Quickie, before i leave.

Voila. This is a video of my packing skills.

click me.

PARIS

    Tomorrow we leave for paris and it is going to be tiiiiight. Six of us are going together, which means 6 cameras. The pictures will be plentiful. Get excited.
    On another note: Barret and I checked out a fasion photography exhibit at the NRW-Forum. The exhibit had about 400 pieces ranging from 1846 - 2006. They had a great modern collection, but i brushed through most of the old school stuff. Here are some of my findings.

    Worthy of Idolatry. Dali, Duchamp, Picasso, Warhol, Bacon...you name it, he photographed 'em. They only had a hand ful of his work at the NRW-Forum. These were my favorites.

Also check out this site. It has everything. Richard Avedon

    The reason i went to the exhibit. He takes fashion photography to the next level. Out of control/shocking/beautfiul. Again, not very many pieces. However, there is an exhibit in Berlin i will check out soon. Favorites.

Go here to be amazed. David laChappelle

A collection of the 'Hundstage' series can be found here. Claudia Knoepfel and Stefan Indlekofler

or their site here.

This was the only Man Ray I recall seeing.

Back in 2000, 'Glass Tears' sold for $1.3m. Highest price ever paid for a photograph. Read about it here.

oh my!

He's tight, just go here.Guy Bourdin

Okay it is now time to upload Paris hot spots to my tomtom...ewww Paris hot spots. au revoir.

Dönertasche, bitte.

    Today i tried to get lost in Neuss. After about 1.5 hours of taking pictures i realized i had made one too many left turns and ended up back where i started. ugh. However, along my circular path I found a small park along a little creek, which i stopped to unsuccessfully photograph.... Passed by a church with a huge rose window. Green vines climbed along the surrounding buildings, as if they were encircling the church. It was very quiet. It gave me time to think about studio. Walking in germany is always very relaxing, especially here in Neuss.
    On thursday, Sierra, Barrett and i went out on the town. If only our conversation had been recorded. That's all i can say about that.
    On friday, everyone went out. We cut a rug. It was delish. Trains stop running around 2 am here. This makes going out challenging. I definitely caught the 530 am train home saturday morning. ugh.

Aquatic transformer attacks dusseldorf university.

    Last night = went to a soccer game. The dusseldorf team is "fortuna". Apparently we suck, but the stadium was filled and the beer was flowing like a river into the place so it didn't matter. We lost 2-3 but it was a fun game. Germans are in their little bubbles on the busses and trains but come futbol time they get a little crazy. See a soccer game in europe. check.

    Today we went to the dusseldorf university. Nothing exciting happened. It looked like a university. The cafeteria food was cheap. das gut. First studio class. Profs discussed our first project, which is: Create a three-dimensional object that changes its orignal form and function or only works in its desired fucntion under water. The object should be able to be on land, to swim on the water and also submerge completely under water. It should futher be able to develop an activity under water that exceeds the object's potential on land. I'm tired. gutten nacht.

Playtime in front of the AIB aka ninja practice. (photos courtesy of Jacob Spence)

I suck at keeping up with this.

I'm experimenting with how i want these pictures organized. Please excuse the mess.

We covered quite a bit of ground on Saturday.

We are home, aka Dusseldorf, Germany.

