Ugh...Christ

I got a 10-page paper due on Monday, a performance on Wednesday, and another performance on Friday. This'll probably be the last entry for a while, but I'll definately post again before Barcelona.

This is Hartford House, which holds the Wallace Collection. It's kind of like the British equivalent of the Frick Collection. We went there Tuesday. Holds one of the largest and nicest medieval armouries I've ever seen.

Play of the Week: "England People Very Nice" @ the National Theatre near Waterloo

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Great play, funny, and deliciously racist.

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If anything interesting happens, I'll et y'all know.

This Isn't Tennessee Williams...We're Talking About a Dick in a Pizza

This week just didn't really seem to stop, but I'll see what I can cover about if from memory.

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Tuesday, we went to the National Gallery...this time, for class. Forgot my camera. I talked about a 3m tall painting of a pony.

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Scene study presentation on Wednesday went well, considering well pulled it completely out of our ass.

The men's day ended early, because our director for The Tempenist wasn't there, so we hit a pub relatively early.

Play of the Week: "Dancing at Lughnasa" @ the Old Vic near Waterloo

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In my opinion...it was okay. I didn't really go for it, but I recognized an actor in the cast who was in The 39 Steps, my first show here. so, that was fun.

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Thursday was a long day. Tutorials until 9:00pm, which are like 1-on-1 sessions with teachers where you ask them shit and then they tell you shit. The Alexander Technique one was amazing; he essentially just fixed everything wrong about my body structure in 15 minutes.

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Friday, we finally found out who we were in The Tempest. The roles jumbl around a lot, but I'm mostly Sebastian (No, I'm not a crab...fuck off).

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Saturday lasted forever because we needed to film our combat scenes, and then rehearse the Tempest right afterward.

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Now, let me just say one thing...

I've been a member of the Society of American Fight Directors (or SAFD) for about a year and a half and am recognized as an Actor/Combatant with proficiencies in unarmed, rapier & dagger (EAE), quarterstaff, broadsword, and sword & shield (EAE). In order to be recognized as an Advanced Actor/Combatant, I needed to be in SAFD for another 6 months or so and get one of the three proficiencies I don't currently hold: single sword, small sword, or knife.

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I just got off the website for Fights Four, a stage combat group that teaches these SAFD proficiencies and is run my some great people I know. As it turns out, they ran simultaneous single sword and small sword classes on different nights from late January to March 7th. If I had stayed in the states, not only could I have gotten Advanced Actor/Combatant by December, but I would have only needed to get the knife proficiency and wait another couple of years before I could attend the Teacher Training Workshop to become a Certified Teacher.

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I chose to go to London.

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Fuck my life.

Benvenuto a Inghiltera (or The Sluggers, Live @ MSG)

Quick! What's the most logical thing to do after coming home from a 4-day tour in Berlin and nearly catching pneumonia from the constant rain?

You guessed it! Show two friends who came up from Italy as much of London as I possibly can in the span of less than 72 hours!

Over the course of the first evening, we hit Green Park, Buckingham Palace, St. James' Park, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and two football games (Manchester United in the first, Arsenal in the second) at the Rocket.

Nicole was not feeling well the second and third day, so it was just Elyssa and I trying to cover the rest of foggy London town. The first stop on the second day was something I hadn't even been to yet since I've arrived...


...the Tower of London. We were fortunate enough to catch the beginning of a yeoman warder (beefeater) tour, so that saved me a lot of energy.

Traitor's Gate, the entranceway for prisoners into the tower since the year 1XXX (this is why I'm not a tour guide for the Tower).

It's been about 4 or 5 years since I've last been in the Tower, but it doesn't really get old. I mean, the Tower itself is old, but...fuck it, you knw what I mean.

For some reason, the crown jewels were a little disappointing this time around. I ust don't recall there being so little of them on display. Even a majority of the White Tower was closed off due to the renovation and developement of a new Henry VIII exhibition due to be completed in the near future, but they still had the cool shit.

My favorite piece is still the 6'9" tall suit of armor actually worn by a human being. Talk about scary shit...you see this motherfucker coming at you with a broadsword the size of you, it's game over.

Interestingly enough, one of the English Kings (I think Charles I) received a suit of Japanese armor as a gift...so that made me happy.

This is Tower Bridge. This is not London Bridge. London Bridge is to the west. Don't point to this bridge and exclaim that it's falling down. You'll look like an idiot.

