Saturday, May 28 -- Nazis and Blaue Nacht

The breakfast egg seems to be a norm in Germany, and Michael had bought easter eggs for us for the breakfast. Today was the day when Timo finally got to see all the nazi museums that Tiiti refused to visit ten years ago. Michael was eager to go with Timo, but we managed to warn him that Timo would be even slower than he could imagine. So Michael had to do with just biking to the station with Timo, in a reckless speed amidst all the traffic. The rest of us stayed at home, doing laundry, resting, choosing a new car for Kaisa and Michael, reading Finnish magazines. This rest was called for: yesterday Tiiti had felt too stressed to hurry from A to B and C, and contractions had been more numerous than ever. Now it was possible just to lie down with the feet up against the wall. We had a lunch of asparagus, but not the Spanish, because all the Spanish vegetables were suddenly poisonous because of the EHEC bacteria.

On the last visit Michael had insisted on speaking German to Tiiti, and Tiiti had answered in English. Now the language barrier had been brought down a bit because of the exposure to German, and Tiiti tried her best in discussing everyday things in German. Luckily Michael seems the most patient of all Germans, understanding everything and never correcting any mistakes. Tiiti guessed she had chosen the correct gender for the word something like once, and usually she just used the method 'random, with slightly more weight on the masculin.' In the end Tiiti was very delighted to meet Timo again, because that involved switching back to the easy English and letting her brain rest.

Timo's report of the nazi: It was easy to get to Doku-Zentrum by the tram. The entrance fee was one euro/hour for the interested student: the exhibition was rather large. At each exhibit, you would type a code in the audio guide to hear information in the selected language. The system was perfect except when the old folks would listen to theirs as loud as they could. The history was interesting though already familiar. This museum hosted quite few items, and more text. After three hours in the museum, there was a two-hour walk around the grounds. Timo watched a rowing competition on the lake, with people carrying boats around and resting in tents. The 60-m wide great road now served as an inofficial testing place for sports cars, and a parking lot for the exhibition centre. Everything was enormous, but the 500.000 people stadium had only reached the groundwork phase--and now it had become another lake full of deadly sulphur compounds. It was great to see all the buildings and places having new uses: one tiny corner of a huge building now was a concert hall for the symphony orchestra. When Timo got out, a gaggle of geese decided to cross the road. They had the right to go first, and the cars stopped to wait.

We were reunited on the Nuremberg station, Timo very hungry after walking the nazi rally grounds, and went to the first restaurant to serve local food. There was no pork shoulder available for Timo, who now had to do with sausages. Tiiti had some heart that felt like ham scaled to one-half in all the dimensions, resulting in an eightfold amount of salt. Kaisa had some sausage but ate not even half of it. After hearing some truthful comments about the food, the waitress didn't bother asking for Timo's comments--well, his town sausages had been the best food on the table.

Tonight there was the Blaue Nacht, or the Blue Night, with all kinds of happenings and exhibitions in sixty spots till five in the morning. We first tried to climb a parking hall to see an Action Painting Washing Machine, but after all the stairs just got to hear that the nightly tickets should be purchased somewhere else. After a short negotiation we desiced that a thirteen-euro ticket for this all-night happening would be a good deal. Later, the washing machine turned out to be a poorly balanced machine that would jump around while spinning. Jars of paint had been somehow attached to the machine, and it would splash paint as it rodeoed around.

Michael had a clear picture of what to see, and the rest would just obeyingly follow him. Not that we Finns would understand any of the short and cryptic German descriptions of the programme. The first object of art, the Jackpot, was the noisiest piece of art ever, but luckily they gave out earmuffs when we crossed the 95 dB line. Closer, we saw that it was money that made the noise, namely one-cent coins on conveyor belts of industry or mining gauge. It was supposed to reflect the circulation of money and especially speculation in the market, but mostly it attracted Timo to make photos. Despite the earmuffs, the girls wanted out too quickly, and no great photos could be shot.

This year everything was themed Fremde Welten, or Strange Worlds. The theme was best seen in a dance performance, which discussed strange cultures and our prejudices. Another strange world was a village in Ostrobothnia, near to where Timo comes from. On a screen on a bridge in Nubermberg, they projected a video showing cars on another bridge in Finland in the winter. To us this was nothing strange, but we spent some time trying to figure out which town it was.

Some churches provided music, the first one piano and guitar music, while a quintet / sextet sang in the second one. The singing was very meditative, and the atmosphere wasn't made any more real by the cloud of blue garbage bags filled with helium, softly hanging in mid-air, lit by changing colour floodlights. There was supposed to be music inspired by Tarantino, Kaurismäki, and Morricone, but we didn't fit in since all the other 100.000 people were interested as well.

