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08 May 2006
May 5 :I have almost no recollection of what I did on Friday.
May 6 :
I allowed myself to sleep until about 11h. Around noon, after having showered and cleaned up after myself, I left to get some breakfast/lunch, and I was surprised to find that Cologne was teeming with people. The city's population is just over one million (though it's still hard to imagine where they must hide them all during the week), but it must have doubled over the weekend. Tourists and native Kölners alike had flocked to the streets and squares.
Earlier I had decided that Saturday would be my museum day, so I started it off with a three-hour visit to Cologne's Ludwig Museum (a museum of modern and contemporary art). After having thoroughly exhausted my eyes, I made my way through one of the main shopping districts, heading (very slowly, thanks to the thick crowds) toward the second stop on my museum tour. I paused briefly to indulge my craving for a cone of fat German fries (topped with ketchup, mayonnaise, and bits of roasted onion).
The second museum, which would also turn out to be the last, was the Lindt Chocolate Museum. With the student discount admission was only 3.5 euros, and it was a worthy investment. I was given a little square of chocolate when I entered, and after an hour or so of learning about chocolate production (from bean to bar), I was given five wafers that had been dipped in a large chocolate fountain. The museum has a small-scale chocolate factory, run by full-size people, where they show the entire production process. It was actually very fascinating. I lingered for nearly two hours in the museum, until at one point I realized that I was one of the last ones there (it being nearly closing time).
Even though I wasn't at all hungry when I left the museum, I decided to eat before it got much later (it was past 19h, and I had plans to watch another movie at Metropolis just after 21h). I tested out another Vietnamese restaurant and afterward was sorry that I had. The food was a little disappointing. (It's also very possible that my judgment was unfairly influenced by my lack of a real appetite.)
May 7 :
I arrived at the church building at 9h30, just as the first meeting was beginning, so I ducked in quickly and took a seat a few rows from the back of the room. As soon as I had entered the room I noticed a flurry of excitement among the missionaries, and they all turned to each other to find out if anyone knew who I was. Before I had been seated even twenty seconds, the delegate missionary hurried over to sit down next to me. I'm not sure if he was disappointed or excited when I told him that I was just visiting from New York, but since the meeting had already begun by that point, he had no choice but to stay next to me for the whole meeting. Making the best of it, he decided to translate for me (a luxury that I hadn't expected to be afforded). Once the meeting was over, all the missionaries crowded around me to figure out who I was and to report on which towns in Utah they were from. They all seemed way too interested in me, but I can imagine that I would have reacted the same way had I been in their situation. And this wasn't Paris, where American tourists are obscenely omnipresent.
My post-church hours were relatively uneventful. I strolled around near the river for a few hours, watching street performers and random passersby. Later in the evening I found a makeshift flea market that had popped up near one of the old city portals, and I had to hold myself back from buying up all sorts of porcelain plates, vintage vinyl (that I wouldn't be able to play anyway), and a really classy pocket knife that looked like it could have belonged to Cary Grant in the late 40s. In the end, I came away with one acquisition: a photograph. I had been thumbing through stacks of old photos when I came to one of Caterina Valente during a performance in Germany (I presume) during the mid-50s. There was something about the photo that pulled me in, and after trying to divert my attention for a few minutes, I came back to it. I couldn't resist any longer. I bought it for 7 euros.
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 15:25 : 2 comments :
]05 May 2006
{ Cologne : May 4 }
I was the first one to arrive at the archive in the morning, at about 10h. Silvia showed up around 10h30, and Marcel was in and out throughout the afternoon. The morning is my favorite time of day to work and study here; with the windows open I can smell the fresh air and hear the little German kids playing at a neighboring kindergarten. A nearby church rings its bells at every hour, and at noon they go wild for a good five minutes.In the afternoon I walked across the street to the college's small bibliothek/mediathek to make some photocopies of articles that Flusser had published in Artforum. The two thin, middle-aged German women that work behind the library counter smiled self-consciously and blushed as I apologized for not speaking German and asked where the copy machine was. Germans, in general, are much more friendly than the French. They actually smile! (Pierre was one of the only ones who gave me that courtesy in Paris.) And few people here have seemed annoyed by my inability to speak their language; all I really know how to say is 'danke schoen' and 'bitte schoen' (though, thankfully, my accent is better than Wayne Newton's).
I left the archive just before 18h and, on Marcel's recommendation, took the tram up to Ebertplatz, a neighborhood in the northern section of the city center (if that makes sense). A cinema called Metropolis was showing the original version (English, no subtitles) of Mission: Impossible 3 at 19h25, and tickets were only 4 euros, so I went ahead and bought one. I had just over an hour to eat, so I found a small café/bar called Casa Mundi that had a few vegetarian options. I knew that it was relatively early for dinner by European standards, but I hadn't expected to be the only one in the restaurant. I took them by surprise when I showed up, and the waitress/hostess had to go to the store to buy some bread while the chef was preparing the rest of my food. It took her a few minutes to run the errand, and the chef had to serve me the salad himself. The food itself was quite good—my main dish consisted of grilled asparagus (both white and green) with a side of risotto mixed with parmesan, spinach, and some sort of cream sauce—but that didn't really alleviate the awkwardness of the situation.
Arriving back at the cinema, I made a sad discovery: the English-speaking social scene in Cologne leaves something to be desired. Watching the small crowd of twenty-some nerdy Americans interact, I got the impression that this was it. They greeted each other with the sort of nervous self-assurance that reminded me of my days as an ex-patriot in Paris, and they eyed me skeptically, as if they were trying to figure out what I was doing at their reunion. Reason no. 2 that I wouldn't want to live in Germany long-term.
That reminds me: I've never mentioned reason no. 1. Allow me to perpetuate some stereotypes as I elaborate on one my reasons for feeling very self-conscious here in Cologne...
Germany is a very masculine country. There's no way of getting around it. Short hair and a solid build will make nearly any woman look manly. What's more is that the women tend to dress and style their hair in the same fashion as the men. And the men... well, they look pretty much like all other European men, though slightly thicker on average. So I guess you could say that Germany is the land of the Mystical Masculine Androgyny. And how does this affect me? Well, from the hair standpoint, all I'd need to do is dye the tips of my faux-hawk/mullet blonde, and I'd fit in perfectly. But as I weigh under 150 pounds, I'm afraid that I'd still look like an underdeveloped 14-year-old girl. Such is the plight of the slight in Germany.
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 15:00 : 0 comments :
]04 May 2006
After leaving the archive for the evening, I took the tram over to a neighborhood that I hadn't yet visited, and much to my excitement, I found the real city! Up to that point I had only been in the older, less metropolitan areas, and I had already started to feel slightly suffocated by the quaintness of it all. But now I had found my home in Cologne amidst the trendy boutiques, designer flagship stores, and youthful nightlife. (I'm really turning into a city snob, I guess.) I'm in love with this city now. We'll see how long the honeymoon lasts.Cologne. A land flowing with milch und honig.
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 11:20 : 0 comments :
]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 : 1 comments :
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