Tschörmany, also

Continuing my Ryanair-sponsored getaway-spree through Europe, I landed in the heart of Bremen.

Bremen strikes me as the greenest city I've ever been in. Polysemic greenness. They're big on trams. They're huge on bikes. They're monumental on parks. I've never seen so much greenness together. The Bürgerpark is perhaps the prettiest and greenest area I've seen in any city so far. It's so green it upsets your colour balance. You walk out of it and everything looks red and blue in comparison.


There is one thing people go to Bremen for: to take their picture with the statue of the musicians (though in the story they never actually make it to the city). I did that too. On a very different note, there's some important aviation/aerospace industry around the city, clustered around the airport and the university. Bremen is also home to the beer I most hate in the world: Becks.



I don't have that much more to comment on the places, but travelling is always full of anecdotes, so I'll give you a few of them.

Here's one: while enjoying an idyllic afternoon in one of the endless parks in Bremen, listening to an old accordion played by an old man, I saw a rape scene. Three males run after a female. They grab her by the back of her head and all together they pin her to the ground. They jump on her and penetrate her one by one, fighting over supremacy. It's ducks I'm talking about.

The female has 4 baby ducklings of most terminal cuteness, who run around clumsily, bobbing and clustering, not knowing what to do. Their mother runs away, and so they find a foster mother in a doormat-dog on a leash. They all run after it and cluster around it and chirp their filial love. The poor dog is utterly confused by this and doesn't know what to do. At this point the people passing by decide to intervene, and like an organized team they chase away the 3 rapist ducks, pick up the ducklings and take them to their mother. Everybody feels good and useful, and there is some heart-warming bonding between absolute strangers. The female duck swims with her ducklings to the other side of the lake, where, upon arrival, she gets raped again.

Here's another: the very kind lady who housed me in Bremerhaven (Tobias' aunt) was determined to put an extra 5 kg on my frame before I left. Though my German is rubbish, I could quite get what she was saying, as the word "essen" (food/to eat) featured predominantly in most of her sentences.

"Blah blah essen blah blah essen blah essen. Blah blah essen?"
"Oh no, I'm full, thank you very much"
"Blah blah essen essen essen blah!"

We cycled in Bremerhaven on borrowed bikes. If they're free, they're good. I, as per use, got a contraption of exotic wobbliness and exquisite rustiness. It was, ahem, wobblier by the time I gave it back. I also got a bit of a suntan and sharp pain all over my body. Great fun.



I went to Hamburg for a day and a bit. I took the only existing coach service between these two neighbouring cities: the Ryanair bus2fly (don't get me started on coach travel in Germany and railway fares, I feel foam coming out of my mouth already). The driver was an old man with a white shoe-brush moustache, who appeared to be in his 9th month of pregnancy. I asked him if I could get on. He didn't answer. I got on and handed him my ticket. He took it, sat there looking through it for a full minute, then all of a sudden banged his fist on the steering wheel and yelled "Scheiße!!!" (shit!). He handed me my ticket back. I asked, "everything ok?". He seemed to suddenly realize I was there, looked at me in surprise and nodded. Tic-tic-tic, ils sont fous, ces Goths.

There are some cute sights to see in Bremen & Bremerhaven, but after one day their touristic appeal is utterly dead. They look like nice quiet places to live, but boring as hell. Even the Universität Bremen seemed to elicit as much fun as an empty packet of crisps. Except for the tower. The tower can be had fun with:


Hamburg, on the other hand, though I couldn't see much of it, did tickle my curiosity enough to make me want to visit again. Big & bustling, night-life, ferries up and down the river. My kind of place. Darn, I wish I'd had time to visit the red light district...

Both in Bremerhaven and Hamburg I spent an impossibly long time watching enormous cargo ships docking, undocking and going through locks, loading and unloading containers. Not exactly your standard tourist attraction, I'll grant you, but I myself found entertainment aplenty in watching containers being loaded and unloaded. The novelty of it somehow made it very appealing.

Seventeen days, one hellish essay, one visit to Spain and many beers later, two Ryanair one-pounders took me all the way to Frankfurt. Well, not really. Not all the way. More like all the way to fuck-knows-where, smack in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, an area of amazing lush greenness, smooth hills, canopied riverbeds, fields of radioactive yellow and cute small towns. Frankfurt-Hahn airport, that is. It happens to be much closer to Luxembourg.




For the "financial capital" you expect, Frankfurt is remarkably cute and a surprisingly interesting place to visit, even if just for the day and to take in the architecture and go up a skyscraper for some sights. Who would've thought?


I got the sights, the photos, the beers and definitely the sausages. This wraps it up for Tschörmany for now. But I vill be bakkh, also.