An Idle Moment in Germany

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Well now let me see, it's been a somewhat travel free weekend, but I'll give some thought into updating before I return to paper writing hell.
I think the topic for this weekend has to be, well, a very strange experience. I'd spent some of my time on my weekend hanging out with Nick and Mitchel, a pair of Australians I'd met in Krakow, which did mean a chance to see another part of the city at least, but it was mostly a non starter due to a communications fail. However, Sunday turned out into a downright surreal experience. My host parents were visiting an old friend of the family, an artist named Heinrich putting on an exhibition so I decided to tag along. It was a nice change of pace, and after spending some time wandering around the art gallery and doing a bit of chit chat and champagne drinking in a deliciously fancy setting my family and a few others went back to the artist's place for something halfway between dinner and lunch. Seriously, I wish I'd taken photos of his place, a veritable compound of insanely pretty houses loaded with paintings, toy soldiers, and of course, dogs, cats, rabbits, etc.
Let's put it this way. I think I just found my little dream home tucked in a small town in Germany.
Beyond that though there's a word that went with the whole experience. It's Gemütlichkeit, and like Schadenfreude is one of those words other people just leave to the Germans to come up with. In a sense, let's just say it translates to a feeling of coziness, where everything's right with the world and you're just hanging out with your friends. It was a weird moment just sitting there, mostly just listening, but it was like watching a switch flick. Normal restraint and thin lipped smiles were replaced with fifty somethings talking about everything from work to sex (ok, parts of this were terrifying), and good food and wine were served. Why does this make the travel blog? Well, because part of this is the time I'm spending abroad, and that means all of it. While most of my weekends may end in a somewhat blurry mess, I think every now and then I'm meant to learn a little something from my time here. I think what I learned is this is the kind of atmosphere I hope to replicate someday, a few hours of perfect calm, where the outside world can kindly go wave the Angst pom poms somewhere else for a little while.
That was a little too sincere wasn't it? Hm.
Well then, three final notes: I discovered that my trenchcoat is something most Germans associate with the cyberpunk movement (and industrial metal), and apparently with rather impressive hair styles that I could not pull off my coat depended on it.
Two: I'm heading off to Munich and Vienna for next week, so hopefully the next entry will be slightly less wishy-washy than the current posting.
Three: On a final note I keep swearing I'll write about the festivals, and a new one popped up in the last week, the Festival of Lights. Basically Berlin gets lit up like a psychedelic concert, with the Fernsehturm resembling nothing so much as a neon purple finger raised in defiance towards the stars. I got a chance to wander around for a while, and damn was it pretty. I wonder if we could pull something off like this in the United States, but somehow I think we'd just end up putting drivel like the American Flag instead of the German approach, which is to display unleaded nightmare fuel on Churches. Gotta love this country.

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Photos

Fabulous Gate
Ever wondered what the Gate looks like with purple lights? No? Well enjoy it anyhow.

Unter den Linden
No, that's not because of the mushrooms you're on, all of the trees really looked like that.

An honest to god photo
Look! It's an actual photo of me! Crazy right?