More Miscellaneous

A couple of unrelated items to add today.

First, on both Saturday and Sunday, there were more anti-Harz IV marches. The first one drew 50,000 people, the second, apparently, considerably fewer. The second was advertised as a "Sternmarsch," or a "star-march," with several different starting points. That may have been too hard for the hard-core hungover unemployed, or else maybe everyone was pooped from marching the day before.

The ultimate reason for this is that Saturday is going to be a national holiday, perhaps the most hated one of all: the Day of German Unity, guaranteed to spawn a riot or two, and a lot of ill-will around the still unhealed wound between East and West. It's a good day to either leave town or else stay indoors. But they seem to be celebrating it all week, since there's a Ferris wheel set up at the Brandenburg Gate, and a lot of bratwurst stands.

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The graffiti scene here continues to get wilder. From scrawling on a flat surface, to using a stencil, to pasting a sheet of paper, now we have the crochet graffitists! I'll have to post a picture of these, because they're just too weird to believe. A long, green, stemlike structure is anchored in a flower pot, leaves are meticulously added, and various stuff is integrated into this sort of vine-like plant of string. I've seen two so far, only formally similar, enough so that you can tell they're the work of the same person or people. I should photograph them before the inevitable vandal comes along.

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And I don't want to leave the impression that I didn't get anything out of PopKommm, either. Taking the S-Bahn there in the mornings, I finally saw the huge Centro Italiano, the wholesale market for the Italian restaurant and deli trade, with retail prices for the rest of us. I went there today and was fairly impressed. Easy to get to from here, too.

The other thing I got:

A cold.

Off to honk some more.