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Back in Germany to Frankfurt and Karlsruhe

we're in berlin. we've seen the wall musuem, checkpoint charlie, a cathedral, and an archeology musuem. today we're off to see the postal museum and the music msuem. pretty darn exciting. this keyboard has driven me crazy, so we'll tell you all more later. - christi

August 8th

We are not in Berlin anymore. We have gone on the Prauge where the keybaords do not easily allow one to use apostrophes, so no contractions for us. But we have said little about Berlin, so I get to talk about it first, except I have to leave the bookstore owner who did not want to part with any of his books for Christi ... who may come along and cut that sentence for giving too much away.
Anyway, We did, as advertised go to the postal museum. They use many gimmicks to lure unsuspecting tourists in. For one thing, the building has an instillation on the outside of it with motion dectors, speakers and sound effects, so when you are walking by, all of the sudden the museum will start meowing at you or a lion will roar or other sounds will happen and it is very confusing at first. Then they have the robots. The bottom floor has three robots, one of which follows a rubber ball around everywhere and one that approaches people and sazs hi in 50 different languages. But you look at all these strange gimmicks and before you know it, they have got you looking at stamps. Actually, it is better set up than all that. Stamps might be boring, so there are very few of them on display. This is the oldest postal museum, so they have had a lot of time to figure this out. What they do have is a long history of the post office, which gets creepy in the thritys because they just have all the stuff they had from then, including the standard post office portrait of Hitler. And they have a large print big exhibit explaining in English and German ´... this is one of the only places where English is used ... that the symbols of the post office are important because the post office must convez the absolute power and authority that the government must hold and all postal employees are representatives of that power and authority. Then you turn around and they have got old cancellation stamps from the 30s there with swastikas on them. A couple had the swastikas struck out, but most did not. ... But you can get online in the post office for free and the admission is free... Anyway, nobody is getting postcards from Berlin, because we decided to just avoid the post offices.

Berlin is sprawly and the buildings are all new. Berliners are very industrious at whatever they are doing. If they are suppossed to be gaurds in a museum or something, by god they are GAURDING. They scowl and protect the art or whatever from whomever might be threatinging it or looking at it too closely or whatever.
Many of you know that instead of taking the very sensible language of Spanish, which should be a required subject in California, I squandered my highschool education studying German. Now, finally, I was someplace where it might even be somewhat useful. But man, you get even one gendered article wrong and they just tell you to speak english. Sometimes just the accent is enough. The eastern half of the city did not learn english in school, they learned Russian, so they will grimace and let you ask for the bill. The eastern half of the city is much nicer than the western half. Is has most of the important buildings and it has a decent tram system which the west desperately needs, but i guess michigan and the american saviors of capitalism needed cars more, so there you go.
we went to the checkpoint charlie museum, which deals exclusively with ways of hiding people in cars, so clearly autos are a liberating force. I imagine there is a similar museum somewhere in San Diego dealing with the equally heroic smuggling of humans across the border there.
We found a vegitarian restaurant near our pension-hotel-whatever. The waitress, who was not ethnically german, told me my german was good. So we went back there a second night. The waitress asked me if I was a vegitarian, and I said yes and then she asked Christi. But I told her that Christi spoke no german, so she said to Christi, in English, "are you a vegitable?" She had a very good sence of humor.
Finally, at some point we went to an old cathedral that had pretty much been blown to bits except for a small part of it that was apparently stable enough to keep standing on its own and had thus turned into a museum. Outside, it had a scultpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse being torn to shreds and a plaque explaining that it was a symbol of piece. It¨s a terrifying thought, really, that a picture of violent death could be a peace symbol.
We do, however, borrow a lot of culture from the germans. Much of our classical music comes from there. And the violent fairy tales. And we both seem to enjoy sprawl. And we both seem to think having sony build an ugly steel and glass building complex containing vendors of generic movies and technology would make a great city center.

Berlin is suppossed to be a major lesbian destination, since i guess the same forces that drive lesbians to the east bay instead of san francisco also send them to eastern europe. But these selfsame forces also make them have everything out at the very far edges of the city and we really did not manage to get our act together regarding figuring out where to find the night bus schedule, so aside from staying in a womens hotel, we saw very little of the queer scene, which is kind of too bad.
Some things that are very nice in Berlin are the East Side Gallery, which is a preserved section of the wall with paintings on it. And the gay cafe we actually did make it to. And the city is full of galleries of contemporary artists. And the museums are actually very well laid out and have good collections, even if the modern art museum is largely devoted to death and dismemberment, especially of animals. The musical instrument museum is very good and has a large collection of historical tubas, showing its evoltuion from Serpent to the modern shape, established by Sax, the same guy who invented the saxaphone. Also, one of the subway stops is the Rosa Luxemburg stop and it has wonderful mosaics. The east stops have art. The west stops have ads.
So there you go.

