oops

I am overhauling picasa, so the slideshows are all wacky now. I may fix them. But anyway you can still see all the photos, plus more after any posts on the picasa site, which is http://picasaweb.google.com/dtschoo

Neuschwanstein

Went to Mad Ludwig II's Castle Neuschwanstein today:

Dachau

I woke upe today to a bird seemingly trying to get into the window. Through the curtain, which was partially translucent in the early morning light, I could see its flapping fluttering wings and hear their thap thap thap against the pane. It was staying at the top border of the window as if trying to acheive some hard to reach perch. It was a small bird, its unnerving thap thap thap persevering for ten maybe fifteen minutes as I lay in bed working up the gumption to rise up to the day. I was reminded of how the Irish say that if a live bird is in your house after someone you know has passed, it means that the person's soul is free, though if a dead bird is found in your house, the person's soul is restless. Finally the bird gave up its futile struggle and I was safe to wake up fully without the haunting presence thap thap thapping against the window.

I went to Dachau today, about 20 minutes by train out of Munich. It was probably the most frigid day I have had on my travels thus far, about -5 centigrade, and I spent most of it walking around outside. Dachau was the first of Hitler's concentration camps and the only one to function for all twelve years during the war. The ground was so cold that even through my boots and two pairs of socks, one wool, my toes still started to go numb. Just a microscopic taste of standing for at the very minimum an hour for role call every morning, no matter the weather, just in your measly prison garb. There was a small creek flowing down the side of the barracks yards that you cross a bridge over to get to the crematoriums and gas chambers, running parallel to the long barbwire fence. Standing on the bridge and looking at the water recede into the distance, bare and brittle winter branches on either side of the creek sometimes leaning over into the water, a grey column of light at the horizon's end of this stark corridor. Three strands of barbwire hovered about a meter above the water in the near distance, a patch of vibrant green in the water in the foreground. This is the image that struck me most at Dachau. I do not know why, perhaps I saw it as a bleak but somehow also hopeful vision of the future. An ambiguous beauty to it, just on the border of a concentration camp.

It was difficult to really absorb any real concrete feeling from the camp memorial site with all the tourists taking picture of every little thing, not really seeing it with their eyes, just recording it as proof they have been there, seemingly. Even with headphones on to try to block them out, try and create my own little world (though I did discover the perfect concentration camp visiting mucic: Max Richter's Memoryhouse) did little good. I feel like with hallowed ground such as that and other sacred sites, where respect is due, it is best to experience it all by yourself. To get a real sense of solitude with the site, to establish a connection with what has happened there, without having to endure people, their flashes going off, navigating through their ranks, etc. It just felt a little like a weird spectacle of suffering with all of the hubbub going on. I know this is impossible, experiencing it by oneself at any rate, though. Anyway, I would feel pretty weird sneaking into a concentration camp at night to try to establish a more enriched connection.

A Rock and Roll Christmas

The Rolling Stones play Paint it Black from a recent tour (well, recent by their standards, like, in the past ten years)... they really have gone down hill, Mick Jagger sounds like some jerk off the street that has just walked in and started singing karaoke. Before that it was No Doubt before their superstar album, Tragic Kingdom when they fancied themselves a ska band with a song called OI! to the World back when Gwen Stefane wore those mid to late 90s super baggy pants with a wallet chain that reached her knee. I liter never seems like much like say in a plastic bottle or some such container designed to carry soda or milk.. Now a westside sign waves in the air to an unbeknownst to me until now pseudo boy group's song Cupid's Chokehold, you know that song that goes ´take a look at my girlfriend shes the only one I got not much of a girlfriend never seem to get a lot´... anyway, until that is you order a liter beer in one of those German style mugs that are a workout just to lift it to your thirsty maw... then a liter seems like a lot. A german man with curly greasy hair to his shoulders, glasses sliding down his slick nose, is singing along to, now Iron Maiden, while his date watches the screen in the mild amusement that doubles as mild impatience. Thinking about it I realize that I have been guilty of that look on more occasions than I care to count. I can't help but wonder if my friends have noticed and have seen it as patronizing and/or condescending. I find myself wishing for/fantasizing about being a spy in this place, pretending to write in this journal but actually sending highly confidential data to headquarters. In this fantasy world, I await my partner, a sensuous curvy Spanish woman named some shit like Emerelda to arrive with our next mission, our relationship strictly platonic despite an obvious high level of sexual tension between us. As I walk to the bathroom, of course scanning the available exits, I tag small surveillance devices to underneath tables. I do this everywhere I go, expanding the ever-growing eyes and ears of my prescient organization. These devices also, with a high frequency transmission destroy any biological evidence of my presence, fingerprints, hair folicles, dead skin cells, oils, pheromones after I leave when I press a button on my watch.

