MARS VOLTA

The next morning I got up early to enjoy some breakfast and coffee in the garden. I didn’t see this happening again anywhere in the near future, so I made sure to absorb every minute. German and Italian breakfast is similar in many ways- very light, with breads, jams and juice but with the exception of German sausages. Oh yeah!

The other three were slow to rise and joined me for breakfast a little later in the morning. Once we were all gathered we headed to the train station and found a train that would take us to Cologne. Our agenda included seeing an exhibit of Piet Mondrian, who is a painter, turned architectural philosopher, turned architect. He was the founder of the De Stijl movement which we have studied closely with the early Modernism movement. I really enjoyed seeing his work on display- most of which I had seen in books many times previously, but I also was able to see many of his unpublished paintings. Our tickets allowed us to see the rest of the museum as well but I don’t think any of us realized what we were getting ourselves into. The Cologne museum was the largest I have ever been to and I think it would take a few whole days to walk through the gallery and really look at most of the paintings. After a few hours I was just walking through the rooms in order to get to the end because my mind was on art overload.

As we left the museum we found ourselves in the middle of a German pillow fight. It appeared to be a school organized pillow fight taking place in the middle of the piazza outside of the cathedral. As we were passing by around the outside, a girl who was armed with a pillow approached me and said something to me in German. I had no idea what she said so I turned my head and continued to walk and as a consequence I was nailed on the side of the head with a pillow. This caught me a little off guard because I was empty handed and didn’t even have a pillow to defend myself with.

We continued to walk around taking pictures of architecture, window shopping and searching for the perfect Bratwurst stand. Before we found the ultimate bratwurst we were distracted by the best looking fries any of us had ever seen- they were wrapped in paper, topped with ketchup, mayonnaise and fried onions. As you can tell by the picture, not only did they look good, but they tasted good as well.

In Cologne we saw a Starbucks for the first time and the girls could not resist. While Loren and Sarah were drinking their Lattes, Olen and I walked down the street to a brewery and sampled a few German beers. More wandering followed, and we finally found a Bratwurst stand. The whole day I had built up an image of a Bratwurst on a big bun, with ketchup, mustard and sauerkraut, but that is not what we got. We were served a large sausage in a small dinner roll with the ends sticking out both sides of the bun. I am not complaining because it was great- it just wasn’t quite what we were expecting.

The next order of business was to start looking for the concert venue which was located in the middle of an industrial area. Once we found the warehouse the concert had already started and the place was packed. For those of you who are not familiar with Mars Volta music- they can be described as a contemporary mix of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Santana all rolled into one. It was incredible!

After the concert we hopped on the last train back to Düsseldorf and proceeded to walk to our hotel since all of the buses had stopped running for the night. Our hotel closes at midnight, meaning that all of the doors were locked and we had no way to get in- well there was a way, but none of us had paid attention when the lady told us the day before. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Since we were staying in a house behind the hotel we were able to walk to the end of the block and hop a few fences until we made it to the garden behind the hotel. It made for an exciting adventure just getting to our hotel room. Loren reminded us that it was Daylight savings time in the US, so we all set our clocks forward one hour before going to bed…