Köln, Part 4: The End

Oh My Goodness, I always knew this day would come, but now that it has finally arrived, I don’t know what to say, *sniffle* *sob* *gulp*, I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to you, beloved Köln, with your hundreds of pictures and thousands of words, hanging over my head for nearly THREE FRIGGIN WEEKS and clogging up my blog. WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT YOU.

OOf. I am happy I am seeing this Köln story through to the end, and I’m sure I’ll value this journal of my experience later in life blah blah blah, but I am very very very ready to empty out my camera’s brimming-full memory card—releasing so much information simultaneously that I may break the Internet as we know it—and get rid of this nagging backlog. Life has gone on after Köln, and I would like to tell you about it!

BUT let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We may be done with Köln, but Köln ain’t done with us:

Saturday was our last day in Köln. Though we were fairly beat and had a train to catch at 2 pm, we were able to summon up a final reserve of whatever diabolical energy had been keeping us going through this entire insane experience and power through one more mid-morning adventure with the dynamic family Gessner. At our long strange meal on Thursday afternoon, Mama Gessner suggested, in the course of an amazing extemporaneous speech about all of the things we had to do in and around Köln, that we accompany the family to a huge, once-a-month flea market in a park on the banks of the Rhein, and we, mad with fatigue, accepted. Good decision.

We tried to get some quick breakfast before hightailing it out of our hostel, but for some mysterious reason there was actually a woman by the food, asking for “tokens” that we didn’t have because we didn’t pay for them. Breakfastless but hopeful, we at the last of the bread and cheese on the train back to Siegburg—the small town outside of Köln where the Gessners have set up shop—where the indefatigable matriarch and her lovely daughters picked us up and drove us to the market.

Why here is Mrs. Gessner now, pictured here next to her daughters, Phil, and something she was right about:The blue BMW is Mr. Gessner’s SUV. Parking was scant for this massive event—why they didn’t just flatten out some of these hills and they pave them over is beyond me—so when we found this spot on our way into the park Mrs. Gessner insisted we stand in it to save it until Mr. Gessner arrived. Sophia and Sara immediately began to complain that the space was too narrow for Papa Gessner’s big wide truck, but Mother was admant. Phil and I talked about the weather while the Gessners bickered (in a thoroughly charming and familial fashion) for a while. The BMW finally arrived, and after much spotting and direction and so on and so forth, the enormous thing actually did fit between the cars. So what if everybody had to pile out through the trunk? Mrs. Gessner still (rightfully) took this one as a victory, and insisted I take a photograph of it. She is the one in brown and who looks very pleased with herself.

Then we were off to the market! It was a strange sort of event, not like the flea markets I am accustomed to that typically feature artisans, antique dealers, and other professional peddlers hawking their wares. This market was less a collection of little mobile shops and more a conglomeration of American-style yard sales, i.e. whole families in lawn chairs, maybe under a little tent, with all the crap they don’t want cluttering up their attic anymore spread out over some tables and blankets. See?I mentioned the similarity to the classic American yard sale to some Germans (they are just all over the place here, walking around, leading lives, talking German like it’s a thing to do) and they had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently, it is not a done thing in Germany to sell your extra stuff off the front lawn. That’s CRAZY. You need to go to a park to do that. Obviously.

I like the mysteries and stories that crop up at all garage sales. When people dredge up the weirdest things they possess and try to sell them on an open market, it gives the buyer—or, in my case, the gawker—a tiny bit of insight into some very private, interesting aspects of the seller’s life. Like, look at these ridiculous horse drawings:Were they drawn by a child with below-average artistic ability and an overenthusiastic mother? A winsome, withdrawn teen who had imaginary horses instead of friends? Some crazy old loon who thinks he is the Rembrandt of scribbling on horses with felt tip markers? And why on earth would they be up for sale? I think somebody is rolling in his or her grave over the fact that “Untitled 66 (horses)” is on sale for a nickel.

The only thing better than the crazy crap people sell at garage sales is the crazy crap people buy at garage sales; more specifically for this sort of supermassive garage sale, it is great that once purchased, said crazy crap must be carried back to the car, and therefore paraded around the rest of the event, no matter how weird it is. For example, I really liked this woman’s wicker sphere:There was also a dude walking around with a 6-foot-long plush iguana, but I did not take a photograph of him for reasons of laziness.

