Image by Kamile Naraite

I’m writing for one of Europe’s best blog- and city guide-networks, Spotted by Locals, for a few years now. First as Dublin ‘Spotter’ (or local city expert), and since July of this year as Berlin Spotter. Last weekend, Sanne and Bart, the lovely Dutch couple who run SBL, invited all Spotters from the 44 European cities in the network to Amsterdam for our first ever get-together, the Spotters Weekend 2012. Here are a few random thoughts and impressions from the last days.

So Sanne and Bart invited all Spotters to Amsterdam, the European capital of peanut sauce and weed. I didn’t know what to expect: maybe a highly professional meeting of travelwriters and social media-guys, complete with awkward team-building exercises and boring discussion panels.

Instead, I slept two nights on an old Dutch sailing boat, fittingly named ‘Flying Dutchman’; consumed a typical Polish snack named vodka and a few cans of Heineken, chatted with a poet from Edinburgh, a ‘Republikflüchtling’ from Hamburg and a Russian woman who lost a travel companion on a bridge in Cologne; walked around rainy Amsterdam in a hungover daze; ate a piece of cake dangling from the ceiling; tried to poop a nail into a bottle; took a vintage tram from 1952; ate with my fingers and read a story about spiders; all the while surrounded by an amazing group of people that did not contain one asshole.

Grandfather, tell me a story. Image by Elena Truskova

So instead of some boring travel convention I attended something that reminded me of a school trip without teenage angst and awkwardness; two days during which an atmosphere of good will was tangible constantly and everyone was smiling, content to meet one incredible human being after another (and the occasional glass of Grolsch). I didn’t feel so buzzed and energised for quite a long while, and have the rare conviction that I was part of something good. Sounds cheesy, but is the only way I could come up with to describe it.

We are representing West Germany, the GDR and Poland in the correct geographical order. Image by Magda Przedmojska.

Ideally, I’ve just made a hundred friends in two days. In the worst case, I’ve now got 44 places to crash all over Europe. Thank you, Sanne and Bart.

In case you want to know more about the amazing Spotters and our weekend, you can read the liveblog. In case you even consider supporting Sanne & Bart’s brilliant business, why not download a city guide or install the app on your smartphone? No, I’m not getting paid to write this. I am just convinced.

via broadsheet.ie

I like autumn. I like bonfires. I like scary books. I like Neil Gaiman. And I really like Halloween – not so much because of the trick and treat and candy-stuff, but more because it means the celebration of a very old Pagan festival in modern times. Therefore I’d really like to share my enthusiasm for this season of dying leaves and burning cars by giving away scary books for free. Welcome to Marcel’s All Hallows Read Competition.

Here’s how it works: I’m basically partaking in master Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read, where you give away scary books in the run-up to Halloween to share the love for books and scary stuff, basically. Here’s what you can get:

• A copy of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. It’s little children dying of a variety of sources in rhyme, nicely illustrated. What better book for young parents on Halloween?
• Stephen King’s short story collection Nightshift. Come on, it’s Stephen King and has a skeleton on the cover. What else do you need?
• A book by Dublin horror master John Connolly, The Burning Soul. It has one of literature’s most downtrodden private eyes (Charlie Parker) and kidnapped children.  Uplifting stuff.
• Dracula. Yes, Dracula. Do I need to tell what it’s about?
• One of my favourite books of the last two years, Justin Cronin’s The Passage. It’s basically a dystopian roadtrip with some of the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered.

To win one of these books, just post a comment here on the blog or over on my Facebook-page and tell me which one you want and why – maybe you can come up with a scary limerick? On the 30th October I’ll draw the winners and ship the books out on Halloween – worldwide postage is included. I’ll even throw in a copy of my own book for good measure. Good luck!!

Dublin 15 is full of rats. There is one crossing the four lanes of Snugborough Road, oblivious to the cars whooshing past and my shadow on the sidewalk. It just scampers along on whatever business large rats have in brought daylight, stopping at the curb for an instance before scurrying into the shrubbery next to the sidewalk. I walk further down the road past the National Aquatic Centre, with the ringing of the last ice cream van of the dead summer disappearing in the estates on my right. The shrubbery is rustling constantly, with every step I seem to startle another greyish-brown critter with a wormish tail, scampering away from empty packs of crisps deeper into the undergrowth. The midges dance on the Tolka river in the last rays of sunshine this September has to offer. In the shadows of the outer walls of the estates there’s the smell of rotten leaves, flat-trampled ice cream-wrappers and long-dead things.

I love letters, words and language, and am therefore quite interested in the history and development of language and speech – so in my opinion these short videos by Myriapod Productions are dead on: ‘In its final form, Mysteries of Vernacular will contain 26 etymological installments, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each episode takes more than 80 hours to create between the research, construction of the book, and animation. If you find yourself charmed, please consider making a donation.’

Mysteries of Vernacular: Hearse from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.

Berlin summer does not smell like hedonism, artistic freedom and debauchery. It smells like suncream, chlorine, cheap chip fat and bitumen, like any other German summer.

Bluebird from California is a place. on Vimeo.

From next week on, I’ll be on my grand tour of Poland and Russia and you can follow my trip over on In the Dark Night. Here’s what I did last week.

Last week, I drove 1100 kilometres in a tiny car from Korea past hundreds and hundreds of Dutch caravans, first to the city where the cinematographe was invented and then further on to a small village at the sea, where it smelled of pine and thousands of cicada were making a sound like a gigantic maracas party taking place in the trees around our tent all night. We walked up the narrow streets of an old hilltop village and had dinner next to the resting place of a French Nobel Prize Laureate who once wrote a poem called Nocturne, and we watched the lights of the cities and villages on the coast across the water getting stronger and the sun weaker. Before I drove another 1100 kilometres back to the city where the three wise men are enshrined, we had another dinner in a small stony village on a hill at a place where American tourists were discussing their alimony payments and where 350 years ago Papist mercenaries killed most people living there.

Image by Timon91

For the last months, I’ve been working on a new project, and today is the official launch. It’s called In the Dark Night, and is basically an online journal following my upcoming journey to Poland and Russia, where I’m following the same route my grandmother took 67 years ago. Here’s the official blurb:

‘What happens when a young woman is abducted by soldiers at 23, transported to a foreign labour camp, and after six years is not returned home, but forced to go to yet another foreign country? The mission of German writer and blogger Marcel Krueger is to try and find the answers to these questions. The woman in question is his grandmother, who was taken from her home in East Prussia by the Red Army in 1945 and returned to West Germany after years of forced labour. 67 years later, in the summer of 2012, Marcel’s aim is to retrace her steps from her hometown near Olzstyn in Poland to the Urals and back.

Like Marcel’s successful predecessor project www.sonic-iceland.com, which documents a musical journey to Iceland, the website for ‘In the Dark Night’ will shine a spotlight on contemporary (Eastern) Europe via not only his own words and images, but those of German, Polish and Russian photographers, writers, blogger and artists. Exploring the influence the events of 67 years ago have had on young people today, ‘In the Dark Night’ will be a travel journal with plenty of space for photography, sounds and words; it will also be written in German and English to reach as wide an audience as possible.’

If you like this, please get in touch: the official website is www.inthedarknight.com, but also follow me on Twitter and (god beware) like this project on Facebook. Danke!

Via broadsheet.ie

Beckett?