This is brought to you live from the VIP Palace in Kiyovu, well it's the house of some friends in what we call la Rue Belge, because historically a lot of Belgian people live here which has of course nothing to do with the name they gave their house...
Anyway, its Tuesday night and I know i skipped a day. Apologies for cheating on you for one door (Tuerchen). I wanted to start by giving credit to those people, friends, who respond to my efforts in form of daily comments on my blog entries or other kinds of little electronic doors like newspaper articles and music. Thanks for that it makes up (kind of) for the lack of Glühwein and Lebkuchen.
Yesterday was a miserable monday, raining most of the day. Thankfully it was not very eventful in terms of work so I was able to start my end of the year works of doing the things I otherwise never have time for. Like working on the website of our program. You have the link further down on the right of this blog and at the end of the year it will actually be updated. In the evening I had a work dinner at my bosses place and she was treating us to a whole seafood meal with shrimps, salmon and stuff that is otherwise fairly hard to get by.
Today is already Tuesday, the 8. day of this last month. I am sitting in the aforementioned VIP palace with some people playing me Christmas songs and I actually feel a little christmassy.




inhabitants of the VIP Palace: Sam and Hez, and temporarily Maurice, behind the camera

Since I am working far away from my home computer i will not be able to work on the 2009 review as i dont have access to my pictures. But we just talked about this book I read this year which made me think of all the other books I read this year or didnt. The book we talked about was by Solzhenitsyn: "A day in the life of Ivan Denissowitsch" (I think am kind of mixing up English and German transcription of Russian), its about Ivan who is in a godforsaken Gulag somewhere in Siberia serving a sentence for supposed treason under Stalin. It tells us about one day that revolves around the worry of getting enough food, not getting sick, knowing the right people and generally keeping your head down and survive the day, which is followed by another day, and another and another...
But generally i havent been very good with reading this year, most books I still havent finished. Like this book "Shantaram", which EVERYBODY loved and recommended. A real story of a guy who escapes prison in Australia (or was it New Zealand), goes to India, lives in a slum in Bombay and becomes a Mafia gangster. He will eventually be captured in Germany and serves his prison sentence during which he writes his story. It lost its appeal about 100 pages in. I also started "Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Alfred Döblin, a book I had been wanting to read for a long time and picked up a book by last year's Nobel Prize laureate J.M.G. Le Clezio, one of his pieces about Africa, but I am struggeling to get into them. Last week I bought an autobiography of Henry Morton Stanley, great and infamous adventurer of Africa, who traversed the Congo a couple of times, followed the big river to its source, found Livingstone and was most probably the model for the character Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness". I have a feeling that I might actually finish that one, although it has plenty of pages. Great pleasure however, I am taking in Robert Gernhardt's poems of which I often read one before I go to bed. And this is where I should go now.