Act II, Scene 1: Our heroes face a difficult obstacle

At night we went to eat in the area near Piazza Navona again, which has lots and lots of great restaurants with acceptable prices, before heading back to the hotel. First we checked around Campo d'fiori (or so) but it was really crowded there with more of a bar scene than restaurants. All the outside tables were already taken though. Before going out to eat we headed back to the hotel after visiting the Museum of contemporary and modern art. That translates to art from the 19th century and younger. We were so lucky too. While proceeding to works up to the 1950s, it started to rain. Not just a little bit of friendly rain either, but a full-blown thunderstorm. If we would have been outside, it would have soaked us completely. The museum was set up so that different periods were together and you would walk fom the oldest to the youngest work. One sculpture that I particularly enjoyed was Canova's "Ercole e Lica", which is rather large and the picture doesn't do it justice. Heck, here is the one I took, not much better, but maybe you can sense the agony on Lica's face a little better (he's the one getting thrown around):

Hey, good way to try out the new Blogger feature too, but I have a feeling I will stick to my old way. More control over picture size and stuff.
The bathrooms in the museum were hidden, but displayed the Romans' apparent joy in washing their feet. Though some say bidets are used for a different part of the anatomy. Right! When we went into the museum, we were told that the part of the museum hosting work from after 1950 was closed, because they were setting up an exhibition until Thursday. We went in anyway.
On the way to the museum we walked through a park that the Romans use to hang out in. They were having picnics and playing volleyball and stuff. To get to the museum we took a bus from somewhere close to the Pantheon, and changed into the Metro. Before that we had ice-cream again, at this place recommended to us the night before. They had a huge selection, and it tasted excellent as well. My conclusion is, that ice-cream seems to be great anywhere you go in Rome, but places will have different numbers of varieties. On our stroll to the ice-cream place we looked at sights on the way and took some time to go shopping.

The interlude

Before I post more about Rome, it's time to reveal the Neighbor of the Month for June. The winner is forthnights. Even though I originally planned to announce the Neighbor of the Month at the beginning of each month, it has now turned out to be more towards the end. Is it laziness? Of course not, I'm just, eh, you know, hmmm, trying to, well, aha: I'm using as much time as I deem necessary in the given month, to give the contestants (who don't know who they are of course) a chance to proove themselves. I'm so proud for coming up, I mean deciding to implement this mode of operation.

Little update here: I have decided to include my profile and put some content in it as well. The link is in the sidebar, right by my name. I also found out that using a div tag instead of paragraphs works better in posts like the one about my vanishing childhood neighborhood. I also noticed some spelling mistakes that I won't bother correcting. And Blogger now allows incorporating images without having to use outside services. That will be much easier than what I have been doing.

Act I, Scene 3: The dance of the melon spirits.

To my surprise, our first trip on a Rome bus went without any bigger problems. Like in smaller towns in Germany, they did not announce or display which stop would be next. So you would also have to count the stops that you need to travel, or lean over to try and read the bus stop sign. I'm probably making it sound worse than what it was, since it worked out for us in about 90% of the cases.
Next thing you know, we're getting off the crowded bus and start walking down a narrow street, as they exist in abundance in Rome. Every other intersection is called a Piazza, and there it is in front of us: the back of the Pantheon. A big ole cube, only it was round. We walked around it in anticipation, and decided it would be a good idea to get our first ice-cream. We were expecting something good, but were not prepared for what was about to happen. First of all, we got a huge portion for the 2 Euros we spent, and the taste of that ice-cream alone makes a trip to Rome worth the money, no matter where you're coming from. Unbelievably good. We also bought a large bottle of water, as our frozen water was almost used up. Christina came up with the smart idea of pouring some of the newly acquired water into the bottle which still had a good amount of solid ice left in it. We would go through about two 1.5 liter bottles of water each day, costing us between 1.30 and 2.20, depending on where we bought it. The day before last we actually bought some at a supermarket. For like 33 cent.
The Pantheon is pretty amazing too, but as most things in Rome in the summer, overrun with people. From there we started heading towards Piazza Navona, a rather larger piazza with three fountains, the middle one being the largest and depicting four river gods. It was there that we first encountered the many street vendors, selling soap-bubble guns, silk scarfs, designer handbags and designer sunglasses. For some strange reason these vendors always decide to take their business elsewhere, whenever the police shows up. Oh, and the different types of articles seem to be split up between different ethnicities. Soap-bubble guns for example, were sold exclusively by people with an Indian (as in India, or ethnically similar) background. At night these same people were selling these flashy-light flying saucers. Very interesting. It was starting to be time for more ice-cream and a little shopping, before we stumbled upon the Castel Sant' Angelo (ex-Hadrian's tomb), saw st.Peter's square from the distance and chilled on a bench in a shade for quite a bit. A well-deserved rest.
Well it was time to get some food, and I had written down areas with good food and one recommendation before we left. At first we couldn't find the recommended restaurant, because the house number was incorrect, but we ended up at the right spot after all. It was pretty popular, and our Australian table neighbors said that it is mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide. The pizza was pretty dang good too. After eating pizza in Rome, I realize just how good (and authentic) the pizza at Da Franco in Trier is. After eating, it was time to head back to the hotel and get some of that there sleep. Finally.

