hellfire

Fires are burning again in various parts of the world that have a curious predisposition for fires of this kind. Much damage has been caused, material and political, and lives have been lost. The cause/excuse is the same as last time: Something to do with religious sensitivities and offense, neither of which I fully understand. What I see in the news reports are brainwashed masses deliberately taking offense and running with it, much like schoolkids in the corner shop take sweets without paying, enjoying a little bit of thrill and the belief that they can get away with it.

Who are these demonstrators? Some just shout their hearts out, others injure and destroy. The BBC sees Islamist extremists in the latter. I prefer to call them marauding lunatics or raving fanatics or manipulated idiots (though idiots wouldn't do full justice to what's going on). What they really are, if you need to bring religion into this, is devil worshipers. The ransacking of embassies, torching of cars and killing of proxies is clearly the work of the devil.

What hasn't got much exposure, ironically, is the content of the offending movie itself. It wasn't too easy to find initially because none of the news sites carries the link. I dug deep and found something that could easily be it, but before you click be forewarned: The content is offensive to good taste and intelligence. What a load of crap! How this can be taken seriously I don't know.

Despite my best intentions (to be fully informed and able to participate in the discussion) I only lasted halfway through the third minute. Painful bluescreen action and vitriolic language can have no other purpose than to drive those so inclined to take offense. A devilish ploy, and it worked like a charm. The connection between Islam and violence has been strengthened in the eyes of the world.

Are both sides in this devils' duel equally at fault? Absolutely not! If I had to pick between lunatics, I'd take the ones that make atrocious movies over those that ruin and slay any day of the week. But I wish the filmmakers would stop uploading their crap to youtube as much as I wish the easily offended would stop watching it.

polo in London

Over the last few months, pretty much since the beginning of this year, this blog has suffered from attrition. Time invested in its upkeep has been cut and the number of posts has dwindled. There are a number of reasons for this, most significantly the fact that my mind isn't in it anymore.

I've been in London for more than five years and the enthusiasm and wide-eyed amazement of the first few years has suffered. When I push through the crowds around Leicester Square or hang out in a bar overlooking the Thames, I'm still buzzed with excitement and feel like pinching myself to see whether this is real, but I don't feel like sharing anymore. You've heard it all a hundred times.

Things still happen as they always have. How could they not? London is a crazy place, full of life, full of diversity, full of people from different worlds. I'm in the middle of it, watching, interacting, participating. But when it comes to reporting, to reflecting the day onto a screen, my energy dissipates quicker than I can log on to Blogger.

Yesterday, for example, I spent a day with a friend who had flown in to see Paralympic athletics, a triple-special birthday treat from his wife. My friend would get to see the Greatest Games Ever™, spend time with a mate of many years and be relieved of his paternal duties for a day.

After watching sports on Friday and a night out in Soho afterwards, we took advantage of the brilliant late-summer day straight from a Visit London commercial to stroll along the Thames, from Richmond to the lock at Teddington. It's a stretch of river with infinite charm, lined first with the perfect pubs and residences of a posh borough and later the dense bushes and ungroomed meadows of rural England. The metropolis feels far away, though one is well within the orbit of London.

I had done this walk before – it is among my favorites – and I know the area a bit. I know, for example, that there is a strong German presence there, almost a German community, though I find it odd seeing these two words together. But there's a big German school, a beer garden much like in Bavaria, the bakery that makes the best bread in all of London and a little deli of many delights.

I also know that there's a famous polo club nearby. For some reason, my mom is fascinated with polo and nearly every week when we talk on the phone, she broaches the topic. I, being here, am supposed to check it out as her proxy. "Have gone to see the polo?", she keeps asking. Only yesterday did her quest came to a successful end.

As my friend and I were raiding a blackberry hedge, we noticed strange goings-on beyond. An event of some sort was taking place, spectators, an announcer – could it be? Further down, there was a gap in the hedge: Polo was being played on a large green. Our access was blocked by a low farm gate, closed and topped with barbed wire, but the view was great. When we realized that the gate wasn't locked, we hesitantly made our way through to get a closer look. It turned out that the spectators were far more interesting than the action.

