Le Grande Bouffet

Wednesday was a day of hard toil! It started with a visit to a swimming pool. I did only 5 pool distances, while Boyana managed 30 ! Shame for me, last year I could do 10, I should swim more often. Than I had a visual analytics lecture, than programmed a bit in Fraunhofer, than finished a draft of my paper for SIGIR 2007 and wrote an email to my Professor.

The Thursday I went to a theatre play in Darmstadt. "Welche Droge passt zu mir", or for those who can't sprechen, "which drug suits me". It was a monologue by a housewive, who is bored while her husband is far away, and her son visits school. So she hooks up with the plumber, who supplies her extasy and cocaine. And then, and then, and then... It was a piece with a good scanario, some realistic situation, realistic description of drug effects, no overdriving in the direction "Drugs are bad, mmmkey" or "Drugs rule". The screenwriter showed well the psychological states of a 32 year old woman experimenting with her body. The one weak point in the play by my humble opinion was the acting itself, the actress was not as good as she could have been, i did not like her voice and her emotions did not convince me enough. I guess this is because I visited 3 theatre pieces in my BG vacation, "Marsrutka", "Stereolove", "Zelenodiwo", and I really think that the Bulgarian actors are quite tallented. Maybe I should go next time to theatre in Frankfurt, it is unfair to compare a city of 150000 like Darmstadt to Sofia which is capital and 10x bigger.

After the theatre we expected to meet Mitaka, who was coming back from Bulgaria, but he was late - some woman died midair (!) by heart attack or whatever, and people panicked and stopped the plane at the nearest airport.

On Friday Jana, Moritz, Gope, Boyana and I visited the An Sibin Irish pub. A real Irish folk-roc-punk band was playing, 6 drunkards and a cute girl with a violin :-) The atmosphere was really nice, Guiness beer is amazing, and we had a good time. The pub was also full of American soldiers, from the nearby bases, who were also really anjoying themselves and their beers. In the good old times before 9/11 there were many times more Soldiers nearby Darmstadt and many discos had them as their primary audience. Now some of the bases were downsized, so the discos closed or changed style, and now An Sibin is the main meeting point for G.I.'s in Darmstadt. On some day one may feel one is in the Midwest - an irish pub with irish waiters and several hundred american customers.

And on Saturday was the event that gave the name of this post, and where the pictures are from (stupid blogspot, how can I set the coordinates of the images ?). Actually, "Le Grande Bouffet" is a classic dark comedy from the 70's, which I plan to see soon, and it means in translation "the big eating". On Saturday Boyana and I prepared a nice dinnner for Steffen and Miriam, because we lost a bet. So we tried our best and cooked rabbit stew, inspired from a French cooking book. Rabbit with thymian, parsley, garlic, onion, bacon, red wine and potatoes. It was amazingly delicious, a real step forward for our cooking skills. It was also the first time in my life when I eat rabbit meat (or I just don'T remember), and it was gorgeous ! Afterwards I planned to see the movie "LE Grande Bouffet", I expected it will ba a biting satire of western culture of consumption, but I was too tired for any long intellectual movie :-)
So I watched "Dwoynikat", or "The Doppelganger", a classic BG comedy from 1979. I watched it for the 5th or 6th time, but still the comedy genius is amazing. It is the story of a scientist, who does not have enough time for both social and academic responsibilities, so he asks his cousin, a barkeeper, to help him. The cousin has no idea of science, but he enjoys drinking at cocktails and seducing the science co-workers :-) Well, watch the movie, it is a piece of genius, and anyone who has something to do with science in Bulgaria, BAN or Sofia Uni, will enjoy it fully, it captures the essence of "nauka", with the stress on the letter a :-).