April 23 - Kimi's Studio and the Circus

We slept in a bit—not taking naps seemed to a require longer night’s sleep—but that was all right because we wanted to visit Kimi’s atelier and she was not free until 11 o’clock so we had plenty of time for breakfast. Breakfast was a good example of how everyday life in a foreign country kept serving up humorous if not occasionally bizarre incidents. On this morning Monika cooked two soft-boiled eggs for breakfast and put them on the table in the nice eggcups that are used in Germany. Up to that point nothing was unusual. But when I looked at the top of the eggs, one was marked “2 Be”, but the other one lacked any marks so that clearly made it “NOT 2 Be”. Since I had to choose one of these eggs to eat, that left me in the truly Shakespearean quandary of eating “2 Be or NOT 2 Be, that is the question!” When faced with those two eggs, I just broke up laughing. In retrospect, maybe you had to be there to appreciate this, but it was surely funny at the time. By the way, there are two acceptable methods for eating a soft-boiled egg in those egg cups. The first method is to slice off its top and use the egg spoons to eat each section separately. The second method is to use the spoon to beat the egg all around its sides until you can peel off the pieces of eggshell, and then eat the egg with the spoon. I tend to prefer the “off with his head!” method, not because I’m related to the Queen of Hearts or Monsieur Guillotine, but rather it is simply quicker and I’m usually in a hurry.

As usual, we listened to the radio while we ate, and the radio also provided intentional and occasionally unintentional humor. Today we heard a clip about the “Jack Nicholson Academy for Media” that was starting a new class in preparing people for the histrionic talk shows like the Jerry Springer show. We heard them supposedly teaching folks how to wail and cry effectively, and the announcer added that the school was particularly seeking folks who had been abducted by UFOs for future shows. If things got out of hand during the actual show, as was distinctly possible, the academy also offered free, anonymous transportation to South America for their graduates!

The radio also had more serious segments, of course. On of these concerned an expansion of the German apprenticeship system that the German Bundestag (Parliament) was considering. The basic problem is that there are not enough apprenticeship positions for the students coming out of the trade school track in the school system. The legislation under consideration would legally require every business with more than a small number of employees to have a certain percentage of positions as apprenticeship positions for these trade school students. The proposed solution shows a fundamental dedication to the apprentice model of education on the part of the German government. While that is laudable in one way, in another way it is adding further bureaucratic burdens to businesses that are already starting to export jobs overseas, and I saw it as counter-productive in that sense. Lufthansa, for example, complained that altho they were already training hundreds of pilots they would still have to create these new apprenticeship positions because the job of “airplane pilot” was not on the list of officially recognized apprenticeships!

I was fascinated that no one seemed to be questioning the basic model of apprenticeship learning in an economic climate where jobs and professions are apt to change quite quickly. Monika’s sense of the political dialog—it was way too subtle for me to understand—was that the political parties were essentially haggling over whether to have a law set the triggering conditions or rather leave it to the decision of the companies. But no one questioned the value the basic idea of specialized job training itself—the people in Germany feel that this model is working for the subset of students that do not continue on to college. In contrast, the U.S. trade school system is much less well organized and certainly not officially supported in the way it is in Germany. I think this may be an example of a cultural assumption where the politicians simply do not consider an alternative approach, in this case to the apprenticeship system, that is not functioning the way it should for some reason.

When it was finally time for us to be on our way, we took the S-Bahn system to the Reeperbahn (Rope walk) exit and headed over a couple of streets to the Grosse Freiheit (Great freedom) street where Kimi and Appelie, her dog, met us. The atelier itself was a big, white open room with a nice set of windows in one wall providing an abundance of natural light, which made it a good room to paint in, I think. Applelie is a big, fluffy, friendly dog with really soft hair who just loves to be petted, so we took turns doing that while we chatted about the family, German culture, Kim’s day job as a gardener, her real job as artist, and so forth. Kim also showed us some of her recent solo and collaborative art work, which was really interesting.

