This week marked the end of my third block, and since I think I did a slightly-higher-than-average job on both the presentation and the written exam, I was actually in a rather relaxed state. Of course, there were some bothering issues throughout the week (including some lost items, but that's a story for another day), but, just like the howling storm that was just there thirty minutes ago on a Monday morning, the whirlwind of event die down eventually, and we're back on the ground. Here a picture I took when I went hiking alone:
The Play Pillowman
This was a read from two weeks ago, actually. I know that I am running on a tight schedule, but it really is worthy of mentioning.
I'm skipping the reasoning behind reading the script of a play anymore because this is not my first read that is formatted or written as a stage show. The Pillowman, written by an Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, is an unsettling tale surrounding several gruesome child murders that were inexplicably close to the details of a writer's works.
Featuring some reenacting of the mentioned stories, it gave me the same level of bewilderment as some of Edgar Allen Poe's works, and the unsettling storytelling was something I appreciate. I first came across this play when I was in high school as we classmates were trying to figure out a script we should be picking for our semester performance. We settled in on the Fly Doctor written by Molière, but before that, I remember Patrick, Aubrey, and I spending quite some time discussing with our drama teacher as to which play to choose from, and the Pillowman was in fact one of the choices. We were seriously considering about using the Pillowman, to an extent that we were already talking about which short stories in play we should and shouldn't be using, and how we should reenact such scenes, but then we found the Flying Doctor.
Inside the play, the writer Katurian took the old well-known German folklore of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the piper who came to deal with the rat problem, subsequently taking away all the kids of the village after the villagers refused to pay for the rat problem, all expect one kid who was crippled. Katurian did an attempted prequel to the tale, and added a borderline sadistic twist to the story. One day, the name of the town Hamelin was mentioned, and it brought me the memories of this play, and on the very same day, I made an order for the book on Amazon. It was so entrancing that I got off at the wrong station when riding the S-bahn.
It feels like ordering something exotic in a dark, creepy restaurant; the experience is a refreshing page on my reading list.
The title The Pillowman itself is also a short story written by Katurian, in which a good-will-looking man consisted of pillows (whose teeth as well were made with pillow) was given with a job to end children's lives before their lives could become miserable and depressingly long. The job was not something the Pillowman relishes in doing, so we went back in time to his own childhood and ended the younger, smaller Pillowman's life before his life could become miserable; The Pillowman disappeared. Same with what the police said with regards to this story, it had a warm, soft feeling to this story. This cluster of stories that gives my blood a cold boil coming from Martin McDonagh made me curious about his other works.
Inside the play, the writer Katurian took the old well-known German folklore of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the piper who came to deal with the rat problem, subsequently taking away all the kids of the village after the villagers refused to pay for the rat problem, all expect one kid who was crippled. Katurian did an attempted prequel to the tale, and added a borderline sadistic twist to the story. One day, the name of the town Hamelin was mentioned, and it brought me the memories of this play, and on the very same day, I made an order for the book on Amazon. It was so entrancing that I got off at the wrong station when riding the S-bahn.
It feels like ordering something exotic in a dark, creepy restaurant; the experience is a refreshing page on my reading list.
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| "Is this your dish-wiping towel?" *Insert shushing emoji* |
The title The Pillowman itself is also a short story written by Katurian, in which a good-will-looking man consisted of pillows (whose teeth as well were made with pillow) was given with a job to end children's lives before their lives could become miserable and depressingly long. The job was not something the Pillowman relishes in doing, so we went back in time to his own childhood and ended the younger, smaller Pillowman's life before his life could become miserable; The Pillowman disappeared. Same with what the police said with regards to this story, it had a warm, soft feeling to this story. This cluster of stories that gives my blood a cold boil coming from Martin McDonagh made me curious about his other works.
Alcohol
I am not sure whether it is ever explicitly written on my blog, but I remember telling basically everyone that I don't drink. No beers, no wine... simply because I don't want to.
