Therma Baths

We were relaxing in the pool, allowing ourselves to drift on our backs in the salt water, when the other Laura, tall Laura, announced in a bored voice, "Okay let's go get naked." It was a reasonable suggestion, and we all nodded our heads and breast-stroked to the stairs. I felt ridiculously lazy, spritzed with sun potion, anesthetized in what felt like warm jello, the red kind they congeal with fruit on top of Erdbeerkuchen. I was a strawberry or a raspberry and my job was to congeal in this jello. But the other girls were egging up to the poolside . It was time to shed this bikini.

We stripped and went into the sauna. There were to be no secrets after this. The trust begat generosity and I could only think the other girls were pretty, each womanly, a salute to our origin. The female heritage of birthing babies is codified in the present moment in every female body. Practically everyone else was over 50 or 60. We sat in the sauna on our towels, four of us, along with 2 other women in their fifties, until a man came in with a pail and wooden ladle. He was wearing cotton T-shirts and shorts. Somewhat sheepishly he looked around the room and startled we sat stone still. Apparently the women-only sauna had male attendants. Soon he was ladling orange-scented water onto the hot coals with the gusto of all seven dwarfs combined and I was feeling my nose dry up and turn to stone. I had to breathe through my mouth. My face was 'sweating' condensation. I felt like Storm from X-men gathering humidity and heat but actually becoming a cloud. Or else I felt like a piece of equipment - an airplane or a space shuttle model, withstanding scalding temperatures in the strenuous elements test-run. Yep. She's gid. Face didn't peel off like we thought it would. Supposedly, this treatment was helping my pores. I was too busy trying to ward off a nose bleed by not breathing to think about how my pores must be doing. I bet they were having a grand old time while I tried to suck oxygen through the palm of my hands. The nudity was the least of my problems.

After testing the naked pool ("Girls! Lift one leg up in the water!"), we studied the sauna bath therapy timetable for the next treatment session. The "honig" session was beginning right shortly - the claimed sauna already contained half a dozen people sitting there uniformly like a cupboard of dolls. When the spa leader came in (the same campy guy from before) and we somehow introduced ourselves as Canadians, a few people took kindly to us and would say very basic things like "Now... we go .. outside." or, "you leave your... handkerchief here then... go out and get honey." For some reason I was not expecting real honey. But what is the logical next step after another excruciating orange water steam cook with what smelled liike rubbing alcohol? I followed the rest outside and put out my hands as if I was dying for this wad of honey. I don"t like the smell of honey. But maybe my pores do. And so I had no choice but to rub this honey onto my naked body and hope that I wouldn't later be eaten by a bear. We were next to the Grimm Brother's forest. While I was rubbing this honey into my breasts I found it difficult to remain serious. Think about the pores... It seemed overly systematic. I looked around and saw only a crowd of sombre faces.

Overall, though, being naked was liberating.

Documenta

Last weekend was the beginning of Documenta 12, a world-renowned art show that takes place every 5 years in Kassel. Saturday I got out of the house finally after being sick all week. It was a perfectly warm and sunny day and downtown was a rattenkonig (wink Dave) of tourists, shoppers, and art freaks. Also, freak show itinerants whom you weren't sure were a sanctioned part of the show. A bearded man with dreads sauntered around the empty Mohl fields with an Israel flag, budging his way through the crowd gathered before the Chinese Poster Men. The Chinese Poster Men were giving instructions to the crowd on multicoloured posters. Things like: Chinese + German = smart kids! translated into 3 languages. One artist at Documenta, a Mr. Weiwei, is flying in 1001 Chinese people to the art show as his project. Today I ran into an artist from London who told me that he thinks Weiwei is playing on people's fears here of China taking over the world. When I told my host mom she twisted up her face (like she often does when I speak German) and said she doubted that people here were afraid of Chinese. Turkish people maybe. Iraqis, yeah. But Chinese? Chinese FOOD you mean? There are hardly any Chinese in Germany! So perhaps Weiwei's big idea will not have the same effect in Germany as it would in Canada or the U.S. On the other hand, it's probably one of the best projects since it gets people talking. What gives with all the Chinese on the trams?

Thai healing massage

http://www.thaihealingmassage.com/thaimassage/index.html
This photo could be violent: What would a thai massage look like on fast forward?

