The Germans were thieves on a grand scale

The Germans of centuries ago – like most Europeans – were thieves on a grand scale and brought home vast boatloads of statuary and the like from Greece, Egypt and those countries which were the cradles of civilization.

I am discounting the Australian Aborigines who – while they started more than 40,000 years ago, were not in the business of carting large blocks of stone about the place. For starters it’s too bloody hot – and who is going to live in a stone house and move it every three months when you go Walkabout?

Also they would have had to use Uluru and that would have made a fine old mess of the tourist industry in the 20^th century.  They made much better use of their time – dressing up, singing and dancing  and making Boomerangs. A weapon that if is misses its prey comes back to you – how clever is that?  

I am telling you – it is too bloody hot to chase anything in Australia – that’s why the blokes just sit there drinking a cold beer and wait for the girls to come along.

 

I find it vaguely unsatisfying that almost every figure is missing a foot, an arm, a hand or even worse – a head. I find it even more unsatisfying that virtually every bust is missing an ear or a nose.

Now no grave robber is going to take an ear or a nose so the bloody things must have been there somewhere, I think this shows a lack of attention to detail. The archaeologists should have looked harder.  We now have thousands of busts that make their owners look like ancient boxers – men and women – with mashed noses and cauliflower ears.

Of course many of the men’s penises are missing but that’s often because religious nutters through the various ages of religious nutterdom decided that these were too scary to be seen so lopped them off. I am expecting this to start happening again in America soon.

We saw Nefertiti. The bust is 3,300 years old. She was a bit of a stunner but even she had ears that look like have been chewed by Sissi.

We are all very luck that Hitler was so bat shit crazy that he did not think of destroying all the stuff that was stored safely in tunnels in Germany and other places. He could easily have done this and it would have been lost forever.

Fortunately at a fairly early stage Adolf took complete control of the conduct of the war so shortened it by at least two years and in the process gave himself little time for anything else except dealing full time with the Fuckup Fairy and taking increasingly large amounts of drugs. 

I have had some anxious emails from people worried that Sarah Palin is going to run for President. Relax. She is not running. This is a just a Sarah Palin Brand Promo trip to increase her value to Fox and the Republican party and to enable her to sell more books.

There is so much more to do

We are not very good tourists in the sense that we do not cover a great deal of ground. Now Cate’s sister Liz and her husband Darryl work on the basis that if they leave a square meter of a city unexplored then they have wasted the trip.

They leave the hotel at dawn and return at dusk – and spend the evening planning their next day. Cate’s brother is also like this. But Cate’s brother is exceptional in that he knows what he is looking at – and remembers it. When you tell him that you went to see the Cathedral in Chartres he can tell you its entire history. It is terrifying.

Cate and I are usually the last one into the breakfast room in any hotel in which we stay and our first stop when we leave the hotel is the nearest café. And we do not leave that café until we know where the next one is.

You see – our idea of visiting a city is to immerse ourselves in the culture – not to skim over the surface looking at the peripherals like ordinary tourists. We find that cafés, bars and restaurants are the best place to do this immersion while we read the books about what we would like to see.

And we find that starting late means that we miss the early morning eager-beaver tourist rush and we have a more leisurely time with the late afternoon queues for museums – and the cafés are less crowded.

The great advantage of our method of visiting cities is that there is always more to see. When we go back to Berlin – for example – there is much to see because this time – as we rarely emerged from the hotel until about 2:00 PM – we actually saw very little – so vast tracts or Berlin lay before us unscathed.

And we will be back because it is – as I have said – quite wonderful.

It is very sophisticated and – at the same time – quite primitive. We saw in the Tiergarten a whole area dedicated to the exposure of naked bodies by gay male couples - and then we saw some horrid contraption called a beer-bike. This is something upon which drunken males ride along while drinking beer – and while shouting at young women.

There is worse. Having achieved a state at which they can no longer pedal they then move to a horse drawn dray where they can don a Bruno Costume – drink beer and shout at anything at all – I assume a Donkey would fill the need by this stage. It is amazing the hideous things that men can think of to do while they are drinking beer. 

Don't have a Vegemite cocktail

The hotel is not too bad at all. It is not really 5 star and Cate took some convincing that it was in fact in Berlin when she looked out the window – because it looks over the Tiergarten and there is nothing much to see except trees.

But Berlin is exceptionally beautiful. After the dual catastrophes of the war and Communism in East Berlin - Berlin has become a magnificent city of majestic avenues and buildings and parks and architecture that is a wonder to behold. It is the kind of city that Hitler envisaged – but achieved in a different sort of way. Albert Speer would have loved it.

Amazingly – some monuments and buildings were left un-pulverized. Nothing was left undamaged but some things escaped total pulverization – which is miraculous.

Simply because the bombing was so imprecise that a bomb aimed at a target was unlikely to land within a kilometer of it and could land up to 10 kilometers away. You would be surprised how many cows died.

So – given the number of bombs that were dropped on Berlin – I did not expect to find much at all – and was delighted to find some things – such as the Berliner Dom – beautifully restored – and the Siegessaule in the Tiergarten – which is untouched.

That these survived both the bombing and the stampede of the Russians into Berlin is nothing short of amazing and makes you realize that the Fuckup Fairy takes no sides and is apt to doze unexpectedly at any moment.

Anyway we have walked for bloody miles and seen many splendid things. We went to the Pergamon museum where they keep the things they stole from the Turks or the Babylonians or whoever. This is why there is no point in going to any of those countries. There is nothing there. It is all in European museums.

This afternoon we had a cocktail called a Nolet Julep. It is a Mint Julep with Licorice. It was Fucking Awful. It tasted like a Vegemite cocktail. It was Cate’s choice. She regrets her error.