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Last night was the first Saturday night this year when it was really warm in Palermo,I was out in the centre and it was absolutely packed… thousands of locals and tourists everywhere,all the bars and restaurants were full of people.
Despite the rising prices there are still plenty of people with enough money to spend.
I guess for the tourists it’s all relative..one part of the people we ate with were a Swiss couple, they considered the prices very low!
Anyway it’s nice to be able to eat outside again without needing to wear heavy winter clothes.
Do you often eat outside where you live,at home or when you go to a restaurant?
You know pink or red buildings don’t look all that bad. Darker grayish tones seem more in vogue these days for new buildings in the US.
I found a bunch of buildings that were built with a limestone called “Tennessee Marble”in downtown. The nearby areas are littered with quarries mining this stuff. [This building](https://imgur.com/a/YIGgqY5) is a good example of the pink variety of this rock.
There’s also more pictures on Wikipedia. [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_marble#/media/File%3AKnoxville-post-office-tn1.jpg).
German verb prefixes will be the death of me.
Think about “stechen” which means to sting or pierce or stab. Ge-stochen means just pierced or stabbed. Simple past tense. Great. But if you say er-stochen it means stabbed to death. What? This escalated quickly. Then there is zer-stochen which means something like covered in stings or stabs (like when you go camping in Finland). Huh. Then, there is durch-stechen which means pierced through which is fine, durch means through, so, whatever. But! If you want to use past tense you need to do durch-ge-stochen (but you don’t do zer-ge-stochen. Why? Who the eff knows). Same with ab-stechen which means… to stick out or contrast. Or to cut off. Probably some more things. And then we come to be-stechen which means to bribe. The why is lost to time. Or maybe not.
Now you just need to remember this next time you are stabbed and you call the emergency, so that they know if you are stabbed, dead, stung by mosquitoes, or bribed.
Anyone else just scrolling instead of doing what they’re supposed to? 😅
Back from Germany. Shocked how poor our German was, we thought we could wing it with our 40 year ago high school German. Didn’t work, ended up using our phone a lot to do some serious Google translate.
BTW, where do the Germans stock the ‘pindasaus’ (Erdnuss-sosse) in the supermarkets? We looked in the sauces-section, but no luck. And we could not find the ‘hamblokjes’ (Schinkenwürfel) either. We bought turkey by mistake…
But I loved the roads! All those S-turns, going up and down 10%. And the view! We even had two mornings where the town in the valley was hidden in the mists.
Tampere Biennale, the contemporary music festival in our city, was this week and I went to a concert yesterday. They played five pieces, two were ok I thought, three were actually really good. There was one for trumpet, trombone and tuba, Friction by Agata Zubel, and it’s probably the funniest piece I’ve ever heard. It became increasingly outrageous as it went on and at the end the performers were basically having a mental breakdown on stage blowing up balloons. It sounds like lame post-modern shit, but performed it actually really worked. I would never listen to that piece from a recording though.
The five pieces performed were all by different composers, and four of them were present. *Really* contemporary. Only one who wasn’t there was Magnus Lindberg, who is a big deal anyway so maybe he had better things to do. Two of the composers were born in the 2000s.
The concert was at the former city hall, which is like a late 19th century neo-renaissance building. I had never been there. It reminds one a lot of like St. Petersburg imperial Russian architecture, the interior especially. Which makes sense, it was built when Finland was part of that empire.
I swear Finland has to be one of the best countries to live in when it comes to contemporary music being performed, there’s honestly a lot of it. Festivals like this, and new pieces get a fair amount of play elsewhere too.