Today was our last outing with Andrea and Peter–after a leisurely morning with a little packing, we took off to take the train North again, from Hamburg to Rendsburg (75 minutes), the town where, coincidentally, both my grandparents and Peter’s grandmother used to live. We all still get a kick out of traveling there by train (even though we did so just Monday on the way from Copenhagen) because the railroad bridge (Hochbrücke) across the Kiel Canal is an enormous loop that goes high up and then curves down to the railroad station.
My sister Judith picked us up at the train station around noon, and we went to the art exhibit that we’d come here to see. It is an annual contemporary art exhibit called NordArt that is in its 25th year, but even Andrea and Peter, art enthusiasts, only discovered it a couple of years ago because it is a bit out of the way (Rendsburg with under 30,000 people is not a big town, and not part of a bigger metropolitan area, either). The NordArt is an international sculpture and painting exhibit to which artists can apply directly to have their works shown, and a jury selects the work. They or their gallerists have to cover most of the costs for getting their works here, although there also seem to be some grants, and there are also some prizes given. The exhibit has an indoor and an outdoor portion, both with LOTS of space, in a former iron and steel factory (Eisenhütte) and the park that was created by the owner, who lived in a mansion right by the factory in classic 19c fashion. Not only the former ironworks but also the carriage house of the mansion were used as exhibition spaces, and many works were large, and varied. The carriage house had a special exhibit for artists from Mongolia, and the park has quite a number of permanent exhibits, so it is a year-round sculpture park as well as used in the summer when the NordArt happens. There was more to see than we could take in, and Mark, Judith and I actually took a break half-way through to find some quick Chinese food in Rendsburg’s sleepy little downtown, while Andrea and Peter ate the sandwiches they brought to max out their art time. Then we all wandered around together in the park some more (the rain that had made this a bit difficult earlier had stopped by then), but around 5 pm we decided our brains were full, so we left.
A sample of fun impressions caught by Mark and Andrea that also shows how interesting and varied the factory space is:
After we had some coffee at a little café in the factory’s former science classroom (I do not know why it had one, but we sat on lab chairs around one of those big experimentation tables and there was a periodic table on the wall and science-classroom sinks along the wall), we took Andrea and Peter back to the Neumünster train station, which was en route to Judith and Michael’s house anyway, so they could get back home more easily than from Rendsburg. We picked up some groceries on the way home, and salad, fried potatoes and some cold cuts (plus ice cream) for dinner, and afterwards went for a little walk through the village of Wankendorf (Judith and Michael live at the very edge of it in the world’s most peaceful and quiet apartment). Michael came home from his long day at the Zen Center where he works / volunteers, and joined us for the last part of the walk, and we chatted for a bit before we called it a day (a long and beautiful one at that).