After a couple of hours Kim had to get back to the day job, but first we wandered down a couple of streets to a bagel shop for a quick and healthy lunch. Despite being an active, curious dog, Appelie was really good about not running out into the street, which would have been deadly in Hamburg traffic, and was also polite about running up to other people or dogs, sniffing them, but then coming along with Kimi when called. The Reeperbahn area of Hamburg is a true red light district with exotic dancers in nightclubs, erotic shops, and so forth. The nightclubs are probably brightly lit at night, but they certainly looked tawdry and tacky by daylight. Kim also showed us one area where the streetwalkers quite literally walk the streets, but she said that different areas seem to have different classes, ages, or subtypes of prostitutes. One big difference with the U.S. is that prostitution is legal in Germany and that gives the women legal supervision and protection that does not exist in the U.S. Since part of this legally required supervision is regular medical examinations, the customers are also a lot safer than in the U.S. Since what I have read about prostitution in the U.S. indicates most of the women lead abusive and often very short lives, I cannot understand why we don’t at least try this type of solution. It seems to me that prohibition of prostitution has been about as successful as the prohibition of alcohol back in the 1920s, so isn’t it maybe time to try a new approach?

We hopped on the S-Bahn to ride over to Dammtor and catch a matinee performance of a small, 1-ring circus that was set up in a field across the street from the S-Bahn station. We found out that our timing was perfect in that we arrived just before 3 and the afternoon show started at 3:30. This tent was the real thing, being held up by thick ropes tied to stakes pounded into the ground, and we joined the parents and children inside on the bleacher seats. We were only about 20 feet from the small ring, which gave us a great view once our eyes had adapted to the dark.

The acts were quite varied, ranging from acts carried out by children to sophisticated trapeze and tiger acts. The child acts were carried out by really young children, not much older than the ones in the audience, and I was impressed by that. In fact, one little girl fell off a pony galloping around the ring during their act. But the surface was ground covered by sawdust so she was OK, and after encouragement from her father she leaped back on the pony. The oldest child was an 8 or 9 year old boy who also had his own act where he balanced on top a large ball and edged it up a series of ramps—excellent balance and control from someone that young.

The trapeze artist was in this case a young, really well muscled woman. I’ve seen acts like this at the big 3-ring circuses, but it was really much more impressive when I saw it done up close. In one part of the act she was spinning around suspended only by a loop of rope around her neck, and seeing it up close made you wonder how she resisted the G-forces. I expect that she worked out with weights or something to build the supporting muscles for that act because most folks would have simply broken their necks!

The first horse act consisted mainly of horses running around the ring and then leaving the ring one at a time, and that rather quickly became boring, but at least they had their exercise for the day. A later act involved one of the horses balancing on a teeter-totter with a man and then another horse, and I thought that was far more impressive. I was hoping for the traditional bareback riding acts, but no such luck. I was also expecting the usual trained dog act, but instead, the kids helped direct a set of five goats perform tricks in the ring. The goats walked across ramps, jumped over a series of hoops, and walked up and down a kind of circular staircase. I wasn’t sure why they used goats, because I would think that they were more difficult to train than dogs, but maybe they looked more exotic to the customers.

We also saw some exotic animals in an attached tent during a break in the performance, including llamas and camels. The horses, ponies, and goats were also there, of course, all of them begging for a handout. A dog was guarding all of them including some lions and tigers in a cage, and he was taking his job very seriously indeed. I accidentally almost stepped on him once and his attention was so focused on those animals that he basically seemed to ignore me, the other adults, and the children crowding around trying to feed the animals.

The second half of the show featured some performances by those exotic animals. After quickly erecting a cage around the ring, they brought out four 8-week old lion cubs, and they were really cute. We both noticed how careful the trainer was to always feed them raw meat from the end of a stick but never from her hand. Her hand was used only for petting the animals and never for feeding them. When you think about it, that made perfect sense.

