Castle Concert

Just down river of Bochum, the Ruhr river is dammed, creating Lake Kemnade to the south. This turned out to be the center of my activities last weekend.

In the summer, there is a Castle on the edge of the lake that hosts concerts. Its a small castle surrounded by a mote. The concert I went to was held inside within the medieval courtyard. There were two rotating stages. The reason I hear about he concert is that Theodosii Spassov would again be playing, and he plugged it at the Kulturecafe. He was the first act I saw. He was great again, but some of the magic from the Kulturecafe was missing.

The next act was a gypsy band with a Jewish woman on vocals. She stole the show with her energy and exuberance. She was extremely animated, and reminded me of my Jr. High substitute music teacher (Ms. Shepard), except Jewish. She sang a lot of Jewish folk songs like you would expect to hear in "The Fiddler on the Roof". The musicians in the band were very good too, and they provided a somber counter the her, kind of like when James Brown's band calls back to him.

The last act, was this sort of extravaganza. The main band was a funky jazz band, headed by a German David Bowie. He played a killer guitar, and his band had some incredibly talented musicians on trumpet, clarinet, trombone and precussion. And the cool part was the show would cycle on and off different acts to play with the band, each with a cultural theme. There was sort of medeival marching band, a classical music section, some belly dancers and persian music, and even an American gospel piece. The next act would usually start in the middle of the courtyard, behind the audience. They would start playing as they approached the stage, creating a fade-in effect. Then the band would sort of work into the style, with some solos and some accompaniment. After the concert, one of the Castle towers was turned into a disco and with a DJ and a live latin drummer. You can tell I've been in Eruope for a while, because I used the word "disco". As luck would have it, I left in time to catch the last bus back into town.

Saturday, Jan and I went to this new bar that just opened up on the lake. They brought in a bunch of white sand, and created boardwalks, all inside the bar. You could choose between sitting in lounge chairs under umbrellas, or laying on a shaded bed. Nobody really swims there, because, well, its still the Ruhr. In fact its the Ruhr that has been stagnated and allowed to warm up. But to be fair, the Ruhr is clean enough now that people have begun swimming below the lake, after the dam.

On the way home from the bar, I saw not one, but two types of glowing insects. The first was a tiny green butted firefly. It was only my second firefly encounter, so I was pretty excited. These were very small, and quite green in color, and they stayed lit for a pretty long time. They were different than the flashing yellowish type in North Carolina. Then, as we walked along a wooded trail back to campus, we saw several green glows under the trees. At first we thought they were more fireflies, but as we approached them, they didn't fly off. So, I reached down and picked one up. . . and it was actually a glow worm. It was short and fat and had three glow spots on each side of its body.