Hanne

15 July 2009

Weekend uni, three innocent people condemned to death, a coffee machine that gives you a deposit back if you return the cup and a touch of sumo wrestling. All within one Saturday. And round and about I also had time to check out the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Baden Baden, cook a thai curry and act as the fairy of luck, drawing winners’ names out of a hat. Yep, it’s all happening at the moment!

Perhaps the three innocent people condemned to death part is a good place to start, seeing as that could be the most disturbing entry in the list. My English course over here is called ‘Debating the Death Penalty in American Literature’ and as part of this course we have read three novels and watched several films. The film screenings took place this weekend. Most people would be quite excited to spend a whole day at uni watching films and gaining uni credit, but when ‘The Green Mile’ and ‘The Life of David Gale’ are on the menu, you have to hope that you have a cherry family to go home to. Both were very interesting films but also rather depressing. Although I must say, David Gale’s manipulation of the media in ‘The Life of David Gale’ was absolutely brilliant. He released three versions of the same film, and each time you learn something new about the death and exactly what role he played in it. I won’t spoil the end, but it is worth a look.

The coffee cup part also belongs to the films day. Bound by their addictions to the potent liquid, several class members made use of each break to head for the coffee machine on the ground floor. Turns out that you pay with your uni card and the machine takes a deposit for the cup. When you return the cup you get the deposit loaded back on to your card. Pretty crafty way of getting people to recycle, but Freiburg is the greenest city I have ever been in. Everyone is so active and rides bicycles everywhere and everyone is very careful to sort the plastics from the paper from the general rubbish. Every time there is a bin there is not just one bin but three, so you can always sort recyclables.

Having said that, I would not like to be the one who had to sort through all the glass after the Händelstraße Sommerfest on Saturday night. I went along after a)watching the films and b)going to the Theatre to see Berthold Brecht’s ‘Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe’ (more about that later…). There were so many cool activities, such as stacking beer crates and balancing on the top while strung up in a rockclimbing harness (the winner stacked them to over 1 ½ stories high) and sumo wrestling suits. The same sort the green party had on campus before the election, where you bellybash each other and then do victory whale-beachings on top of each other. Very refined for m of entertainment! They were super fun, although somehow I managed to graze my knee and get a black toe. It is not all that easy to run when the knee part of the costume is around your ankles! The other super cool thing at the Sommerfest were all the burning tree stumps set up around the place. They had star shapes cut in to them and then I guess they were filled with kersone… I was lovely and toasty to hang out by them though. Mmmm, woodsmoke. Good memories of bonfires by the beach!

So, back to this theater performance. We have been hearing about Brecht all semester in my course on literature from the Weimar Republic, so I was super keen to see one of his shows on the stage. It was about capitalism and a meat factory and buying and selling and the workers out of work and at times was very grotesque. Such as when the wife of a worker who fell into the machine was bought off with three weeks of free lunch. Meat from the factory. Mmmm, husband. Yummy. Other highlights included a steak being cooked on the stage with a blowtorch and then two characters proceeding to rip it apart like dogs. (You could buy steak afterwards, there was a stall set up in the theatre foyer). And then the holy Johanna came on stage naked for a while, and I really should read the play I think because I really don’t know why. But I told Holly about this show and she was insanely jealous. Steak and naked ladies in one place. I told her she should try to be more cultured and come to the theatre more often and she might be surprised at what she finds!

The theatre Freiburg posters were also really neat, with pictures of Bambi being subversive and/or striking militant poses with an AK47. Interesting concept. After the show they were selling posters and t-shirts and I thought that a t-shirt of bambi giving the fingers with the caption ‘State Protection Rule 37: Too much inner security impedes’ would be quite a good souvineer of Freiburg. Perhaps rather obscure, but so were the plays in the line up that I saw.

My eyes have actually been getting rather a treat this week (apart from all the death penalty movies). On Friday David and I went on a trip to Baden Baden to check out the exhibition from the group ‘Der Blaue Reiter’. This was an arrestingly breathtaking experience. I think I almost forgot to breathe, even. Who are ‘Der Blaue Reiter’? A group of German Expressionists who worked pre-WWI in Munich. They painted quickly, outside, in nature; animals represented purity; the colours all have emotiona connections. Several of the artists were actually killed in WWI, Kandinsky went on to paint some of my favourite pictures ever. He was synaesthetic and could see colours when he heard music, and I think his pictures are breathtaking. Very abstract, though. Anyway, I spent a couple of hours in the museum and then we went to Triberg and looked at the highest waterfall in Gemany, saw three squirrels, tried to find a giant clock, failed in our mission when a 1km walk turned out to be more like 4.5km, so went and ate cake instead. Mmm, Schwarzwaldtorte… I am definitely bringing the recipe home!

Almost jumped through the whole weekend now, Sunday was a bitsy day in which I heard all about the new ACC levies for motorcycles (!!!), baked cookies (including a giant one shaped like XXIII), celebrated David’s 23rd in the Feierling Biergarten and made a thai curry for Clara’s family. All over the place! Oh, and to top it all off I got to be a fairy at the end of the day! Yes, on Sundays they screen the crime show ‘Tatort’ in the Mensa and you can guess who the murderer is. At the end the “Glücksfee” picks names from the hat and the first correct answer gets free coffee. This week it was particularly hard and it took 20 tries to get the correct answer! Someone even thought the murdered guy had done it himself. (Ok, that might have been me… I arrived late and was slightly confused about all the names…. > <

Anyway, that was the last week in a nutshell, although it would have to be one Rambo-big nut to fit everything inside, I think. Now I am into the last two weeks in Freiburg and it is already sad to think about leaving! I have met so many awesome people here, will definitely have to come back to visit them all. Just one more piece of news, Holly is going to show me around Budapest just before I come home (she did an exchange there and can speak the language. I have a feeling that might come in handy, just a little…!) So Eastern Europe is now well and truly on the agenda. Exciting stuff!

Alles Gute und Schöne Grüße,

Hanne

PS When we arrived in Triberg there was a guy on a BMW doing slalom through some cones for a riding school exam. Only he was doing it in the middle of the road, and busses kept coming and the hi-vis-suited instructor kept waving his arms about telling the rider to stop and try again. So it was quite entertaining to watch…