To America

[geoffsebesta]

I return to America in eight hours. I'm too hungry to sleep and Denmark doesn't use Euros and I'm out of kroners so I can't do anything about it. So let's finish off the photos, shall we?

So.

I ran around Münster for three days.


It is very strange to see my name everywhere. Geöffnet is the German word for "open."


Anthropologists should find this interesting. Synchronized drinking is big around here, if you're a college student at least. Everyone else is a little horrified, and Astrid swears it was nothing like this when she went to school. Perhaps Germany will catch up to America in alcoholism?


I went to the room where they signed the Peace of Westphalia, which I'd love to tell you all about but this insanely expensive country charges for internet by the minute so we shall have to leave the wiki-ing for later. Suffice to say this room has some marvelous panelling.


It also has this, which I do not know what it is. I mean, it's a golden cock. Obviously. But I do not know why it is.



Back outside, looking around.




Astrid told me what sort of heretics they are but I forgot. I think they were protestants.


Beam me up Scotty.


There is nothing so old and lovely that you cannot stand outside of it, smoke a cigarette, and look bored.

So I was back wandering around, and the universe said, here Geoff, I know you're feeling tired and a bit cranky.


Have a gigantic Tom Otterness statue. It's in Germany so he can say what he really means and let his anticapitalist tendencies have full rein.


So of course I took a gabillion pictures.










It's called the Uberfrau, and like all Otterness's work, it's extremely clear in its intention. I can spell it out for you if you're interested;


Matriarchy will be the end of capitalism and it can't happen soon enough.


It's not his best work, maybe. But it's certainly the biggest I've ever seen, and it thrilled me to the bone. Otterness has so much best work, why quibble? It's definitely damn good and the last thing I expected to see when I walked to the Münster library. A passerby informed me that in Germany 0.5% of the budget for a public building must be spent on art. God bless you, Germany.


I'm sure this hammer and sickle is just a coincidence and he means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BY IT.


Good times. Man I love sculpture. I hope I get serious about sculpture when I get home.

And, then, it got dark.


The next day we (Astrid and her wonderful housemates) went to see a castle. This brings the tourist things I've done in Europe to three -- I saw the Roman fort in Bad Nauheim, I saw the Louvre, and now I saw a German castle.


And unlike Chateau-Thierry, it was a castle that was not in ruins.




There was a great museum inside too but none of the pictures came out. One of the more interesting things was a mechanical collar with spikes on the inside that the owner of the castle had forcibly put on a rival back in the 1600s. The poor guy was 80 years old. But he owed him money, or something. Things were rough back then.


A statue on the grounds. I loved it. BTW you can see one thing here that separates Americans from Europeans -- as a general rule we have much, much more forward-jutting cheekbones. It's the Native American blood I think.




Astrid, looking adventurous.


Then we went to another castle; this was the one of the guy who owed the guy who owned the first castle, the one who had to wear the freaky torture-collar. We couldn't go inside because it had been converted to apartments. Man Germany is cool sometimes.

These castles reminded me of "The Pink Panther Strikes Again."


Then we went for a walk in a swamp. Of the four housemates, two are professional artists and three are professional biologists. It was all horses and hedgehogs and high-maintenance cats all the time. Bette found a frog.




A word about gear. This is my dear, dear backpack, my constant friend and companion through Europe. If you put it all together there have probably been less than twenty-four hours in the last two months that it was not within arm's reach. I bought it the day before I left and it was a brilliant purchase; thoroughly satisfied, would recommend it to anyone. It's a Kelty Redwing 3100. I call it "Mister Siegal." That makes a triple pun (which Rubio might appreciate) and that sums up a lot about how I feel about this time around. I haven't really seen Europe at her best, no. But I saw her for real, and in some ways that's better, and I think we both had a damn good time.




I left Münster in no particular rush, took the train to Hamburg, told the conductor I had a ticket but I couldn't find it in my backpack. He obviously did not believe me but did not care so that was that.


Hamburg is a good city for the stunning, multi-layer view. It is a bad city for internet. I found a Starbucks, wasted a couple hours complaining to Facebook, and then bitched out an American who was talking some tea party nonsense right behind me. It was at this point that I realized I was grumpy and I was done. I mean, done. Two months is enough. Don't get me wrong, if I had been somewhere where I was staying I could have just toughed it out and in a couple days I'd be ready and rarin' to go again. But the end of the tour is in sight, and I just don't care any more. I don't care where I am, I just want to be somewhere. I'm tired of Going Places. I want to Be Places. I don't care if they have tea party idiots or what, but it would be nice to be able to read the street signs.

Got back on the train. I'm out of books in English, so I was translating French comics. Went to Elkhorn, then north towards Flensburg. A conductor finally caught up with me and I paid twelve Euros to go to Schweslig (sp?), then stayed on two more stops to Flensburg, and then it was 11pm and there were no more trains where I wanted to go. So I started walking. Flensburg is on the Danish border and I thought if I just crossed over the 5km to Padborg I could save some loot.

Unfortunately Germany does not believe in maps. Or road signs. So I navigated by the stars, which were easy to see, because it was very cold. But the roads did not go where I wanted them to go at all and at one point, because I just didn't have any options, I had to walk down the autobahn for a couple kilometers. Scary kilometers. But there was a rest area not far down, and it was below freezing out but I'm pretty good at camping, so I survived the night. Woke up with frost on my sleeping bag but all fingers and toes still attached.

The sunrise was stunning.




If you look on the left edge you can see another photographer doing the exact same thing as me, but with a more expensive camera.

