HR Giger Tourism II - The Bar

Shopping Center Milieu

Since we weren't able to visit the Giger Bar at Gruyères back in 2002, because the bar was under construction, I made sure we'd route our next Switzerland trip two years later via the city of Chur. It's the artist's birth town, and one of the country's oldest.

I'm not exactly sure any more what I expected of a Giger Bar. Maybe an ancient black castle or cathedral. Or some underground caverns, where HR Giger's sickest sinister artistic ideas would fit like a biomechanical tentacle in an eye socket. The greater our surprise was when we pulled over the parking area ...of a futuristic shopping center!

Ok... so this is a mall or an industrial park or something made of giant plastic cubes or  something... well, it kinda has some kind of a space station looks, somehow, but not quite what I imagined a Giger Bar to look like. Once inside the actual establishment it was more like it, very Gigerish interieur with Harkonnen chairs, biomechanical details - even the floor plates looked like they were part of an Alien space ship.

Giger Mirror

The next surprise was actually the clientele. One could imagine that a genuine Giger Bar would be crowded with freaks, goths, metal heads, artists, xenomorphs and other rejects. You know, black leather, tattoos and piercings, frowning sulky faces, a Charles Manson lookalike mad DJ playing dark music. Granted, we paid our visit during the afternoon hours, so no wonder there was no freakshow of a customer base present in the almost empty bar. The few customers were just some regular white collar salarymen, probably work mates having a beer before going home. I mean, they didn't look like they had deliberately come to the Giger Bar - they looked like they had gone to have an after work pint at the nearest pub which just happened to be a Giger Bar.

Happy Tourist

Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's not like me and my wife would have fitted into the alleged freak scene much  better. But hell, we travelled thousands of kilometres for the sole purpose of having a pint in a Giger Bar! I actually told that to the barmaid, who seemed genuinely surprised why anyone would do that. But she rewarded my fanboyhood by giving me some freebies from the bar, matchbooks and photos. I also bought The Mystery of San Gottardo book as a souvenir for myself. I was expecting a weird place to visit, and weird it definitely was, in a slightly different way, but undoubtedly worthy.

Habsburgs Rest in Pieces

Monarchs and other rulers usually want to make themselves remembered, one way or another. Pyramids, anyone? I'm particularly fond of the way the Habsburg dynasty (the Austrian emperor line, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine) has immortalised themselves by even harnessing the Viennese urban planning into action. When a member of the Habsburg family dies, he or she becomes embalmed, almost like the ancient upper-class Egyptians. The body is prepared for the sarcophagus, for the post-funeral display, whereas the heart and the rest of the entrails are preserved in separate metal urns - silver for the heart and copper for intestines and other organs. And like in a proper canonising process, people are encouraged to visit the crypts where the different body parts are laid to rest.

The Habsburg royalty are entombed in the very centre of Vienna, of course, but every family member is ingeniously separated in three different places, so there will be more burial sites for the royal subjects to visit. The hearts can be found in the Herzgruft (Heart Crypt) in the Augustinian Church. The guts are displayed in the Herzogsgruft (Ducal Crypt), situated in the catacombs of Stephansdom (St. Stephen's Cathedral), the most ostentatious landmark in Vienna. The embalmed bodies of the royalty lay in their sarcophagi in Kaisergruft (Imperial Crypt) below the Capuchin church. The guide showing the Ducal crypt told that despite the double sealing of the urns one of them started leaking some time ago, filling the catacombs with horrible deathly smell of rotting innards.

In the Imperial Crypt you can witness the ornament race on the sarcophagi. The oldest are simple metal coffins, but by walking deeper in the crypt the decorations of the newer caskets grow in spectacular proportions. The further you go the more ornaments, crowned Death's heads, veiled semi-nude women and cherubs there are on the sarcophagi. The winner is undoubtedly the stupendous double tomb of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I Stephen, which can also be seen in the video below. Pay attention to the weird knight(?) on the side that looks like a wooden pole is wearing an armour. Towards the end of the crypt the newest tombs like the are again more discreet, like in the vault of beloved couple Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Sissi and their son Rudolf.

In the end of the video below the alarm goes off when I'm shooting the death's head ornament from close distance. I'm not sure if it was me setting it off...

Paris Catacombs Photo

Skimmed through some old photo albums and found this picture of me (right) and and my friend in the catacombs of Paris during an Interrail trip some twenty years (and kilograms) ago. Time to visit Paris again at some point!

Loughborough Family Butcher

Low quality mobile phone camera snapshot.

After visiting a local business photographer, I walk in the centre of Loughborough. It's a busy sunny summer afternoon. People are running errands in the post office, shopping their groceries after work. Some are already having their first pint in a pub. Lots of cars driving around. A typical and nice day in a typical and nice English small town.

There I walk, minding my own business, when suddenly I spot an eerie establishment on the other side of the street. It's like a shop, because of the large display windows, but all the windows, including the door glass seem to be covered by brown packaging paper from inside. Above there is a sign with the text:

EDDIE BAILEY
FAMILY BUTCHER

Screen cap from Google Street View.

