Well I think I'm two weekends out of date by now so I'll try to hit highlights from both weeks though I'm sure I'll be leaving out all sorts of interesting things.
Last weekend our small troupe of RISE students in Darmstadt visited Köln(Cologne). The Köln train station is famous because it is built right next to the Dom, which is a huge Cathedral. It really pretty strange to walk out and see this massive intricate building stretching out in front of you. We looked around inside the Dom and paid 1 or 2 Euros to climb the thousands of stairs to the top of one of the spires. It's really impossible to fathom the effort put into building this sort of building. You look at it and either see a big building, which is impressive, but not huge by todays standards or you look at some small section of detail and see a lot in this small space, but lose sight of the fact that the whole building is full of such detail.
It a really impressive building, but walking through the inside, I kind of felt like I could understand why Martin Luther and others in his day saw a need for a reformation. I thing the building has been a sort of tourist attraction ever since it was built. It would be difficult to actually worship God in this place that was ostensibly build for that purpose. I had a brief conversation with one of my companions about how the place seemed built to impress people into believing in Christianity. Sort of like a, "wow, we should believe what they believe because they build massive temples!". which may sound simple to us when described that way, but really reflects a pretty common way we think; we want to follow a God that makes us look powerful.
I know that there is some good intentions that might go into building such a cathedral. With the right approach I think it could be a good reminder of how God IS a lot bigger than we are and that there is value in doing things just to praise Him. But that wasn't the feel of this place.
Annother funny thing was that weekend was "Church day" in Cologne so there were all sorts Christian events and meetings going on in the City center especially around the Dom. This group was obviously more of a protestant tradition or more of a "hip" modern efforts. They all seemed to have these orange bandanas and some of them had uniforms, it reminded me of AWANA in the US in some ways. Our group was generally annoyed by the gatherings though. Now, there's at least one member of our group that just has a chip on his shoulder about all things Christian, so I'm not suprised by his negative reaction to the meetings outright, but I also felt a bit uncomfortable about the events. There was mostly a lot of loud music, most notably some ear-shattering beatboxing, and a sermon or two. This whole thing struck me as Christians trying too hard to be "fun" and "hip". Now granted any sort of big event tends to have annoying music and such for people who aren't there for the event, but still it didn't strike me as much of a witness to non-Christians in Köln.
Anyway, we had a pretty good time in Köln: we visited a Chocolate museum, walked through this park that forms a belt around the whole city, had some tasty crepes, tried this pretty tasty drink called a Donerkeil (tastes sort of like licorice and cinnamon) that is apparently only found in Cologne and generally had fun being tourists. It's actually really funny, but visiting a place famous makes it a lot smaller in my mind. Cologne seems like one of those must see European cities before the visit, but after you've walked through the city for a day or two, it's a much more real place, just like any other city. Still interesting and worth visiting, but no longer so mysterious.
The week following the trip has been pretty uneventful. I have started to do some really work with the wireless sensors, mostly in preparing a small game of "Whac-A_Mole" with a laser pointer as the hammer and the Tmotes (our wireless sensors) as the moles for a demo this Saturday. The one motes would lite up an LED for each player (up to 3 players), the players then shoot their respective moles with the laser to score points, difficulty is increased by decreasing the time that the LED is on.
On Friday, Da-RISE folks meet up again to go to the "Schlosskeller"(Literally in the old basement of the castle.) because someone had seen a sign for this "latin-funk-jazz" group that was playing there. The entrance was 3 Euro, but couls have been atleast 5times that. The group called, Mann-mit-hut, was amazing; they played some really excellent tunes, the drummer and the keyboardist were really incredable to watch/hear. We stayed from ~10pm until 2am listening to their music. It was really great stuff. I wrote down the website: www.mann-mit-hut.net, but unfortunately, they don't have any sort of recordings. They do have a schedule online though so if you're going to Germany anytime soon, I'd take a look at it.
Most of the day Satuday was spend back at the office for the Electrical Engineering department open house. (Apparently TU Darmstadt is the worlds oldest EE dept. at 125 years old? maybe it's just Germany's oldest, impressive nonetheless.) It was actually a pretty good time even though I had to be there on a Saturday. It was a neat to get a chance to get to know some of the people in the dept better than just a brief introduction. There was also food provided for lunch and hanging out briefly soda in hand after cleaning up; it's always a good feeling to hang around with people after cleaning up form a successful event. You feel like you've accomplished something together.
After that, some of us went over to a party at Troje's house (Another co-worker). It was a tasty BBQ and I had a pretty good time, though it was a little awkward not to know more than one or two people and everyone was probably ~10 years older than me. Still one thing I'm learning here is how to just live with situations where I don't know exactly what to say or do. I kind of just sat down, had some halting conversations on German about what I'm up to here and listened a lot. People are actually pretty willing to accept you in their casual social groups it seems if you're polite and friendly; being ein Auslander (a foreigner) helps generate sympathy for lack of social grace and provides an easy topic of conversation. I actually started to feel pretty at home there. Troje even sent me home with some meat from the grill, which is what I ate for lunch today. :)
Parag and I walked back into the city after leaving the party since we live in the same direction and we had a pretty neat conversation about world politics, economics and globalization (Parag is from India), and ethics in engineering. It was a good conversation for a long walk.
Since I've already filled a lot of space, I'm not going to comment on all my photos from Frankfurt and Cologne, but you can find all the photos I've posted so far at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mjeffryes/Darmstadt
http://picasaweb.google.com/mjeffryes/Frankfurt
http://picasaweb.google.com/mjeffryes/Cologne
Thanks for tuning in to this weeks edition of "Adventures in Germany". Tune in again next time same time(sort of), same URL.
1 comments:
As to the value of cathedrals, I think a lot depends on your point of view. I found the catherdral at Koeln and the other cathedrals I wandered through in London places where I could worship quite easily, though I was often aware that the majority of those around me weren't taking them that way. Maybe I'm just a visual person or a silly artist or some such, but it saddens me that the reformation seems to have rejected visual worship completely. Just because something is seen does not mean it is not worshipful or done just for show. We have no problem with elaborate musical styles of worship, and yet seem stuck within Luther's whitewashed walls when it comes to visual arts. The creation of such buildings was itself an act of worship (probably not for every peasant who dedicated their lives to the building, yes, but who are we to say that *all* of the builders did it for their own glory?), and they were built to glorify God and reflect His awesomeness and majesty. If there is a tragedy here, it is that they are no longer seen in such a way. The crowds that wander through are not there to worship God, but to see a big, historical building. They see the church as a big, historical entity that used to be tied up in big, historical socio-economic machinations of various sorts. The church was not and is not perfect, and there were and are doubtless many members of it who do "worshipful" things for their own glory, but I hope that we were not, and are not, entirely perverse.
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