Wadlstrumpf

How to jubilate with propriety

2011-07-11T16:58:00.005+02:00

I'm back in the U.S. but still have Wadlstrumpf blogging to catch up with. Allow me to begin with some observations about the proper pace of jubilating in Germany.

The discussion will focus on the opening hymn of the wedding mass the other week, "Erfreue dich Himmel, erfreue dich Erde."

If you were a Jewish American organist music-theorist who played for a small southern U.S. Lutheran church, you might note the dancing lilt of the 6/4 melody and, considering also the text ("Rejoice, Heaven; rejoice, Earth"), opt for a cheerful upbeat tempo such as this (please note I self-identify as a keyboardist, not a singer):

Germans, however, understand that because God is very far away, you must sing very slowly and very clearly in order for him to hear you. Joyous hymns, therefore, should be sung ponderously, while solemn hymns (given their solemnity) should be sung very very ponderously. "No--slower, slower," was the advice I received from my musician collaborators in the organ loft, "and don't forget to leave time for people to breathe at the breath marks here and here," thusly:

"I actually thought the hymns were a little fast," observed one relative after the ceremony. Seriously?, wonders the foreign Gastmusikerin, who was brought up in the U.S. on German classical music and doesn't remember joyfulness ever being so restrained.

A little research on youtube reveals that German organists apparently also feel the festive tug of this melody and find opportunities to push the tempo before settling into the lugubrious pious pace of the sung word.

As you watch the following video, listen to the peppiness of the improvised organ introduction; then observe the aural brick wall encountered just before the congregation begins singing (around 1:00-1:05). Note that the organist leaves lots of time for the singers to breathe and that the singers want to take an even slower tempo, which the organist gradually accommodates over the three verses.

I returned to the U.S. on Saturday, in time for work on Sunday morning. "Your sub did fine," people told me, "but he played too slowly." Oh, it's good to be home.

Tor!

2011-07-08T09:06:00.006+02:00

Elias has been enthusiastically trying to catch women's world cup soccer games on TV, so we surprised him on Tuesday with a trip to Augsburg to see Japan play England. Our original plan was to pick up the tickets, go hang out in old town Augsburg for a bit, then go to the game; but when we arrived at the stadium 2.5 hours before kickoff, the parking lot was already filling up. We skipped Augsburg altogether and people-watched instead.

Some folks were rooting for Japan,
and others were rooting for England.
Some were rooting for Germany (playing against France further north in Moenchengladbach later that evening).
It was a very friendly crowd,
and pretty much everyone cheered whenever either team displayed finesse, but Japan was clearly the crowd favorite. This might have been because Japan was #4 in the FIFA rankings, vs. England at #10, or because Japan was playing so well despite the devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. After the game, Japan thanked the world for its post-tsunami support, and England's players joined in the banner march to show solidarity.
With 20,777 attendees, the relatively small stadium still had room for another 2,000 or so; but 20,777 is a lot of people when it comes to clearing out parking lots and walking to mass transit stops. Both teams would go on to the quarter finals regardless of who won. England surprised everyone and won the game 2:0. Toooooooooooooor!

A vegetarian abroad

2011-07-06T07:52:00.005+02:00

When I first started coming to Bavaria with Stefan 21 years ago, it was a challenge to find vegetarian fare in restaurants. Times have changed, however, and it's much easier now to find at least an ovo-lacto option such as Käsespätzle mit gerösteten Zwiebeln und Blattsalat (little boiled egg dumplings, pan fried with cheese, served with fried onions and a side leaf salad), or a Gemüse Teller mit Spiegelei (plate of cooked vegetables with a fried egg). Salads have also undergone significant changes, shifting away from arrangements of potato salad, cooked cabbage, and corn kernels, toward a variety of green leafies. Still, as in the U.S., the vegetarian in Bayern occasionally faces limited options*:
and has an excuse to cobble together a tasty if questionable complete protein.
(The beverage pictured above is Mineralwasser mit Kohlensäure, of course, because fizzy water is always available in this cultured society.)

*You'd think the carnivore has limited options here too, as all there is to eat other than french fries is Wurst--but the Wurst connoisseur understands the differences between grilled pork sausage, beef 'n'pork sausage, white pork sausage, and hot dog chunks in curry sauce.

Wedding

2011-07-04T23:43:00.008+02:00

Look, some charming little cherubs are playing stringed instruments in the clouds:
Their heavenly compatriots play brass and drums! What relaxed embouchures!
Meanwhile, smack dab in the middle of the music loft ceiling at Bavaria's wee country Blumenthaler Marienkirche, a wingless keyboard player (an earth-bound human?) accompanies a choir of cherubs under the experienced baton of Frau Engel.
See those lines radiating from the organist's head? Do not be fooled--they are not a halo. They are wisps of perspiration, for when the organist agreed to play for her nephew's wedding, she did not know the organ was actually an antique harmonium, nor that it possessed a mere two pedals, both of which had to be pumped continuously in order for music to sound.
On the bright side, pumping added some pleasant challenges to playing Pachelbel's Canon in D, a piece that, I'm sorry to report, has finally made it across the Atlantic as a wedding processional. The two singers and the violinist performing with me insisted that, despite being in the business for a long time, they had never once heard the Canon used for a wedding processional. German organists have much to look forward to.

In any case, the organist was delighted to offer her services to the happy couple, and, during the lovely wedding mass, to get in a good workout.

Back in Bayern

2011-07-02T07:44:00.005+02:00

We left SamfaylYOUdayGWEEshoals early Thursday morning and flew from Barcelona to Munich. Oh Bavaria, how I had forgotten I missed you so--your rolling farmland, your afternoon coffee and cake, your Brezeln and Semmeln, your solar farms, your roll-up-your-sleeves enthusiasm for tidiness manifested by swept sidewalks and invariant village house colors, your incomprehensible fondness for thick white asparagus rather than tender green, and your Mineralwasser. If anything epitomizes the difference between Germany and the rest of the world, it's Mineralwasser.

In Barcelona, you need walk no more than a few blocks to find a very small, slightly grungy, well organized, supremely friendly family-run grocery store where you can buy fruit and vegetables and, if you're lucky, score a bottle of Vichy Catalan (Catalan's self-proclaimed finest healing mineral water, apparently most healthful when served cold). In the Munich airport, you need walk no more than half a terminal to find at least two large, well-polished, impersonal corporate-owned grocery stores, where you can buy fruit and vegetables and at least five brands of mineral water with four different varieties each (high fizz, medium fizz, low fizz, no fizz). I'm not sure who goes to the airport to buy fennel and beets, but surely every frequent flier can use a liter of medium-fizz seltzer, and it's good to have choices.

Sant Feliu de Guixols

2011-07-01T22:40:00.007+02:00

From Sunday midday until Thursday morning, we were in Sant Feliu de Guixols on the Costa Brava. Despite spending nearly four days there and hearing native speakers say it multiple times, we still don't understand how to pronounce the name of the town. Sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoals? Sant FAY-lee-you day ghee-SHOALS? Fail-YOU day ghee-SHOAL? Catalan and Spanish are related but independent languages. The Catalan x is pronounced sh after i, but that's about as far as we were able to match phonemes with spelling. Our knowledge of French kept intruding too, in our effort to process that x, so our de kept sounding like deux instead of day, which didn't help.

Sant Feliu de Guixols saw major development post-WWII, when Germans started flocking to the Spanish coast and the Spanish coast responded by building great swaths of hotels and high rises. One hears as much German as English in Sant Feliu (sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoal?), when one isn't hearing Catalan or Spanish.

Stefan left Elias and me on our own while he attended a European Science Foundation conference. What to do, what to do? Elias was in heaven after all the boring hiking we had done: the hotel had a swimming pool, we could walk to the beach down the hill, and our room had a TV with a channel broadcasting FIFA Women's World Cup games. Because I am about as far from being a "beach person" as is humanly possible, I was grateful that there were two soccer games to watch every afternoon, as they were the only thing that could compel Elias (a beach person if there ever was one) to abandon the sand and pebbles.

