20.May.2005

Got up nice and early today to go to work. My only shift this month, since they called me during my vacation to tell me that they had cancelled my other one.

I had no problems getting up, though. The shift was also shortened to four hours, by the way (from five) so by noon I would be done already! I was in the basement again. This time though, it was simply because I didn’t understand the guy quick enough when he was asking for volunteers to work the front door outside. That would have been nice. Oh well. The Frau wasn’t there today and by 12:30 I was done and picking up lunch for my way home.

I managed to sleep a tiny bit in the afternoon, but by 5:00 I was on my way out again, ready to experience “Culture Night” till 2am in the museums and galleries of Speyer! It was me and Chris again, mostly because we’re the only ones nerdy enough to want to spend the whole night in museums. We had dinner first, at his favorite Italian place in Speyer. (As if I had not had enough Italian food lately!). But it was actually really really good, huge servings, and by the time we actually found it I was good and hungry ;)

The first actual museum we went to was the technical museum. This place was huge! The cooles thing about this place is that they have a bunch of huge airplanes out in the yard, up on 30 foot stilts, with staircases thaty ou could climb go get up into them. They were sitting up there, too, at different angles so when you walked around inside, it just felt crazy. You could even get into the cargo bays and out onto the wings. And as if we didn’t feel enough like little kids playing around up there, on a bunch of the planes there were slides coming out of the exit doors that you could slide down right back to the ground!





Okay everobody, just pretend like you're "cargo"...




May I present the man with rubber ankles...


And his beautiful assistant


There were lots of really great old cars and boats and vehicles like tractors and firetrucks in there too, along with an Imax theatre. My favorite of all, though, had to have been the old German submarine. For some reason I have just seen a lot of German or Russian war submarine movies lately, like “Das Boot” or “K19” so it was really cool for me to actally climb down into one. The inside of it was so incredibly tiny – mostly to make room for giant torpedoes. But yeah, the beds, the toilets, the instruments and everything in there was exactly like the movies. It was awesome!



"Torpedo tube"


Oh yeah - and this is the gunner's chair under the cockpit of an old Russian cargo plane. Can anyone say Millenium Falcon?


Our next stop was the historical museum. It was kind of boring in compaison, but they did have the world’s oldest bottle of liquid wine. It looked so nasty. Also a timeline of how the graves of a bunch of old German kings and queens were unearthed and restored in the early 1900s in the Speyer Cathedaral. Yumm.

Oh yeah - I guess Chris was enthralled a little mor by the historical museum than I was. He had found this helmet and shield in the museum's kids section and decided to wear it through the entire place. So embarassing.

... just kidding.

And since it was next door and we were really wanting to rest our feet at this point, we stopped in the cathedral itself for a while. There was a choir singing in there tonight, though. And well I guess the choir was allright, but what was simply incredible was, to hear the acousitcs in that place. I really can’t describe how enormous this cathedral is, but it is all made of stone and glass, and the sound lasted for literally 15 seconds after the voices would stop. Sure beats the stairwell at Miller!

Choir was done, back to it. Next stop, the Jewish baths. Now, neither of us really knew why Jews needed their own baths… because nobody wanted them to bathe in the river with everybody else, maybe? Well, you’re supposed to learn stuff when you go to museums, right? Right. Well, the whole exhibit was outdoor, actually, we first walked through the ruins of a really old synagogue, we thought maybe some baths had been in there?? Nope. Out beside the synagogue was a little staircase made of stone with a rounded stone roof over it, so we went down… and down… and down… At the bottom of three levels the stairs wound over to the side and ther was this opening in the wall where you could look down into this deep pool of water. It turns out the Jews constructed these underground pools for ritual cleansing purposes. Requirements of the Torah were that they needed absolutely fresh water, i.e. pure rainwater or groundwater for cleansing, and so in many places in Europe they had built these amazing undergound caverns for that purpose.

But Rabbi, I don't WANT a bath!


Next stop, considering that it was already 11:30 – coffee. We got in just before they closed, too! After a bit of a rest out there (it was a beautiful evening!) we headed off to the contemporary art gallery. Like usual with contemporary art, about ¾ of it was junk, but the stuff that was good was really really good. My favorite was a bronze sculpture called “Icarus IV” of perfect arms and legs attatched to a melted/destroyed “body’. And then there were the baguette photos… I do not believe I have the litereary means to describe these. They involved grass, shopping carts, light, lots and lots of baguettes and topless people. I will have to leave it at that.


Now, to find a livingroom to put it in...

By this time it was nearing the end of the Culture Night. We had set out to see one last gallery but couldn’t exactly find it in the city, so at 2am sharp we were on our way back to the train station. Only… to find out that there wasn’t another train to Mannhein until 4:30. Wooops. I guess that’s one thing we had forgotten to check! On Culture Night in Mannheim the transit was running on special schedules. We had no problems getting around. But inter-city transit. That’s another story.

There was nothing left to do but wait. So we waited! It had started to rain a little too, but we were safe under the train station overhang. We played hackeysack a bit, played with the luggage racks a bit, sat around a bit, talk to some drunk German teenagers a bit, and before we knew it we were on our way back to… Ludwigshafen.

This time I'm not kidding.


Yeah that particular train did not go to Mannheim. But we were a lot closer now. And at this point the sun was up already so we were feeling pretty awake again ;) We ended up waiting another half an hour at the Ludwigshafen station for a train to Mannheim. When we finally got to the Mannheim station we immediately went and got breakfast. It’s not like another half hour awake is going to kill me now ;) When I finally walked in the door at 6:30am, with the sun bright and shining, Hanna was slightly surprised. Oh, the things I do for culture.