Week 11: Five-Star Reviews for Dummies
Everyone's a critic and you can be too.
Order Up
Are you fed up with bad internet service? Are long blog posts with an absurd amount of links that throttle your data putting you to sleep?
Lucky for you, I’m here to give you the insider tips on how to shut me up by shutting me in a room with British TV series, a copious amount of books, and only letting me out to spend Black Friday at the only grocery store open on Friday evening and buying nacho flavoured tortilla chips for €1,29. As one critic (my grandmother) put it, “I’m living the dream.”
The Bread
Top Slice:
Tip #1. Anything can be five-star worthy when done with the right people
…talking about Phineas and Ferb during intermission at the Elbphilharmonie Symphony, guess-timating how many sweet potatoes to buy at the supermarket for Thanksgiving dinner, and getting dizzy from Glühwein and then climbing up fake rock walls for two hours afterwards.
Bottom Slice: I wish I could offer a pre-release of next weeks plans, but as the very famous music critic, Eminem once said, “Really, I have no idea.”
The Filling
Tip #2. Write about what you know.
I met with my first exchange student Hanna Rosebrock in Hamburg this weekend. She stayed with us all the way back in 2014 and I have not seen her in ages and did not know she lived two hours away in Northern Germany until her mother let my mother know. We had a really lovely time on Saturday walking around the city and she brought her partner as well, who I had not yet met. Does one really “know” someone they haven’t seen in so many years or stayed in consistent contact with? Probably not but she found it hilarious that when I use Google Maps, I never push “start.” I only use the map to orient myself/read street names to save battery. She does the exact same thing and it drives her boyfriend crazy and I was honoured to help her antagonise him with this little, yet funny shared trait. Hanna and I also realised we share a deep love of leaving Google reviews so keep an eye out for two reviews for Gao Kitchen on Lange Reihe.
Tip #3. Use your words.
My courses were very laidback this week. I had my first meeting with my tutor for my Urban Studies class who will help me walk through the lectures and check for comprehension. Her name is Alma and she is in the class too studying anthropology and politics. Honestly, the course is really easy and just a history lecture so we just drink coffee and talk about the airplanes that look like whales that are manufactured in Hamburg.
But this week we had a guest lecturer who was supposed to talk about city development in Vienna but instead gave an hour and a half lecture on Neusiedl am See. This tiny town has undergone much change as it has evolved into a resort town/escape for wealthy Austrians and tensions between the residents and private developers are high.
I had considered doing a political science minor at Bowdoin, but urban studies really encompasses the sociology, history, politics, and for much of Europe, environmental science, that I was interested in. Instead of giving an oral presentation for this class, I will be writing a book review on Stadt-Land-Frust: A Political Survey by Swiss author Lukas Haffert. It was just published this year and present an argument that the polarisation of society in the last few years is deeply entangled in the regional discrepancies and economies that resulted from geo-political conflicts. The argument seems intuitive in some ways, but Haffert uses the United States and France as case studies to compare to Germany and I am very interested to delve into it. He is now a professor at Universität Zürich where much of my thesis material was sourced from.
When I visited Switzerland back in March, I excused my pitiful German skills because the Swiss-German accent was difficult to understand. Sitting through the lecture however, I was also completely lost with the thick Austrian accent. I felt seen though, when one of the German students asked for clarification on one of the points and Christiane, the lecturer, apologised for using so many Austrian colloquialisms amd phrases. I had no idea what was going on, but at least I wasn’t the only one.
On Thursday, we also went to a museum for my Benin Bronzes class and one of the students performed a rap about colonisation and the British never giving anything back. It was freestyle but not freiwilig or optional—I talked to him afterward and he said he did it in lieu of writing a final term paper. But then, our professor requested he write down the lyrics. Everyone knows the first rule of writing a scathing review is to not leave a paper trail so the joke is on him.
Tip #4. It’s all relative.
On Thursday, we organised a Thanksgiving dinner with our programme cohort. It was very non-traditional: Raclette, several types of potatoes, ice cream, Lebkuchen, apple crisp, and I contributed Sichuan green beans and Quiche Lorraine. Not the five-star Thanksgiving meal the Marriott Hotel here serves and students have gone to in the past, but I think our menu is a close relative to the one at home: midwest green bean casserole, cranberries, and rutabagas also known as turnips to the Scottish.
I love lists. And Liszt. And classical music. And speaking of the Scots, we went to the Elbphilharmonie this Tuesday with our programme to listen to Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 also known as the “Scottish” symphony. The solo violinist for the concerto was insanely gifted, but I have been listening to The Hebrides, Op. 26 "Fingal's Cave" which was the opening piece.
The Elbphilharmonie It is a crazy work of architecture with two halls and multiple other small performance studios. It was finally finished in 2017 (ten years later than scheduled) and designed by a Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd. who also have completed several projects in the US—the majority of which are art museums. The Elbphilharmonie absolutely looks like a museum with its sweeping glass crest and the foyer’s white ceilings creating a sail-like effect within the 26 floors. Considered a Gesamtkunstwerk, I was honestly so grateful the orchestra program was not Wagner (who is accredited with distilling the concept to the public).
