The downside of being in Berlin for business meetings is that I have to spend all day sitting in those meetings instead of running around experiencing the city. But the upside is that after those meetings, the counterparty takes us out for dinner at a fancy rooftop restaurant with terrific views . . . .
. . . and then on the walk back to the hotel we pass Checkpoint Charlie.
Tomorrow we finish meetings here and fly out to Amsterdam for another round of meetings. Our hotel isn't going to be nearly so well situated, but hopefully I'll be able to get out and see some of the city anyway. Fun fun!
I'm in Berlin for work this week. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it! I got in yesterday and discovered that my hotel (which was booked by my colleague) is located right in the heart of the old historical center. That meant I could go on an evening walk after dinner and hit many of the key sights in this part of town.
Strange to think that last time I was here, I was 23 and it was freezing cold in February. So much has changed! So much is still the same.
Brandenburg Gate
Soviet prestige tower
Tons of construction everywhere
There are brightly colored tubes everywhere. The cabbie explained that they're meant to
pump water out of the construction sites for a new subway line. They look like art.
This is what happens when I need a snack
but can't find a Belgian waffle shop.
Reichstag
Super ornate church
So the Kaiser had a palace in the olden days across the street from the crazy ornate church.
Then WWII and the Cold War, and the palace was replaced by a hideous glass
Soviet building that made everyone want to poke their eyeballs out (at least, that's how
I felt when I saw it in 2003). Then 1989 and no more Wall, and now they've
torn town the Soviet monstrosity and are replacing it with a new palace.
Yay!
Saturday morning before the wedding was a study in contrasts:
Niko: He got up at a normal time, showered, strolled down to the dry cleaners to pick up the shirt he'd forgotten to get the day before, watched a few episodes of Portlandia online (per my recommendation the day before) in his pyjamas. Eventually it was time to leave, so he pulled on his suit and tie and we headed out into the autumn morning.
Me: I timed my alarm so that I woke up exactly fifteen minutes before Niko said he was setting his so that I could quickly get in and out of the bathroom without interfereing with Niko's pre-wedding routine (which I assumed he had). While he showered, I reviewed and practiced each of the songs that I'd be singing during the wedding. I wrote and scrapped a couple of blog posts, ate breakfast and did the dishes, sketched out an action plan for the unscheduled afternoon hours, planned my outfit for the evening reception, and then showered, dressed and was ready to go with twenty minutes to spare.
In retrospect, it seems to me that there's no reason for a wedding guest (even one with a minor singing role) to be more neurotic on the morning of the wedding than the groom himself. Sheesh. Can you imagine what it would be like if I was the one getting married?
Anyhoo, our first task was to pick up the flowers. They turned out lovely and, from what I could tell, exactly what QN had in mind.
From there, to the church -- which I loved. It was all modern, with a large, light-drenched, acoustically live chapel for the wedding.
Once inside the church, I set about figuring out what I was supposed to do for the music. QN had asked me to prepare two hymns for the opening and closing -- but I had no idea how Catholic masses (especially wedding masses) normally worked and I was anxious about throwing everything off. For example, I didn't even realize until the day before that I wasn't expected to sing a solo, but rather to lead the congregation in singing the two songs. Nor did I learn until that morning that it was customary to have the audience stand for the songs. It's never been so obvious to me just how Protestant Mormon meetings are!
Meeting customs aside, I was also nervous about the mechanics of the music itself: I would be near the pulpit at the front of the room -- but the organist would be in the back of the room facing away from me. I had hoped to have some time with the organist to practice the pieces, address any technical issues, and align our thinking with respect to tempi, dynamics, etc. The organist, on the other hand, had his own agenda. He ended up granting me only about five minutes -- and in that five minutes it became blindingly obvious that although he was a very talented and professional musician, he was not an accompanist. He had little interest in hearing anything I had to say about how I wanted the music to go. He also insisted on making up his own accompaniment instead of playing from the sheet music that QN had provided to me. It's one thing to change the key of a song, but it's quite another thing to change the accompaniment -- suddenly he was adding music between verses that, to my mind, shouldn't have been there, and I was placed in the position of having to take cues from him for tempo and entrances because I could no longer rely on the sheet music. Which, let's just say it, was a frustrating role reversal for what should have been the conductor/accompanist relationship. Further, he had settled on a tempo that would have been delightful for an organ solo but was way too fast for a congregational hymn -- I knew that most people would not be familiar with the hymns, many would be uncomfortable with singing in the first place, and so they needed the organist and me to make it as easy as possible. I tried to get the organist to understand this, but then my five minutes were up and we split for the ceremony to start. I went back to my seat reminding myself that I can't control everything and praying that everything would run exactly the way I wanted it to.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite. The opening hymn was okay -- it felt a little shaky to me because the organist was buried behind the standing audience, so I had to rely exclusively on the sound of his playing to catch tempo and entrances (since clearly he was not watching me). The problem is that given the distance of our separation in the church hall and the degree of reverberation, there was an inevitable delay between the sound and what I should have been conducting (I do have enough experience singing with organists in Catholic churches to know that a good accompanist will have a mirror to carefully follow the conductor and will actually anticipate the beats so that the sound of the organ aligns with the visual cues of the conductor, it's tricky but awesome when done well). He also tried to add his inter-verse accompaniment bits, which just didn't work for the audience that was reading from sheet music that didn't include those interstitial moments. Thankfully, he ended up abandoning the interstitials and just played the music as written.
