Before I continue with more parts of Germany (and other places), I have to take a moment to talk about the phenomenon of football. Being from North America, “football” usually brings up memories of epic Monday Night Football music, a brown “pigskin” oblong ball, and college. Everywhere else in the world, “football” = PARTY TIME/NATIONALISM! View full article »
Tag Archive: National Identity
It’s hard to know where to start on my jam packed trip, so I think I’ll just go through the days as I went around the city. It starts actually before I even left for Cairo…
The Random Scarab Appearance
A long time ago I got one of those little stone scarabs that they make in Egypt that look like the ancient ones. Since then, I’ve turned it into a hemp choker which I actually wear more than any of my other pieces of jewelery— I think it’s always been my favourite. In any case, on Monday I was walking along the student living center here in Stuttgart with my friend when she stopped to look at something hidden in the hole of a buried sidewalk cinder block. She poked it around with her foot as I turned to look at her, quizzically. “What did you find?”
“Isn’t this one of your bug things?”
“What?” I have a couple of “bug things” ranging from jewelery with fake (and real) bugs to a very large dragonfly tattoo on my back, so that was a pretty vague question. “What do you mean?”
“You know.. you have one on that necklace you always wear! That is a bug, isn’t it?”
“You mean a scarab??” View full article »
So if you didn’t catch it the first time, I’m here in Germany primarily to study at the media school here in Stuttgart. Learning German and travelling are secondary objectives, even though I find those more interesting to talk about which is why I haven’t really brought this up before. In any case, I’ve been doing some cool things here so I thought I’d write about it.
The big main course that I’m taking is Studioproduktion Ton (Studio Production, Audio), which is a major 12 credit class that takes up all of my Wednesdays and is taught completely in German. This makes it pretty hard… Thankfully I already have a pretty good background in audio recording, so I already know about concepts like Compression and Automation, etc. But when a big complicated piece of machinery is being explained to you another language without much slack given it can definitely have its stressful moments. In any case, there are one or two other kids in the class who have been gracious enough to take me and the other Canadian and try to integrate us into the group a little better. This is the big main board, the Vista 7! It’s pretty high tech, and worth about €5,000… tread carefully.. View full article »
The Olympic stadium in Munich is probably most well known for housing the Summer Olympics back when Hitler was in power and Leni Riefenstahl was filming everything. Today it’s better known for housing some of the last World Cup. Based on what I remember seeing in the old propaganda films, it used to look like a pretty standard, almost Roman (or Greek?) stadium. Since then, I think they’ve tried to reduce the old stigma as well as update it for the obvious reasons like keeping up with the Olympic Committee standards… and now it’s just huge and ridiculous. I love it!
And that’s only a small part of it!Today it looks like it’s the equivalent of a massive metal tent complex ready to house some 
space age nomads. It’s totally weird architecture, but it’s totally cool. The colours, the material.. everything. And it’s MASSIVE! View full article »
My travelling buddy to Munich was another Canadian student who’s strong will and passion is rooted in Judaism, and she made it a point that she wanted to visit Dachau to pay respects and learn what she can. I thought that was a great idea and who better to pay respects to the victims of a concentration camp then with a Jewish friend. This visit was not only one of the darkest and most intense places I’ve ever been, but one of the most humbling as well— the camp in Dachau was the first concentration camp and remained only as work camp (not a death camp like Auschwitz) throughout it’s entire functional life.. which in some ways I consider to be worse than the death camps because these people weren’t immediately doomed to die— they were doomed to be worked to death. Not to mention some of the most horrific human experimentation ever documented also happened there— completely without the knowledge of the citizens of the then small town of Dachau. View full article »