series of tubes

These concrete drainage tubes converted into individual hotel rooms are certainly more comfy and less treacherous than the pipes that the Mario Brothers have to navigate. This installation in a city park in Bottrop certainly has the same arcade-feel, and booked-solid, operates on a small environmental footprint principle under a pay-as-you-wish scheme. This would be a fun twist on camping with a bit more space (2 meters in diameter and 2.6 meters long) and a few more amenities.

Diese Beton-kanalrohre wurde als Hotel Zimmern eingerichtet, und sie sind gewiss weitaus bequemer und weniger gefährlich als die Abenteuer des Super Mario. Die Anlage stehen im Park im Bottrop mit dem ähnlichen Videospiel-Stimmung ausgebucht ist. Das Park Hotel funktioniert nach dem geringstem Umwelteinfluss-Prinzip und sind Pay as You Wish. Nächtigen im Inneren des Rohr ist Camping mit einem industriell Twist.

built this city on rock-and-roll

Some clever software engineers several months back produced a faithful three-dimensional model, extruded with a homemade 3-D printer, of the Coliseum in Rome from an aggregate of holiday snap-shots found on a photo-sharing site from all sides and all angles. The computer processed and analyzed all this data autonomously, and I thought about this feat during our recent trip to Dresden. This tidy and automated routine can no way compare, however, to the rebuilding of the city's landmark Frauenkirche essentially from collective memories. Although putting the church back together again was not completed until 2006, it was symbolic and important for many as a gesture of reconciliation for divided Germany, like the peaceful rallies, Montagsdemonstrationen, at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig.

The church was not actually hit by a bomb, experts surmise, but rather imploded during the ensuing firestorm that heated the porous sandstone building material to a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius. Only the darker stones on the Frauenkirche are original, puzzled together from a pile of rubble that sat in place in the square for some six decades--the lighter-coloured material is new restoration.

Making whole all the baroque indulgences of Dresden, the Semper Opera House included, was a labour of love, remembering and piecing back together.  We passed by a memorial (Communist-style sculpture) to the Trümmerfrauen, teams that dug through the debris of war, salvaging what could be saved and unriddling remnants of a city that's once again glorious. I thought that this one had built this city on rock-and-roll.

dereliction

The US reached and surpassed its legal debt ceiling, before it was raised by Congress just before all money was obligated, back in mid-May, and extraordinary bookkeeping measures, creative accounting not far removed from the kind of shenanigans that led to the collapse of Enron and WorldCom and more recently, averted or deferred--Merrill-Lynch and Italy, were implanted to buy the government a little more time. Those extra weeks certainly were not devoted to serious contemplation and meditation. This paying Peter to rob Paul, was in part, financed by floating funds from the Thrift-Savings Plan (TSP) accounts of soldiers and government employees. Who's to say whether or not those retirement-nest-eggs were the first things made whole again, once the borrowing-limit was raised? That was no different than any other pension-raiding scheme. More so than any precedent that has coloured economics for good or bad through war, plague or invention, what I think we are seeing is not a failure in business but a crisis in governments. Avarice always dampens business-ventures, but globally governments have also been negligent in safeguarding treasure and creating, enforcing the regulatory framework that makes growth and meaningful employment sustainable. The job of governments is to protect its citizens from threats and promote equality of opportunity. Too much effort, however, is squandered in the name of safety from imagined but serviceable dangers and into cultivating the ideal consumer culture, instead of concentrating on ways, creative, dogged or just brute that makes people independent, self-sufficient and self-determined.

silhouette of saxon

We're taking a long weekend to visit the phoenix of Dresden. I am sure it will be a nice refrain to sustain the feeling of last weeks' travels, and there will be a lot to see and do. I am hoping also to have the chance to explore the surrounding countryside known as the Sächsische Schweiz with its gorges and colossal rock-formations. No bureaucracy or committee ever diminished or contributed to the aesthetic value of anything, however, with Dresden's Elbe Valley being only one of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Weltkulturerbe und Weltnaturerbe) to be defrocked because of the muncipality's decision to build an Autobahn bridge to close to the Altstadt, it seems obligatory to celebrate what's original and authentic about a place--any place. Though it was a committee which too made that choice that's turned more and more unpopular, that move also ensured that the entire area tries to make amends in terms of preservation and conservation. Character and charm can be restored while they are not something easily displaced with either awesome enmity or mundane zoning.