Cologne

On Saturday, I went with that same American colleague to Cologne. It is just a 45 minute train ride from Bad Godesburg. As soon as you get off the train, you are greeted by the Kölner Dom. This immense, 13th Century cathedral amazingly survived Allied bombings during World War II. Though certain portions of the facade look like they are in the process of restoration, most of it looks bittersweetly beaten and weathered.

The amount of detail on building was breathtaking, as was the view from the top of the South tower, which visitor are allowed to climb.

Cologne's main square was more lively than Bonn's, with a mix of both locals and tourists. The Dom gives the square a sense of drama and history, and it is strikingly anachronistic couched within its modern, commercial setting. Unfortunately I am unable to upload a video I took where you can hear the Dom's chiming bells at 6:15 p.m.

In other news, Cologne also had several Beer gardens open Saturday, as well as this mobile bar, which served as a testament to the German love of teamwork, bicycling and beer:

The Godesberg

This is the Godesberg Schloss, which marks the center of my town, Bad Godesberg:

At lunch the other day, my American colleague and I climbed to the top of it.

I don't mean to be morbid...

but there is this really beautiful cemetary in my neighborhood.


I have marveled at it several times passing by, but this was the first time I actually went in.

At first I felt like a trespasser, like my taking photographs was somehow dishonoring the deceased. But then I remembered how at the Rheinisch Landesmuseum, there were extensive exhibits on the burial rituals of ancient societies. This was my own anthropoligical study on how the Germans honor their dead.


The gravestones were all very different. Some were tall, others covered most of the legnth of the burial plot. All of the sites had not just flowers, but landscaping - bright, tropical flower beds, complex ornaments and shrubbery. Each site had somewhere on it a small, lit candle.

My Little Friend

On Tuesday evening I received a visitor at the back door of Zuzana’s flat:

I tried to feed her a piece of Brie cheese, but she would not eat it. Perhaps because she is a German cat, not French.

If she returns, I will try sauerkraut.

German Kids

For years I’ve been reading news reports about declining populations in Western Europe. But you wouldn’t know it from a walk through my neighborhood. Everywhere, there are kids. And unfortunately, they are often loud and unruly, and their parents often smoke as they push them in their baby strollers.

On the bright side, these kids bring with them some excellent playgrounds. As I mentioned before, there is a park in Zuzana’s backyard. Just a few blocks down the street, there is another playground, and then another and another, repeat. They are all of similar quality, but unique. The Germans seem to delight in designing creative but sturdy jungle gyms.

At Bonn’s Rheinische Landesmuseum Bonn which I visited Sunday, part of the permanent exhibit focused on the region’s earliest civilizations.

Between ancient artifacts, they had areas where children could put on life-sized replicas of the clothes and shoes worn by the early inhabitants, and then enter model homes. Museum staff helped the kids prepare food from the era, gather wood and write on cave walls.

After seeing what the kids got to do, the audio tour suddenly didn’t seem so great.

A few days later, I took a new route home, and stumbled upon this elementary school:


I peeked inside and saw walls adorned with Piet Mondrian paintings and doors that looked like they had been painted by students:


The next time I become a child, I want to visit Germany.

My First Home Dinner Invitation

My culture book said that it is common for German families to invite people over for dinner. On Friday, my colleague Matthias gave me my first such invitation.

He lives in a cute residential neighborhood near Siegburg...

...with his wife and three young children. The evening was very casual. We ate pizza bagles and salad. Embarrassingly, Matthias' seven-year-old daughter spoke English better than I spoke German.

After dinner the kids gave us a gymnastics show in the basement, and we all had ice cream. Matthias and his wife have invited over several employees from my company, because they said they want their children to learn that people from other countries are not scary or bad.

Before I left, Matthias' daughter gave me a picture that I think is supposed to be me, although I don't remember wearing a flowered shirt.

CNN

I would like to take this opportunity to complain about CNN.

Given that I have a television at Zuzana’s house, and only two channels in English, I have been watching a lot of CNN International and BBC World. Now, the BBC has an off day every now and then, mostly because the quality of the hosts is inconsistent. But CNN is just consistently bad.

Of course, in the States, CNN is also bad. (Sometimes I’m convinced its sole purpose is to see the most absurd station-promotion it can get Wolf Blitzer to say on-air.) But there’s something even more embarrassing about the fact that CNN International serves as a kind of American ambassador, bantering and blathering while the important news is unfolding throughout the world.

