"The artist must train not only his eye, but his soul."

I had a forced vacation today. This weekend is Carnival in the Catholic world, a holiday that a lot of people take here in Germany. I was going to be the only one in the office and that's not allowed, so I had to take the day off. I certainly didn't mind.

Before I get into today I wanted to share some pictures with you, from downtown Munich.

This is the "Rathaus" on Marienplatz, which is sort of the city center I guess. It is a central shopping area. "Rathaus" means "city hall" in German; I've always enjoyed the fact that the word "rat" is in there, even though it means something entirely different in German.


Here's another view from Marienplatz with one of the many ornate churches in the area and the statue of probably King Ludwig, which sits at the center of Marienplatz. The churches around Marienplatz are sandwiched between shops and restaurants.


For Carnival this weekend they decorated a bit:



I thought that was pretty cool.

Speaking (or writing) of Carnival, I'm going up for some Carnival-ing tomorrow in Cologne. Should be pretty interesting, I hope, and it will be my first use of the trains here in Europa. Hooray!

Back to today. There have been these signs all around advertising a Kandinsky exhibit at the Lenbachhaus and today, with the vacation time that had been so nicely given to me, I decided to go check it out.



The Lenbachhaus is this neat art museum here in Munich and they, together with the Guggenheim in New York and the Pompidou thingy in Paris, put a bunch of Kandinsky works together to show. This is the building:



Also this:


The whole thing was pretty neat I thought. Kandinsky was pretty much the father of modern painting, more or less, and it was interesting to see how his work progressed
over time, becoming more and more independent of any recognizable form, beyond geometric shapes and lines. Someone told me Kandinsky could hear color.

If you don't know much about him go check out Kandinsky on Wikipedia and/or give him a Google search. I particularly liked this one, called "Moscow I":


Notice the Bavarian couple in the middle. The color was a lot more vivid in real life.

For Carnival tomorrow I tried to find a classic Bavarian hat to wear in Cologne; apparently they find the Bavarians pretty funny. Todd Bauknecht has one. Unfortunately, my is is just a bit bigger than the average Bavarian head and I could not find any hats that fit well. We went to three or four different traditional Bavarian clothing stores and none of them had anything that fit me. Hat's have always been too small for me so I wasn't too surprised, just disappointed. I will find one before I leave in August. I might even by some Lederhosen.

A couple people told me that Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. I think that's probably true.

Later this evening I went and sang Karaoke with some of the Germans on the 5th floor. One of the guys has a program on his computer for Karaoke and we hook it up to the sound system in the communal room. There were only 5 of us there but that hasn't ever hampered the fun. They really seem to love the whole singing thing; I want to try and get them to try it for real sometime, if I can find a Karaoke bar around here.

That about wraps up a particularly image-filled little post for you. When I get back from Cologne I'll have more exciting pictures and such.

Goodnight.