The closing hymn, on the other hand, was kind of a disaster, at least in the sense that it didn't go as I'd planned. Part of the problem was the organist -- he picked an extremely quick tempo (even faster than before, despite my instructions to slow it down) that exacerbated the acoustic delay problem and left the audience in the dust (it's sad, as the conductor, to watch inexperienced singers struggle to keep up). But the other part of the problem may have been my fault: I may have ended the song too soon! And I say "may" because I'm not entirely sure. All I know is that after doing everything I could to hold everything together with some semblance of grace and order, I got to the end of the last verse and waited for the organist to do his closing flourish in the accompaniment. The flourish ended up being an entire additional run-through of the song, which seemed unusual to me, but since the organist had gone off-book, I just assumed it's what struck his fancy at the moment. But then, after the ceremony was over, the organist came up and asked me why I stopped singing. I had no idea what he was talking about and asked him why he played another verse of the song. That was the crux of the error -- either he played one too many verses, or I sang one too few. Given my preoccupation with the fast tempo and my concentration in trying to keep everyone together with the organist, it's entirely possible that I skipped a verse without even realizing it. Which, if true, is very embarrassing. But I didn't say a word to anyone. I've performed enough that I know better than to apologize for mistakes -- you just make them big and push on with confidence; most people won't realize that anything was wrong (and if they do, it's not like drawing attention to it will fix anything).
But enough about me and the music -- although this post is about me, the wedding was all about QN and Niko, and the music was just a tiny part. The real take-away is that QN and Niko got married and the ceremony was beautiful in both its substance and its linguistic presentation (different portions were presented in French, German, Vietnamese and English -- a great symbol of the mixing of families, cultures, experiences and interests of the couple). QN looked gorgeous in her custom-made gown, and the recessional through the great double doors of the church, complete with full wedding bells, made me think of the wedding scenes at the end of so many Disney princess movies.
After the ceremony and light refreshments, I joined the other former IEP students and went into the downtown area to find some lunch and hang out before the dinner and reception started later that night. It was cold and rainy, really terrible weather for sightseeing (and there weren't any sights to see in that stretch of street, anyway).
We ended up just camping out in a "typical" Bavarian restaurant that was such over-the-top kitsch (complete with busty women in dirndls carrying giant mugs of beer, with oompa music in the background) that it would have felt right at home in Disneyland. Naturally, everything on the menu involved some combination of meat, potatoes and cabbage. The French folks (who'd picked this place) instantly became squeamish and started looking for menu items that looked more French than German (half of them ordered a plate solely because the cheese was described as "similar to Camembert"). I, on the other hand, adopted the "when in Rome" philosophy and ordered sausage with sauerkraut.
After polishing off our sausages and pretzels, we split to refresh ourselves for the reception that night. I went back to the apartment to change out of the suit and tie that I'd worn in the morning and into slacks and a blazer with a bow-tie (QN had specifically mentioned that bow-ties were welcome -- and she was right, at our table alone half the men were wearing bow-ties). Dinner was a tasty array of classic cuisine:
Quail in raspberry sauce, frisee salad with balsamic vinaigrette and figs
Salmon with pesto risotto
Praline ice cream wrapped in marzipan with rhubarb and currents
The reception was enormous fun. It was held on the top floor of a building overlooking the Gendarmenmarkt, which is flanked by a neoclassical theatre and two churches -- one German and one French, built for the French huguenots who were welcomed to Berlin to escape persecution in France. The details of history aside, the big picture theme of the location had a nice symbolic echo to the Franco-German alliance of the newlyweds. We ate and talked and looked at pictures of QN and Niko from when they were little. Grit, another of my best friends from the Rennes year, was there with her boyfriend and it was really great to be able to catch up with them -- we hadn't had much contact since the Croatia vacation in 2010 (Grit and Andre joined QN, Niko and me for the last half of that trip).
