Cancer 145

Margaret Thatcher did get something right.

Now I have your attention I would like to admit I have done something I haven’t done for years, I have been on a bus. OK it was a shuttle bus going about 2km from a car park to the Konigstuhl on Rugen Island in Germany, but it was a bus. I had to wait forever, and when it finally came – not at the time specified on the timetable even though this is Germany – I had to get on, interact with the driver to buy a ticket, sit in a seat, and eventually I was driven to the destination. But, and it is a big but, there were other people on the bus! I don’t mind driving my car with other people in it, I know these people, but going in a tin can with people I don’t know. I am not sure this is acceptable. Apparently it is quite normal for buses to transport people who don’t know each other from one place to another. Good grief, it is worse than a taxi, and that is bad enough when you don’t know the driver and they don’t drive correctly (ie, like me).

Thatcher suggested that only young people and failures go in buses. I tend to agree. I did used to travel in buses when I was young. My record is home to Austria when I was 15 and then again when I was 16 (school trips), but I am older now, and as I have travelled in a bus I must be a failure.

The Konigstuhl itself is quite impressive, 118 metres of chalk cliff above the Baltic, with a skywalk looping over it. Well worth a visit, unlike the accompanying exhibition. It was one of those technological exhibitions, with audio support, things to touch, buttons to press, and very little of interest to see. It was also designed for children.

I don’t think technological exhibitions have much value. The children just press buttons, run around and probably don’t learn anything, while adults dont even bother pressing buttons. The only thing I learned was the German for centipede, which is hundertfussler – obvious really. At the start of the exhibition we were shoved through a set of doors and harangued by someone in German, and then shoved through further doors and harangued by our audio systems, which had been fitted by expert personnel, who knew exactly how to put the headphones on our ears. We weren’t to touch!

This is a serious point. With a technological approach the person doesn’t have to do anything, so they don’t learn. With a traditional approach the person has to focus on an object, a painting, a machine whatever, perhaps read a small blurb, and try to understand something about the object. At the end they have learned something because they have put some effort in. This exhibition can be contrasted with the exhibition we recently saw at Peenemunde, where there were artefacts from the war period which had short explanations. There were photographs from both the war and recently which showed how the facility functioned and what remains. I came out of Peenemunde having learned something. I came out of the Konigstuhl exhibition only having learned about a hundertfussler and that technological exhibitions tend to be crap.

Finally, being shoved through doors into small rooms with large crowds and harangued in a language I don’t understand reminded me that we were in Germany and some things never change. There must be something in the genes of nations that make them behave in certain ways. For the British in Germany it seems to be rule breaking. Don’t tell anyone but we queue jumped…..