On Wednesday, conference participants had the afternoon off, so we drove to Figueres to see the Teatre-Museu Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum), the third most visited museum in Spain. Adding to the bizarre art was the industriousness and determination with which most of the huge crowd took photos of the collection. Say "patata," Galatea of the Spheres!

Núria

2011-06-28T14:07:00.011+02:00

Last Friday, Stefan engaged in one of his favorite vacation activities: minor home repairs for nice people. After crossing back over the Pyrenees to Spain from Niaux (yes, more curvy mountain roads, but only for a brief while), we happened into a sweet rural pension, made all the more cozy by the leisurely outdoor evening chat that quadrilingual Stefan enjoyed in Spanish and a little Catalan with the owners and other guests. So when one of the ceiling lights in our room didn’t work, instead of letting the proprietors know, Stefan got out his trusty Swiss Army knife (always be prepared), dismantled the fixture, and rewired the circuit. The next morning, he rebalanced the washing machine in the common kitchen.

We were staying in Ribes de Freser to take one last mountain hike, from Núria (a somewhat over-developed ski resort that we reached via cog train from Queralbs) to the Coll de Noucreus.

The mountainsides were covered with fuchsia azaleas:
Above the trees and into the scree, we saw numerous grazing chamoises:
The trail became significantly steeper toward the end,
which was OK going up but had the acrophobe (me) wanting to clutch the hillside on the way down. It was a quick walk from the saddle
to the top.
The ridge line is the border between Spain
and France.
We paused both ascending and descending so Elias could play with snow.
No hike in the Pyrenees would be complete, of course, without numerous waterfalls,
wildflowers,
and cows.
We spent so much time admiring the gorgeous late afternoon light on our descent that we almost missed the last cog train from Núria back down to Queralbs. Which reminds me to mention: the early summer sun doesn't set here until ~9:30pm--and June is still the "off season." It's brilliantly light at 6:30pm, so if you're a foreigner, you might not recognize that evening is upon you and you need to hurry up to catch your train. (Tourist trains and the sun both run later during high summer). Many businesses shut down for the afternoon, then open again for the evening; if you show up in a restaurant before 8:30 or 9:00pm, you might be the only person dining.

Crossing over to the other side

2011-06-27T13:51:00.021+02:00

Clouds and rain moved in pre-dawn on Thursday, our last scheduled day in Vall de Boí, so instead of going on another hike, we went to France. We had not planned to go to France. We went because the drive from Barcelona to Vall de Boí had taken about eight hours, twice as long as we had expected thanks to our taking "the scenic route." (Stefan, who had done all the driving, thought being in the car on curvy mountain roads for several hours was the bees knees. This made me think of all the how-far-can-you-drive-in-how-little-time vacations my family took when I was a kid, and reminded me again of the many ways in which I seem to have married my dad.) Elias and I nixed the idea of spending another long day as passengers on winding mountain roads, and our topo-maps indicated that just north of the Pyrenees, France was pretty flat and the highways pretty straight. The route was longer, but we figured it would be quicker. Thus we found ourselves in the glorious empire of highway roundabouts.

Our sojourn was limited to the Ariège valley, where medieval castles, ruins, monasteries, and cloisters abound. It was in Ariège that the pacifist, anti-materialist Cathars set up camp in the 12^th century and made a heroic effort to survive the 13^th before being quashed and massacred by fed-up allegiance-demanding materialist feudal lords and the Catholic Church.

The highpoint of our day was a stop in Saint Lizier. Reigning over the top of the town's highest hill is the medieval Palais des Évêques (Bishop's Palace), the walls of which enclose the church Notre-Dame de la Sède. When the bishopric of Couserans was terminated in 1801, the palace variously served as a prison, workhouse, and lunatic asylum. A relatively recent restoration of the church revealed, beneath 19^th-century woodwork, a stunning spread of 15^th-century paintings on the vaulted ceiling and on many of the walls. The paintings borrow the Sybils of ancient Greece to prophecy the family tree of--and thus the coming of--Christ.

Down the hill from the Palais is the 12^th century Cathédrale Saint-Lizier, named for Saint Lizier's 6th-century proselytizing bishop. A stately adjacent cloister lets only a little loose with its virtuosic carved column capitals--apparently the standard way for Romanesque cloisters to keep up with the Joneses.

We stopped for the night in Foix, a town dominated by the hill-top Château de Foix. The Château's first tower was built around 1000 CE, the third tower about 400 years after that. The castle served as home to generations of counts of Foix, including Henri III of Navarre, who graduated from counthood to become France’s King Henri IV, and local hero Gaston Fébus. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the castle was used as a prison. Perhaps a prisoner was responsible for this coq graffiti in one of the tower stairwells:

Incidentally, the English-language Wikipedia entry on Foix, written perhaps by a prickly native Foixian tired of all the tourists, somewhat petulantly lists but one local point of interest: the botanical garden, with its collection of cacti succulents. The French entry, in contrasts, skips the garden and goes for the Château.

Despite these delights, what actually drew us to Foix was some even older history: the late Paleolithic cave paintings in the nearby Grotte de Niaux. The oldest and youngest carbon-datable paintings (those containing charcoal) are ~13,800 and 12,800 years old; the paintings made with red iron oxide and manganese oxide are, alas, undatable. For reasons unknown, near the end of the last ice age, over a period of at least one thousand years, Magdelenian Cro-Magnons trekked with torches and oil lamps some 900 meters into the cave into a nicely symmetric vaulted cavern with amazing acoustics, where they then executed masterful drawings of bison, horses, ibexes, and stags. In another part of the cave, not viewable by the general public, there’s a drawing of a weasel--the only known weasel among all the prehistoric cave paintings in Europe. Because the paintings are rare, irreplaceable, and fragile, cavern tours are limited to groups of 25, led by a guide. A slippery 0.9 km later, at the opening of the "Salon Noir" (Black Room), everyone but the guide turns off and sets aside their individual flashlights, to limit the light shining on the paintings. Visits in the Black Room are limited to 25 minutes at a time, so as not to overload the walls with carbon dioxide.

I've been to Europe often enough to get used to seeing 1,000-year-old art; seeing 14,000-year-old art* took my breath away.

*"Art" or "craftsmanship"? The tour guide warned against projecting modern sensibilities on prehistoric images.

Romanesque churches

2011-06-26T19:28:00.005+02:00

Vall de Boí had its heyday during the 11^th and 12^th centuries, when every thriving teeny town could afford to hire expert stonemasons from Lombardy to build elegant teeny Romanesque churches, usually on the outskirts of town. (Had the teeny towns not been so bustling, there would still have been room in the center of town for a church.) The original church frescoes are gone, as is the plaster and paint that apparently once covered the tidy masonry, but the beautiful stonework and bell towers remain, and the churches continue to be used for worship. UNESCO declared the valley a world heritage site in 2000.

When we weren't hiking, we were admiring the churches, including

Santa Eulalia in Erill la Vall; and

Sant Climent in Taüll. At Sant Climent we learned that the stones of the churches would have been stuccoed and painted; there is a trace of an exterior stucco-and-paint job (presumably not original) at the top of this window:

Changes in stonework suggest Sant Climent was built in multiple stages:

The valley's most charming village--the one with the most tumble-stacked densely-packed collection of old stone houses--is Durro. Looking down at Durro from the hermitage de Sant Quirc (and squinting to fuzz up the modern apartment blocks built for skiers), one can imagine the village as the model for a medieval woodcut.

Vall de Boí

2011-06-26T18:09:00.022+02:00

I thought I was being only a little smug last week, when I wrote about how Spanish impediments to internet access supposedly pertain to government anti-terrorism measures. Yet I have to hand it to Spain: I'd be surprised if any foreign evil-doers here manage to check in with one another online more than once a week, and then only if they're hanging out at resort hotels or in cities large enough to have cell phone stores (and only if they have time to pull themselves away from their dastardly plots to make multiple return trips to said stores--though perhaps that's why one has minions). Fortunately for us, our vacation plans involved no government-toppling, and once we were reunited with our luggage (lost somewhere between Newark, Lisbon, Barcelona, and possibly London), the lack of access didn't hold us up.

