Good ol' Germany

You might have wondered why I haven't posted anything for the past few weeks. The reason is that I was in Germany over Easter to visit family and friends.

The mighty gothic cathedral of Cologne.

My trip started on the 31st of March at 3 am. Yes, you read correctly: 3 o'clock in the morning. That's the price you have to pay for booking an almost free flight. The other disadvantage is that you land on a former U.S. military airport in the middle of nowhere and the company running the shuttle bus suddenly decides they don't feel like carrying any passengers today. So you're forced to take a taxi to the next train station and go to Cologne by rail for double the bus fare.

After my arrival in Cologne, I spent most of the afternoon visiting Musuem Ludwig, a modern art museum with an excellent permanent exhibition as well as very interesting temporary ones. At the time of my visit, they showed paintings by Salvador Dali and photography from the National Portrait Gallery in London. The rest of the day, I browsed through "Saturn", the self-proclaimed "largest record store in the world" (it really is incredibly huge) and tried to resist the impulse to buy its entire contents. I also paid a visit to "2001", an independent publishing company that finances their various ambitious projects by buying in remaining stocks of books, CDs, DVDs etc. for almost nothing and reselling them in their shops and online for ridiculously low prices.

In the evening, I met with the members of the [progrock-dt] internet community living in and close to the Rhine metropolis, talked and listened to a lot of nonsense and generally enjoyed myself. The weekend was spent at my dear friend Marcus's in the hicktown of Hunsheim with a rather... interesting... jam session and, of course, further nonsensical conversations. For the first few days of the following week I returned to Cologne to visit my other good friends Sal and Petra, to eat their delicious food and, you guessed it, to have stupid conversations with them. I also paid a visit to the mildly interesting Museum for Applied Arts. On Thursday then, it was time to journey on to the back-country of Saxony-Anhalt. Perversely enough, the train ticket was more expensive than my two flight tickets taken together.

Idyllic countryside in Saxony-Anhalt.

Saxony-Anhalt is actually the part of Germany where I was born. However, the only ties I still have with the area are my grandfather and my half-uncle, both called Werner, who live there in the villages of Altenroda and Laucha. Werner jr. not only happens to be three and a half years younger than me, but is also one of my closest friends. Although we don't really have much in common, we somehow always manage to talk and fool around until the early hours of the morning. Moereover, I feel I gain some new ideas and impulses each time we meet.

Of course, I was also happy to see all my other relatives at the big family gathering at my grandfather's place; to exchange news and anecdotes, engage in political and philosophical discussions, take walks through the beautiful countryside, watch the children during the traditional egg search on Easter Sunday and more. I should also mention our trip to Europe's largest model train exhibition in Wiehe, which brought back nostalgic memories of the model train I owned as a child. Above all, however, I have to laud the impressively elaborate and well-done passion play on Good Friday in the church of Laucha, in which Werner jr. played Jesus for the third year in a row. All in all, I spent a great two and a half weeks in good ol' Germany.