day 141: what happened to babe
what happened to babe © Verena Fischer
Yesterday in the shop when stocking up on food I certainly found proof that the festivities aren’t fun for everyone. I was a bit surprised that they sell whole piglets with the head and everything, but then I was too busy trying to take a picture to think too much about it. By the way, I’m sorry about the title, but sometimes I just can’t help it with the sarcasm. After all, you can either laugh or cry about it and laughing is probably healthier in the long run. For those of you who don’t know it: “Babe” was a film featuring a cute little piglet. It also reminds me of an album of Client that starts with the line “Life is cruel and then you die” which is awfully fitting for many situations, including this one. Sarcasm like this just proves that I’ve lived in England too long. There it’s very common to just make fun of the things that are beyond your control. Why let such things ruin the fun of it all?
Personally I actually find it quite good that you can find this in the meat section here. I have less of a problem with people who eat the little piglet anyway. My beef (excuse the bad pun) is with people who are entirely disconnected from the fact that their dinner cost the life of an animal. I precisely mean people who get squeamish about this sort of thing, but still eat meat since they don’t want to connect the dots. We all can decide how we live our lives and I think it’s important to remember that someone somewhere always pays for our lifestyle choices. It doesn’t have to be about the little piglet that died to be our dinner, it can just as well be about the electronic garbage that gets shipped illegally from the US, the UK, Germany, Italy and other countries to for example Ghana making it nothing more than a landfill for the richer countries. Awareness is key.
I hope this didn’t ruin your dinner … I myself will be grateful to a duck tonight. Happy New Year!
the year 2011
© Verena Fischer 2011
As the year concludes I look back at all the pictures I took in the last almost 5 months. 140 pictures I published here and there were many more that didn’t make the cut. It was quite a crazy time actually, finishing my degree, exploring Berlin, traveling, moving and during that time I’ve learned a lot about photography. And along the way you lovely lot were with me, commenting, clicking the like button and encouraging me to keep up my work. Thank you all for your support! I also would like to thank Julie @ Outtakes on the Outskirts, münchow and zendictive for nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award, I thank Nadia Elpis for nominating me for the Kreativ Blogger Award and PC Photo for nominating me for the Liebster Blogger Award. I feel flattered that you nominated me, but somehow I don’t seem to find the time to fulfill the conditions connected to the awards. I hope you don’t take it badly and I’m still really glad that you guys like my blog! I would also like to thank my top commenters: spilledinkguy, dhphotosite, KarenAnn, PC Photo, Mufidah Kassalias and robert che vola. I also follow your blogs regularly and to the rest of you I can only highly recommend to check out these links.
Maybe when I finish one year of this challenge I will post some of the “b-sides”, but for now I will just show you my favourites, in case you haven’t seen them already. I will pick two for each month that I’ve been taking pictures:
August
making the best of it © Verena Fischer 2011
2 doors down © Verena Fischer 2011
September
temptation © Verena Fischer 2011
architectural marvels © Verena Fischer 2011
October
where does it all end © Verena Fischer 2011
too golden © Verena Fischer 2011
November
city lion © Verena Fischer 2011
sleep photographing © Verena Fischer 2011
December
pretty much all of Hamburg © Verena Fischer 2011
Brühl © Verena Fischer
day 140: abstract street art
abstract street art © Verena Fischer
These markings on the street are like the politics that have us all entangled. On first sight it seems to make sense, but then after a while you get lost and start wondering what it all means. Politics, society, “common sense”. Maybe it feels like rope around your neck that is suffocating you slowly. Or maybe that rope is a mere imagination, which you invent whenever you feel as if you are in a situation that is beyond your control. In any case, in the end you want to escape, like any cornered animal. Let me tell you though … there is no escape from it all. Running off into the forest won’t help. Believe me, you will come crawling back and if it is only to rummage through the city bins. In the end you will be like the guy in Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep. Nobody will understand what you were trying to achieve, but everyone will know that you have failed.
day 139: lights in the dark
lights in the dark © Verena Fischer 2011
Flying is generally not my cup of tea. It usually involves too much waiting and too many crying babies to actually be enjoyable. I also used to be quite afraid of it, but lately not so much. These days I have a new thing to keep me distracted during take off: Photographing out of the window. Sadly the airplane windows are normally a bit fuzzy so especially at night I get a lot of glare, which was also the case yesterday. When taking off from Dresden there were no clouds and so we could see quite a few well-lit towns beneath us. One of them you can see in the picture.
