colour – bruecken_schlag

Schlagwort: colour

Early Morning Rome – The Colours of the Eternal City

Four years ago, in 2009, I spent four days in the Eternal City with the family I had lived with in the US for a year when I was 16. It was simply an amazing city trip. My host father had organized tours of all the major sights, we had all the delicious food (oh! the gelato!!) and the weather was perfect. What meant by far the most to me, however, was having time with my second family. Even though I only spent a fraction of my life with them, they do feel like my dad, my mom, and my little sisters. I am blessed to have not one, but two families in this world who I love and who support me so much.

In the light of this, I was soaking up the company of the people I love and don’t nearly see often enough so much that my heart couldn’t even take in all of Rome. On my last day, my host family left around 6 am to catch their plane. I got up with them and decided to re-visit the places we had been to during the last few days, but this time in the early morning hours – without the masses of tourists and the burning August heat of the day.

The light of dawn slowly turning into day accompanied me on my walk from Vatican City, via Piazza Navona with its beautiful renaissance fountains, to the Piazza della Rotonda with the Pantheon. The colours were simultaneously intense and almost muted – a weird twilight state, hard to describe. I took many opportunities to just sit down anywhere – on the pavement, if need be – and just note down my thoughts in my journal. I will quote from it below.

I have a thing for inscriptions, or any kind of writing on the wall (pun absolutely intended). I call them word sights. This one is a quote from the Bible in the Vatican City wall. How could religion not be omnipresent where Vatican City is? I was thrilled to remember my Latin well enough to understand it right away. This is Psalm 91, 11 – „For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.“ I was grateful that this inscription made me feel protected in this moment, because just a second earlier I had felt a tiny pang of loneliness after the last few days that had been spent in constant company. Vatican City was incredible at 7 in the morning. I remember sitting and looking at the ginormous basilica for a very long time, marvelling in the light effects the sun created. My journal says:

I am sitting in St Peter’s Square, the place that impressed me so deeply when I set foot in it for the first time on Saturday. It still reverberates in me – the presence of an unearthly power. Is it Love? Is it Beauty? Is it God? Does it really matter what we call it?

I pondered deeply on religion sitting there, and the difference between faith, religion and the church. I won’t bore you with all my babble on it. But I do think that no matter if you believe or not, no matter if you even care about religion, no matter your confession – having seen Vatican City will make you see things about it that you haven’t seen before.

On I went through the sometimes small and narrow, sometimes broader streets. One thing I regret is not having taken any pictures of bridges across the Tiber river – but I wasn’t the Bridgekeeper back then. All the more reason for me to go back, I am sure. I reached Piazza Navona still deeply in thoughts.

The beauty of the Renaissance fountains was so perfect, so aesthetically impeccable that it was hard for me to believe it was not some kind of trick. The enormous dimensions of everything in this city extended to the beauty. It was unreal. Next to me street musicians played jazz classics in a group of a cello, a guitar, an accordion and a saxophone. Their style turned everything slightly latino-pop, and it added greatly to the relaxed morning atmosphere. My last stop before I had to make my way to the airport to fly back to Germany was Piazza della Rotonda where I took a look at the Pantheon. I loved the deep orange and red colours of the houses in the square. They contrasted harshly with the white marble of the Pantheon – The temple for all the Gods, as the name tells us. An ancient Roman temple converted into a church.

My journal says:

Beautiful and horrible: How vehemently Christianity takes possession of everything. Beautiful, because it creates an impressive case of interculturality. Horrible, because the Christian church thus makes a claim for power that might be deeply un-Christian.

Such were the ways that Rome inspired me to think. How is it that philosophising seems to come to me more easily when I am surrounded by beauty? In that sense, Rome made it very easy for me. I think I shall return, sleep during the day, and roam the streets between midnight and early morning every day.

Pumpkin Festival Instagrammed – A German Thanksgiving

Oktober 10, 2013 / bruecken_schlag / 4 Kommentare

As autumn is running its course and I have grown a little bit more domestic as of lately, I will have to write more about the joys to be found in the amazingness that is Berlin. You cannot possibly ever be bored in this city, and there is always something to discover. A domestic life in Berlin is probably still just as exciting as a few weeks of travel in some other areas of the world. I stroll through the city on small adventures, taking pictures with my iPhone, so very often. My first post of instagram pictures was on Leipzig and it was quite well received, so I think I will be doing instagram posts more frequently. In this one I am taking you with me to Schöneberg’s yearly pumpkin festival.

