Munich/Leipzig/Hamburg/Copenhagen

WOW! I feel like a rock star without all the booze, drugs, and women. Well I did get drugs. $200.00 for penicillin and ear drops. Doctor in Copenhagen doesnt know what i have but that should do the trick he says. German Beer is way better in Germany then in the states and the pretzels are huge. I also got to play some german game I call slam hand. This old German guy with a belt of bear claws (NO NOT the Doughnuts) the he supposedly acquired himself in battle, that's what I understood from the sign language. Well he wanted to play this hand slapping game with a bunch of Italians that were in Munich, it was Italian weekend at Oktoberfest, but none of them would play. Well when he saw Sara and Patrick playing cards he had a fit and tried to take them away. To make amends I offered to play the game with him. Little did I know what I was in for. the game starts out with all hands on the table. One person starts by slapping the hand of the other person, then the other person reciprocates with an even harder slap. Now begins the first of escalations in hostilities. The first person goes now but slams his fist on the other persons and back again. Next is shoves to the shoulders, then a punch to the chest, and finally slaps in the face. I won the second game when I showed the guy my finger deformed at birth, but he didnt know that. He felt so bad he bought me a beer and kept trying to hug me and kiss my head. I guess I have a bear wrestling friend forever in Munich somewhere.
To watch a clip of my game of SLAM HAND click on the picture and you will be taken to video of live action!

Leipzig was o.k. Still feels like it's under communist rule. Went out to the Zaha BMW offices and headquarters. Took some illegal shots inside and then got yelled at by security. "PAPERS AND PASSPORT! DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE THAT TAKE PICTURES IN HERE?"

"They are asked to leave?"

"Silence!"

Anyways, you get the point. That night we went to out for a bite and when we got back to the hostel I forgot we had a key to let us in the front door. So I buzz the front desk to get let in and as I'm doing so I remember the key. As i am smiling into the little camera and pulling out my key I tell the guy who just said "YES?" that I have my key. "That's nice", he says, as if to ask if I wanted a cookie as a reward.




Munich = Beer, Leipzig = Communist, Hamburg = ?. I know one things for sure: You can ride the subway all day and never pay, but I think if you get caught you have to choose between a E500,00 fine, or get sent to Leipzig. We went to see the new Multimedia center on the Northern edge of town. We got off at the Beef Dominator metro stop and walked a mile without realizing the Halter-Top stop was right in front of the building. Returning back to the Hostel we missed the Gross Hands Off stop and ended up back at the central station. In Hamburg the metro stops all have names we can't pronounce, so we made them up. There also seems to be a problem with people being drunk and just passing out where it suits them.

I had to step over a guy that had some how gotten into our room in the middle of the night and was in a lump on the floor inside the door.


I knew when you go to Copenhagen you had to take a ferry across a large stretch of water. I didn't know they drove the entire train on it!


This was a very interesting building. Two concrete grain silos along the river were converted into condo's. The interesting part was how they enginnered the structure so allow the living space to be on the outside of the silo's and the inner core to remain empty as if to celebrate it's original intention.

This was one of many highlight to the trip. We got a personal tour of Jean Nouvel's Danish Radio Preformance center construction site. They have a display area with drawings, models, and multimedia demonstrations. Outside they have a bunch of wall mock-ups along with a shed that contains a model of the interior perfomance space. By code, because there are acoustics involved, they are required to have a 'to scale' model of the performace space that they can test the sound in, which requires pumping gas to change the density of the air inside that mimics air's density at that scale.