day 138: fountain in winter
fountain in winter © Verena Fischer 2011
I remember from my childhood that you shouldn’t drink fountain water since there is nasty stuff in it. We obviously had to figure out what kind of stuff and put some of the water into a bottle. Let’s just say that even as a curious kid I was immediately convinced that drinking that would be a bad idea. For once, there seemed to live all sorts of nasty bugs in that water. I distinctly remember looking at that bottle and there was one bug that looked as if it had fangs. It was swimming in circles in the bottle, round and round, and it wasn’t something that lived on the fountain, no, it lived in the water. Bugs that swim? That was certainly new to me and I poured the water from the fountain in a bottle many times to look at the monsters living in there. I never saw the fanged monster again though.
This picture was taken at one of the fountains of the Brühl. In winter there is no water in them.
day 137: the ice-cube-lamp
the ice-cube-lamp © Verena Fischer
In the little extra room in my mum’s flat there is a set of lamps that creates fascinating patterns on the wall. You can agree with me that the name ice-cube-lamp is quite fitting for it. Yesterday I used it to test my new lens. As you can see with the picture yesterday it can have quite a softening effect if you focus on something far away with a wide aperture. For some purposes that can be quite an interesting effect. I however prefer images with quite a crisp foreground, so I was playing around with a wide aperture and focusing on the part of the lamp that was closest to me. It had a great effect throwing the rest of the lamp out of focus with the moody patterns on the wall. And what’s really cool is that the unsharp mask which I use to sharpen pictures taken with my other two lenses has almost no effect here, since the lens already produces really crisp pictures by itself. Sure, it’s the photographer and not the camera, but good gear really helps.
day 136: Brühl
Brühl © Verena Fischer
My mum lives close to the Brühl in Chemnitz. The area used to be very lively and I remember that it was full of people when I was little. I used to go there to do pottery when I was a kid. I was absolutely without talent there and produced a number of rather ugly deformed animals, but that’s another story altogether. Nowadays the Brühl looks like this, empty, run down. Almost all the buildings are abandoned and apart from one or two shops everything is closed down. In some houses there is only one flat inhabited, others stay completely dark at night. Over the years there were a number of projects to bring life back into the area, but all of them failed. The company that owns the buildings was against renting the flats to artists and young people for example. There will be another project, reconstructing most of the buildings from European funds, which should probably do the trick, but until then the area is a bit spooky. I avoid it at night when I’m alone, since my mum even was robbed there once. I like going there during daytime though, since it’s a great place to take pictures of decay.
day 135: santa’s surveillance van
santa's surveillance van © Verena Fischer
In our family my mum still tries to keep the pretence up that Santa is actually bringing the presents, although we kids are 26 and 30 now. This year there was definitely the least of this, but at some point my mum suggested that the presents were thrown in through a hole in the window. Uhm, right, no chimney here, but that must have been one big hole. I had some great presents, one of which was a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4! Since I take lots of pictures after dark it seemed like the best gear to get. I immediately tried it out for a bit and to take a picture of something rather dark I just photographed out the window with the widest aperture. In front of the house there was this white van parked and my brother said it looked like a surveillance van. Well, maybe it’s Santa’s van, since he has to make sure that nobody is looking when he puts the presents under the tree. Quite a challenge when we’re all in the same room.
day 134: reading
reading © Verena Fischer
Traveling means waiting. Killing time, reading, listening to music, eating, just so that the time passes. This man reads while waiting for the train. I took pictures of him while waiting for the train. For Christmas my family usually meets at my mum’s place in Chemnitz, where we all used to live. Only my mum lives there now and like most people who left Chemnitz, the rest of us have no plan of returning to this town. I don’t really know how it is now, but when I lived here it seemed as if there was nothing. Province. Even the gothic parties I used to go to were quite provincial in tastes. It’s as if the rest of the world moved a bit faster and had a better taste in music too. Every year we still come back, although we don’t do the old stuff anymore. We don’t go to the same parties, we don’t necessarily meet with the same people and when we do it’s sometimes shocking. Last year I ran into an old friend of mine at a party and was shocked that I ever considered him a friend. I don’t think he changed much. I changed. And that’s generally what going away does to you. It changes you and when you come back everything seems odd, precisely because it all stayed the same.
