Profile: April 2005 Archives
I recently returned from a trip to Spain and Switzerland. While I was in Zuerich, I went to a restaurant called Der Blindekuh. (The name is a pun, since "blinde Kuh" is the name for the game we call Blind Man's Bluff.) It is run completely by blind and sight-impaired people, and it's completely dark. The idea is to give sighted people a sense of what it's like to be blind.
It was a completely fascinating experience. I thought I knew what to expect, but when you enter the dining room and all of a sudden you can't see anything at all, it's pretty shocking. The waitress (who was blind) leads you to a table with you holding on to her shoulders in a train. She then drops you off, tells you where everything is (we were at the bar) and tells you what the bartender's name is. This is very important, because you of course can't meet someone's eyes to get their attention, so if you need anything you say the waiter or bartender's name out loud, and they appear to help you.
In the total dark, against logic, you find yourself straining to see, as if willpower could help you. You don't know where anyone else is, how many people are around you, what the layout of the room is, or anything. It makes you feel vulnerable and much more dependent on the staff. When the bartender came first he touched my hand gently, and I felt so relieved to know where someone was.
I noticed in general that if I wasn't touching anything, I had a weird kind of vertigo feeling, or at least I felt detached. I felt much better with my hands on the bar, or with my shoulder touching my friend's. We also both noticed that we smelled things much more strongly. We knew when someone's fish dish had come out because we could smell it go by, and both of us actively noticed and enjoyed our coffee more than usual. We also had a dessert of chocolate flan, and I found myself much more aware of the texture and temperature of it. It's also extremely difficult to eat when you don't know how much is left, how big the plate is, where on the plate it is...about half the bites I brought to my mouth were empty.
It was really an extraordinary experience, and very affecting. When we came out everything seemed so bright and loud. And after hearing the people around you talking, you start to develop a mental picture of what they look like, but then when you see them they're usually radically different than you thought.
My friend Cyrille told me a funny story about one time he was there, and the Italian woman next to him put her hand on his knee and asked her husband, "is that you?" Cyrille answered in Italian, "no, it's me," and she almost jumped out of her skin.
That doesn't generally happen in a normal restaurant.
