... was a very busy day. At breakfast I met John Cunliffe of ELFA;
he informed me that in the afternoon, he would give a show involving top
hats. After breakfast, Gay Merril Gross showed me a few of her folds and
told me about her work with Lilian Oppenheimer, and how the small "Friends
of Origami" turned into the huge OUSA of today. At 9:30 the AGM of
Origami Deutschland started. It was the first one for me, and it took over
3 hours...*sigh*. At dinner, Jan Polish
surprised us all with the beautiful models Mark W. Kennedy ("The Paper
Dragon") had folded and enameled (if that's the right word for it..).
What a wonderful, generous gift! There were salmon, masks, dragons... all
about 4-7 cm long. I'd probably break my fingers trying to fold this small!
Jan told us Mark folds dozens of these while driving; every red light,
every traffic jam is worth a few folds. Traffic jams are not wasted time
for Mark!
At 17:30, two buses picked us up for a city tour and the visit to the Siebold Museum; for the week of the Convention, it had been turned into an Origami Museum. Brian Cox from Canada had previously installed a mobile of 1001 cranes, which now slowly moved over our heads while we enjoyed the local white wine and listened to a speech about the Siebold family. There was also a long cloth tube hanging from the ceiling, all the way from the first floor to the basement. It had hundreds of Origami models attached to it; the traditional crane, flowers, dinosaurs, turtles, santas, etc. Somebody must have spent hours folding and attaching all these models.
A chosen few then proceeded to assemble a (fairly straightforward) puzzle on the floor. You saw the end result on the title page: Viva Kasahara! Then the bus was there to take us to dinner in the "Ratskeller". I was lucky enough to share a table with Gay Merrill Gross, Edwin Corrie and Cinzia Garufi. Thanks to Gay I finally learned how to fold the Lotus out of a napkin. I had tried to fold it with paper before, but had always ended up tearing it to little shreds <g>.. Edwin showed us his "bird no.9" (or was it no.7..?) and later on a white rabbit in a black... top hat! At nine o'clock I called home; was I surprised when my daughter Lea picked up the phone! My wife later told me that Lea missed me very much, which made me feel great of course <g>. |
After the speech
we stormed the exhibition. There were many models by Kunihiko Karahara
(of course), and other creators too. Kasahara's models were arranged in
scenes, from the monkeys in the jungle to the owl at night. For me, one
of the most exciting models was the "Gecko on the wall" by Herman
van Goubergen from Belgium, who also was in Wurzburg. It took a while before
I found the Gecko... and there was a fly, too, which unfortunately isn't
recognizable on the picture.