out of control

Last weekend we went to see the newest Wes Anderson movie: The Grand Budapest Hotel, a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It’s not quite as amazing as his last one, Moonrise Kingdom, but it is still really really good. I would definitely encourage you to go see it. Since the cinema was near the train station in Düsseldorf I mostly took pictures in the station and around it in one of the rather shady neighbourhoods.

All pictures taken with: Olympus Pen E-PL3 and Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 ASPH.

It was a Sunday and therefore the station was full of crazy football/soccer fans and police. Don’t ask me what the allure of football is, I was always wary of mass phenomena like this. Since a lot of football fans act like the lovely people in this picture, it actually always surprised me to find football fans even among academics and highly educated people. I fail to see how any sane person could feel compelled to shout at a TV screen just because a bunch of overpaid people run after a ball, but well … humans are a rather weird species compelled to do extremely strange things sometimes. Kicking a paper ball around in the middle of a busy train station and then shouting like morons falls in the category of strange (and inconsiderate) behaviour in my book. Seriously, I probably wouldn’t have anything against football, if people would be able to engage in such pleasures without all the male posturing, the conformism, the shouting, the drinking, the sorry excuse for singing and the latent (and sometimes open) violence/hooliganism. In general I could easily do without all the inconsiderate behaviour connected to all of these mass phenomena like sports events, parades or even carnival.

I agree with the screen in the background.

Sorry, this one needs a little German to show anything beyond my obsession with pancakes. The sign on the right says: “Graveyard too expensive? River burial. The alternative”. Only slightly macabre …