Second stop of the honeymoon trip,
from Munich to Cologne in Germany,
then to Barcelona and Granada in Spain.
Pay Toilets
Last time I talked about how Germany shows a kind of rigorously clean cityscape.
This feeling also shows in one point: pay toilets.
In Germany,
whether it’s a tourist site bathroom,
or a mall bathroom,
many require a €0.5 entrance fee.
(Handicapped bathrooms are exempt.)
This left me, who has visited toilets all over the world, a bit dazed (x.
The last pay public toilet in my memory
still stands at the People’s Square bus stop from my middle school days,
welcoming my arrival as I took the bus to school.
In a 奇葩说-style question I asked Mia:
“If in the future all public toilets in China charged a 50-cent entrance fee,
would you support it?”
Mia: “Of course I’d support it, as long as they’re as clean as Germany’s after charging.”
Me: “I’d also support it, as long as it supports WeChat/Alipay payment.”
So amid the laughter we used the “What If Phone Booth” once again.
The What If Phone Booth
The “What If Phone Booth” is a future-tech that Doraemon brought back.
With its help,
the world can operate the way you imagine.
xkcd’s what-if series has the same effect.
Next to Cologne Cathedral is the Rhine River,
and lying across the Rhine is the Hohenzollern Bridge.
What’s special about this bridge is not its very LOTR-sounding name,
but the urban legend about it:
hang a lock on the bridge, throw the key into the river, and your love will be locked for a lifetime.
By capture-recapture method rough estimate,
at least 300,000 locks hang on the bridge.
Mia and I started chatting again about the various possibilities of the lock-hanging couples on the bridge.
Like Qian Zhongshu’s metaphor about radio,
ten thousand humans have ten thousand sorrows and joys.
Also like Lu Xun said,
I can find them noisy.
Mia sighed to me,
if the timing we met hadn’t been so good,
we might have missed each other.
This reminded me my dad sometimes also sighs,
if his English had been a bit better back then,
he would in the end be missing many simple happinesses.
Nobita still, as always,
after experiencing failure, returned the “What If Phone Booth” to Doraemon.
A human individual’s present moment
is only a slice of his long life.
This is probably the sorrow of higher-dimensional beings.
Nature
When visiting cultural landmarks,
you always need various background knowledge, author analysis, reading comprehension, mental composition.
But natural landmarks are different.
It’s like nature directly throws large swaths of blue sky, rolling mountains, boundless ocean in your face,
just perceiving it drops it from your brain into your spinal blood.
On the last afternoon in Barcelona we went to Montjuïc.
The cloudless sky was like a Windows blue screen,
the invisible air diffused the fragrance of plants,
the horizon at the mountaintop was as flawless as the one in 《The Truman Show》.
European drizzles follow the clouds,
and each cloud follows its mood.
If in a good mood it’ll run aside to play,
if in a bad mood it’ll cry while darting around everywhere.
So on this side of the Earth, the proportion of humans holding umbrellas drops noticeably.
When it rains, just put on a hat to shelter,
when the sun comes out, lazily soak up some sunshine,
very pleasant.
Why isn’t Shanghai like this?
I couldn’t help wondering.
Maybe because we’re not the Allies,
no weather control device.
I couldn’t help answering myself.
Gaudí
Although the sky on this side of the Earth is intoxicating,
as tourists we still have to be self-aware as tourists,
clutching our bags, we stepped through Barcelona’s popular cultural sites:
Casa Milà, Casa Batlló, Sagrada Família.
These buildings have one common point:
the architect is all called Gaudí.
To be precise,
the architect is the same person, his name is Gaudí.
I won’t gush specific rainbow farts.
I hope readers also get a chance to see them.
The most magical thing to me is:
Gaudí turned “business code” into “timeless masterpiece.”
Casa Milà is actually because a rich guy named Milà
paid Gaudí to build him a house,
but Gaudí straight up turned an engineering work into a piece of art.
Same with Casa Batlló.
Thinking of this,
my gaze admiring the stained glass of Sagrada Família
became brighter and more complex.
do things matters
When I used to debate with friends,
I’d often be questioned back:
“Sure, Linus is amazing,
but us business-code writers,
we can’t possibly create works like his, right?”
At such times, lacking material to draw on, I could only say more mystically:
“The world will shine because of you,
in the end we’ll surely all make big news.”
My dry explanation only made friends bitterly smile:
“You can think this way because you’re different…”
My friend,
when Milà posted his task to build a house,
he didn’t say: “I want to build a World Heritage Site.”
Gaudí got the task of “build Milà a house,”
and there are thousands of engineers in the world who got the task of building houses.
But the world changed because of Gaudí.
He used his talent and effort to make the thing turn out differently outstanding.
A slogan immediately popped into my head: do things matters.
It doesn’t just mean striving to be at core positions doing important things,
it also means every thing ‘matters’ because I’m the one doing it.
There’s only one Gaudí in the world,
there’s only one you in the world,do things matters
(End)