Last Sunday, we survived harrowing cultural differences in behind-the-wheel boldness and successfully navigated our way out of Barcelona in a rental car. Stefan had plans for us to go hiking for a few days in the Vall de Boí, a rugged valley in the central Spanish Pyrenees, leading into the Aigüestortes-Sant Maurici National Park.

We stayed in tiny Erill la Vall and hiked and hiked and hiked some more. We had learned in Barcelona that signage in Spain is more for locals who already know their way around than for clueless out-of-towners, so on our first hike, along a "well signposted trail" severely lacking in formal signposts, we were grateful for the...
stone cairns (can you find them in the picture?) that led us...
up assorted rivulets and water falls to...
Estany (lake) del Pessó. On the way, we found this piece of...
prehistoric petrified toast, and saw great expanses of...
wildflowers.

Our second hike followed the rocky edge of a dammed lake, the Embassament de Cavallers...
over...
giant chunks of granite, up to a lovely green expanse full of...
cows. Deterred by...
the accumulating clouds, we skipped going all the way to Estany Negre de Boí and instead spent the afternoon doing a more sheltered hike along the Ribera de Sant Nicolau, to...
Estany de Llebreta. This third hike was by far the easiest, with the softest paths and least elevation gain (a mere 300 meters), but the combination of wildflowers, grassy valley, rolling river, and mountains brilliantly lit by afternoon sunlight (it didn't rain) made it the loveliest hike of all. Sometimes being knave of the valley beats being king of the hill.

Barcelona*

2011-06-19T21:57:00.020+02:00

Stefan is giving a paper next week in Sant Feliu de Guixols on the Catalan coast, and his nephew is getting married the following week in Germany, so we're taking a pre-conference, pre-wedding family vacation in northeast Spain.

Our trip began last Wednesday in Barcelona. We stayed four nights in a little apartment at the northern end of the Eixample and walked miles and miles through Eixample, Old Town, and Montjuïc.

Although one can happily cover great distances by foot in Barcelona, cars clearly have first dibs on the roads. Drivers are remarkably good about going from 60 to 0 kph when pedestrians have the right of way, in exchange for which the pedestrians wisely stay within the crosswalks. Crosswalks are located an eighth of the way around the corner of every block to give cars room to decelerate, to make room for parking, and to give walkers 25% more exercise. At the busiest intersections, stenciled paint in the crosswalks reminds walkers that one out of every three traffic related deaths in Barcelona is a pedestrian, so atencio!, pay attention.

Like most large international cities, Barcelona boasts impressive architecture. Its most beloved architect was Antoni Gaudi, whose Catalan modernism featured undulating waves and spirals and biologically-inspired appendages. Had hobbits ever abandoned the shire for urban condominiums, Gaudi would have been their guy.

The Casa Batlló (1906): condos for the hobbit elite on fashionable Passeig de Gracia:

After designing houses and parks for the wealthy, Gaudi turned his attention to a massive church--La Sagrada Familia--a giant sand-drizzly religious effusion.

Nearly a century after Gaudi's death, Barcelona remains committed to completing the church, which means hiring other designers to work on it. Like Gaudi's east entrance, the west entrance also has four huge towers, though less drizzly, with a facade in a completely different style and designed by a completely different architect (Josep Maria Subirachs).

In elegant and austere contrast to the Sagrada Familia (1883+) and Barcelona's Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia (built primarily in the 13th-15th centuries), the gothic Basilica Santa Maria del Mar was constructed in a mere 54 years, between 1329 and 1383, which makes it the only church built entirely in the Catalan gothic style:

No such unity for La Sagrada Familia, which, for better or worse, could swallow the Basilica whole. Gaudi's megalith towers over the rest of Barcelona despite still missing its gargantuan central dome. The only other building in Barcelona that comes anywhere near La Sagrada Familia's height is a giant sparkly phallus (below, to the left), owned by the water works:

The lines to get into La Sagrada Familia were longer than our patience, so we decided to visit the Museu de la Xocolata instead. There we saw La Sagrada Familia, the organ from Montserrat abbey, Asterix and Obelix, and Michaelangelo's Pietà lovingly rendered in chocolate.

Other Barcelona highlights included a brief trip to the beach and a leisurely amble through the Joan Miró museum (Fundació Joan Miró) on Montjuïc. Mixed in were the more mundane aspects of being a tourist: learning some of the differences between Catalan and Spanish, avoiding copious puddles of dog pee on the sidewalks, recovering lost luggage, and disentangling the complexities of internet and cell phone access (the difficulty of which, according to one Vodafone employee, supposedly has to do with government vigilance against terrorism).

*Not in Southern Germany, but closer to Southern Germany than to North Carolina.

Reminiscence roadtrip

2010-09-04T18:42:00.017+02:00

You know how it is: you spend your childhood in a town somewhere, you grow up and move away, and then when you come back to visit seventy years later, everything looks different. You wouldn't mind so much if someone had had the decency to ask or at least notify you before making the changes--before building the new roads and new houses, before replacing the obsolete train depot with a more modern one, before widening the quay and paving the dirt paths and opening the new eateries and expanding the schools and all that. If you're lucky, some of the old institutions are still around, like the Ox Restaurant where your dad used to hang out--but times have clearly changed, for now the kitchen closes for the afternoon and sorry, you'll have to go to the waterfront to find a bite to eat. Oh dear.

I know how this is, and I've only been away from my home town for 23 years. Almost everything that has been done in Urbana, Illinois, since I left has been an improvement (the prairie grass trails through Meadowbrook Park, the statue gardens on and off campus, the state-of-the-art university buildings, the cleaned up Boneyard Creek), and many of my favorite old things remain (the classy tree-filled parks, the dust-covered plaster 3-D topology models in Altgeld Hall, the experimental cows with the windows in their stomachs). But every time I go back, something else has changed, some old restaurant has closed, some store has replaced another, and it's kind of weird and kind of disorienting.

We spent August 19, the second day of our reminiscence roadtrip, visiting several more places* where Helen had spent her youth, culminating in Ueberlingen.

With all the change Ueberlingen has seen since 1944, it is a wonder that we were able to find the Admiral's house. Helen directed us straight to it, past all the newer buildings she had never before set eyes on. "There should be some train tracks there...an alley here...some stone steps..."--and suddenly we were standing right in front of it. Admiral and Mutter Fischer had moved from the stately house next door to the small clapboard house after hard times forced them to downsize. Their son Peter was Helen's earliest childhood playmate--later her sweetheart, her fiance, her husband. It was in the small Fischer house that a young, widowed, and pregnant Helen lived with her in-laws after Peter's death during WWII.

We opened the gate into the wildflower-filled garden and knocked on the door. No answer. We called up to the open window. No answer. We poked around to the side of the house and knocked again. A woman opened the door and looked quizzically at us four strangers. After Stefan introduced Helen, the woman generously invited us in and gave us a tour.

"You'll see we've changed a few things," she said. "Look, here's where we moved the kitchen."
--"It used to be in the basement," said Helen.
We went upstairs.
"This is my room," the owner said.
--"Mutter Fischer's room," said Helen.
"And here's where my daughter sleeps," the owner said.
--"Lilo's room; she's 97 now and lives in Hamburg," said Helen.
"There was a son too, wasn't there? A soldier in North Africa and Italy," the owner said.
--"My husband," said Helen.

After visiting the Fischer house, we set off to find the house Helen's father had built when they lived in Ueberlingen. "Most of these are new," Helen said of the buildings en route; "maybe the house isn't there anymore." But it was, and it looked quite grand: a massive American foursquare for the American Stoll. No one answered our knocks. We took a photo of Helen standing by the front door more than seven decades after her family had moved east to Bavaria.

Walking back down the hill on the stone steps behind the Fischer house, Stefan received some sad news on his cell phone: 97-year-old Lilo had passed away in her sleep the night before. "We were meant to come here," Helen said; "this was a gift from Lilo."

*First stop: Meersburg, a beautiful historic town on the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz), densely packed with scenic views--old old castles and old new castles, wattle-and-daub houses, medieval walls, creaky water mills, turrets and towers--all piled one atop the other. Despite all the buildings that have stood there for centuries, change nonetheless comes to towns that build their economies around well-preserved Altstaedte. Second stop: the baroque church in Birnau, in front of which Helen spent many an hour flirting with Peter.