day 133: crazy horses
crazy horses © Verena Fischer
The other day Ezequiel and me went to he mall again to buy some headphones for me. My black Sennheiser PX 200 died the usual cable death after just about 2 years and I decided that 4 years with the same headphones were quite enough – I used to have the same ones in white. It took me ages to decide on a pair and the ones I wanted after reading reviews on the internet weren’t available in the electronics store. Well, in the end I went for some with not so good reviews, Sony MDR-ZX300, because I found them quite alright when trying them out at the store. First of all they fit me, which is hardly the case for my small head. As for the reviews I guess they just don’t sound right for people with bigger heads. Granted they are a touch too heavy on the bass, but most headphones are and it’s hardly enough for giving bad reviews. Unlike speakers headphones are very subjective business and in the lower price ranges the differences can be quite big. After trying them out extensively for a couple of days I can’t say anything bad about them. Especially for electronic music they’re really quite good. Comparable to my old Sennheiser ones with about half the price and way better cables.
After that success I took a picture of a little carousel in the mall. I actually found the smile of these horses quite creepy. However, I also don’t like clowns or amusement parks, so all of that might seem creepy to me.
day 132: down below: Gesundbrunnen
down below: Gesundbrunnen © Verena Fischer 2011
Just two subway stops from here is a mall. It’s quite big and I checked out a few shops the other day. I was surprised about the relatively big selection of gluten free products they sell in one of the shops and got myself a gluten free beer for the evening. Shame that they only sell lager, since I’m a big fan of dark beers. However, I’ve become less picky, since all I can get is a close approximation of the real thing. Once after trying out a different type of gluten free “bread” I called out “Wow, this almost tastes like … bread!”, but to be honest I hardly remember the taste. Same goes for most other processed foods. Coffee, nice yogurt, tiramisu, croissants, garlic bread, tortelloni and many other random things I miss. It’s like having lived in a different country and missing something that you can’t get at home. Just that it’s right in front of your nose all the time, but it would kill you in the long run. It’s so frustrating sometimes! However, you have to play the cards life deals you and it’s no use complaining about your fate all the time.
Well, I’m not complaining all the time. Every once in a while I’m allowed …
The picture was taken when trying to find a way out of the subway station at the mall. I got a bit lost and I think this part actually belongs to the train station. Close enough for the category “down below” though.
day 131: modern day pirate
modern day pirate © Verena Fischer 2011
Ezequiel was on the way into battle. The opponent: an IKEA chest of drawers. He had the knife in his mouth like a pirate and that was only the beginning. In the end we won, but it wasn’t easy. The instructions weren’t very clear and we had to build all the drawers twice. I guess, it’s just the normal IKEA madness. Now I have some space where to put my clothes. Since we’re traveling to my hometown on Friday I’m saving that joyful unpacking of suitcases, since I will be packing for our trip at the same time.
day 130: coffee envy
coffee envy © Verena Fischer 2011
In the morning Ezequiel has an espresso with a little milk. Maybe I mentioned it before, I don’t know, but I love coffee. Sadly I can’t drink it anymore since my body seems to reject everything that strong. I haven’t had coffee in 3 years, but still, every morning I feel like I really need one. Over the years I have reduced my caffeine intake to 0. When my health problems started I was trying to get off coffee, but always failed. I read somewhere that it takes only 3 days to get over caffeine addiction, but it took me two months to actually manage to not have a coffee for 3 days. After that I reduced it more. First I drank coffee, then black tea, then green tea and now I’m off caffeine. And I tell you, it sucks!
I have many fond memories of coffee. When I bought my coffee machine – a blue senseo coffee maker – it came with 3 different types of coffee to try. Of course I had to try them all. Extensively. So I had 6 cups of coffee. What I didn’t know was that one pad machine coffee has about double the caffeine of a normal filter coffee. So, over the course of the day starting in the afternoon I had the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee. I was buzzing! At 1am I called a friend and asked him whether he wanted to come over to have pancakes and drink coffee. And that’s what we did the rest of the night.
I also regularly drank a Red Bull copy called Booster. Once when we – that is me and some friends of mine – were driving to a party, one of my friends sat behind me in the car. He couldn’t see what I was doing and I opened a bottle of Booster. It has quite a strong smell, much stronger than Red Bull, so my friend on the back seat said “Verena, it smells of Booster, did you cut yourself?”
