The Mysterious Autostadt Water Arches in Germany

 I love to reminisce about my Europe trip...

Walking around the Volkswagon automotive theme park, known as Autostadt, and located at Wolfsburg, Germany was a delightful experience. This was one of the places I saw while in Europe last summer. If you remember, in one of my Europe posts I told you about the twin Auto towers, which serve as Volkswagon showrooms. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside, as the lineup was too long  and admission fee too steep. So we visited the other showroom where I made myself comfortable in one of the snazzier models on the floor. I'm not really into cars...well, I'm grateful for them as they can make travel rather nice (We toured Europe in Das Auto), but I can't get really excited about cars, or any other vehicle for that matter. If they get me from point A to point B, that's all that matters.

Anyway, so my friend, Kathy and I were walking around this park, enjoying the sights and sounds of the place. There was a lot of water, with fountains or some kind of pump shooting water high into the air - sometimes rather unexpectedly, so you got sprayed a bit. But it was a warm enough day, so we didn't mind too much.

There were also gorgeous flowers along the walkways. It must have been the year of the hydrangea - where ever we saw them, they were a splendid spectacle.

As much fun as that whole day brought, my most delightful moment came, as we were standing in front of the white arches which were squirting water. We were some distance away, and were watching people walking through, and wonder of wonders, it seemed like they were not getting wet! "OK, what's the deal here," I wondered out loud, "Why are those people going through, not wet? Is this some kind of fake fountain?" Kathy found this rather funny and I guess it is, because is there such a thing as fake water?

"That's it." Kathy stated after watching this spectacle for a few minutes. "I'm going through. Here's my camera. Take  a picture." I couldn't wait to see this! I moved closer with Kathy's huge camera, but as she got closer to the arches I was so intent on watching her come out dry, I forgot about the fact that I was to capture the moment. Too late, I realized, that the moment that should have been frozen in time, was not. There are three arches and I could see that this water was for real, as soon as Kathy went through. She turned around, came back through the squirting arches. As she stood in total disbelief right in front of the arches and announced, "I'm wet!" Her face was absolutely priceless, like it was the most unbelievable concepts in all of Europe to get wet with water. And it was then I realized I hadn't taken the picture... Well, I did take one, but not the one I wanted. Somebody else should have taken a picture of the two of us laughing like hyenas.

We took a closer look at those mysterious arches and realized the two outside ones were squirting water to the left and the middle one was squirting water to the right. What we missed before, from our directly in front view, when people walked through, is that they were weaving their way through, going under the squirts at the sides, instead of right through the middle as Kathy had done. Had we looked at these arches from the angle in the picture, Kathy wouldn't have had to take that version of the 'bucket challenge'. But neither would we have had such a good laugh. Kathy was a real trooper for this one!

And when Kathy will send me the picture that I did manage to get, I will put it right here.