Masked Monday

Monday, November 9, 2009 is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As life-changing that event has been for this country and for the world, as much as life for millions has changed in the two decades since the old order fell, 20 years is but an afternoon in Europe.

This year is the 2,000th anniversary of the Varus Battle – or the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest -  in which a band of Germanic warriors defeated three Roman legions in 9 AD at Kalkriese, in northwestern Germany near Osnabrück.

That long-forgotten battle also changed the direction of history.  It was a decisive clash which put an end to Roman expansion into Northern Europe.

Those three masks are reproductions of a magnificent Roman cavalry mask at the centre of a display of Roman artifacts unearthed at the battle site.

If you’re anywhere near Osnabrück, go to the museum site for a day and marvel.  It’s really worth it.  I’ve been back four times and find something new every time.

A gorgeous autumn day in Hamburg

Our trip to Kaiserslautern last weekend to attend a friend’s birthday party turned out to be equally as memorable for the two days of walking through a beech forest in all its autumn brilliance.

A Hamburg October can be as dreary as anything Vancouver can throw at you, but the day we left for the weekend was stunning.  I’d been waiting for two weeks waiting for the sun to come out, hoping I’d get a chance to take a few photos before all the leaves were gone.

I managed to squeeze in an hour of cycling with the camera.  Though it was my day off, I went to work – though not inside the office – to take these shots of the maples just outside our window.

One of them had bunches of spikey seed coverings, kind of like chestnuts only smaller with longer thorns.  Can anyone tell me what kind of tree that is?

The last part of that outing I spent just around the corner from our place admiring the curling advance of flame on the black slate facing of an office building.   They knew what they were doing when they planted those vines.  The effect of the turning colours on the massive charcoal grey background is stunning.  It’s difficult to convey the effect in a photo of just one part.

A furnace of hot yellow in the beech forest

Why is it that every autumn seems to be more brilliant than the last?  Or is the intensity I’m seeing in colours this year thanks to an effort to look at the world at a slower pace?

Taking off for a weekend just the two of us to a spot in the middle of a beech forest might have something to do with it.  We boarded an ICE train in Hamburg late Friday afternoon bound for a weekend in Kaiserslautern, arriving at our hotel close to midnight after a short taxi ride.  If the journey was merely a black tunnel slashed with fleeting smudges of white and grey as the train fled south through the German countryside, the sight which greeted us from our first-floor window the next morning made up for it:  A woman walking four draught horses across a field, their breath puffing in the morning mist, splashes of yellow in the wet grass.

Out the door and down a path after breakfast, within minutes we were surrounded in the intense yellow of the beech forest.

The forest near Kaiserslautern is part of the Naturpark Pfälzer Wald, and forms the largest area of continuous forest in Germany.  Though we were only minutes from the border of a small city and from the lookout tower could see a German Premier League and 2006 World Cup soccer stadium, we walked as if the still of the path had been reserved in advance for us alone.

Though every corner brought a new combination of colour as the beech gave way to larch, European and American oak and evergreen pine, what struck me the most was its clear floor and general uniformity.  On the west coast of Canada the underbrush is so thick you can’t see  to either side of the path, while in Eastern Canada the greens, yellows, browns and reds of the dying maple leaves turns the forest into a jumble of hue.  Here the forest floor is a flat carpet of brown beech leaves, the sky above yellow.

We had to go into the city only once, and were glad we did, because its surprisingly unattractive, charmless streets  made us want to return to the beauty of the forest that much sooner.   We’d never have gone to Kaiserlautern had we not been invited to a friend’s birthday party, and it’s lucky for us she chose to hold it at Bremerhof,  where we stayed.  I can’t stay right now whether we’ll go there next fall to enjoy the forest all over over again, but it would sure be worth it.

Search this!

Doctor, I said on my last trip to the shrink.  My wife has histrionic personality disorder.

What makes you think that?

Last night while stoned on camel dung hash she kept repeating, How do you get this damn thing to stop blinking?  She was trying to figure out how to make her Tamagotchi have sex.

Is she American? he asked.

No, I said.  As a matter of fact, she thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth, queen of fucking everything.  My wife whips me when I disobey, too. Imagine – she has me whipped bloody!

Maybe she’s the self you have to live with, he said with a sigh.

What do you mean? I asked.

Well, he said, shifting in his seat.  Look at Charlotte Roche, author of Wetlands.  She once wrote a book about Angela Merkel naked in the sauna.  Like some landscape artist on crack in London, it was a surreal collage of naked pictures of girls with tube breasts, American females totally shaved in German saunas, pictures of zoo animals with buggy eyes copulating while making screaming granny sounds, nude klingons, photos of naked ladies and girls from Squamish, sex in wheelchair pictures, photos of spanking all over Europe, ending with helpful tips on how to make your own shank out of a toothbrush and things to alleviate cramp.

Look, I said, I couldn’t care less about Charlotte Roche’s chaotic nightmare, saunas or Angela Merkel’s butt.   I’m worried about my wife!  Just the other day she came out with: I’m so British, I shit the queen!

Perhaps you should bring your wife’s cuddly butt into the office next time, he said.

I would, I said, but it might be easier to drag her to a cave dwelling in Capadoccia or skating on canals in Holland.

Hmmm… let’s deal with your wife when the time comes.  You aren’t thinking about quitting blogging are you? he suddenly asked.

What? What gives you that idea?

You, Canadian skier Ian, may be the author of more than 300 posts ranging from chess and Hitler to Dutch canal winter skating,  but you’re starting to look like a Canadian idiot.   An EasyJet crashing into Big Ben wouldn’t make half the mess this blog is turning into.  You’ve got everything from how to make a bike look crappy and the dangers of ipods in saunas all the way to 12-year-olds buying condoms and a nude olive run video clip.

Besides, you hardly ever post lately, and when you do, it’s some take on something that happened 30 years ago.

Don’t give me any of your putrid paranoia! I said. I never set out to write the definitive answer to everything like some Greenland girls’ nude blog.  Those are just search terms that landed here!  And it’s not just text searches, either.  Most of them cough up photos via google image searches.

Really? he said, perking up.   You mean if you post photos, and stick tags on them, they will show up in searches?

Sure, I said.  Everyone knows that, even Derbyshire nude grannies, Canada’s most toxic waste dump/flute player or a jobless bum.  Besides, the less often I post, the more hits I get.  Go figure!

Well, he said with a sigh.  The hour’s up.  Same time next week?

Why not? I said.  I hope by then you’ll have done something about the reading selection in your waiting room.  Monocle Magazine is shit, and the “little red book” of Mao, 1968 is really out of date, don’t you think?  You should subscribe to magazines that answer life’s imponderables, things like what if the world stops spinning, or is nine too young to have a baby?

No way, he said.  To pass the time in a waiting room, it’s much better to read all about camel penis and skunk families in Montreal while peeking at pictures of mausi naked.  Her oldest got sprayed by a skunk, you know.

Just in case you’ve never read my sidebar, every line in this post is drawn from a search that coughed up this blog – most often as an image search.