Amsterdam; Osnabrück, Germany
The middle one is Maren's father; I stayed on his (the Engelker) farm.
"Hallo, meine Schatz!"
Once I got to Amsterdam Centraal, I realized I had about 4 hours until my train to Osnabrueck, so I got to wander and do a few things I wasn’t able to do when Carley, Ooons & I were in Amsterdam.
I mean, I know that Venice is sinking (acqua alta), but what about Amsterdam? I mean, isn’t 27% of the Netherlands below sea level, with about 50% under one meter?
Haha: "God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands"
De Poezenboot (the CATBOAT!).
Click on the tiny Union Jack on the website for an English version.
Unbelievable. I was wandering down the Herengracht canal & saw this boat that appeared to be crawling with felines across the quay. When I got to the doorstep/dock I wasn’t really sure what to say, but found myself welcomed into this cat clinic/adoption center/sanctuary to sit in the middle of this boat among the 25-30 whiskered residents (and one whiskered, volunteer: Gordon).
WHAT
Yeah, ok.
With 4 hours to burn in Amsterdam, what’s the first thing I end up doing? Go to the Sex Museum! Not really work safe.
I think it’s pretty amusing that the Dutch have figured out how to pun with cum but haven’t realized out that “There are thing” is grammatically incorrect.
More buildings.
I cannot emphasize how nuts Dutch sounds & looks. For some reason (who can I blame) I thought that the Dutch spoke Frisian (which they do, but it’s a smaller number of Dutch), which is the closest living European language to English (except for arguably Scottish English: ”Come on!”.)
"No spot for your bicycle?"
Well then…
Find a space in this bike (parking) garage!
I feel like I’m being redundant.
My arrival to Hitzhausen!
A small farming village in Lower Saxony, Germany that is about a 25 minute drive outside of Osnabrück city center.
Oh yeah, and all the antlers are her dad’s, self-congratulatory hunting trophies (surely mounted on his own, also).
The tags I made for Maren’s birthday banquet/beer barn.
Beer barn!
I should’ve taken the photography of this more seriously, but I was too busy trying to speak and understand German for more than 8 straight hours. Drunk Germans groanin’, “Preeeetty laaaaydy, will you dance with meee?”
Making colored eggs with leaves & other flora wrapped around the egg, then covered with a nylon sock.
Maren’s mom & sister on our Easter stroll.
All of the farms in this area are built with red brick & timber framing (I think it is called Fachwerk), which makes them part of the historical preservation projects of the area & kind of dumb building regulations for what you can and cannot do to your house (for example, all the windows must be wooden so that the house is exactly how it’s always been, though the costs of upkeep are never fully reimbursed & the pains of replacing wooden windows every few decades makes that regulation, for example, seem illogical).
The houses may also be part of Deutsche Fachwerkstraße, or the road from Lower Saxony to the south, which links Germany’s medieval timber frame houses.
On Maren’s 30th birthday, her friends came over & made her put on a Cooperative Farm costume where she had to waddle around in ein Topf all day; clean a bunch of random doorknobs; find a virgin that would kiss her; and take any shot that anyone put into her hands. Seems like a pretty miserable 30th-birthday rite of passage (reserved only for unmarried women - doesn’t count if you’re engaged or in a long term relationship, and doesn’t apply to men).
The reason for her cooperative farm costume is her lifework & concentration in studying food business.
Previously, she spent about a year in Namibia working on a farm & a few months from now, she will be arriving in Uganda doing various food business-related things like teaching nutrition classes to Ugandan children. (She kinda rules!)
& the whole village wandering around with her for some hours (friends, family, neighbors) while she cleaned doorknobs.
The one on the far right is a journeyman carpenter (or one of this society: Die Fremde Zimmergessellen): it’s his three year apprenticeship as a traveling carpenter. Some guidelines:
- You have to wear that uniform for the entire three years (it’s part of the tradition).
- You cannot stay in one place for more than 3 months
- You cannot pay very much for travels (so you must hitch, for example)
- You cannot return “home” and cannot even come within 50 km of your birthplace the entirity of your apprenticeship.