Act I, Scene 2: Sammy meets his long-lost father.

First order of business: go to the Colosseum. Not because it is the most important thing to see or anything, but because it is within walking distance of the hotel. We stop by a tourist information, get our third map and start heading towards a park that is adjacent to the Colosseum. The park had plenty of sleepy bums in it. I felt like some sleeping myself. We start heading down towards this ancient arena and are approached by a girl, asking us if we would like to join a guided English tour of the Colosseum. Well, we declined, as we wanted to check things out first and didn't know if the price she said was okay or whatnot. But how nice, and what a coincidence. At least that's what I thought until the next person asks us the same thing 2 minutes later. And then another just after that. And they were always like 'It starts right now, you gotta decide now' and didn't wanna reveal when the next tour would be or how often they offer tours. One guy actually told us they were two English tours a day. What a bunch of bull. There was an English tour every 5 minutes I would say, as almost everybody there did not know Italian. We decided to save the Colosseum for later and headed over to the Forum and Palace instead. The ticket line there was significantly shorter, and the tickets you buy are good for the palace and the Colosseum. They were 10 Euro still, that's what the guided tour people said, and they would charge an extra 8 for the tour, which also included the Forum and some things outsdide the Colosseum. So it wasn't a bad deal after all. But we decide to look at the Palace first.
Most of those buildings are of course ruins. And you can only guess how big they must have been in their time. After the palace it was time for the Colosseum then, where we were approached by another person offering a tour, well 3 more, but the first one reduced the price for the tour to 6 as we already had tickets to get in. But we didn't want a tour, so we just ignored the rest of them. We figured 10 Euro was enough to see it, and we knew some things about it already, and combined that with what we know about the Amphitheater in Trier and nuclear physics. Good enough. After that it was time for a short rest, which we used to buy frozen bottled water. We knew we would need more soon.
It was time to check out the buses and underground trains to see how we could get around. And that's where our troubles began. The bus stops tell you which lines stop there, and which other stops they stop at. Where are those stops located in comparison to where we wanna go? No info. What time do they go? They only tell the time of the first and last bus. A map of the lines and how they run? No info. So I bought a map with the bus lines on it inside the metro station. I looked at it and figured it out. Or so I thought. In order to find a bus that would take us to the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, I would have to look on the map to see what lines go to the place we were at at the moment. Then I would have to guess where a stop might be close to where we wanna go, and compare the list of bus lines that go there, with the list of bus lines at the current location.

Act I, Scene 1: The death of a piece of pineapple candy at high altitudes.