Detours

2010-09-02T03:52:00.012+02:00

After visiting the Burgruine Roetteln, we headed eastward along the German/Swiss border, skirting the southern edge of the Black Forest and crossing back and forth over the Rhine. (We started by heading in circles for a while, looking for a gas station. Through the magic that is the tri-national agglomeration of Basel, everyone in every rustic small-town sleeper 'burb owns a car, but none of the rustic small-town sleeper 'burbs have gas stations.)

Eventually, we made our way to the tiny town Ofteringen, despite Helen's don't-put-yourself-out protestations ("only if it isn't out of the way. We shouldn't go if we have to go out of the way"). Helen used to visit Ofteringen with her father every summer when she was a little girl, and she had fond memories of the sawmill and restaurant her relatives owned there. It's a small enough town that it took only about three minutes for us to find the mill. Alas, the restaurant was closed for summer vacation, but after we loitered for a while, we noticed an elderly man crossing the sawmill yard. "Go talk to him," we nudged, so we tromped over and Helen politely asked whether he had perhaps heard of her father, Otto Stoll. Ayuh, sure he remembered Otto Stoll; long time ago, though. Yep.

A road sign near the mill pointed to Erzingen, 4 kilometers away. Helen's father was buried there, in his brother's family plot, after he died too young in 1942. "I don't need to go," said Helen, shuffling her feet. "It's out of the way. The relatives there were nasty. We shouldn't go; it's out of the way." "We're going," Stefan and I said.

We were already going out of our way, of course: if you want to get from Freiburg to Steinebach, driving along the Swiss border is hardly a direct route. But in Helen's defense, distances do expand in odd ways in Germany. Stefan's family used to drive from Steinebach to the neighboring village of Auing to buy farm-fresh eggs. That the farm was an easy 10-minute walk from their house was beside the point: Auing was a whole village away, so they drove.

We did well to visit Erzingen, despite the vast 4-kilometer detour. We located the cemetery above town. Although we read every single grave marker, we didn't find the stone we sought. The closest we found was a column memorializing bones that had been moved from the old cemetery in 1964. Yet we had clearly found Stoll Central. Every other marker belonged to one Stoll or another. And we met two helpful, living Stolls: a friendly middle-aged woman whose father was also an Otto Stoll, and an elderly silver-haired Frau Stoll who, after some thought, wondered if Helen's father might have been "the American Stoll." (Otto had spent several years as an immigrant in New York before returning to Germany and begetting Helen.) Frau Stoll said "the American Stoll" in a way that suggested the relatives considered him a curiosity, if not a black sheep.

Having become comfortable with detours, we made several more the next day. I'll write about them in my next post.

Burg Roetteln

2010-08-29T00:06:00.007+02:00

On August 18, Stefan, Elias, Helen, and I departed Freiburg for Steinebach. The drive would normally take only about five hours, but we spread it out over two days and two countries.

We began by heading south to Loerrach, because I was determined to satisfy my romanticist ruins itch after our triple-whammy failure in Elsass. Nestled on a hill overlooking Loerrach is the formidable Burg Roetteln, third largest ruined fortress in all of Baden. Like pretty much every other ruin in the region, Roetteln dates to the 12th century or so C.E., after which it was happily occupied, renovated, taken over, conquered, reclaimed, expanded, yadda yadda, over the subsequent four or five hundred years. Impressively, it outlasted many of its peers, having the honor of not being permanently trashed until the late 17th century, when, under the reign of Louis XIV the Sun King, French troops sacked it during the Franco-Dutch war.

Because not everyone in our party shared Elias's and my penchant for scrambling through and around ancient crumbled stone walls, we only explored the upper third of the ruins. The lower portion, alas, will have to wait for another visit. Suffice it to say, what we saw was right swell.

Elsass, part II

2010-08-17T14:59:00.004+02:00

One of the very fine things about the German language is that it produces tidy verbs like uebernachten (literally, to overnight) that sound so much less clunky than in English. In Elsass, we overnighted (see?) in a small hotel in the pretty little village Andlau. (Yes, it's redundant to say "pretty" when you're talking about little villages in Elsass.)

At breakfast, Elias and I tried the hot chocolate, which in France seems to be made by taking one Lindt dark chocolate bar and one Lindt milk chocolate bar, melting them together, and putting them in a cup. Even for hardcore chocoholics, it is a formidable beverage.

After breakfast, we took a stroll through town, and I discovered it's next to impossible to accurately capture, in a single photograph, the charm of densely packed Fachwerkhaueser on narrow streets; so I gave up trying to photograph whole alleyways and streets and focused on windows instead.

Near the middle of Andlau is an abbey that was founded by spurned-wife/future-saint Richarde in 880 A.D. Most of the Romanesque church dates from the 12th century or later, although the oldest crypts are from the 11th century. Note the lack of floor-to-ceiling paintings (although if you look at the bottom right corner of the photograph to the right, you can see the faint remnants of a former wall decoration).

From Andlau, we drove to Haut Koenigsbourg. Rather than visiting the Château--beautifully restored by Wilhelm II in the late 19th century--we gawked at the miles and miles of tourists and then continued on to the pretty little village Bergheim for lunch.

Afterward, we attempted to chase more ruins. Imagine: three crumbling Châteaux--St. Ulrich, Girsberg, and Haut Ribeaupierre--on three outcroppings atop one small mountain! We parked at the trail head outside Ribeauvillé and after hiking a while, we learned that French trail signs are about as useful and accurate as German ones. Remember this, remember this, remember this, and bring a good map. Alas--it's painful to say--we never made it to any of the ruins.

After our disappointment, we bought a case of wine in Zellenberg, then turned east across the Rhine to Freiburg.

How to eat a Semmel at breakfast

2010-08-16T14:58:00.008+02:00

The photographs in the previous post are somewhat misleading, because they show Semmel on plates. The proper way to eat a Semmel is as follows:

1. Slice the Semmel in half lengthwise. DO NOT RIP THE SEMMEL.
2. DO NOT PUT BOTH SEMMEL SLICES ON YOUR PLATE AT ONE TIME. This is not an arbitrary rule. Your plate is for butter and jam. There is not enough room for two Semmel slices. Plus, if you put both Semmel slices on your plate at once, you will get unsightly crumbs all over the plate.
3. Put the Semmel halves next to your plate.
4. Because the Semmel has already been sliced, if you so desire, you may now rip off a small piece from one half. (Remember, DO NOT put the remaining ripped Semmel half on your plate. It belongs NEXT TO your plate.)
5. Spread butter and/or jam onto the Semmel piece you plan to eat. During this process, it is permissible for the Semmel piece to come into contact with the plate.
6. Eat the Semmel piece.
7. Return to Step 4. Continue until all of the Semmel has been consumed.

Note that it is also perfectly appropriate to slice a Semmel in half, place one half next to your plate, and return the other half to the community Semmel bowl so that others may enjoy it. There are so many different varieties of Semmel (plain, poppy seed, plain, sesame seed, plain, Kaiser, and plain), that it's nice to share.

Behold the Semmel

2010-08-16T10:05:00.009+02:00

Behold the Semmel in some of its infinite variety:

The Semmel* is the most revered of German breakfast foods. Made with refined white flour, it is what we oafish Americans would call a Kaiser roll and might ignorantly buy in the deli section at Kroger's without batting an eye. Not so in Germany. The locally-owned corner bakery might be good for Kuchen, but if you want the lightest, airiest, fluffiest, crust-crispest Semmel, you paradoxically must go to the chain-store bakery halfway up the block; and if you are a Semmel conoisseur (i.e. German), you can actually taste the difference. Unlike hearty rye Pfisterbrot ("the best bread we Bavarians have," says Helen, and which Stefan once gushed over by exclaiming, "and can you believe this stuff lasts for weeks without ever tasting stale?"), a Semmel's shelf life is limited to a few hours, on principle if nothing else. Reheated day-old Semmel do not a proper breakfast make: they must be purchased fresh, daily, if you're going to do breakfast right ("Immer frisch, immer frisch"--always fresh--Helen instructs). You could choose to start your day with something "heavy," say a whole-grain roll with actual nutritive content, but the Semmel-eating majority will shake their heads and pity your woeful miseducation.

