Some Bundeslands just don't like me

I went to Kassel on Sunday for an audition-- this meant leaving the house at 6am to travel 4 hours by train, forgetting to eat lunch, and then not getting the job. And it was COLD! I was walking through the town in the drizzling rain after the audition, when I spied a fabulous yellow palace (I think 75% of the baroque palaces in Germany are painted yellow-- why?), so I high-tailed it over for a little baroque nerdiness. And let me tell you, inside it was indeed nerdy, but not in the way I expected-- the museum inside the palace is the Astronomical-Physics Cabinet! There were globes from the 15th and 16th centuries, astrolabes, weird surveying equiptment, alchemy vessels, card-punching computers, a movable-type machine, and....
a microscope from 1700!











After that delicious dose of culture that I wish I could have shared with Jeremy (duh), I sat around the train station for an hour because the weather was wretched. When I was finally able to get on my train, I luckily found a seat next to a crowd of jolly beer-drinking men. Everything went smoothly for 2 stops... and then... one of the train doors refused to close. They tried to fix it for an hour and a half (during which time I made friends with the several children bouncing around the train) before making us all get off the train in order to get on another train. Another piece of luck-- this train was going straight to Cologne. Only 2 1/4 hours after I would have originally gotten home.

The thing is, Kassel is in the state (Bundesland) of Hessen-- the same Bundesland where you will find Göttingen (remember that sitting-on-the-floor-with-giant-costume-boxes fiasco?). I don't know what Hessen has against me, but every time I try to leave that place, it takes me twice as long as I planned to get home.



I am writing now from Winterthur, Switzerland (which is not the home of breast-milk cuisine, and the choreographer gagged when I told him about it), where I am doing funny dances with a couple of tall actors and trying to look manly.