Sorry this took a little, but here is the first in a series of posts about our trip to Rome. The reasons it's gonna be in episodes is because that way it won't be as long and boring, I don't have to spend a whole week writing one post and that I initially had quite a brilliant idea of how to write this, that I am too lazy to do now and don't find that funny anymore. At first I was gonna make "predictions" about our trip that would actually tell what we did and date them back to before we left. Then I could come back and say "I was right". Hilarious, right? Well this type of humor is too good for you guys anyway.
So let's start with the trip there. We got up on Saturday 'morning' at 2:30. We're pretty f-wording tough. But that way we would have four whole days in Rome instead of the first and last day being used exclusively for travelling. We flew from a little airport between Münster and Osnabrück, and had to walk a little bit to get from our parking spot to the terminal. Lots of cars there since that's about the only way to get there. The lady at the check-in desk didn't even look at our passports, and no one ever verified it was really us that was getting on that plane. Good job.
As usual, the flight attendants were trying to hit on me by offering everything from perfume and alcohol to soft drinks and a whole basket of sandwiches. I took a sandwich. And another one for Christina. We arrive, and the first schock: No pissoirs in the airport bathroom. Those crazy Italians.
You know what sucks? People getting their bags from those conveyor belts. Or maybe it was because it was mostly Germans. They run right into you without saying a word, crowd the belt so that if your bag shows up before theirs, you have to push them aside and they wear funny pants. We dragged ourselves to the airport train station and got tickets. Somebody must have been using Jedi Mind Tricks on the train guy, cause we made it in just seconds before it left, and skipped waiting for another 30 minutes. Now that I think of it, it could have been JMT, that stuff the kids from "Children of the Damned" do, or just plain old hypnosis. It was hard to tell as we were running to get on that train. At the main station in Rome, we decided that trying to check into the hotel early is for suckers and tried to look for lockers for our bags instead, so we could start exploring Rome. We ended up checking in at the hotel about 30 minutes later and started exploring Rome.

Proud heritage.

Now I don't want to reinforce exisitng stereotypes, but I have to share something with you. I am reading a book about American history at the moment which chronologically covers everything from the colonial times to the present. Well I bought this book a few years ago so it only goes up until Clinton's second term. I think I will copy the additional chapters from the latest edition at the library once I get done. It's a pretty good book not only focussing on political aspects, but cultural developments as well. But it's in German, so a lot of you guys will have some trouble reading it. To anyone else I recommend it. It's called "Geschichte der USA" and written by Jürgen Heideking. The publisher is A. Francke Verlag Tübingen und Basel. Gots to cover the legality of this enterprise.
Anyway, I have made it through the wars for independence and arrived in the early 19th century. The book is now talking about continuing democratization and reform movements, specifically the 1820s. And here is the German quote, which I will translate below:

Im starken Alkoholkonsum glaubten viele Reformer die Quelle zu erkennen, aus der die schlimmsten Übel wie Verbrechen, Armut, Mißhandlung von Frauen und Prostitution flossen. Die Initiative ergriff der presbyterianische Pfarrer Lyman Beecher aus Boston, der seit Mitte der 1820er Jahre in Neuengland die totale Abstinenz predigte. In der Folgezeit traten mehr als eine Million Menschen, die meisten von ihnen Arbeiter, lokalen oder regionalen Temperance Societies bei und legten das Gelübde ab, keinen Alkohol oder zumindest keinen "hard liquor" mehr zu trinken. Der Kampf für Prohibitionsgesetzte führte aber nur in wenigen Staaten zum Erfolg, weil sich irische und deutsche Einwanderer vielerorts heftig gegen den Zwang zur Nüchternheit wehrten. (Heideking, S.126)

This really doesn't need commenting, so here's the translation:

Many of the reformers believed that massive consumption of alcohol was the seed from which the worst evils, like crime, poverty, mistreatment of women and prostitution grew. The presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher from Boston took the initiative, and preached complete abstinence in New England since the mid-1820s. Over a million people then joined local or regional Temperance Societies and swore an oath not to drink alcohol, or at least no hard liquor. But the fight for prohibition laws was succesful only in very few states, because Irish and German immigrants vehemently resisted the obligation of being sober in many places.

I hope my translation makes enough sense for you. Well, like I said before, it doesn't really need commenting. All Americans, please drink a beer and a shot to honor the proud achievements of German (and Irish) immigrants in your country.