From what I can see, CNN “International” covers fewer foreign stories that most regular German news shows. Of course, the BBC is guilty of focusing more heavily on Britain and the countries of origin of British immigrants. But CNN takes national bias to new heights.

Perhaps they just have an low budget. That is not necessarily their fault. But I cannot believe how many audience-generated "iReport" submissions they use instead of correspondents.

And then there are the hosts.

Half of them sound as though their teleprompters are malfunctioning any time they reports news of any substance. Then they adopt this snarky, condescending tone when they joke about the news between segments.

Oh, and did I mention yet that they did a legnthy story Thursday about how Vladimir Putin went fishing on his vacation without a shirt on?

Whoever told the hosts to deliver the news “with feeling” ??? Hala Gorani sounded absolutely devastated as she told the story of a paralyzed Palestinian child. She paused dramatically and labored over each word. But just seconds prior, she was giggling about David Beckham.

Finally there is Richard Quest I was first introduced to Mr. Quest in a "Daily Show" segment in which Jon Stewart's own British correspondent, John Oliver, spoofed Quest's cliche British phrases and exaggerated accent.

Quest’s segment this week, "Business Traveller" discussed the “Open Skies” agreement, which, beginning in March 2008, will deregulate the market for Transatlantic flights between EU countries and the US. It’s a worthy subject. But Quest spent the most time in his report taking out a map and asking an EU official, “Wait, so…you mean I can go from here…to here!?! Or here!?! Wait, wait…what about here!?!?” The official’s response was always an obvious “yes.”

Also, for no apparent reason, Quest chuckled when he said the names of ordinary airlines.

After his “report” on Open Skies, Quest did a story on ZipCar, where he traveled from London to New York to show how INCREDIBLY EASY it was to use the service. It was a straight-up advertisement.

I promise I will not make Mein Blog a place to air my personal grievances. But Richard Quest is without question the most absurd television journalist of all time.

Slugs and Snails

It rained all last week, but I noticed that Bonn does not get many worms! Instead, it gets plenty of big fat slugs and snails.

Personally I prefer these creatures to worms; slugs are easier to see (and thus avoid) and some snails have very pretty shells. In fact, if I had to be an animal, I might consider being a snail.

More Civil Disobedience

After visiting Beethoven Haus Saturday, Lenka and I stopped for some pasta and wine. Amidst our conversation about the breakup of Czechoslovakia, we heard all this commotion coming from the University of Bonn’s main square. When we walked over we saw hordes of Polizei (police) complete with plush, Mercedes-Benz SUVs, well-groomed horses and barking German Shepherds:

What was this all about? From what I could see, the police were called in to monitor a group of 20-30 "punks" who had congregated on the lawn. They were drinking, smoking and engaging in other visually disruptive behavior. The police (who outnumbered the punks two-to-one) huddled together, and so did the punks, each group strategizing and waiting for someone to make a move. Every now and then, a punk would break off from and begin hurling verbal insults at the “pigs.” The police would respond by inching closer, and nothing more. They would not violate anyone's free speech rights, and the punks would not break the law.

This dance continued for several hours; I left several times and returned. Each time there was a surrounding audience, guiltily enjoying the free show. The punks must have spent hours selecting their anarchy-themed American t-shirts, slicing their pants and spiking and dying their hair; the police donned their official uniforms and sped around on various noisy transportation methods, pushing aside the general public to rush into “the scene;” all so that onlookers could react appalled and talk to each other over dinner about how the society is going down the drain. The whole seemed result from boredom and overprivilege.

Once the punks grew tired of their own antics, they headed towards the main train station. The police followed closely behind, appearing as if they could have been the young punks' parents.

Strike!

Last week my co-worker asked me if I took the train to work. “No,” I told him. “I either walk or take my bike.”

“That’s good,” he said, “because the train workers are going on strike.”

I looked online, and sure enough, a group of “rebel” train drivers were orchestrating a country-wide strike until they got a 31 percent wage increase.

How exciting! My first workers uprising!

Deutsche Bahn, the federal transportation operator, said it would maintain a scaled back schedule (about one train an hour) by recruiting civil servants with train operator licenses. Civil servants are barred by law from going on strike.

But then just a day later when I began asking people how they were dealing with the strike, they informed me that it had already ended. A court in Nuremberg made it illegal for the train workers to strike before late August, because it is the height of the tourist season and it would do significant damage to the German economy.

