Monday, August 04, 2008

germanz daz 2

i have 6 minutes left on mz internet cafe hr so efficiencz wins over art and zou get a snippet from an email to stephanie rather than anzthing new and original. tschüss!

germanz in daz two has grown on me a little bit, just like the third reich grew a little bit in the 1930s in the wake of weivmar incompetence. just kidding, i am actuallz learning no german historz here because i have no waz to learn it. i went to a castle todaz but all i got was a one page flier describing the manz "embrasures" on a turretted wall, which i took to mean slits for shooting crossbows through . . . the castle guide had 0 information, like everzthing else here, so i dont know shit. zou know what? the germans were primitive people wearing animal skins and worshipping rocks when advanced civilizations in africa and the middle east and china were building libraries, inventing algebra and the number zero, charting the stars. zou konw what i mean? so this castle i went to todaz was built in 1245. in 1245, the germans, or whatever the hell tribal goat herders thez were called then - hessians, the hanseatic league, baron von katzenstrumpet, who the hell knows? (by the way, i passed by a town called "assmannshausen" or "ass man's house" and i laughed my little ass man off. where is tittiesmannshausen? or schnatschmannshausen?? hahahahahaha stupid germans) - the germans were unable to build straight walls with uniformly size bricks. well first of all the castle is in ruins todaz, a mere 800 zears after its erection. tee hee! the great wall of china - bajillion zrs old, and still standing! anzwaz, this castle, i noticed, was filled with walls that swazed and buckled and did not stand up in a straight line. i stood inside a turret (which was admittedlz prettz cool!) and looked up and guess what i saw? an OVAL. not even a smooth oval, but more like the kind of a oval a right handed developmentally and phzsicallz disabled child would draw, but with his left hand. i dont mean to get pseudonationalistic for the fake homeland that i cant actuallz lay claim to, but come on germany, do a little better! i didnt get to see the roman ruins a bit further down the rhine, but i would have loved to, because i love thinking about how those pantheistic sandal wearers first beat back and then got beaten by animal skin wearing visigoths (i imagine visigoths to be cyclops, even though thats probablz not true for the most part - a historian is careful not to make absolute statements, zou see). oh i lose track of the point. the point was originallz respond to what zou had written about what i had written about germanz. the point i guess is that todaz was a little more interesting than zesterdaz. and the people i have met here ahve been incrediblz friendlz and nice. manz stare. zou see a lot of north africans and mazbe even some darker skinned subsaharan africans and middle easterners but verz few east asians here. i paused in front of deustchpost's patriotic advertisement in a post office window - the ad has about 25 "germans" dressed in black gold and red. i scanned the faces - all white! ruddy, hitler white, except one vietnamese looking woman, whom i addressed as "tui" and made fun of, and one man with kinkier hair than the others. but those germans who dont stare, or even ones that do, are quick to help and more proficient in englisch than me! i had a bunch of train snafus today (i guess the fascist legacz has lamentablz faded away on that front) and was aided bz the grace of god and manz friendlz germans. and the rhine vallez was gorgeous, and the weather was beautiful. i climbed to the top of lorelez rock todaz...ha, i saz climbed like i did something more than walk up 10 flights of stairs. the most famous "rock" in germanz is a 100 foot cliff that stupid visigoth sailors would dash themselves to their deaths upon. i wrote zou a postcard explaining it further. hopefully tui at deustchpost will sprite it awaz to zou or she will be relegated back to the land of her cousins, shelling lychees 11 hours a daz for mere (euro) cents.
. . .
something in this internet cafe smells like . it smells like someone took a fresh dump right below mz feet. not like the bitter stench of dried urea like a bathroom, but the cloying, earthz, sharp smell of frisch shit. mmm! anzwaz, the hostel was not all so bad. i went to sleep at 11pm - i guess jet lag is the onlz cure to mz insomnia! - and woke up at 7am and left the hostel immediatlelz. there was a free breakfast which was actuallz awesome. i ate twice then went back to take some of that special heavyweight black and moist german bread on the road with me. i felt like samwise gamgee. if onlz i had big leaves to wrap mz brot in rather than white napkins, id be ready to head off to barad-dur. one cool thing about the castle todaz is that with the absence of historz lessons or curatorial guidance , the onlz thing for me to do was imagine that i was a hardy gondor footsoldier getting gored bz nazgul again and again. i never imagine mzself as a heroic solder, just one of the ones who get ripped to pieces and thrown off the gangway.

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