Visiting David

After the full on exhibition in Frankfurt and a day trip to Paris, I get to visit my German friend David in Stuttgart. We were planning to go for a roadtrip... well... there isn’t really much planning involved and the result is rather chaotic....

I met David in Canberra, Australia. He was a friend of a friend and we got to know each other at a church camp. At the time, I had devised a game of mismatch Bible characters for an ice breaker game. So a person with a ‘Samson’ name tag has to find ‘Delilah’, ‘Mary’ has to find ‘Joseph’, etc.... I had to sign people as they come in and my name tag was ‘whale’ (I had to find my partner Jonah, and yes I know that the fish who swallowed Jonah isn’t exactly a whale). David walked in and said, “Thats a nice name you call yourself.”

David was an exchange linguistic student in Australia at the time. After he finished the exchange program, his rent was expiring and he stayed in me and my housemates flat for a couple of months. David is a bit of a hippie. One Christmas, we were the only 2 people left in Canberra. We celebrate Christmas at the back of his house doing a good ol Ausie BBQ with a bit of metal barrel, bits of coal and gum leaves and wired tray for the sausages to sit on… with hippie-ish music playing in the background.

It was hard for his friends to imagine that he has parents or live in a normal house. We’d like to think of him and his girlfriend living in a forest, inside a semi- perfect, cube-shaped house with triangular roof. His house would be on a tree, filled with old rusty furniture that he got from random garage sales in the closest village. The ladder up to the house would be a single firm knotted rope and his friends would be a variety of wild animals. He would write books on the trials of his life, his travels and a collection of mysteries and contemplations of a living God on an old type-writer. His other activities would be reading, teaching his animal and other hippie friends to speak Pidgin and search rhubarb plants for food.

But as I arrived at the front of his house, I soon discovered that David lives in a normal German house, with normal parents, eats normal German food and brothers who are almost exactly like him.