There are two ways to get from Essen to Frankfurt am Main by train. You can change trains twice for a 2-hour straight route, or stay on the first train for a three-hour journey via Bonn. I wanted to spend as little time in transit as possible, but Jochin and Angela encouraged me to take the long way round.

I was really happy to have taken their advice. The train followed the Rhein where vineyards slipped down steep green hills to the river, and every small town had a castle. It was a breath-taking journey, and it made me wish I had more time so I could have got off the train whenever I could.

Frankfurt is a dissapointment. Every bit of history has been cloaked by business and consumerism, and the people appear the same. Like a snobby Sydney. It’s also the hottest day I’ve had in Europe, and the humidity is killing me. I’m continually sweaty and my fat rolls spill over my overpacked, oversized backpack and I look like a freak among all the oversteroidized, chemically bronzed or anorexic freaks here.

It’s only three thirty in the afternoon but I already want to head to my hotel room where I can have a six-hour long shower, and watch German TV (don’t care if I don’t understand it). Just want to go home. Only 44 hours to Melbourne, and another 16.5 to Shepparton.

I took a three-hour train ride from Essen to Hamburg this morning. A beautiful city, and everyone sells hamburgers it seems. All the signs say Hamburger Bank, Hamburger Chemist, Hamburger toys.

It was divine design - pure serendipity! I got lost and ended up at a place called the Rathaus Markt (town hall marketplace). There at the art gallery was a showing of my favourite artist, Frida Kahlo. I saw the original Self portrait with monkey and the less known but equally strange and painful Heart, cactus and foetus.

I grabbed lunch at Hamburg’s version of Hudson’s, called Balzac Coffee (such an unfortunate choice of trademark) and sat on a bridge over the main canal (canals everywhere, please, no more canals).

There I got a pain in my stomach as I watch a couple of small children play with their dad while mum looked on, protectively amused.

It is really time for me to come home.

Though I will miss Uncle Jochin and Aunt Angela. They have been brilliant hosts and have made a complete stranger feel at home, with family. Thank you.

I’m loving myself sick in Germany. It’s one of the most beautiful places on earth for a guy that likes to get lost in tall thick forest and yet find themselves again in a beergarden or on a busy urban street. Shepparton Teusners and Emersons: I declare we are living on the wrong continent (but you know I always say that when I go overseas - this time I mean it - yeah, yeah I always say that too).

Jochin and Angela showed me around Essen, including the old part of the city, after we had driven to Düsseldorf. The whole city is Chapel Street, with major fashion stores like Chanel, Harris Scarfe, Florsheim, Bi-Lo and Toni&Guy. I had run out kidneys so decided to pass on the real shopping.

Tomorrow I’m off the Hamburg for the day and then on to Frankfurt before leaving for the Antipodes. I’ve noticed from my google analytics account that there are some readers of this blog from Northern Germany. If anyone is in or near those two cities and would like to talk online religion or emerging church stuff, drop me a comment and let’s meet. My apologies that English will have to be the official language of the conversation (unless I lose my pants and need directions).

It is good to be in the land of my ancestors, Germany. It’d be even better if I could speak a single word in German. I’m staying with relatives here (Jochin is in advertising and Angela is in web design, so we we are all media people - Angela designed the picture logo on my blog), and they’re English is superb, but I wish I could help them relax a bit.

I emailed some friends who learned German in school, but one emailed back with phrases like Wo sind mein hosen? (Where are my pants?) which is really unhelpful since I have been wearing saris the whole time.

My relatives met me at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam - the city where there are more canals than Venice, where killing tourists with your bicycle is a national sport, and where the green stuff in the bowl next to your ciabatta roll is not pesto.

Here I had the rare opportunity to see the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum - the largest gallery of original Rembrandt works. Here I saw the famous mural Nightwatching.

Before we could see the three by five metre painting (it looked that large), we had to enter a room where the walls were dotted with television screens. Across each screen segments of the painting were shown, intersperesed with pictures of models dressed as characters in the painting, while a narrator told the Nightwatching story. The entire room and the television montage were designed and created by British director, Paul Greenaway.

Whe it was over another door was opened and we walked into a small theatre/auditorium where we could only view the mural from our seats. Then the lights went out, a soundtrack of thunder, rain, gunshots and screaming followed a lightshow that was superimposed on to the painting itself. Rembrandts us of light and shadow created a perfect 3D effect on the items in the picture, and the lightshow enhanced that. Spotlights drew characters in the background to the foreground, so teh narration in the soundtrack could focus on them. Other images were superimposed onto the painting to show the story that preceded the depicted event. Animation brought some charcters to life. The whole lightshow and soundtrack offered a vision of the event that was meant to “make some sense” of the world Rembrandt was trying to convey.

After the show was done we were allowed to view the mural from a little closer as it stood, but only for a minute or so before we were herded out to make room for the next audience.

I felt cheated. I had come all this way to see the mural only to get a few seconds with it so someone could give me a song-&-dance event about it that I could have bought on DVD somewhere.

Are modern audiences so consumed by film and television that we need such a display to appreciate a picture?

Once we had trou guides, trained by art critics, historians and curators with university degrees in art history to tell us about the visual art we see? Do we now reject those discourses? Do we look to film makers and other creatives to tell us what we need to know, in the language they have learned and have taught us?