Omnibus Blog 4: That Canadian Visit

German bars getting into the spirit of the Tour de France.

I’ve fallen into that old trap of posting once a month. A bad habit, even if things have been busy on my end. But I’m making up for it with the Lazy Writer’s Round-Up Edition of the Omnibus Blog, a brief collection of short blurby blurbs.

The Tour de France comes to the Dorf

Düsseldorf has French fever. A touch of French has entered Düsseldorf's bakeries and bars recently – German institutions.

The bakeries are displaying fresh baguettes more prominently in the windows. The bars are decked out in the French tricolour (although I haven't seen French beer on tap). Oh, and those speed-bike-ring, short-short-wearing folks are racing down sidewalks a little more proudly. 

On my bike ride to the office, workers are busily erected barriers and beer tents. The Dorf's own Kraftwerk is playing a concert. They actually have a song called Tour de France and it's... well.. techno.

The start of the event are time trials, so 13km of race way is being cordoned off, most of it along the Rhine River. The next day, the Tour leaves Dusseldorf, riding through some pretty country in the Rhineland to Liege. Coincidentally, neither the beginning or the end of this stage is in France. 

We're planning on wandering around and checking it all out, but we've heard rumours the events are prohibitively expensive. If true, the extent of my instagram photos might be tiny blurs in the distance with a moody filter. 

Kraftwerk's concert stage goes up.

That French Election

Emmanuel Macron, the centrist, beat out the nationalists to win the French presidency and won a majority in the legislature. He'll cruise along with his agenda, which includes investing in skills and training, reforming the labour market (like that 35-hour work week), bringing free market reforms to the economy, among other things.

Smooth sailing, right? I don’t know... 

He's a youthful, refreshing politician, but voter turnout for the presidential and parliament elections hovered around 50 percent. There is something deeply wrong with civil society in Europe.

Some of this disengagement from politics might be total apathy of the elitist, and often corrupt, nature of French national politics. But some is likely because European government have been incapable of dealing with today's seismic shifts – a years-long recession, high unemployment, fear of free trade, the migrant crisis.

Macron's pragmatist agenda, which takes the best from the left and right wings of the political spectrum might be the shock France needs. Or it might not. Serious reform needs to come from Brussels too. 

We'll see how engaged people are when the next elections roll around.

Canada Trip

Oh, yeah. That happened. It had been a year and a half since our last visit to my homeland, so we were overdue for a visit.

The short version: we went to a wedding in Toronto, went to a baseball game, Kata got sick, we cancelled a trip to Montreal, went back to London, recuperated, then went to Ottawa, and back to London with a one-hour pitstop in Toronto, then back to Toronto to fly back.

I packed the schedule a little too much, yet no what matter it’s impossible to see everyone. That seems sad, but we ended up spending some quality time with the friends and family we were able to see.

It's a living-away-from-home compromise. You don't see people as often as you'd like, but you do have a good time with them when you do. It isn't a perfect arrangement, but the solid, strong, lifelong friendships are the ones that weather the distance and time apart.

So even as we all move forward and grow up and be more responsible, it's good to know that friends will still make the time for me that I will make for them.

Ottawa Paparazzi.

Art of the Dorf

Dusseldorf's K21

We’ve been planning a visit to K21, Düsseldorf’s top notch contemporary art gallery, for a while. The K20, its sister gallery, gets a lot of the attention for its collection of classic and modern German art, but K21 is an interesting visit for those ready to brave the occasional strangeness of contemporary art.

Full disclosure, I’m not a big contemporary art nut. 

Sometimes I'm impressed with it. Other times I wonder if a six-year-old could have done the same thing. I don't hide my ignorance about it. I try to appreciate the artist for coming out and doing something that wasn't done before, which is the barest minimum we can all do when looking at art.

K21 is big for a contemporary art space. And it's a gorgeous old building too. Usually you don't see that, but Düsseldorf was Joseph Beuys’ hometown, so there must be a civic bias for absurd, contemporary artsiness. 