This is for my mom, who hasn’t kitsched-out her garden enough yet.
Mom, have you ever thought about building a well (why)? A bridge over your waterfall (you might question the necessity, but the aesthetics?!)?
Swantje, Nicole, Thomas, Manja.
Easter Bonfire!!!!
Every year, everyone collects organic/unusuable/dead things from their gardens or farms & the local fire station supervises a HUGE bonfire with sausage stands & beer to boot.
This ceremony is also supposed to symbolize the end of winter (the end of winter!!!!).
tinyGermans get their own babybonfire on.
Manja is spinning fire behind the dwindling bonfire.
A monument for the Germans from this village that died in WWI (hidden up in the hills).
We went to this museum that is mostly focused on the archaeological finds from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Varus-Schlacht) where the Germans defeated the Romans.
The battle lasted from September 9th (My B day!) to the 11th in 9 A.D.
This established the Rhine as the boundary of the Roman Empire for the next several hundred years.
Here’s a pretty amusing picture of Germans dressed up as Romans in 1911 (and I will feel like such an asshole if they're dressed up as 9th c A.D. Germans).
Osnabrueck.
Look out, it's some urban gardening!
Universität Osnabrück
Boxturm
This is an old witch-burning tower in Osnabrueck.
I read this book entitled Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body & Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici, which would most likely have had a lot more information about witch trials & executions in north Germany, but unfortunately I returned my copy to a friend months ago.
Felix-Nussbaum-Haus
This is reproduction of the original. I thought it was entitled “The Victory of Death” (the original of which is in BCN), but I can’t find a titled image online. His self-portraits (Selbstbildnis) are pretty wonderful/deranged/desperate. Here’s a better copy.
If you actually saw the sculpture, it’s of a tin-box man carrying another tin-box man over his head, but as a shadow it just looks like someone tiptoeing.
Speaking of tiptoeing, I never understood the expression that I thought was “tow the line”, but this whole time it has been: “Okay, that’s where I’m going to toe the line.” Unbelievable how much satisfaction dumb things like that give me.
Ohmygod: Albrecht Dürer’s anatomy lessons!
I have my favorite of Albrecht Dürer’s etchings as my journal cover. The lion of "St. Jerome in his Study" is entirely due to the imagination of Dürer. He had never seen a real lion in his life, so this is what he imagined one would look like.
One of my many resolutions for whenever I have the time (perhaps in the summer) is to read more about the history of calendars, because any time I learn something about a different kind of calendar or the incompatibility of existing calendars, it kind of blows my mind.
Hell yeah that looks stable enough!
Speaking of towing vs. toeing the line: you can do both with this tightrope!
A nice wood falsefront and then:
The real one in the city.
This chocolate company in Osnabrueck, Leysieffer, sells really wild, gourmet chocolate including chile (pepper) & jalapeño chocolate; lavender & rose chocolate; Darjeeling & Earl Gray tea chocolate; lots of others, I don’t know.
One of Manja’s red squirrels!!!
The area that these squirrels have to run around in is huge. The tubing goes all over the garden, they have a large, open barn area; several lofts in other shelters on the farm, plus crazy tubing up all sorts of trees.
CHOWTIME.
These sheep are crazy about feed pellets (made from some “sugar root”?).
German Ice Cream café.
WHAT.
I got “spaghetti ice cream”.
Time to be small-minded. I've spent the past several days reloading news pages, re-reading biographies and C.V.s of the students and profesors that were killed, and it really bothers me how much this has obsessed me, but not managed to destabilized me. It's astonishing to me what kinds of personalities were killed - all of the mini-biographies exude talent (or talent come to fruition), potentiality, capability, and in so many cases generosity. I don't have anything profound to say in response; I grew up knowing a handgun was sitting on my parent’s dresser from whenever my dad was home from work until when he left again in the morning. Now that my brother is grown up, he has an NRA membership & even if he doesn’t have a gun cabinet of some sort (I’m sure he does), he has easy access when he wants to go to a shooting range with friends. Since this shooting, I learned that 39% of households in the US own guns and a total of 200 million guns are in circulation in the US (2 for every 3 people!). I am really more surprised that this hasn’t happen before to this scale.