After a while, they cleared out a section of tables and the place became a dance floor. QN and Niko started with a well-practiced waltz, and then everyone else joined in for more modern dances to pop music, as well as some traditional Breton dances (the link being that Rennes -- where QN and many of her quests are from -- is located in Brittany, where Celtic, pre-French Breton culture remains vibrant).
Inviting the rest of us to join in
Niko et moi
One of the great things about wearing a real bow-tie is that you can untie it
late in the evening to show off that yes, it IS a real bow-tie.
QN et moi
Grit, QN, Andre
I stayed late (until about 1:30am) and would have stayed longer had I not needed to leave for the airport before the crack of dawn. By the time I got home, packed, and figured out how to get from Niko's apartment to the airport early on a Sunday morning, it was 3am. An hour and a half later, at 4:30am, my alarm sounded and it was time to get ready to leave. Fortunately my travels today went perfectly -- I got home around 6pm, have partially unpacked (acknowledging that I'll just be packing for another wedding trip in three days), and will go to bed as soon as I finish this post.
I admit that in the beginning -- indeed, until the moment I landed in Berlin -- I wondered why I'd decided to go to the wedding. Wouldn't it have been better to go later when I could spend more time and avoid the conflicts with work and Mark's wedding? In some ways, maybe yes. But I loved being there for the wedding, getting to be part of the special day and having the chance to mingle with QN's and Niko's other friends and family. Not only did I feel like I was able to renew my friendships with each of QN and Niko, but I now feel further integrated into their broader network of family and friends. And isn't that, really, the whole point of all these traditions surrounding wedding celebrations -- the melding of two people and their friends and families? I think so, and I think the best wedding celebrations do that -- this one certainly did a lot to accomplish that goal. It was a whirlwind trip, and definitely worth it.
So. Berlin. There and back in three days. Thirty-six hours of wedding-related eating, singing, partying, dancing, speaking French, not speaking German, renewing old friendships, making new ones, saying farewell until next time. No sight-seeing. Almost no sleeping.
On that last point, I'm happy to report that jetlag actually makes it easier to keep up a breakneck pace of merry-making. I've had a total of 8.5 hours of sleep total since I got up on Thursday morning (0 hours on Thurs; 7 hours on Friday; 1.5 hours on Saturday), and I've hardly noticed it.
In other words, this weekend's jaunt to Berlin was a lot of fun. Extravagant? Probably. Worth it? Absolutely.
The reason for the trip was Quynh-Nhu and Nikolas's wedding. You may remember them from our travels through Austria, Hungary and Croatia a couple of years ago. We became friends (and they started dating) when we were all studying at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Rennes, France. Now, ten years later, they finally tied the knot officially.
I landed in Berlin shortly after 11am on Friday after a sleepless overnight transatlantic flight (sleeplessness due mostly to trailing work obligations, but also to a compelling murder mystery -- the body count was skyrocketing and I just had to know who dunnit). I found QN waiting cheerfully in the cheerless lobby outside of customs. She had the bright (verging on frenetic) energy of an extremely competent bride determined to play the gracious hostess to her guests while still finalizing the outstanding items for the wedding the following day. The hostess part was particularly challenging because she had people coming from the four corners of the globe. Literally. Friends and family from Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Estonia, the USA, Australia (and probably other places) were pouring in for the festivities. A few got lost in the shuffle, but most were well taken care of by the beaming bride. I was fortunate enough to arrive during a lull in arrivals, so I had a few minutes of one-on-one time to catch up without other distractions.
After a few more guests arrived, we dove into the city, distributing the others to their various hotels and finishing at Niko's apartment, where I would be staying.
View from Niko's balcony
View in the other direction.
The church where they got married is just around the corner to the left.
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to errand-running. We ordered the bouquet and boutonieres from a florist down the street, resolved a stemware problem at the Vietnamese restaurant that would be catering the post-wedding refreshments, and did a site-visit at the church to make sure the tables and chairs were properly arranged. (And by "we" I mean that QN and Niko did everything; I just went along and nodded as if I understood German.)
Eventually QN left to collect more guests from the airport, and Niko needed to meet again with the priest. I headed home to hang out my clothes (no iron yet in the Huynh-Bader apartment, so I needed all the help I could get) and rest for a minute before going out for dinner. Turns out I did, literally, rest for only a minute -- I had just set my alarm for a 20-minute nap when two of QN's friends arrived. I had met the guy ten years ago (enough to remember his face and name); but the girl was completely new (turns out she was the Maid of Honor). I didn't get a nap after all, but it was good to have a few minutes with just the three of us to build our acquaintance.