After a while the sun came out. It was the first and only time it dared to show its ugly yellow mug for the whole dang Köln trip. Much to the surprise of some cold girls, I warmed up and stripped down to a t-shirt:
As the sale wore on the weather improved and approached “beautiful day” status. Even in the midst of this bourgeois frenzy for material goods, I was able to see past the DEALS DEALS DEALS and catch a couple glimpses of the awesome park the whole delirium took place in:
I made the excellent decision to come to this flea market with absolutely no money. I suppose it wasn’t so much a “decision” as an “oversight,” but it still ended up paying off. Without money, I couldn’t buy any of these seashells:Or any of these Legos:Or any of these Legos (People were selling a lot of Legos. No, I do not understand why.):Or either of these jackets, although I’ve really been dying for an injection of OPIUM into my wardrobe:
So yeah, no money was great. Oh except: I also made the very poor decision of coming to this flea market with absolutely no money and an empty stomach. I eventually bummed a fiver off of Phil, which proved enough for the makins for a hard boiled egg sammich and a cup of coffee, with a fancy new button-up shirt to boot. Here is Phil squinting while Sara talks to him:
SO ANYWAYS this fountain was nice in a staid, classical kind of way:And this pug was cute in a puggish, cuteish kind of way:And the Gessners were flawless hosts in an extremely friendly, German sort of way, but as we had a train to catch we eventually had to say goodbye. Mrs. Gessner drove us to the train station and put some candy in our pockets and safety pinned our contact information to our shirts, then sent us on our way back to Köln…

…where we promptly missed our train. For strange ticket-system reasons this was not a problem at all—we just had to wait an hour or so for the next train. We went down to the river (of course) and bought our only Kölsch from a tap, which was just exactly as tasty as all the other Kölsch I drank in Köln:Those of you with an eye for volume probably noticed that the above beer is a little smaller than previous beers depicted here; most every beer I drink here in Europe is a full half litre, while this little Kölsch clocks in at a mere four tenths of a litre. Because they are crazy in Köln, this was the big beer. A typical Kölsch from a tap is served in a much narrower glass and consists of a mere 0.2 litres—a very silly amount of beer to drink, in my opinion.

I was paranoid about missing another train so we schlepped into the Hauptbahnhof and up to our platform, which was basically desolate:And which tapered off to nothing in what I found to be a very strange way:The sun would occasionally shine on this lonely little spit of concrete, so we sat there to wait for the train. I also took the opportunity to take one last photo of the Dom, BECAUSE IT WAS THERE:I swear this thing just takes pictures of itself. I was a mere camera-holding vessel for its towering late-Gothic will.

This is how I looked on the train back home:And this is how I felt on the train back home, because I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra like a jackass:
I was asleep when the train hit top speed, but Phil was on the ball enough to take this photo:Awesome.

And then I got back to Berlin, and then I did two and half weeks more of stuff while working on this blog post! AAAAARRRGGHH!

Thank you to every one who made it through this Köln quagmire. Please do comment if something strikes your fancy—nothing encourages your humble blogger more than solid evidence that someone, anyone is reading this thing.

I am happy to be done with it! Please expect a massive photo dump in the next few days, and then some much more contemporary blogging about things that are actually happening to me on a daily basis.

Stopgap Post, Pt 3: PROOFREADERS WANTED

Hey all you intelligent people, the deadline for the IES writing contest is tomorrow and I need somebody to proofread my entry! If I may make a soap opera-style proclamation, the top prize of 100 euros will be mine, provided my essay is not riddled with errors/completely nonsensical. I would really appreciate if 1-2 people could please take a couple of minutes to look this over!

Also: I am allowed to include a couple of photographs, so I included the 3 I think I will include. If you feel a different picture would work better, please let me know!

