We drove into town to attend the big deal once-every-two-years 1250 Ship model show in KASSEL.
Everyone was excited. They were stacking up outside the door.
People were not let in before the appointed time. Only the ones selling things were inside. There were a lot of people selling things. Car Deal guy and Shipcollector were peering into the room excitedly, but Chris was motioned in by Norbert the German hippie. He would help Norbert sell, so he got a pass.
Usually, Chris would like to have a big selection of ship models to sell. But this year, he had some bad luck with the production of the models and didn’t really have enough to make reserving a sale table worthwhile. Norbert had kindly offered him space on the tables he’d reserved
I stood out with the rest of the collectors and watched in amazement as the hall filled up. Lots of people had gotten there early.
Then, the ticket sellers let us through. The collectors swooped in and began to buy ships.
It’s difficult to convey the atmostphere at this show. It was a lot of quiet concentrated peering:
many people peering:
It seemed to be bigger than the other time I’d been. In addition to the first big room, four other rooms were filled with model ships and model paraphenalia.
Sellers had devised many different methods of displaying these tiny delicate models:
This is a recreation of a harbor, one that loaded containers (best known as those trailers that semi trucks drag behind them) onto container ships:
As you can see, the typical ship collector is
1. Male
2. over a certain age
This homogeneity was broken up when I saw these two:
Twins, I think.
they were very cute.
I was sitting at the table with Chris, prepared to sell some of the ships he had brought. I felt pretty ignorant though. I could take money and give change, but as for answering questions about the merchandise, I had to defer to Chris
He was pretty busy answering questions.
Of course, he did have to slip away and try to talk with manufacturers and other people who could be useful to our business.
Those dicussions looked like this:
It was all about the models, friends.
Someone tried to take a survey of the attendees:
it was somewhat incomplete. But it was an idea of how far different folks had travelled to get there.
I got to meet some of the people behind the manufacturing lines I had gotten to know. That was pretty exciting.
There was a little snack bar where we got some food to get us through, but at the end of the day we were wiped slick.
We packed up and got ready to go. It was kind of hard to stop talking and saying goodbye to all these people. Everyone had stories or ship facts to share.
But we made it back to the hotel.
Chris had turned into a deflated balloon. His eyes were bloodshot and he had no energy. My man was sick.
“I used up all my energy reserves today,” he said. “I need to lay down.”
He crawled into bed and slept.
I went off to explore the hotel’s sauna.
They had the hottest sauna I had ever been in. There was a sort of cartoon on teh wall explaining how it worked. You were supposed to hose off, get into the sauna, then get into the freezing cold “hot tub”(was it supposed to be freezing?), hose off again, rinse and repeat.
it looked complicated, so I just went into the sauna. wow, it was hot.
There were two. One normal, and one that said it was at 90 degrees celsius. That’s 194 degrees! it was so hot, I almost felt like I should have a lifegaurd there to drag me out if I fainted.
But it felt good.
I went back upstairs to check on Chris. He looked worse.
So I showered, and read and hung around until dinner.
He was worse.
So I went to dinner alone and had a time with a bunch of ship people. Car Deal guy was there, and some new people I hadn’t met. It was a good time, but I was worried about Chris.
Car Deal guy and I talked it over. We realized we didn’t have much planned for the next day but to make it back to Frankfurt in the evening to meet our flight. I recommended we take it easy, and he could mosey into breakfast whenever and we’d find each other there.
I went back to the room. Poor Chris.
“Hey baby,” he said weakly.
“Poor thing.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t go to dinner with you.”
“It’s okay baby, you are sick. You can’t help it.”
“I’m sick”
“I know. Get some sleep. We dont’ have to get up in the morning anytime. You can just rest.”
“You’re nice.”
“Good night.