That night Niko and QN decided to divide and conquer: Niko took the German-speaking crowd to one restaurant (Chinese) while QN took the French-speaking group to a different restaurnat (Vietnamese). I was included among the French-speakers and had a great evening of spicy sauteed chicken and friendly celebration.
Spicy and tangy soup with mushrooms and seafood
Spicy stir-fried chicken
Turns out I had previously met most of the other French-speakers in Rennes or in Brussels, so with them I already had a foundation of acquaintance to build from. Everyone caught each other up on what they'd been doing and reminisced about the olden days. It was so easy and fun that I felt like I was in one of those movies about a group of friends that meets up for a special occasion only to have some drama come crashing down -- only no drama ever crashed down.
Charles, Christophe, QN, moi
Dave (the other American, also from DC), Hugues, Marie-Amelie, Mi-Kyu
My favorite topic of conversation: Vacation days. Our poor French friends each get between 45 and 50 vacation days per year (in addition to all the official holidays), all of which they are required to take. Only it's impossible to take that many vacation days and actually get any work done. So they inevitably have to roll untaken days over to the following year -- meaning that they end up having to carry these oppressive loads of vacation days from year to year. Eventually the burden becomes so great that they just have to have the government buy back some of those days -- but then guess what? the value of those days is taxed. So it's, like, quadruple oppression, or something. Honestly. Their lives are so, so hard. (That, plus the 35-hour work week and the fact that it's impossible to fire anyone, and we wonder why the French economy suffers...)
Dinner was the last organized activity of the day. When we'd finished I left the others at their hotels (they were all in the same neighborhood) and went back to the apartment, where Niko was getting ready for bed. I jokingly expressed my surprise at his early bedtime on his last night of "freedom", I mean, shouldn't we be out all night hitting the clubs on some last bachelor hurrah? To which he said I was free to go on my own. There were all types of clubs in Berlin, he said; surely some of them would be just right for me. For example, there were techno clubs and alternative clubs and "clubs for people who are ironic and smoke." Unfortunately, I'd left all my ironic tee-shirts at home, so I decided to go to bed instead.
Last night after seeing Tribes, we realized that the night was still young (it was only 9:45pm). So we ran back up to the movie theater at Lincoln Square and caught a screening of Mirror Mirror, the new Snow White movie with Julia Roberts and a handful of other interesting people. (And yes, if you're keeping track, this does mean that in less than 36 hours, we had seen two movies, one opera, one play, eaten at three notable restaurants, and toured a cathedral -- because that's how Amanda and I do New York.)
The movie was terrible. Visually very pretty, but in all other respects one of the stupidest movies I have seen in years. Almost offensively so. To the point that if I hadn't been so tired, I would seriously have contemplated leaving mid-movie (which I've only done once in my life). And because it was so bad, that's all I'm going to say about it.
Ballet Preljocaj: Blanche Neige
Infinitely more interesting and satisfying on all levels was the performance of Snow White by Ballet Preljocaj at the Kennedy Center (which I saw this afternoon, directly after getting off the train from New York). This French dance company (which is headed by Angelin Preljocaj) told the classic fairy tale in the form of a full-length narrative ballet but in the vernacular of modern dance -- so no pointe, no tutus; instead, we had funky modern movement in aggressive costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier.
I really enjoyed it. In particular, some of the highlights:
1. The piece opened with the good queen (Snow White's mother) alone on the stage in a long black dress, heels and a crown. She's enormously pregnant, and we see her give birth alone and in agony, and then die. Clearly, this was not going to be a whimsical romp.
2. When Snow White first meets the prince in the woods, they dance a very romantic pas de deux twice: The first time, when their eyes first meet, the music stops, and they proceed in complete silence. Then the music resumes and they repeat it exactly. It felt to me as though we'd seen, in dance form, the concept of spiritual creation preceeding physical creation: The dance without music was the spiritual connection between the lovers, and then the music brought them into the world and made it real. Such an interesting and unexpected effect.
3. The poison apple scene was completely terrifying. Rather than allowing Snow White to eat the apple and wait passively for the poison to work, the witch rams it violently down the girl's throat, tormenting her until she's dead. It felt like watching a poisonous snake take down a lovely bird.
4. When the Prince discovers Snow White's body, he doesn't just kiss her -- first he melts in grief, and then he takes her lifeless form and dances a tender and lovely pas de deux. It was surprisingly moving and, although he did eventually kiss her, I had the feeling that it was the dancing that brought her back more than the kiss. It made me think of Gisele, where the heroine supports the dying prince as he dances under deadly enchantment.
5. Oh, and speaking of dancing to death, guess how they kill the witch! They bring in the fatal red shoes (from that other gruesome fairy tale) and force them onto her feet -- she then dances frenziedly until she expires of exhaustion.
