Pam Am witnessing the jolly British and some short-tempered Frankfurters

As I have so wonderful friends in Frankfurt I must post this one here.

(Please find the original source, Teknik 360, here. Thanks, TN!)

* * *

The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one’s gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them.

So it was with some amusement that we, a Pan Am 747, listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground control and a British Airways 747, call sign Speedbird 206.

Speedbird 206: ”Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway.”

Ground: ”Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven.”

The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop.

Ground: ”Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?”

Speedbird 206: ”Stand by, Ground, I’m looking up our gate location now.”!

Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): ”Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?”

Speedbird 206 (coolly): ”Yes, twice in 1944, but it was dark, and I didn’t land.”

Berlin at the end of Nov 08

Hello, Franz Biberkopf, here we come! (The main character in Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz)


In the Berlin web site they say that

"some call it wild, colorful, and full of surprises, while others find it a little too hectic and gruff. Berlin is intriguing because it is so versatile and so multi-faceted. Differences are more extreme, conflicts more tangible, and problems larger than they are elsewhere. Yet even Berlin’s contradictions are part of its appeal."

Maybe that's why I had to organise a trip there. I have been there twice: once travelling through East Berlin in 1988, to Chechoslovakia and further down to Budapest, and in 1991 when I participated an international Nuclear Phase-out Conference (the real name of which I fail to remember). The most memorable moment then was a Buddhist ceremony on the minefield in the midle of the wall area. I think it was somewhere near the Potzdamer Plaz and Reichstag.

Seeing the area(s) now, there is absolutely no way I could tell.


Culture! Among several museums we managed to visit the main building of Faculty of Arts. Why? Because we needed to walk through it to the Jewish monument.



... which is right here. Very still, very moving.



And walking through it was not as easy as it seemed at first.


Books were burning, as everything else, under the WWII.


Ku'damm and its festive decorations.


The splendid life of the Finnish publishing editors does not require sparkling wine only.



Mr HP and I had to visit this place, too. First time in Berlin, for MR HP, it was. And at the Checkpoint I was thinking about the Len Deighton books.



Time to go back to Tegel ad take a plane to Helsinki sweet Helsinki. Editors would have wanted to edit this sign a bit.


We saw none of these guys at the airport.

Vienna Report, part I: Downtown Wien

We are the Champions! We did it again! (Last time in 1998 with a slightly different team. Slightly.)


Birthday Celebrations. Football Euro Cup 2008. The Third Man. Mauthausen (Gusen) Concentration Camp.

Those were the overall themes of our recent visit to Vienna. We were ten happy Finns, four of us children between 3, sorry, 4 and 17.

* * * * *

The Third Man, Opening narrator:
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and whom had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs but, well, umm, you know they can't stay the course like a professional.

Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the centre of the city that's international policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German.


Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit.

Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don't know, some sort of job.

Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.


Anna Schmidt: You know, you ought to get yourself a girl.




Popescue:
That's a nice girl, that. But she ought to go careful in Vienna. Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this.


A monument respecting the Austrian victims in concentration camps. Mr HP, Miss Funnybunny and I have visited Salaspils near Riga, too. (Cheerfull travellers as we are.)


Harry Lime: What did you want me to do? Be reasonable. You didn't expect me to give myself up... 'It's a far, far better thing that I do.' The old limelight. The fall of the curtain. Oh, Holly, you and I aren't heroes. The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories.

The Final scene on The Third Man is taking place near this spot, the Schwedenplatz.


Really cool disco in Karlsplatz, the park nearest to our place.


The dragons helped when it was too hot hot hot.

Vienna Report, part II: Funny stuff

Prater, Vienna. A surprisingly cheap pleace to enjoy afternoon, and very few people were into the same treat. Miss Funnybunny and I tested several machines and ice-crean stands.

Football Euro Cup has decorated the Ferris Wheel.


Harry Lime, in the cabin of the Ferris Wheel, Prater: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.


Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.


Our corridor. We had rented the place in the 4th floor of this beautiful building in the beginning of Favoritenstrasse.


..and next door there was this beautiful church. Outside it looked small and modest. Just a plain door in a plain old building, no special decorations. But the inside... like a treasure castle.

Vienna Report, part III: The Match. Hrvatska - Türkiye

Ernst-Happel. June 2008. Turkey-Croatia Quarter Final.

As a beautiful act of loyalty – respecting the international fraternity, and love for the whole mankind – I sang the national anthems of the both teams! Which was not that difficult since the words ran on the huge screens in karaoke style.

The Croatian cheer went Hrva-Hrva-Hrva! Hrvatska!