We choose the Hard Rock Cafe as a rendezvous point on Christmas, because obviously no self respecting criminal mastermind would set foot in such a pedestrian establishment, especially on a holy day as this, our lord and savior's birthday (in my spy world, the criminal masterminds are always in cahoots with the vatican, that penultimate of criminal mastermind organizations. I'm not being blasphemous, what better of a disguise than the Catholic church?).

Yes, I am in the Hard Rock Cafe in Munich on Christmas. I was dropped off a couple of hours ago, dropped off my pack at the empty dormroom and set out in search of life and love and laughs, and this is what I found. You would think that in Munich of all places, you would be able to find a regular bar to have a couple beers at, let alone a normal restaurant to eat at, but after a couple hours of searching, walking randomly around the city center, I decided to just settle on the Hard Rock Cafe. It also didn't help that virtually nothing is open here on Christmas day.

I am finding a wonderful absurdity to being at this establishment on Christmas. Instead of my family, I am spending xmas with Roger Waters's guitar, a portrait of Phil Collins staring extremely intently at me (does he have any other way he stares?), Lenny Kravitz's guitar... countless other rock stars' guitars, and a drumset that says 'Dope' above me... is that a band? Also a very generic looking Christmas tree by the door. I wonder why they didn't do a rock and roll themed Christmas tree. A place where when you descend the stairs to the bathrooms, all of the tiles are diagonal which adds to the affect the music creates by sounding like it is underwater. Whether this is purposeful or not, I cannot say. Where even some of the music that I love turns out had some of the worst music videos I have ever seen (the 80s and 90s really did butcher a great deal of artistic expression) and realize also that this decade, whatever it is called, is not looking much better. Where I realize that, as much as I don't want to be a music nazi, and want to be able to find something enjoyable either intellectually or viscerally, it doesn't matter which (though not ironically, it is a tired cliche to have ironic love for a music you cannot stand, its patronizing and obnoxious (which could be the most elitist thing of all)), I just cannot identify with a vast portion of music that is out there. A place where thoughts like, 'I wonder what Pink's target audience is...' cross my mind. Ah shit. I gotta get out of here. These two liters of beer are going straight to my holiday head.

Merry Christmas.

A Bavarian Christmas

My hosts are going Xmas shopping today and needing a little downtime I have elected to stay here citing my distaste for holiday crowds and my addiction to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

My hosts are a very sweet couple, Liz and Marcus. Liz is a professional guitarist and teaches guitar and yoga. Marcus is an elementary school teacher. They live next door to Liz's mother and her uncle and grandpa live down the street. They have two cats who, if outside, arrive every evening when it gets dark in Liz's mom's arms because she does not want them to get cold at night. Very cute. Liz is glad for the cats partially because they diffuse the attentions of her mother a little, and as I learn later that is a small part of the reason why they are having couchsurfers over this Christmas this year, to diffuse the stress/annoyance factor of Liz's fam being in such close proximity. Fine by me.