I miss those times. And I miss coffee. And every morning Ezequiel has his espresso with a little milk. And every morning I want to steal it from him! I guess, once an addict, always an addict …
day 129: no money – go looting
no money - go looting © Verena Fischer 2011
The area where we live now is supposedly not a good one. You don’t see any organic supermarkets, no cool shops, nothing expensive. Instead you have many kebab shops, cheap stores, internet cafés and casinos. Just like in the area where I lived before. I don’t mind it at all. In fact I prefer this international flair of borderline poverty to the artificial coolness of a “hip area” where you only see young muesli eating families. In Brighton they call one area “muesli mountain” and it’s precisely like that. Cool people pretending to be on a hippie trip. This area here seems more real. People have problems here and you see these “badly integrated migrant teenagers” roaming the streets. Seriously, they don’t even seem dangerous or as if they’re up to something. They just seem to have nowhere else to go.
There is an attitude that goes beyond that: “The government has done nothing for us, we just do the same”, but I don’t think everyone perceives it like this. On the subway I overheard a young migrant boy saying to his friend “I don’t get my dad, he’s so lazy, he hasn’t worked in years. If it wasn’t for the German system we would have nothing”. The other day when roaming the streets myself, I saw the poster on this stall encouraging looting if you don’t have money. However, I doubt that there is much space to actually do something like this around here. If you live in this area, it’s likely that one of your friends or cousins works in one of these stores that you could loot, so why would you do that? Might be that most of these kids are not going to be doctors or lawyers, but I think that the media overstates the case a bit when they talk about a “problem area”. It’s like the area where I lived before. You can either live peacefully in one of the backyards or side streets, or you can end up in a house where the police comes every week. And I don’t think this is going to be a problem in our house.
And for me it’s actually great: grocery stores sell gummibears 10 cents cheaper, since people around here are on a budget!
day 128: sometimes size matters
sometimes size matters © Verena Fischer 2011
On Saturday I went to Butlers to buy a few more mugs and bowls. I always liked these colourful mugs, but back when I had a flat in Düsseldorf I already had enough of such things, so that I had no space for them at all. Now I finally had a reason to buy them and Ezequiel likes them too. It’s an old bad habit of mine to buy too much stuff for the kitchen. It actually runs in the family, my mum also has lots of stuff for the kitchen she doesn’t really need or use. And there is definitely some more cupboard space in my kitchen for me to not restrain that habit!
On the way to Butlers I walked past the Institut Francais where I saw this boy having some fun. I looked around to locate his parents, but I think they were just standing having a chat nearby. The boy took his time to climb up there, almost fell over in the process, but in the end he managed and darted along the side of the building. If he had been any bigger, he wouldn’t have fit on there.
day 127: abstract view
abstract view © Verena Fischer 2011
Another picture that I took late at night after a day of trying to sort out things around the house. It shows the view from our bedroom window through the curtains. I like the patterns they create on the walls when the streetlights shine in. I remember many situations where I looked at patterns like those at night and strangely enough felt as if it was part of feeling at home. We could get thicker curtains, but I think I prefer it like this.
day 126: at night
at night © Verena Fischer 2011
Late at night I thought “Wait, I still have to take a picture!” and this is what came out of my efforts. The mug was handmade by my mother and I really like it, because it has lots of character. And as always when it comes to my flats, I end up with IKEA furniture too, the bedside lamp is from there. At one point I even had the nickname IKEA girl, since I had most of my furniture from there. Of course I got that nickname after watching Fight Club with a friend. Why we end up with IKEA furniture around here is easily explained though, since most furniture shops in Germany have not only ugly furniture with bad quality, but you also have to wait for ages to get it. I prefer the self assembly to that any time.
day 125: lost in translation
lost in translation © Verena Fischer 2011
These days I haven’t had much time to dance tango. It was all packing, moving out, moving in, buying and assembling furniture, the usual when you’re moving. My mum came to help us move the stuff from one place to the other and we also had to make sure that the builders that were still in the flat on Wednesday and Thursday actually did their job properly. They were slow, sloppy and at one point even wanted to saw into one of the kitchen cupboards. You basically had to stand right next to them and watch or else you’d end up with 3 different types of door handles in one room if they didn’t forget to put the door in altogether. When they gave me one of the mailboxes they broke 2 more in the process. And just as I was glad they were done we realised that one of the thermostats is broken. More builders, oh dear …
The picture shows an academic book about tango which I’m reading at the moment. There is this myth that you can’t write about a dance, because something gets lost in the process. However, I think such books can still help in understanding what’s going on when we dance.
day 124: packing skills
packing skills © Verena Fischer 2011
Tuesday was the day before my mum came to help us move to our new flat. As a result we were packing quite a bit and so this picture came about. The rubber duck was a gift from Ezequiel. And since he has moved many times he also has quite some book packing skills. Would you believe that almost all of these books I somehow accumulated only in the half a year I have been living in Berlin? It’s strange how they sneak onto your shelves without you noticing and suddenly you have to think about how to get them down the four flights of stairs! Our new flat is not that far up luckily, so for now moving out was much more annoying than moving in.