Coming over here to Germany, through, was when it surreptitiously changed. It started quite dynamically, at the orientation party when I consciously/unconsciously drank some strong fruity liquor, and then the half cup of Hugo at an Irish pub, and many small cups after that. The repulse for anything alcoholic was swapped to curiosity at some point, and even though I still don't drink a lot (not that I am able to drink a lot), I wouldn't shy away as often as before when offered a glass. Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite in such respect, claiming to the world that I would not drink anything alcoholic , sometimes I would feel more than a little guilty when considering the reason behind drinking came from a well-wrapped package of peer pressure, but these doubt go away eventually, and as nothing goes to extreme, I think my morality can bear the weight of one more item of the world.
In the passing weekend, when Johannes, Abhinav, and I were watching a movie together, Paul came to the other two guys and asked whether they want to join some round of beer pong. Beer pong is basically a drinking game with plastic cups filled with beer. Set on opposite sides of the table, people aim for the cups on the other side, and if a hit is make, the opposing team in the corresponding position would have to drink up the beer in the container. It wasn't the first beer pong that happened in our kitchen, but this time I was ready to give it a shot.
I would have to admit that it was more difficult than I thought, with two adjoining square tables of distance set in between the two teams. For my case, I would have to drink for any hit Johannes made, and vice versa. From what I was observing and what Johannes told me once (and it kind of make sense, come to think of it), even though the game was designed so that drinking is a form of punishment, but it is not an objective to "not" be "punished". One of the goals is to score every cup on the other side, but you're also expecting to be able to drink some alcohol as well, or what is the point of this so-called "pre-drinkning" game? So anyway, I was a bit anxious about not being able to at least graze the cups for what must had been the first ten throws or so, not out of embarrassment, but for fear that my opponent wouldn't have anything to drink, and that was when Johannes gave me a guideline as to which area to aim for, and...
Plop.
A ping pong ball from my hand finally fell snugly into the red plastic cup. There you go. And then another and one more even. I scored three cups in total. Or four, I am not really sure since I was basically drunk right then. The dizziness hit me, so it was hard to register things like numbers. I am now really glad that I managed to pull out my phone to write down what I was experiencing at the moment. Here is it: "Dizzy; Dried eyes; (Possibly) loud; You feel the muscles pulling when trying to smile" The last part was pretty accurate, but I remembered struggling really hard to remember that this was to be put down in the cell phone, mostly thanks to the confusion the dizziness brought me.
Too much, I told myself, as I was trying to steer myself through the hallway back to my room after dealing with the dishes.
At least the other day I wasn't hangover.
Coming over here to Germany, through, was when it surreptitiously changed. It started quite dynamically, at the orientation party when I consciously/unconsciously drank some strong fruity liquor, and then the half cup of Hugo at an Irish pub, and many small cups after that. The repulse for anything alcoholic was swapped to curiosity at some point, and even though I still don't drink a lot (not that I am able to drink a lot), I wouldn't shy away as often as before when offered a glass. Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite in such respect, claiming to the world that I would not drink anything alcoholic , sometimes I would feel more than a little guilty when considering the reason behind drinking came from a well-wrapped package of peer pressure, but these doubt go away eventually, and as nothing goes to extreme, I think my morality can bear the weight of one more item of the world.
In the passing weekend, when Johannes, Abhinav, and I were watching a movie together, Paul came to the other two guys and asked whether they want to join some round of beer pong. Beer pong is basically a drinking game with plastic cups filled with beer. Set on opposite sides of the table, people aim for the cups on the other side, and if a hit is make, the opposing team in the corresponding position would have to drink up the beer in the container. It wasn't the first beer pong that happened in our kitchen, but this time I was ready to give it a shot.
I would have to admit that it was more difficult than I thought, with two adjoining square tables of distance set in between the two teams. For my case, I would have to drink for any hit Johannes made, and vice versa. From what I was observing and what Johannes told me once (and it kind of make sense, come to think of it), even though the game was designed so that drinking is a form of punishment, but it is not an objective to "not" be "punished". One of the goals is to score every cup on the other side, but you're also expecting to be able to drink some alcohol as well, or what is the point of this so-called "pre-drinkning" game? So anyway, I was a bit anxious about not being able to at least graze the cups for what must had been the first ten throws or so, not out of embarrassment, but for fear that my opponent wouldn't have anything to drink, and that was when Johannes gave me a guideline as to which area to aim for, and...
