{ chrislip.com/matthew : blog }
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03 May 2006
May 1 :Traveling from New York City to Cologne was a remarkably comfortable experience. The plane ride (from JFK to Frankfurt on Lufthansa) was mostly pleasant; I had plenty of leg room (I was seated in the second-to-last row of the plane, where the body of the plane curves inward and doesn't leave enough space for a third seat on the far side, resulting in plenty of leg room for the occupant of 55B), and the flight itself felt abnormally short. I didn't even bother trying to sleep—what with eating two meals and one snack, watching two in-flight movies (Fun with Dick and Jane and Yours, Mine & Ours), and making one quick trip to the WC, I had landed in Germany before I had the chance to think about a nap.
May 2 :
I arrived in Frankfurt just after 6 AM, and by 7h09 I was boarding the train to head to Cologne. The Germans have really got their transportation down. The train was clean, comfortable, and very quiet; the atmosphere was almost library-esque. Anyway, the train pulled into Cologne's central station at 8h04, and it was only a two-minute walk from there to my hostel. I dropped off my bags, but since I couldn't check into my room until 2 PM, I postponed my shower and headed off to the city's most famous landmark: the cathedral. Between admiring the very intimidating vaulted ceilings and climbing a narrow spiral staircase up to the top of one of the towers, I crouched in one of the pews and pretended to pray as I scoured my map of Cologne.
By noon I was completely exhausted. I had spent the rest of the morning nibbling on an apfelstreudel and window-shopping in the major commercial district, and it was enough to deplete every last drop of energy that was left in my body. I took lunch at a little vegetarian café/kitchen called Zikade—I had a large slice of broccoli quiche and some stuffed eggplant—and soon after headed back to the hostel. At 14h45 I flopped down on my bed, and although on numerous occasions I had been lectured on the detrimental effect of napping on the body's ability to recover from jet lag, I decided to let myself rest until 16h. I woke up at 20h45. As I showered I contemplated going out for some dinner, but I ended up back in bed by 22h, and I stayed there until 7h the next morning.
May 3 :
I woke up feeling very refreshed (and for the record, I haven't been tired all day long, and it's already 19h00). After getting dressed and making myself pretty, I packed up my books and supplies and headed off to the Media Arts College (home to the Flusser Archive), grabbing a pastry along the way.
Marcel (one of the directors at the archive) let me into the archive at about 10h. He showed me around their collections and library and afterward took me on a short tour of the rest of the college and its surrounding neighborhood (most of which I had already explored, since I had been early for our meeting). Once back at the archive, I put myself to work. Silvia, the other director, arrived later.
I worked until 18h, sifting through each of the English manuscripts and tagging those essays that seemed most relevant to my research. Marcel and Silvia were both very warm and welcoming. When I had decided to get some lunch (at a very yummy Vietnamese restaurant), they gave me keys to the building and the archive so that I would be able to come and go as a please throughout my stay in Cologne. They also asked that if I decided to take any materials back to my hostel to study during the night, that I simply leave a list of what I had borrowed. Their immediate, unquestioning trust was actually quite frightening.
Now I'm off to have some dinner and maybe catch a film. I'm still feeling a little of that new-city-with-no-one-to-really-interact-with bizarreness, and movies tend to be very therapeutic for me.
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 21:10 :
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1 Comments:
Silvia got a kick out of my use of the word 'directors' to describe their roles at the archive. ('Researchers,' as they were called in one article, is perhaps more accurate.)
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