On the Train from Halle to Frankfurt

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't posted any pictures here. I'm never sure how they'll translate from my phone to the blog--as in, will they be too enormous in size--so I don't do it. I might try when we get home.

Busy day yesterday: took the train from Halle to Leipzig to Chemnitz. Avery's class had a field trip to the State Museum of Archaeology Chemnitz (SMAC) that I keep wanting to call "SLAM" for some reason. We had permission from his professor to tag along, and we tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.

We got to meet some of Avery's friends/classmates, including Lena (or Lena 2 or dark-haired Lena, as I now think of her) and the very talkative and deeply philosophical Oskar (not entirely sure of the spelling) who bears more than a passing resemblance to a young, 1969/1970 Elton John--not that this is a bad thing. (I have to say that German college students dress much more smartly than their American counterparts. Nice to see Doc Martens and retro '70s sneakers are popular in Germany).

[We just discovered that we were in the wrong car, as we were overrun by a huge group of loud students from Erfort who booked the whole car. It was our mistake. We accidentally sat in car 24, we were supposed to be in car 23. That's okay, those loud kids would've driven us crazy].

After the museum tour and presentations the students did, we wandered around the enormous Kosmos Festival in hot, dusty Chemnitz. There was music, dancing, vendors, food, high wire walkers over a large reservoir in the city, which itself was full of paddleboats. In short, it was crowded and crazy and sweaty.

Taking a break for now. Back later...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

President Obama

I don't even know how to begin, and I know whatever I say will end up sounding trite. What an amazing, historic, and emotional day. I was reminded of Martin Luther King's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech, the one he delivered in Memphis the day prior to his assassination. It's the King speech that has always stirred the most emotion in me, even more than the much more lauded "I Have a Dream" speech. Near the end, in the part that always makes me teary-eyed, King says: "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!" I always have believed that the "we" in "we, as a people" could apply as much to whites as blacks. Perhaps whites just didn't realize that they needed to make it to the promised land. Well...
Read more

1984 album in review: The Replacements--Let It Be

Image
Former Replacements guitarist Bob "Slim" Dunlap died on December 18 after many years of ill health. Though Slim didn't join the Replacements (aka the 'Mats) until 1987, this seems the perfect time to write about the band's 1984 album Let It Be , and thus continue with this little series on 1984 long players. Let's rewind to that magical year of 1986, the year I have rhapsodized about so often in this blog. I don't remember exactly how this happened, but sometime in autumn '86, Ron P.--an older guy who lived on my dorm floor--let me borrow his vinyl copy of Let It Be . I assume this has to do with the R.E.M. factor. Ron may have thought that Let It Be was similar enough to R.E.M. that I'd like it, and maybe it also had to do with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck being guest guitarist on the opening track, "I Will Dare." (All roads lead back to R.E.M.). Allow me to digress for a moment and say a retrospective "thank you" to all the peop...
Read more

1984 album in review: R.E.M.-- Reckoning

Image
In my latest sporadically published posts about 1984 albums, I tackle R.E.M.'s second album, Reckoning . This is yet another album I discovered after the fact. It was that hallowed autumn of 1986 that I have mentioned at least a few times in this blog. I had already heard "Fall on Me" that summer and quickly went out and bought a cassette of Lifes Rich Pageant at the Camelot Music in Saginaw's Fashion Square Mall. A month or so later, I arrived at Michigan State and quickly learned that, compared to several other kids, I was an R.E.M. newbie. I was "tripled" in my dorm room at MSU, which means I had two  other roommates. (We were assured by the university that as we settled into the school year, the "triple" would revert to a "double." Of course, I couldn't help but worry who would be the odd man out). Anyway, one of my roommates was a guy named Tim F. Tim was cool. Tim was the first to arrive and already had posters of the movie Era...
Read more