Demonstration

About a week and a half ago, in Heiligendamm, there was a G8 summit, accompanied by the usual demonstrations, skirmishes between demonstrators and police, arrests, and other newsworthy stuff. Last Friday, it turned out that although the summit has long ended, the demonstrators and police are still going strong. On the Universitätsplatz, some people were braving the drizzle and handing out small leaflets complaining about the treatment of the demonstrators by the police, and calling for a human rights commision to be installed, whose duty it would be to check that the police abide by the laws they claim to uphold. I also got a leaflet, and looked at it, whereupon the person who gave it to me said: "I don't know what's in there, I'm just drinking beer [showed me his bottle] and handing out leaflets."
I went into a shop to buy something, and when I came out again, I found some fifteem policemen in pure green uniforms¹ idly standing by and watching a demonstration of about five people with signs around their necks (I unfortunately forgot to read them). I asked what was going on, and a lady standing next to me cheerily informed me that 'we were being checked'. As I did not have a Personalausweis with me, although foreigners should always have one at hand, I did not share her apparent feelings on this. It turned out, however, that only the participants in the demonstration were being checked, since they had not requested permission to proceed with this demonstration from the local authorities. The officer who told me this said: "It's no big deal, they can go on demonstrating, but we'll just take down their names." I stayed a while, to see whether anything would happen, but when after five minutes nothing noteworthy had taken place, I decided to go home.
On the whole, I felt this 'clash' was best described by the German word 'gemütlich'.

¹The German police wear green, but these uniforms were slightly different from the ones worn by the usual patrols. Maybe they were riot police...

Midterm fatigue

At UC, people always used to (and probably still do) hail an approaching midterm break with comments like 'it's high time,' or something to that effect. Although I often shared this feeling, I could never help wondering what would happen without the break. The old and venerable Ruperto Carola¹, standing firm against such modern hupsafladder² as breaks in the middle of term (except if there is a real reason, such as Christmas), presented me with the chance to find out.
I don't know whether it is that I have become accustomed to being able to do nothing for at least one in eight weeks as a consequence of being pampered at school and in college, or that I am just lacking the inner fire that is required to push further the boundaries of human knowledge, or that I am just lazy, but I do notice a distinct drop in motivation, after nine weeks' going. I now need to tell myself to sit down and do my homework, even though the homework itself has not become more or less time-consuming, interesting, boring, or enlightening than it was at the beginning of term.
So, apparently, if this small sample (N = 1) can be taken as representative, the welcoming of the midterm breaks at UC was justified on my part.

¹Officially, the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.
²Dutch readers unfamiliar with the work of Marten Toonder: shame on you. Non-Dutch readers: hupsafladder is a Dutch word coined in the 1970s by Marten Toonder, a Dutch author whose work enjoys high popularity and quotation rates in my family, roughly meaning the opposite of 'old and venerable'.

Choir weekend

Singing. Tired. Nice music. Party. Warm. Continually dry throat. In short: choir weekend (in June).
The usual ingredients were there: lots of singing; a party on Saturday evening; decidedly less than the optimal amount of sleep; doing the warming up an octave down on Sunday morning; etc...
Some things were different than last time: there was much less dancing at the party this time, and more talking outside, to avoid getting altogether dehydrated. The bass sectionals were in the chapel of the place where we were staying (something church-related), so the guy leading our sectional got to play the organ instead of the usual second- to third-rate keyboard also known as Gummiklavier. Which was nice: when we were falling asleep, he would just play the orchestra's part, with all four limbs, and we would quickly return to singing to make him stop :).
People seem to be more confident that the performances are going to be good. It's justified, I think: we know the music much better than last term at this point, and simply have less to learn in total. This piece is usually four-voiced, sometimes five; last term, we had something usually six-voiced, sometimes four, sometimes ten. And this time, people know the lyrics already.

Of course, some things were the same; as the conductor said: "Singen wir jetzt das Lied über den Dirigenten: `dieser Mensch hört nicht auf zu reden Lästerworte'..."

QED, at last

After 3/4 academic year studying general principles of quantum field theories with examples from toy theories like φ⁴, we have finally come to quantum electrodynamics (and QCD and QFD), to the real world! Not that it looks very different, more real or something, but at least we are talking about electrons instead of undefined 'particles'. Again, not that electrons are that well-defined (elementary particles are still a bit of a mystery to me), but still, they make up much of our bodies, for example. And that makes the whole topic feel more 'real', in a sense. It's nice :).

More music

Slightly delayed: I've seen the Wise Guys :). Last weekend, in Rennerod, which is located am Arsch der Welt, as I was told by a stranger on the Limburg am Lahn train station. Apparently, the German public transport system agrees: it took me the better part of the afternoon to get there by train and bus, and only two hours to get back by car. Interestingly, despite this unfavourable location, the audience consisted mainly of people not from Rennerod, if I remember the poll results¹ correctly.
The show was as good as usual, funny, well-sung, generally well-presented, with a nice mix of old and new songs. Unfortunately they again didn't sing Achtung! ich will tanzen; I've been hoping to see this one for three shows now, but hitherto in vain. The other slight drawback was that the audience was clapping the rhythms of most songs very enthousiastically, which made the songs themselves a little hard to hear at times. On the other hand, the audience's Schunkeln during this song was all the more real :), especially as it was a standing concert.

I have also seen Don Giovanni, which was refreshingly easy to follow, both story-wise and musically. On the other hand, it did at times seem to become just a comical series of very well-performed songs. It strongly reminded me of professor Kügle's² remark that Mozart effectively integrated the opera seria and opera buffa genres: most of Don Giovanni's scenes were obviously intended comically, whereas Donna Anna and consorts seemed to come from the standard early 18^th-century Italian opera.
On the whole, I felt that it was a very suitable opera for newbies like me, precisely due to this mixing of comical and serious genres, and the relative lightness of the music. There is probably much more to be found in there that I didn't notice yet, but it was nice to see nonetheless.

¹They always conduct a small poll on the audience's geographical and age distributions and familiarity with their music.
²From Utrecht, taught the course on Western music history I took at UC which is the source for most of my amateur musicological ramblings ;p.