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.

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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.

der Kleingarten

Today’s word means “small garden”, specifically the many small gardens that often make up community garden plots in Germany. But 24 year-old men aren’t really the typical demographic for gardeners, so in order to understand why I give a damn about small gardens you will need some biographical background on me.

When I graduated from Drake, withdrawal from school hit me hard. For the past 17 years, I had had some sort of class Monday through Friday and then all of a sudden nothing. Cold Turkey. It was a rough time, but I decided that maybe, as an adult, I should cultivate a hobby or two that didn’t involve school. Day drinking, I later decided, did not count as a hobby. I tooled around with computer programming, cycling, crochet, and lots of other stuff, but none of it was that fulfilling. I managed to hold out about 3 months before I caved in and enrolled myself in a class. I’ve always loved plants, and I decided that the Iowa Master Gardener Program with its 60-some hours of initial coursework would kill two birds with one stone. Namely, I could get back in a classroom and get rid of my shakes, and I could also cultivate an interesting new hobby.

In the master gardener classes, I looked…out of place. The average age of the other master gardeners is somewhere in the high 50’s, and the gender balance is heavily skewed in the feminine direction. Despite this initial awkwardness, I loved it there! Some very very interesting people are master gardeners. It ranged from jovial high school chemistry teachers to no-nonsense FBI field agents, and, though their personalities are varied, they are all welcoming and affable people. I got involved with the committee that built and maintains the gardens at the State Fairgrounds, and before our first meeting, I sort of expected it to basically be an old ladies’ tea circle. When I got to the restaurant, the other gardeners were already there, and the restaurant had run out of beer because of them. Needless to say they are a fun group of people. So, this is where my interest in gardening and consequently in the small gardens of Germany comes from.

OK, so down to business. These gardens I mentioned, they are everywhere. Since most German houses are built close to each other, there isn’t space for a yard. As near as I can tell, there isn’t a German word for “yard” meaning just a space of grass with a garden around a house. “Hof” is close but is more of a courtyard or farmyard. Consequently, many homeowners will lease a small garden space on the outskirts of the city and plant a garden there. They usually aren’t single gardens, but rather several hundred together. These garden clubs are beautiful, and the area around my dorm and work is filled with them.

Most people build a small house on the garden property to hold tools and whatnot, but some of the houses are more luxurious. In this case they function more like a small cabin or a ‘dacha’ (a Russian word that I learned recently and for some reason find really cool). The garden areas are very serene places and the people clearly put a lot of work into the gardens. Some people use them for vegetable growing, but mostly they are just for visual enjoyment.

I don’t know how popular this type of garden is in the rest of Europe, but the conditions that led to them in Germany aren’t unique to Germany, so my guess is that other places would have them too. If you know for sure about this, let me know. I’m curious.

A path through the garden near my job.

This gardener has a garden filled with several thousand tulips.

German "Ordnung" made real.

This is the path I walk to work everyday. It's gotten so much prettier since then.

Robben knüppeln

In Europe there is an EU-wide university exchange program called ERASMUS, which I will probably end up dedicating an entire blog post to later on. As an American I can't be part of Erasmus, but I've ended up falling in with the Erasmus students here. One of the nicest things about being a foreign student in Germany is that even the tiniest universities have groups of native students that organize programs, excursions, and parties for the Erasmus students. My first week here in Rostock, I stumbled onto the weekly Stammtisch from the LEI, the local Erasmus organization. A Stammtisch is technically a table in a bar that is reserved for the regular guests, called the Stammgäste, but in this sense it is just a weekly meeting point. At the Stammtisch I learned more about the programs that are put on for the Erasmus students, including one that went on about a week ago.

In Warnemünde there is a seal research station, and we just had an excursion to go see it. Today's word means “seal clubbing.” Not this kind of clubbing:

But rather, this kind:

Rest assured we performed neither the kind of clubbing with the baby seals. But I digress, calling this place a „research station” is sort of like saying that diet caffeine-free coke is coke. Like, it's technically correct, but it gives a false impression. The station is at the end of a breakwater in the yacht harbor, and I'm walking down the ever-narrowing peninsula expecting some sort of giant laboratory complex for seals, and yet I am not seeing anything of the kind. And instead of assuming that the “research center” isn't a giant laboratory, I naturally assume that there must be some sort of secret underwater tunnel that takes us to the lab or a ferry to get a hidden offshore research platform, and I have got myself all hyped up for some sort of Fortress of Solitude style lab. Then I notice that our group has stopped and is waiting at the gangplank of some normal looking ship. Crestfallen does not begin to describe my emotional state. Since I work in a lab, I sort of naïvely assume that all science looks like this, which is not the case.