I never went inside the store. Wonder what it looks like behind those brown paper wrappers. I bet it's a real old-skool butcher's shop. Carvers, hooks and knives hanging from the ceiling and walls. More cutting tools and a big roll of that brown wrapper on a cutting block. Eddie himself standing behind the counter with a huge cleaver in his hand wearing somewhat bloody apron and a white trilby hat with a big smile on his face. Guess I'll take my wife and son there the next time we visit Loughborough. Maybe Eddie gives us family discount!

Hidden Camera in a Bone Crypt

I blogged earlier of the Capuchin crypt in Rome, which is decorated mostly with human bones. As I happened to have a spy camera (camouflaged as a pen) with me, I used it to shoot some footage of the skeletal ornaments and bone piles. The quality is obviously horrible, lighting almost nonexistent and the camera keeps moving annoyingly all the time, but anyway, here's a small video glance into the notorious bone crypt.

The Mummified Monk of Samui

The shrine

Koh Samui's top attraction? Easy: the mummified body of Loung Por Daeng (aka Phra Khru Samathakittikhun aka Dang Piyasilo), a Buddhist monk, who predicted his own death, which occurred at 1973. He died while meditating at the age of 79. The body didn't decompose normally, but was rather mummified probably by dehydrating very quickly. After decades he still is in amazingly good shape. At least for a dead guy, that is.

He left his disciples instructions to place his body in the temple of Wat Kunaram in an upright cross-legged position 'to aspire the future generations to follow the Buddhist teachings and be saved from suffering'. The story doesn't tell if it was also his instructions to have those nifty Ray-Bans, but they were said to be placed on the remains of his nose, because his sunken eyes started to look ghastly. To be honest, the result - a shades-wearing mummy monk sitting in a glass casket (like Rascar Capac in a Tintin comic!) - is still a tad appalling.

Loung Por Daen

I'm not sure if he was still alive when this photo was taken.

HR Giger Tourism I - The Museum

We really made the effort to reach the Giger Museum back in 2002. We were traveling with Interrail tickets around the Central Europe. Our tickets, however, didn't help us further from the Swiss city of Fribourg, so in order to reach Gruyères where the Giger Museum was supposed to be, we were adviced to take a bus to Bulle. There we should hop into a local train which stops at Gruyères. It sounds more complicated than it actually was, and before too long we were treading uphill towards an idyllic medieval hilltop village famous for its cheese.

It was yet another boiling hot cloudless dead calm summer day. Most of the people in the village were swarming groups of sixty-something or older men and women moving in groups with little stickers on their shirts marking them as members of their tourist group. Many of the guides herding them had little flags or something else to hold up in order to get their group's attention. As we approached the end of the village, where Château St. Germain looms just before the upper castle of Gruyères, we overheard a tourist pensioner asking his guide about the museum door nearby.
- Oh no, you wouldn't like that, it's a museum by one of 'those' artists, you know, the guide replied merrily, leaving the man somewhat baffled, and unable to ask more. Eyes rolling we entered the museum, which still is one of my best museum experiences ever. The old castle suits perfectly to Giger's off-putting, dark, macabre and (thought-)provoking art.

Unfortunately the Giger bar right next to the museum was under construction at the time. We peeked in through the dirty windows and amongst the scaffoldings, dusty plastic tarpaulins and halogen work lights we saw already half finished spinal vault arches in very Alienesque surroundings. A pity we couldn't grab a cold pint at that time. But one of the greatest things of the whole visit in Gruyères was the contradiction between the village and the museum - who would have guessed that deep in the picturesque beautiful medieval village swarmed by happy old cheese tourists there lurks a dark pit of bizarre and perverse art straight from the outskirts of hell?

Check out also my other Giger adventures:
The Giger Bar

Bones and Brimstone in Rome

What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.

Rome provides numerous excellent spots for a tad more morbid touristic destinations. The famous Roman catacombs are an obvious target for at least every other tourist, and many city center churches provide access to their crypts, underground vaults and tombs. And one doesn't run out of churches in Rome very quickly. However, the Eternal City has two even more cadaverous places to visit for those after somewhat more macabre rambling.

Bony Grim Reaper lurking on the ceiling.

Let us start from the end: Death. In addition to inspiring the name for a type of coffee, the order of Capuchin friars has also had a peculiar way to burying their dead brothers. They dug them up and used their bones to decorate the crypt of the church of Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione. The ossuary ornaments and bone piles consist of skeletons of about 4000 friars. The grotesque adornments consist of individual bones arranged in most imaginative way for example as skull-pelvic butterflies, shoulder-blade lanterns and all kinds of decorative patterns within the stretchy boundaries of human imagination. The skeleton Grim Reaper with a scythe and scales made of bones was probably my favourite.I have to agree with Marquis de Sade: The Capuchin Crypt is really worth a visit.