So, without further ado, it is my humble honor to present:

'Adapting'

My computer died about a week after I arrived in Berlin. I didn’t take it well.
Just as an injury to an obscure muscle group greatly enhances one’s appreciation of the ubiquitous, tireless, thankless, heretofore flawless and totally unnoticed work performed by this muscle group, so did the eventual forced hibernation of my laptop make me realize what a pillar of support my computer it has become to me, especially during stressful transitions. No matter where I am on earth, I can listen to Pet Sounds, check my email over and over again, and type in 12 pt Times New Roman about whatever strange advertisements or awesome dogs I saw today—unless, of course, if my laptop has the wrong mouthparts and cannot nourish itself off of the local energy grid. I lacked the proper adaptor for German electrical outlets and was forced to watch my computer starve to death over the course of a week.

My computer died in the midst of perhaps my most drastic transition to date, and it shook me. I felt truly adrift for the first time in a long time. Things got worse from there. A full inventory of all of the things I found to complain about would be boring and embarrassing, but you can get a pretty good idea of my general state of mind by pacing back and forth in your room for a few hours while chanting the following mantra:

“I can’t buy hair conditioner or black beans. These people are awful. I’m sick. My blog is terrible. These rules are inconsistent and humiliating. Nothing is worth photographing or writing about. I can’t buy hair conditioner or black beans…”

For a couple of days I felt uninteresting and generally crappy. This city is large and beautiful enough that I was able to distract myself with novel or bizarre things, but my alienated, drifting, angry malaise persisted.

I was grouchy and I needed to complain about it to the Internet, so I finally went to the major electronics retailer, laid down the euros, and got what I needed to connect my old computer to my new home.

This is my new electronic adaptor, or, as I learned after extensive, embarrassing circumlocution with the guy at the store—“I need a thing, like an electronic thing, that you use to give electricity to electronic devices, that are from the wrong country, and that country is America…”—‘Adaptor’ in German.

The stylish mid-80s adaptor I got from my well-traveled Grandma Mona wasn’t compatible with the strange modern outlets here in Germany, and my first purchase—a much sleeker little black number that cost about as much as a beer—wasn’t equipped for the triple-pronged plug on my laptop power supply. This humble, homely little thing—that cost about as much as five beers—may not be much to look at, but it means quite a bit to me. Namely, it represents:
1. My first successful, independent interaction with a mechanism of German society, that mechanism being the “electric grid/chain electronics retailer/electricity consumer” ecosystem.
2. My eventual triumph (by means of increasingly large outlays of cash) over frustrating little pieces of plastic designed by injection-mold engineers at the behest of German government in an effort to prevent me from starting an electric fire, burning down my apartment complex, and limiting the economic productivity of my fellow citizens.
3. The catalyst for a little reflection about change, translation, and what kind of person I am.

My first thought: I am an American. I believe in justice, the rights of the individual, and making sure power is actual before I obey it. I love bald eagles and pine trees and the Mississippi River. I love my country, and I miss it.

My second thought: I am an English-speaker. In hard times or awkward situations I always fall back to my Muttersprache. When all else fails (and all else fails all the time), I am someone who can talk good: turn a phrase, tell a joke, say something outrageous or disgusting or strange enough to earn some attention.

My third thought: if I want to be happy in Germany, I need to let go of both America and English.

This one was contrary and scary and challenging, but down as I was it seemed worth pursuing.

Here’s the thing: Language and culture are our link to the rest of humanity, our common medium. American culture and American English are my life-long, scratched-into-my-soul interface with society, so connecting with other English-speakers in America is as straightforward as plugging my computer into the wall. America and English have been constants in my life, permanent and all-pervasive routines, and I find routine deeply comforting.

But (BUT) I did not come to Germany to be comfortable. I came here to break routines and challenge myself and try another way of life; and the only way to do that without going insane is to let go of that three-prong, 110v worldview and connect with these European-types on their own terms, two prongs at 220v, with like a little jacket and a tiny cup of espresso. .

I’ve been letting homeland baggage drag me down and hold me back—refer back to when my computer died and I pouted rather than dealing with it. I don’t know what I am, but I do know that I am more than an American, and I am more than an English-speaker. This is my chance to see what sort of person I am when I give up my dominant external themes and dissolve myself in a new culture.
So: I need to dissolve, embrace change, and adapt. I love America and English, so I will let them go. They’ll be there when I get back.

