Import Shop Berlin

As a rule, I don't care too much for trade fairs, but the Import Shop Berlin is an exception.  Most of the exhibitors sell goods from foreign "exotic" countries, and most are traders not artists, which I find a shame.

I found myself homing in on the smaller stands, which looked less like trading posts, and more like a collection of the work of single artists, but regardless who I talked to, trader or artist, no-one had heard of etsy.  I didn't spend the whole day there, and I didn't stop at every stand, so I can't speak for very many people, but what was being sold there is exactly the kind of thing that gets sold on etsy, so I did find that surprising.

I think the main reason is that the majority of the sellers at Import Shop Berlin were foreigners, and mostly from the southern hemisphere.  That part of the world will inevitably join the online market, its only a question of when and how, in other words how soon, and on which platform.

My favorite seller this year was also my favorite the last time I visited four years ago. Enamel jewelry from Budapest:

One of the stands I most liked sold all kinds of crafts from peru, and the stand attendant explained to me that the stand owner didn't have a website because she said that export taxes are so high for anyone selling more than 17,500 dollars worth of goods annually, that it just wasn't worth it.  Which means that the total sum earned by the exhibitors during the four days of the trade fair was substantially higher than the reported "sales of around 5.5 million euros" I wonder how much higher.

Murphy's Law

I'll be flying to Kasachstan for the first time on thursday via Riga. Something I've been looking forward to for several years now, but getting a visa proved more complicated than expected, and was a nerve-wracking experience.

We bought the plane tickets about three months in advance, and when I started downloading the visa application form just over a month ago, I realized that my passport wasn't going to be valid for the required six months after the return trip (it was only valid for five), so I looked up the British Embassy's website, which pointed me to the Düsseldorf Consulate, which is now the central Passport renewal office not just for brits living in germany, but also for a whole handful of neighboring eastern european countries as well. They had a passport renewal application form, which I printed. Then I filled half of it out, shaved (burning my thoat badly), grabbed an umbrella, took the metro to a photographer, forgot my umbrella in the tubes, had my bimetric picture taken, and picked up emily from her school -all in about 50 minutes.

When I got home I had to go shopping, and then cook a meal, after which I made the dreadful mistake of baking chocolate chip cookies before completing the form. Because of that I just made it to the post office before it closed, and sent off the renewal form and my old passport without the photos. I only realized that I had forgotten to include the photos when I got back from the post office to take the cookies out of the oven. By then the post office was closed.

So I sent off the photos in a separate envelope on the very same evening (a friday), with a letter explaining everything. On monday I tried in vain to phone the passport section of the Consulate in Düsseldorf. They don't have a number, and the only option is to phone an office in the UK (irish accent) which bills the phoner's credit card about one euro a minute. If you don't have a credit card, you can't contact anyone, but then again, credit card was the only method of payment for the passport renewal anyway. I wasn't quite ready for that, so I phoned the Embassy in Berlin disregarding the voice message telling me that they don't have anything to do with passports, and I was put through to a very friendly lady (I don't mean that sarcastically) who reassured me that yes I had made a pretty good mess of things, but that Düsseldorf would be sure to get both envelopes, and sort things out. She also said that there was a four week delay in Düsseldorf at the moment because the entire computer system had been replaced three weeks previously.

I found all of this not at all reassuring, but I did have about a month to go, so I decided to wait a couple of weeks before panicking.

Two weeks passed. An email I had written remained unanswered, so I had a good long 13 minute phone call with england from which the only thing I learned was that my passport was definately not being proccessed yet. The time had arrived; I decided to panic and phoned first the British Embassy in Berlin, (friendly, promised to write an email to Düsseldorf) and then the Düsseldorf Consulate's switchboard (in Düsseldorf I never got past the switchboard) who was extremely nervous and rude and hung up on me twice. I assume the switchboard operator was so aggrevated because she gets about five hundred calls like mine a day, and she always has to say no, but hanging up before I had finished talking didn't help anyone.

Then I got an sms telling me I had missed a phone call from Düsseldorf, and when I phoned back, I was stuck with the same nervous operator, who isn't allowed to put me through. That was when my panic climaxed. I had a pretty bad headache that evening, and the next morning until I get another call from Düsseldorf in which a german talking really good english tells me that my passport had been finished and sent off on the previous day.

So that's how I managed to make every possible mistake there was to make, and still got my passport renewed. It was strenuous but worth every minute. I spent my panic time well, mostly with flashbacks of past travel mishaps, but also with some good memories of the first time I flew to New York...

I was eight years old, and it was summertime, and the moment I can remember best of all is when we left the airport at around midnight. The waves of nightime heat, hotter than anything I had ever experienced under Englands sun. And the skyscrapers, and scores of long yellow taxi cabs coming and going. I might as well have landed on the moon.

That's what I hope to experience in kasachstan. Something that goes beyond the ordinary, something that changes my perception of the world. I know its impossible; I've seen too much now. My memory's too full, and my subconsciousness constantly compares the present with the past, but with a new passport in my pocket the least I can do is try.

Kipling knew better

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
-Rudyard Kipling

It's pretty, but is it Art? | Kipling

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
The Conundrum of the Workshops Rudyard Kipling

Google image search results for landart when sorted by red orange yellow and green respectively

I love it when google improves its image search results, especially when my images float up to the top. (Sorting image search results according to their color is only available for google.com, the rest of the world is going to have to wait). vi.sualize.us is the site that helped my images climb in the google results. And vi.sulize.us is still the best place to go if you looking for landart images on the web.

I've linked the screenshots to their relevant search results, which will probable stay similar for a week or longer.

"I think our TV news editors are still sometimes using the language of government propaganda. We still hear the term 'war on terror' for an illegal war. We're still hearing the words reform and modernization when what we really mean is privatization and public greed."

-Ken Loach

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."
-Kurt Vonnegut