I have a large number of notes to get through in this post, which I am writing after having finished my email about Halle. My first note is about the hostel that I visited: some of the people whom I met there, including some from Singapore, were very interesting. One of the people from Singapore told me that men there have to serve for two years in the army and then return to the army periodically for several years; they look at their return trips to the army as vacations, as service is often less stressful than work. This same person also told me that he was glad of Singapore's stringest laws concerning cleanliness and general disorderliness, as he found Rome, Nice, Florence, and other cities that he and his friends had visited dirty and poorly-managed. Finally, it was interesting to me that this man and his friends spoke English with one another: it was their only common language, and yet they spoke it with a strong accent, as though it were their second language. It turns out that almost everyone in Singapore speaks English and only some of the people there speak another language; while Malay is the country's second official language, many Singaporeans are descended from immigrants from other Asian countries, and they grow up principally speaking English. This goes to show what I know about other countries: I had always assumed that people in Singapore spoke English and Mandarin Chinese!
Looking back on my notes, it is easy to see why I was so upset when I got here. I had a slow morning, exacerbated by my having gotten buttonholed by someone who talked and talked as I was trying to leave the hostel and having had to wait over an hour for the train to Leipzig. Since the train station in the new town is hugely undeveloped, I had to wait outside next to a group of alcoholic bums, and I felt as though I had stepped into a sauna when I stepped out of the train station in Leipzig. The hostel employee who greeted me took ages to check me in, did not tell me anything about my room or about Leipzig itself, tried to charge me for four nights despite my having emailed the hostel several days previously to inform its staff that I was shortening my stay by one night, did not mention that the hostel had free wi-fi, and did not mention that the hostel had no kitchen and no fridge. The hostel's lobby, lacking either windows or air conditioning, was like a furnace, and it was infested with flies. When I asked the hostel employee who had greeted me if day-trips to Halle and Erfurt made sense, she shrugged her shoulders; when I asked her about sights outside of the city center that might interest me, she tried to sell me a 10-Euro ticket for a bus tour; she told me to go shopping at the train station when I asked her about local supermarkets; and when I asked her where I could get cheap, traditional German food, she recommended to me what turned out to be a hip cafe and bar with neon lighting and over a hundred tables. When I went to the cafe to eat, I was approached by a very strange and drunk woman who kept saying that she was boring until I finally told her to go away. Leipzig itself was hideous - that is a whole other story.
My first observation about Leipzig was that it is a terrible city for walking. It is full of highways, has very few crosswalks, has a dearth of street signs, and even occasionally allows cars in the pedestrian-only zones, of which there are few. There is a huge number of bums and indigent immigrants from the Near East in a park near the train station, which I saw before I saw any of the city's attractions; it has seemed to me for the whole duration of this trip that immigrants from the Near East often turn out to be the poorest people in Germany, and there were very many of them in Leipzig. Leipzig has a fair number of statues, but one cannot discern what any of them are in honor of, as they lack clear writing and do not always represent anything specific. The city center is composed almost entirely of stores rather than buildings of historic interest, and fewer of its citizens smoke than in the rest of Germany - they are not real Germans. While Dresden has modernized in tandem with preserving its history, Leipzig has grown ultra-modern and thrown history out of the window; it is a little like Stuttgart with a world-class university. Many of the city's best attractions, such as the older buildings of its university campus and a street stall from which I bought good strawberries and phenomenal cherries for a reasonable price, are located outside of the city center, in which there is nothing to see except for the city's town hall (which can just as easily be seen from parts of the university campus outside of the city center) and one of its central churches, which has one of the most creative, unusual interiors that I have so far seen in Germany - it has supporting columns topped with carvings made to look like plants, and its walls are painted, rather than inset with stained-glass windows. Leipzig looks like a nice city in which to live based on its city map, as it appears to be very green, is not too crowded, and has fountains in its central plazas, but it is a wretched place to visit.
