The Ghost Of Tuffi Walks!
Wuppertal: Okay, so after a night off in Cologne we were to head to Wuppertal. Our night off was an uneventful one, unless your Calamity Kate who goes out and finds the coolest bar in Cologne (Sonic Ballroom) proceeds to drink everyone there under the table and wander back to our hotel before check out time. Pure rock star through and through. At the other end of the spectrum was me, getting up early in the morning for my run. We were a block away from the Cathedral, which is the largest standing one left after WWII. So with this in mind, I started out by warming up lapping the holiest of structures in the Northern Hemisphere. I didn't think it was unusual, but there were people taking my photo. I don't know whether Germans generally don't use the Dom for exercise or if it was because Goatwhore was leaking out of my earphones and I *might* have been singing along. Under my breath... Either way, I headed for the Rhine and used that to jog along instead which was very pretty, but made it much more difficult to annoy people on spiritual pilgrimages and the Catholic church.
And so we went onto Wuppertal. We had an in-store appearance at Cargo Records, which was pretty cool, and had the dubious honor of popping their burlesque cherry, since I don't think they've ever had a show like that in store prior. I was sceptical at first, but it proved to be rather fun, and like all good gigs I managed to broaden my horizons by learning a little bit about the town and it's history. Leave it to me to seek out the hilarious yet tragic...
Wuppertal Schwebebahn is a suspended monorail that runs through the town. Its full name is the “Eugen Langen Monorail Suspension Railway” (Einschienige Hängebahn System Eugen Langen). Designed by Eugen Langen, who originally planned to build it in Berlin, it was built in 1900, opened in 1901 and is still in use today as a local transport system in the city. It is the oldest monorail system in the world. And rather creaky it looks too (I'll never talk smack about the Expo line in Vancouver again, by the way) The suspension railway travels along a route 13.3 kilometres long, about 12 metres (39 ft 4 in) above the surface of the river Wupper between Oberbarmen and Sonnborner Straße. The river is key here for this story, people.
Let's go back to July 21st, 1950, when the circus came to town... The Althoff Circus orchestrated a publicity stunt by putting an elephant by the name of Tuffi on the train at the Alter Markt station. Tuffi became upset shortly into the ride, crashed through the left side of the car and fell into the river Wupper below. I imagine because like most of us, Tuffi didn't care for public transit. The elephant, two journalists, and one passenger received minor injuries. Both the operator and the circus director were fined after the incident, which is getting off kind of lightly. Honestly, when I think 'elephant' I think 'suspended train system' - makes sense right? But I digress... To this day, the wall of a building at the location of the event (in-between the stations Alter Markt and Adlerbrücke) shows a painting of a jumping elephant. I imagine there are horrified children and clowns on the riverside with faces that look like Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'. Tuffi will be making a dramatic jump, and there might be, oh, I don't know, rockets shooting from her to emphasis the jump. One can hope.
It was in the quiet moments before departing (and I set of a smoke bomb in the parking lot) that I thought that I could maybe hear an elephant trumpeting. Maybe Tuffi, patron elephant saint of travelling circus folk and bored performers was there with me, asking if I fancied a ride in the tram. In my wisdom I declined. But on the other hand, the Smoke bomb did go off very nicely and sent billows of white smelly smoke pluming around the bus. So all in all it was a good day.
Now, we find ourselves in Sweden. Time to start searching out our Swiss metal Gods!
Little Miss Risk