You're such a nerd.

So much has happened, where do I even begin? Okay, let me start over. Nothing has happened, where do I begin? Now that's some deep stuff right there. Anyway, I was just wanting to let everybody know that I succesfully switched computers. My old P3 only had 64MB of RAM, and while we were out eating with some people from Christina's work I asked if anyone had some old RAM they would be willing to get rid if for a small price. Cause I was planning on getting a new system as soon as I got a job. But I no longer need to, as one of her colleagues had a whole computer he was trying to get rid of. It's a P4 at 2,2GHz, 512MB RAM (I might upgrade that later) and two 110GB harddrives in a RAID 1 configuration. I had no idea what the heck that was. I was just told that it had two drives which are mirrored, so actually I only see one drive and the other is an exact copy of the first one. Backs up your data automatically. Then I looked up how that works, and I learned about RAID.
Anyway, I bought that a couple of weeks ago but never got around to setting it up, cause I had this long Word file for work and didn't wanna risk messing up the formatting. Last weekend I decided to do it anyway. It hurt to work on a slow computer with the other one just sitting there, calling my name. For same reason the computer referred to me as "Sweet Sam" but who cares. It hurt deep down inside. Oh, I can still fell that pain just thinking about. The new computer also has WinXP, while I was still working with 98. An upgrade long overdue, even though I was dreading it a little. But it didn't take too long to get to know XP and how it works and now I like it.
The biggest hassle was getting all my e-mail to show up in my mail program. I use Mozilla Thunderbird and several address books, 4 accounts and a few local folders in it. There is no export function and importing from my old hard-drive, which I also installed in the new machine, was not possible. But with the help of forums and such I figured it out, even though I thought I lost most of my stuff at one point. The problem was that in order to copy the mail folders, you had to set up the accounts in Thunderbird first, as it it will not automatically display an account for each mail folder in the profile. But I figured it out, deleted my old profile, was devastated, looked in the trash can, found it and remembered I also made a backup copy on my old hard drive. The world was saved again. If the world consisted of my pitiful life that is.
I have been working on this here post for three days now but never got around to finishing it. By the way, the last song, which no one could guess, is "Daylight" by the one and only Aesop Rock. I'm not even going to talk about all of you people's lack of enthusiasm for this awesome contest. On Saturday we're leaving for Rome for four days. That should be pretty nice.

Remember: Just the facts on this blog.

Now that Kelly has left a comment, it's time for the next episode of our existence. I said I would write about the vanishing of my childhood neighborhood, so here it goes. There are actually two versions for this incredible legend, and it's up to you to decide which one you believe more.

#1: The lonely cry of the excavator

My parents' house, which my grandfather built at the ripe age of 21 before going to war, and adjacent factory, which we are renting out ever since he retired, is surrounded by fields on all sides. We have no direct neighbors, except for a few houses up the road, on the other side. The town really starts a little bit down the road. Anyway, one side of the road that one of my friends lived on was only developed on one side, there were no houses on the other, just a big field. Usually there were animals on that field and an electric fence around it (ouch), but later on we played frisbee on there too. My friend and I loved frisbee by the way, and spent hours throwing that thing back and forth. Unfortunately it would always land in the neighbor's garden at his place. So the field was way better. There were crops on the field too sometimes, and one year they found a huge stone, the findling. It was awesome. They placed it right on the edge of the field and we would climb on it and play spaceship and stuff like that. It's hard to say how big it really was, but it had plenty of room for two kids playing on its slope. It was hella cool. And slowly the empty field vanished. It started with just one house right across from my friend's, and ended with nothing but houses and a new road right through the old field. You would never guess it if you saw it now. The findling was moved up to the museum, but it was damaged in the process and not placed like it had been by the field. So house after house was built, and a huge wall of dirt accumulated, so that we could no longer see what was going on in the ex-field. Not that it matters, but the dirt gives some sonic relief from the trucks that go by for the new residents. Sissies! So that was basically it, one of my childhood playgrounds, even though not a very popular one, was replaced by houses. It was not a huge loss of natural habitat for animals or anything, and I'm not sad about it. It's just weird how the city keeps growing and growing. Where will it end?