There are two other couchsurfers here, a young, about 23, married couple from New Jersey living in Geneva for the boy, Chris's, internship. The girl, Tory has the extremely annoying habit of saying "that's so amaaaaaaaaazing!" or "it's beeeaaauuuutiful!" in regards to everything she sees or tastes or is shown or otherwise presented with. This translates into her saying one of these phrases about every 20 to 30 seconds it seems like. Not only that but profusely thanking our hosts with about the same frequency. It is this limited vocabulary extreme over-politeness that at first made me feel bad for my seeming infrequency of thanks-yous and fake awe-struck impreessions of things like their fucking SNAILS. There was a quote in Infinite Jest that I can identify with: "...acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else." Seeing as my threshold for things like this, i have found, can be pretty high... sometimes, I do not think I will be fatigued enough in the 2 days I will be in contact with this person to accept her, so I am resigned to silently hating her, occasionally shooting psychic knives at the back of her head from my eyes when no one is looking. Though then I started feeling bad for hating (ok, not really hate, of course, just extreme annoyance, which everyone knows can feel like hatred) this girl for being so Freaking Nice!... and then started resenting her for making me feel bad (it is amazing the multitude of thoughts and emotions that can go through your head in just a couple of seconds of sitting on a couch shooting knivies from your eyes)... and then decided to just accept the fact (fatigue?...) that I really do not like most people, let us just say I have a very refined taste in those who I choose to associate with... though others would, I know call it questionable, it's all relative, and it is ok for me to not like someone for just being too nice. It doesn't make me a bad person. It brings to mind a quote from some speaker on an episode of This American Life, "...I find racism very intriguing, of all the reasons to hate people, why of all things choose skin color?"

Anyway, enough of that. We went to the longest castle in Europe, but was a little disapointed as the castle itself was not over a kilometer long, but all the courtyards and walls surrounding them. Bastards got the moniker on a technicality. We also went to a pilgrimage site which was unique in that it had paintings by hundreds of people who had allegedly received a miracle from making the pilgrimage. So all the walls were covered in art from the early 1900s to the present day.

On Christmas day I get a ride from Liz and Marcus to Munich where I will be staying in a couchsurfers dormroom while he is not there until Teagan arrives on the 30th.

Arrival in Munich

I have arrived inMunich, sitting in the only place where I can eat and have a beer that is not overcrowded with mad holiday shoppers. I am scheduled to meet, Liz, my Xmas couchsurfing host in two hours at a bookstore that looks like it could possibly be the most crowded store in the city. I am a little upset with myself for having forgotten to get a gift for my hosts while I was still in Paris, we were just so busy. Now I have to sally forth, slightly delirious from what turned out to be more of a 14 and a half hour bus ride with my huge pack knocking over shelf displays in one of these madly packed shops and buy some stupid box of chocolates or something.

There was no passport check anywhere on the bus journey. It is a strange sleep you fall into on a long busride like that. Hard to describe. Not sleep, sort of like closing your eyes for a long time, but not being conscious. I had no dreams, never a deep sleep, too uncomfortable for that, but not even that half sleep where you have those hybrid daydream/fulldreams. It is not a limbo, more of a no-sleep. Just darkness and the slight humming and revving sounds of the bus in the nether regions of your brain.

Departing Paris...

I am at the bus station in Paris about to depart for Munich. A 12 hour bus ride. 12 hours. 10pm to 1045am. More like 13 hours. I am nervous about crossing the border even though I am a day within my 90 day limit.

The air here smells fetid, like a long unmaintained subway tunnel even though there are ducts of various shapes and sizes snaking their way all around the ceiling, which is painted a brilliant blue and looks like styrofoam. A young woman paces slowly and juggles talking on her phone and listening to music on her phone as if she is interacting with the device as opposed to what it transmits, she has that semi-concentrating look on her face where she stares in the middle distance intently. Occasionally pigeons fly around under the ceiling. I love it when pigeons make it indoors, like a little fuck you to mankind, you cannot keep nature out, as hard as you try. Though these busstations can hardly be called indoors, even though enclosed. Sort of a middle space, neither one nor the other. A bus maneuvers a nearly impossible route between two concrete pylons. My bus. I am going to Germany for Christmas, my first Christmas away from home, from my family. No mom, no dad, no sister. The bus says Deutschland-Paris and with its mirrors looks like a giant bug. It is my bus. It is gonna eat me up. Eat me up, maybe check my passport for some tense seconds, and spit me out in Munich. Goodbye Paris, France.