Köln, Part 3: Friday

Back again, Thursday morning, eating breakfast, waiting for my coffee to brew. My preferred coffee-making device is now the French press (or as the Germans call it, “der Kaffeedrücker”—the coffee pusher/squeezer), the sort with a glass canister in a metal frame and a plunger on top. (It is the thing on the right in this photo) It’s a very simple, elegant design that produces very pure coffee, and moreover every single German home seems to have one. Maybe the government sends every German citizen a French press, a free pound of coffee beans and a “#1 CITIZEN” mug when he or she turn 14.

But wait, I don’t have TIME to tell you all about what’s happening now; there’s so much left of the past to relay!

So: Friday morning in Köln. I woke up in time to go eat a massive breakfast in the hostel’s cafeteria thing. This was my third stay in an A&O hostel—some folks would rather stay at dingy pricy places with all kinds of “local character,” i.e. bugs in the beds and rude, hairy men, smoking in the lobby. I tend to regard a hostel as just a bed with a roof over it, so I am happy to deal with a big faceless corporation and bored employees in blue polos if it means I can spend a little more on beer and gifts—so I have become familiar with the breakfast system. You can either buy these little blue “breakfast” tokens for 4 euros a pop and drop them in a little honor system dish when you go down to eat, or you can not buy the tokens and go eat anyways. I chose the latter. Another advantage of a corporate hostel: I do not feel bad not paying for their overpriced breakfast.

Anyways: I ate an apple, two bowls of Müsli with yogurt, and three meat n’ cheese rolls, all washed down with three cups of OJ and five cups of coffee. (I was poor and young and on the road and it was free food, okay?) Phil came down at the tail end of my one-man face-stuffing session and argued a cup of coffe past the surly little rat-faced employee trying to shut down the breakfast. We went back up to the room, where our roommate had come to and picked up his endless phone conversation where he left it off last night—we stayed in the cheapest room available, “dorm-style” with four beds, and our sole roomy was a young Italian man who was always either on the phone or fast asleep—so we waved good morning, put on jackets, and hit the streets of cloudy, crowded Köln.

Here are some PHOTOGRAPHS of the THINGS that we SAW:

I really dug the proportions of this old city gate:This thing used to be like a hulking, impregnable fortress on the edge of a metropolis in the northern wilds; now it is a thoroughly obsolete military structure (stupid gunpowder) in the middle of a nondescript mid-sized city in the middle of modern Europe. And yet, there’s something about it—the 3X3 array of the façade, the contrast between the round towers and the flat central portion, the rough stones and pointed arch down below—that makes it a pleasing and worthwhile thing to keep around. Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I am allowed to like this old thing but not all the old things in Dresden, it is because this old thing has not been resurfaced and polished to a sheen and decked out with drunken angel fountains and plaques about how those barbaric Allies blew it to pieces for no reason.

This is that same Platz that was so thoroughly dead at 6:10 a.m. the day before: We ended up walking through the poshest, touristy, and hence most irritating part of Köln on our way to the Dom (cathedral). Look at all those idiots, consuming goods and services like a bunch of ninnies. Phil and I ran around throwing rotten eggs and yelling “SHEEPLE” for a while, but the power of bourgeois materialism proved too great for our noble free spirits, so we kept walking.

This is fairly crass for this blog, but I have never been able to pass up a Star Wars reference:It’s a quality AT-AT stencil, too classy for a pee joke. There should be an army of these things marching across a white boxcar somewhere.

Hey, it is a promotional cow!I assume this is one of those “we shall unite the city with identical statues” fundraisers. Bessie here has a couple of issues:
1. She is a cow. Come on, Köln, couldn’t you come up with something better? Little cathedrals or Roman centurions or something? Any Podunk two-horse crap-town could come up with cows *cough Brainerd Minnesota cough*.
2. She is a half maitre d’, half pile of vegetables schizophrenic. That’s just crazy. Either give this cow some pants or cover it in cauliflower, but don’t half-ass it. (Or should I say “half-cow” it?! No, I should not.)

