Art and Craft, Travel Art and Craft, Travel

Adventures in Berlin, part 1

I flew into Berlin a few days before Kelly did, so that I could do some research-y things in the city before we took the train (er, trains) to the lovely little town of Wernigerode in the Harz mountains (about a 3-hour journey south-west of Berlin). Here are a few more random photos from the first few days...Wernigerode tomorrow!

Found outside a random flower shop.

The courtyard outside the German Resistance Memorial Center. It was in this courtyard that Claus von Stauffenberg and others involved in the plot to kill Hitler were summarily executed. (More information on the July 20th plot at Wikipedia.)

And on a much lighter note...

A giraffe made all of legos at the Sony Center, near Potsdamer Platz.
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Back from Berlin

Huzzah! It was a great trip--I got plenty of inspiration for the book, and Kelly and I had a lot of fun. Seanan said he felt like he'd been looking at 'Present at a Hanging' since December, so I think I will treat him (and you) to a blog post full o' pics every day for...well, for awhile. I took hundreds, you know.But for now, here's a random assortment. (I seem to have misplaced my laptop adapter and the battery's running low...)

The 13th-century Marienkirche against the GDR-era TV Tower.
Durty graffiti at the East Side Gallery (a 1.3km stretch of the Berlin Wall painted by an international group of artists in 1989-1990).
(Found on a bridge inside the Tiergarten.)
A view from inside the Schloss Wernigerode, in the Harz mountains.
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Festival Season (reprise)

Sunday night the Macnas parade drew an estimated 70 to 80,000 people. Here's a clip from the website:

A spectacular night time event, "Apocolopolis" is the city that never sleeps, a non-stop party spinning, flashing, beeping and thriving under the agreeable King Du Washawanna and his lovely wife Queen Free. But a sinister threat lurks behind this hall of smoke and mirrors, as the circus comes to town, all pounding drums and flashing flames, led by the terrifying Colonel Chuckle and his hordes of Clownmandos.

It was really fun--felt like the Emerald City on acid, lots of demented clowns and ghouls on stilts and mutant sea creatures busting out of their cages and such. It was hard to get a decent photograph, but here are my best attempts.(Felt like this thing was staring at me for about ten minutes before the parade started.)

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Festival Season

July is a great time of year to be in Galway. The Film Fleadh is on right now, and the Arts Festival opens on the 14th. Last night Brendan and I went to Eyre Square to catch a free screening (actually, it was the world premiere) of Kíla: 'Once Upon A Time'. I hadn't heard of them before, though they've been a band for many years--made me wonder if I'd unwittingly been living under a rock. Before it started Brendan described Kíla as "psychadelic trad," which seemed pretty accurate to me. The funkiest part was when women in Rococo-style foufy white wigs and fancy garb were walking around the stage in stilts.I sat on the grass and knit while Brendan danced like he was at a rave, and some loser (bottle of Buckfast in hand, of course) came up to him and asked for drugs. The dreaded bohemians smoking weed in the crowd don't bother me somehow--it's the lads who drink to get drunk, piddling in doorways and generally making total nuisances of themselves, who make me angry. That Brendan might have been dancing out of sheer enjoyment of the music never would have occurred to a guy like that. At any rate, it was really fun for me to sit there and watch him. I wish I'd brought my camera so you could see how happy he was.So we walked through the city centre to get home, and the weekend revelers were out on Shop Street in full force, as usual. Like I said, I have very low tolerance when it comes to public intoxication, but every so often you come upon a truly entertaining drunk. Last night there was an overweight man dancing in the street outside Neachtain's without a shirt on, shimmying up to passersby while singing "Woo hoo, woo hoo hoo" (click here for clarification). And when I say "shimmying up," I mean he was jiggling his man-boobies in random women's faces. This was all mildly amusing, but what really clinched it for me was when one (sober) woman he accosted in this fashion replied (with facetious delight), "What a treat!"Gosh, I love Galway.

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Let the Christmas knitting commence!

I have promised myself I'm not going to be knitting frantically three days before Christmas. Here's what I have to show for myself so far:I only started this cardigan a few days ago--big yarn + big needles = fast progress. It's the Thick-and-Thin cardigan coat out of Stefanie Japel's Fitted Knits, and it's for my grandmother.(Actually, I have more done on the Christmas knitting than this, but I can't post them until the end of December because the recipients are reading...)

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Who loves your feets?

So far I haven't blogged much about knitting because...well, I'm still in blogging practice mode, which means I have maybe two-point-five regular readers, all of whom I have already bored with talk of what's on my needles.I am rather proud of my first pair of socks (pattern by the Yarn Harlot) though. They were for Brendan, but I'm modeling them here (pre-blocking) because I was impatient to get a photo up on Ravelry. He says they fit like a pair of gloves. Hooray!I can see myself getting totally addicted to sock-knitting. This reminds me of an op-ed (if you can even call it that) I wrote for the Washington Square News entitled "Trash Your Panties: Going Commando with Camille." (I was going to say it was tongue-in-cheek but that sounds a little dirty under the circumstances...) Anyway, towards the end of the piece I suggested that socks replace ladies' underpants as fetish objects:I recommend socks for their wintry practicality and distance from the danger zone.I should dig out that piece and post it here sometime. It was one of the better things I wrote for the paper at NYU (sadly enough).

(I've just finished this pair for Seanan. Pattern here.)

Next entry will be all about Cúirt, the international literary festival going on right now in Galway.

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The Boyfriend Sweater

I spent the first half of 2006 driving around Ireland doing research for my guidebook, and as you can imagine I met loads of characters almost every place I went. In Leenane I met Tom, an American artist in his sixties, who was at that time working as a handyman at Sleepzone Connemara. Tom had a serious case of wanderlust--and by "wanderlust," I don't just mean location-wise. He told me several stories about the women he'd loved and left, and I was struck by one story in particular. One of his girlfriends had knit him a sweater, and he continued to wear and treasure it long after he'd moved on. Eventually the sweater started to unravel, and he decided to send it back to her with a note asking her to fix it.Needless to say, he didn't get the sweater back.I don't know if I was more appalled or amused by the size of Tom's cojones, but his story got me thinking about the etiquette involved when one knits a gift for a significant other. The rule of thumb seems to be that the recipient should return the item if the relationship ends, but I suppose it depends on how amicable the break-up is. And is the garment a general symbol of your affection, or does it symbolize your feelings at the time you were making it?I see why you'd ask for it back (and I seem to recall Tom saying his ex-girlfriend had wanted him to return the sweater, but he liked it too much to give it up), but it feels a little like giving with strings attached--so I think I'd rather not make the sweater at all than give it with any sort of stipulation. Feel free to disagree with me here.

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