Cultural Cartography

Directions

You know you really "live" somewhere when someone asks you for directions and you can give them an answer. Yesterday someone stopped me outside Friedrichstrasse Station and asked me the way to the Pergamon Museum. I was really chuffed (Northern English for pleased and flattered) and gave them a very detailed answer with lots of hand waving and explanations.

I left them, walked into the station and up onto the platform which is high above the ground and realised when I looked out of the windows, that I had sent that young innocent pair in completely the wrong direction!! I was so embarassed and upset that I seriously thought about trying to find them again to send them the right way. Why? Not because I really cared if they found the museum or not, but because I had shown that I didn't know my way around Berlin and that hence I haven't really arrived here yet. It was of course much more about me, than about them. But then don't you find, that it often is?

The New Start

My promise to myself and to you readers: I will not only complain and compare Berlin to London. Things are different here because people live diffferent lives and it will be my task to try and use my training and background to uncover what lies beneath the differences

Wedding bells and moving boxes

Thought I should put up a quick post about why I've been so remiss recently in my blogging. Not only am I getting married in under 5 weeks, I'm also moving to Berlin (from London) and so am in the process of selling my flat and sorting out my life in general. It takes up a lot of time. No real excuse but still an excuse. So apologies.

It does of course mean that I'll have lots of exciting news on the way that Germans live their lives and the signs they use to do it.

But I'm not the only one who is talking about "moving to Berlin": check this out

Lost building

I'm currently reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography (well in all honesty I've been reading it for quite a while now as it's huge and far too big to take on planes). It's amazing and reflects a lot of my feelings for London. I agree wholeheartedly with what was said here. Ackroyd makes the way that the city has grown organically his central tenet and somewhere he talks about using buildings to navigate our way around the city becuase the original landmarks of hills and rivers are now gone or covered over (like the Fleet).

Well anyway, recently whilst travelling on my favorite bus (Route 19), I was shocked to notice that coming up Sloane Street towards Harvey Nicks, you can actually see Hyde Park now. The huge horrible building that used to be there has been ripped down. It completely changed my perspective on where I was and what is more interesting it completely changed my perspective on the building next to it on the right which was now shown in radically different light. It's the Mandarin Oriental London. I know see that it was a much more graceful and well thought through building than I ever realised.

It has an arch between the back and front:

And if you look at this image (which I got here), then you can see how demolishing what is outlined in green would completely change the whole area.

Just another way in which the things that are around us and how we perceive create structures of meaning. What will that corner of Knightsbridge "mean" when it looks like this:

rather than this:

Winter wedding

On my travels in London, I saw this couple outside Westminster Abbey. Getting married is really interesting semiotically because try as you might (and I'm speaking personally) you can't escape the semiotic significance of the various elements such as a white dress and a veil. It's like so much of semiotics: because it's there and it has prescribed the meaning, you have to either go with it or realise that in not going with it, you are making a cultural comment. Even if it's winter and it's freezing.

Great Cities Part 2?

I'm in Houston for the first time and this was my view from the cab on the way into the city. Wow. Does that say America or what? It's big and appears out of nowhere, designed around the car and has this weird quirky charm which it takes you a while to get, and sometimes it just makes you want to scream. That's of course without having set a foot in Houston at this point.

I also like the strange angle of the taxameter.