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Published: June 24th 2008
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Arrived in Saarbrücken
Rachelle's in Germany!! ...how totally unreal! This one’s on par with Milan, guys, easy. Seeing a legendary painting that is peeling off the wall, as hard as humans try to stop it, and seeing a legendary athlete, who will also one day deteriorate, but is currently at his career high. Which is better? …Man, they shouldn’t even be compared, they are both absolutely amazing in their own rights.
What the hell am I talking about?
I left immediately after a final on Thursday to catch the trains to
Saarbrücken, where Rachelle, my friend-since-quite-a-while-now greeted me. She’s here in good old Deutschland visiting… well, how do we categorize this boy? He wasn’t a boyfriend until about 2 months ago, but they met when Rachelle was here studying 2 years ago (on the same program I am now on). Just don’t make fun of him cuz his name’s Kim, I guess. How confusing is all of that? So, I arrived in Saarbrücken about 11:30 at night, we drove to Kim’s house, and slept. After all, it was late and Friday was a big day.
Friday was a big day because I got to go see that
athlete I was rambling about a paragraph back. I’m sure most of you
Karlsruhe
Kim and his car. He's kind of a car nut. have figured it out by now… “Let’s see: Europe, in July, famous athlete…?
The Tour de France had been calling me to come and watch for a while, and I gave in to its appeal. We awakened, ate breakfast, and all hopped back in Kim’s car to cruise down to the not-so-far-away city of Karlsruhe, which that very day was playing host to the endpoint of stage 7. We got there about 12:30, with plenty, plenty of time before the riders all blew through at about 5, so we went to visit the nearby art museum, the
ZKM. ZKM is more than just an art gallery, they are a full service art propagation center, offering not only multiple galleries for their various and ever-changing collection, but workshops, symposiums, festivals, lectures, you name it. We almost spent too long inside exploring the multimedia gallery, and when we finally got back outside I came to the sudden realization that I would not be standing fence-side to see my cycling heroes pass by, there were way too many people already. No matter, we hardly had to compromise, we got primo spots on an adjacent fire escape railing!
And then we waited. And waited. The enormo-screen TV
Karlsruhe
Kim and Rachelle they had set up in the ZKM’s courtyard blared in German as to the stats and wherabouts of the leads and main peloton for over an hour before the magic moment. Then, it was "here they come!! Ooo!! Ooo!!" …And they whizzed by at their 45kph (28mph) so fast I couldn’t actually identify a single rider. Might it have been different at the fence? Yeah, probably, but the stage was so flat that the guys were really booking, especially considering I was about 3km from the finish and inside the final sprint, it was a *long* ride that day (228km) and they had been riding under ominous and/or rainy clouds all day. In any case, it was exhilarating to see, and it’s convinced me of one thing: I have *got* to come back and do this more often!
So how do you top that? **What do you go on living for?** That’s an easy one: carnival rides! The 3 of us trooped up to the finish line in the car when things had cleared out a bit and some of the roads reopened, and entertained ourselves in the convention center where there were stands selling stuff and giving away stuff
Karlsruhe
about 1:30 in the afternoon and promoting stuff. A lot of stuff. But leave it to Rachelle and me to find the “let’s make ourselves sick and laugh about it” ride. Y’know those carnival rides that lash you to one end of a propeller blade and then swing you in circles so you’re right side up one moment and upside down the next? Well, a true genius decided he could make it better by adding a bike. See photos.
The rest of the day… well, we drove home. It was already 10 by the time we got back, so we stayed in and had drinks whilst playing pinball. Score, dude. I suck at pinball, but I had a damn good time.
Saturday Rachelle and I headed to the train station to catch a ride down to the town of
Trier where our friend Annika currently is. She’d just finished her diploma work for interior architecture degree at the
Fachhochschule there, and we went to see her class’ final exhibition and generally have a good time hanging out and being girls. It was a grand success, Annika’s project was really nice, I got to see Carolyn Boos for a few minutes (maybe a half hour? But
Inside the ZKM
Rachelle in the 'dancers' exhibit I’ll see her back in the US), and we 3 girls got to catch up. Annika was an exchange student to K-State last year and that’s how I met her, but Rachelle knew her from her exchange semester… confusing again, I know. Suffice to say: good stuff. Sunday morning (I use ‘morning’ as a subjective term, I think it was more like 1pm), Kim drove in to get Rachelle and they split for close by Luxembourg, a place Rachelle had been wanting to get back and see againi. Annika and I spent the afternoon trying to get her plane tickets (she’ll start studying again in Kansas in about a month), and walking around the Altstadt. In the evening we went to the Mosel's riverfront where there was a fair going on for the weekend and we sat and talked some more. It was really relaxing to hang out with the girls, and I know we’ll be pulling repeats back in Kansas when everyone is there again in the fall. Monday brought me back home and back to reality: mountains of homework and little more than 3 weeks in which to complete it. So it goes.
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