Requiring horses, polo is a sport for the upper class. It is also a place to mingle for the same crowd, and we clearly didn't fit. The women all wore flowing dresses, heels and careful hairdos. The men were in chinos and button-down shirts in pink, violet and assorted pastels. It's likely that the posher you are, the bolder the color of your dress. One gentleman strutted by in a navy blazer and yellow slacks. In our T-shirts and jeans, we stood out like pimples on a prom queen's face.

Everyone can fake dress, I guess, but adopting the correct behavior is more difficult. The picnics on the sideline spoke volumes. Big tables stood heavy with food and champagne, cigar smokers sat in wooden folding chairs and the ladies lingered in canopies to keep their skin pale. It was unclear how all the kit got there; there were no cars. But no detail had been missed. In the back, I saw smaller tables with seconds protected from insects with little mesh structures.

The game itself was not much to behold. I was intrigued to note that, much as in poorly played pick-up football, everyone was charging after the ball at the same time, galloping horses overshooting their target and long-handled mallets windmilling about. "Spread the game!", I wanted to shout, revealing my ignorance, and "Pass the ball!", but then our escape wouldn't have been so smooth.

The day continued for many sunny hours, with beers by the river and dinner al fresco, a slice of London that hasn't got much exposure on this blog. Yet, when I had put my friend on a train to Gatwick and got myself back home, writing was the last thing I wanted to do. With my mind occupied in many other ways – work, job search, the future – there just isn't the drive to babble about London.

In addition, I find myself in and around Marseille more frequently and begin to see my life there. It isn't yet, and as I can't even tell whether it will be, I can't write about it as if I lived there. What you get instead from time to time are ill-composed travel pieces, mostly relating to time spent at airports or otherwise in transit, that I can't imagine you enjoy reading any more than I enjoy writing them.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I am neither here nor there at the moment. My two half-lives don't fully add up. This is not exactly a new situation, but it's becoming increasingly draining. The good news is, it's going to end. My contract at Imperial ends in October – this time for sure – and I'll move away from London. After that, the frequency of posts will surely pick up again.

the real Switzerland

Yesterday I came back from a quick trip to Switzerland. Each August, Italian friends of mine take possession of a converted farmhouse in the Simmental, an unfashionable valley near Bern, and have a good time, enjoying clean air, dairy products fresh from local cows, strenuous hikes, relaxing hours in the municipal swimming pool, and loads of good food cooked in large batches. They've been inviting me to join them with increasing insistence for at least five years. I've promised to come for at least three. This year, the seemingly impossible finally came to pass.

To make the journey exciting, I came up with my very own Top Gear challenge. Flucha and I would leave work at precisely the same time, she in a car from Marseille, me on various forms of public transport, rail- and airborne, from London. First on parking 2 outside the Geneva airport would win. It would have been a tight race, had everything gone according to plan, but Flucha did a wrong turn and found herself visiting Gap. Nice place, but not where you want to be when you want to get to Geneva double-quick. It was inevitable that I got there first, with a lead so comfortable that it almost invalidated the idea of the challenge. A bit more than two hours later, we hugged our friends in Lenk.

The best day was the third when Flucha and I undertook a hike that was just within our capabilities, a bit more than nine hours of walking with 5000 ft of climbing. It was warm, the wildflowers were out in blinding force, and every half hour, the scenery changed completely. We started in the lush green of a wide valley, advanced through receding vegetation past forbidding cliffs and up slopes of debris to the highest point of the hike. Up there, the trail flattened but variety remained. The colors changed repeatedly between grey, brown and green, each vista different from the one before. We passed by gushing rivers that could have been in northern Canada, glacial lakes and roaring waterfalls. We ran into cows and were briefly held up by a shepherd dog when we got too close to the flock he was guarding.

The presence of livestock so high up in the mountains is a general feature of the Alps. I learned today that the technical term is transhumance, which describes the seasonal migration of livestock between valley in winter and high pastures in summer. All high pastures are organized around a small self-contained dairy farm where the animals return at night after a day of grazing. The farms are remote; there is no way of getting the milk into the valley. Cheese production is the almost logical consequence.

