Frühling (Spring)

It's become very beautiful in Bonn and I took the opportunity today to go out and enjoy the weather. I made a trip to the Botanical Gardens to see the flowers, while they last, and take some photographs. I was starving by the end, so I bought a small mandarin orange and coconut cake on the way back. It was fantastic. The ladies selling it apologized to me that it had been baked before noon and therefore wasn't AS fresh as possible. If they only knew I come from America and would probably have just bought week-old grocery store Entenmann's donuts if I were home.
Anyhow, here are the pictures. Also included are a few from my neighborhood. It's really pretty perfect here -- though I do miss springtime in New York and Connecticut.

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Tree just outside my window


Flower boxes on the first floor of my building


Someone's little Easter shrub


Another flowering tree in my neighborhood


Clemensruhe(building) and some of the gardens


An odd statue on the grounds


Tulips and other flowers

Holy Thursday was lovely for me. As I mentioned, I went to hear the Johannes-Passion performed at the Beethoven Halle, conducted by the world-famous Raymond Leppard. Anyone who ever has the chance to hear Bach, played live, should take up on it. As wonderful as it is to listen to recorded music at home, there isn't anything that really compares with the energy of a live performance. There is a hypnotic sort of communion that can take place between the singers, orchestra and the audience. If you're lucky, for a short while, you can forget everything in the world but the sound.
Here are two pictures from the end of the concert, during applause and curtain calls, where the lead singers receive their flowers. (Also, a cultural tidbit: Germans clap for at least twenty minutes straight after the performance, through several curtain calls. Applauding your performers becomes a performance in itself. You can sneak out early, but somehow it just feels wrong.)








And as a bonus, Claudia. This is Claudia hard at work correcting an essay of mine. To chop through so thick a forest of errors requires nothing less than Zen-like concentration.

Mondaufgang am Meer (Moonrise Over the Sea)

By Caspar David Friedrich, 1882.

More people, fewer places, a couple of signs.

Not much new happening except I finally sucked it up and decided to go to Berlin with the rest of the junior-year crowd (from June 7 to June 12.) Let's face facts; I'm so lazy I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise. If someone's willing to haul me across Germany at little to no expense, I might as well submit. I'm anticipating the trip to be 70% irritating/stressful, but I'm hoping this crochety attitude is only due to lingering pessimism from the Marksburg excursion.
On another note, below are some older and newer photos. En-joy.

Hunger-induced dementia obviously responsible for this ill-considered foray into self-documentary. (And yes, I did take this in my bathroom. I'm also aware that I look like an extra from someone's high school production of 'Oklahoma!'.)


Some friends of mine, He-Young and Ya-Ling, at café Pathos on our last day of orientation. Just look at 'em. And you thought kittens were cute.


Same café. Yu (the boy) and Ying-Chu. Yu and I still have class together. Ying-Chu has gone elsewhere; she is missed.


This is one of two anti-Bush/Cheney signs I came across in the Münsterplatz (Bonn's main square.) "Bush in die Gummizelle" means "Bush in a padded room" and "Cheney ins Gefängnis" means "Cheney in prison" (the bars probably gave that away.) It's interesting to see that people in a small city in western Germany are so engaged with American politics.


The second sign. "Stürzt Cheney bevor erden Iran nuklear bombardiert" means, essentially, "Overthrow Cheney before he nukes Iran."

FOUND magazine

"Dear God, help my brother from monsters."

This is an item from Found Magazine, a magazine devoted to displaying little notes and pictures that people have lost and which other people have found. The finds tend to be strange, primitive, poignant, and funny. It's a unique idea. The creator of Found also has an entire book devoted to a cache of photographs of people from an obscure Indiana town.
"La Porte, Indiana" can be bought here.

I haven't updated in a while because there hasn't been much worth reporting. I started my new class, called Intensivkurs C (Intensive Course C), and I'm really enjoying it. My teacher, Claudia, is as sweet as Jutta could be off-putting; which is to say, she's incredibly sweet. Claudia reminds me of some sort of benevolent forest creature from some unnamed children's book. Maybe with a hint of Mary Poppins. I'll get a picture of her sometime next week. You'll see what I mean.
Anyway, I'm mostly writing today because I bought a ticket to hear Bach's Johannes Passion performed live, here in Bonn, next Thursday (the reason, also, why Johann's dear image is included in this posting.) I'm attending this performance in the hall where I recently listened to a concert of Sibelius and Shostakovich. This will be my first time ever hearing Bach performed by a live orchestra and live singers; to this point I've just collected the music on CDs. Next Thursday night should be nothing short of miraculous.

More Dürer.

