6 july 2005

Im sitting across from Talley in a six-seat coach of a train heading east; the German couple sharing our car is reading and Talley is adjusting her cd player and I am sipping a tall brown bottle of Heffeweisen and staring absently at Isabel Allende.

Talley and I met up as planned and found the apartment of Dorte, a German woman I met online. Dorte and her boyfriend Frank took us to dinner at a cozy warm cafe nearby with a whole menu of pfiferlingen, the chantarelles now in season.

Dorte had a busy weekend planned so she left us keys to her place and a big city map. Traveling gives me hope in people.

Sunday morning our plans to visit the Chocolate Museum were abandoned when we walked into the middle of Colognes gay pride parade. For the next few hours we ate street food and danced to ABBA and Queen.

Monday morning we decided to head to Landscapepark Duisburg Noord, an immense smelting-plant-turned-public-recreation-area that gets landscape architect dorks like ourselves all flustered with excitement. Our breakfast with Dorte, however, stretched into an extended Q-n-A session about German politics and culture, so what was left of the afternoon we spent book shopping and sitting in a coffee shop where I outlined the next four weeks of my trip.

Out: Slovenia, which it turns out is really just like Austria despite the American tendency to lump it in with Eastern Europe since its name vaguely resembles Slovakia.

In: Bosnia and Heryegovina, Serbia, maybe Montenegro.

So. Today we finally got to Duisburg and the park, a wonder of towering climbable metalworks and concrete bunker gardens. Hooray.

We then realized that this park, in fact, was so cool that it was maybe the only thing we really wanted to see in Germany. So tonight at 10:39 we got on a train to Prague.