On Thursday the 19th there has been the twenty years Party of the Kindergarten where I work...there were almost all the children with their parents, playing and eating some bloody pasta and some nice home-made cakes...everybody was in the garden...there was also a show for children, made by a woman dressed like a tiger....
I was really happy of the whole situation: it was nice to see that the children run to me to tell you just Hallo, that the parents smiled at me, and that the teachers considered me as part of the school, one hundred percent...

But the coolest thing happened when the party for the family finished and I went with 15 teachers upstairs to drink some wine....photos of ten years ago came out, stories of the past, told in this strict Berlin accent, came out as well...and I could feel at a very intuitive level that I am working in Eastern Berlin...I loved it...

Yesterday I went to this German-Czech Jazzfest, that turned to be OK but a bit too poppy for my taste...mostly because when I think about jazz on one side, and about the amazing players that I heard in Czech, I feel like I miss something for sure...and then there is this kind of typical Czech attitude of making charts of anything: when you study Economic History of the previous socialistic Eastern European Countries, it is easy to find some Czech authors who will tell you that Czech was the 8th biggest world economy in the 1920s, in every essay the will write....or that Czech always scored better than any other previous brother-country from any of the European standards - that is actually not true...or that the mountains on the Czech side are nicer...
So it is Ok I guess, but why should I care about the fact that the piano player I am listening was ranked among the best 10-12 European piano players of 2006, according to some magazines...I mean: since he plays a cheasy version of Fragile, full of funny (negative meaning) keyboards sounds...?
Anyway that was the first thing the leader of this band - Shanti (ethnojazz v Ceske Republiky) - said....hmm....


It was cool though: I met a woman from Prague there, who actually offered me a ticket for half of the price: we obviously talked in German: since she lives in Germany since 1966 it was the language we could both talk well enough...

TIPS

Last week I read a book by Agotha Kristof, the first of my life: Hier....amazing, probably less than 100 pages...but so intense and so direct....read it, if you do not have a book on your table right now...by the way she is somehow a product of what happened yesterday, exactly fifty years ago...
Right now I am reading a book by Coetzee: the beginning sounds really good...

So after such a kind pretentious cultural part, a short story to make you all laugh ( hopefully): Lost in Translation

A nice week to everybody...

P.S. It would be nice if the people who read this lunatic blog could post something from time to time...just to keep some more contacts...
Tschüß.