Wild Raspberry Jam

The very, very best jam in the world is made from wild raspberries and jam sugar, nothing else. Most years I will go berrying and get a liter of blueberries and a few tiny wild raspberries. If it's just a few I'll eat them myself, but since the neighbors who water our plants when we are gone really like the jam too, I tend to make that extra special effort to find enough for a smidgeon of jam.

This year, everything is different. There are almost no blueberries - I have enough for decorating fruit salad, nothing more. But raspberries, oh my! The bushes we planted years ago against the fence ducked under and are now loaded with big, thick, sweet berries. But the sides of the roads and the woods are filled with wild raspberries, some as big as cultured berries are most years. And they are soooooooo sweet! I got half a liter in just one hour, so I cleaned them, put them in the fridge and went out the next day for another half a liter. With a liter of berries I can make four little jars of jam. That's one for the neighbors and three for me ;)

A friend just tried making jam herself for the first time this week. When she was done, she
twittered: Why do people *buy* jam? It's so easy to make and so much more delicious! Indeed, you have complete control over the contents (save a bug or two). So what are you waiting for? Make your own jam today, it only takes a liter of berries, 500g of 2:1 jam sugar and some sterilized jars, you are done in half an hour.

Welcome WiseGrandkid!

A very warm welcome to the world is extended to WiseGrandkid, who was born this past week to WiseKid and his girlfriend! WiseGrandkid showed up two weeks early, so I dashed back from vacation to spend some time getting to know this sweet young thing. Okay, up until now it has been sleeping and crying that I've seen. But such a sweet young thing, with a face full of lanugo - so soft to touch!

I went along for the First Walk with the new baby buggy this afternoon, and noticed something interesting. It used to be that walking with WiseKid would cause people coming towards us to frown at us, let us pass, or even walk on the other side of the street. WiseKid likes to look mean, and scares people.

But with him pushing a baby carriage or holding the little one in his arms, the elderly folk walking towards us positively beam - and sneak a peek into the buggy.

WiseKid seems to have paid attention to some of my rants after all - he has requested No Pictures Posted To Facebook Or Other Social Media Places. I suppose he remembers still the episode in the fifth grade in which some girls googled a picture of him as a baby. We needed a lot of effort to get that one removed from Google's databases (but it did work!).

I look forward to be getting to know WiseGrandkid in the near future, and will do my best to ignore the "It-must-be-pink-or-Hello-Kitty" requests from her Dad. Wait - that makes me a grandmother. I'm not old enough for that yet!

Bruce Springsteen in Leipzig

For complicated reasons we didn't make it to see Bruce Springsteen last year when he was in Berlin with the Wrecking Ball Tour. We had seen him in the Waldbühne maybe 20 years ago, I remember finding it strange, all these Germans singing "Born in the USA" with such inbrunst! So when the concert was announced in Leipzig, we figured that was just down the road and got tickets.

We took a train down this morning (yes, 7 minutes late), visited the Museum of Modern History, drank a Hugo, had lunch-dinner and then walked to the stadium. Oh my - it was the old stadium they had the youth sports festivals at in the DDR, far too large for modern Leipzig, so they ripped out the decrepit seats and put a new, smaller stadium inside. Meaning you walk 80 steps up, 60 steps down, 60 steps back up and 15 or 20 back down. I was exhausted!

Bruce Springsteen kept us waiting 45 minutes without explanation, people were getting kind of impatient. Then, finally, he stepped before the crowd of 45.000 people and began singing.

After a few songs he went down to the front row and collected signs, singing a few of them. Perhaps he just picks the signs for the songs he will be singing anyway, but one did not please his band, it took a while before they were able to play it. He sang many uncommon songs, and then in an encore series many old favorites. He didn't give a damn about German curfew laws and sang 45 minutes past the quiet time, so we did get 3 hours of solid rock - no breaks!

He had some typical show bits like getting the cameras to focus on a hefty woman in pink just shakin' it, dancing with another woman, and pulling 2 kids up on the stage. One was great, she actually sang in English, couldn't have been more than 10! The other one was scared, just looked at Bruce in awe instead of playing guitar.

I found myself - post PRISM - uncomfortable with the American flag and some of the songs. I like the music, but "We take care of our own" sounded very arrogant tonight.
Bruce played on and on - he loves to sing and his voice was just as strong after 3 hours as it was in the beginning. We were glad we booked a room (another Bed and Breakfast without Breakfast for an atrocious price), although the Leipziger are extremely efficient carting people downtown with trams, we would have just made the last train back to Berlin. So more sightseeing here tomorrow, and Bruce on the iPod for the trip back!

(Updated to fix spelling problems from typing on tablet and links added. And no iPod on the trip back because the train was packed to the gills and we didn't have reservations. We sat on the floor.)
Update 2: Here's the set list from Bruce Springsteen's home page and some notes!

Bed and Breakfast without Breakfast

Oh dear, I seem to have quit regular blogging...

Just got back from Würzburg where I spent a week researching in the library there. They have some great stuff in the estates of two professors, someone should really get paid to publish some of this as a book.

Anyway, I booked a Bed & Breakfast for the week, as it was cheaper than the cheapest hotel, and centrally located, so I decided to try it out.

The lady noted that there was no sink in the kitchen, but I could wash the dishes in the bathroom sink. Okaaaaay. Oh, and it was without breakfast (!), but it was above a café, so you could easily get breakfast in the morning.

