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.
that pug is in great tip top shape, clearly he is german also ruggidly good looking.
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