munster: where street art bleeds on gas station walls & the trains know your story before you do
there’s a crack on the wall outside the city train station that looks like a kid scribbled something existential over the centuries. i pressed my hand to it yesterday, high on cheap cigarettes and midday disappointment, and felt like the stains were whispering in polish or something. the air here smells like old petrol and pretzels. i just checked and it’s a damp 12c, but the feels like is 11, which is perfect for pretending to care about strangers’ grandkids on the 7pm ICE to frisia.
this place treats public space like a canvas. last week i saw a guy painting a giant black hole over a glowing love sign near the morgenmarkt. the black hole had a little devil face in it. someone told me that’s the work of @raptor-dribbwall, a local who thinks all street art should either scare or seduce. (his flickr page is a sermon in layers:)
the subways here run like they’ve got a death wish. the U30 line delayed again? classic. the crowd was a mix of goths debating nietzsche and grocery shoppers arguing about bratwurst seasoning. an elderly man at the chemiehandel yelled at a kid wearing neon sneakers. i overhead three conversations about the stupid noise from the Vischerntal factory before i bought a lukewarm coffee from a lady named Ilse who thinks telemetry is the devil’s work.
there’s a map of the city that looks more like a heartbeat scan than a grid. green arteries pumping through concrete veins. go underground: the karnevalskirche tunnel musicspace is where the real noise lives. it’s in a WWII air-raid bunker converted by punks who rejected normalcy. entry is €3, which covers a draft beer and a chance to hear a droning Ukrainian harp-player argue with a tempura chef about the end of the world.
don’t eat at the tourist traps. go to "/r/iamarealgereren"’s lentil soup kiosk near the central station (free vegan options if you’re polite). and if you wanna get lost? follow the murals. there’s one near the geschichtsmuseum on a laundromat that’s clearly a direct message to marx-red fist punching through a capitalist infographic. someone told me the city council tried to jail the artist for ‘verleumdung der patz’ (damaging public space).
tomorrow i meet a friend who swears she can find the city’s oldest bookshop in the dark. it’s called ‚tomsunnen‘ and it’s got a cat that guards first editions like a feral CEO. i’ll get more reasons to hate myself here. or maybe i’ll find the love note under a bridge that says ‚i miss the sound of your chainsaw.’ weird town. weirdly alive.
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