Oberhausen and Vaguely Offensive Shops

On my second to last day in Germany, Zeynep, her friend Maddy, and I took the train from Gelsenkirchen to Oberhausen to see an exhibit at the Gasometer --"The Appearance of Beauty." The Gasometer is this huge old gas tank that was eventually turned into a museum. It’s 120 meters tall (roughly 360 ft).

We arrived an hour before closing so we didn’t have much time to explore, but the exhibit was very cool. It traced cultural perspectives of beauty through time.

At the center of the first floor there was a mirror on the ground which reflected an image of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling 

Two different cultural representations of love on the left a Hindu painting, and on the right a Japanese woodcut.

Two stories of the Gasometer were dedicated to just this, and then from the third floor up was just empty space that the modern art group Urban Screen used to put on the exhibit 320 Degrees of Light. It basically used the hundred meter high rounded walls of the gasometer as a planetarium screen for a light and sound show that could only be described as trippy. I didn’t have the right lens to capture any of it, but this video can give you an idea of what it was like.

After that we went to Centro, which is the region’s shopping mall—you can never escape the reach of consumerism can you? There I spotted two interesting shops, one vaguely offensive and the other downright confusing.

 

Ummmmmm.......

Next we had a meal, and called it a day! At this point the exhaustion of Munich was catching up to us, but still I immensely enjoyed the former coal mining and steel milling city of Oberhausen.