town of opposites

At the beginning of the month we ventured to Kassel to go and see the big art exhibition called 'documenta'. This spectacle only takes place every five years, I really liked the one five years ago, so of course we had to go. After getting up far too early and taking a car share who's average speed was 200 km/h on our lovely Autobahn, we arrived in Kassel bright and early and it looked like it was gonna be a sunny day. We went on a Saturday and half the nation seemed to have decided that going there on the weekend was a good idea too. If you wanted to see any indoor exhibitions, you had to queue up, a long long time. And of course you weren't allowed backpacks, so you had to queue up infront of the cloakroom containers first...and afterwards too, to get your stuff back. Obviously, we weren't impressed. So instead we just took a stroll trough the city, which seemed huge to us, even though Wikipedia tells me it only has about 200.000 inhabitants. Kassel is an interesting town, you have lovely old and old-fashioned brick buildings right next to modern design monstrosities, partly the fault of WW II bomb damage. But sometimes you just think they let all the mad architects roam free, without any sense of proportion. It also is a very green town, with nice parks and many open spaces. I'm sure even worth a visit when there's no big exhibition and millions of underage hipster kids with cameras they don't know how to use loitering around...