Saturday Sightseeing in the Rain

Holy crap, am I making a blog post about something that happened less than two weeks ago!!??  Yep, turns out my desire to procrastinate on lesson planning means that I instead choose to tell you what all it was I got up to yesterday.  As you know, I'd had yet to get out an experience any of Kassel's sites beyond that of the beautiful Bergpark, so on Saturday I was determined to call up my backpacker's heart and spend the day tromping around museums and churches.

After a lazy morning, I did indeed pack up a bag and head downtown, despite the grey and cold weather.  Pretty much the minute I stepped off the tram, it started to pour.  Typical.  Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first nor the last time I would go sightseeing in the rain.  I swung through the Brüder Grimm Platz.  The Grimm Brothers weren't born here, but they compiled their first compendium of fairytales while in Kassel, Kinder- und Hausmärchen.  As in all cases where a particular town or region might not have terrifically much else to recommend it, Kassel really loves the Brothers Grimm.  Which is why I was rather surprised the other week when I first came upon the surprisingly meek and tiny statue of the two brothers at the aptly-named (but also tiny) Brüder Grimm Platz.

In perusing my Kassel maps and guidebook, one of the things that had stood out to me was the Museum for Sepulchral Culture.  A welcomed respite from your standard art and history museums, I was really excited to peruse the works in a museum that proposed to focus on "the culture of death, dying, burial, and mourning."

Well.  What a freaking letdown this place was.  I was hardly expecting something along the same lines as the Capuchin Monk Bone Art (see Rome post), but all the same.  First of all, it is incredibly small.  Furthermore, all the captions and descriptions are only in German, which I realize is my problem rather than that of the museum's, but it certainly did nothing to enhance my experience.  Lastly and most importantly, there just isn't very much there.  A few transplanted gravestones and urns.  A couple hearse-carriages.  A few coffins, modern and antique.  One glass cabinet with mannequins wearing mourning clothes that looked to be Victorian.  And some other stuff, but there was nothing edgy or different or weird or even terribly interesting.  There was a little bit of modern art that dealt with the question of death, but only one or two pieces of mention.  I'm not sure exactly what I had been expecting, but this was not it.  I would have been extremely frustrated if I had forked over the 6 euro admission on a backpacking budget.  Even walking through the entire ground floor two times, I was done in less than half an hour.  Big letdown.  Unless they have some sort of Free Museum Day, you really can go and spend that 6 euro on beer with a clear conscience.

Antique coffins

When I came back up to the entry level, the woman at the ticket counter had found a small flyer for me that did explain some of the exhibits in English.  I thought that was extremely nice of her, but I'd been just too damn underwhelmed to take the flyer back downstairs and walk through a third time.  Oh well.  I brought it home, and suppose it will make some some good light reading one night.

After the Museum for Sepulchral Culture, I found my way through the rain to the Neue Gallery, that was supposed to house a good collection of modern art.  The main level has late Renaissance-style paintings and portraits, with a few modern art installations thrown in.  I really liked this one, although I forgot to take a picture of the card so now don't remember the artist or title.

Upstairs is their main collection of modern art.  I enjoyed it, but didn't see the name of anyone I knew.  (Not that I'm some sort of modern art expert, hardly.)  My favorite piece upstairs was this spirally installation:

My second time through this room, I found the info card, and wouldn't you know it -- the spiral is the work of none other than Mario Merz!!  (I should have recognized it, spirals feature prominently in his works.)  I was really happy to have stumbled upon it, and there was that one familiar name that happened to be attached to the most interesting thing in the place.

The other piece that deserves mention was a spoken-word film (in English, yay!) by Willie Doherty, "Secretion".  I don't want to spoil the punch of it by saying too much, so let's just leave it at that it gave me way creepier chills than anything in the Sepulchral Museum.

The last cultural stop for the day was across the street at the Brother's Grimm Museum.  Also quite small, again I'm not exactly sure what I expected but this place sadly did not fill me with wow-ness.  There was a lot of personal ephemera in glass cases; the cards said something like "drinking cup of Jacob Grimm's brother-in-law's half-sister's cousin" or "ring from an unknown woman in the Grimm family."  Um, super?  Some rooms were devoted to the modern interpretations of the Grimm's works, which  might sound cool but in reality just included items such as a framed movie poster of Dreamwork's Puss n' Boots.  The coolest thing there was probably Jacob Grimm's seal.

Back down in the gift shop, I thought about buying my nephew a coolly illustrated book of Grimm's fairytales for Christmas, but they only had one option that was in English and I wasn't loving it, so saved that purchase for another time.

I'd intended to walk down and check out this one church I'd been passing every day on the bus going to or from work, but suddenly food seemed much more relevant.  I parked myself in a corner restaurant and ordered pork schnitzel with "hunter's sauce", which turned out to be a spectacularly delicious brown cream sauce with mushrooms.  The schnitzel options came in three portion sizes, and I ordered the "medium" which I think was 260 grams.  Having always been terrible at math, I had no real reference for how large that was going to turn out to be.

With human hand for scale

This schnitzel was deeply, amazingly fantastic.  But OMG.  The hilarious thing was that they also offered a schnitzel almost twice as big as this, a 500-gram monster.  Which, the menu noted, would come without salad.  Because let's face it, if you're going to set out to consume 500 grams of fried pork slathered in cream sauce, there is not a salad on earth that is going to save you.  (No mention was made of it coming without fries.)

As I worked my way through this thing, I amused myself with imagining how such a creation could ever have come to be in the first place, like a scene from a culinary version of Drunk History.  "Dude!  Let's deep-fry this massive pork fillet, and then cover it with cream sauce!"  "Yeah!  And dude -- it needs to come with fries.  Like, a lot of fries."  "Dude!"  "Duuuuude."  Fistbump.

I had a great dinner at this place, Eckstein's, but when I got my bill I saw that the second beer I'd ordered had been rung up as "Alkoholfrei".  WTF.  Now, it is of course completely possible that's just what they punched into the computer and not actually what they served me, but I had noted that my second beer tasted distinctly different from the first.  So, bummer.  Truly, I do not even see the point of non-alcoholic beer.  It's like caffeine-free diet coke -- with calories!!  At that point, shouldn't you just be drinking seltzer?

Anyway.  Decided to walk home rather than wait for the Saturday evening tram to finally lumber around.  Stopped in for toilet paper, water, and wine (how's that for a trifecta??), and settled in to watch more Jeremy Brett DVDs.  A very satisfying Saturday, all around, even with the less-than-mindblowing museum experiences and the practical joke of my second beer.

I think maybe I'll stick around this place for a while.