The Germanic adventure, and the 3 Gates

I've been here in Germany for 2 weeks now, and it's like we live here. We know our way around, and can get from to and fro with ease. Our days have been filled with adventure, discovery, and exploration, and a whole heck of a lot of walking. We would just get on the tram, take it farther then we had before, get off, and start walking around. We have found some awesome places, and parks, and it has been a totally incredible way to really feel at home in this city.
Something that is very popular nowadays, especially in Europe, is this outdoor acrobatic exploration called Parkour. It was named by the french, if you've seen the latest James Bond Movie than you have seen it. It's the beginning seen where He is chasing some black guy thru the city and he is flipping , and jumping off, and twisting thru all sorts of everyday equiptment. There is also a Madonna video with all of it in it. Well anyway being who we are of course we are going to do some playing, so Mauriah found this park that had all these cool things to play off of, A very interesting and awesome playground, that just happened to be right next to a nuclear power plant.

We also try and get as much culture as we can, which I think is just right on and awesome, so we went and checked out this modern art muesum. Now it was not the Modern Art Muesum that we wanted to go to, it actually ended up being the, let's say contemporary art Muesum. Dude this place was weird, and had some pretty stupid exhibits. And it also had some pretty unsettling pieces. For instance it had this one room with these 2 video monitors on the floor, and the one had this crazy painted guy humping this mayonaise jar, and the other monitor had him pouring all these condiments over his necked body, it was pretty horrible. On the top level there was the big open space with these bean bag chairs facing this empty white wall, and the piece was how the metal scapultings shadows hit the wall. kind of cool, but still weird. Outside was beautiful however, and going downstairs I got some good pics too.

So on another day when the crew went exploring they hit a huge jackpot, so the next day they gathered almost all of us to go back to this magical fantasy land, they called Narleyia( a mixture of narley, and Narnia). So we took the train to a stop further than most of us had taken, got off walked past some more residential housing blocks, a school, (of course thru all this we are warming up our parkour skills) and we past thru our first gate.






The first gate was this big nice wall, that looked like the entrance to some nice government park. We were greeted by beautiful gardens on each side of the paved path, How lovely we thought. As we kept walking I was just thanking God for the beautiful sunny day, and all the great nature I was seeing that seemed to be so far away from the city. We were all enthralled at how so much life and growth was in this place, and then we come across the fork in the road, and in so discover that this luscious garden of beauty, is actually the land of the dead. We were actually in a big cemetary. Talk about being thrown for a loop. This realization put a whole new dimension on how we were feeling, and added this extra level of awe.

Well after being lead thru there we came upon the path to a hedge wall, and as I saw the leaders dissapear , I knew we had reached gate number 2, the doorway to The fields of the children tamed Beasts. We had passed thru this small opening fence door in the hedge to an actual petting zoo!! Hahaha, it was awesome, so we walked around petting and feeding the sheep, and goats, and just watched the pigs playing. They also had baby ducks, and chickens. I have to admit half the fun was watching these cute kids around this place, absolutely adorable. There was also a small swing set which I got to be on and get that fantastic feeling that runs thru your body when you hang upside down going backwards. Man that is awesome!!!





We again are heeded by the crew of leaders to continue on, and they take us on this dirt path by the side of the zoo, and end up in some kind of maze. Literally some kind of garden labrynth, with the wall hedges being as high as over my head, but mostly at shoulder level, and what we saw over these walls were beautiful and funny. It was The Garden Village of the Dwarves! We saw all these luscious garden plats and they seemed to be hiding these small one roomed cabins. But it was a whole village of these extravagant gardens and bush walls with these little wooden shacks in the middle of the garden plot. It was incredible and the likes I had never seen before I had gotten here. I had seen something like this the first day we got here, for I went and got lost and ended up in another one of these garden village plots, it's truly amazing. It's like they move to these plots in the summer to soley plant and garden.
We go thru a series of leafed archways and stand in awe of our final destination.

THE SPIDER CASTLE!!


WOW! It is this extravagant public playground right behind these big soccer fields that is made up entirely out of intertwined rope. Not just some kind of jungle gym, this thing was huge, and shot clear up a story or 2 in the sky, with this rope connecting everything. There were 3 main spires, The 3 towers if you will, connected by bridges, and one other bridge to get on in easier way. There were also 2 other smaller circular ones on the sides not connected so that you could just jump up and down in like a trampoline. It was Freakin Awesome!!! Oh and we found out the hard way if you shake one area the whole thing shakes,(poor little girl). Man we spent the rest of the morning and afternoon there acting like monkeys and subjects of the Spider Kingdom.













One of the most awesome trips we took was our day trip to one of the top 4 cities to see in Germany, Cologne. Now in German it's spelled koln with a special double dotted o, think about how confusing that was trying to by a ticket. It was only about a 20 min ride, and the train station lets you out right in front of the Cathedral. he only place that did not get bombed during the war since it was the highest and most recognizable building. And It' amazing! This place took 600 years to build. And it is astounding, full of atherial awe, artistic magistry, and spiritual enlightenment. It also has a spiraling tower of somehwere between 500 and 1000 steps,(Cree counted), we went up and saw the whole city. It was just surreal, but absolutely worth it. Just amazing that I can have this experience being a dancer. God has totally blessed me, and this was the perfect place to give him reverence for it. Coming down of course was very dissying, and when we got out some of our legs were shaking for like 10 minutes after that. The courtyard behind was full of life size statues for entertainment, they were all pretty lame, except for one , he was the only one worth getting a picture of and giving money too, but when we're around in open space, there is nothing next to us, and we started playing around and doing some of our dances, and we ended up stealing the crowd from them, which gave them a smoke break, it was soo funny. I spent the rest of the day shopping, absolutely fabulous, I love Germany.