    Many updates. This is the first I've been able to sit down and use a computer. I still lack internet. Geoff sits two feet across from me with decent internet access and yet I can't seem to get a connection. We are at a tight hostel across the Rhein. Everything is brand new and their color palette rocks. I haven't entirely decided how I am going to organize this blog, but for this post I'm going to sum everything up in reverse. maybe.     After a bit of help from tomtom (who hasn't been any help at all, Europe get some working satellites), we made it to our hostel. We only came to this particular hostel because of our trip to AIB. When we arrived there we met Lars, this-really-nice-chick, and some other nice lady. They basically saved our butts. Really-nice-chick showed us around the Media Harbor area, including a hole in the wall pizzeria. When i asked really-nice-lady for a German slang similar to "cool" or "awesome" she taught us the word "geil", which translates as "horny". Apparently they also use a derivative of "porno" to describe something that is tight. geil. I devoured a ham, onion, tuna, mushroom pizza as per her suggestion. It was surprisingly good. Before our lunch we were able to use AIB's internet access to find the hostel we are at now and really-nice-chick made us reservations. We found ourselves at the AIB, after a 15-20 minute walk with 3.5 months of crap on our backs, because the hostel we had booked reservations with the day before had an nice little note on their door letting us know they were closed for the holiday. What holiday? No one seems to know. Thanks for the heads up crappy hostel. To get to this crappy hostel we had to take a quick bus ride, 3 stops from the Central Düsseldorf station. At this central station we waited 45 minutes and watched two buses for our route drive by us. The buses were supposed to come every 15 minutes. Waiting along with us was a grey haired, 50+ year old lady in a thigh high skirt. Everyone around her has big coats and scarves but she obviously battles the cold with the jungle of hair on her legs. ew. Anyways, back it up a bit. How did we get here? Our train was from Brussels to Cologne to Düsseldorf. We trained for about 3 hours from Brussels to Cologne. The countryside was a beautiful mixture of industrial buildings, concrete walls dipped in graffiti, pocket sized lakes, giant wind turbines, typical European apartment style homes squeezed together shoulder to shoulder and lastly areas of extreme poverty dotted with little homes smaller then your bedroom.     The train ride was peaceful after we figured out where we were supposed to sit. I pissed off a few (many) Europeans as I went from one end of the train back to the other end carrying my roller board, branding Samsonite into everyone's elbows, as I squirmed through the narrow aisle. Let's get off the train and get back to Brussels. Nothing exciting happened the morning we left, except for the waking up at 2:30am wondering why it wasn't 7:00am. Sleep schedule is still a little off.

Brussels

day 1

    We arrived in the morning, after only a few hours of pseudo sleep on the airplane. First class, fully reclining chairs, pillow, blanket and I still can't fall asleep. We walked around, looking like tourists with our roller boards. Found the hostel. Dropped our crap off in the lockers at the hostel. Then we made our way to the Museum of Fine Arts. They had two exhibits, Rubens and Alchensky. Of course you had to buy additional tickets for each of these exhibits, we didn't, but we did get to see a good portion of Alchensky. I'll post the pictures as soon as i can. He had some really great pieces. In the museum, there was a nice Bacon piece, a few Magrittes, one with a flying tortoise that i really liked, and one Dali. Other than that...check out the pics i post later. After the museum we went to a restaurant, recommended by some random dude, that was on the 6th floor. The view was pretty tight, but the food was way over priced. I ordered something random from the menu and was surprised with one white pseudo-sausage and one black pseudo-sausage. It was paired with apple sauce and some mashed potatoes mixed with carrots, which was delish. The dish was a pricey 22 euros, definitely not worth it.

After lunch, the weather turned ugly and we were all exhausted so we headed back to the hostel. We crashed around 3pm and didn't wake up till the next day.

Day 2

    Up at 7:30 for breakfast, which included a bowl of corn flakes, 3 pieces of bread, jam and orange juice. Then we were off to Antwerp, a city just north of Brussels. Fashion capital of Europe. The central station in Antwerp was intense. The building was gorgeous. ahh pictures soon. Our first stop was a beautiful church, amazing stained glass, choir had incredibly intricate carved seats. It was here that i realized you can take Vivian Paul's class, study all the old churches and think you know about late European architecture, but until you are actually in the presence of something like this you have no idea...no idea. It was here that my battery in my camera died as well. Lame. After the church we found some food at this little Italian place. It was delish. After we filled our bellies we took a few pictures by a fortress and near the riverside. Then walked under the river Schelde via a lonnnnnng tunnel. There wasn't much on the other side except for a booie graveyard. So we headed back under the river and to the Black Panther, a little gallery of contemporary art. I'll post the art soon, basically it speaks for itself. Tempted by the countless bakeries at every turn, we finally gave in and got some really good chocolate pastries. Then on our way back we pushed our way through the crowds that lined the sidewalks of "fashion street". This was basically a huge strip of designer shops and boutiques filled with crap ya don't need. Jumped a train and headed back to Brussels. Passed out soon thereafter.