day 123: all that love
all that love © Verena Fischer 2011
I took this picture on the Christmas market next to the Gedächtniskirche after we signed the contract of our new big flat. It’s about double the size of my old flat and I really like it. The owners are doctors and apparently they have so much money that they can afford to own 160 flats in Berlin. We signed the contract in their doctor’s office and they are just the type you imagine when you hear this little fact about the number of flats they own. Hard to describe, but these are the kind of people who don’t really care how much money they spend. There is a nice probably very expensive built-in kitchen in the flat with all the perks which illustrates exactly this fact. Strange what kind of people you meet when you’re looking for flats.
And the Christmas market was great for taking pictures. I took many good ones, but I liked this one the best. Of course everything they sold would have been poison for me, but these stalls are still great to look at. I really liked how the bright colourful sweets contrast with the facial expression of the girl selling them.
day 122: another photographer
another photographer © Verena Fischer
I’ve been thinking about this shot for a while, but obviously I needed a second camera to pull it off. Since Ezequiel is here with me at the moment, I could give the hot water yeti his camera. It’s a Canon EOS Kiss X2, which is basically the same camera as I have, but bought in Japan. At least this way we have a way of not mixing up our cameras. Funny though that Ezequiel has the camera with the girly name. This picture only shows off that the yeti has even more hidden talents. He’s more than just a yeti, he is also a hot photographer. No pun intended …
day 121: spikes
spikes © Verena Fischer
These days I’ve been feeling a bit rough, so I just took pictures at home. Here I took a picture of a massage mat I have lying around. It’s rather crazy, since the spikes are really sharp and I only tried it once so far. Maybe I will use it more in the future, but somehow it seems a bit too dangerous for that. Not sure I’m the type to lie on spikes. At least it’s a subject for an interesting picture.
day 120: pure christmas spirit
pure christmas spirit © Verena Fischer 2011
Yesterday we had two flat viewings. The second viewing was quite memorable actually: The owner apparently sits all day in his office on the ground floor looking at CCTV cameras waiting for people letting their dog shit in front of the house. The guy was a gold watch sort of guy and what we would call “gutbürgerlich”. If this was a suburban rather than urban area he would be the one with the lawn mower. He was telling me all this stuff about his house in Spain and his daughter who is the official owner of the flat. Let’s just say that I wasn’t really impressed or, well, interested. I prefer renting a flat from a faceless company or from people who live far enough away so that I don’t always have dealings with my landlords. And above all I’m really not interested in any information about their relatives.
The flat itself was on the fourth floor and the current tenants were still living in the place. I have hardly ever seen a more hideously decorated place. From awful black plastic sculptures of headless naked women and men to the biggest brown sofa imaginable it had everything. Including purple rounded corner mini shelves. And of course there was a massive flat screen TV and not a book in sight! The living room had a view over the sports ground of the police station that was just in front of the house. The other guy looking at the flat immediately asked whether the sports ground was accessible to play football there. He fit right into the place. As the owner said “We only want nice people living here”. And I’m proud to not fit into that category, thank you, but no thank you.
Don’t get me wrong. Everyone can live as they please, with hideous sculptures and watching TV during all of their spare time, I don’t particularly care, since they would take their stuff with them anyway if we would move in. However, having some guy who is rich enough to own an apartment building sit there all day play landlord, that’s seriously out of order and ridiculous! You can believe me, the conversation I was forced to have with this guy was certainly not the highlight of my day. The good thing was though that after seeing this flat we could definitely decide to take another flat we had seen on Thursday. I called the estate agent yesterday and if all goes according to plan we can sign the contract on Monday.
The picture I took yesterday while trying to find an internet cafe with a fax machine. Serious Christmas spirit going on in this picture. And no, I’m not being ironic. Not at all …
day 119: play
play © Verena Fischer
Between rushing about to view flats, reading about tango, going to driving lessons I felt that I had little time to stop and take a picture. Only at night, in bed I finally picked my camera up and was taking a few pictures of Ezequiel and Señor Bunny. I picked this picture, because I really like the message and the colour of the T-Shirt. I couldn’t agree more, we all should play more and worry less. I guess I’m the last to follow this advice though, I tend to worry a lot, especially about the future. However, also with flat hunting I managed to take things as they go, which is at least a step forward. I just say one more thing: Play!
experiments in experience 