Bill's Blog

Oliver fell off his bike on Monday after school. He had a small break at the end of his radius, near his right wrist. I shot some video at the Minoh City Hospital. I am learning how to edit video using Final Cut Pro and this is one of my first attempts. 

He is doing OK and is in not any pain. He loved all the attention the cast garnered him at school. Ollie showed up early to school with his Sharpie® for his classmates to sign the cast. 

Close to our Air BNB apartment in Berlin is the apartment where David Bowie lived in the late 1970s. This was a hard time for Bowie, he was fighting an addiction to cocaine while living in Los Angeles. He moved to Berlin to get away from the drugs and he was also seeking anonymity. Bowie was also going through a divorce from his wife Angela. In his four years living in Berlin, he beat his coke addiction, divorced his wife and recorded three albums. All were pretty good commercial successes and included Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979). In 1980 he moved to New York to begin another stage in his life. That is one of the things I admire about Bowie is how he continually redefined his music and his stage characters.

His apartment building is marked by a plaque. Dedicated fans left flowers and candles and it has become somewhat of a shrine. When he died in early 2016, many people left flowers and mementos. He shared the apartment with Iggy Pop.

Bowie’s music is always on our Spotify rotation and one of our favorite musicians.

On our way back, we found a store selling American candy and bought some Hubba Bubba gum and the boys ate their first Twinkie.

I got to explore a bit of Berlin before my conference began and enjoyed getting to know this vibrant, global city. Berlin is the largest city in continental Europe and only London is larger in the wider region. The greater metropolitan area has a population of almost six million people.  It is the capital of Germany since it became unified in 1990 and is truly a world-class city, with a high standard of living, incredible fine arts and cultural opportunities and a huge service and IT and business sector.

The city started on the banks for the Spree River and has been an important part of the various German/Prussian kingdoms for over 1000 years. In reading a bit of the city’s history, I learned that the Germanic tribes ousted Slavic tribes in the 7th century AD. 20th-century history is more on display in the city of course, with Berlin serving as the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich. Berlin was destroyed in World War II and not much is left, thankfully, of the Nazis here. Germany does acknowledge publicly the horrors of WWII, much more than in Japan.

My biggest interest in the city was considering the Berlin Wall, which divided the city during the Cold War. It started being built suddenly in 1961 to stop the flow of defectors leaving East Germany and didn’t come down until 1989.

Two of the major icons of Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag were not used during this era because they were in the “no-man’s land” near the border between east and west. The path of the former wall is marked on the sidewalks near the area. Today it is a really well done public space along the river and huge parks and plazas surrounding them. The Reichstag was renovated in the 90s and a glass dome was added to the roof and is a huge tourist draw. The tour was fully booked during the time we were in the city.

The highlight for me was seeing the remnants of the wall near the train station of Nordbahnhof station and Checkpoint Charlie. We read many poignant stories of people successfully escaping the Iron Curtain and also, tragically, stories of many lives lost because of the wall. People were so desperate to get out that they tried all sorts of risky methods of leaving including homemade hot air balloon, makeshift zip lines, and hidden compartments in cars. It was so sad to hear how families were separated from each other in the division of the city.  I highly recommend spending time in the Mauer Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

I have not been in Europe since leaving Belgrade in 2014 and it was so nice to feel the vibes of life in a European city. It is so different from life in Japan. The wide streets lined with thousands of huge trees and the old, but well-kempt, solid apartment blocks, make it a very different cityscape than Japan. I sampled the famous Berlin currywurst on the Pariser Platz. I noticed thousands of tourists from all over the world, not as diverse as New York City, but still, tourism is a big business here and the city receives more tourists than Rome.

This was the most time I’ve spent in Germany, with my previous visits to Frankfurt and Munich, were either short business trips or overnight stays during transport. The Germans certainly are big, both men and women, and it was in stark contrast to the diminutive Japanese I am used to. I didn’t notice a large immigrant population here. Our taxi driver was from Somalia and there were Middle Eastern commuters on the trains. I was curious to see the impact of immigration. I read articles that the right was growing in strength in German politics, somewhat based on the fears of large immigration.

On the long flights to and from Germany, I read Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth. It is the latest book of the Hogarth Project, which publishes Shakespeare’s works as interpreted by best selling and acclaimed novelists of the today. Nesbo is a Norweigan thriller writer and so his Macbeth is set a dreary city in Scotland in probably the 1980s. It is still a story of how ambition for power can corrupt and lead to madness and death. Instead of Macbeth as a king of Inverness, he is going for the chief police commissioner and the office of mayor. There is a lot of murder, action, drugs and eventually insanity. I have not read any of Nesbo’s detective novels.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=uh5zUIKnmI8

The book was definitely a page-turner, although some of the plot points were really far-fetched for me. I would recommend the book as it made me reflect on what the drive for power can do to people. I often gain some vocabulary words or ideas from books and they are below:

• Tithonos – This is a character from Greek mythology. He was the human lover of the goddess of the dawn, Eos. She asks Zeus to grant him immortality, which he does. However, she forgets to ask for eternal youth as well and poor Tithonos ends up a bag of bones as an old man in bed, but he cannot die.
• blond plaits – an older term for braids
• pillion rider – a British term for a seat on the back of a motorcycle
• quay – pronounced like “key”, a stone or metal platform projecting into a body of water and used for the loading and unloading of ships
• a ruddy, porcine face – pronounced “poor sign” and means resembling a pig
• bollard – post on a ship or quay where a boat can be secured; also posts to block motorized transport
• casino croupier – another word for dealer

The British rock band Queen has always been pretty high on the Kralovec family playlist. We were excited to see the new movie, Bohemian Rhapsody last night. We went to the IMAX theatre and were not disappointed. A very entertaining movie with the best part being, of course, the music! My takeaway was a simple one, Queen used the idea of audience participation to gain popularity. A simple, but brilliant idea. Audiences need something to do during a concert, more than marveling at the technical skill of the musicians and Queen were masters of getting people to participate in the music. The culmination of this idea and of the movie was Queen’s set during Live Aid back in 1985. I remember the day, a hot July summer afternoon before I went off to college. I rode my bicycle back from cutting lawns with my dad for our 30+ clients that summer and watched the concert on television. I highly recommend going to see the movie in a theatre with great sound!