They did have good coffee and butter croissants, and it was nice having a little kitchen so that I didn't have to eat in a restaurant every evening.

But oh my - there was a discotheque across the street. Not enough that the street car zipped through regularly, but the youth just loved this place. Starting at about 10 pm they just noisily showed up at the joint, talking loudly, coming out for a smoke and jokes, and having a grand time until 3 am or so.

But other than that: Unfriendly lady who gave me the key and took my money, great bed, lots of hot water, and a bitch washing dishes in the bathroom sink. But I spent four nights in Würzburg for the same price one night in Munich would have cost me, so I'll probably do it again.

Better than Eurovision

We were driving around Skania, looking at churches and castles and stuff and hit Dalby just after 3 pm. There were lots of young people rushing into the church, we thought there might be a wedding or something. But it was a choir, rehearsing for an evening recital.

About 25 young people, men and women, were practicing a gospel-sounding song that I had never heard before. They were so enthusiastic and the director, a very young man, was so energetically pulling sound from them and weaving an amazing song that we sat, fascinated. After a short deliberation over coffee we decided to skip attending the church service in Lund and instead go listen to this choir.

We got there early, but there was already a line. We managed to get seats rather far in the front, I was actually able to see the score, as I was just behind the elbow of the conductor. The choir, called Mixtum, presented a very varied program: Entire choir, women's choir, men's choir, solos, duetts, quartet, accompanied at various times by organ, piano, flute, guitar, djemba, tambourine - or just a capella.

They started with some standard Bach and a bit of Mozart and Purcell, then they sang a song that one of the conductors, Henrik Dahlgren, had composed. He arranged much of the gospel songs they sang later on in the program. My absolute favorite was the one we had heard during their practice: Days of Elijah, by Robin Mark. They were singing without a score, focused completely on Dahlgren, who was playing them like an instrument: louder, softer, repeat, modulate up, modulate back down. He had the whole church clapping along to the very catchy rhythm.

They closed with Ernst Toch's Geographical Fuge which was just hilarious! Time had just flown by, they had presented for over an hour and a half - and as the other conductor said: Hey, we could sing for 2 more hours if you would sit still for it. I believe her, they were so enjoying singing.

Much better than the songs of the Eurovision, and I'm so glad to see young people making music instead of just pushing buttons on a machine.

The Deep

The small movie theater across from the Cathedral in Lund had decided to extend the Icelandic film Djúpið (The Deep) for another week, so we were able to see it in original with Swedish subtitles. It is a film by Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelandic filmmaker who made the cult film 101 Reykjavik, among others.

It is a simple story - and a true one, apparently. Kormákur uses the first 3.5 minutes to check off all of the things that an Icelandic film must have: drunks; vomiting; pissing; gorgeous landscape of the Vestmannaeyjar (Westmann Islands); fighting over a girl. With that out of the way we see the hungover crew of a fishing boat take to the seas. They catch some fish, and have one bout of the nets getting caught on a jagged stone. They manage to free it, but soon the nets again get caught and the boat is threatening to sink. One of the sailors insists on cutting the net - the captain won't hear of it, as it is a brand-new net.

And so, the ship sinks.

Three of the crew die right away, two soon after. One guy, Gulli, solidly portrayed by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, decides to swim to shore - a distance of about three sea miles or 6 kilometers. He starts swimming, and a sea gull decides to accompany him. He keeps swimming, and eventually reaches a rocky shore. But the cliffs are so steep - there is nothing else to do but to go back into the water and swim around the tip of the island to a place where he can draw himself up.

He walks over sharp lava in the freezing air back to town and collapses at the door of the first house. He is treated in the hospital, and then subjected to tests - how could anyone have survived this? It remains a mystery. He returns to his island, takes care of the things he had promised God he would attend to if he lived as he was swimming, and he returns to fishing.

A deeply moving movie, exposing many aspects of a people who live - and die - by the sea.

P!nk in Berlin

Ooooh, I had tickets to Alicia Beth Moore's concert in Berlin last Friday. That is the artist known as P!nk. It was in the large sports arena on the other side of town, I was not sure that it would be that cosy, as 14.000 people fit into the arena.

We went early to get some dinner, but the choice was extremely limited, so it ended up being fish & chips. We had good seats in the upper deck, on the aisle, except that people kept getting up to go get more food and drink. The band Churchill led off at the dot of eight. Kind of ho-hum, but it was something to listen to. They played for 30 minutes, and then they started getting everything ready for P!nk. We could see the technicians clearly, and they had a big problem: two computer screens were pitch black. The technicians were flipping switches, checking cords, restarting computers, all to no avail. There were no chickens sacrificed, but they fussed around for 45 minutes while the crowd grew a tad restless. We wanted music!

But oh, the wait was worth it! It was like a three-ring circus, you didn't know were to look next. And P!nk is quite the acrobat, pulling all sorts of fantastic stunts AND singing attached to some guy wires. In the finale she flies out over the crowd standing in the inner field, and came quite close to us even.

She sang the songs from "The Truth About Love", and played one round of drums and one song at the piano. She was skimpily dressed - as were many of the dancers - and there were lots of snide remarks of a scatological sort. But the music was great and the show fascinating. I'm glad we went!