the cigarettes go in the cigaretteAaaaand Sunday evening has arrived, here at the end of a long, strange, beautiful weekend. Thanks to a broken bike, a bum knee, and a generally high-strung, nervous attitude, I came into this weekend a little shook up and in need of some genuine relaxation. It took some doing, but I eventually got into the swing of things. Fate did me a few favors and kept me out of doors and on my bicycle: as I mentioned, my internet conked out, keeping me from spending all day crouched over the computer; the weather took a fantastic turn and has been straight up beautiful early summer since Friday; and the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of the Cultures)—an extremely huge, awesome street festival with all kinds of music and vendors and just stuff to do—provided me with a ton of great no-pressure walk-around fodder. I tried not to take any photos but I was not successful. Long bright days, lots of drum circles/street performers/top-notch people watching and friends met unexpectedly—nothing like bumping into multiple acquaintances at a super-massive public event to make a man feel like a resident—have put me in a better place, I think.
that's good, we can always use some more smart carsNow on Monday morning (my lord this is taking a while to write, what am I thinking with all this time spent away from my computer) I shall slam out as much of the next chapter of my Köln excursion as I can while still remaining totally relaxed. Really, I am loose as a goose made out of cooked spaghetti right now. I am chanting like a monk and breathing deeply with my eyes closed and my hands are just typing automatically. So peaceful I can barely stand it. I am as serene as this salad:
it's like the salad radiates peace of mindSo: when we last left our brave adventures, they were aimlessly wandering the empty streets of early morning Köln after a sleepless night on a cramped and crowded hell-train across the country. It was cold and cloudy but not quite raining. Through an intensive “waiting around” procedure we eventually transitioned from early morning to mid-morning. Central Köln woke up as we watched: the first of the human statues—Charlie Chaplin and a Roman centurion—set up their soap boxes and started standing very still, and the first wave of elderly, highly-efficient tourists trotted across the Platz and began systematically photographing the Dom (cathedral). I stared up at that dark mind-blowing church and wondered how much closer it could bring me to heaven while Phil took a phone call that I was too tired to care about.
As it turned out, Phil has a friend in the area, a young woman named Sophia Gessner who had spent a year of high school in Temple, Texas, Phil’s hometown, and we were invited to lunch at her home. It is possible verging on likely that Phil had mentioned this connection earlier, but as I had the attention span of a goldfish at this point it was news to me. Also a pleasant surprise: instead of doing the zombie shuffle/sleeping on our feet until 3, when we could check into the hostel, we had a genuine German family to get to know and free food to eat…while very, very sleep deprived. Did you ever get the feeling that you were on a hidden camera show or perhaps the unwitting subject of an elaborate gentlemen’s bet.
So Sophia came and found us catatonic on a bench in front of the Dom. Being a practical German girl she tied some stout rope around our waists and led us like cattle onto the train to Siegburg, the small town southeast of Köln where she lives with her sister and her brother in her parents’ excellent little home.
Papa Gessner picked us up at the train station. He greeted us in very good English, but immediately switched to German when he saw we could handle ourselves. (Remember, this whole getting-to-know-you cross-cultural scenario is playing out in a foreign language, having not slept in 30 hours and counting.) He works in the pharmaceutical industry, in some sort of job that required him to periodically take phone calls in English, German, and I think French. He’s a very smart dude with a flair for trivia and history, and, as we found out once we hit Casa de Gessner, a large collection of musical instruments. We didn’t get to hear the bass or the cello:
And the sitar(!) was out of tune:
But we eventually convinced Sara to take the white baby grand out for a spin while we waited for Mama Gessner to put the finishing touches on lunch:
She was very good.Speaking of musical instruments: Just inside the front door at the bottom of the stairs hangs the Mahlzeit (meal time) gong, struck to inform the herd when the latest batch of delicious traditional German cuisine is on the table.
Speaking of delicious traditional German cuisine: after an indeterminate amount of time (Forty seconds? Forty minutes? Two weeks?) spent chatting in the living room, Mama Gessner called us to the table and began dishing up a huge hot meal.
Mama Gessner (I never quite worked out the parents’ names. Everyone just referred to them as “die Mutti” and “der Vati,” which mean literally “the mom” and ”the dad.”) works full time as a rep for a homeopathic medicine company, wrangles three kids (Sophia, 19; Sara, 17; and Arthur, 12) and her husband, and regularly prepares astounding spreads for the whole family. She is a boundless fount of maternal energy and an inspiration to us all. More on her relentless drive and gift for logistics later.
So: over Kartoffelkekse, Lachs, Spargel mit Käse und Hollandaise (translations in the pipe, hold your horses), and I’m sure other things that I can’t recall right now, Phil and I babbled in German about what a strange day we were having and what a nice house this was while Papa Gessner named all the flowering trees in the backyard and Mama Gessner informed us of all the things we absolutely had to do while we were in town. Yes, it was as weird as it sounds. Generally very comfortable, and a thousand times better than being wasted and bored in Köln, but still: profoundly weird.
Also: delicious! I was too busy saying German words with/putting food into my mouth to photograph all these pretty dishes, but I suppose I can at least translate all those tasty words from the top of the last paragraph:
Kartoffelkekse: I think this is what die Mutti called the potatoes, which were like thin, crispy, tender hashbrown pancakes. They were awfully good and went well with the Lachs.
Lachs: Salmon, fresh and very good. This was the only thing close to meat on the table, which was perfectly fine but sort of surprising for a big German spread. Phil later informed me that the Familie Gessner is unusually health-conscious and nutritionally progressive, verging on vegetarian. Good for them!