For my music family and music loving nerds, the website overview of the organ construction/acoustics of the hall is really amazing!
I was not super familiar with Mendelssohn or the ensemble, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, but after the concert did some good Google reconnaissance. The Staatskapelle Dresden appears on almost every list of “The World’s Best Orchestras” and is ranked up there with the London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna, Chicago Symphony, Boston, and Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra was founded in 1548 and will be celebrating its 475th anniversary this upcoming year. Although we weren’t hearing Richard Wagner (thankfully), the ensemble has been directed by some of the best conductors in history including Wagner himself, Richard Strauss, Colin Davis, and Erich Kleiber.
I go through phases of music listening where I’ll be stuck in Classic Rock for a few months and then 90s rap and then Eminem (jokes) but haven’t returned to classical music for probably two years. Now is the time and while I love reading professional music critics’ opinions on the character or sound of the orchestra, to listen in person is incredible. I am so grateful to have heard ensembles of this calibre growing up—sometimes not even knowing how world-class they are. My one regret at university was not taking a music history class. But I think being here, having so so so so much free time (emphasis on so so so much if that wasn’t clear), I can go to many of these events for free, read up on the programme and do some independent research/start reading music criticism as voraciously as I read art criticism today since both institutions are so embroiled in political agendas and national interests—especially with ensembles as old as the Staatskapelle.
Tip #5. Looks can be misleading.
There are more than 30 Weihnachtsmärkte in Hamburg and I have meandered through a few of the main ones in the downtown. They have been so busy, I haven’t had the chance to slow down or really look at anything, so resolved myself to find the ones in the farther corners of the city. However, I went to the markets with my climbing group spontaneously today. The Gänsemarkt Christmas market was so much more pleasant and chill but was only a five minutes walk from the two biggest and busiest ones. Very convenient and I found it lovely how the markets wind through the streets of downtown and one can hop from one to the next but find calm oases in between.
The star system is almost always used in reviews, but even those with a smaller number deserve a second look. My favourite thing to look at in the markets and in the windows of buildings are the Herrnhuter Sterne which are hung for Advent and can even be found in Moravian congregations in Pennsylvania or North Carolina. I have not personally seen them in the US, but I love the delicate look of the 26-pointed star.
The Sauce
for this week would naturally be gravy, but since everyone in my program is vegetarian—kind of—its more like Rotten Tomatoes.
Tip #6. Keep an eye out for cross-over episodes.
I have been meeting so many other German students who have spent random chunks of time in the United States. During the Sprachcafe, or informal English-speaking session I help lead every Tuesday, I met two different students who lived in the US during their high school years. One did a year in Kansas and another in Nebraska. A student living in our dormitory was an au pair in Pennsylvania and a friend of a friend did a year in Alabama. My tutor I mentioned above, was in Texas and another climbing group member I met today was in Beaverton, Oregon. The majority gave the experience five stars, however, one had a caveat and said “I hate that Americans eat raw broccoli. But I like ranch.” Top ten individual in my eyes and I will be hanging out with him more solely based on this fact.
Tip #7. The book is always better than the movie.
I have been on an aggressive reading streak and finally completed my Goodreads goal of 120 books this year. A good chunk is certainly attributed to my thesis materials (yikes) but also some re-reads of Jane Austen. If I’m not reading, I’m demonstrating my refined Anglophile taste by watching the new season of Love Island UK or Pride and Prejudice BBC version. A friend has said it is superior to the other movie version, because the TV series is true to the book and word-for-word. Austen was the OG reviewer with her eloquent letters and I suggest writing your restaurant reviews using word-for-word Love Island lingo:
“The restaurant was really my type on paper but I got the ick when the geezer wrote on yelp that he got mugged off when a blind date stood him up.”
Tip #8. You can still make a five-star recipe with substitute ingredients.
Except pumpkin pie. A grocery store clerk looked around the store for canned pumpkin for a full fifteen minutes. It was supposed to be in the same aisle as the briny fish preserves which definitely do not scream, “five-star dessert.” He even called the manager on the phone who said “we have it.” They didn’t and so, we didn’t either and stuck with an apple crisp.
Mystery Meat
Tip #9. Allow yourself to be star-struck by:
The airport in Madrid that sells bags of quasi-Cheetos in the shape of soccer balls. Another tip for reviewing—never forget the details and I brought the ridiculously overpriced apparently illegal chips back to Hamburg for my favourite football playing weird food craving friend who likes to break J-walking laws with me.
Stumbling upon a gallery filled with art by Alex Katz in the Guggenheim Bilbao while simultaneously his solo show in the Guggenheim NYC is running. His grandson is one of my good friends and gave a
This week
Such an abrupt end when talking about Alex Katz’ exhibitions, haha!
You are not the only one that does that with Google Maps and I can wholeheartedly say that I am in the same boat. I just do not want Google to start talking to me. Maybe it is wrong, who knows?