#2: Electric boot

One year my brother and I played in the field right by our yard. It was rainy and muddy. At one point my brother got stuck in the mud with his rain boot, and I ran inside to get my parents. It ended up with my brother being rescued, but there was no hope for the boot. Heck, I don't know what happened to it, I'm sure my Dad dug it out, but I have no memory of that. And so I have to assume that the boot was consumed by the field. And it never came up again. Shortly thereafter a huge stone was found in the field that vanished, the findling. Shortly means either an unknown number of years and months or before the boot vanished, but I'm pretty sure the findling came later. Long time later, it's a field after all, not a lightning bolt. So the boot sinks in, and the findling comes up. Give and take. The findling was hella cool by the way. But you already knew that. Wait a second, how did you know? Maybe this thing isn't over yet. Anyway, I also had this toy rocket, and one of my brother's friends was looking at it and said, oh, a nuclear missile. Little me was scared. Nuclear? In my hands? I'M GONNA DIE! Cause I knew nuclear was bad and makes you die. Duh. So I put it somewhere in our attic, and never saw it again. A week later I woke from my sleep, and decided to go out on the balcony, by our bathroom. Outside was a person in a dark hodded thingy. Like Obi-Wan and Anakin and everybody else is sporting in the latest Star Wars movie (so that's where they got that from). Did you see that? Wasn't too bad. The original ones don't even compare though. In my opinion at least. Too much CGI. Anyway, he was looking right at me and gesturing with his hands. Not trying to communicate, just doing some weird ole stuff. He then walked back and forth across the field, twice, and walked down the road. Only that he never came out from behind the trees that line the sidewalk by our house. He may have also stolen my He-Man. But I digress. One day I was playing on the findling, spaceship of course, as everything else is for lamos, and suddenly the field began to move and the electric fence started giving of bolts of lightning into the field. First it moved very gently like a lake, but it grew stronger and stronger. Alright, this is getting out of control. I don't think I should reveal all, as it doesn't seem to be over yet. All you need to know is that the whole thing further involved a tiger-striped bunny rabbit, Jimmy Page's left hand index finger hangnail, a bottle of orange juice, 3 bottle rockets with ladybug pilots, a lock of Angelina Jolie's hair and that one chick from TV as a child who had travelled in time.

Two stories, one incident, and many unresolved mysteries. I will do better next time.

I'm ready, promotion!

or Climbing the Ladder

Okay, it's not really a promotion, but I am now in charge of updating the German website of the company I do translations for. This basically means that I have to translate and put online texts about new products, general news and update menus and banners, buttons, etc. For that I have to go to the office once a week or so, sometimes less, sometimes more (not likely). It's not a big deal, but it means that I will be in personal contact with my boss more often, and have something steady to do, besides doing translations, which I have to do as they come in. You know what I'm trying to say? I also rode my bike out to the office, which took about 30 minutes, not riding too fast, but the roads were pretty empty, I still did get lots of red lights though. But it wasn't too bad. The advantages of living in a city without hills.
Anyway, I just wanted to bathe in the glory that is myself and let you know that I watched the Spongebob Squarepants movie. And I wasn't scared one bit, you bubble-blowing babies.

Battle shells.