Until then, Deutsche Bahn said it would try to negotiate the workers' salary without any disruption to future operations.

German Class

I enrolled in a cheap beginner German class for longer-term visitors and immigrants. It is me, Lenka, two people from Turkey, one from Italy, one from Libya, one from Morocco and another American (who, by the way speaks zero German and is capable of making the most confused face I have ever seen on a human being).

I wanted to quit after the first class. My teacher allowed very little English, Arabic or Turkish to be spoken, and no one understood enough German to tell what the hoot was going on. But Lenka encouraged me to stick with it, and the second class was much better.

We will see if the immersion approach pays off.

Sprechen Sie Deutsche?

Several of you have asked whether or not I have learned German. The short answer is: not yet. The longer answer is that I have surrounded myself with German speakers, audio lessons and dictionaries, and everywhere I go, people speak English!

Studying English is a mandatory part of the German education system. And most Germans are keen to practice with native speakers. Of course, a handful of store owners frowned at me when I told them, “Ich spreche keine Deutsche” (I don’t speak German). But the majority of Germans have simply begun speaking English to me after they hear how poorly I attempt to speak their language.

The people at my office come from all over the world, so several languages are spoken. About a quarter of them do not speak any German; they speak English and their native language. The Germans are usually pretty considerate about switching to English when they are in the company of foreigners, but it is obviously more comfortable for them to speak German, so often they switch back without noticing.

I have now sat through three meetings conducted entirely in German. I did not know whether I should just tune out and begin reading something I had brought with me, or whether I should join in and laugh disingenuously whenever the room erupted at a joke that I clearly did not understand.

I did start laughing (however this time, *ingenuously*) when all the Germans began banging their fists on the conference table after one of our colleagues gave a presentation. What a hilarious kind of German nonsense joke! Ha ha ha!

Strangely though, no one else was laughing.

I later read in my culture book that this is the German equivalent of clapping.

Brühl!

On Sunday, Lenka (my other Slovakian co-worker) invited me to go bike riding with her in Brühl. We were joined by another expatriate named Raphael. He is here from Beijing training for a job with DHL.

I did not know really what to expect. I just knew I had my bike. When we got off the train, we were greeted by the great schloss (castle) Augustusburg:



Augustusburg was the residence of Clemens August, the Archbishop of Cologne. It is surrounded by beautiful forests and Baroque gardens. The interior looked similarly spectacular on brochures, but Raphael and Lenka said they planned to visit another time with a tour group, so we did not go inside.



Instead, we traveled by bike to a collection of lakes on the Southwest side of Bruhl. It is a popular vacation/camping spot for Germans.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather. But unfortunately we did not bring our bathing suits. In lieu of swimming, we decided to feed the swans:


Here is Raphael with his new friends:

But then his friends started getting scary:

(Barb, do you remember when that swan bit dad????)

We walked around the surrounding area, and in a typically German style, there was a small amusement park:

And another example of how the Germans will mechanize just about anything:

Lenka and Raphael are both smart, well-traveled and easy to talk to. (Not to mention particularly enduring on a bike!) We had a really nice time. But Raphael showed me how to work the focus function on my camera. And I feel foolish for not knowing how it operated before. I promise to take better pictures.

Some More Pictures of Bonn

My office:


The building next door (It's either a statehouse or a hotel. I ate dinner there, so it's probably a hotel):


Deutsche Welle:


The University of Bonn:

There Are A Lot Of Bees

When you eat outside, they swarm all around your food. But they are kind of lethargic and weird, even when you swat at them. I’m surprised I haven’t gotten stung.

Russlands Seele (The Russian Soul)

Thankfully, the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublic Deutschland (Federal Art Museum), which I visited next, was much busier. This museum features a handful of traveling exhibits. And what luck! The first was about Mother Russia!

The collection was taken from the first National Gallery in Moscow, which was created by a wealthy industrialist named Pavel Tretyakov. The curators went to great lengths to point out that Tretyakov believed that wealth should be acquired only to give back to the society in some way. (The concept of a common good is strong in Germany, likewise in this exhibit.)

I stepped over to the first piece and attempted to read the Cyrillic text. Just as I was beginning to string together some phonetics, the man next to me spat out some quick German and started laughing. I looked at him and realized that he was looking back at me.

