Cologne Sunday

Sunday was a pretty relaxing day for the most part (though still crummy weather). I started it off by watching Hilary Duff's "Raise Your Voice" dubbed in German while I got ready. I'm embarrassed to say I followed every bit of it, not because of my excellent German (I don't sprechen) but because I've seen it at least twice, which is 2 more times than is acceptable.

I ended up meeting Henry for a little bit before his train left in the afternoon. We (he) got some Chinese guy to take a photo of us in front of the Dom, but for some reason I'm not able to steal it from him and post it here. 

After Henry caught his train, I went to Museum Ludwig, which has lots of Picassos and the largest collection of pop art outside of the US. It also has some really really strange stuff. I'm not going to try to define what counts as art, but some of this seems like it's stretching it a bit. Like this:

It's a video set up in a dark room. And I don't know if you can tell or not, but the image behind those white rectangles is a butt. A naked butt walking. Talk about artsy fartsy.

This one looks like something a kid drew at a psychiatrist's office as they try to get to the root of his fear of spiders and breasts.

Some pop art:

Andy Warhol's Double Elvis. In German, they call it Doppel-Elvis, which I found amusing because all the Germans I know think it's funny that the English language just stole the word doppelganger without changing it at all. Maybe they're not aware that most everything in American culture is stolen from somewhere else.

This bored lady is actually one of the works of art. She doesn't seem too impressed with Lichtenstein's pieces.

And then Picasso. I have a lot more photos but I figure you guys probably didn't care to look at a bunch of photos of paintings.

There were also some pieces by lots of famous artists, like Miro, Magritte, Mondrian, Pollock, Jasper Johns and Kandinsky.

After the museum closed, I still had several hours to kill until my train (because the later tickets were cheaper) so I got some uninteresting dinner and hung out at a Starbucks. My train ended up being delayed 30 minutes, which made me a little anxious about making a train in Utrecht and then a tram in The Hague since it would be getting late and I don't know when transportation stops running. 

But luck was on my side and there were still a few trains to The Hague and I made the very last tram to my neighborhood, putting me at home around 1. I just have one international trip left (Paris in a few weeks) and thankfully, my train should get me home much earlier than 1. And because I don't have many trips left to talk about, I might just have to do some more Italian posts. All in favor?