Lauri strike The Pose outside of the high-speed train that'd just taken us under the English Channel.
Today was a travel day. Sort of a day of rest. Somehow it doesn’t always feel that way. Barbara put it well by saying that
travel days were a lot of sitting down for several hours, broken by short,exhausting, crazy bursts of running. “Oh no, the train’s just changed from track 12 to track 14″…zoom! I do love the long train trips though: the scenery, the leg room, and often the chance to meet people from other walks and have some cool conversations. One of the first chance meetings was at the station in Brussels where we changed from one high-speed train to the next. Who did we meet? A lady who’d played flute in the Fresno Philharmonic, and her daughter who’d graduated from Hoover High School just two years before me. Crazy, eh? On the train itself, we had a great mixed-up multi-lingual-multi-person conversation going. That started because we said hello to a young woman who turned out to be a Russian who had just learned German. So, with Lauri’s bit o’ Russian, and my bit o’ German, the comedy began. Across from us was a Frenchman from Burgundy. Lauri pulled him into the conversation when she saw him trying not to laugh too obviously at something I’d said in my halting German. ["Your hovercraft is full of eels."?] He (of course) spoke a few words of Russian as well as French and English. Then it was only a matter of time ’til we pulled in the German lady next to him. Crazy, but cool.
When we got into Dusseldorf we finally got to make the in-the-flesh acquaintance of our host for the last leg of our tour, the Irishman turned German businessman/pub proprietor Stephen Leech whom we’d met via our long-time internet radio friend Mike Lidskin (no surprise there, Mike being not just the curator of his weekly radio show, but also the curator/matchmaker of musical friends. Check him on Saturday afternoons at www.twirlradio.com and at KUBU 96.5fm if you’re in the Sacramento area. I’m listening as I type!) Stephen got us safely onto a train that took us to the smaller, nearby town of Hilden where we would be staying for the next few days. And here’s a good enough spot to say, that if you’re ever in the Dusseldorf area, find Stephen at his place: The Irish Pub . We can’t thank him enough. All I can say, is that we will try our best to spoil him when he and his come to California.
Afterwards, some of us crashed at the hotel, and some of us couldn’t resist a late-night exploring of Dusseldorf.
and sometimes one does need a special tag: “things are a little bit different in Germany”…a slightly surreal Brothers Grimm spirit and style that sometimes shows through:
the (should be) world-famous Nutella Nipple of Dusseldorf
