the subway and feel like in the middle of Korea). It’s true. A bit like China Town, but this time really only Asian people there (and us). We found a fantastic mall with a supermarket that makes your eyes pop out: huge dried octopus, fresh lychee-type fruits that have the size of melons, meters of shelves with dim sum dumplings, half dried ducks just laying there on the shelf (without a bag around them), really(!) weird dried herbs and gigantic plastic bags of frozen seafood.

In another remote part of Queens we tried out “real” ethnic food again and went to what they call the best Bolivian restaurant in town. The food was great indeed, but we were a little bit distracted by a X-Mas tree blinking and playing the same song over and over again, two TVs with a dating show in Spanish and a bunch of guys throwing coins into a jukebox constantly (this was a great mix altogether) oh, and a woman going from table to table selling “home-burnt” copies of movie DVDs.

The other day, we also had gorgeous weather and went to Brooklyn Botanical Garden, where we sniffed lots of fantastic roses and other fragrant plants (they have a “smell and touch garden” there). After that we took a walk near Park Slope in Brooklyn in order to find a cafe in an interesting street a friend told us about. Unfortunately, we were not sure about the street name and walked to a similarly sounding street (for ever as it seemed). First, the houses were really nice, but then all of a sudden the atmosphere changed and we were in a rather strange area. We tried to find a bus stop, but since it was weekend, no bus was going back and we had to walk through this area to get back (we again the only white people there). Patrick thinks it wasn’t that bat, but I only felt comfortable after we were back on Flatbush Avenue in Park Slope, which is a nice area by the way, with lots of shops and cafes etc. So if you would want to rent a flat in Brooklyn, you should really go there and see what the area is like, because it can change quite fast … probably a good idea anyway.

Oh, and then we were at Brighton Beach/Coney Island where everything is very Russian. I’ll tell you about that some other time, but check out the pictures.
The pictures: Queens, Brighton Beach and Brooklyn