Book of the hours

Christmas Eve I spent in midnight mass in Freiburg Cathedral, cold, and squished in on every side by Elliot and maybe a thousand other people, and seeing almost nothing, and hearing glorious ritual and music. There was also a tongue-in-cheek sermon by a rather charismatic priest, a slight twist on the standard New Zealand "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of consumerism": "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of overeating."

The very early hours of Christmas Day I spent outside and very cold, cycling to Emily's along a road that seemed endless. Christmas morning I spent waking Emily up (she has a fondness for dozing), and then making pancakes that changed on the fly to French toast when we realised that neither of us had bought milk before Christmas Eve shop closing. Christmas afternoon I spent visiting a really, really nice German family whom the university had acquired on its drive for holiday-day adopters for its lonely foreign students. We went for a walk in the Black Forest, and then I was showered with home-made Lebkuchen.

On Boxing Day Simon arrived from Princeton, safe, and with hair ruffled only to the correct degree, and intact apart from his suitcase, which British Airways had sent to London. (It was last heard of yesterday in Basel. With luck it will make it to Germany by the time he leaves.) On the day after Boxing Day we went shopping for replacement clothing, and studied ("studied") representation theory. Two days after Boxing Day, or rather yesterday, we left for Cologne, where we are still now.

It's a city of a million people. It's one of Germany's smaller big cities, and I picked it more or less at random to go see: it had Roman ruins and Rhine frontage, and less of a journey to get there than Berlin or Munich, and sillier and friendlier people than Frankfurt. We caught a lift up with Jutta, whom I'd found on the miraculous car-sharing website Mitfahrgelegenheit, the penniless German student's primary mode of transport. She was from a small town south of Freiburg originally, where she'd been staying with her parents over Christmas, but lived now in Cologne, where she was heading back to for New Year. She agreed that people from Cologne were silly and friendly: the local dialect is exciting, though she couldn't describe it, and on New Year the people stand on the bridges over the Rhine and let off fireworks. We went to the hostel and dropped off our bags.

We spent the evening with friends of friends, a middle-aged gay couple who run a dog-walking service in an eastern suburb. They were silly and friendly: they had a collection of miniature East German cars arranged on their mantelpiece, they served us pre-fizzed water, and we ended up chatting til midnight and crashing the night. They were also really interesting: we learned the German words for "nepotism", "deform", "taciturn" and "surveillance".

And today? The normal Saturday-sightseeing mix of sleeping in, wandering around, rushing through fantastic museums a little too close to closing time, and sitting exhausted in cathedrals pretending to pray. Dinner was a sausage Simon claims to consist of blood and fat, though I maintain it's only food colouring. Then we hung out in a cheap internet café with a loud Italian guy talking on Skype.

And then they all went home and had some toast. The end.

What we heard on high

It's Christmas Eve, and my 3000-resident "student village" has almost emptied for the holidays. Shops shut at 1 pm today, and will stay shut for the next two days. Despite having only the slightest dusting of snow out, it's bitterly, bitterly cold. I'm grateful for really powerful radiators, and for supermarket "Just Add Heat!" mulled wine.
Yesterday it wasn't cold. I went hiking in the snowy upper Black Forest, with Emily, and Elliot (American), and a couple of Kiwi tourist friends of friends. We took the rickety regional train 8 km east to Kirchzarten, the bus 5 km more to the village of St. Peter, and then walked 8 km from St. Peter to the next small village, St. Märgen. The route was high, white and full of Germans out for Sunday afternoon strolls. For the middle of a Forest, the countryside was surprisingly open, and surprisingly populated.

We reached St. Märgen in time to have a look around before the community choir carol concert we'd come for began. It was a small place (fewer than two thousand residents), with a lot of big decorative bed-and-breakfasts. I passed by a community notice board, according to which there was a lot going on. Nearer the church, we came across a sobering (Second World) war memorial: for St. Märgen's war casualties, it was unusual to be the only son in your family that was killed.

The carol concert was put on by the St. Märgen choir. It was amateur, but competent, and apart from an unfortunate trio of zitherists totally enjoyable. Elliot chatted up the locals with practiced smoothness, Emily and I burst into laughing at a heavily-Alemannic-accented rendition of Feliz Navidad ("We wanna vish-you-a Merry Christmas"), and we went home with O du fröhliche ringing in our ears.

I'm heading off now to hear midnight mass in the Freiburg cathedral, and then sleeping over at Emily's. Happy Christmas, everyone!

Under the weather, and really over the chill

I've been fighting a cold for the last few days, and consequently haven't been maintaining this diary in the manner to which it's become accustomed. A pity, too, since it means that my exploits downing tequila in antlers, and my long wait for 5 am (when McDonalds opens) in the Karlsruhe train station on the way back from Vienna, and my miraculous discovery of sparkly Christmas decorations in a back cupboard of the kitchen just hours after wishing for them, will go forever unblogged. Really a pity.

However, when times are tough, blogs must share in their writers' sufferings -- and I know mine bears its tribulations willingly. Thanks, darling.

Anyway, what I've been doing too much of this week to ignore -- apart from sneezing, and beating someone (he knows who he is) at internet Scrabble -- is goofing off with my classmates in honour of Christmas. On Wednesday afternoon, most of the way up the four flights of stairs to representation theory, I encountered Janine, who's also in the class, coming down. "Too boring to stay?" I wondered. No: the tutorial had been cancelled, by unanimous vote, in favour of a class trip to the Christmas market. We headed over, crocodile formation, and drank mulled wine in what even the Germans considered to be a cold breeze for an hour and a half.

After forty minutes' pretence of work, the same thing happened in differential geometry on Thursday. On Friday was our model theory tutorial, and there the celebrations had even been planned beforehand: everyone brought a plate of Lebkuchen, and we made tea. I should mention, in view of previous remarks, that the Lebkuchen produced by our mostly-male class were quite fabulous -- enough to make Emily and my jam circles (the result of a four-hour Wednesday bakeathon) look rather frumpy. And that only some of them were store-bought.

Somehow, I find Christmas festivities at university just indescribably cute. But I suppose it's really only the novelty: I've spend half my schooling in a country too fiercely multicultural for public Christmasses, and the rest in one where (summer) holidays start too many weeks beforehand for them to make sense.