Bremen and Northwestern Germany – 2006/2007
My first international trip was with a girlfriend to see her family and spend New Year’s in Germany, where her father was working. This was the first of three times I willingly visited Europe during winter, which was behaviorally the nail in the coffin concerning me being diagnosed with a severe mental illness.
Anyway…I enjoyed the trip (in retrospect). It was very tumultuous and we ended up breaking up, so I got a lot of writing done…that’s a positive I guess. Let’s just look at some pictures….
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- “Danke” means “thanks” in German. This is a bin where you throw in a scraps of paper on which you have written all of the things you are thankful for. Interesting, distinctly German concept.
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- Sometimes you have dizzy nights in these new environments. Wonder what the fuck you’re doing and why you are there, but it’s tranquil in a special way.
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- One of us found Christ…. I’ll give you a clue: I have blonde hair.
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- Night scene in Bremen. Often I feel out of place and then I calm myself down and realize I feel out of place because I’m thinking rationally…and that I actually am out of place. That is why I like not being in America–because I feel the same way there anyway and then it’s just irrational.
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- Sondra under a bus stop. I was feeling “artsy” I guess…. I don’t think we fought this night. ;)
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- Graffiti on an old bomb shelter outside of the apartment we stayed in in Bremen. I didn’t get a chance to test its effectiveness.
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- A view from our room on the third floor. Christmas lights taped to a window that had a splendid view of the bomb shelter.
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- That’s one hell of a belt buckle…
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- A woman dressed like a anatomically-incorrect skeleton places a phone call to a dermatologist in hopes of covering up her inadequacies with skin. I didn’t have the heart to tell her…
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- I can’t wait to get old and ride my bike in the cold weather by a sea, experiencing dreary weather for months and months with no respite. …But for now I’ll just take pictures of random strangers from the windows of trams and buses.
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- Miniature explosions are a great way to start each new year freshly. Cultures all around the world recognize this.
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- An elderly couple walk through a square in Bremen. They are on their way to the candy shop where you can buy chocolate bars in the shape of minature Euro bills. The shop also sells excellent gummy bears, if you’re a connoisseur of that sort of thing.
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- Sondra ponders jumping into the icy water to swim with the penguins, evicted from their homeland so others may view them briefly as a spectacle and then return to their normal days. Zoos rock!
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- I’ll let you guys in on a secret…I’m actually a penguin and these are my brothers. I’ve been impersonating a human all these years and that’s the reason I am slightly awkward and struggle to find a regular adult human job.
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- “Hi, I’m an old lady walking by the North Sea, jovial as always. Young man, you could take a lesson from me, if only you would–stop taking life so fucking seriously!!”
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- Bremerhaven, where I first touched the North Sea. That’s a pirate ship in the back but the pirates were all on vacation in the Caribbean.
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- My German girlfriend. She taught me how to count to 10 (in German). Her demeanor was so advanced that I wrote about her years later in a song.
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- Early morning train ride. Normal mental state.
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- Sometimes I try to be artistic in the bathrooms while on trains to Paris. Just kidding…I only did it once.
