Année du tournesol

It's the year of the sunflower.

Can you locate Ernie?

The convenient sunflower map --- a pleasingly-abstract thing, resembling an extensive Venn diagram or perhaps a postmodern self-portrait of the artist as a very hungry caterpillar.

The Venn diagram style of planting made some of the intersectional plants hard to locate, and apparently also hard to reach with nourishing sunbeams.

The Ernie sunflowers were crowded out by their much taller neighbors.

This post's theme word is boscage, "mass of growing trees or shrubs." The sunflower boscage brightened the surround.

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is a pretty city, a lovely place to seek cool refuge from the sweltering sun and treelessness of denser and more tropical cities. It reminded me of Ithaca, featuring an expansive university nestled in hills and trees. The weather was pleasant. I took many photos.

Local church, directly out my window.

The streetcar's modernity nestled against the historical buildings.

This is art. Or a sundial? Or a postmodern playground.

The local language is Germany; proximity to France is completely ignored, and signs are not even bilingual (or, when they are, it is German/English). This combined with a forbidding, darkly gothic architecture, to make me think that I happened upon a vampire nest.

Gothic frontage, part 1.

Gothic frontage, part 2.

I visited an art exhibit in an abandoned chemical factory. It was very cool. The ambiance of abandoned rooms and stark pipes, walls, and windows, reminded me of post-apocalyptic video game settings. Some of the art blended with the setting, so that it was hard to distinguish art installations from decaying building.

I'm pretty sure this was just an empty room with abandoned freestanding plumbing features.

The paint flakes, mirrored windows to the next laboratories, and floor tiles was very cool. Unintentional art re: decay and order.

If this were a 1st-person video game, I would momentarily receive a parcour training session across these glassed roofs.

The weather was great, the university was nice, my talk went well, the research was interesting, the scenery was nice, and my ear was delighted to try to decipher German.


This post's theme word is esthesia, "the capacity for sensation." Travel titillates my esthesia.