29 June 2016
I wrote the first part of this day from the Hbf in Koblenz,
where our train had been delayed for 80 minutes. Nat told me that Joana, who we
were about to see in Essen, had cooked incredible amounts of food! We bought
some bread at the station, and ended up with 3 loaves between us! We were
rather ambitious, but told ourselves we’d keep some of it for Amsterdam as
well.
Joanna met us at the Essen Hbf. She is tall, blonde, with
black-framed glasses and reminds me somewhat of a bird. She is incredibly kind,
and brings us immediately to a fruit stall to get some fruit for dessert, and
then brings us back to her house on the U-bahn. On the way, we talk about the
bombings that had just happened in Turkey, and it all seems so removed and
foreign because above us the sky is blue and before us lunch is waiting, and I
can’t help but feel a stab of guilt. Who are we to be so fortunate, so safe, so
free? We are so geographically close to terrible tragedy, and yet culturally
and experientially, we are worlds away.
Joanna and her Mother made a veritable spread of comestibles
(my new favourite word. It just means food.) including banana bread, couscous
salad, yoghurt and peaches and cherries... We eat our fill, and then head over
to the Zeche Zollverein Ruhr Museum and heritage site. Situated on the site of
an old coal mine created by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer. Before 1986, the
mine produced a total of 240 million tons of coal, and had been the space for
up to 8,000 miners. No longer operational, the mine is now a museum, art and
culture location.
We went to its permanent exhibition, spread over a few
floors to trace historical, geological and cultural developments in the Ruhr
region. This museum had a wealth of information (they have over 6,000
artefacts) which smashed my Dad’s question when I mentioned we were going to
Essen ‘Why Essen? There is nothing in Essen.’ Essen seems young and new, but
has a long history – its seeming newness is explained by the fact that, as an
industrial place that also produced armaments, it was destroyed in World War II,
as the British Royal Air force dropped a total of 36,429 long tons of bombs on
Essen between 1939 and 1945.
One exhibit in the museum was the doll’s bed of a girl who
lived through that time, and is still afraid of aeroplanes.
The stories of the Ruhr people are told in various
innovative ways in the museum, photographs, sounds, and smells and a variety of
weird and wonderful artefacts, like the soup bowl of the Ritter family from Kirchhellen who can only fill
them half-way because their house is tilted (a result of the subsidence caused by mining), or the two water jars of Mrs Keuter who fled the advancing Americans in 1945 and had to draw water from a spring at night to avoid low-flying aircraft, or an 1959 advent calendar made of matchboxes from 1959 belonging to Norbert Reichling and his two brothers.
Alongside the human history of the Ruhr is its natural history. Something that completely floored me was a bolt of lightning
that had struck a sandy bedrock of the approximately 80 million year old floor
of the Cretaceous sea, and because of its extreme (up to 30,000 degree)
temperature, had melted the sand, forming a fulgurite. Isn’t that incredible?
That instant-aneity preserved in the earth forever.
After finishing looking around the museum, we climbed to the
top to the museum, and saw all of the Zeche Zollverein industrial park spread
around us. It wasn’t as you might imagine, rusty and full of metal – the Ruhr
is growing back into nature again, and the red of the industrial structures
grow out of a blanket of green.
Back in Joana’s place, we had dinner (stuffed peppers and
the most glorious apple and chocolate cake) and met her lovely and talkative
mum, who speaks as much English as I speak German, and so we communicated
mostly by signs, guesswork and Joana’s translations. Joana saw us off at the
train station, and I left Essen with a friend by my side, a new friend standing
on the platform and a warm feeling in my heart.
On the train, Nat and I talked about the psychology of
disgust and then self-love, vulnerability and how ‘it is very hard to love a
perfect person’. I listened to Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘Amsterdam’ as the train
passed seamlessly into Holland.
At the Amsterdam Central Station, we were greeted by a group
of young people standing around a piano, singing ‘Love Song’ by Sara Bareilles,
and then another man singing in earnest to the woman sitting beside him. It
seems that every in Amsterdam can sing!
Outside the station, we saw a hotel with a comforting
lighted blue sign saying ‘Jesus Loves You’, but were also frightened by a drunk
man who set his glass beer bottle down very loudly on the metal seat at the
tram station. He got onto the same tram as us, and we made sure we went into a
different carriage. It was about a 20 minute tram ride to our airbnb, in Jaques
Oppenheimstraat, where Vera opened the door and welcomed us, showed us our room
and told us about how coconut oil healed all the wrinkles on her face.
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