A Familiar Face!

FVR haunting me across the oceans.

I was walking with my disoriented omelet-brain and I stumbled into a Frankfurt gallery and "bumped into" our former president Fidel V. Ramos.

After days of meeting many people who did not even know where the Philippines was, I was pretty amused by the sight of him. The portrait was on an easel, and the jars of paint beside it indicated it being in the process of completion, but you never know when people do stuff for effect.

No one was around, so I put on "Disko Partizani" and danced a little while browsing the rest of the artwork. I briefly contemplated some kind of robbery, but everything was just so big.


From some EU exhibition at the same gallery. Above is a bull painting and below are dancing little cubist people individually cut from some kind of metal.

I remember neither the artists' names nor the gallery's name. But I think this one was along Kaiserstrasse.

A Little Bit of America in Alemanya

Germany is the most Americanized European country I've ever been to. I held this as a faint idea two years ago, but now I am without doubt.

From the popularity of McDonald's, to the explosion of both hip-hop and emo/hipster pop culture, to the amount of cars roaming the cities, to the use of common kano idioms... there is a kind of familiarity that makes it easier yet a little less enchanting to travel around Germany. (Note that "enchantment" while travel is, however, overrated.)

Obviously, it still has more in common politically and linguistically with its neighbors. But this is the kind of thing that endless mountains of wurst cannot hide.


OMG Shopping Queen!

And hey, what do you know, there is a book about this whole phenomenon. Maybe the cultural invasion has its roots in the Americanization of the West Side of the Wall? Maybe the Wall intensified the aspirational pull of a drastically different model of living. I don't know.

Coming from a thoroughly Yanquified country myself, I find it interesting (yet frustrating) to always have this lens over my everyday perception of popular culture. It is painful because I consider American mainstream media to be of revolting quality, and I have a special discomfort with the ease with which it has exported itself. It sure doesn't make us less awesome as people, but it's a challenge and is something to think (and do something) about.


West Side of the Berlin Wallz yo

Something of a Misadventure

Traveling light with the 80s blue duffel bag and arnis sticks.

After being through backpacking hell and high water (e.g. sleeping on freezing park benches and in other public places) you develop a certain kind of traveling hubris when it comes to "winging it". Although the map said that the house was just "a few steps" from the bus stop, I was still at the airport, and it was getting late.

Frankfurt Airport is no joke. It is big, with several terminals. I tried to use the phone and dialed "Information", but the guy told me that he had nothing to say about trains. And so I looked for the Deutsch Bahn office, where they sold me a ticket (53 € from Frankfurt to Bonn!) with German details, and told me that my train leaves in five minutes.

This is an alternate universe where things are always on time, so I ran, asked searched for the right platform, hopped on the ICE train (a high speed baby which "enjoys highest reputation"), then I dozed off in my seat. Luckily, not before asking the man beside me if I was on the right train to Bonn Siegburg.

"Attention please, we are in Bonn Siegburg". It was not the train announcement speaking, but the man beside me, as he poked me awake. I said "Danke" and got off, and went down the escalator to the tram station, bought a random ticket on the machine (they never check anyway), and rode to Bonn Hauptbahnhof (very useful word, it means central station).


German, German, German girls, waiting for a late night tram.

From here I took a bus (only after a policeman told me my map was wrong and tried to get me to take another tram). The driver couldn't speak English and let me on for free, and sent me off at the Annaberger Street stop with well wishes.

"A few steps away" from the bus stop turned out to be, initially, fifteen minutes past small-town shops, a school, and empty phone booths.


Oh the sturdy look to this indigenous phone booth! Doesn't it make you want to call someone... anyone.

Luckily, I came across Sebastian, a friendly stranger. Even more luckily, he happened to rent a room in the house I was going to, and (damn I am lucky) he let me put my bag on his stroller. That sounds dirty, but I mean it quite literally, as you will see below. Haus Annaberg was actually another thirty minutes from where I was. And it was inside a forest!


Sebastian is bananas, though he prevented me from having a really good story to tell.

I never would have figured that out. I would have plopped down in exhaustion by the side of the road (serious). I am glad I didn't, though, as temps dropped to freezing after a few hours.

I arrived before my hosts, who drove in a van from Berlin. I could only laugh at my lack of due diligence. It is my fault, it is always my fault. Sometimes I think I do it on purpose.

Wie Ghets, Dairy Deutschland?

Potato and cauliflower creamy soup with bread.

It's not easy being my tummy in Germany. Although the food is delicious, it usually entails a whole lot of cheese, bread, cream, and an endless array of white sauces. Whenever I travel to a dairy-eating country, I try to eat cultured food for the first few days, as I am mostly vegan. I mean stuff like yogurt or buttermilk to colonize my stomach with local milk-digesting bacteria.

These "vacations" from my native food are not easy. Almost every day of my life back home, I eat rice and lowland vegetables (warm weather stuff! not cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.). And so when I begin to eat heavy stuff, my stomach sometimes stirs and cries out like a wounded/mating large mammal.

Nevertheless, it's all worth it. What a drag travel would be if we could not dialogue with cultures and landscapes through food!


A breakfast of various fruit, bread, jam, and hazelnut spread. Germany was created by God to spread the hazelnut gospel throughout the world. I didn't eat the egg.

I'll blog about these more in the coming days. I think for now I should be a grown-up and unpack, and sort my mind out. And yes, I've also started to caption my photos.