This week, all the weight of the studies have been lifted from my shoulders, and I can finally put more focus on my blog... or not. You'll see why at the end of the letter, or maybe you have figured out what it's about already.
Tuesday Day for Blowing off Steam
It was out of impulse, when I decide that I was to do something for myself on the day. I had no class to attend to, no group meetings for the project, and I was desperate to have some fresh air pumped into my lungs that was filled with indoor inactivity.
I was scrolling across the timetable of the trains I could opt to take on a half-day trip, and I saw a place called Kaiserslautern, west to Mannheim. No research, no extra fuss or indecision, and I was already packing to leave.
The trip took roundabout and hour and a half, and half of it was passed while talking to Melody on the phone.
Kaiserslautern gave me a more Mannheim-like feeling, Mannheim but less visited and more slow-paced.
The research as to where to go to was only done on the train. There on the map pinpointed with a green tree icon read "Japanischer Garten" which was, intuitively, the Japanese Garden. It showed pictures with architecture that scream "Japan" and I felt like this would be my ultimate goal for the day.
Due to a lacking of breakfast and insufficient planning, the first sense of basic human need that I felt after disembarking was hunger. Through the alleys of the rather tranquil residence area, I sauntered slowly through the chilly, free air whilst hunting for food. In an Italian restaurant, I found something worthy of trying: a bowl of pasta topped with a piece of pizza dough. I would want you to imagine how you make a pasta gratin. You prepare the pasta, and afterwards, you fill it in a heat-compatible ceramic bowl, top it with mozzarella cheese, bake and serve. The dish I mentioned was of the same kind of idea, but instead of having cheese as the upper layer, it was a piece of soft, oily dough that was capped above the pasta. It was soft and was able to entangle with the pasta when you twist it with your fork. The whole piece of dough felt like an extra portion of pasta, and I waled out of the diner with a satisfied belly.
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| Something I might potentially try in the future |
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| How it looks on the inside |
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| Homemade tiramisu |
I wasn't expecting it to be that cold, to be frank, and neither did I expect to see some hail falling, but none of those were ever going to stop me from reaching the destination I wanted to see.
And it turned out to be a classic Hugo day... the Garden was closed. Somehow, the fact that this garden stays closed throughout winter and all the way until the end of March was left omitted on the Google Map, and I was standing at the gate, staring point blank at the torii, the red dome-shaped structure characteristic of Japanese architecture. The plate at the gate told us that the Japanese garden will be back With the public soon after the winter break. Rather dismayed, I walked on, becoming aimless for the moment.
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| The Japanese Garden opens on the first of April!! |
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| What I could only capture when poking my phone through the gate. |
I walked to a small grassy community designed with a grid-like layout. Each grid comes with a miniature one-man row house and a rather big garden. A mother seemed to be managing her yard while her child was walking around, playing; an old lady was playing with her dog, unleashed. I talked with the lady for a bit as she acknowledged my presence, and I told her how I ended up here after finding out that the Japanese garden was closed.
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| It's either gardens or children's playground. |
I wanted to head out to another city scape, but even a the sun started beaming again at some point, the time has already gone by, and I would have to make my return. I'll be back to the garden in Kaiserslautern when the time is right.
One Immortal Written in the Page
One Saturday, I felt suddenly tired of everything that had been going on in my head were things related to the schoolwork and decided that it was not healthy a mindset to have, so, I chucked my work aside, and pick up my halfway read book, For the Immortal by Emily Hauser, and gulped it down like fish drinking water. Fluently written with multiple changes of POV, this is the writing style from Emily Hauser that I know of. Knocking down the chauvinism with focusing on the women coming from different tidbits of the Greek mythology vastness, all the same time hammering down the fundamental pillars of what constructed the cosmo of the Greek pantheon.
Here are some more details. For the Immortal took the thread from the fabric of Hercules' story, spinning it off into a new tale while Admete's and Hippolyta's eyes became ours. Admete was the princess of Mycenae, who was said to have accompanied Hercules on the quest for the golden apple, as Hippolyta was the queen of the Amazons, one of the fiercest battle tribes that was depicted in Greek mythology. The females in the books have their own voices, and I think that was easy enough to spot, as the male perspectives are very much magnified in the traditional narratives, and it simply proved that Greek mythology can still be told over and over in a million other ways. This book, as the finale of the Golde Apple Trilogy, destructured the concept of "Unavoidable fate" and reshaped the whole scope of the mythology. Although the new ideology of the implication that all Gods have been so manipulative and calculating didn't appeal to me as much as the previous two installment claiming that we make our own choices, I still highly appreciate the novelty of such radical way of storytelling from the author, and it was a pleasant surprise.
The book also talked about the idea of becoming immortal through writing down about people, about their deeds and their actions, which will be passed down in the form of stories.
And that is how we become immortal.
End
I mean, the Coronavirus has been on the rampage. Things have become very different, from plans to go to Czech Republic and France have been cancelled, and now I will be going back to Taiwan, in two days. More on that in the next letter.
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