I have gotten through many of my notes unscathed - I only have a bit left to write about. One of my remaining notes is that I found a bookstore in which one could buy reasonably-priced books here. Books seemed to be getting increasingly-more expensive until I found this bookstore, where I found a section of classics that each cost 3.5 Euros - barely more than one would pay for a book at a used book store. The classics section was comprised entirely of Shakespeare and Victorian novels, which are, apparently, all that Germans (that is, German booksellers) consider to be English-language classics (This is probably because of salability more than ignorance.). I considered getting Dickens' "Hard Times," but, having read five pages of "A Tale of Two Cities" and execrated it, I decided against it. The Bronte sisters did not sound too distinguished to me, but Jane Austen, whose work is considered quite important, caught my interest. It sounded like some work or other named after a pond was the novel of hers that was the broadest in scope, so I went for it: my entertainment for the week or so following my finishing "The Bacchaes" lies in her hands. I have not actually finished reading "The Bacchaes"; in fact, I just recently started it (the fourth of the four plays included in my collection of Euripides' work). It is curious to come across English words in their original setting: while I knew that corybantic, maenad, dionysian, saturnine, stygian, and so on all came from Greek, I did not know that their meanings could be perverted. That is, while dionysian is taken to mean "given over entirely to the bodily passions" (unless I am mistaken) in English, it does not appear to have meant that to the Greeks. At the point of the play that I have reached (the very beginning), Dionysus seems pretty mad about some treachery or other that was commmitted against him, as a result of which he has driven a bunch of women mad and decided to revenge himself on his offender. The mad women in the play, while they would be described by us as dionysian, are not true followers of Dionysus, as he has preached unbridled bodily worship to them out of spite, not as an exposition of his actual worldviews. I will have to read further to find out if we have perverted the meaning of the word dionysian - to find out, more precisely, if we have falsely associated Dionysus with surrender to bodily pleasure - but so far suspect that his name has been misused in our language.
Now I am even closer to the end of my notes: I have established that Leipzig is a repugnant city that one should avoid at all costs and that my hostel sucks. I noted that for every good day, one is bound to have a bad day or two - that is how life, and travel, works. Having pitied the young man from Singapore who had seen only Nice, Paris, Rome, and Florence and would have said that he had seen France and Italy, I have concluded that travelling as I have done, combing a country for treasures outside of big cities as well as inside of them, is the right way to learn about other cultures, though I may have taken my search a bit too far in visiting every little village (or so it seems) in Germany. Again, this might be a lesson that I can use in future in order to turn a mistake into something good; I might be saving myself future wasted time by wasting time now and, in so doing, learning not to do it. I saw fields of sunflowers, fields of solar panels, and fields of the lavender for which Southern France is so famous on the train ride here, and it occurred to me that travelling restores one's faith in humanity. While it is possible that one only thinks this because of being shielded, while travelling, from all of the bad in the world (as one tries to avoid visiting unpleasant places, though one often fails), my overall experience has shown me that people are generally good. All of the people who have helped me, smiled at me, chatted with me, or otherwise done something to make my days better have shown me that people have an overwhelming propensity to try to improve the world; all of the monuments to human ingenuity, tenacity, and courage that I have seen on this trip have reinforced in my mind that people are committed to making life better for one another and for humanity as a whole and that they are generally proficient at doing so. Perhaps this view is a little naive, but it is a welcome thought on a bad day, and if it is an illusion, it is at least a very pleasant one to maintain. The absence of any such belief would, in any case, be crippling: it is better to believe in something motivating but slightly false than to believe in nothing at all. With that thought I leave you to watch part of a movie and continue planning my trips for future years. One cannot get enough of travel!
The strangest wall in Europe belongs to Leipzig.
Looking back on my notes, it is easy to see why I was so upset when I got here. I had a slow morning, exacerbated by my having gotten buttonholed by someone who talked and talked as I was trying to leave the hostel and having had to wait over an hour for the train to Leipzig. Since the train station in the new town is hugely undeveloped, I had to wait outside next to a group of alcoholic bums, and I felt as though I had stepped into a sauna when I stepped out of the train station in Leipzig. The hostel employee who greeted me took ages to check me in, did not tell me anything about my room or about Leipzig itself, tried to charge me for four nights despite my having emailed the hostel several days previously to inform its staff that I was shortening my stay by one night, did not mention that the hostel had free wi-fi, and did not mention that the hostel had no kitchen and no fridge. The hostel's lobby, lacking either windows or air conditioning, was like a furnace, and it was infested with flies. When I asked the hostel employee who had greeted me if day-trips to Halle and Erfurt made sense, she shrugged her shoulders; when I asked her about sights outside of the city center that might interest me, she tried to sell me a 10-Euro ticket for a bus tour; she told me to go shopping at the train station when I asked her about local supermarkets; and when I asked her where I could get cheap, traditional German food, she recommended to me what turned out to be a hip cafe and bar with neon lighting and over a hundred tables. When I went to the cafe to eat, I was approached by a very strange and drunk woman who kept saying that she was boring until I finally told her to go away. Leipzig itself was hideous - that is a whole other story.