One thing I have never seen before at the Tower, however, was a pair of gentlemen, dressed as artillery soldiers, showing off how to use ranged weapons in the Tower moat. They fired off a giant crossbow and a perrier (which is a smaller, man-powered version of the trebuchet...not a fancy type of water) down the moat at a group of wooden dummies. Awesome.

The rest of the afternoon was a seat-of-our-pants marathon of failure. We couldn't go into the Globe because they had a performance that afternoon. We couldn't go into St. Paul's because there was a memorial service. Therefore, we just decided on doing the longest possible walking tour of London.

We headed down Fleet Street and saw the Royal Courts of Justice. If Judge Turpin was real, he would have worked here. I'm just so glad that Sondheim did some dramaturgy on the actual Fleet Street before writing Sweeney Todd.

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Later that evening, we at a little place in Chinatown that offered shark fin soup. I know sharks are in great danger because of overfishing in Asia, but I can see why. That shit is delicious and it made me want to hunt a lion with a katana.

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Even later that evening, we went to Slim Jim's Bar right by the Almeida Theatre. There was a slight confusion at the door because the bouncer thought he had thrown me out of the bar last month. I had not been there since January. Eventually, everything was resolved, Zack and I became friends and he let me in no problem.

We ran into our Aussie friends at the bar, believe it or not. It's kind of funny...everytime someone from NYU has run into them, I'm the only one who knows who they are. I also sort of accidentally became the drummer for their rock band, The Sluggers. It's a long story, but when they hit the US in 2010, I may suddenly be attending a lot of random jam-sessions.

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The next day, we hit the inside of Westminster Abbey, saw a bunch of famous dead folk, then hit the London Eye.

The London Eye is the world's largest Ferris wheel, just so you know.

Great shots of London from the Eye.

Best part about the Eye: NYUL students get reimbursed for going on the Eye. Woot!

After we said goodbye, I hit up my...

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Play of the Week: "Night, London" @ the Tristan Bates in Leicester Square

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This was like nothing I'd ever seen before. A cast of 25 people started a show on March 2nd, completely improvised, and every successive night, they continued the story with the same characters, totally unscripted. This was, probably, the most important piece of theatre I've seen so far. Sure, "Shun-kin" was phenominal, but this made me realize that if I was ever to direct a show, this is what I'd want to do. I wonder if the Edison Valley Playhouse would let me do that. One could only hope. It was a drama, but it was hysterical. The theatre was small, the majority of the audience were cast members whose characters were not in the show that evening, and after the intermission, the audience was invited in on watching a guest director work with the actors in an hour-long experimentation with what he saw in the performance. Coolest theatrical experience thusfar. I'm sure with the right people from And More!, Quaint Little Coffee Shop, and More Ways Out, we could pull something off.

RAPE IS A FLOWER?!?!?!?

I'm not even joking...Chris Polansky found this for me.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed
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Of course Chris Polansky would know this sort of shit, but in all seriousness, what genius fucking botanist looked at the pretty yellow Brassica napus flower (whose seeds are used to make vegetable oil, by the way) and said, "I want to name this flower the rape flower"?
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Did they even keep that bastard at the university after that one, or did they just let him go crazy? "We'll call this one the incest tree, and this one the genocide vine. Oh! We can call this one the sodomy bush! Where's my noble prize?!"
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And people think actors are odd. Those people have not met scientists.
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I know several scientists. None of them qualify as "normal".

Whatever You Do...Don't Mention the War

Just a fair warning: this blog entry is going to cover 4 days and 3 nights of Berlin tourism...so. it's going to be long. If the challenge of reading this is too daunting, just turn away now. No one will judge you.
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Day 1
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London Stansted, 6am: I had just spent the night sleeping in an airport. Don't believe the stories...it's not as fun as people say. We arrived in Berlin around 9am their time; we were stll exhausted, but we tried to power through it. Nathaniel and his sister Cassie thought that they could catch a quick nap on the train from Shönefeld Airport...
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...they were wrong. The minute Nathaniel's head hit his backpack, a 4-man mariachi/polka band started playing right next to him for about three train stops.