*Northern Germans call Semmel Broetchen (diminutive breadlets), which Bavarians think is Just Wrong.

Elsass, part I

2010-08-16T01:39:00.004+02:00

On Thursday and Friday, we made a westward excursion across the Rhine to Elsass (Alsace). Our tour began in...

...Gengenbach (in Germany, opposite Strasbourg). The town boasts a well-preserved medieval Altstadt of Fachwerkhaueser (wattle-and-daub houses) with an oddly out of place baroque Rathaus (city hall). Gengenbach's Stadtkirche St. Marien (city church of St. Mary) dates to the 12th century, but like most centuries-old churches around here, it has been renovated and revised and Baroquified and de-Baroquified assorted times. The church interior currently sports a late-19th-century take on a Romanesque floor-to-ceiling paint job (see here for the real thing). In sum, Gengenbach presents a loving ode to anachronisms.

We proceeded onward to Strasbourg. More Fachwerkhaueser, more charming narrow streets, lovely canals and a beautiful river, one picturesque scene after another--and then we turned a corner and went weak in the knees when our random meanderings brought us face to face with...

...Strasbourg's whomping huge, amazingly ornate cathedral. It filled our view and took my breath away. I've never been so overwhelmed by a building.

More strolling, followed by the requisite 4pm coffee and cake, and we were off again, now into the Vogesen--Elsass's answer to the Black Forest. And lo, we saw ruins, so of course we had to pause for a little ruins chasing. First stop: the Château de Spesbourg. According to a sign, the Château was built in 1250 by the Baron Alexandre de Dicka de Stahleck. What a great name. In the 14th century, the Château was taken over by the knights of the nearby village Andlau. In the 16th century, the good citizens of Barr (another nearby village) burned down the castle to avenge the dishonneur of a young Barroisie. (NB: don't abuse the hired help.)

From Spesbourg, we could see the next ruins over--the Château d'Andlau--and I figured I'd trot on over while Stefan, Elias, and Helen hiked back to the car. It was a good trot, but in vain: the ruins were closed for renovations. I guess even ruins need a little TLC every few centuries.

Lots of windows and one door in Elsass (Alsace)

2010-08-14T17:16:00.015+02:00

Das Navi

2010-08-12T00:26:00.004+02:00

After we left Tübingen, we amused ourselves by turning on das Navi--our rental car's GPS navigation system--and then ignoring its directions. To its credit, it didn't raise its voice at all, although when we turned off the highway into Donaueschingen to see the Donau Quelle (the spring that is the source of the 2840km-long Danube river), I expected its default soothing feminine lilt to say something like "ich sagte, links abbiegen, du doofer Idiot" ("I said turn left, you doofus").

Tübingen

2010-08-11T22:59:00.005+02:00

On Tuesday, we drove two hours to Stuttgart to pick up Stefan's mom, Helen, whose tenant had driven her west from Steinebach to meet us. On the way back to Freiburg, we decided to stop off in Tübingen, location of the eighth oldest continuously operating university in Germany. The university was founded in 1477, some 380 years after Oxford, some 13,000 years after the area was likely first settled, and the very same year (surely not coincidentally) that Tübingen expelled all of its Jews (allowed back in 1850).

Unlike Freiburg, most of Tübingen survived WWII intact. The Altstadt thus includes many original wattle-and-daub houses, the oldest of which date to the 14th century; parts of the Schloss above the Altstadt are yet three centuries older. We thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon meander.

A developing relationship

2010-08-11T22:31:00.006+02:00

On Monday, while Elias was off with a friend visiting the highest waterfall in all of Germany (die Todtnauer Wasserfaelle), Stefan and I caught a local train to Gundelfingen, then hiked toward Heuweiler, up to the Zaehringer Burg ruins, and back down into Herdern. En route we ran into none other than Frau L., proprietor of the corner bakery. I hadn't seen her since I almost burst into tears in her store in December--and there she was, picking blackberries in a sunny field next to the trail and enjoying the beautiful day. She handed us some berries and told us enthusiastically about a spot where "you can collect whole pails full!"

Today I stopped by the bakery to pick up some bread for dinner, and Frau L. recognized me from our hiking encounter. Suddenly we were on more than baker-eater terms, and the questions flowed: "how far did you hike, where did you go, how long did it take?" My answers were rewarded with more questions: "where do you live, how long are you here, did you make many acquaintances here in Freiburg?" And then, The Biggie: "oh yes, that's a nice hike indeed, Frau...Frau--Wie heissen Sie?" (How do formal-you call yourself?).

This is a big deal: you're an accepted member of the community when Frau L. begins to address you by your family name.

4th Place!

2010-08-09T21:51:00.004+02:00

I forgot to report that Elias's lunch table at camp won "4. Preis fuer Tischmanieren" ("4th-Place Prize for Table Manners"). The teachers said Elias and his friends Johannes, Paul, and Ricarda really deserved first place prizes (which, trust me, is more impressive for what it says about the low standards here than for any active accomplishment), but the rest of the kids brought the table down. To put things in perspective, the total number of lunch tables was five.

St. Ottilien

2010-08-08T13:26:00.007+02:00

Saturday was another lovely, cool, sunny day, so we decided to go hiking again. Because I had gotten a blister coming down the Belchen, we chose something relatively short and easy this time--the Roßkopf-St. Wendelin-St. Ottilien route. We were joined by Jan, a colleague of Stefan's from NCSU who is in Freiburg for a sabbatical.

Near the end of our hike, we stopped at the restaurant next to St. Ottilien for lunch. The current chapel dates to 1714, but the story of St. Ottilie reaches back to the 7th century: the blind daughter of an Alemannisch count, Ottilie was healed by water flowing from a spring that flows under the chapel site. The chapel is only open occasionally, so it was a special treat for us that folks were setting up for a wedding and we were able to take a quick peek inside.

It didn't occur to me to seek out healing waters for my toe. After lunch, to avoid further blister damage, I contorted my foot and got compensatory blisters on two additional toes. Ouch. When we awoke this morning, Elias cheerfully announced, "Mama, you can be happy--it's raining!"

A packed Friday

2010-08-08T12:05:00.012+02:00

On Friday, Stefan and I drove south to Staufen, then east, past Münstertal, and into the hills...

where we parked and began our hike up the beautiful...

Belchen (1414m). A helpful trail sign left little doubt about what direction we should take, until we encountered this...

fork just a dozen meters up the road. Stefan wisely checked the map, but it didn't show the fork, so we stayed to the left until...

we were strongly advised to go to the right. We had one last view of the...

valley behind us, where lay nestled the tiny village Kaltwasser, before we headed into the...

mossy...

woods. We saw nothing but trees, switchback after switchback, until at long last we emerged...

atop the ridge, with water vapor still burning off the mountain in the warmth of the late morning sunlight.

The Belchen is clearly a lovely place to spend the summer if you are...

a sheep or a goat or...

a cow.

We opted for...

a more open route back down, and observed that folks on the Belchen enjoy a little more flourish than those on Schauinsland when it comes to...

stacking wood. After we walked back through...

Kaltwasser to our rental car, we decided to drive to...

Staufen for some coffee, seltzer, and ice cream. I believe Germany is one of the only countries in the world where one can make an occasion of going out for seltzer.

We made it back to Freiburg in good time to see...

the play Elias's summer camp put together. The play is about a king who locks up his daughter because she doesn't want to get married; but then he begins to have regrets and sends a dragon from Toulouse to look after her. First the dragon has to track down the princess; a rabbit is unable to help, and the dragon subsequently receives conflicting directions from two foxes (shown above). Eventually he learns that the princess has been stolen from her tower by a band of robbers; the dragon rescues her and...we have to go back next Friday to see how the story ends, since the play isn't done yet. (Elias won't be in camp next week, so he'll be in the audience rather than on stage.)