There are so many old churches in Germany that they don't bother to repair them all. In the middle of Nuremberg there are the Katharinenruine, the ruins of the Katherine church. Only the walls are left of this medieval gem, while the rest burned in the war. This night the namesake of Katharina arranged a light show, projecting an animation about a butterfly princess and larva on the walls. We came a bit too late to catch the story, but anyway the pictures were drawn in a nice style, and the crawling paths of the larva would follow the shapes of the church windows.

The blue of the night started to show as the evening grew darker. Someone had made blue filters in all the streetlamps in the old town. This didn't help the visibility, but the cars were driving carefully, as the pedestrians weren't.

The main show was on the town square. A large stage had been equipped with spotlights and water cannons, and we saw waterworks like fireworks, accompanied with music. At times, a fog screen emerged from the front of the stage, and we wondered whether it was produced by the TUT spin-off company Fogscreen or some competitor. They showed some poor man's Koyaanisqatsi on the screen.

Meanwhile, the EHEC epidemic had grown so that even Tiiti's mother sent us some email to warn of dirty cucumbers. Otherwise nobody in Finland would take care of us during the whole joyrney.

Sunday, May 29 -- Railway Museum

We slept very late, or until nine! Michael went to play mölkky (a Finnish summer outdoor game where you throw a piece of wood trying to hit other pieces--Kaisa and Michael play in the German national level). The rest of us decided to visit the German Railway Museum. It's only natural that we got a free entrance with the inter rail ticket, but the guy behind the counter did not know this until we enlightened him. Everything in the museum was in German, and when Timo went to ask whether there were any translation leaflets, it turned out that the guy too was available in German only.

The best thing in the museum was no doubt the old locomotives, the good second being the posters from the 1920s to the 50s. The first locomotive in traffic in Germany, Adler, was on display only as a replica, but quite a beauty anyway. Each locomotive was accompanied with information about the technical details, why this design was revolutionary, and what technical innovations were used for the first time. Tiiti had to translate long texts to Timo, and because train tech vocabulary is not her speciality, the translation quality was often 'then there are two crankshafts, if this word means crankshaft... and the driving wheel is 2 m in diameter, or maybe it should be something like the flywheel..." Anyway, by combining engineering and linguistics, we managed to come up with logical explanations for the performance figures.

The first locomotives were about as aerodynamic as bricks, and stream lines were a later invention. Good gears have been difficult to manufacture, and thus the driving wheels have had to be as large as possible to keep the rpms within reasonable limits. The coal-car hosts water below the coal, and a huge float is used to indicate the water level. We even admired the leaf springs under the trains. As for the cars, we saw Louis II's and Bismarck's saloon coaches.

Brilliant posters were on display in the 1920s and nazi sections, both advertisements and propaganda. Where do I get one of those?

The Germans were lucky to have built lots of railways before World War II, otherwise DDR might have got the Soviet gauge (as in Finland, btw). Reichsbahn and DB operated side by side for tens of years, and the museum remembered this by having their exhibitions side by side in the same rooms.

The heavy German style breakfast accompanied by the Finnish porridge came handy, because we didn't seem to find the other end of the museum. The hands-on section provided wooden toy trains, rideable trains to sit on, and signals to control your friends' driving. We had the chance to try to operate the railway switch, and also tried the train simulator, but the dead man's switch was all too difficult: "SIFA-zwangsbremsen" or "SIFA forced brake" was all we got. The cherry on top was the model railway world, with half a kilometre of tracks, operated by a lucky guy who gets paid for that. We could have just watched for an hour, but had the worse case of the munchies already.

We practically ran through the museum of communications, upstairs, only stopping to try the quill and the pneumatic mail. There were no radios, and the telephone switch made of relays wasn't working. Timo was happy that the internet and computers section was up to date, as is not the case in most museums. When we thought that we'd finally get out and have lunch, we found another hall of locomotives. There was even a possibility to ride the narrow gauge, but we were old enough to say no. Most people would probably exit though the outdoor area like we did, and miss the non-tactically placed museum shop like we did.

Bravely we walked all the way to the restaurant Michael had suggested--only to find it closed. A nearby place had a similar menu, and Timo got his traditional pork shoulder, with all the fat, skin, and probably most of the hair still on. The traditional side dish was the Kloss, or a ball of very sticky mashed potatoes. Tiiti tried the Sauerbraten, and it wasn't nearly as good as in Sauerbratenpalast Aachen. It seems that you have to be careful where to calibrate your taste.

Had the DB museum not been as huge and interesting, we could have gone to the Albrecht Dürer museum to see his graphic art. Timo has to go there the next time he visits--Tiiti had seen the place before, and Dürer hasn't been very productive lately. We took a glance at the Hare statue and the castle gardens, which are a must every time we come here. Tiiti's favourite, the museum of industrial culture, had to be skipped, too.

Tiiti spent the evening with cryptic crosswords, while the others played rum with colourful special cards. We packed all we could, and went to sleep. Michael was bid farewell because he would go to work early.

Next stop: Prague.

Leave the train.