A photocopy of a burn mark made on the apron of
Sister M. Herendorps by the hand of the deceased
Sister Mary Care Schoelers, a victim of the plague
of 1637. (Original apron is kept in Germany.)

After death comes afterlife. So it's convenient to continue to the next level: the Purgatory. In roaring catholic Italy it's a common thing to believe that some dead souls have to suffer a temporary rather than eternal punishment in order to purify themselves from all the sins before entering the Heaven. Or something. Fine. But what in fact is this Purgatory? Is it merely a 'condition of existence' like the previous Pope put it, or an actually physical, undoubtedly a fiery place where you actually go after dying to fry your sins away? In Rome you will have an excellent opportunity to review the evidence of the latter yourself: The wonderfully named Little Purgatory Museum (Piccolo Museo Del Purgatorio) in the church of the Sacred Heart sports numerous exhibits that have been burned by people reaching out from the flames of Purgatory.

The tunic of Mother Isabella, burnt by Father Panzini
in 1731. The story says the burn mark is on the sleeve.

No shit. Among about ten purgatorial items enclosed in a single huge glass case (so that they are very difficult to photograph) you have for example a small prayer book with burnt fingerprints, a night-cap with burnt fingerprints, and piece of table surface with a charred cross and a hand-shaped mark. Dead people have reached from the depths of the purifying holy fire and scorched stuff.

Why? Usually the point for a dead person suffering in eternal flames is to appear to someone familiar and ask him or her to pray on to shorten the time in purgatory. I don't know how it worked out for the souls that burned these objects. Nor do I know how modern insurance companies would react to claims for indemnity for purgatory-burned property. But the exhibition is definitely worth seeing.

Edit: Check also the video filmed in the Capuchin crypt!

Elephant Penis in a German Ship

Maybe about 25 years ago I was traveling with a youth orchestra (I played the sax) by bus from Finland to Holland or Belgium, to some brass band festival. We made a stop in Lübeck for just a few hours and we youngsters got some time of our own to spend in the Old Town.

Photo © Stefan Nagel

One of the older guys in the orchestra knew about a museum ship parked next to the Altstadt in the Trave River and the bizarre sea voyage exhibition in it. He particularly stressed that they have a giant elephant's penis there. An elephant's member? That is a must-see! So of course we boys bolted to the ship to see this remarkable wonder of the nature. The Museumship MS Mississippi was docked there indeed, and the sign at her entrance promised an exhibition from overseas, miracles and mysteries of this world.

We entered this dark and dusty, moldy and musty exhibition in awe. It was like a childhood dream come true, like a live illustration for old Tarzan books or Tintin comics. We were surrounded by literally thousands of curiosities: skeletons, masks, stuffed animals, primitive weapons, insect collections, shrunken heads, relics, idols of gods, skulls, animal horns, models, sacred items of different religions, old diving gear, figureheads, miniature ships, board games, constrictor snakes, chests, art, statuettes, seashells, anything you could imagine and beyond.

Photo © Stefan Nagel

The items were collected by a German adventurer and explorer Reinhold Kasten and his wife Mady during their tens of years on the Seven Seas, several times around the world. Many of the exhibits were wonderfully  labeled with little stories, of which we Finnish boys unfortunately understood very little. There was a teeth set of a savage man-eating shark with a list of stuff that was found in its stomach, including a shoe, human flesh and a pocket watch that was still ticking. There was also a stuffed giant constrictor snake which had stolen and swallowed a 2 week old baby straight from a hammock. Or a giant skull of a white elephant that was shot by maharaja after it killing two of his guards. And indeed there it was, locked in a glass showcase (obviously so that nobody could steal it), a stuffed or mummified or embalmed, well, somehow preserved, very big, no, gargantuan exhibit: the elephant phallus. *Tee hee hee*

After witnessing the Beavis & Butthead'esque culmination of the exhibition and before leaving this spectacular hanseatic attraction we discovered a chest full of Chinese paper knives lying on the ship floor near the counter. Pure kitsch! Only couple of Deutschmarks each! My knife has been decorating my home to this day.

SS Prinz Heinrich aka MS Mississippi was built in 1909.

Unfortunately the more than 100 year old MS Mississippi is not moored in the Lübeck Altstadt any more. The ship has been moved couple of times already and she's nowadays being restored to be relocated at her original berth in Leer with her original name Prinz Heinrich. The fantastic sea voyage exhibition with thousands of its wonderful items was moved in a lighthouse-museum in Warnemünde, but it was closed in November 2009. Needless to say, the magic of the exhibition was surely gone already as soon as the exhibits were moved away from the historical ship. But alas, now nobody can see the marvellously macabre sea voyage spectacle at all any more. They don't make these kind of museums these days. Never ever underestimate little boys' amusement towards animals' reproductive organs. Look, it brought me to this unique, mysterious and now sadly lost museum!

This blog entry is partially based on Stefan Nagel's article about the museum ship Mississippi. Thank you also for letting me use the photos.