I hitched from there on out. My first ride was a boarding-school teacher named...uh, forgot her name. She was real nice and spoke perfect English. My second ride was a Polish dude named Roman who spoke only German, so we sort of talked like that, and he dropped me off on the edge of the autobahn. I didn't get ten yards before a cop pulled over, lights flashing.

But I used Tourist Power and the guy actually gave me a ride all the way to Copenhagen, two hours away, and told me all about Denmark as we went. His name was Hans and he was a sterling fellow, one of the best folk I've ridden with.

And hey, if you want to turn some heads, get dropped off at the hostel in a police car.

Said it before and I'll say it again; there are some things that you can get for free that you could never get for money.

So I'm in Copenhagen! The journey is almost complete. Checked into the hostel, which is of course ferociously expensive because this here is Denmark and it will leave its mark on your wallet.

Then I went to the Glyptotek, the amazing art museum here in Copenhagen, and it was every bit as good as Rand said it was. Sadly this occurred at the end of the trip and I just have no mental space left for anything, let alone an art museum stuffed to the gills with larger-than-life marbles. I could only bring myself to do one reference drawing, and it's not that good. I just took lots of pictures so that I could go back and look later, when my brain isn't full.




This is the first thing you see when you walk into the Glyptotek. I have no idea what to make of it.


The museum did not get more normal from there.


Beware the hippopotamus!




So many busts, so much sculpture. Acres and acres of busts.


Hey Austin does this look like anybody you know?

It's actually Alexander Dumas's son.


And it is amazing, just amazing what they do with sculpture. I mean...


That is not cloth. That is not flesh. That is marble. 100% marble. I mean how the I don't even what the~~~


Okay, that's pretty hot for a stone chick.


They had one room that could very accurately be called "sexy marble women." Actually they had several rooms like that.


They also had some rooms that were crazy disturbing and probably more than a bit misogynistic. I didn't take pictures of all the sculptures of women being dragged around by their hair but there were a lot.


I mean...

what is the artist's intention here? Do I even want to know?


This is the same sculptor. I guess he had a thing for giant stone people with their hands tied behind their backs and all, and I guess I give him props for making some of the freakiest rocks I've ever seen.


Yeah I would be a bit spaced too if I had to stand in that room all day, but she's supposed to look crazy; that's Ophelia. BTW she was Danish. Hamlet's castle is the next stop north on the E20 autoroute.


Degas was...Degas was a weird cat. He's not someone who makes you feel comfortable when you study him closely. I rag on Picasso and Pollock all the tmie, but Degas and Rodin were just as despicable if not more so. But I like their work. Degas would be called a pedophile today; at the time he was just a pedarast. But that's the exact same thing.


This here is a Degas sculpture of a little girl, dismembered in a bowl of soup. Apparently he did a lot more sculptures than anyone has ever seen. After his death his friends decided a bunch of them were "not suitable." I can believe it.


It is the actual "The Thinker." Rodin was also a piece of crap, and he took credit for a lot of other people's work. But wow, he (and his wife and his assistants) was (were) good.

If there's one thing that makes me sad about the destruction of the WTC, besides the thousands of lives lost, the uncalculated environmental harm, the emotional trauma, and the two pointless wars that it sparked, it's the vast number of Rodins that were destroyed. He had sculptures all over that place.


Ha, this kid totally has chick hips. The opposite of Michaelangelo, who sculpted women as "men with breasts stuck on their front." This is pretty obviously a female model with a small package attached. Shoulders, hands, neck...even the elbows are feminine.

This is one of the very few sculptures that was not anatomically perfect.


Unless you count all the Greek/Roman/Etruscan stuff, which has been beat to crap by the ages. I didn't even bother with most of it, I was too tired to learn.


Thought this one was cool, though. I Claudius here has been scowling for like two thousand years.


At this point I realized why so much of this stuff looked familiar -- because I have the "Great Museums of The World: Copenhagen" book, and I'd drawn from it a million times. Quite a trip to see it in real life, though.




The Scandanavian fascination with death metal started a long time ago. Hey, see how his eyes follow you? It's a nifty trick.


Oh, to heck with it, let's eat.


From the roof you can see Tivoli Gardens, which is sort of Six Flags Over Copenhagen. Except freakin' ancient, of course. The air was filled with the screams of the Danish. I liked it.

I left. I went to McDonalds. It sucked, I went to a different place, I liked it there, I spent the last of my kroners on bread and coffee. I saw probably the best fountain I've seen this entire trip:



And that's it. I came back here. I'm going to go to sleep one of these days. There's no more pictures, there's no more Europe. It's time to go home.

Can't wait.

If I was less tired I'd have something deep to say about Europe right now, but I dunno what. The last two months have been one of the best times in a lifetime of good times. I feel lucky. I feel honored. I feel happy and satisfied and I know I'll carry the things I've seen and done with me forever. I met so many wonderful people, saw so many things. I learned French, I mean really learned it; I've never known another language this well, and it's such a great feeling. This has been time well-spent.

Big thanks to everyone who made this possible, I will express my gratitude more thoroughly at another, less exhausted date.

And now to New York. Oh America, you silly, crazy, beloved place. Even if the tea party eats you alive I still love you. I wrote you a poem.



To America

Oh, carry me home
where the buffalo used to roam
and the shopping malls
have all
overgrown

Give me nothing
lots of nothing
endless plains, crossed by trains
bringing nothing

Give me a grand
place to stand
and watch as we abandon sanity
you'd better keep an eye on me
I'm selling you
Liberty.