Really I’m too busy feeling rotten and guilty about several things, the most maddening of which is my relationship (ha!) with my Austrian roommate. Nothing kind of works its way under my skin as much as someone fully delegitimizing me: my opinions and experiences, my needs as someone sharing the apartment (and I’m the only one that’s been here for the whole year, so it’s like having someone come into your comfy-cozy nest and edging you out), my existence (and by “existence” I don’t mean a new-agey sense of my soul/being … I mean, the fact that I am in the room; I am answering questions he’s asking; I am speaking; I am not a ghost). He will even do something as brazen as survey the room for everyone’s opinion on a matter, and ask someone to my left, skip over me, then someone to my right. (And in the most recent instance of him doing this it was, “Do you think my friend is ugly?” His friend visiting from Austria was out on a smoking break.) The worst part about him disregarding me or ignoring me is that I know the only notion he has of me has to be a combination of my worst attributes, all the things I hate about myself. If being around someone makes you feel extremely awkward, the only things that stand out to you about them are the damaging things, and so I can only assume it’s the same the other way around. Basically this means that whenever I’m up making coffee or around the living room with a friend or roommate, he will be there to jog my memory about everything that sucks about me. I would like to think I am really compatible with everyone, hardly delightful or entertaining in comparison to a lot of others, but that I am easy to be around and a breeze to live with. I’ve had 14 roommates and until this one, there’s never been an issue (not that there is any issue here either? If I could attribute the way he behaves towards me to an argument or ill words or awkward exchange in the past, it’d make it a lot easier to manage, but it seems to me that it is just me and I honestly hate him for making me feel like this about myself). He will invite a bunch of people over for dinners, brunches, drinks, dessert and all of these people are actually better friends of mine than his, and even though it’s my apartment, it’s his dinner party, and disappointingly, everyone is just too uncomfortable to ask him why he does things like ask: “Isn’t there a law in Sweden where you can camp anywhere and go wherever you please?” to someone looking confused next to me and then I answer, “Oh yeah, Allemansrätten… Patrick, Allemansrätten…” and he will pretend I’m not speaking until they go, “Oh that’s right, Allemansrätten.” It’s really barefaced how aggressive he is acting, and not only do I not understand the origin of his hostility, but it just exposes how cowardly everyone else is (and how I am). I don’t really feel petty posting this, because it’s at its height and I am curious how you all would respond to this situation, if you would bother responding at all. My faint-hearted response at the start of every day is to try again to be pleasant to him, to ask him how his day was, to say hi, to extend some iota of friendliness, but it is always struck down with monosyllables and remiss. I think it’s actually the worst thing I could do because I loathe him so much; it feels pretty fuckin’ phony after I realize I have to fold day after day.
In some good goddamned news I am going to Uppsala, Stockholm and even (hopefully) Haparanda, Sweden at the beginning of June! I just spent the last hour on the phone with a relative, Fredrik, who is really enthusiastic about taking me out to see some tight archipelago (Alands hav?), introducing me to every relative he can think of, and flying me up to the top of the Gulf of Bothnia (near the Finland border and near the Arctic Circle, holy shit!) to see where my Grandma is from! Most of the reason I feel so rotten is how spoiledrotten I am in life, not that these trips are being funded by anyone but me and my bank account, but there’s no way I would be a fraction as enabled as I am without my parents (or without my parents’ meticulous attention/love/support) or even without all the friends & family that keep taking me in all over the world.
Oh no. It is kind of late and I am supposed to be finishing a paper I haven’t started for my most, most, most favorite professor on “Why did Joyce call his novel ‘Ulysses’?” I need to start learning how to write essays for me, because as it is, I am great at taking on labors of love when I treat it like I’m writing for a professor I cherish so much, or on an author I have utmost devotion for. Here’s to not being a stumbling idiot when I see him, knowing he’s carved out a big chunk of his life just for me (why?).
Kinda wanna be home.
(Dutch is an unbelievably amusing language)
Scheiße! Easter Bonfire!