Week 13 & 14: Rat Race
Behind the scenes of being incredibly behind...on everything.
Order Up
When the moon hits your eye like a big piece of pie, Rats amore.
When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine, Rats amore.
—Dean Martin x Lily Poppen x Antiquated Instagram caption from January 2020
I’m stuck in a rut that has kept me from my pile of work and from writing the post for the last two weeks. I need to get on it but instead I’m job searching because all my friends have moved to New York City. Or are in Seattle. I don’t know if I want to move to New York but the perfect position I was eyeing has already been filled. Mayor Eric Adams obviously has no Rats Amore and I have no motivation to do my minimal homework. Gotta get that drive, determination, and killer instinct.
The Bread
Top Slice: A week very much centred around food and public transit. A rat race from taking long train rides to the nether regions of Hamburg for a class trip and a climbing gym with a kilterboard, to falling asleep during a three-part Bach Weihnachtsoratorium in a cold church, cooking for our dorm’s Weihnachtsfeier dinner to directly leaving for a concert in my climbing gym, and then off to Belgium on a bus. From being hosted in Belgium to hosting a friend from Berlin to holiday shopping and packing for my host family. Oh and how can I forget—an apprehended coup planned by Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß and members of the extremist council “Der Rat” to take over the government.
Bottom slice: I will leave for southern Germany on Thursday evening and need to wrap up quite a few things (unintended Christmas pun) before I leave. A friend wants to try and get tickets to “The Nutcracker” ballet but the rat king part still freaks me out even after twenty years. Sadly the rat race is going to continue through the holidays. I’ll be headed directly from southern Germany back to Hamburg for a few days and then to Morocco to visit a Bowdoin friend from Iowa. And then directly into quasi-finals season that I plan to get ahead…probably. The limited snow we had is fading to mush and soup because of the warm front, so crossing my fingers it will return when I’m back in like, 20 days.
ALLERGY WARNING: This sandwich includes dairy products and talking more about France than Germany…again.
The Filling
In full transparency, Ratatouille (2007) used to be one of my favourite movies and I was horrified when it became the main meme in 2020. I love the artist Camille and her song “Le Festin” which translates to The Feast, which there was much of this week, but the reason it was meme-d was Tik Tokers trying to sing it pitchily and pointing out the absurdity of a rat cooking in a kitchen with a chef named ‘Linguini’ which is actual Italian and not French and basically the entire movie is such a weird pitch but still made $624 million and still makes me unreasonably happy.
So for feasts: there was an absurd amount of cheese consumed the last two weeks. On Friday there was a dinner at our dorm. It was the first one in two years because of the pandemic and was super lovely. The entire basement was decorated and each floor brought something—mostly sweets to be quite honest—but I represented our floor making things only that were orange unintentionally including sweet potatoes and carrot bread. There was also a cheese board (very trendy) and then when I was downtown at the (Rat)haus I consumed some Kartoffellanzen which are like hash browns but way overpriced and burn your mouth to compensate for the frigid temperatures here these last two weeks.
On Saturday, we said goodbye to one of the students who is not studying abroad at the university through Smith College, but completed a research project from October to December. Her name is Tamia and we had a nice dinner at Crêperie bretonne which prides itself in being the first Breton restaurant in Hamburg. So niche that I’m not sure it has a lot of competition but everyone was in the classic stripes, there was a random gift store within the restaurant, and the galette was satisfying after the two-hour Weihnachtsoratorium I arrived thirty minutes late to due to public transit disasters and then couldn’t find the entrance to the church and was skulking around in the dark like the rat from “Fantastic Mr. Fox” who looks French but has a Wild West accent.
The evening I left Belgium, the streets looked like the Wild West. There were so many police officers in shields and fully armed just hanging out on street corners or by the train station I could not believe it. Wednesday night was of course, FIFA’s France versus Morocco and there had been some vandalism when Morocco beat out Belgium in an earlier round so I suppose they were trying to be proactive. But there were so. many. officers that when I totally mixed up my bus departure stop and had to frantically try to catch a taxi to the airport where the bus would pass through, the driver swore and swerved since many of the streets were blocked off or closed. Super stress.
But Belgium itself was a total surprise to me as I had no expectations or background info but it was really vibrant. I ate a lot of potatoes and fries in the form of fries, raclette, and Halloumi but aside from that, took a short train ride with a friend up to the cities of Bruges and Ghent. The country only has three regions, Flanders (Dutch-speaking) in the north, Wallonia (French-speaking) in the south, and Bruxelles (bilingual) but is incredibly diverse and varied in the atmosphere, pace of life, and vibe even within the capital city and seat of the EU itself. The 19 surrounding neighbourhoods are called ‘communes’ (shout-out to my Blue Vic commune buds) but obviously, are not communes as in an alternative, intentional, artsy-crunchy community. The beautiful Sonian Wood, historically a hunting ground for the Habsburg Empire and now a public forest filled with some old-growth Beech trees, lies right behind my friend’s house and honestly, he should consider creating an actual commune. There is so much good wood in there a Flemish-Dutch woodworking utopia village seems like it wouldn’t be that out of place even in the 21st-century. If Pixar can sell rat-infested Paris as idyllic, it shouldn’t be too hard.