Day 3

    This was our most successful day of doing touristy crap. First item on the itinerary: Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit. After walking thru a massive park and up a decent set of stairs we find out that we are about 3 hours early. My bad. So we walked back. We've done a TON of walking. Da Vinci was put aside and next on the list was "Piss on a church". In London if they catch you pissing on a church you go to jail. In Brussels, they encourage it. So much that they actually built a public urinal on the side of a church. So we found the urinal aka the side of a church did our thing. Then we walked around the front of the church, stepped inside to see that mass was in session...very wierd. These Brusselians are strange, but i like it. To continue the theme of piss, we headed over to the Mannekin Pis, aka the little boy pissing statue, made famous in Brussels. Pictures soon. All this piss made us hungry. Can't go to Belgium and not get Belgium waffles. I got a waffle covered in chocolate and bananas. It was amazing. Somewhere in there we ate lunch also, but I've forgotten the right sequence. Anyways, then we headed back to the da vinci exhibit a few metro stops away. The church that this exhibit was in was sweet. The Da Vinci exhibit could have been tight, but none of it was in English. Da Vinci was a pro at documenting his work. I know i would have got more out of it had we picked up the little translator devices. Oh well. After the tour you could go to the top of the church. It had a panoramic view of the city. Incredible! I couldn't take pictures but I will steal some from Geoff. The view from atop the church was by far one of my favorite stops in Belgium. Back to the hostel. Exhausted. Walking on cobble stone = pain. Asleep by 9:30pm. gutten nacht.

dadSleeping counterReflection     professional     trainReflection     trainStation

pickpocketing     trainTicket     gateway     lostArc

onceYouGoBlack     shadow     seperateButEqual     airplaneRide

antwerpChurch     maxErnst     explosion     dali01

blackHole     bacon     alchensky01     alchensky02

Current location: Chicago O'hare International Airport

Packing for professionals. Coming Soon. Geoff, my dad and myself left Dallas this morning at 1055am. It was a quick flight, i think we all slept most of the way. I got about 3 hours of sleep the night before. Excitement could have been the cause. We are sitting in a terminal waiting for our 430pm departure to Brussels, discussing options for my blog layout. We had some decent chinese food and learned the German word das Krankenhous. It's one of those words you can roar, unfortuantely the translation is "hospital" and so it really isn't as cool as it could be.

6 days until Belgium.

Okay, ready, set, go! Site is live, woohoo. I'm going to Dusseldorf, Germany for an entire semester. This is going to be my outlet to share/keep record of all delicious experiences. Basically, I'm going to throw tons of photos up here and try to keep the text to a minimum.

This is a map. Google is badass. AIB is our school. I kinda got screwed because I'm out in BFE, aka Neuss, a town next to Dusseldorf. The host family says it's about 20 mins. by train to AIB. Not a big deal. The other pegs are galleries and museums.

This is the email my host family sent me.

dear gavin, thanks a lot for your message...we had so much stress arround christmas, that we did not answer, sorry for this. we are looking forward to meet you in january. you will be `our` 13th student and we really enjoy it most times. but let me introduce us, we are Viola and Armin and Djamil, our 12 year old son,he loves everything what has to do with computers, he often goes to swim and he likes to act & plays in theaterpieces. armin and I, we are artists and psychotherapists. we work mostly with less educated kids at school or in projekts. we live in neuss, which is very close to düsseldorf( about 20 minutes by train, but don`t worry going by train is very safe and common in germay), we have a small house with a small garden...everything is small here compared with US... you will have your own room and bathroom in the base of the house. anything is allready prepared for your comming. hopefully you and your family had a nice christmas...and will have a great new years party! enjoy your last days in US...esspecially the weather, - in germany we have a bad cold and icy weather at the moment. sorry for my bad English, writing is so much harder than talking...;-) have a good trip and see you soon, viola

This is so tight. This is so tight. This is so tight. This is so tight. mmmk, more to come. guten nacht.

ps. Emily says i need a picture of myself. done and done.