Albrecht Duerer

I bought a small Taschen book today at Bouvier, another to add to the several I've collected these last few years. This time it was a group of sketches and watercolors by Albrecht Dürer, an artist probably best known for his spectacular woodcuts. I wanted to share some images from my own copy, but the scans keep coming out with odd horizontal bands. Maybe I can figure out later how to tweak that to make them look better. For now, I have the cover picture (which I scanned successfully) and some images I snagged from the web (also all in the book.) The watercolors are brilliant -- they're five-hundred years old and they still feel strangely modern.
If you're interested --
A Dürer bio with some more images

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Aachen

This past Wednesday (3/22), I traveled with the other international students to Aachen, another old town in the far west of Germany (about an hour and a half away from Bonn.) I had a pretty good time, certainly better than I had (overall) in Marksburg. Here are some photos of the Aachener Dom (Charlemagne's cathedral) and Aachen in general. It's a beautiful cathedral in a beautiful little city. I'll add a few historical tidbits (if I can remember them) along with the photos, but more extensive info can be found here.

Note: I have figured out how to bring up the quality of the photos slightly -- some things have been re-loaded, the cartoons as well as portions of the Marksburg set.


The first photo I took of part of the church -- quite an imposing structure:


A small model of the church:


Bronze doors leading into the cathedral. They aren't opened anymore, but there is a lot of interesting history attached to them. For one, the Devil's thumb is meant to be stuck in the mouth of the lion on your right. I felt around extensively, but no luck:


Sven, my Führer ('Führer' is the word used by Germans for 'tourguide'):


This sculpture of a bear/wolf-like creature is located just inside the church. It used to be a fountain, evidenced by the hole in the chest. This came from Rome and it is older than the church itself, which is dated as having been started in 786:


Inside the cathedral. This is an image of the ceiling with its mosaic of Christ as judge of mankind. Stunning, important to experience in person:


A chandelier commissioned by some rich patron of Charlemagne. More interesting history that I have trouble relating properly. I do recall that it is meant to be a representation of the new Jerusalem, the one to be founded after the coming of Christ -- hence the structure and gilding. There must be a book someone can buy on all this (and it would be a worthwhile purchase.):


These pillars are quite a bit older than the church itself; I think they date back to the third or fourth century. They were brought from Rome to Aachen:


The windows of the Gothic Choir; the tallest windows of any cathedral in Europe. The glass in these windows, sorry to say, is relatively new. The glass has been replaced, in total, three times - the last time after the windows were destroyed either by a hail storm or allied bombings in WWII. I can't remember which came first:

It's said that Charlemagne's bones are kept in this gilded box. A complete skeleton isn't actually contained within; only 94 bones of someone who might have been Charlemagne are present. The missing bones were snagged by other kings who were crowned in this place; I guess they took them as souvenirs, hoping to siphon off for themselves some of the greatness of Charlemagne. One hopes they didn't have any dogs:


The throne of Charlemagne, assembled from bits of what used to be the floor of a building in Jerusalem. 'They' believe this is quite authentic; this particular kind of marble is only found in what used to be Rome's eastern provinces, and may even date back to the time of Christ. On the side of the throne not shown here, you can faintly see a traditional Roman game (something like tic-tac-toe, probably played by soldiers) scratched into one of the slabs:


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A square in Aachen:


And a street:


An odd sculpture with little bronze puppets. I loved this:


A brass band playing outside the cathedral. I could swear these same people showed up outside last night's Sibelius/Shostakovich concert (a blurry picture or two from that later):


A nice little dog I passed on my way back to the bus:


Another set of sculptures:

AG was fairly nice today, though Osterhus doesn't look as spicy to me as she did in the beginning. I'm thinking of asking her to kick it up a notch; I need something to keep me alert when my afternoon nap-urge starts to settle in.
As for class itself, I learned that Wilhelm Busch was great.
A short bio can be found here: Wilhelm Busch
I've also joyfully rediscovered Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter.
A sample from the collection: The Story of Fidgety Philip

Tomorrow afternoon I'm spending a few hours in Aachen, another historical city (larger than Marksburg, I think). I hope to come back with decent photographs but I make no promises. It's clear to me my second self, my elderly self, is very much encouraged by fieldtrips. Sometimes I'm unable to occupy myself with anything but complaints about the weather, how these damned kids have no respect, and how my dentures only really feel right when I soak them in Efferdent Plus.

Last for now, a quick plug for the old Milos Forman film Amadeus. If you haven't seen it, you must see it. Peter Shaffer's writing shines as brilliantly here as it does on any stage, F. Murray Abraham gives the best onscreen performance of the '80s, and Mozart's music is so interwoven with the film that Shaffer himself called it a character all its own.