As the young woman crawled around my body on the mattress it was so quiet and peaceful and sublime that I half expected her to be holding a frying pan or buddha bust above my head. It was too quiet and inconspicuous; these girls were too unassuming. My thai masseuse was about half my size - it was like being tended to by an newt. I could hear her breathing as she leaned on every muscle and bent each joint sideways. I was completely disarmed -- she could have just laid on me. It was sort of like being put into arrest in slow motion -- ''observe how she brings the patient's arms behind her back and pulls her upright.''... like a corpse come alive from a coffin. Laying, eyes closed and WHOP! hello lantern screen. It was like a dance routine, gymnastics in space. There we could have been in the galley of a spacecraft MinJi and Laura cracking one another's backs before naptime. The sparkling waterplate would have sailed over to me like a streetcar, like her hands over my hamstrings and we would have smiled to our loved ones back home: our spines were enlarging out here.

Berlin in May

Journeying from one place to the next was a lot like being in an Opera and waiting for the Prima Donna to finish the 7th movement of her neverending song. The lover is leaving, the tram is leaving, but I can't figure out this map. The map is a blackhole, as are most streets. Occasionally, this meadering produces collateral discoveries: we found a 150-year-old pawn shop built underneath the S-bahn tracks. Every ten minutes a train's momentum would shake the tea cups and urns and mooseheads that were attached to wooden walls and bookcases. No bacon presses there (I won't relent). I figure that's okay since train grit had free range in the outside yard where kitchen appliances were stored (next to antique stroller-buggies and black busts of sober mustached men)

On the way to Berlin, I took the I.C.E (Inter-City Express) train with eight other students since the bus was full. We were entertained on the train by some alcoholics which I later realized were not alcoholics but GERMANS! The bastids! Germans are efficient at doing a lot of things including getting drunk. They don't mess around. They get drunk with the same concentration and efficiency as parting their hair. Eins; zwei; drei... so many gates to be passed and they'll do it speedily, with the same thrust of the 230 km/h train we're sitting on. Everyone drinks together. I watched these people in their 40s and 50s with their bottle that was covered in crinkly tin foil like the jagged finish of a space arm. Some of them drank out of film canisters, others out of doll-sized mugs. With the same rigour they had to finish the bottle. The 50-year-old with jeans and hair like dried algae, doled out again. His wife, blond, round, the type who wears one piece of every kind of jewelry, young-looking, almost like his daughter, intermittently went into a concentrated daze. After each shot she stuffed the same kleenex into her tiny cup and looked around. Her eyes wandered like a stunned fish, but she had a hard mouth and her cheeks were flush with energy. Their voices built like heavy clouds: Ich bin so weg! said one man. They got sloppy, and confused when they checked their surroundings. But soon they were giggling as though they'd hit an electric fence and there was some current pushing out tears and pulling the jaw wide. It's not the stage of drunkeness that would stop them, only the quantity of booze left and our arrival at the crepe-scented Hauptbahnhof in Berlin.

I left a lot of touristy things until I go back in July with my parents. My timetable was thus a little weird. Also, every place we chose seemed to be falsely advertized. Andrea and I made a list of things we really wanted to do and we came up with was this:

World War II Bunker (actually, a haunted house with mechanical manequins and sound effects)
Checkpoint Charlie (actually, a tourist trap!)
The Sea Dome (Andrea really wanted to do this and she made me read every Did You Know sign. My only retribution was seeing sting ray eggsacks suspended like headless bats from a wire.)
Gay and Lesbian Museum (pretty much what it said: a history in photos)

At the sea dome we went into a circular elevator that was surrounded by a fish tank. It was a novelty that wore off pretty much as soon as we stepped on. Why? Because we were stepping, and not being pushed in wheelchairs. We had not sat down in approximately six hours. The five-minute climb to the apex of the office building was a great anticlimax. Looking out the window was like staring at a crappy double-exposed photograph of gold fish and hotel/office windows. Andrea and I walked off the elevator as though we had just had foot surgery to attach raptor claws (a new fad?). We hobbled as if on hot-coal through the terrasse coffee drinkers to a cafe. There I sat with a cold chai and a packet of honey, eating honey directly out of the packet as if it were some sort of balm. I was in need of many massages.

The club that night made up for a lot. We had planned on going to the grand re-opening of a techno club called 'Tresor' located inside an old power plant; unfortunately, half the clubbing population had the same idea. The line-up was more of a mob, and it was impossible to judge whether people were budding in line. I was dressed up in a Lame belly shirt that I wore backwards. I also had purple and black hairspray keeping my ratty hair in place and two facepainted triangles on my cheeks. I was a raver. There are advantages to looking crazy. Strangers are intimidated by your gutsiness and don't harass you. If they do you can feign craziness, or Englishness, and turn a philosophical talk with a panhandler into an Austin Powers moment: I don't know you; you’re not German; but you're alright baby! Party on!