(side note: Word just informed me that the document I type all of these blog posts in has so many spelling errors that it lacks the processing capacity to put little squiggly red lines under them all. So, sorry if my spelling worsens. I consider this a victory. 48,383 words and counting.)

Phil insisted I photograph this futuristic, hyper-advanced trike, or “twike,” as they call it in the world of tomorrow. This thing had more electronics than the space shuttle and a windshield wiper. I wish I could’ve seen it in action. I suppose we could’ve stolen it and gone for a super-trike joy ride around Köln, but we had other plans for wheeled transportation…but first, the Dom:Still there, still mind-blowing. Good for it.

I found this bronze very strange, I suppose because of the clash between these two beautifully rendered bishop-type dudes with that cheesy New Age logo one of them is palming off on the other. Couldn’t one guy be handing the other like a model of the church, or a cross, or could we just get rid of the thing in the middle entirely and pretend they are just talking about God and stuff? The silly object between them—consisting of a Christian cross, a Muslim crescent, and a shooting Star of David (are you allowed to do that with a Star of David?) looped around a couple of peaks that I assume to be the towers of the Dom—seems to be ome kind of namby-pamby “So what if we have built the ultimate monument to the one true faith, all (abrahamic) religions are okay I guess.” I wonder if it was part of the original design, and somebody thought it would be a really great idea to juxtapose these Renaisance-style bronzes and their cool veiney hands and photorealistic folds in their catholic man-dresses with this crappy logo that looks like it belongs on a laundromat/bank/Unitarian-Universalist church that folded in the mid-90s; or if this new loopy whozawhatzit was custom-made to replace whatever super-offensive object these guys were manhandling back when they were cast. What could have been so nasty that the “I’m Okay/You’re Okay” pan-faith travesty in the middle represented an improvement? Like a Muslim cleric’s severed head, or like a dead baby with a sign around its neck reading “Jews Killed Me”?

Anyways, that ridiculous statue was instantly forgotten when we entered the cathedral. I didn’t take any pictures of the interior, because it felt insanely disrespectful (dozens of other people had no problem with that), but rest assured that it was quiet and vast and very, very tall. I was blown away, and I understand how airplanes work (sort of) and how the universe is structured (probably) and why stuff falls down when you drop it (it’s gravity). To an illiterate middle-aged (i.e. 27-year-old) peasant farmer with five kinds of intenstinal parasites and a basic scientific understanding of nothing (because science hadn’t been INVENTED YET) who walked into this thing when it was first built, this must have been utterly overwhelming and downright heavenly. Religion sure did used to have things easier, huh?

“Climb the cathedral” was basically the only concrete item on the to-do list, so we paid an extremely reasonable fee of one thin euro (St. Paul’s, in London, charged 10) and started the long, long ascent of the south tower. The narrow, winding, worn stone staircase, designed back when the average height was like 5 foot nothing, was just barely big enough to accomdate the flow of foot traffic up and down the tower, and it seemed to go on forever; but the climb was, of course, worth it:I think this might be a photo contest candidate. I wasn’t even trying. The Dom did it, I swear!

A commanding view of cloudy Köln. That’s the Rhein (duh), spanned by the bridge with all of those lovebird locks, and the low, crenellated building on the right is the Museum Ludwig, which apparently has all kinds of fancy art I didn’t bother to pay a bunch of money to look at.

Heck, I have all the art I need right here!People have been scratching/Wite-Outing their names up here for decades. The oldest date I saw was 1980, which is now 30 years(!) in the past. This little spire grabbed me because of the heartbreakingly sincere quality of the 10-year-old inscription on the left right up against the I’m-sure-equally-heartbreakingly-sincere but (to me) mystifyingly hieroglyphic text on the right. Does anyone recognize the language/alphabet?

They started building this church in 1248 and didn’t finish until 1880. There were some, uh, delays. It is so old that even the hasty repairs of crumbling bits are historical. Look at the patina on this little copper girdle, holding on a hunk of stone:
Köln is laid out in a series of wildly irregular concentric circles, centered on the old Roman colony with the Dom at its heart. This results in a lot of incredibly confusing streets and dangerous corners, but on the plus side you also get wacky little blocks like this one:
I don’t know why I liked this one. Probably because “Warriors” is in quotes.