As far as neighbourhood festivals go, I feel like Schöneberg is the queen of hoods in Berlin: Primavera is their spring festival with a focus on asparagus, now the pumpkin festival is for autumn, and then there is the traditional and infamous LGBT festival in the summer. I quite like Schöneberg on the whole. It is laid-back, calm area with lots and lots of beautiful art nouveau city houses.

In between all of that, the pumpkin festival is on Akazienstraße and has your regular stands for jewellery, clothes, knicknackery and food – most of the latter offering pumpkin specialties adding to their regular offers. I have a heart-shapes waffle with apple-pumpkin-mush. Delicious! We also get to try different pumpkin chutneys and pestos, a pumpkin ginger jam, and of course pumpkin soup. There is also pumpkin decor on many stands. It is a grey day, but the bright orange does lighten it up a lot!

It also happens to be Harvest Festival weekend, in German: Erntedankfest. It is a Christian holiday (although not an official state holiday in Germany!) with some similarities to the American Thanksgiving. I remember it from when I was small as the weekend when our church would look especially splendid in its autumn decor with orange and golden flowers and corn. I am reminded of that as my friend and I stroll along the section of the festival that is actually dedicated to pumpkins, incidentally just in front of the Church of Apostle Paul.

The pumpkins come in all different shapes and sizes and have funny names such as Butternut, Hokaido, Baby Boo and Spaghetti. There are signs for each specific kind that tell you if you should grill them, fry them, cook them or pickle them. Some are round, some are long, some have funny pointy outgrowths that look somewhat indecent. But the way they are all lined up they are sure beautiful in their variety. And I do feel grateful for this harvest as I look at them and take my pictures.

Are there neighbourhood street festivals where you live? Do people eat a lot of pumpkins this time of year where you are from? Did you know they come in so many different shapes and sizes?

Capture the Colour – Streetart Edition

September 5, 2013 / bruecken_schlag / 14 Kommentare

I am not a photographer. I am slowly, ever so slowly starting to get a grip on perspective and lighting in a process of learning by doing as I am taking photos for the blog more and more; and I have recently understood that photo editing is something I cannot stay away from forever. But I am still self-conscious when it comes to my pictures.

All the bigger was my surprise that Julika of Sateless Suitcase (an enchanting blog everyone should follow!!) tagged me in theCapture the Colour Photo Contest. While I am most definitely not going to win anything (it must be a huge contest with God knows how many participants), I enjoyed the process of choosing five pictures for their specific colour – a new way of looking at photos and training my eye to see photography as artistry. I chose to show you pictures according to a theme, like I have seen others do it on their respective posts (Julika chose one city for each colour), and am showing you five street art pictures I took this year.

Red

This is a former squat in Tübingen, Germany that is still a self-governed youth center. When I went to school in this cute little Southern German town, I would pass by here on my bike almost every day. I took the picture last March when I went to visit my alma mater. Most of the writing on the facade are slogans of the political left. Tübingen was an important place in the 1968 student movement, and I feel like this place is somewhat continuing that tradition.

Green

This is actually a connection box for street lighting. They are usually just left grey and boring in Germany, but this one in Lübbenau, in the Spreewald region South of Berlin, has been turned into a little canvas for a cute little piece of art. And didn’t I have to love it all the more as it was depicting – a bridge!

White

Gdańsk Zaspa was my street art discovery of the year, and I have dedicated a whole article to it here. It is an area in my beloved Polish city Gdańsk where the socialist concrete buildings have been turned into overdimensional works of art. I love this one because it is so plain and yet so detailed with its sea of drowning houses.

Blue

I took this picture at the demonstration against the partial tear-down of Berlin’s Eastside Gallery. This is the street art you can see on the original Berlin wall – and the hole that was recently made in it in order for an investor’s plans for building large apartment and office complexes in the area. The Eastside Gallery is the longest connected piece of the Berlin wall that is still in place and an amazing document of history as well as an artwork of epic proportions. I hope it will keep being protected by the people and government of Berlin.