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Poor Nathaniel couldn't catch a break to save his life. Right after they left, a 5-man Christian a capella group entered our car and started singing gospel songs. This was going to be a long day.
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We separated momentarily so that we could each check into our respective hostels. I was saying at the Amstel House near Turmstrasse for the duration of my stay, while everyone else wa staying near Alexanderplatz. It was a pretty nice place, except for the fact that someone took my provided linens on the last night I was there.
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We needed to link back up arond noonish. Damn-near hopelessly lost, I am charged with finding a small cafe on Invalidenstrasse where everyone is eating lunch. I pass by a place called Invaliden Park..."The Invalid Park". Sure, why not? Cripples and sickies need parks, too.
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Further down the road, I walk by der Museum für Naturkunde, which was by far the scariest-looking natural history museum I've ever seen.
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We eventually meet up and decide to head ondown to the Reichstag building. On the way, we pass literally through Berlin-Hauptbahnhof (West Berlin Station).
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Enormous, gorgeous, and plenty of American food chains.
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The Reichstag Buiding: the most-visited active parliament in the world. I'm not sure why.
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Maybe it's because of the big glass dome on the roof that you can climb up. Sadly, renovation work started the day we arrived...so we just walked around the roof of the Reichstag building and looked around for a bit.
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We only spent a few minutes at the Reichstag building, because the only drawing factor about it was tht damn dome. We walked over to the Brandenburg Gate, whic was apparently a huge place for touristy pictures. We saw two guys, one in a Soviet Union uniform, the other in a WWII US uniform, both holding their respective flags, charging for pictures next to them. If there isn't a wall between them and there's no visible hostility, I'm sorry, but I just down buy it.
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Things got dark very fast. Just as night hit, we stumbled across the Holocaust Memorial. It was gigantic. Almost the size of a full city block with thousands of these concrete rectangles, each the same length and width, but differing in height as you went deeper into the memorial.

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The rectangles slowly began to turn into monoliths, towering over us and turning the memorial into a dark labyrinth.
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We had accidentally scared each other several times while in the memorial...then, we started to do it on purpose. It turned out to be rather fun.
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Don't get be wrong, I'm not making light of the Holocaust here, but could you imagine playing paintball in a field structured like this memorial? You'd shit your pants every time you turned a corner. I mean, look at how creepy this thing is at night!
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We quickly discovered that when the sun went down, everything in Berlin became creepy as hell.
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Tommy decided to go with the flow.
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We did, however, see a magnificent theatre in Gendarmenmarkt with a statue of the four muses in front of it...which was nice.

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After that, we headed down Friedrichstrasse, which is kind of like the Berlin Oxford Street (bunch of stores car dealerships, etc.) While we were walking down the road towards Alexaderplatz, we came across a totalled Mini Cooper that the owner just seemed to have recently abandoned on the side of the street. We took full advantage of this opportunity.
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TOURIST ANGRY! TOURIST SMASH!
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Day 2

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We met up in Potsdamer Platz, which is kind of like Times Square, but smaller and darker.
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I mean, there were tall buildings and a train station. I'm not really sure how to describe it there.
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They did have a display of some large chunks of the Berlin Wall around there, though. There was even a kiosk with Soviet "soldiers" offering to stamp your real passport with old East Berlin passport stamps from the 50's and 60's. I didn't want to have to try to explain to pissy UK Border Patrol that I did not, in fact, travel through time during my vacation, so I opted out of the pasport stamping.
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We made our way through the colossal Tiergarten and we stumbled upon a large monument to all the Soviet soldiers who died in WWII.
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They had heavy cannons and tanks along the outside, so we had some fun. For those of you who read my Dover blog...

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...sorry, Doug, but Tommy now holds the record for largest fake artillery penis. I hope to stand behind the HMS Belfast before I leave the UK. I want that record.
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I imagine Tiergarten is lovely in the spring and the Summer, but it just sort of looked dead when we were there.
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It had a pretty music statue, though.
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In the center of Tiergarten is der Siegessäule (Victory Column). The Nazis moved this statue from outside the Reichstag building to here, added a whole extra part to it to make it much taller, and made it the symbol of their triumphantness. It's now a symbol of Berlin's homosexual community.

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Well, there's a complete 180 for you.
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Back to Potsdamer Platz and into the Sony Center. Quite large, but everything in and near it was quite expensive.
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They did have a LEGO giraffe, though, which was cool.