- Celeste

I didn´t cut the sentance about the bookstore owner.. we went to this used english bookstore- there´s supposed to be lots of science fiction at it, and we want a douglas adams book, so that seems good. get there at 9:45, not having a clue as to what time it opens, and wait, and some guy shows up and starts banging on the locked door. finally, it opens, and since it´s an odd time, we ask the guy now standing in the doorway if it´s open. oh, no, it´s not, but we can come in anyway.. alright. bring in our used books, which, we now realize that he´s the owner, and he looks distasfully at them. most of the bookstore is science fiction, in some order, but a very dislexic one. pick out some books. bring them up. he looks at one and say, oh that flimsy paperback is 15 dollars, but I´ll give you 14.50 when you bring it back... but we´re leaving for prague today, we aren´t bringing it back.. well, then you can´t have that book- you can only have it if you promise to bring it back.. we´ll mail it back. nope. you can have this one and mail it back.... so now we have to mail our used books back to a bookstore in berlin, or else. the guy spent a hour talking to us about science fiction, tried to get us not to go to prague, and was this close to asking us just to move to berlin so that we could join his science fiction book club when the phone rang, and we escaped.

people are strange

--christi

August 21
Frankfurt
Ok, we are back in Germany. I was thinking perhaps I had been unfair to Berlin, that maybe it was like LA which looks hopelessly auful if you don't know where you are going, but is actually very cool. As I was thinking this on the train out of Holland, the German border patrol appeared and demanded to see the passports of the three black people on our train car and nobody else's. hrmmm... Still trying to be open minded. But Goethe Huase is here and they made such a huge deal about it in my high school German class, I'm very curios. Also the people here are very friendly, Christi keeps always picking people who don't speak any English.
the streets here are very wide. It reminds me of the south bay that way. Just randomly, we saw the largest cathedral in Germany from the outside. It's in Köln, right outside the train station. It is amazingly massive, it's so large and so close to the train station, it could step on it. Large giants could attend services. But we didn't see the inside, we just looked out the window, felt intimidated by it's largeness and sprinted off to our connecting train.
Christi says that there are castles about every five minutes down the rail line to Frankfurt. I don't know. I was asleep, drooling into my jacket. Then I woke up with a bad case of zipper face. But Christi was very excited about the castles. They're all kind of rural, but I do want to one day live in a small castle. Maybe Holland is full of castles too, hiding behind the windmills so you don't see them in pictures. We haven't been in many non-urban locations at all, so we only know what big cities look like in the places we've visited. But that's ok. We're urban people. (I know this is a sad thing for my mother, because she is a country girl, but horses used to be urban dwellers too. it might be nice if they came back.)
Randomly Yours,
Celeste

August 22
We've just arrived and we're already leaving. Yesturday we went to Goethe Haus. He was a poet, the most painted and sculpted (as in represented in painting and sculptures) poet in hostory, if I understood the informational signs in the museum. I'm going to have to pick up a translation of some of his work.
Then we went and met up with a guy from from my synthesizer list and his girlfriend. He has cool synths. His girlfriend is a radio DJ, so I went and hung out at the community radio station late last night. Christi was dead tired asleep, so I went by myself. It was guest DJ night so one guy was spinning dirty trance, called schmanz, which is big around here now. And then another guy came on and spun reggae. Schmanz has a nice sort of mellow sound. It was all very cool. It was nice to just sit and talk to people about stuff. We've been in a million museums, but have only had a few rectreational conversations with people from the cities we're visitting. And these people were good folks, so that made it all the better.

In between these two events, we went outside behind our hostel to relax for a bit and heard a marching band. We went over to the back gate to see what was going on and there was a terrible, out of tune marching band playing a funeral dirge over and over. Behind them were people carrying a small child-sized coffin and a bunch of people behind them carrying torches. So we went out to see what was going on, since it seemed a starange time (after dark in the eveing) and location (the restaurant district) for a funeral march. We got closer and saw that right behind the coffin were, among the mouners, a man dressed as a mortician talking and crying into a microphone and a woman in a nice dress with a sort of beauty pageant sash over it. A bunch of the men among the mourners were wearing some sort of uniform, like one would have in a civic organization. One of them broke free from the march to try to take a picture. He was climbing up into a tall planter but was totally drunk and I caught him falling. So I turned to an observer next to me and asked what the heck was going on. Nobody was dead. It was the end of Brunnenfest, some sort of celebration associated with the wells in the old city and a 500 year old tradition that they have this march. The streets were decorated for the festival, like for christmas with pine wreaths and blue and yellow streamers. The wells were all decorated too. One of them was the Frau Rauschen Brunnen, the Woman Intoxication Well. Somebody was controlling it so a supersoaker-like stream of water would shoot out of the statue's mouth at passersby. It got me. Finally, after marching in circles around the neighborhood, they got to a square and set the coffin on fire. The sash wearing woman put on a firefighter jacket and hat and got a fire hose and sprayed the burning coffin, putting it out. Then the band started playing happy songs. What does it mean?? I think it might have something to do with the end of summer and fire season (which the wells would be useful in combating), but I really have no clue. And it's not even in our Weird Europe book.
-- Celeste

