Gray, Empty and Beautiful

Day two: Morning view from my hotel room. Welcome to Baden Badden:


On the third day, a warm fog dropped down on Baden... It was beautiful and reminded me of that New England grey light that filled the reck-rooms of my childhood.


We went for a drive to pick up some parts at a scale model factory near by. Baden is near the border of France. Here is an image of the town and a peek at the boarder...


It's funny how the grey light slows down the eye on a scale model as well...



This field was a beautiful moment on our journey:


This is a blight that grows on trees here. They're called "missals" and are carried by birds. They sometimes produce white or red berries that the birds will eat and carry to other tries. It is an old tradition here to take a piece of one of these parasites and use them for decoration in the winter months. It is also tradition that if you are near one of these decorative sprigs with a loved one, you are supposed to kiss each other. They call these sprigs a "toes," which gives them the common name of "missal toe."

Robotic Swiss Video Drone

So I have decided to do a web log of this trip to Germany after the botched France trip blog went down in smoke... (Click here to see a few pictures from the France trip)

However, my laptop is broken that the screen is almost entirely black. I may or may not publish these during the trip.

Either way: I am in Baden Baden Germany. Famous as a spa town since Roman days. I imagine it's a bit tamer now...

I'm her helping set up an exhibition of works by Dirk Skreber, an artist whom I have been fabricating for over the past few months and may continue working with.

To start, I am amazed I was able to make ti to the plane. I was in a huge rush to finish a GIANT closet in my new tenants room. HUGE thanks to Dawn who helped me day in and out getting ready for this trip!

I arrived in Zurich at 8-am local time which I had attempted to adjust to by going to sleep around 6 p.m. in the states for a spell (a plan which failed...) but I feel better adjusted than usual (that is I don't feel suicidally exhausted. [I remember the first time I came to Germany; the lag was so bad I could not hear music without weeping...])

Every time I am in Switzerland I am struck by the clean hyper efficient setup of the whole place: the slow moving, power savvy escalators that accelerate when you approach. By how the airport had been designed to absorb sound so as to create a calm 'Swiss' feeling for passers-through. This was accentuated by the pastoral sounds piped into the air tram, synced with the video billboards that flickered in the dark train tunnel at a precise rate to allowing an idyllic image of Heidi to blow you a kiss as you sped away... And when one steps off the train, an enormous display of led lights, arranged in a densely packed cube of points which produced soft amber movement in space, something like digital rain...

An elderly couple gave me their all Switzerland train pass so I was off to Germany. On the train I was still a bit surprised at how openly people drank. (Driving in Germany, of course your passengers can drink in the car... heck, even you can. You just can't be 'too drunk' to drive.) I found out later that it is actually not normal for people to get ripped on the train, drinking strait from their jumbo bottle of wine without a glass at 11 am. but the gentleman across the train looked so natural I just rolled with it.

In Baden Baden, I found out taxis cost .10 euro a second!

The hotel is much nicer than I thought it might be:



Here's my view from breakfast:



The town is quaint for certain. The people must have been brushing up on their english speaking skills when they heard that thousands of monied English speaking people would be coming here every day. The best description of Baden Baden I have heard was that this is a grandma's spa and casino town. Not exactly, but it sure is sleepy and beautiful.

I am looking forward to a delightful little time and some welcome down time. I'm also planning a little skiing trek in the Alps.