Vienna Report, part IV: KZ Mauthausen (Concentration Camp)

These pictures tell more than thousand words, so I comment on (some of) wthem only briefly. Please see the official pages of Gusen /Mauthausen, too. These are quite informative pages, too.

We took a train from Vienna to a small village of St. Valentin, in the district of Amstetten in Lower Austria. We had lunch in a beautiful little beergarten of a hotel near the railwaystation, and took a taxi from there to Mauthausen. The distance being too long for a stroll.

The weather was hot (for us Finns, especially): +32 C, in sunshine almost unbearable. Mr HP and I kept giving Miss Funnybunny water, but we did not complain. For the prisoners it was unbearable constantly.

The camp is on the hill in the middle of a beautiful landscape and Autsian villages. Only 20 km from Linz, and near Vienna as well. The Donau valley begins from around here.


In these barracks there are now museums and exhibitions.


"Steinbruch and Todestiege". The rocks used by Speer for the Congress Hall in Nuremberg (Nürnberg) came from here. (See IStori post of Oct 2007.)






Between the memorial monument and the farmhouse in distance there lies the quarry, and behind it, the river Donau is flowing towards Vienna. The "Todestige", "Steps Of Death" lied up from the quarry. Many prisoners died on the steps carrying the rocks.






These look scary, don't they? But people have right to live next to a concentration camp.


Linz. Hitler's favourite town. Very industrialised nowadays. In the middle of it there was a spectacular cathedral, and we heard there is an Old Town, too, but we did not have time to visit it.

... Calling To The Faraway Towns..."

I'm going here.

And here, as it was recommended by him.

And I am already thinking about visiting some sites worth seeing, belonging to this, too.

And will be meeting people in here, too, hopefully from other Nordic Countries as well – a Nordic Reception as it is.

In my iPod I have this, too. As usual.

An update en route, look forward to that.

Beach, Shakespeare and Paris

Books. My favourite medium of interior design. I live and work surrounded by books.

Paris. My favourite town.

The place where I wish I were. Right now.

Sylvia Beach was an American lady, only twenty-something in 1919, when she sent from Paris her mother a message asking for money. Mummy was in the USA.

Beach wanted to found a bookshop in Paris, and start selling American (and British and Irish) literature for the French. Literature she adored, and in a stimulating, lively, vivid town she had started to see as home.

This was not her original idea: at first she had wanted to run a bookshop in NY, but the rents were much higher there, and living costs in Paris were inexpensive.

She had lived in France and Switzerland, knew the language, so the decision was not that far-fetched.

Soon Shakespeare and Company was opened on the left bank, by Rue Dupyutren. And she started having guests. Boy, did she have some visitors! James Joyce. Among her closest friends. (Beach even published Ulusseus, the first print run being 1 000 copies, but Joyce suggested 12! Luckily Beach knew better.) Ezra Pound. There, too, of course. Ernest Hemingway. Well, sure. F. Scott Fitzgerald. How to avoid him, Hemingway and Pound being there, too? Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The eccentric lesbians, the Dynamic Duo of the Literary Life of Paris.

And many, many others.

*******
(Picture: Beach with Joyce.)

Shakespeare and Company is probably the most comfortable, stylish, respected, well-known and attractive bookshop in the world.

I have been even dreaming of it lately. It's because I am reading the autobiography Sylvia Beach wrote in the 1950's. It is so interesting.



I am reading in Finnish, for a change.

*******

I am thinking about that book all the time.

And I am leaving for Warsaw tomorrow.

*******

Well, some history of WW II and the ghetto & highly artistic Polish posters will invade my mind.

Report from Germany, part I: Frankfurt am Main

Typical landscapes. The first one from the balcony of our hotsts' Book Fair taking place around the tower the highest point of which looks like a pencil, far left.





From the website of the fair:

"At the Fair a record 7,448 exhibitors from 108 countries presented 391,653 titles. Despite the train strikes and Autumn school holiday 283,293 visitors came to the Fair. During the three trade days there were 154,269 visitors – almost one per cent up on the previous year. At the weekend the German-speaking halls were full to capacity with members of the public.

"There has seldom been a Book Fair which has been so optimistic about the future of the industry," said Dr. Gottfried Honnefelder, Chief of the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association) at the end of the Fair. "For publishers and booksellers this is very important, as the mood of the Fair is very influential on the development of the book market in a given year."

*****


A typical scenery, again.



And you'll get soooo hungry...






Alte Oper, the Old Opera. And Punk is not dead!!!!




Cheers! And thanks! We are toasting and hosting, for a change.