Can there be a better way to top off a great day than to go see...

your two favorite German soccer teams face off in an exhibition game at a small town field in Bahlingen am Kaiserstuhl? How fortuitous that we happened to be in town during the Kaiserstuhl Cup! SC Freiburg beat 1860 Muenchen, 2:0, scoring a dramatic second goal just before the clock ended. Other highpoints of the evening included two storks flying over the field into the setting sun, and the absence of vuvuzelas.

Getting around, part II

2010-08-04T22:09:00.023+02:00

This morning after Elias left for camp, I walked out the front door and headed south through...

Herdern, past...

the Schwabentor bordering the Altstadt, through...

the Wiehre neighborhood, with all its big snazzy Jugendstil houses, and all the way to...

the old monastery gate at the edge of the village Guenterstal, where I cut east into the...

wooded hills. I had five kilometers behind me, and my goal ahead was the top of Freiburg's nearest sizeable mountain, Schauinsland, a mere 8.5 or 9 kilometers further away, depending on whether I believed or followed...

any of the signs. The signs are quite detailed, as you can see, but they aren't terribly accurate when it comes to distances, and while one trail intersection might have signs pointing you toward 20 different places, another intersection might not have any signs at all. Remember this, remember this, remember this, and do not be lured into false hope by the signs. Instead, carry a good topo map. But don't entirely rely on the map either, since there are always dozens more trails to choose from in real life than will ever fit onto any map, such as the trail less traveled that led me to this...

mossy bench next to a rivulet. (I'd amuse myself and call it a mossy Bank, since Bank is German for bench, but I'm told puns aren't funny in German, and even a bilingual one is probably a stretch). The trail spit me back out on a gravel road with a bucolic view of...

sheep. My route threatened to descend back down into Guenterstal, so when I came to a junction, I headed upwards into more...

woods. There were lots of...

wildflowers; and of course no hike here would be complete without abundant...

stinging nettles. The scenery stayed rather...

consistent for several kilometers, until I gained enough elevation to enjoy a...

rewarding vista of the valley below. The subsequent views included...

more woods. Eventually, I passed under...

the Seilbahn line that runs from the town Horben, in the valley below, up to the top of Schauinsland. The Seilbahn crossing was a welcome sight, because from there on, the trail straightened out somewhat, although it became steeper. I turned onto a mountain-bike path, where I saw a sign warning travelers about...

horse flies (Bremsen). Oh wait, silly me, the B is lower case: bremsen is a verb: so not "Attention, horse flies," rather "Attention, brake." Further ahead, I crossed the only...

bridge of the entire hike, and then number 483,000 out of about a bazillion...

piles of tidily stacked wood. Only...

2.5 kilometers to go (no, no, don't believe the signs!): past copious, sun-kissed expanses of...

wildflowers, past...

the two giant windmills, to a rocky trail that climbed upward, crossed the paved main road, and then terminated at an unmarked T-intersection. No trail sign? Surely that meant either option--left or right--would end up at the top of the mountain. Did I check my map? No, no. I took a left onto a nice wide graded gravel road, because my ultimate goal was the end of the Seilbahn line, and the Seilbahn was now quite a ways to my left. The gravel road continued on and on, passed under the Seilbahn line, and continued on and on some more until it reached...

a dead end. Realizing I had inadvertently added a few extra kilometers to my hike, I cursed loudly (in English, because I haven't lived in Germany long enough to instinctively curse in German) before cutting down to the...

paved road. After walking a short while, I saw a...

Naturschutzgebiet (nature preserve) trail that wasn't on the map. It offered a significant shortcut, as well as some...

fine views, before meeting up again with the paved road, which I followed the rest of the way to my...

final destination, where...

this handsome guy was waiting for me. The grand total: five hours, 23.3 kilometers (significantly more than 5 + 9, you might observe), and one kilometer elevation gain. (Stefan, for his part, biked 69 kilometers round trip in a little over three hours, climbing a combined total of about 1440 meters: Freiburg-Zaehringen-Heuweiler-St. Peter [break for a hazelnut pastry]-Unterriebental-Kirchzarten-Oberried-Hofsgrund-Schauinsland-Freiburg.)

After half a liter of Sprudel (seltzer), a Heidelbeershake (you'd think that would translate as blueberry milkshake, but it's actually a foamy lukewarm puree of blueberries and milk), and a plate of Pommes (fries)--a nutritious vegetarian lunch if there ever was one--I took the fast way home:

Titisee

2010-08-03T21:55:00.015+02:00

Stefan couldn't find a store in Freiburg that rents racing bikes, so today we drove to Neustadt to rent one there. Afterward, we thought we'd check out scenic Titisee, reputed to be an idyllic lake-town gateway to the Black Forest.

Surely it was, once. Now it's an international summer vacation destination for people who want to kick back and relax in the company of a few thousand like-minded tourists. The camping is European Lake Style, meaning rows and rows of RVs and tents are squashed together like sardines. The lake offers some good photo ops if you can coordinate views unobstructed by people.

After an initial look at Titisee, we headed away from town, eventually hitting a trail that took us past old farm houses and into green mossy woods. Ahh, much better.

Schumann Wahlfahrt

2010-08-02T20:55:00.022+02:00

You'd think that because 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann's birth, every organ concert this year from here to Berlin would feature at least one of the composer's intriguingly unidiomatic organ works, in the same way organists celebrated Felix Mendelssohn's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr last year. Of course, Mendelssohn wrote a lot more music for the organ than Schumann did, and his holds together better, and it isn't so stormily melodramatic or--how should I say it--puppy-doggishly confident. But with such a small opus, it would seem easy enough to play all of Schumann's organ works, from the brilliant cream-of-the-crop to the so-so ones--and be done with them, just for the record.

Alas, this is not to be. The baroque church in St. Peter is offering a series of six summer organ concerts, and would you believe this past Sunday's was the only one to program anything by Schumann? Knowing this in advance, of course we had to go.

We didn't have access to a car, so first we walked 1.5 miles to the Hauptbahnhof, took a train to Kirchzarten, caught a bus to Stegen, misunderstood the driver and got off one stop too late, near Eschbach, guessed we might find a trail behind a recently-mowed hay field, and ended up at a creek. Since Stefan was the only one of us wearing waterproofed shoes, he gallantly carried me and Elias to the far bank. There we followed a path covered with a lifetime supply of sheep poop until it disappeared in a field. We waved to the sheep across the fence, then switchbacked through the waist-high grasses and flowers until we found a logging road that went directly up the Berg.

The logging road eventually ended at a huge pile of sawed up pine trees--uncharacteristically untidy for Germany--so we descended a bit and took an alternate route: a muddy wildflower- and weed-covered road that ended at a fence in a field of stinging nettles and raspberry brambles. After squeezing through a gap in the fence, we comforted an understandably distraught, scratched-up, stinging-nettle-zapped Elias, decided we'd have better luck bushwhacking through pine branches, and retraced our steps. Trail-less, we continued upward around branches, over sticks and moss-covered rocks, through thinning brambles and nettles, until at last we reached a graded gravel road. There, Elias and I traded right socks, as his was threatening to give him a blister, and we briefly admired that my size 10 foot fits into the sock of a nine-year-old boy.

When the gravel road met up with a mostly paved one, Elias offered a sacrificial gelatin-free gummi bear to a patch of stinging nettles, and it was relatively easy going after that. We followed the ridge for a few more miles, eventually encountering fourteen stations-of-the-cross markers that led us down to St. Peter.

Looking at the photographs above, taken from the ridge, you're probably thinking the hike was pretty easy. I didn't take any pictures of the miserable bits with the evil expanse of stinging nettles. The photo to the left, taken at a small open spot with a wee tilting chapel surrounded by the sourest blackberries in the world, hardly does justice to the incline.

We arrived in St. Peter about 20 minutes before the concert, and stopped off at a little cafe across from the church for the quickest and tastiest Kuchen inhalation ever. Then into the church we went for some Buxtehude, Couperin, and--bestill my beating heart--Schumann.

