Munich's Not Very Exciting

Good thing Art is!

Yeah, I'm late today. I was busy and will make up for it with a blog that is actually interesting, okay?

So I got up at the ungodly hour of 8 am, and was unhappy to admit that Piff was right, this is about 12 hours too early for me. Oh! There was a moment of realizing what a keen sense of irony Lexi has- I drug her up to bed with me last night to play calming music to make me fall asleep somewhat earlier. So she picked cheery songs about circuses and lots of Garbage and other things with bass guitars and loud drums and crazy metal solos. Not that these things are bad, but I have all this great mellow music, and it was late, you know? Anyway, I already kinda figured out that Lexi is all about the kind of music that is good for dancing to, so I popped her on again this morning to get me awake, figuring that since I have at least 5 songs about waking up (matter of fact, one of them is playing right now), Lexi would Know and play one of them. What did I get? Slow little ballads about how a boy loves his mechanical dog toy, and other mellowness that made me want to roll over and cuddle deeper into my pile of blankets and sleep. She's making up for it right now by playing lots of sweet songs so I can't be mad at her. Plus she's all pretty. Cheeky, but pretty.

Wait, this was supposed to be about my adventures in Germany, not my strange relationship with my iPod. Sorry. So anyway, I did drag myself out of bed, and I even felt cute enough for pigtails (yes! and dinosaurs on my lapel!) and got some breakfast in me and then the host parents and Anja and I (the boys being doof, even though Piff and Basti were already awake because they are Insane) got in the car and drove off through the 8 or 9 cm of snow that's accumulated (weatherman says every other part of Germany is getting something like 40 cm. We are jealous beyond belief.) to Munich, which Philipp warned me was "a really ugly city. I have no idea why anyone would want to live there." As it turns out, Munich is ugly in the way Barnes and Noble is ugly, which is not, but at the same time, there are many prettier places to be, right? As an American, I have seen ugly cities. (Philipp has also spent lots of time in America, but apparently he missed the ugly parts.) In any case, Germany has this tendency to be really pretty though, and there are all these gorgeous cities that you could spend your time in. Like Augsburg. Or Bonn, which is literally a postcard come to life, but not one of those ugly ones with a fat lady on a horse or something. (My brain is so full of culture at the moment that I am just sort of spitting it out in ways that make no sense. I apologize.) Anyway, our goal was the Franz Marc exhibit at some art museum because Art is Awesome, and we left all early because it is apparently super-popular. I figured out that Munich is a Major City because the U-Bahn announcer-lady spoke German and English, and also because there were lots of people in the U-Bahn. We got to the art museum and stood outside in a super-long line Forever and Froze and Froze and there were two Americans behind us speaking English like it was totally normal, and it freaked me out a bit. I mean, who speaks English? It is sort of like Latin, it is a language that you write in and read and maybe you say the words when you are having a Linguistical discussion, but you do not stand on the street corner and have a conversation in it unless you are Crazy Pretentious. That is what my brain says, at least. We finally got through the long line of icey death, and bought some tickets (using Anja's student id for both me and Anja in a feat of fooling the overworked admission-ticket lady) and then it was back out into the Frigid and across the street and underground to find the actual exhibit (this was pretty weird). And then it was a whole bunch of people in a big huge room full of colorful pictures of horses and sheep and dogs and cats and the occasional naked lady (but very occasional) and I liked it best because you could see the development of Marc as a thinkin' person who makes pictures, meaning I could see how he went from kinda boring pictures of a blue deer in some trees to crazy crazy abstract things that he claimed were cows. You kinda have to see the pictures to understand. We finished up with that exhibit and went back aboveground and around the corner to the actual art museum building, where they had lots of stuff from Marc's early career, which was basically more sheep and horses and stuff except that they were normal colors and not at all abstracted, so it was pretty boring. There were lots of sketchbook pages, though, and I love sketchbook pages and studies and things- I love art class when we do studies, and I like to consider studies finished artwork because, somehow, the finished composition isn't as cool- I like seeing the whole thought process on the page. We wandered from early, boring Marc to a big huge Blaue Reiter exhibit, which started out equally boring except that it was vaguely colorful landscapes, and then came that point when Kandinsky hit brilliance and drug most of his friends with him (a couple BR guys remained boring) and I spent forever wandering around reminding myself that Kandinsky is awesome, and also has one of the most recognizable faces ever- those glasses, that pointy beard- he just sticks out, and that makes me feel like I know things, too, because I can always find him in photos or portraits or whatever. I was disappointed to find no Dada as the museum went from the Reiter to pop art to lots of modern stuff, but then I got distracted by an installation that was a couple of mortuary carts and boxes of congealed fat and some other things, and I started to explain to my host mom why it was art, and she decided I was crazy and left me there contemplating it to go look at the disco ball installation (I have no awesome meaning for that one). Man, I love art. There were other crazy awesome things in the museum including a room full of pink 3x5s, some photos, some drawings, that I could have stared at forever, but we were hungry. We went wandering through Munich looking for food, and came upon a bunch of lion statues (Munich is doing that thing that cities do where a bunch of businesses or whatever decorate some animal statue and stick it on the street- Richmond did it with fish, some city in Massachusetts did it with sheep) and a giant manger scene from Spain with animatronic figures and lights and a working waterfall and everything. My host dad is all about manger scenes, so we spent forever looking at the thing (it had a guy roasting a pig on a spit! Not kosher!) and starving. We finally drug him away and found some nourishment (I had bratwurst) and made our way through the cold back to the U-Bahn station where Anja figured out how to get us back to our car (it was complex because Munich has like 59 different U and S Bahn lines, not to mention all the normal trains) and we drove home, where the boys were doing nothing and not freezing (so doof). We had tea to warm up and watched the Germans lose at the ski jumping thing and I have been internetting a bit and the boys made up for being doof about art by having a nice huge debate about action movies at dinner (also proving why Indiana Jones is better than British Romance-Novel-Based-Made-for-TV-Movies-That-Are-Super-Popular-Here) and card games were abandoned for Tomb Raider 2 on TV. I might go to bed earlier tonight, especially if Lexi doesn't get over this thing for Fiona Apple.

Also, I have to agree with Philipp about Munich. I have no clue why anyone would want to live there.