Oh my God, you'll never guess what happened. Oh, you already heard about it? Read it in the newspaper? Saw it on TV? Okay, so this is somewhat old news, but I'm sure you will appreciate a first-hand account of how it really went down. You know, the true story.
Last weekend we went camping on the Baltic Sea. We is Christina, Alice and I. Originally Alice was just gonna visit us over an extended weekend. Thursday was a holiday in most of Germany, not Bremen though, and Alice took Friday off as well. Then the weather was gonna be really nice and Christina was in dire need of a vacation. So she looked up camping sites and found this one called "California" in a little town called "Kalifornien". It's still in Schleswig-Holstein, not too far from Kiel. Anyway, Alice gets here on Thursday night, Christina still had to work on Friday, and we pretty much pack everything to leave around 1. Plan pretty much worked out. That week we also bought a new tent on sale. Great deal for a tent that will meet all of our needs.
Okay, so we leave Bremen, experience minor traffic around Hamburg, specifically after going through the Elbtunnel (this info is more thorough, but German) and have no problem finding the road to Kalifornien from Kiel. We arrive at the camping site, find a spot and set up our tent. That looked something like this:
You see the grill on the left? We are getting ready to grill some Bratwurst that we took from Bremen. That's a whole story for itself, but I think you heard enough about that on the radio. We also got a good spot with plenty of shade, but possibly with a few more flies than the other campers. Not too bad though. There were also plenty of geese and some swans around. At night, one the geese was channeling a 300-year-old washwoman's spirit, which sounds almost exactly like geese just making goose-sounds. Didn't fool me though. Okay, next day was the day we were going to fry in the sun. We went to the beach around 10 or 11 if I remember correctly. At noon the sun was getting plenty hot. Christina and I used factor 8 sunscreen, as we were in Germany afterall, not California, while alice had 22. Silly. We built a kickass sandcastle, that some kids enjoyed playing with later. Hooray for us. The water was freezing cold, but it was possible to swim a little after you got over the initial shock and numbness in your legs. My balls have never been colder before though. Holy macanoli! Okay, at night it turned out that Christina and I were the silly ones, as our neck and shoulders were quite red from the sun. We grilled some greasy sausages from the little camping ground supermarket that night, but the Bratwurst on the first night was better. That night we went to the beach again, with its gorgeous white sand, to see the sunset. Sunset, you wonder. But you were on a shore to the North. Yes, I know, but we had a secret trick. We turned our bodies to face the sun vanishing in the ocean. It worked wonders. Here's a pictures of that:
That lump you see on the beach are the remains our our beautiful castle. The sun had severely dried the sand and the once solid structure had collapsed. Alice then went to completely flatten it, in order for our pictures to be lump-free. Now the news reported that a helicopter landed on the beach at this point with secret service agents trying to question us, but this is entirely made up. I did notice a person in sand camoflage gear in the small dune that is part of the dyke, but didn't wanna freak the others out and kept it to myself. Later, said person was abducted by a crazed bike rider. Normally, the next picture would have showed up here, but I noticed in my browser, that things got a little messed up since the text that went on the side of the first picture was not enough to allow for at least one line of text between the pictures, so I decided to ramble a little. Form over content. I am so proud of having the pictures layed out the way they are, I couldn't let some silly lack of content mess that up. For breakfast we ate untoasted toast on Saturday and Brötchen from the little store on Sunday. Both with either jelly, Nutella, cheese or whatever else we took. Saturday morning two little dogs came by our tent, probably counter-spies, to look around. They were ugly little rats with stupid names. I tried to tell the one to get away, pointing my finger, and that dummy stands up on its hind legs. The owner was calling for them, but they did not care one bit and wandered on. Well, one went to him, but the other pranced on like a little princess of the sewer rats. Later on, this is back the beach at sunset, we also took this picture, among too many others:
Now there are plenty of more pictures, probably nicer ones, but I just wanted y'all to get an idea of how nice it was. And it was still May! We really picked a good weekend, cause right now it's cold and rainy in Bremen. Now I pretty much covered everything. There was a nude beach next to the one we were using. We stayed away from that. On Sunday we went to the beach again, but it was more cloudy and windier. Cause of my sunburn, I decided to keep my t-shirt on most of the time. Around 1, I think, we headed back to our tent, ate lunch and packed everything up. We got to Bremen around 6, and Alice still had a 5-hour trip ahead of her. Christina and I on the other hand got to relax. Okay, that's all. Anything else you hear is either completely fictiaticious or an intentional lie put out by the government to discredit my claims. The camping ground also had pretty nice shower facilities, but I gotta say that German campgrounds such as the one we went to, aren't the best. I remember camping in Indiana, in a state park, and it was so much more secluded. Of course that was also in the middle of a big forest, no beach in sight.