Deutschland Diary, Pt. 10: Germany, I hardly knew ye
Yes, I'm back home, but still only half way through my travelogue. I'll continue on. To gear myself up again, I'll start with a little educational segment. You know I'm all about the teaching.
Today I bring you a little known fact about Germany. When you think of Germany, you probably picture rugged mountains, huge glasses of beer, and Valkyrie in horned helmets (in other words, lunch with Kat in the Alps).
But did you know that there's another side of this fair country? A side that cherishes...
cute
kitties.
I'm not talking a love of actual cats. I'm talking an obsession with photographs of cute, big-eyed kitties. The cuter the better.
They're everywhere.
They're never pictures of full-grown cats or of cats in any kind of natural setting. They are the feline equivalent of Ann Geddes prints--contrived, overly precious shots from the 1970s of young kittens photographed with a variety of tender props.
Every souvenir shop has a rack of postcards with local attractions and a selection of cute kitty cards. So, for example, in Oberammergau, the racks had postcards of King Ludwig before he was overthrown, the Passion Play depicting the death of the Christ, and little white Persians with pink bows sitting in a flower basket full of petunias.
I kid you not. I saw too much of this not to conclude it's a strange anamoly in the German psyche. Okay, maybe it's just the Bavarian psyche, but nonetheless, it's there. I don't know what it means, but I think it might explain the country's affection for Daniel.
As evidence, I bought this postcard in the Munich airport. It's not quite as cloyingly cute as most, but I'm a sucker for a skinny orange cat or two and I liked the colors, so I chose it over the tiny grey tabby sitting with the pink parasol.
So, next time you picture a robust Bavarian in lederhosen and a stein of beer, know that he probably just downloaded his computer's desktop from this site.
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BTW, just to continue with the Charlotte-Munich Cosmic Connection, I thought some of you might enjoy the postcard I bought in the Charlotte airport as well.
Thanks to Susie for the kitty link and for being such a wonderful hostess.