Spargel: thick white asparagus steamed and served with cheese and fresh hollandaise sauce. This was my first experience with this particular German delicacy, and I was repeatedly assured that if it was not to my liking I was free to push it to the side of my plate, but I actually found it to be tender and tasty. The thick coating of cheese and hollandaise sauce (which consists, if I recall, almost entirely of butter and egg yolks) did not hurt the flavor one bit.
The one aspect of the meal I did manage to photograph was this neat seashell trivet.
I taught the dad the word “trivet”—you can tell he is one of those dudes who absolutely loves learning new words in English—and he taught me the German equivalent: Untersetzer (“under setter”—the Germans are nothing if not direct).After lunch I took a couple of photos of the backyard. This was a landscape I hadn’t seen in Germany before, like a smallish town spread across the countryside. It reminded me of Baxter or Nisswa, except prettier. More trees than concrete, everyone has a car and a backyard, and some folks even have little blue ce-ment ponds:
My greatest dream is to someday own a fine little shed like this one:
I also ran into this awesome tuxedo cat who may or may not have belonged to the Gessners.
He spotted me right after I took that first photo and immediately made a beeline for me,
Where he rubbed against my ankles and I scratched his ears.
I like cats, and I miss living with one. Nice to run into a friendly feline out in the country.Now: at some point during the course of the meal Mama Gessner seamlessly transitioned from suggesting activities for Phil and myself to planning an actual, extensive, immediate outing with the whole family. I kept nodding and eating asparagus and before I knew it I was in a car, headed towards a mountain.
(Note: we were certainly capable of politely declining on account of massive fatigue, but the Gessners were fun and interesting, that huge meal pushed me into some bizarre new phase of fatigue where climbing a mountain seemed like a good idea, and in any case at this point our only planned activity back in Köln was the v boring “check into the hostel and go to sleep,” and sleep is for suckers.)
Forty minutes later we were here:
This is a view of the Rhein valley from atop the Drachenfels, which means “Dragon Rock” and contains no actual dragons. Despite the clouds and a thin drizzle, this place was super great and provided a wonderful dose of the natural beauty that I have been hankering for while living in the city. In fact it is so pretty I think I will show you another picture of it:
Mama Gessner kept lamenting the cloudy weather and assuirng us that it was all much more picturesque in full sun with birds singing. I kind of liked the moody, muted feel on this rainy day.Among the many pleased Germans here at the top of the Drachenfels was this group of young men participating in a German tradition the Gessners were very pleased to explain to us: the Thursday of Himmelfahrt (Ascension) weekend is Vaterstag (Father’s Day), and for whatever reason the proper way for men in the 18-35 age bracket to celebrate their fathers is to walk around all day drinking beers from a little wagon they pull behind them:
it makes so much senseAt least I think it is a boys only thing. I never saw any women pulling wagons, and this one had a fairly misogynistic little pennant on it:
Maybe the women push shopping carts full of boxed wine on Mother’s Day.I haven’t spent much time with families in Germany, so it was very comforting (and often entertaining) to hear the Gessners chat and joke and squabble. One topic of particularly heated debate concerned the proper titles of Drachenfels’ two structures, the Schloss (castle) and the Festung (fortress). After much debate and reading of explanatory bronze plaques, it was established that the much older, late Middle Ages, antennae-adorned ruin at the tippy-top was the Festung,
And the fancy pants, 1920s-built residence over my right shoulder is the Schloss.
This photo does a good job of capturing how weird and tired and dirty and unshaven I felt while accepting the hospitality of this extremely nice German family. Phil seems to be either hallucinating that I am a mythical beast or a delicious roast of some sort, or preparing to nod off and pitch backwards over the railing.We did a Schloss tour at the mother’s insistence. The ornate pleasure palaces of hyper-oppressive European nobility have never really been my thing, but this was a fine thing for what it was—oil paintings of German legends and royal forefathers on all the walls and ceilings, fine oak doors and extensive gardens, golden elk statues,
A collection of mounted jackalope skulls,
This fairly awesome conversatin’ chair,
And these actually very impressive stained glass windows, the only two out of dozens of similar works to survive when this thing got blowed up real good:
The Schloss—home to the Adolph Hitler School for a couple of really marvelous years in the 1930s—was heavily damaged in the war, and every German seems to agree that the biggest loss was the majority of these rare, intricate windows. Apparently this kind of richness of color and level of detail, especially on the portraits, takes an enormous amount of skill (and time and money, I would bet). That attitude seems to favor some priorities that I’m not entirely comfortable with, but you can’t deny that these things are impressive. Look at those fine details etched on mopey old slouch-shouldered Heinrich Heine’s face, hair, and jacket:
On the walk back down the mountain, we passed by a sign for a restaurant called Drachenbrunnen (Dragon Fountain). I naturally got my camera out, ready for some fantastic dragon statue with light up eyeballs and water just gushing out of every orifice, with some extra little dragons like twirling around and spraying water on the crowd. Instead, I got this sorry excuse for a fountain:
Come on, guys. A potted plant and a couple of bird statues? I can see the hose for heck’s sake! Shocking accusation: I think somebody just wanted to open up a lucrative mountainside restaurant, and this fountain was merely an afterthought to draw in families with stupid, easily impressed children.Aaaand then we bid the Gessners farewell (for now—they shall return) and took a train back to Köln, where we managed about two beers apiece before collapsing on thin hostel mattresses and sleeping until our long, eventful Friday.
Thus endeth Part 2. The third and hopefully final part will be hopefully written tonight and hopefully posted tomorrow, hopefully. I love you all, hope you’re well, etc etc. Now if you’ll excuse me, the pool is closed because it is another holiday (AGAIN it is like one holiday a week around here) and I want to run before the sun sets.
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