Expertly Napping

Boy, am I on a roll. This bit from The Guardian is what I've been searching for my entire life to justify my love of napping. Turns out, napping can improve alertness, lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and, in general, make the world a happier place. This article even gives instructions. If there's a Society of Napping out there, I should join it. If there's not, I should start it. I don't nap every day, but some days there just ain't no functioning without one.
(And, yes, that is a cute kitten picture. So sue me.)

Bombs away!...please.

I've flown into Berlin's Tegel Airport a few times and I can't say it ever occurred to me that old buried munitions would give the term "final descent" a new and slightly macabre twist. According to this piece in Der Spiegel (yes, I've been reading it a lot lately), the fact that there are WW II bombs buried under the tarmac is no secret. This coming spring, they'll finally be removed and disposed of from Tegel and another 500 give-or-take other sites (but who's counting?). Unexploded WW II-era bombs are actually not uncommon in Germany (here's an interesting article about that), along with other weaponry–a construction site in Berlin recently uncovered a stash of weapons. That I knew. But the fact that there are live bombs close to the surface of an active runway at an international airport–bombs which become more unstable as they age–and it was known does make me wonder. Did the authorities calculate the odds? Every 9 out of 10 planes? Anyway, who am I kidding? I wouldn't have changed my travel plans even if I had known. I like a gamble.

It's just a jump to the left...

Many who know me are familiar with my interest in East Germany. This slight obsession dates back to the few months in 2000 when I spent lived in an apartment in Friedrichshain, a neighbourhood that was part of East Berlin. I shared this apartment in an altbau with the French-German owner of a health food store and his dog Paula. Across the street was another altbau that was filled with squatters. They had painted the entire front of their 5-storey building–a tank, gas canisters, skulls, a wrecking bomb. (This photo is not that building. All my photos are still on paper. One day I will digitize). There was a mud sculpture park next door. The front of my building was covered in graffiti and looked somewhat abandoned, but the apartments were beautiful. The heater in my room was a ceramic coal heater–there was a bucket of coal and a shovel next to it. There was a Trabant collectors club nearby. Ah, the glamorous East!

There was an interesting mix of old and new then and plenty of reminders of the recent DDR past. So of course a headline like this would intrigue me: East German Time Warp. This is a short article from the International (read: English) version of Der Spiegel. An architect who was working on a building in Leipzig opened the door to an apartment long shut. It seems this apartment was very hastily abandoned sometime in early 1989–so hastily that there are still ashes in the ashtray, dirty pots, and old–really old–bread on the counter.

Of course, I can afford to treat these matters with curiosity and a certain level of amusement because I didn’t have to actually live through them. The people I know who did have direct experience with the East have, how shall I put it? a slightly different take. For anyone who wants an idea of what it was like, I highly recommend the 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives Of Others.