The "research station" is basically a ship with a netted-in area around it where the 10 seals can play...bummer. But still, baby seals are on the agenda and that can easily make up for the “research station” being a tugboat. We meet our tour guide, and she looks just like an older version of a friend of mine from Tübingen. 

Our Führerin...can I say that?

The tour is in English, which I assume was really hard for some of the other students to understand. The tour guide told us lots of cool facts about seals, including a little gem that I thought was interesting. Apparently when the seals hold their breath, they don't fill their lungs with air?! Right, I was confused as hell. As I understand it, the little devils are some how able to dissolve more oxygen in their blood, which is good because if they held their breath like we do, they would get the bends as they surface. Also, seals have fingernails, which is just wild. One of the seals in the “research station” is nearly blind, but somehow this isn't a problem (crazy!) because his whiskers are a good enough replacement for eyes.

Basically I learned that seals are fucking crazy. The don't hold their breath with the lungs, blindness is “no problem”, they can identify individual humans, and they can sleep underwater. They are almost as freaky as octopi/octopodes/octopuses.

Because this story can't end normally, I also have to relate the story of my return trip from the “research station.” All along the peninsula there are enormous boulders and signs telling little kids (and presumably adults too) NOT to climb on the stones since they can be slippery. Since it hadn't rained, I silently thanked the signs for their concern about my well being and then began to jump from stone to stone, I made it probably 100 yards and then started to get cocky. Instead of jumping to a stone, calculating my next jump and then going further, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just run along the stones. That worked for about 10 more yards until I rolled my ankle.

(Mom, put down the phone, I'm fine! No need to call the FBI, this time) My ankle looked hilarious for about 2 days, not unlike the leg of a baby elephant. But since then it's gotten better, still a little swollen on the back outside side, but I'm babying it and whatnot.

So that's the latest and the greatest, readers. Until next time!

Straßenkunst

Ok Leute, I alluded to making this post earlier, and now I’m finally gonna do it. I’m finally gonna release my cache of street art photos that I’ve been hoarding like an Appalachian farmer hoards his beautiful harem of inbred daughters.

I had a year of art history in high school. I remember it being one of my more challenging classes, since in reality it had very little to do with art. The teacher herself consistently made fun of the course’s content, which was mostly human geography of Europe and naked paintings of virgins, by calling the class “AP Maps and Boobies.” Regardless, I worked like a dog for that class, and as a result it made me sort of hate high art. I mean, I could never achieve something as technically skillful as painting the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean I think it looks good. I’ve always been drawn to sort of lowbrow entertainment: Roller derbies, lewd stand-up comedy, the musical stylings of GirlTalk, and pulp science fiction. So, when I came to Europe and saw the amount of graffiti and sticker campaigns here, I was captivated and starting photographing it.

Graffiti along with these sticker campaigns are to me a mixture of political speech, egoism, vulgarity, art, and advertising. Graffiti can be simple or complex, boring or thought provoking, direct or metaphorical, etc. Anyways, enough of me rambling. I promised pictures and I’m going to deliver.

Berlin. Above "Take what you need!" The options are "Love, Hope,  Faith, Trust, Endurance, Courage, Understanding, Peace, Passion, Beauty, Freedom"

Frankfurt. This is the main character from a fairy tale, Struwwelpeter. Basically the kid misbehaves and is punished (hilariously) by the universe.

Hamburg. This one is part of a political message. I like that it doesn't explain itself well.  I mean the creator of this could have spend pages explaining precisely what she means, but instead I get to consider and find my own meaning.

Karlsruhe. Very often the graffiti is cynical and critical, but  I guess the point of art is to change society not reinforce it.

Krakow. Like I've said, Europeans love their bikes, and there are a ton that are just abandoned all over the place. This one got a knitted cover added to it.

Krakow. Given that Poland is so Catholic, I thought this was an interesting bit of art. My best guess is that the penis was added later...

Krakow. In addition to being cynical, the graffiti is more often than not political. My guess is the Cameron and "shock and awe" weren't randomly added.

Mainz. "Animals free you must" I'm not entirely sure what the Anti-Fa organisations even stand for. Apparently everything.

Neubrandenburg. "Skinheads against Nazis" To answer your question/confusion, there is/can be a difference. But really keeping track of the different subcultures from the 70's is a full time job. Skinheads, Mods, Punks, Antifascists, blah blah blah. It's a very interesting topic, but it's sort of like reading up on conspiracy theories: Interesting but really pointless.

Neubrandenburg...duh. Like I said, a lot of the stickers are simple advertisements. Certainly some group made them and they have a deeper meaning or motivation, but in end effect they are little more than advertisements.

Neubrandenburg. Again with the Antifascists. I really don't understand them, so if someone wants to explain what they are for/ against, other than the obvious, I'd be very appreciative. 

Neubrandenburg. Word.

