Good Week

So we left off with Sunday's hike.  Let's skip to Thursday.  The international student group all went ice skating.  It was quite a good time.  I take for granted that ice skating is a part of our culture and we've all grown up doing it at least annually.  Not the case worldwide.  For much of the group, it was their first time putting on skates.

Come Friday, I found out that Germany does have hardware stores very much like what I would find at home.  I went to "OBI" and found some good wood glue to fix the guitar I broke...  I also used it to fix the hole I made in the wall when I tore a picture down. 

Saturday morning I got up early (8am) to make sure I had eaten and woken up by my 9am appointment with my landlord.  The meeting was about finding a bike.  See next entry for details.  It made me happy.  That afternoon I met up with a friend from PUMA (Lisa) to go the Toy Museum (Spielzeug Museum) in Nuremberg.  For just 3€ it was quite a good time.   A few pics below.  This morning, the church who provides us a room for the international student meetings invited us all to the service followed by lunch provided by them.  I quite enjoyed it.  We went for a stroll afterwards around a part of the city I hadn't seen before.  All I keep thinking though is, "wow, this would be so much more awesome in summer!"  Oh well, summer is coming.  I can't wait.

In other news, I got a biomechanics of footwear book the other day from 1987 written in German.  I'm going to try to plow my way through that.  My flatmate also finally finished unpacking and is going to lend me a few novels in German to try reading.  That's all for now.  Off to write an entry about bikes!

These folks flip one over the other down the stairs like a slinky

This is a toy kitchen.  Many of the ovens let you put a candle in to heat water.

Stieff toys "with button in ear" was their slogan.

American toys - Popeye the Sailor man

Lisa at her masterpiece

A Tale of Two Cities

I hope you all watched wishbone growing up. If you didnʼt you really missed out. Well
most of what I knew about Charles Dickensʼ A Tale of Two Cities I knew from Wishbone
and even that I remember very faintly. Their rendition was made all the more confusing
because a key in the book is that there are two men who look almost identical, but in the
Wishbone rendition one role is played by an man, and his doppelganger is played by
Wishbone (a dog), so I didnʼt realize they were supposed to look a like.


I just finished reading the book the first time. Absolutely brilliant. Charles Dickensʼ way
of introducing and developing characters and weaving their lives through each othersʼ is
fascinating. The incredible evil during the French Revolution is so vivid and so near,
both in time and space, just a few generations removed from us, one country away from
me where my cousin is now studying fashion (or actually just finished). Itʼs so hard to
imagine living under such oppression, leading to so much revenge and bloodshed, and
yet on this very planet, just out of earshot from most of us, there are still similar things
going on.


Another theme throughout the book is living a life that was worth it, not wasted,
remembered by posterity, unselfish, quiet heroism. We always feel though like such
acts of courage are of another time because none of my friends are on their way to La
Guillotine, but as noted just a paragraph earlier, Iʼm fairly sure that there are
opportunities in this world for us to risk our lives to make life better for those that are
suffering. It would really be a shame to come to the end of life and realize you had
been pretending that everything was good and just, and that no innocent were dying, or
poor were starving while your eyes were closed to it. In the story is seems so blatant,
as the Marquis de Monseigneur runs over a baby with his carriage and he drops $50 to the parents and
continues on his way to his summer cottage built of the oppression of the town in the
valley below it, whom he has taxed to itʼs starvation. Every luxury he has comes at the
expense of the abused. In our case we have a few layers of middle men to buffer us
from the poor that support our needs, but itʼs there nonetheless, and in our day of world
wide communication at our fingertips, ignorance is not an excuse.


Work hard and be profitable, but not to your own end. Pull those up underneath you
who have allowed you to rise in the first place and have woven your shoelaces by hand.
Sorry for getting all intense. Iʼm really scolding myself first and foremost. Read the
book to yourself, and keep some of those thoughts in mind. Even if it doesnʼt bring you
to the same place, it is at the very least brilliant literature and you wonʼt have lost
anything by reading it.


Iʼm still trying to figure out how this post fits with my post on JOY. I donʼt support living
in wretched misery so that you can save all the worldʼs poor (though I may come to that
conclusion before long, who knows?).


“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” - that would be a good sentence to finish my life with I think.