While we were debating what to do since it was clear we would be waiting hours to get in, I emptied out my wallet of small change and dumped the money by a lamppost. I left to get a beer and a bottle-collecting girl with red dreads found my stash of coins. The people I was with reported that she was very excited. Maybe that was my fateful mission - to leave change by a lamppost dressed in pocketless clothes so that the person who found the money would use it in order to prevent the end of civilization. Sometimes you hope life is like the movie Crash.
We left that line-up and walked down the street to a subway entrance. During the day no one would notice the graffiti and poster-covered metal door that was the entrance to a different club. Inside the club was devised like a heart: atriums and ventricles and arteries made it feel like a never-ending bunker; the doors batted open and shut between rooms like valves. Each room (minus the buffer halls) pumped a different style of music. If you walked far enough you found a door to a semi-covered patio with impeccable angular couches and cushions. Everything was clean, and everyone was civilized, talking quietly as though sharing stories at a slumber party. A few half-rooms later, you found a blue-glowing swimming pool with a long mattressed bench running along one side, and a statue of Buddha at the far end. I sat here for a long time staring at the sky and feeling as though I was high up, on top of a skyscraper, and imagining this was the private party of someone I knew. Heaven knows the poolside whiskey tasted good.

the key to my heart

Saturday we bussed three hours to Wolfsburg, home of Volkswagen, to watch Wolfsburg and Bremen in some sort of semi-finals. I was a little behind in the play by play and I'm sorry to report the cultural experience was lost on me as it was on most of the other Canadians sharing Block 50 row 17. It wasn't because we were too far away; the field was amazingly large - so large that the players on the far side of the field were noticeably smaller than those closer to us. And it wasn't because we weren't open to the experience: I had a curry bratwurst in one hand and two beers in the other. I was playing along. Why then did I feel as though I was wedged into someone's living room with 18 year old boys and 50 beers? Why could no one explain this game to me?! By the end I had finally figured out which team was Wolfsburg. Up until then I was more concerned with the timeclock and whether having another beer would be simply too much. When you're sitting in front of two maniacal soccer freaks who look like they enjoy romping in outhouses and winnebagoes, you start to lose respect for what they're cheering for. Andrea and I were enjoying ourselves infinitely more by taking photos with the pretzel vendor who was shimmying down our aisle. It was all quite hysterical, even when the ever-frowning guy behind me would yell SCHEISSE over my right shoulder and the woman dug her sneaker further into my back. It was probably the beer. And therein is the essence of sports stadiums, and the key to my heart when I'm forced to sit in one.

Outside the stadium, men were lined up on a grassy knoll pissing into the creek like a firing squad. I was impressed that there never seemed to be a lull in the golden offering of testosterone.

Each toilet stall had two buttons: one for each excrement. They're leaving it up to me! - five water droplets or eight?

look at those quads! quaddream3000 can work for you too!

The Laura is here to stay

17 Mai 2007

Three days after my arrival in Kassel I am still adjusting to strange circumstances. My host mom endearingly refers to me to her kids as 'die Laura' (the Laura). It's as if I'm a seasonal sand storm or hurricane or something: 'Don't bother the Laura,' 'The Laura is here for 6 weeks.' I have my own room on the third storey of their house and from it I can see the Wilhelmshohe castle nestled on a forested hill just a few kilometers away. The castle was built in the 1700s by some duke Ludwig who decided a palace with a Hercules statue and waterworks was better than none. The Hercules statue is being repaired (his muscles are cracking?) and so from a distance the palace looks like an abandoned factory with a lopsided radio antenna (the scaffolding), or a forest watchtower that happens to be in line with one of the main boulvards. Waterworks cascade down the hill to another palace and apparently it's quite a sight.

Emerging from the cigarette smog of Germany, please welcome....

First order of business is to apologize for this extremely late post, and hope that I may still have friends who will read this. Internet has been sporadic. Disorientation of the country coupled with vague priorities has generated a lot of air-headed wandering and coffee-drinking. Wandering through the Te Gut drugstore gives me reassurance -- like the reassurance sought by an OCD ape counting cracks in the wall. Reading labels, smelling differently-perfumed air, trying on every pair of kiddie sunglasses -- all comforting. After a while though, enough is enough. What follows are some of my adventures from the past 3 weeks in the Deutschland. Please remember that you're not missing anything.