After maturing for a year, the cheese is sold locally, either directly from the dairies or from fridges placed in front of many houses in the valley. The fridges are an odd sight and a fine example of what a perfect place Switzerland is. Most fridges have a locked honesty box nearby where you drop the money for the cheese you choose. Some have second box, open that one, with change in case you need it. The cracker was a fridge with the entire honesty box open inside the fridge, stuffed full of notes and coins, more than 50 franks.

My friends commented that this wouldn't work in Italy. People wouldn't just take the cheese without paying but also the money if they could get their hands on it. Flucha thought in Argentina, people wouldn't bother with the content. "They'd take the entire fridge", she said to general hilarity. In Switzerland, honesty sells cheese quite naturally.

But Switzerland is a strange place anyway. I've come up with the theory that there must have once been a country, let's call it Suisse, of outstanding natural beauty, with diligent inhabitants, correct procedures and trains running on time. When the inhabitants' strive for perfection in their existence and surroundings reached a limit, they created a perfected copy in its place. In analogy to Disneyland, they called it Switzerland.

Upon payment of an admission fee of 40 franks (disguised as annual motorway toll), visitors can explore the country as they please. In the mountains they can see accurately mown meadows covering inclines up to 50% steep. They can hike to waterfalls and way beyond the tree line. Wherever they go, it's like a walk in the park, because it is a walk in a (amusement) park.

Visitors will see park employees leaning out of the windows of the most picturesque houses that immediately recall Christmas in Hyde Park. To keep a wall of fabrication, the employees will communicate with each other in an invented language that's not entirely unlike German but completely incomprehensible. When the visitors get home they can tell their friends about a beautiful place that didn't feel quite right, a place that was too perfect to be real. This place is Switzerland.

like a bird

Today, the Olympic triathlon came by work, or least very nearly so. The running and cycling took place between Hyde Park and Green Park and the swimming in the murky waters of the Serpentine. At 11:30 on the dot, as the starting gun fired, the local fauna suffered the shock of their lives. Frantic flocks of coots, mallards and the Queen's own swans launched a narrow escape from the threshing of the swimmers' arms, only to be sliced into waterfowl carpaccio by a TV helicopter's blades seconds later. It was pandemonium – a theme of the Olympics since Brunel started the industrial revolution during the opening ceremony – and only a short stroll away, past the Albert Hall and across a street.

A British pair of brothers came first and third, and while China and the US fight a proxy war for global supremacy, Great Britain is quietly adding to its own tally and leading the rest of the world in the medals table by a huge margin. They Games are far from over and they've already accumulated more gold medals than Michael Phelps earned over the course of his Olympic career. The glory!

But Britain is a good place to emotionally share in success. People are humble and self-deprecating. There's never gloating when things go well, no teasing or taunting. Spiteful patriotism is reserved for football (with no risk of ever winning). The British are genuinely happy and charmingly incredulous about their team's performance. Go Team GB!

There isn't much negative about the Olympics besides the cost (which I won't have to stand for). Prices haven't risen, traffic hasn't collapsed, everyone is cheerful. Many residents gave left town to take their summer vacations. The city feels quieter and calmer for their absence and, unless you run into an Olympic crowd, easier to navigate.

Besides the branding, London hasn't changed all that much. It is full of international visitors, much like always, except this time around they're wearing patriotism on their sleeves. Free arts and entertainment events are being staged all over town, much like always, except they're now Olympic-themed, at least in name.

Tongue in cheek I could say that the biggest problem is the number of volunteers, greeters and helpers. There's just too many of them and too little to do. You can hardly walk down a street without running into some dude in pink who engages you enthusiastically and tries to force a venues map into your reluctant hand. I've got four at home already.

