A Room for Improvement

After classes at the Goethe in the evening, I generally grab a latte, or two, and head back onto the subway with my copy of The Magic Mountain (sadly, incredibly, I'm almost done) to catch the last bit of Aida rehearsals. Tonight I caught the last 7 minutes. But Christopher and Roy invited me to dinner.

I'm done with Kneipers. Done. (Kneiper: tacky, Oktoberfesty, Germanish casserole & wurst-centered bar/restaurant strangely like diners in Dallas.) The waitresses in Kneipers don't like to draw straight lines with their eyeliner pencils and you can't get the taste of wurst out of your mouth. Roy and Christopher go to one nightly. When I couldn't finish my tomato soup-flavored overcooked pasta with cut-up ham squares (something you could only otherwise find 18-year-olds eating in the worst college kitchen after an all-night bender) the waitress refused to take my plate away.

Rehearsal this morning was one big hilarity. The stage had been built super high for this production (for reasons I can't discern), putting the singers & chorus a good 3 feet higher than they'd normally be. This puts the orchestra a good 3 feet further away from the singers than it would normally be, and Renato Palumbo (semi-famous conductor who looks like he's in the Sopranos) likewise. Renato had a fit. So rehearsal was effectively ended and a group of thick workmen with cigarettes, tattoos, slick hair and leather came out to rig the orchestra up a couple feet in the air while everyone else left in a huff. I'm not sure where these guys come from, how they raised a 50-person orchestra 3 feet in the air, or more particularly, why they work in an opera house and not at a kegger at Oktoberfest, but they're hysterical. It's like going to a nursing home and finding that your 90-year-old grammie is being cared for by a 250-lb. ex-professional weightlifter with long, greasy hair.

This weekend I move to a new apartment (my 119th since being here?) footsteps away from the Institut so I can spend my remaining days in Berlin in the smack dab center of the city studying my butt off -- apart from buying flashcards, I wouldn't say I've studied hard so far -- and going to as much theater as humanly possible. Something to look forward to.