“Ich verstehe nicht,” I said. (I do not understand).

“Ja!” he replied happily, and walked away.

I realized that he was laughing about the fact that he did not understand the Russian text. And by my reply, he thought I meant that I did not understand the Russian either.

In reality I probably understood the Russian better than I understood him. But there was an even greater irony: I am Russian and German. That is what I tell people in the States. And here I was, only decades removed from these ancestors, and I would not be able to talk to them if they were alive today.

Anyway, at this exhibit, the art labels were detailed and in English, so I was ready to move on.

I must admit, I was not terribly familiar with Russian art before coming to this exhibit. The Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, which dominated the first few rooms, was obviously influenced Neoclassical and Romantic techniques in Western Europe. So they did not feel very “Russian.” But I had never seen paintings by Leo Tolstoy or some of the bright, cartoonish drawings of Russian fairs. Both were delightful.

The works began to take on a more "Russian" feel in the 1860s with the “Wanders” movement. These artists strove to portray late-19th Century society truthfully, which (in most cases) meant critically. Some of the paintings were positively heartbreaking – ragged old women who had lost everything in political reforms and dark Orthodox churches whose only light came from a few clusters of candles and reflections they made off the gold icons.

The Russian landscape scenes of were similarly bleak. “I love the monotonous nature of my home soil,” wrote writer Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, “for what it instills in its people.” There were pictures of immense swaths of land that grew nothing; they merely froze and thawed. Painters often used the same grey paint for the skin of Russian people and the grey, Russian slush.

There was, however, some comic relief from the ridiculousness of Russian drama. The “Wanders” often painted scenes intended to capture a single, suspenseful moment. They all made me laugh, particularly Ilya Repin’s “They Did Not Expect Him.”

The Kunstmuseum

Yesterday I visited the Kunst Museum – Bonn’s museum of modern art. It didn’t really do it for me. There was very little information written on the art labels, and all of it was in German. So I had trouble putting things in context.

Probably the most impressive part was the building itself – a spare, clean design with complex entrances, secret passages and windy staircases. The only problem was that it was desolate. As I made my way from room to room, I realized that I was all alone, except for one or two museum attendants who stood up as I entered, then proceeded to stare at me and shadow my movements. I began to get a sense of paranoia as my heels clicked across the long, wooden floorboards. Maybe I was the art! Maybe this was all some bizarre experiment in human behavior, a kind of highfalutin version of “Candid Camera” where they let people loose in a tangled maze of architecture and highly abstract art, to see if they can tell the difference between a doorway and a conceptual rendering of our culture, manifest in small rooms with walls made entirely of beeswax.



Then I though maybe the museum attendants were the artists! (The work was current enough that this could have been the case). And they just wanted to see how people responded to their work – how they approached it, and what they did and did not like. But as I made my way into the early 20th Century room, I realized that the attendants would have had to have had a lot of plastic surgery for this to be true. And there were even some other patrons in these rooms. Clearly my solitude (along with the all the mirrors and reflective surfaces) had gotten to my head.

For lack of a better conclusion, this was my favorite piece:

Bad! Godesberg

Despite its certified air purity, the smoking ban has definitely not made its way to Bad Godesberg. It seems like everyone smokes - even at offices and museums. Every few km there are cigarette machines:

And almost every public advertisment is for smoking:

Communists!

In outdoor areas they often have books available for public use. It's not unusual to see a mini library like this one in a park or shopping center:

I Never Want to Drink Water Without Bubbles in it

Never.

My Temporary Flat

I am staying with my co-worker Zuzana. She is about my age and from Slovakia.

Like most of my co-workers, Zuzana's English is very good. She has been working at the company for about 3 years and has gotten to travel with them a lot.

Her house is very nice. She left town today for a 3 week holiday!!! While she is away she has allowed me to stay in her flat...

And use her bike!

What a blessing she has been! I cannot imagine how I would have transitioned myself into Germany without her help.

This is the children's park in our backyard:

A Popular Hangout

After about an hour walking through Bonn, I had to use the toilet. Zuzana recommended I stop in McDonalds.

I walked in and down the stairs. I was immediately met by a friendly bathroom attendant who pointed me towards a selection of unisex toilet stalls, each illuminated inside with its own neon light. When I told Zuzana about the bizzare selection of lighting, she shrugged matter-of-factly, “Yeah, McDonalds is very popular with young people.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.