dubious.biz(ness)

So I have kept a travel diary since my first trip overseas (to London) and I figured since I’m not able to tweet as I thought I would, I would compose a little blog post, in the notebook and type it up. I am honestly not a video man, I should stick to what I’m good at, namely letters and pictures, but the video thing has been fun to try out and if I have a slightly more snazzy camera maybe more is possible (though it’s amazing what I can do with that little number).

Anyway here it is:

Regensburg is a time capsule of a city, a quasi-authentic modernisation of a city which tries to be all times at once like a Disneyland version of Barvarian history. Such a set piece which can be called “well-preserved” and simultaneously false is like a memory of a happy time, and while the place itself may be false the people seem caught in an eternal moment of nostalgia.

I am in a square at a cafe, one which serves the sort of insurmountable ice cream that only a German mind could conceive of and only German hands execute. Around me are trophy cups of eis overflowing with fresh fruit, candy, cream, and chocolates all inserted in to perfectly round unmelting spheres of soft ice cream. It is like a childhood fantasy come true and fits perfectly with the rest of Regensburg.

At some unseen corner of the square an accordion plays. People continually pass through, it is the type of square (the types being many) in which people walk straight down the center, passing through the lowermost point on display before turning down their destination street. The center teems with so much traffic that it is often gridlocked, but the square is not of square shape and this forms turning lanes and exit ramps.

The sun shines down on the square until 7pm this evening, when the shadows cast by the Rathaus grow long enough to shade the whole square, seemingly at once like a shutter.

A boz plays with the fountain, squeezing it into a jet to spray his mother, she smiles and beckons him away.

In front of me, consuming a smaller eis is a beautiful girl who exhibits all the marks of an Italian, in the legs at least. Most German girls seem to have the sort of legs a running back would dream of, fatless hunks of muscle slabbed on top of each other in thick layers. This appears to be the case irrespective of their overall build and as many cross the square in chattering lines I imagine one of them taking a mark and grabbing a pass.

For furniture the square has stacks of bicycles, 5 trees, and a small squadron of pigeons and sparrows. These birds appear as peaceful as the rest of the inhabitants, respectfully obeying the traffic laws governing pedestrians and best of all not lazing siege on ice cream drippings under cafe tables.

The Rathaus, or city hall, is stuccoed like most German buildings and covered in windows which are themselves covered by elaborate iron gratings. They run at diagonals and at some places one can see stars of david formed by their intersections.

Where there is no moulding, Germans are happy to paint it on but in a tasteful way, not the “false sky” style of building-painting that one finds at Caesar’s Palace but rather a coexistence of clean lines of the flat stuccoed walls combined with some ornamentation to break the monotony. So these windows are painted with Classical Grecian moulding and arches. The shadows fall eastward, making it likely confusing in the morning. Each sill is filled with purple flowers save the center ones.

There has been no more humorous sight in the square thus far than that of a hulking balding man pounding through the square wearing a shirt reading “Deustchland Deustchland Deustchland” in the national colors, hunched over a chocolate ice cream cone.

But the sun is going down and the air is a little too cold now. My beer glass is empty as is my mind, and so it is time to move on from the cafe table down the narrow alleyways to encounter more living ghosts of Regensburg.