Neubrandenburg. Haha. What can I say, I like the lowbrow stuff too. It used to say "exit"

Rostock. "It's our right to block Nazi marches.  Don't give an inch to the fascists. Neither in Dresden nor anywhere else." The translation was rough at best, it's more eloquent in German, trust me. Even though East Germany is supposedly more opposed to foreigners, I think they Germans make a bigger deal out of this problem than it really is. At the same time, I don't know how to separate German directness and racism. I mean the word "Neger" is still sort of accepted, and rap music is sold as "black music", which, by and large, it is, but still I find that racist and Germans don't bat an eye.

Rostock. "Choose a path" Another open ended one.

Rostock. Nothing very special about this one, this is just the name of the train station.

Rostock. "War is god's way of teaching Americans geography." I thought this was utter bullshit! Since most Americans still can't find Iraq on a map! This one was written in the picture above.

Rostock. "Just go fuck yourselves. For respect -- Against hatred and homophobia" This message was, of course, brought to you by the Green Party...duh

Rostock. A surprising amount of the graffiti is in English.

Berlin. "I'm from pussy, you Kreuzberg." Ok this one takes some explaining.  First of all, normally it would read with the words pussy and Kreuzberg switched around. Second, Kreuzberg is a part of Berlin. A really shitty part of Berlin. Like don't walk around in Kreuzberg alone or at all if you are a girl. Also, good luck finding an intact piece of glass there. So, the sticker is a play on how offensive/uneducated Kreuzberg is (because they said pussy), and also a joke about how hard Kreuzberg is.

Tübingen? This is from a while ago. Tübingen also had a graffit war between two teams to see who could tag the most with the most slogans. The teams were "Falafal" and "Currywurst". I think Falafal won, but they slogans would pop up out of nowhere.

Tübingen? Not much explaining to do here.

Bratislava. I laughed at this one for literally 5 minutes. In hindsight, it wasn't that funny, but I still like it.

Friederisiko!

I remember hearing someone say that god never closes a door without opening a window. I don't really believe in god, but if this quote is the case, 1) god must have an astronomical energy bill, and 2) god was on my side last week. Last week my plans to head to Erfurt for Easter totally blew up in my face. It was clearly through no fault of my own, but who's interested in placing blame? As fate (or a perpetually window-opening god) would have it, the day those plans fell through, my friend Caro invited me to spend the weekend with her and her boyfriend in Potsdam. Needless to say, I readily accepted.

Before heading to Potsdam, I knew precisely two things about the city. First, through a fairly simple mnemonic device I remembered that the last major post-WWII conference regarding the fate of Germany took place there. And second, from my several trips to Berlin, I remembered that a metropass including Berlin and Potsdam costs a full €2.30 more than a regular Berlin metropass. The €2.30 alone has been enough to prevent me from seeing Potsdam despite having been in Berlin at least 5 times.

I caught a train on Thursday afternoon and headed toward Potsdam to see Caro and her beau, his name is Joe (haha that rhymes!). The train station I got into was called Park Sanssouci, a name which I consistently mispronounced as Park Sarkozy, and it's right next to the Palace grounds in Potsdam. The Palace is great, but also overrun with tourists. The Palace, which doubles as a university lecture hall and of course student bar, is currently being renovated and spruced up because the man who built the castle, Friederich the Great, is about to celebrate the big 3-0-0. And Potsdam is going ape shit about this! The festival is called Friederisiko, a combination of his name and the German word for “Risk”. They're even building a new castle. Apparently the old one wasn't good enough. There is an art exhibition, and this whole shebang is slated to last 6 months.

My first night in Potsdam we went to see a Nirvana tribute show in Lindenpark, which is right next to where Inglorious Basterds was filmed, btw. The music was great and the atmosphere was really chill. I have to admit though, that I expected more of a Nirvana “show”. Those of you who know me know that I can't stand Courtney Love, and I fully stand behind the theory that that shell of a human killed Kurt Cobain. I had my fingers crossed that they would have paid some tired old hooker to impersonate Courtney Love and walk around the concert shouting obscenities at the crowd, spilling drinks, and that at the end she would reenact how she killed Kurt. But alas. After this we stumbled...erm walked classily to a campus bar in Potsdam, where we met two dudes from Cameroon. In typical German fashion a debate followed, where the Cameroonians, who by the way both live in Germany now, described the immigration problem in Germany. Let me repeat this: Two people from Cameroon, who immigrated to Germany, believe that immigrants are a threat to Germany....

Whatever.

The next day we set out to see the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain, in German). I didn't quite understand why were were doing this at first, and I should have asked for clarification earlier when I heard phrases like “...but the watchman is really lax” and “just an abandoned military installation”. Despite how it sounds, the place was baller! It's an old American radar station and listening post on the outskirts of Berlin. You have to climb through a chain link fence ringed with razor wire to get there. Though somehow there are mothers with children in strollers all over the place. Germans are a tough folk.