Yellow

On my last day in Chicago, my friend Jesse took me to the predominantly Mexican-American neighbourhood of Pilsen for some excellent, excellent Mexican food and a blast of Latino culture. Getting off at the L stop at 18th Street (use the pink line!) alone was amazing – the station is covered in beautiful art that shows the cultural heritage of the inhabitants of this part of the city. I could have stayed and looked at the details forever.

This is my street art focussed colour contest contribution. Now I would like to tag Aggy of DreamExploreWander, Ulli of ansichtswechsel, Aryn of Driftwood & Daydreams, Aiko of Behind My Messy Desk and Mandy of Emm in London and invite all you great blogging girls to do the same and show us the colour in your life!

I’ve Got the Month of May

Mai 22, 2013 / bruecken_schlag / 14 Kommentare

May has been my favorite month ever since I can remember. That transition phase between spring and summer is so full of hope and opportunity, so bursting with expectation and dreaming. Nature is exploding in all her most beautiful colors and the sky has that special color that is both coyly pastel and stunningly intense and deep.

The train ride between Berlin and Gdańsk never ceases to be of indescribable beauty to me. Between Berlin and Frankfurt / Oder, the first hour of the ride, I can’t help but notice how different the landscape looks now from the way it did when I made the journey in the winter. The wide and rolling fields of Brandenburg are now not barren, brown and lifeless. They are juicy green and promising. And as I look out the window, suddenly I my heart starts leaping. Green has been substituted by garish and bright yellow.

It is the first rape field in blossom that I see this season. I could just cry. They say that up here, you can see with the naked eye if someone will be coming for a visit in three days. Everything is spread out into the open. Everything is just there. In this world and in this life that holds so many surprises for us on an everyday basis, I think it more than calming to find myself in this Northern Germany plain that doesn’t keep anything from me. Barren brown and grey fields in winter. Explosions of green grass, golden wheat and yellow rape in summer. This is home to me, a place where I can feel secure and at peace, unafraid of the surprises that may lurk around the corner.

At my most recent stay in Poland, after our visit to Grudziądz, Karol decides to not go back on the Autostrada – the large highway – but on the quiet country road by ways of the countless cute little villages on the way to Gdańsk. After the humid, hot day with stunning blue skies, small clouds has started to emerge, and now they are thickening across the wide dome above us. Nothing hinders the eye from wandering along the horizon on either side – no hills, no house, no tree distorts my view, and the sky looks different on every end in millions of shades of white, grey and blue as it meets the earth with its astonishingly juicy green fields. The rape is blossoming a little more carefully here than it was in Brandenburg – the fields are not of the same unbroken golden yellow colour, but they are intertwined with green. The rape is not entirely ripe yet, still waiting to give out its explosive force entirely.

On another day, Aga and I take the tram from the Gdańsk city center out to Brzeźno and walk from there to the park in Jelitkowo. It is too windy to walk right by the Baltic Sea beach, so we take the tarmaced trail behind the bank slope. Families with little children abound, young and old couples walking holding hands, friends chatting away, cyclists, skaters, buzzing life. The trees jutting out of the slope show leaves of such tender bright green that I feel any touch would have to destroy them. When we get to the park, we lie on the grass for an hour, sleeping, chatting and wreathing daisies.

Back in Berlin, the chestnut trees have exploded. In German the blossoms are called blossom candles, „Blütenkerzen“, as though they were something that shed light and was burning brightly into an already bright summer’s day. The pink ones have been my favorite trees since I was in high school. Their color is not subtle, it is crazed and screaming, exciting, fresh and fitting for visions of summer.

And speaking of blossoms, there are of course the cherry and apple trees that have their white beauty on display as though they were ready for their wedding. They never look as gorgeous as they do when in blossom, no matter the appeal of a tree carrying ripe fruit. I cannot help but think how the entire change of seasons and the idea of the passing of time is so iconically symbolized in the little white flowers on these trees. They remind me that every moment is precious, and they make the promise of a good tomorrow. I find hope in them.

Do you have a favorite month? What do you like about this time of year?