On my way home from work, just past the volleyball venue, there are two side streets leading to official parking areas. Each night, on either intersection, a brave soul in yellow high-visibility jacket engages with me to ensure my safety, holding the rare car and waving me across, irritating self-importance mixing most bizarrely with a genuine sense of service. I feel like in kindergarten and want to punch him or least yell at him to get real. At the same time I want to hug him for his passion and thank him for doing his part to make the games fly. Who would have thought just three weeks ago?

open

It's not that I'm suddenly getting sucked into the hype – for that I lack live TV – but it's the first weekend of the Olympics and some words are in order. I managed to watch the opening ceremony yesterday, one day later but in all its high-definition glory and uninterrupted by commercial breaks. My thanks go out to the BBC and to the license fee payers (who, as a reward for their financial sacrifice, get to watch live TV).

I can't remember watching an opening ceremony before. I might have, as a kid, but it didn't leave a lasting memory. This one might pass into oblivion as well, but that would be a shame. It was a remarkable show. The British are known to be quirky and to have their very own, rather different humor. It showed. If I had to give the ceremony a leitmotif in two sentences, it would be: This is who we are. Get on with it. (If I had to do it in one, I would replace the full stop with a semicolon.)

Some parts were odder than others. The hospital beds and the actual nurses and doctors dancing about in a celebration of the National Health Service – who came up with that? The NHS is a national treasure, much like the Queen, but what is it doing in an Olympic opening ceremony? Who in the world could connect with this? You might not, so I will enlighten you.

The NHS is the best health service I have encountered. Once you've registered with a local general practitioner, she'll see you and help you when something is wrong, within days in my experience. I don't remember ever showing my insurance card and I've certainly never paid a penny. Substantial sums are deducted from my salary every month, but when it matters, it's peace of mind. When you have to see a doctor, that's priceless.

With a wild mashup of the last few decades of popular culture, in movie and music, the show bit of the ceremony ended and the pageant of the nations started. I started ironing shirts and pants at this point, knowing that the parade would go on for hours and not offer the same density of visual excitement as the first part. Some things caught my attention nevertheless.

Never mind the chests, bare and oily, of many Pacific Islanders and the colorful kit of most Africans, the award for most outstanding dress must go to the Czech. They helped the British make fun of themselves – a national pastime and one of the overarching themes of the ceremony – by waltzing into the stadium in Wellingtons.

Much has been made of the fact that, for the first time ever, no team excludes women on the base of their gender. What was even more striking was that the majority of the teams were led by female competitors, though none waved the flag like Hoy the Hulk, with one hand and no effort. But even Chris Hoy couldn't top the Kenyan flag bearer, a white dude in front of an all-black team.

lighting the fire

This morning, listening to Radio 4, I was reminded of the second big event of the Olympics. This morning, at precisely twelve minutes past eight, all church bells in the country would be rung and everyone was asked to join in, be it with bicycle bells, neighbors' door bells or car horns.

The ringing of the bells had been the idea of Martin Creed, a Scottish artist who first rose to fame with the Turner Prize-winning (and, in my opinion, -discrediting) installation The lights going on and off, in which he periodically filled an empty room with light or, in other words, turned the lights on and off automatically. Since then, he has built a career and reputation on turning things on and off, for example by having runners sprint down the length of Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries in intervals. If you wonder what the point is, you should listen to Creed describe it. The inarticulateness of the artists is in perfect harmony with the vacuousness of his works. He has nothing to say and doesn't know how to say it. On the other hand, he knows how to turn things on and off, a skill perfectly suited to the ringing of bells, and his involvement promised a majestic sonic experience, London awash in music.

The first big event of the Olympics was supposed to be majestic and uplifting as well. Boris Johnson, the clown-mayor of London, saw in it "the contagion of joy". When the Olympic flame passed in front of my flat yesterday, families and resident business owners, shoppers and visitors, lined the street in anticipation, yearning for that vibe. A solitary chain of Olympic pennants in primary colors and pink fluttered above as the excitement built below. What happened then be best described as the kid sister of the Tour de France: copious security with flashing lights, a paucity of floats advertising sponsors and a runner that passed by in a flash. Instead of magic, I saw self-importance pushed to ridiculous levels. The only positive aspect was the thorough cleaning of the street before the torch relay. All the detritus of poverty had been swept away by an army of temporary council workers.