You Go Girl, indeed

This was our posse. The floor would occasionally just open up into 10 foot deep pits. This area was relatively safe.

The smallest of the four domes. You can climb inside and enjoy a great view of Berlin.

I'm not gonna share too many pictures because I'm saving up for a post later about graffiti and street art in Germany. After Teufelsberg we hit the town, and be damned if we didn't meet those two Cameroonians again!

Saturday we nursed our hangovers and checked out Potsdam. We found the villas where Stalin and Truman lived during that post-WWII conference, and we also found the Brandenburger Tor...the other one.

The Potsdam Brandenburger Tor, which is the one actually in Brandenburg.

The Berlin Brandenburger Tor, which is by and far more famous.

On Sunday, of course, we painted Easter eggs, like normal college students do on weekends, and then I hopped on a train back to Rostock, because that evening there was an exchange student party, but that is a story for another post...

Komm schon, Hansa!

Any post relating to the FC Hansa Rostock Soccer team has to begin with disappointment. And my disappointment was two-fold. First, the team lost 0-1. This was expected, but still disappointing. Second, there was no rioting, and that is more disappointing than the loss.

See, when I told people in Neubrandenburg that I was going to Rostock, invariably they would make a joke about the soccer team here. Usually it was how much they sucked. The team is currently ranked last in the Second Bundesliga, and if they keep on losing could be knocked into the fourth league, since they might not be able to handle the third league's fees. The other kind of jokes were about the rather violent soccer fans that Hansa Rostock is known for. I quizzed a German friend of mine, and she cautiously or jokingly recommended that I go to a game, but she also stressed that it should be a game against another East German team, since those tend to be more violent.

The FC Hansa fans in Rostock are...insane. And everywhere. Essentially in Rostock, anytime you see some sort of vandalism, you can safely assume a Hansa Rostock fan is behind it. Broken window in the train station, Hansa Rostock. ACAB graffiti on a building, Hansa Rostock. Overturned car in flames on the street...Ok it's not that bad, but still. Luckily, the fans are easily identifiable by their tattoos. One group of fans in particular, the Suptras are known for their violence against the fans of other teams. The fans are often punished for this by the owners or people in charge. For the last game Hansa Rostock had against Dresden, the teams were forbidden from selling tickets. It was a ghost game because the fans were too out of control the last time.

These are the Rostock fans at the game against Dresden in 2011.
© Suptras Rostock

So, when I found out that Hansa Rostock would be playing Erzgebirge Aue, a team from Sachsen, and that some exchange students were getting tickets, I was on that like broken glass on the streets of Rostock. I was banking on these crazy-ass fans to start some shit at the game. Truth be told, I wanted to riot, but to borrow a quote from Battlestar Galatica, I also like to “let the emotion of the crowd flow over me. Waves and waves of it. Like electric current.” It almost sounds soothing, and it is, but at the same time it's very exciting. Electrifying, I feel alive in situations like these. You can lose yourself in the crowd.

Sadly for me, the Suptras screwed themselves over. After a few incidences like the one pictured earlier, the stadium owners decided that maybe placing the violent, Molotov cocktail-hurling, xenophobic Hansa Rostock fans next to the other team's fans was a poor choice. So they closed off an entire section of the stadium to keep the two groups apart. The Suptras are not pleased to say the least, since this area, die Südtribune, was their (curb)stomping ground. Now they are crammed into a corner section with much less space, and of course many fewer people. So, unlike previous games, there were no fights, no fires, no smoke bombs, no attacks on the other fans. But there were still the customary helicopters circling the neighborhood all day like normal. It's good to know some things never change.

As far as the crowd feeling, I wasn't let down. The regular fans are still pretty vocal and there wasn't a dull moment. I had a very loud German guy behind me the whole time shouting commentary on the game. Little gems like “What the fuck are you doing?”, “Move your ass!”, and “No, you ape, we're the team in blue and white!” His girlfriend was just as loud; a perfect pair really.

During the opening chant.

Speaking of chants a whatnot, today's title means “Come on, Hansa!” There is a fan song related to this: the Komm Schon, Hansa fan song...to the tune of Barbie Girl for some reason.

The game itself was pretty boring. It always is when your team is losing. There was a red card pulled in the first 12 minutes against a Hansa Rostock player, Erzgebirge Aue faked more injuries than I thought possible for adults. But all in all, I would certainly go back for another game. The tickets were cheap, the mood is great, and eventually the Suptras will start something. Like I said, it's a goal of mine to be in a riot, and if my teachers taught me anything it's never let go of your dreams.

Yes, I did take pictures of more than the fans