Bonntastic

No time to write as I'd like to, but I'll try to gradually get everything I would like to get out over the week, including a little blogasm over the May Day Bad Seeds concert, whose imperfections only rendered it more lovable. We went to Bonn and had a lovely time over the long weekend - I relaxed muscles that I thought had turned into bone by this point, I've been so tense, and I feel like I got a bit of perspective on my high-pressure yuppie life and how to end it without physically destroying myself.

It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.

However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:





The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.

Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.