Thanks for all the feedback on the blog, both via comments and via email. Blogger.com refuses to let me respond to comments with comments at the moment, so here's a full-fledged entry to catch up on issues/questions/concerns you've raised, for all you enquiring minds who want to know. In no particular order:
A zip line is a pulley, sometimes with a seat attached, suspended on a wire cable on an incline.
Thanks, Teofrastus, for contributing the Spanish word hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliofobia (fear of long words), which measures in at a delightfully ironic 35 letters (assuming I counted correctly). Helen says we left "Gesellschaft" (company) out of Donaudampfshifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaensgattin, which would bring that word up to 49 letters. I pointed out to her that "Starnbergersee" has nine more letters than "Donau," but she objected that there isn't a steamboat company on the Starnbergersee. There is one on the Danube--so we're not just goofing around making up words here.
No, I'm not having too much fun in Germany. Being a cultural ambassador is hard work.
Ah, the platform in the toilet bowl--the #1 comment-generating topic to date! What to say.... According to Freud, a child's first gift to its parents is poop (a child who withholds such gifts is anal-retentive; and note the delighted fuss parents make over successful potty-training). The platform offers toilet bowl users the opportunity to admire, shall we say, the fruits of their labor well into adulthood. By the way, when doing routine cleaning, it is a bad idea to drizzle liquid hand soap on the platform, though the bubbles you get after flushing are mighty impressive.
Never fear, there are Beethoven and Mozart streets in Freiburg.
On the lack of a Mendelssohnstrasse: There's one in Basel and one in Offenburg, so it isn't a regional thing. I'm guessing the composer street names in the Freiburg 'burb date from the 1930s--big years for German Nationalism. A few years after Mendelssohn's untimely death in 1847, Wagner published an anonymous, remarkably anti-Semitic article on "Judaism in Music," claiming that Jews just can't write anything good and criticizing Mendelssohn's music as underdeveloped and derivative (and Heinrich Heine's poetry as false and inauthentic). So an intersection between Mendelssohnstr. and Richard-Wagner-Str. truly would have been sweet to see.
Stefan is a German citizen; Elias and I are American citizens. Stefan hasn't voted in an election since he moved to the U.S. in 1989. If he gets his act together, he'll vote this fall. We're here until the end of December.
Yes indeed, people rabidly guard their Restmuell bin space. Observe this bin, photographed this evening in the Altstadt. Know what the red doohickey on top is? That's right, it's a lock. I did manage to find a Restmuell bin without a lock downtown this afternoon (not that I would ever, ever sneak my own trash into someone else's bin, of course).When we're back in the U.S., we'll have to invite all of Elias's java-drinking buddies over for Kuchen and decaf.
No comments:
Post a Comment