August 26
Ok, we are in Switzerland now (where apostrophes seem to be mysteriously hidden from the keyboards), but it is time to fill you all in on the rest of Germany.
The next day in Frankfurt, we went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst, aka the modern art museum. It is small and shaped like a slice of pie or cake with a dome on top that even resembles sort of a scoop of ice cream. It is nice looking on the outside and the inside. It is too small to have much of a permanent collection, so they mostly show touring works. This is very nice for locals because they see different stuff every time they go and it is very nice overall because it means that they have no urinals signed "R Mutt." (Sadly, Duchamp wears thin after a while.) Almost all the art there is new, which is nice. Many museums seem to get kind of caught up with the canon of modern art and forget that new stuff is still being made and needs to be shown. And also, new art tends to be wonderfully strange. We saw a rubber seal wearing a blonde wig hanging from the ceiling. I have really no idea what it "meant," but theres somthing just sort of cool about that. After going to that museum and possibly helping save a dog from drowning (hello people, do not throw sticks into the water for your dog to get if there is no way out out the water for the dog.), we went to the Icon Museum, which was conviently located next to our hostel.
Hillege Johon des Taufers is German for "Saint John the Baptist." I learned this because there were three icons of him in that museum. You may wonder what icons are doing in Germany. Apparently a collector left them to the city of Frankfurt in his will. The best of the three JtB icons featured a large central picture of him being behaded. The artist staged it so that the head was actually falling to the ground and blood just beginning to squirt wildly from his neck while Solome waited with her platter in hand. Uh, so some icons are kind of gross, but it also had smaller pictures around the outside including two identical picturs of people finding his head in a cave, which I think was suppossed to symbolize the First and Second finding of his head. All this and it was free day for Museums too.

Then we got on the train and went to Karlsruhe. You may have not heard of Karlsruhe. It is a not very big city about two days walk from the French border that has a few universities in it and a design school at ZKM. It also has a lot of tech industry and Germanys supreme court. (oh yeah, that.) It was not located in Berlin or Bonn as a part of a war plan in case the commies attacked. It is definietly off the beaten tourist path, but we went because I know somebody at ZKM who wrote a paper about mp3s. Her name is Judy and she is a virtusso player of the balloon. (What that sounds like) She arranged for us to get a tour of the studios of the Institute for Music and Acoustings at ZKM (they call it "zed kay em"). Normally random visitors do not get tours unless they arrange it months in advance and pay a large fee, so we were very lucky and happy. Now, let me reiterate that ZKM is an academic institution. It has the best studio I have ever seen or heard of. They have a better set up than Saul Zantz does at Fantasy (the building across the street from Nolo Press in Berkeley where Green Day records). Their big studio is big enough to seat 200. It is a building within a building (which Fantasy is not) so the Concord could fly right ovrehead at low altitude and you would not hear it inside. Furthermore, they have a nifty proprietary patching system. Draw some lines on your computer screen and you can route the output of any microphone to any mixing board or computer in the whole center and you can route the output of that to any speaker in the entire center. Everything moves around, so you can pick up the giant mixing board, take it whever you want and use it. You can sit in your studio in one building and mix the recording going on in another building. All by drawing lines on a computer screen. A computer company cuistom built this system for them. Its really cool. (I promise not to go on about mixing boards from this point forward.) The big building is exactly the same length as the Titanic, which is eally long, in case you missed the movie. The other building (the building within a building) is a giant blue cube.
In all of this are also some museums and the afore mentioned design school. We saw a nifty insitallaion by an icelandic guy. It had a lot of ice and wind in it. and we saw their little modern art museum. It had a thing on the bottom floor with lipstick colored rocketships making funny sounds called The First Rockets on Venus and a spcae ship that played the sound track to science fiction film and gold plated grocery carts with marketting slogans on them. It was cool.

There are also some other cool things around there. We went to the castle. It has local history and a bunch of wooden statues that used to belong to a church. They had two statues of John the Baptist, in both of them he was holding a sheep, but it was never explained why. Do sheeps need to be baptized? And another painting of him being beheaded. He wasnt holding a sheep, but his robe looked a lot how sheep wool is drawn when its still attached to the sheep. Theres clearly a strong sheep connection in the west that does not appear on icons. Then we went and looked at a neo gothic mausoleum with gargoyles on it. They were cool. then we took the tram out to the sticks and went hinking in the Black Forrest. We have both been carrying around heavy backpacks and frequently climbing tours in castles and churches, so we got to the forest and basically just ran uphill for an hour. This was actually a lot of fun. We ate blackberries and Christi saw something that looked a lot like a witch, but it was just a shadow on a tree. We thought maybe we might disappear and only our film of this shadow would be found, but fortunately, we did not have a Blauir Witch experience. Kalrsruhe is warm like Santa Cruz, so the forest was a lot like forests I know.
Finally, we went to a party at a squat. Our hostel had a midnight curfew (no joke), so we had to switch to a regular hotel to do this, but it was very nice having normal social interactions. Judy invited us to this party and told us where to go hiking and told us about the gargoyles and was just generally really nice and informative and helpful. Judy is cool. We like Judy. You should listen to her music. Her bands are Shar, Judy Dunaway, and Judy Dunaway and Evan Gallagher
-- Celeste