Plop.
A ping pong ball from my hand finally fell snugly into the red plastic cup. There you go. And then another and one more even. I scored three cups in total. Or four, I am not really sure since I was basically drunk right then. The dizziness hit me, so it was hard to register things like numbers. I am now really glad that I managed to pull out my phone to write down what I was experiencing at the moment. Here is it: "Dizzy; Dried eyes; (Possibly) loud; You feel the muscles pulling when trying to smile" The last part was pretty accurate, but I remembered struggling really hard to remember that this was to be put down in the cell phone, mostly thanks to the confusion the dizziness brought me.
Too much, I told myself, as I was trying to steer myself through the hallway back to my room after dealing with the dishes.
At least the other day I wasn't hangover.
Vegetarian Week
There was this day last week, after a certain Taiwanese braised pork dish, I casually mentioned to Abhidha, the strictest vegetarian of the floor, about how I had been consuming a bit too much meat for the past two weeks. I talked about the possibility of becoming vegetarian for a while, which she responded with an unimpressed "okay". I magnified her response just because, and feigned an accusation that called her out for not trusting me. Granted, I actually consume quite a lot of meat, either back in Taiwan or here in Germany. But I don't think that it would a grand task for me to switch to an eggless-vegetarian diet (like Abhidha's), so that was exactly what happened.
Wanting to save some time on describing the food I cooked for my vegetarian week, I would simply post them over here:
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| Baguette tanks with mashed potatoes and cheese. |
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| Tomato pasta gratin |
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| Wraps with vegetarian filling |
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| Green tea soba noodles |
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| Mushroom potato soup |
Sometimes it almost slipped; like when Johannes was making steak at around nine in the evening, but with meat being such an ingredient with defined shapes and textures, it is way more easier to remember not to eat meat than trying to avoid eggs. Imagine staring at the breads at the bakery, those shiny, luscious-looking pieces of pantry, and all the thoughts about having an omelette at 7:30 in the early morning to start the day. But I pulled it through when you don't look at all the cheese intake that I had throughout the week; This debate had been there every single time I was spotted having cheese in my diet. Here's why.
So when you are producing cheese, there is a certain mixture of enzyme you would add to the milk curd (please save all the ranting against my use of cheese terminology; It isn't as if I would become a cheese expert in a week) which is, most commonly, called rennet. If you try to separate all the components in this rennet, you would likely see it is made up mostly of an enzyme called Chymosin, something that is supposedly a part of cow stomach. However, in order to mass produce this Chymosin, the food-manufacturing scientists took the cell of the cow and implanted it into some bacteria that are called hosts. With bacterial division, the Chymosin was also duplicated, hence creating the conundrum whether cheese produced with such Chymosin is counted as vegetarian or not. I was not willing to relent, though; take away my meat and eggs, but not the cheese as well, especially when there was a cheese fondue party funded by Johannes on Sunday (According to the other people, the cheesy smell of the fondue lingered for another two days.)
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| First cheese fondue; Am I going to miss it? NO. |
It wasn't a big accomplishment, I know, but it doesn't really feel bad to steer away from meat-based diets every once in a while. There is a chance that in the future I will be doing this once a month or so.
End
There are still some other topics yet to be covered (just Hugo pulling a classic procrastinating Hugo) but I think this is it for the week. Our new block will be marketing, and I wonder how it is going to be like.
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| By the way, went out for a bike ride with Johannes before the day of the written test. |
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| Saw the sunset with some cargo ships by the canal; we watched the whole process of how such large ships were sent through the parts of the river with a difference in height. |
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| Went on a single hike during the weekend to this ruins. |
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| Procedural propriety is to be upheld when the Committee of Rocks are in discussion |
Sincerely,
Hugo