I meandered around the city a bit and went to the Magritte Museum that was infested with school tours and some ‘exceptional event’ that shut many of the museums down but really enjoyed just walking from end to end of the centre in a city that is shockingly diverse for Europe with approximately 40% of the population from non-European country origins. My friends Stoc and Kyubin spent around two months there in early fall doing research and while I was sad our trips did not overlap, will be eager to swap some insights even though one absolutely cannot get a full picture of a place just visiting for a few days. I remember vividly singing the song “Flanders Fields” in choir which is set to the poem by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, but could never actually place which country Flanders was in. Funny how things click later but also a little sad how world geography falls by the wayside in most US primary schools. I didn’t make it to Flanders Fields but got a quick-hit history lesson from my friend and probably will give my ex-history teacher grandpa a call to hear more. I have absolutely betrayed my young self by becoming a history nerd who likes to read all the plaques in a city and read WWI and WWII literature etc. etc. but so it goes.
My friend Selda, from the 2016 German exchange, came to visit me in Hamburg as her term is finished in Berlin. I’ve never gotten to spend very much time with her one-on-one but it was honestly, a highlight of the month. We cooked quite a bit during the weekend and consumed some good paneer, tromped around the city and rode the metro all the way to the new HafenCity stop which honestly, should be the main train stop with how aesthetic it is, and frequented some record stores and subsequently binge-watched all of the TV series “High Fidelity.” Needless to say, a seamless, and wonderful way to close out the week coming back from Belgium.
We attended a dinner with my British friend who hosted our climbing group and made vegan mince meat pies, a proper British roast, and trifle. There was no red cabbage or blue cabbage, which I guess is a thing? And since I love fermented things it was a bit sad, but ate some pickles with the raclette the prior week so all was good. And the meal was truly delicious and at the end, we all pulled Christmas crackers which I have only ever seen done in movies and so I was really delighted. Selda took pictures in the famous, yet flimsy paper crowns, but is very vintage so they are all on her film camera that will need to be developed. Stay tuned.
Last Friday I went to a concert by the artist, Sofie Royer who is an Austrian-American-Iranian singer. The venue was tiny and in the ‘tower’ room but the vibe was very laid back even though almost no one there knew her music. In fact, there was no band—she mixes all her music herself. It was just her and a random MC who after the show, I chatted up and learned he was in the film industry and met Sofie subletting his flat in Paris and just randomly hopped on her tour in September. This Saturday, I took Selda to a jazz club called Birdland Hamburg (not to be confused with New York) and we heard the Sophia Oster Quintet which was quite good. The club was so full that Selda and I had to sit on the stairs and during intermission, ended up talking about how the jazz club went from a historically, more or less wild dance hall, to a somewhat high-brow Saturday night outing for older white couples. She is a voracious reader and has family in Paris so I recommended The Autobiography of Malcom X and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin; the former because of Malcom X’s incredible and vivid accounts of the Boston jazz scene and the importance of Black Liberation and the latter because Baldwin was his contemporary and details the Germain neighborhood jazz scene in his writing. Highly recommend.
The Sauce
I tried to locate a thread of texts about rats to my friend Isa for this post and realised that I have a tendency to describe myself as a rat a stunning amount of times. In class, we learned some common sayings that attribute animal traits to human habits including Schwimmratte which is terrifying, but apparently, there are several breeds who are semi-aquatic. I too am semi-aquatic or am forcing myself to be as it is too cold and slippery to run anymore, so I turned to lap swimming. And ascended to Holy Trinity status, the wet rat (baptised in chlorine), the frozen rat ( from the lowered pool temperatures due to the energy crisis) and the holy drunken rat (I had vertigo for several days after from trying to race the speedo guy next to me). Familienbad Ohlsdorf was truly a transformative experience.
The word for snacking / nibbling at sweet things in German is ‘naschen.’ I brought back some Liege waffles from Belgium. I had an overnight bus from Bruxelles and went directly from the station to my classes and had to give a presentation. When I got home I was planning to do some more work, but was so tired I fell asleep at 4pm and awoke to find the crumbs of my waffle still on my chest. As they say all the time in the French speaking part of Belgium, voilà.
Mystery Meat
Enjoy your meatless Monday and a collage of texts that sums up the energy of the last two weeks perfectly.
