Thursday, October 23, 2008

BayrischerPlatz

On my way to campus, I walk through BayrischerPlatz. This is not one of the glamorous city squares like AugustusPlatz, which has the Opera, the Mendes Fountain, and the gorgeous concert hall, the Gewandhaus. BayrischerPlatz is situated between the university's medical school and a working-class neighborhood of huge apartment blocks. However, the platz is not without charms.

It has a cafe that actually opens at 6:00 a.m., three hours earlier than other cafes. It has a post office, tucked away in the back of a sort of convenience store where one can buy milch and pfeffernusse. There is a branch railway station and a tram stop. It also has an open-air market, a movable and variable feast whose vendors depend on the weather. On rainy days, only the fruit and vegetable sellers are there, under their awnings. Today, which is cold but sunny, there were butcher shops dealing from trucks whose sides let down, crafts booths, many stands selling leather goods, stalls with inexpensive clothing, and booths with miscellaneous collections of objects. I bought a hand-kitted scarf, a package of Christmas cards in German, and an apfelstrudel.

The Platz has something else, too. In the midst of all the mundane commerce, transportation, and postal action, there stands a lovely, delicate, life-size statue of two ballet dancers. The man is lifting the girl, her leg raised in a graceful arabesque. The statue is of polished black material, metal or else some synthetic stone, and if I could find a small reproduction of it, I would buy it in a minute.

Another thing I can't do is upload the photo I took of the statue, or the one I took of the Platz. For some reason, Blogger won't let me, although I'm following the exact same procedure I used for previous photos. Now it tells me I'm not connected to the Internet, which I clearly am, or else that I have the photo's address wrong, which I clearly don't since I let the "Browse" function fill it in after I chose the photo. So what's the problem? Can anybody out there help me with this? Does it maybe have to do with logging on in German but then having all other directions come up in English?


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