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

As an encore, Götz played a transcription of Schumann's Lied, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," which ends inconclusively on the dominant of the submediant. In nontechnical terms, that means that most of the audience sat in stunned silence waiting for the piece to end, not realizing it already had.

After the concert, we headed to our favorite Italian restaurant and ate gnocchi on the balcony, watching storm clouds roll in over distant Freiburg. Then: a bus to Denzlingen, a train to Herdern, and a rainy walk to Urbanstrasse, and we were home. All in all, quite a fine day.

Augustiner Museum

2010-08-02T19:29:00.005+02:00

The Augustiner Museum was closed for renovations last year, so it wasn't until this past Saturday that we were finally able to pay it a visit. Small but beautifully arranged, the museum includes some impressively tall statues and gargoyles from the Muenster--centuries-old originals that were replaced to prevent decay--respectively depicting the twelve apostles and the seven deadly sins. And thanks to the backside of a c. 1500 altar cabinet painted by Martin Schaffner et al., we learned that 15th-century sinners got what was coming to them for playing backgammon naked.

Back in Freiburg

2010-08-02T17:17:00.003+02:00

Thanks to an odd twist of fate, as of this afternoon we're back in our old apartment in Freiburg for the next few weeks. We spent the past three nights staying with friends Wolfgang, Christina, and Terisa on the building's third floor (which would be the fourth floor in the U.S.--I want full credit for all those stairs) while the tenants who replaced us in December moved out. That was more than sufficient time for Terisa, age 3.5, to fall madly in love with Elias (actually, he was targeted before we even arrived). Elias in turn demonstrated he's a remarkably gracious and good-humored 9-year-old.

Elias is spending this week at a summer camp at the Weiherhof school, practically in our backyard. He attended the same camp last year, and we thought it would be a good way for him to meet up with kids again and hone his German. The teachers were delighted to see him this morning, and Elias was delighted to reconnect with three of his best school friends. After camp, Elias went across the street to trade soccer cards with his faithful pen-pal and fellow camper Johannes.

Nothing is sacred

2010-08-02T15:58:00.007+02:00

I'm sure German can be a poetic language when it wants to be, yet it is a language of unexpectedly limited vocabulary. This is ironic, given that German allows speakers to invent new words by smashing multiple old ones together; but German ran out of phonetic Ur-combinations some time ago. Thus it has to use the same word, die Dichtung, to mean both poetry (hail Goethe, hail Schiller, hail Heine) and gasket (hail exhaust manifold, hail intake air duct).

Granted, English does the same thing. Take the noun key, for example, which can be both something to unlock a door (der Schlüssel) and something to affect sound production in a musical instrument (die Taste).

Still, you'd think concepts like poetry are sacred enough that the Volk would have found a different word/concept to share with gasket--say, das Radieschen (radish) or der Elch (elk). Maybe gaskets were invented before verse.

If poetry is not sacred enough, what is? We merely need turn to the word for mother--die Mutter--to learn that nothing is. Die Mutter means both mother and screw nut. The crass English double meanings of screw and nut perhaps highlight that I shouldn't be too critical of German. Still, mother and nut?

German reserves der Vater solely for male progenitors, so maybe we can simply blame all of this on The Patriarchy.

Getting around

2010-08-02T15:23:00.001+02:00

There's lots of room to park at the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof.

Koenigstuhl

2010-07-29T23:48:00.010+02:00

We are visiting our friends Hans-Walter and MaryBeth in Heidelberg, Germany for a few days before heading down to Freiburg, which means we are enjoying good company and eating well.

Today, Elias, Stefan, and I hiked up the Koenigstuhl (the local mountain or hill, depending on your standards) to the Max Planck Institut fuer Astronomie to meet Hans-Walter for lunch. We arrived an hour late because we got caught in a thunderstorm and had to hunker down in a shelter for about 30 minutes before continuing on in the rain. The sun emerged just as we reached our destination, but by then, Hans-Walter was late for a meeting, so we didn't get to see much of the Institute. We did enjoy seeing this lovely, late 19th-c. gate to the Sternwarte (observatory). I photographed it at an imposing angle, as the gate looked somewhat less elegant with the big recycling bin in the background.

Frankfurt to Heidelberg

2010-07-29T23:00:00.005+02:00

A train! A train! A train! A train! Could you, would you, on a train?...Would you, could you, in the rain?

I would not, could not, in the rain. Not in the dark. Not on a train...

Mightoughtashould.blogspot.com

2010-01-01T12:44:00.001+01:00

We're home...

Odd and ends

2009-12-27T20:35:00.007+01:00

So many things still to write about--dinner with Stefan's brother's family yesterday in Odelzhausen and our conversation about whether Jewish soldiers would have been included on WWI memorials with crosses (yes, if the crosses were "iron crosses," but probably not if the crosses were church-affiliated, and so much more to say about different kinds of anti-Semitism and how it played out regionally in the part of the world now known as Germany); how to recognize small Bavarian churches from afar (see photos below--there are basically two predominant types of Baroque towers, the onion dome and the simple triangle); lunch with Inge (Helen's best friend for the past 70 years); the annual dueling Haensel und Gretels in Muenchen (today we reconfirmed that the Gaertnerplatz performance is not the one to attend if you want to be able to hear the singers over an adequate pit orchestra, but we aren't sure we can handle going to the Staatsoper performance next year to confirm that it's the one to see); and how sad it is that the performance of "Aloha He, Stern der Suedsee" by Die Flippers has been removed from youtube.com because of copyright restrictions.

But (to paraphrase Chaucer) instead of writing about all those things, we're feverishly packing and repacking, already pining for Germany before we get on a plane tomorrow to head back to the U.S. We thought we had all our suitcase and carry-on space cleverly mapped out, and then a Nigerian guy tried to blow up an airplane in Detroit the other day and our airline changed its baggage rules. Oh well. Back to work.

There are, of course, lots of things to look forward to back home: our friends, our cats, our house, our neighborhood; organs to play, pots to wheel-throw, a choir to conduct, writing workshops to give; a gas oven and stove top, American baking powder, and local streets that are wide enough for two cars to drive on in opposite directions at the same time. We're dusting of our "might coulds" and "oughta shoulds" and girding ourselves for culture shock.

I don't know that I'm ready to give up my Wadlstrumpf home quite yet, but our final week of Vodafone service expires at ~22:30 tonight, and that deadline seems an appropriate way to mark the end of a lovely six months of talking to myself and to you dozen or so loyal readers out there in ether-space.

But saying farewell to Wadlstrumpf doesn't mean I'll be giving up my new blogging habit. Tune in Tuesday at mightoughtashould.blogspot.com for the next exciting installment.

Also, pfirdi, pfirdi, also, also, servus, pfirdi!

Frieding

2009-12-26T00:17:00.002+01:00

As tends to be the case when we're visiting Helen, the plan for recovering from a big event like Christmas Eve is to go out the next day to eat more food. We had a reservation for 11:30 this morning at the Wirtshaus "Zum Queri" in Frieding, in theory about 5 miles away from Steinebach. So after I got up, I put on my hiking boots, grabbed a Semmel (crusty roll), and set off for a pleasant walk, with the intent of meeting Stefan, Helen, Elias, and Familie F. for lunch.

My route took me first through Auing and across the highway to Seefeld. Schloss Seefeld, which in its current iteration dates mainly to the 18th century, is still inhabited by the local nobility, the Graf zu Toerring, who counts the Woerthsee among his many holdings.

From Seefeld, I tromped south to Widdersberg, where I found a teeny tiny sign pointing to "Frieding-Andechs" and listing a few addresses on "Friedingerstrasse." That's when I made my fatal error: assuming that the sign meant the street was named Friedingerstrasse and that it would lead to Frieding.

I should have learned my lesson this summer, when I tried to get back to Steinebach from nearby Hechendorf am Pilsensee by following a sign labeled Auingerweg. I assumed the gravel road would lead to Auing, but instead it dead-ended at two barking miniature schnauzers in the middle of a cornfield.