Tonight, the flame will reach the Olympic stadium and, culminating a quaint and bucolic opening ceremony, the cauldron will be lit. Tomorrow, the games will properly begin. But even though we're constantly being badgered into patriotism and enthusiasm, doubtful voices remain. The most recent bad news is the heat – never mind that rain would have really screwed with the show. Pollution levels have rising so much in London that athletes are not expected to be able to perform at their peak. I could feel the pain as I weaved across the Gloucester Road crossing, cutting through the hot exhaust of buses that should run on hydrogen and cars that shouldn't be in the city at all. The heat has now subsided and the next days are forecast to be properly English, cooler and wet. May the rain wash the dirt from the air.

Beside the weather (which one can't control anyway), the biggest headache of the organizers was transport. How would a system that runs at capacity most of the time cope with a million extra journeys? Early signs indicate that the worries were misplaced. Far from being afflicted with the contagion of joy, many people, residents and city breakers alike, have chosen to stay away from London during the Olympics. Colleagues of mine who commute to work have reported eerily quite trains. Hotels are far from fully booked. The bug has yet to catch on.

This morning, I was doing my best to catch the bug. I wanted to feel the bells around me. But it was still too early. Had I left home when the anchor reminded the nation of what was to come, I would have been locked away in the white noise of the lab when Big Ben set off three minutes of clatter. So I slowed my breakfast down to a crawl. Bread was buttered assiduously and jam spread most meticulously, with millimeter accuracy until I left at five to eight. Somewhere between Earl's Court and the Olympic lane at Cromwell Road, the minute hand hit the twelve, but I couldn't tell. There was no sound. I had my ears open and was receptive to even the faintest toll. But there was nothing. In the middle of London, the Olympics were going entirely unnoticed.

second person

Munich is the second biggest airport in Germany though Terminal 1, unmarked and anonymous, feels like Rodez or Innsbruck – gate, passport control, exit door with hardly an escalator in between and surely no lengthy moving walkway. Budget airlines don't pay for the fancy terminal, nor do they for gate access if they don't have to, dropping you off on the tarmac just out of sight of the airport facilities. A bus takes you to the terminal, and once you're there, you're out again.

It could be anywhere. There's a nameless city shuttle and countless signs giving directions to parking lots – not what you're looking for. Public transport is not advertised, nor is the direction of the main airport building. The sun shines harmlessly as you wander up and down along exit doors that open silently as you walk by. This could go on for hours, to no effect. You turn around and reenter the building.

There's a coffee shop, trying to be hip but abandoned of trade and prospects, and signs to Area B, C and F, though it wouldn't make the slightest change to you if someone came and swapped the letters. There's nothing. Inside you rises doubt whether the plane dropped you off at the right place. These things go wrong, don't they? After all, the staff had to get up earlier then you and be even tireder. More tired than it takes to make up wonky comparatives. Tired enough to mistake Munich for Nuremberg.

You wonder where you are. The words on the few existing signs aren't incomprehensible, but that's hardly reassuring. It doesn't exactly narrow down the location. Germanic or Romance writing wouldn't jar, especially in the stupor of the early morning, and maybe the writing is English, the lingua franca of our age.

Then you take the ramp to the lower level that you haven't noticed before. There's more anonymity and empty space. It feels like a mega-church where everyone knows his way or, if not, is guided by god. You discover a map, sufficiently out of place to make it's discovery an occasion. You find yourself at the periphery of the airport, not far from uncharted territories.

A few minutes on fast moving conveyors and you're in familiar surroundings. The central plaza of MUC is remarkable: drugstore, bakery, brewery, beer garden – everything the weary traveler might need. There's also a battery of ticket machines for suburban rail, sadly undersized. In front of each machine, buttons are pushed in confusion. Half a dozen people wait for progress, but that's unlikely to happen.

Munich has the world's most complicated transport system. Suburban trains, underground trains, trams and buses cut through zones and rings and spaces and areas. Tickets can be bought by any parameter. Two large files are available online, showing what looks like the same map at different levels of magnification. Either map can be zoomed to silly levels with no gain in usability. Ever more detail appears, an infinity of gradations. The grid radiates from the center, each stop and connections crisply drawn, but what ticket is optimal for a set of journeys remains forever hidden. There is no sense to any of this and no advice on what to get.