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We hungered at that point, so we headed over to a little restaurant, near Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten (Zoological Gardens Station), that I fell in love with. It was mostly because of the food...
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...but they were also in close proximity to the zoo's llama enclosure. Funny story with the llamas: they were all on one side of the pen, looking at a younger on on the other side. I went to take a photo of them all looking in one direction. One must have spotted me, because when I looked up from the camera, they were all looking at me dead in the eye. I figure it was that punk in the center that ratted me out. I did, however, promise to tag them in the photo for Facebook if they promised not to spit. They didn't spit, so I guess they were cool with it.
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One of the coolest things we saw while in Berlin was the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Memorial church), which had it's highest spire damaged by the bombing of Berlin during the war. They decided not to repair it, but to cover the damage with cement to stand as a testament to the futility of war. There was a lot of that in Berlin. Apparently, Germans aren't a big fan of war nowadays.
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At night, we hit Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous of locations of transportation in between West and East Berlin. We walked into the American sector, but there wasn't a whole lot there.
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We were able to walk back into the Soviet sector because I had purchased a Soviet winter hat to try and combat the rain. You'll see that hat in a later photo.
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Strange enough, we ran into our buddy Devin from NYUL on the only day he was staying in Berlin. Naturally, we went out for beers. Devin let us in on a somewhat touristy beer served in a goblet and drank through a straw.

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Nathaniel said it wasn't a beer, but something he drank when he was sick.

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Tommy called it the gayest drink he had ever seen.

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I have dubbed it Der Fraubrau, or "The Woman-Beer".

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Sadly, I found it delicious.
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The effects of Der Fraubrau were so strong that when Nathaniel ordered a pitcher of man-beer to follow, he was incapable of pouring a decent glass of beer. Side-effects of Der Fraubrau may include, but are not limited to, unexpected intoxication, loss of alcohol-related motor skills, and loss of testicles.
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Day 3

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We stayed relatively close to Alexanderplatz because everyone was headed off for Munich that evening. I believe this is a shot of the Altes Museum, but I only took this because it was a convenient extra photo to take while standing in the middle of the square to take a photo of...
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...der Berliner Dom, a massive Protestant Cathedral built in the late 1800's. It cost 5 Euros to get in and people were hesitant about it, but the allure of the cathedral prevailed and we went in.
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5 Euros well spent.
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Easily the prettiest church's I've ever been in, surpassing Bath Abbey and Westminster Abbey in grandeur.
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I think the most spectacular part was the altar. You can't really see it in this photo...
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...but I'll do the best I can with this one. It's almost impossible to do justice to it without being there.
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The Berliner Dom also houses the remains of the Hohenzollern royal family, including Friderick the Great.
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We climbed up to the top of the cathedral and saw a spectacular view of all of Berlin.
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Interesting story about that TV tower, by the way. The Russians wanted to build a large, rotating TV tower when they conquered Berlin to show off how wealthy they were and how advanced their technology was. Halfway through building it, they realized that they didn't have the money or the technology to pull it off...so they hired the Swiss to do it for them.
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Ahh, Berlin...
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...we will conquer it for the Motherland!
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PS - We found a hash museum that grew its own shit in the window. Crazy.

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Our last meal together was at a little sausage stand across the street, by far my favorite place to eat in Berlin, mostly because of the awesome dude that runs it. If you'e ever in Berlin, drop by this place and get some sausages.

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Day 4

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I was on my own for my last day in Berlin...so I sought solice among the animals.

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This was the most dangerous thing I've done since coming to Europe...chilling near hippos.

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Unfortunately, my camera battery died shortly thereafter, but let's see if we can't some up the attitudes of the animals in der Zoogolischer Garten in two words...

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Vocal & Agitated

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I got the shit scared out of me by a lion who decided to give a full bellowing roar less than 10ft away from me and by a Siberian tiger that decided to roar and jump at the cage where the zookeeper was trying to transfer it outside.

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That pretty much sums up Berlin. If you're thinking about travelling there, here are some tips:

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1) Try to speak German to the people. They all know English, but they are so happy when you try to accommodate them as opposed to th other way around.

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2) Don't respond if a small child or a middle-aged woman wearing a handkerchief on her head asks if you speak English. They are Bosnian gypsy vermin who are trying to beg for money. If you do get trapped and they hand you their "begging letter", reply (in whatever language you want) that you are a university student and you don't have money. Walk away immediately. Give them absolutely nothing, not even pity...because gypsies have no souls.

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3) Eat the local food. It's some of the best in the world if you know what to order. Stick to beer and meats and you'll do fine.

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And, if you're looking for some fun extra shit we found, scroll down and read my "Top 11 WTF Moments of Berlin".