We eventually got our fill of touching/vulgar inscriptions and grey Köln from 97.52 meters and tromped back down the staircase through a large group of tourists who didn’t seem to understand the conept of “walk on the right.” Spiritually refreshed and midly dizzy—those spiral staircases can throw you for a loop, especially when you have to look down to keep your feet for the entire 8-minute descent—we cut across the plaza towards the tourist info center to inquire about bicycles for rent. I paused to photograph this sidewalk chalk masterwork, because I like polar bears:
On the advice of the friendly tourist info staff (there is a job I would not want to have), we walked down to the river and rented a couple of fine bikes from a little independent stand. It was maybe 1 in the afternoon by this time, so the 10 euro price for an all-day rental was looking a little steep; we had only to express vague skepticism to the young employee showing us around and the owner, an old sprightly dude who loves bikes, materialized and cut us a fine deal, the terms of which I can no longer recall. It must have been a steal, because look at this darn bike:NICE.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re all thinking/angrily sputtering: “B-but what about poor Molly, sitting alone in Berlin, while you’re out…cavorting with this, this…strumpet!” Look: I love my bike as much as the next guy. Probably more. But me and Molly, we have an understanding, understand? She’s built like a ship so she’s awful heavy, plus I wouldn’t want her getting mishandled by some oafish rail employee or like hit by a freight train, so she stays home when I go on trips. And as a man has…certain needs, I am completely allowed to ride other bikes while I’m away. Look, if you don’t believe me, then you can take this up with Molly.

My ol’ bike didn’t really have any reason to worry. These were tourist bikes, low-geared cruisers with big knobby tires and cushy seats—definitely not what I’d want for getting around Berlin, but just about perfect for a leisurely ride down the Rhein. There was a most excellent path that ran for several klicks along the river, so we hopped on and sailed on down the bank.

It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but someone had clearly been whipping some donuts on this little stretch of concrete. RADICAL.

This is the University of Köln’s floating biological laboratory, which sounds plain too suspicious to not be a supervillain hideout where the League of Villainy plots a mutant alligator attack on the city. What appeared to be a middle-aged woman in a rain jacket and her big hairy German shepherd boarded the ship while we watched. They were obviously henchmen in disguise, or maybe holograms.

Hey, it’s another statue of Otto von Bismarck! Thank goodness, I had almost forgotten he ever existed:This one was actually pretty neat, though, and I like that he’s holding a shield and not a sword. We had pulled off at a train station to check a map—we spent the whole afternoon looking for an apocryphal ferry across the river—and buy a couple of road beers when we saw this hulking age-blackened structure across the street. I thought it was a church at first, but it was actually just a weird free-standing tower sort of a thing, with this blockily monumental Otto stuck on the front.

I smiled at the first line, snickered at the second:
Although we never confirmed this, I think it must be some sort of Himmelfahrt (Ascension) tradition to tie colorful strips of paper to trees. I thought this one looked very nice, bright and lively in the Rhein breeze on a not-so-bright day.

We kept riding and riding and riding—checking the time, wondering where the ferry was/if it existed/if we’d find it soon enough to get the bikes back by 6—and riding and riding and riding, and as Köln is a relatively small city we eventually got into some fairly rural country. Exhibit A: this horse:
We took a little detour into a small town to ask about the ferry and buy a little lunch. The lunch—hard boiled eggs on fresh baked rolls—was delicious and cheap, but the ferry advice didn’t help much. Just keep going down the river, they told us, you can’t miss it. Phil went into this neat phone booth and tried as hard as he could to become Superman. It did not work out.

Time was running a little short, but we perservered, certain that just around the next corner we would see a great big dock with a big friendly ferry and some friendly ferrymen with elaborate mustaches waving us over for an invigorating jaunt across the Rhein. Instead we found this:And this:And all of this:
Earlier, from atop the cathedral, I’d noticed a ring of heavy industry on the horizon, and we had very clearly reached the inner edge. Köln is in the heart of the Rheingebiet, home to one of the world’s first and largest steel industries. This is where Germany got the metal to build all those railways and bridges, and later some submarines and bullets and stuff. They’ve been producing steel here since steel was like a hot new innovation, and they do not seem to have slowed down. These things were all pretty cool, really, especially the crane, but also jarring and unsettling after hours of pony meadows and hobbit villages, and moreover not very ferry-like at all. We turned around and made tracks back to Köln on the same pretty bank we’d taken down.