My first observation about Leipzig was that it is a terrible city for walking. It is full of highways, has very few crosswalks, has a dearth of street signs, and even occasionally allows cars in the pedestrian-only zones, of which there are few. There is a huge number of bums and indigent immigrants from the Near East in a park near the train station, which I saw before I saw any of the city's attractions; it has seemed to me for the whole duration of this trip that immigrants from the Near East often turn out to be the poorest people in Germany, and there were very many of them in Leipzig. Leipzig has a fair number of statues, but one cannot discern what any of them are in honor of, as they lack clear writing and do not always represent anything specific. The city center is composed almost entirely of stores rather than buildings of historic interest, and fewer of its citizens smoke than in the rest of Germany - they are not real Germans. While Dresden has modernized in tandem with preserving its history, Leipzig has grown ultra-modern and thrown history out of the window; it is a little like Stuttgart with a world-class university. Many of the city's best attractions, such as the older buildings of its university campus and a street stall from which I bought good strawberries and phenomenal cherries for a reasonable price, are located outside of the city center, in which there is nothing to see except for the city's town hall (which can just as easily be seen from parts of the university campus outside of the city center) and one of its central churches, which has one of the most creative, unusual interiors that I have so far seen in Germany - it has supporting columns topped with carvings made to look like plants, and its walls are painted, rather than inset with stained-glass windows. Leipzig looks like a nice city in which to live based on its city map, as it appears to be very green, is not too crowded, and has fountains in its central plazas, but it is a wretched place to visit.
I have gotten through many of my notes unscathed - I only have a bit left to write about. One of my remaining notes is that I found a bookstore in which one could buy reasonably-priced books here. Books seemed to be getting increasingly-more expensive until I found this bookstore, where I found a section of classics that each cost 3.5 Euros - barely more than one would pay for a book at a used book store. The classics section was comprised entirely of Shakespeare and Victorian novels, which are, apparently, all that Germans (that is, German booksellers) consider to be English-language classics (This is probably because of salability more than ignorance.). I considered getting Dickens' "Hard Times," but, having read five pages of "A Tale of Two Cities" and execrated it, I decided against it. The Bronte sisters did not sound too distinguished to me, but Jane Austen, whose work is considered quite important, caught my interest. It sounded like some work or other named after a pond was the novel of hers that was the broadest in scope, so I went for it: my entertainment for the week or so following my finishing "The Bacchaes" lies in her hands. I have not actually finished reading "The Bacchaes"; in fact, I just recently started it (the fourth of the four plays included in my collection of Euripides' work). It is curious to come across English words in their original setting: while I knew that corybantic, maenad, dionysian, saturnine, stygian, and so on all came from Greek, I did not know that their meanings could be perverted. That is, while dionysian is taken to mean "given over entirely to the bodily passions" (unless I am mistaken) in English, it does not appear to have meant that to the Greeks. At the point of the play that I have reached (the very beginning), Dionysus seems pretty mad about some treachery or other that was commmitted against him, as a result of which he has driven a bunch of women mad and decided to revenge himself on his offender. The mad women in the play, while they would be described by us as dionysian, are not true followers of Dionysus, as he has preached unbridled bodily worship to them out of spite, not as an exposition of his actual worldviews. I will have to read further to find out if we have perverted the meaning of the word dionysian - to find out, more precisely, if we have falsely associated Dionysus with surrender to bodily pleasure - but so far suspect that his name has been misused in our language.
Now I am even closer to the end of my notes: I have established that Leipzig is a repugnant city that one should avoid at all costs and that my hostel sucks. I noted that for every good day, one is bound to have a bad day or two - that is how life, and travel, works. Having pitied the young man from Singapore who had seen only Nice, Paris, Rome, and Florence and would have said that he had seen France and Italy, I have concluded that travelling as I have done, combing a country for treasures outside of big cities as well as inside of them, is the right way to learn about other cultures, though I may have taken my search a bit too far in visiting every little village (or so it seems) in Germany. Again, this might be a lesson that I can use in future in order to turn a mistake into something good; I might be saving myself future wasted time by wasting time now and, in so doing, learning not to do it. I saw fields of sunflowers, fields of solar panels, and fields of the lavender for which Southern France is so famous on the train ride here, and it occurred to me that travelling restores one's faith in humanity. While it is possible that one only thinks this because of being shielded, while travelling, from all of the bad in the world (as one tries to avoid visiting unpleasant places, though one often fails), my overall experience has shown me that people are generally good. All of the people who have helped me, smiled at me, chatted with me, or otherwise done something to make my days better have shown me that people have an overwhelming propensity to try to improve the world; all of the monuments to human ingenuity, tenacity, and courage that I have seen on this trip have reinforced in my mind that people are committed to making life better for one another and for humanity as a whole and that they are generally proficient at doing so. Perhaps this view is a little naive, but it is a welcome thought on a bad day, and if it is an illusion, it is at least a very pleasant one to maintain. The absence of any such belief would, in any case, be crippling: it is better to believe in something motivating but slightly false than to believe in nothing at all. With that thought I leave you to watch part of a movie and continue planning my trips for future years. One cannot get enough of travel!
The strangest wall in Europe belongs to Leipzig.
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