But the act that worried me the most was a 17-year-old boy who was acting as the trainer in a cage with four full-grown tigers. Tigers are by nature isolated hunters rather than pack or pride animals like lions, so they really don’t like being in a cage with each other. I think most tigers are also irascible and I was sometimes holding my breath about the young man in the cage, especially when one of the tigers clearly didn’t want to continue doing the act and was refusing his directions. It was the same tiger that got into a brief brawl with one of the others, so I guess he was just having a bad day, but you don’t really want to be in a cage with a killing machine who’s having a bad day! Fortunately, the young man got that one safely out of the cage and continued with the other three, but unlike Gunther Goebbel-Williams (who I saw performing many years back), I don’t think he was in complete control of the critters. I was worried enough about it to avoid taking any flash pictures for fear of upsetting the beasts, and when I start sacrificing my photographs you know I have to be worried.

After the show wrapped up, we took a bus over to the Rathaus and looked at booths representing the new and old European Union countries in the big square out in front. The Baltic States, Turkey, Slovenia, and even Ireland had booths in tents set up on the square. Many of the booths were selling ethnic foods, and the smells were deliciously tantalizing. Monika finally broke down and bought a glass of Beamish Irish Stout from the Ireland booth. I had a taste of that and we agreed that it was a lot like the Guinness stout we had on a tour around Britain a while back, which is to say, very strong and tasty.

Altho we were sorely tempted to eat some of the ethnic foods for dinner, it was really too cold to eat in a tent so we picked up travel literature from the Baltic States since we want to see them some day and took the S-Bahn back to Reinbek. When the bus let us off at Aldi’s, I popped in to buy some ridiculously cheap tomatoes (500 grams or 1 German pound for .39 Euro) and one of those 2-foot long cucumbers that weigh over a pound (also .39 Euro). The cucumber was called a “Holland” variety and all I know is that the skin was thin enough that I could just wash it and eat it like a really big carrot (think of a 2-foot long green carrot about 3 inches in diameter, if you can!). That and the usual hot hard rolls with meat and cheese constituted our dinner, but we were so late that our set of TV programs was already starting so we ate out in the front room while watching TV. For once there were no gruesome reports from Iraq, for which I was very thankful. In fact one TV segment showed a re-activated ballet school in Baghdad that was being run by a woman who had gone into exile during Saddam Hussein’s regime and returned last year. She even admitted she was Shiite, but she emphatically disagreed with the radicals and was trying to teach Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish boys and girls about western ballet. The kids seemed to enjoy it, and it was so nice to hear a “good news” story from Iraq for a change.

>In fact, the big news of the day was that Daimler-Chrysler was pulling out of Mitsubishi, which sent Daimler-Chrysler stocks up and Mitsubishi stocks plummeting. If I understood the wording correctly, Daimler-Chrysler will put no more money into Mitsubishi and has written off its past investment as a non-performing asset. This was, of course, just two weeks after the chairman of Daimler-Chrysler was really raked over the coals at the annual stockholder meeting for pouring money into both Chrysler and Mitsubishi, which are both currently losing money. Those were really irate stockholders, and you haven’t lived until you’ve been scolded by an irate German—they don’t pull their punches! Somehow I didn’t think it was a coincidence that he decided to shed Mitsubishi within days of that meeting and I wondered if Chrysler would be next.

Apparently the German Mercedes branch of Daimler-Chrysler is really competing well in the European and American markets and making money but they have been pouring those profits into Chrysler and Mitsubishi. The success of Mercedes did not surprise me because I observed many of their creative offerings on German roads including the 2-seat mini called the Smart car, a new sport coupe version of that, an imitation of the Toyota Land Cruiser, and commercial vehicles ranging from vans to busses. The Smart car is comfortable, nimble and easy to drive (I drove Detlef’s last year), has a wheel base short enough that it can even be parked sideways between parking spaces, can hold 120 kph on the Autobahn, and is extremely fuel efficient. That plus a reasonable price demonstrated to me, at least, that Mercedes could compete hard at the lower end of the market as well as the upper end of the market.