Overwhelmed by numbers and words, you take a step back, giving up your spot in the line. Lack of sleep and too much information don't go together well. You're a bit dizzy when a blond girl comes into focus. She looks at you with mild suspicion: "Do you need a ticket into Munich? I bought this day pass earlier." You strike a bargain, half-price of what a proper ticket might have cost, more or less.

You take an escalator down. The train is waiting. You find a seat and sink down, stupefied. Three quarters of an hour to go. You open The New Yorker that you've started on the plane and go back to Juno Diaz's latest exhortation that has been messing with your language so much already. Homies and sucias and second-person narration – all the gimmicks in the book, but powerful stuff nonetheless. The train starts moving noiselessly. It is half past nine in the morning. The weekend can begin.

olympic sprit

I've avoided it for as long as possible. I've closed my eyes and my ears and refused to acknowledge what has been building up. But this past weekend, something snapped. Maybe I woke up. Maybe I looked around me. The Olympics are in London. I am not excited.

I'm not much of a spectator sports person. I would not go into a stadium to see people run laps or dash down a track a sixteenth of a mile long, and I would certainly not pay for it. The Tour de France is the only sport I've seen live in the last ten years outside events I've participated in, like football, running and cycling. Football is the only thing I watch on TV. Whether there are Olympics or not makes no difference to my life.

Except it does. London is a big city, 8 million people by the latest count, but the two weeks of sports days can be felt everywhere, and the ramifications aren't pleasant. The venues are largely concentrated in the east of town but scattered throughout. Athletes, officials and spectators will shuttle around, clogging roads and putting strain on a public transport system that already runs at capacity. I have received several flyers warning me that bus routes will be altered, tube stations exit only, and roads blocked.

On my way to work, I walk by Earl's Court. In normal times, this is a dull conference center where trade shows like the Service Desk & IT Support Show and the Great British Beer Festival are held. During the Olympics, it will be the venue of the volleyball tournament. Pedestrian flows to and from Earl's Court tube station will be tightly regulated. I hope I'll be able to walk as I always do, even though I go against the flow of the crowds both in the mornings and in the evenings.

I hope but I don't bet I will. Some roads that I have to cross on my way to work provide Olympic routes, express lanes that are off-limits to regular traffic. Crossing them will be severely restricted. I will still make it to work with only minimal aggravation, but distant tube commuters won't be so lucky. People are advised to work from home and stay away from public transport during the Games. A recording to that effect by Boris the Clown, mayor of London, is currently played in all commuter rail stations across town.

Imperial is next to Hyde Park where the triathlon and marathon swimming will be held and the marathon, race walking and road cycling finish. Some days will be completely mad. All days will be at least a bit mad because the Japanese and Swiss Olympic teams reside in Imperial student halls. Every morning, the Senior Common Room will open late to Imperial staff so that the athletes can have their breakfasts in peace. Will they be served the usual fare, full English with tepid drip coffee?

Travel and breakfast will be minor inconveniences. Security looks like a big fiasco. G4S, the company that got the quarter-billion-pound (!!) contract for providing guards and screeners failed spectacularly. Fewer than two weeks before the opening ceremony it came to light that they were 3500 staff short. Soldiers, some just returned from tours in Afghanistan, were quickly drafted to fill the gaps. Yesterday, I saw the first platoon march through St. James's Park, nothing Olympian about their camouflage uniforms and lithified faces. But they were eerily in tune with other security arrangements.

These must be the most heavily militarized games ever. Air defense missiles have been installed on top of a residential tower block near the Olympic Park and on four further sites in London. Near Greenwich the Royal Navy's largest vessel has been moored for the last month and a half – to protect the equestrian events in the park at the expense of spooking the horses.

I could go on. But there's bright side. Today it was revealed that the Olympic torch will pass just outside my living room next Thursday, on the penultimate day of the relay. I won't have to jostle for space or get wet from never-ending rain to watch it. With a pillow under my arm I will lean out of my window and soak up the excitement. Let the Games begin!