cassis

Though not persuaded to go out and “taste the rainbow” and draw the comparison myself, I found it pretty interesting to learn that whereas purple coloured candies and drinks for American palettes might be conditioned to expect a grape taste (natural and artificial flavouring), for Europe and elsewhere, purple signals blackcurrant, as Atlas Obscura informs.
Although I had only ever heard of it as a fancy infusion for imported vodka, I think they are delicious—I might be a bit partial since it is called (Schwarze) Johannisbeere in Germany—and are kind of a super-food. The shrubs were kept out of the Americas for a long time because it was thought that they carried botanical disease agents, but the moratorium is being relaxed because there’s little scientific evidence of this correlation. “Grape-Drank” might no longer be the default for those in the States.

fahrradtour: baderland

H and I took a little bike trip from Bad Karma, our fair city, through Bad Kissingen to Bad Bocklet to have a drink and rest for a minute before heading back in the twelfth century palace, Schloss Aschach.
Biking along the flood plain of the Fränkische Saale, a tributary of the River Main, we got to see Bad Kissingen from a new point of view and saw sites that we didn’t know where there, like a regional airport, mainly for hobby-gliders, and this fascinating Salien, a saltern—that is an installation constructed for extracting salt by evaporation, and has been in operation since before the year 800.
It was a pleasant day and not too hot but the blast of cool, salty air emanating from the was more amazing than the best, optimised air-conditioning system.
A bit further on, we passed the bore-fountain (Bohrbrunnen) called Luitpoldsprudel. Named after the Bavarian Prince-Regent of the early 1900s, it produced naturally carbonated water (Sprudel) for decades.

open-house

As part of a European-wide Heritage Days, this weekend in Germany marks der Tag des offenen Denkmals (Day of Open Monuments), when historic attractions which are not normally open for public inspection (due to lack of funds, etc.) are made accessible and often special exhibitions and excursions are included. Sometimes parts of museums and great houses usually off limits are open as well and is also a vehicle to highlight and promote little known histories. If you are out and about this weekend, be sure to pay special heed to local lore to support this movement and the conservation of heritage.

colossus and curio

After reading about Iowa County Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, a sprawling labyrinthine campus of connected wings built in the late 1940s by an eccentric collector to house an expansive and random collection of artefacts (whose provenance and authenticity could not always be vouched for, so there are no more labels or signs)—which includes the world’s largest indoor merry-go-round, an “infinity room” that juts off the edge of the cliff it’s perched on, a mock Victorian street, wax-figures, elaborate Glockenspiel and other musical automatons, besides displays of historic dresses, chandeliers and Santa Claus figurines, I was reminded of the time we visited the Colossus of Prora on Germany’s Baltic coast and spent a day in its museum.

The four and a half kilometer long compound hugging the beach was to be a monumental retreat for Nazi party members and service-members on shore-leave, a resort with accommodations for twenty thousand and available to all at nominal prices—but was never completed and abandoned.

The East Germany army had used a small portion of the building up until Reunification, when it was wholly deserted. When we visited, one could wander the neglected and graffiti-spattered but sturdy corridors freely, and there was only one central column that was put to any use at all, hosting a youth hostel and a museum, curated by a local family.
Being that Seebad Prora has been refurbished and sold off as luxury condominiums, I doubt the museum with its random exhibits of taxidermy, mock-ups of East German Command and Control and the typical resort room plus the typical East German living-room, geology, motorcycles, grade-three’s artwork, some exhibits defying explanation, a lot of Ostalgie and a Viennese café are there any longer.

It does make me sad to think that there was no room for someone as passionate about history (and wanted to make sure that that place and those times did not fall into total obscurity) as the individual who commissioned the House on the Rock above—and despite the chaos, I do remember that every item was well researched and documented—but maybe all these artefacts got to stay together, somewhere.  That rugged and quiet beach is probably again off-limits to the all-comers as well.

Here are all the images of Prora that I could find from our visit and exploration back in the summer of 2010.  One ought to really visit such places when one has the chance, since one can never say if it will always be accessible to the curious public.

kitsch and clowder

Thanks to Poseidon’s Underworld, a blog dedicated to unearthing forgotten cinematic kitsch, we learn about an obscure but star-studded production of a movie called “The Phynx” by Warner Brothers and the Seven Arts, released to only a few venues in 1970.
It sounds wonderfully dreadful and has an equally byzantine storyline (that’s sort of derivative, hoping to maybe capture some the success that operatic productions like the Beatles’ “Help” found with audiences a few years earlier) that seems to be a light-hearted indictment against Communist Albania, who seems to be systematically kidnapping America’s national treasures in order to lower morale in the West and claim them as part of their own culture. Colonel Sanders is abducted and forced to cook for the Albanian First Lady—Marla Gibbs, Butterfly McQueen and countless other personalities are being disappeared as well and pressed into service as celebrities behind the Iron Curtain.
America’s intelligence agencies meet but are unable to agree jurisdictionally how to proceed, previous efforts to infiltrate the country having failed, and so turn to a “super-computer” called MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps Americans) for advice. MOTHA suggests quite sensibly that they form a boy-band—the eponymous Phynx—whose members are also trained in the arts of espionage, to take Albania and the whole of the Communist Bloc by storm and liberate their captured compatriots. This looks wacky and deranged but I think just for the sheer number of cameo appearances (the actors and/or their roles of the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, singer James Brown, Charo!, choreographer Busby Berkley and Charlie McCarthy—not the leader of the Communist witch-hunt but rather the ventriloquist dummy), the animated interstitials and musical interludes, it might be worthwhile viewing.