We returned the bikes precisely on time, then did some less memorable stuff—including seeing the new Robin Hood movie, which I enjoyed and Phil found an unfaithful travesty—and then went back to the hostel and fell asleep early. We were still drained from the day before, and all that time on bikes just made those hostel mattresses seem even more like featherbeds.

Gaaaaah almost done! Homestretch leftover picture categories:

1. Boats
A. Awesome firefighting boat, complete with a little speedboat for fighting fires down narrow canals. This make an absolutely outstanding toy. I would blow it up with so many firecrackers.

B. This cool old wooden rowing skiff was just sitting on the bank. With a couple of oars and a coxswain we totally could have made off with it, or at least challenged the University of Köln crew team to a rowing grudge match.

2. My foot:
Say look, it’s a picture of my foot:I took this to garner pity for my poor sore pinky toe. It had the sort of little cut that you don’t want to walk on, or like bike all day on. As luck would have it I had my little first aid kit with me, so I was able to disinfect and re-dress it a couple of times throughout the day. This is in keeping with my personal motto, Be Prepared.

3. Advertisements

A. Why if it isn’t a visual pun:Let me explain: Bock means ram or buck, as in a male sheep or goat. (Shiner Bock drinkers: look at your beer. Does it have a ram on it? I thought so.) To have “Bock auf” something is to have a hankering or desire for something. HOWEVER, as auf means on or atop, “Bock auf” something can also mean that something literally has a goat on top of it, as in this advertisement here. For you see, not only is there great general desire for Gaffel Kölsch, there is a goat on this keg as well! I like German wordplay

B. This one requires a little background as well: the Germans are bad at translating movie titles. Oftentimes, American films will be retitled in Germany, I suppose as part of the dubbing process, and oftentimes these new titles are so painfully straightforward and awkwardly specific that I kind of cringe when I read them. Examples off the top of my head:

All About Steve→Crazy About Steve
The Back-Up Plan→Plan B for Love
Law-Abiding Citizen→The Law of Revenge
Avatar→Avatar: Escape to Pandora

I guess they just feel compelled to make it completely clear exactly what the movie is about? Do the Germans generally just go to the theater and pick a film based on the posters? Anyways, this title translation is the best/worst one so far:Bad Lieutenant is a hilarious, bizarre, violent, and great movie starring Nicolas Cage as the world’s crookedest cop. Its full title in the States is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, which I found appropriately ungainly and wacky for this thoroughly weird film. Some German producer, however, took one look at that title and said “Port of Call, New Orleans? But he is not a sailor, he is a cop—and a corrupt one at that! Why does it not say anywhere on the post that he is a crooked cop? Audiences will be expecting a nautical thriller! I had better clarify things.” Hence, the new title: “Bad Lieutenant: Cop Without Conscience.” Christ.

C. NIGHT OF THE JUMPS

YES

YES.

4. Beers
At some point we wanted a cheap beers while in the classy, touristy, pricey Altstadt, so we went into the Hauptbahnhof (main train station—have you learned ANYTHING from reading this blog?) and bought a couple of half-litre cans of this crappy beer:
It wasn’t anything special, but I had to include it to give some scale for this next beer, which was found in a grocery store somewhere and consumed during the movie with great success:Heh heh. Yessss. I liked this can (and its Viking) so much that I kept it. It is currently sitting on my shelf above my desk, wearing a tiny plastic sombrero.

Whoooooooooooo one more one more one more post and I’ll be done with Köln, and then I will just have to do the Mother of All Photo Dumps to get caught up on my photos. (Guys, there are so many of them.) I love you all and I’ll be back soon. Thank you to all who wrote postcards, I will work on replies this weekend (I owe one to Sam and Pammy and Nate and Maya and Daniel and [your name here]) along with all of my other work forever.