der Legostein

I was a weird kid when I was younger. I nourished myself almost solely with coca-cola and cake frosting, I refused to wear jeans as I was convinced they were made of metal, at the age of 6 I made napalm, and for a good two years of my childhood, my mother had resigned herself to the idea of having an autistic son. She (tentatively) was later proven wrong. Despite my...erm...idiosyncrasies? one part of my childhood was very normal. I loved to play with Legos. I still have a giant box of them in my room and my various Lego spaceships completely with Lego crew are still docked at my Lego space station.

About three weeks ago, I went to visit my very good friend David in Ulm. The goal was that I would meet his family, throw paper airplanes from the highest church tower in the world, and generally make Ulm a little insecure. We did all that of course, but then David dropped a little surprise in my lap. It turns out that Legoland Deutschland is only a hop, skip, and a jump from Ulm. My tail began to wag at the first mention of Legoland, and I got this dopey grin that I couldn't get ride of when I found out that he and I were going to visit it.

The church tower in Ulm. One of my paper airplanes reached the Danube...another one reached the police station.

See, I've always wanted to visit Legoland. The original one is in Denmark, but it's just slightly to the East of the Middle of Nowhere, Denmark, so a trip there was infeasible, and I had all but given up on the dream. I knew there was a Legoland in Germany, but I had forgotten about that one since I'd been living in northern Germany.

Legoland was awesome. I probably would have gotten a very little bit more out of it had I been an actual child, but that would only have been because I could have ridden more rides. I was beside myself with enjoyment as it was though. There are a couple of roller coasters, but since the median age of Legloand patrons is somewhere between 7 and 11, the coasters aren't too scary. The first thing we did was get on a roller coaster, which also doubled as a haunted house type thing. We all got high-fives from the roller coaster operater as we passed by. My guess is that I wasn't the first conspicuously old person to ride the coaster. Afterwards we hit up another ride themed around “Ninjago, Masters of Spinjitzu.” I have no idea what spinjitzu is, but somehow it lends itself to a bucking carousel ride that resembles a tie fighter. The seats also had wings that you could steer. This gave you just enough rope to hang yourself, so to speak. If you tilted the wings just right, you could make your experience significantly more terrifying than your neighbors'. There was another ride that was some sort of robot arm that tossed you around like a rag doll, I cut in front of easy four 2^nd graders to get the best spot.

The park also has a movie theater, which was kinda lame. Go figure. The show factory was pretty cool to see, though. Ohh wait I just remembered something about that damned factory! Ok, so the tours are in groups and are all started with a short film about Legos. We waited in line, during this wait a child and I played around by jumping back and fourth with one another. Then the doors opened, and our comeradery dissolved as I basically palmed him and two other kids into the pavement to be the first one inside. The door man was handing out souvenir Lego bricks and I stood there expectantly awaiting my Lego brick. The man looked at me and said in a dismissive tone that only the children get the bricks. I thought about arguing but the last thing I wanted was to get thrown out of Legoland over a goddamned Lego brick, so I sighed, conspicuously loud, and went inside. Bullshit. Today's blog title means “Lego brick” by the way.

By far the coolest thing about the park was the miniature world. The imagineers have recreated a handful of cities around the globe in Lego form and the amount of detail is awesome.

This is the Lego version of the Castle Neuschwanstein. To get an idea of the size,  my friend David is standing in the background taking a picture and he is about 6'2". The plants are all real. I managed to corner a gardener in the park and she told me that there are only 20 gardeners who take care of the entire park.

t

This is a Lego version of Römerplatz in Frankfurt. It's not totally accurate, but Lego is an imperfect medium. Oh, and my (other) friend David, who is a Frankfurt tourguide, told me a story about a man in the Frankfurt city hall who would spy on important meetings, and on the real city hall in Frankfurt they have a small statue of him, which the Lego designers recreated!!!!

Berlin in Lego form. This is specifically the Berliner Dom and the TV Tower, which I captured in my own travels to Berlin.

The is the German Parliament. I haven't seen this technically, yet, but I will be seeing it next week. The short (Lego) woman in the snazzy jacket can be no one other than Angela Merkel (a fellow Ossi, I might add)

This little gem was found in the recreation of Schwabenland, I had to photograph it since both my aunt and David's mom are named Sonja.

I liked this mostly because I utterly hate pigeons. The woman's book says "Pigeon recipes"

Oh lord. Ok, so hooking is legal in Germany, and the city of Hamburg (recreated here) is famous for  the Reeperbahn, an area dedicated to quite literally hookers and blow. So the Lego imagineers recreated Hamburg, complete with hookers.

No, this isn't New Orleans. This is Venice. The ships in the model really do float and travel along the canals. David (the first one) noticed that the 'Italian' music playing in the background was utter gibberish.

I am no fan of Munich, but even I have to admit that this recreation of Allianz Arena is pretty baller. The whole thing is about 7 feet across, and glows at night. They had to design a special kind of brick that was translucent in oder to get the proper effect.