Side note, Beuys is famous for a few things, like his tin cans, but after a visit to his exhibition at Ottawa's National Gallery, my favourite Beuys is a cross with a sausage hanging from it. 

Anyway, back to our K21 visit

We wandered into an exhibit with a light show in a mirrored box. In another, we approached what we thought was a red rectangular screen, only to reach out and discover it was an optical illusion. It was actually a room with a curved back wall lit by red LEDs. The curved wall, without corners, tricks your eyes into thinking your looking at something without depth, like a screen. Clever, tricky Contemporary Art!

K21's biggest draw is a creation by Tomas Saraceno: an elaborate web of steel cables suspended above the building’s atrium. Visitors put their belongings into a locker, don coveralls and hiking shoes, and walk or lounge on the steel cables, looking four floors down onto the atrium below.

It’s amusement park-esque, but there is a typical contemporary art explanation about how people’s actions affect other people. That's actually not bullshit. When you walk along, especially if you're a clumsy bag of bones like me, other people have to steady themselves as the web shakes and strains and shifts beneath them.

Walking along Saraceno's wire web at K21.

Wandering through a contemporary art exhibit sometimes leaves me wondering what I just saw, it's also nice to know that contemporary art can also surprise and delight me too.

Labour Day's True Meaning

During my university days, a beer company launched an advertising campaign that included a petition calling for a public holiday in June. Their reasoning was if May, July, August, and September had public holidays, June should too. 

The petition collected thousands of signatures, but hit a snag when no one figured out what occasion the public holiday should celebrate – other than a brewery's desire to sell more beer.

They could have called it June Day and no one would've minded.

May's holiday is Queen Victoria' birthday, although it's not celebrated on her birthday (May 24). Instead it move arounds to fall on the last Monday of May, so people have a long weekend in the spring to open the cottage, drink beer by the case – or two-four, as they're called in Canada – play with fireworks, and visit hospitals to reattach blown-off fingers

July 1 is Canada Day, and is always on July 1. It's the only summer holiday they don't shift around to make a long weekend. People get grumpy about that.

The first Monday of August is a public holiday because it's Civic Day, which I'm not even going to pretend means anything.

The first Monday of September is for Labour Day. On paper it has something to do with organized labour and celebrating the 8-hour work day. In practice, it marks the end of the summer, when people close the cottage, quit drinking beer by the two-four, put away the fireworks, and make up a less embarrassing story to tell people about their new prosthetic fingers.

When you start moving public holidays to create long weekends, people tend to forget what the holiday is about. Labour Day is a great example.

Canada once celebrated Labour Day on May 1st, along with the rest of the world. This day honoured the gains of the organized labour movement, especially the 8-hour work day. The unions would march in the streets, call for better working conditions, and then spend the day with their families. 

Of course, workers in the streets attract considerable police attention, and nothing calms large crowds quite like a massive police presence. Riots were common. In 1886, someone threw a bomb at police during a Labour Day march in Chicago. Police responded by firing indiscriminately into the crowd. 

Labour Day became a day of remembrance for that massacre, which invited larger rallies and more clashes with the police. The Canadian government switched its Labour Day to the first Monday of September, hoping to avoid working class commotion on May 1st. It worked.

Today, the first of May is just another work day in Canada, while September's Labour Day is another day to sell barbeque accessories and beer. 

In Germany and Hungary, there are still marches on May 1st. The anarchists also join the fun, so there is occasional rioting. The far right groups organize demonstrations on the same day against immigration and, so brawls tend to erupt between the two extremes.

I've never seen a march in Canada on Labour Day. And many people I know work more than 8 hours a day. Some often work weekends. Most struggle balancing work with life. 

Beer companies can ask for all the public holidays they want in June, February, or whenever, but it doesn't make a difference if we’ve forgotten how hard it was to get the time off we deserve.