between Dusseldorf and Essen. It is lovely, peaceful . . . and a great place to relax. I stayed at the very nice Hotel Am Ruhrufer, but more importantly ate every night at their amazing Thai Restaurant!However, one morning while I was getting a pot of hot tea at the hotel breakfast buffet, a Swiss man moved my food, setting, computer and what not to another table . . . because he wanted to sit where I was. I thought for ten seconds about whether this was a misunderstanding . . . that perhaps there is another way to indicate that the table is occupied, besides having all of one's things at it . . . or whether the man was perhaps mentally ill. I don't think either was the case. I think this was just a pushy guy. Freakish. Anyway, here is a pastoral view of the Ruhr river from the dam where his body would be burried, if in fact there was a body, which there isn't.
You Know You're Old When
You know you're old when, you go to the Love Parade . . . (the German underage drinking, smoking, and can't tell you if you don't already know festival) . . . and you want to send a million
people to their room (with a plastic bucket and a mop).But allow me to explain in graphic detail:
I'm working 20 minutes from where the Love Parade is scheduled to take place. I recall the Mandy Moore film, Chasing Liberty, and I think about how cool it would be to say that I too have been to the Love Parade.
Despite not having a lover, I am a "Lover." I love. Ich liebe dich. I could parade my love around. I support Love (but sadly the relationship is not reciprocal - Love mostly sits on my couch and watches TV with his hand in his pants . . . but I digress).
But I'm torn. My issue is that this same weekend, I want to visit my family/friends on the Belgian Shore. I must either choose between seeing a once in a lifetime sexually charged cultural experience . . . or domestic tranquility with a family that I see once every five years - who has a new baby.
I decide that the optimal course is to do both: Yes, take the baby to the Love Parade.
No, no. I mean go to the Love Parade, but leave early and drive to Belgium in a rental car.
This plan however is an exercise in logistics:
I try to rent a compact car. They have no compact cars left, so they give me, for the compact car price, a brand new Mercedes Benz. I'm not joking. A brand new silver Mercedes with black leather interior.
Then I realize that I have to drive this expensive luxury car through the Love Parade to some unknown parking plaza for a million people. The hotel concierge admonishes me to take the train, and leave the car in the local station parkingplotz. "It will be safe there, and when you return, you can leave for Belgium."
So, I go by train, and materialize at the Dortmund HauptBahnhof.
There is a 20 minute pilgrimage with a million other people to the highway in front of the sports arena. Everyone is dressed excentrically (a shabby effort compared to the average pride parade). It looked more like a Hookers and Vickers party. All the young ladies were dressed in fishnet and heels, and the young men . . . were wearing the last five drinks they had imbibed.
I literally saw some poor African family, dressed-up for travel, emerge from the train station in the midst of this carnival. They, clearly conservative, were confused and appalled by their circumstance. As they pondered the scene, a 16 year old rained his small intestine over their luggage.
(I hope you're not eating as you read this.)
Anyway, so a million German youths show up early to the Love Parade (The Germans are nothing if not punctual). We have a two hour wait. There are food boths and souvenir stands . . . most are empty. The young people pose an elbow insert a cigarette and light up. For the next hour 1 million teenagers smoke like crack junkies in fishnets.
I wish I could get my hands on the bastard that sold 30% of the drunken youths whistles. Not party whistles. Not new years day musical whistles. He has sold them coach Baker's "Give me 50, with a smile Weinbrenner" whistles. So the second-hand smoking is enhanced with the continuous din of 15,000 drunken peeling whistles.
The hot smoke and the noise disstabilizes the atmosphere. It begins to rain torrentially on one million German teenagers who are hunched over cigarettes, deafened by whistles. There were four people with umbrellas. I was one of them. 100 people tried to stand with me under my small umbrella. It was not Love, but it *was* intimacy. Others used garbage bags and jackets to augment my "regenschirm." Soon I was the center ring of the Barnum and Baily's Irish Cream Circus.
The rain stopped. The music began. Thumping. Hooting. A roar from the crowd. Then it went off. No music.
The music began. Thumping. Hooting. A roar from the crowd. Then it went off. No music again. The Love Parade was in fact teasing one million sopping wet, deaf, emphysema victims with nothing to defend themselves but whistles.
A third time, the Love Parade began. Thumping so loud that the whistlers never knew what hit them. They could whistle their brains out, but, only, between, the, huge, deep, base, rattling, every, tooth, in, their, drunken, little, heads . . . .
I (old, wet, and sober) decided the writing was on the wall. The crowd was shoulder to shoulder for 30 acres. Now was the time to get, while the getting was good. I would buy an electronic CD later, and re-experience the event in the privacy of my luxury Mercedes. Did I mention that it was a MERCEDES!
I pressed my way back through the crowd, like a ornery salmon swimming upstream in a river of beer with an expensive camera (mixed metaphors, ay?). The torrent of people never ended. The crowd was contiguous back to the train station. As it was already packed at the Love Parade, I could not imagine what the next million people were going to do when they arrived. I didn't stay to find out.
I rushed to catch the train back to the Mercedes.
Halfway between Essen and Dortmund, a torrential rainstorm soaked the German landscape. I, snug, in my commuter train felt I'd made a good decision in leaving. Then the train came to a stop. An unintelligible voice garbled over the loudspeaker. I asked someone near me if they understood. They did.
Apparently, Love Parade Hooligans had gotten into a fistacuffs with the Engineer of the train currently in the Essen Station. As a result the Polizei had arrived to arrest the thugs and take the Engineer to the hospital (krankhouse - still cracks me up to say that - - because it makes me think that this is where all the krank calls in the world come from . . .).
The Hooligan train was blocking Essen station. All it's passengers had decided to quit the train and walk on the rails in the pouring rain to Dortmund . . . so all trains had been ordered stopped until the tracks could be verified as clear.
In short, I sat in a stopped train for three hours!! I was frosted. Stupid Love Parade. Stupid Concierge. Stupid Hooligans. Stupid Rainstorm . . . etc.
In the end the train commenced movement, to another town . . . where a very nice girl from Albania invited me to join her in her friend's car, who was coming to pick her up. This I did. Bless that young woman!
I was off like a dart to Belgium - three hours late!
On the way to Belgium, I came upon a Smart Car going 140 Km/Hr (See also "Nuclear-Powered Golf Cart") . I passed it of course, if only to preserve my self-esteem. I mean one cannot allow a golf cart to blow one's doors off - no matter how fast it is going. I seriously thought about throwing an ice cube from my new silver luxury Mercedes at the Smart Car, but realized that the ice cube would knock the Smart Car over and it would explode and kill everyone inside (the ice cube being equal in mass to the Smart Car).
I thought to myself, if I were in a Smart Car and it was going 140 - there would be screaming. Even if I were driving. This is tantamount to hurtling off a cliff on a lawnmower. Screaming is entirely appropriate.
But suffice to say, I got to Belgium . . . where the next Blog entry will begin.
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