The gravel road I followed today headed south, passing by a pretty village off in the distance. Eventually it descended down a hill and into some woods. A nordic walking sign pointed in the general direction of the main road, so I took a right onto the trail. It eventually dead-ended at a deer feeding trough in the woods, at which point I remembered the lesson of Auingerweg. Simultaneously cursing and snickering, I pushed my way through some scrub and emerged in a recently plowed field that I cut across to a road. I hailed down a passing bicyclist who kindly redirected me to Frieding--the pretty village I had been admiring from afar for the past two kilometers.

How to tell you're in Bavaria

2009-12-25T21:57:00.007+01:00

Imagine you are abducted by aliens from outer space. They bring you aboard their ship, decide you aren't a particularly interesting specimen, and throw you back onto the planet they fished you off of. But they don't pay a whole lot of attention to where they toss you, because all of the planet looks pretty much the same to them. What top three key pieces of evidence convince you that you've landed in Bavaria?

1. Biergarten signs. Every village you wander through in your dazed state has a Biergarten, and as you approach, you see signs advertising it. The signs include sky-blue and white--diamonds perhaps, or stripes. In the text, you notice the diminutive suffix -rl and consequent umlaut: you are approaching a Bräustüberl (Bairisch), not a Bräustube (Hochdeutsch). You know you are not in Baden-Wuerttemberg, because the signs there would be for Straussenwirtschaften, where people would drink wine.

2. Maibäume. 30-40 meter high blue-and-white maypoles reach up to the sky, decorated with symbols representing village life and vocations. If the aliens abduct you shortly before the first of May, you might also observe thieves trying to steal maypoles from neighboring towns.

3. Kasspatzen mit gerösteten Zwiebeln und Blattsalat. As a vegetarian, you notice a bizarre and startling constancy between menus across the state. Pretty much every Bavarian restaurant with a "warm kitchen" is guaranteed to offer these pervasive small boiled dumplings, sauteed with cheese and served with fried onions and a side salad.

P.S. Loferl

2009-12-25T19:31:00.003+01:00

I forgot to mention yesterday that my swanky new authentic Bavarian Chiemgauer Loferl were made in Austria (just like the Ur-Rezept for Linzer Torte!).

The jewel in the crown

2009-12-25T00:09:00.009+01:00

The obligatory Christmas preparatory frenzy came to an end late this afternoon, when activity all over Germany came grinding to a halt and almost everyone sat down for coffee and Gemütlichkeit (coziness). At Helen's in Steinebach, gemütlich it was, with peppermint tea and hot coffee, clementines and apples and pommegranate seeds, and Plätzchen, Plätzchen, and more Plätzchen (Christmas cookies).

There is no shortage of Plätzchen in this part of the world, because German industriousness kicks into a wild bacchanal in the kitchen during Advent. In mid-December, while I was busy scouring the internet for a brownie recipe that would actually work with German ingredients in an electric oven with a broken temperature gauge*, every other woman in Germany was busy creating magic with nuts, egg whites, butter, sugar, and chocolate or an occasional form of fruit (candied orange peel, lemon juice, raspberry jam). In Freiburg, where Plätzchen are called Brötle, Paul's mom gave Elias a tin of homemade cookies, and then the ravioli guy gave us a bag of cookies, and then we had dinner with Familie M. and there were more homemade cookies, and then Familie R. gave us a veritable sack of homemade cookies for the road (Christina's Zimtsterne topped with meringue Baiser were pretty much the best Brötle I've ever tasted). Despite being nearly blind, Helen herself must have made at least 250 cookies in five different varieties, and she has received cookies from so many different friends that it's no longer possible to keep track of who made what. Fortunately, keeping track is not really an issue anymore, as we ate most of the remaining cookies this evening.

Then it was time to open presents. Ever romantics, we gave Helen a clothes dryer, because even if you're a pro-environment, industrious, robust German willing to schlepp your wet clothes from the basement of the little Häuschen next door all the way up to the attic of the main Häuschen (the only place at Helen's where clothes can dry quickly in the winter), you deserve a break when you're almost 87.

As we don't usually celebrate Christmas at home, Elias was thrilled to hand out and open packages beneath the Christmas tree. (The dryer, of course, was not under the tree, but rather in the basement of the Nebenhaus.) And while we had intended to do only low-key gift-giving, since suitcase space is at a premium right now, there were some special surprises. It is difficult for me to express in words my gratitude to my mother-in-law for the present she gave me--something so simple, yet so profound in the intimate bond it expressed. I don't think anyone has ever given me a more perfect Weihnachts gift: my very own Wadlstrümpfe (Loferl + sockies).

*I found one! For best results, use a small pan or triple the recipe, and err on the side of undercooked. If you use coarse salt, all the salt will sink to the bottom. If you're lucky, like me, the novelty of salty-bottom brownies will impress the starving graduate students in the lab where your husband has been a guest professor, because the students are happier to think you're a creative cook than an error-prone one.

Woerthsee walk

2009-12-23T22:48:00.005+01:00

Today I stole two and a half hours from the obligatory a-major-holiday-is-coming-up-and-we're-going-to-prepare-properly-so-we-can-all-have-a-nice-time-together-dammit frenzy and went for a walk around the Woerthsee.

The Woerthsee is the third largest of five lakes in the Huosigau area southwest of Munich; the other lakes, from largest to smallest, are the Starnbergersee, Ammersee, Pilsensee, and Wesslingersee.

Steinebach, where Stefan's mom lives, is on the northeast end of the Woerthsee. The first known settlers were Celts, some 2300 years ago; the first known written reference to Steinebach (as Steniginpah) dates from 920 A.D.

A hundred and ten years ago, Steinebach was still primarily a farming village. With the advent of the Pasing-Herrsching railway in 1903, Steinebach became a summer recreation destination and, eventually, a sleeper community for people working in Munich. The walk from Steinebach around the Woerthsee thus affords some lovely views of the lake, but (as is probably the case with most bucolic little lakes near large prosperous cities) the route requires quite a few detours around private summer cottages, marinas, and gated mansions.

"How we Bavarians really are"

2009-12-22T23:59:00.003+01:00

The front page headline of this morning's Abendzeitung ("Evening News"--I don't yet understand why the "Evening News" arrives in the morning) read "So sind wir Bayern wirklich" ("How we Bavarians really are"). The accompanying photo shows a man with a curly moustache; he is wearing short Lederhosen, a hat, Loferl, and boots. The outfit screams "Bavarian," and look how happy and exaggeratedly dynamic the man is. Most Bavarians I've met masquerade as people who wear mundane street clothes or, occasionally, Tracht of the non-costume-like variety, but such people apprently aren't the real deal.

I hereby apologize to the editors of the Baden-Wuerttemberg Edeka Sunday supplement for previously criticizing their stereotypes of Bavarians, as Bavarians clearly revel in stereotyping themselves. "We're kind of like Texans in that regard," Stefan explains.

Föhn

2009-12-22T22:53:00.018+01:00

We are currently enjoying a weather phenomenon in Steinebach called Föhn. Föhn is a warm wind on the leeward side of a mountain. It results from moist air passing over the mountain and dropping most of its moisture on the windward side. In southern Bavaria, Föhn is when air coming northward from Italy dumps rain (or snow) on the southern side of the Alps; as the air continues northward, its tempature rises due to adiabatic changes in pressure.

As a consequence of today's Föhn, we had an amazing view of the Alps from the front yard. The highest peak in the photo to the left is the Zugspitze. We are very proud of the Zugspitze in Bavaria, because it is not only the highest mountain in Bavaria, it is also the highest mountain in all of Germany. A little to the left of the middle of the photograph, on the hill in front of the Zugspitze, is the Kloster and brewery Andechs, another source of Bavarian pride.

Today, Föhn also meant that after 20 years of visiting Munich, I finally saw the Alps from the top of the Alter Peter church tower. The Alps didn't look any closer from there than from Steinebach, so I'm willing to bet that a little technological enhancement is behind many of the postcards of Munich that show glorious Alps rising immediately behind assorted landmarks.

Speaking of technological enhancement, this afternoon we ate lunch at a fashionable Munich pizza place frequented by the Schicki-micki crowd. Of particular interest were the Botox-and-altered-lips subset. It was really, really difficult not to gawk.

Freiburg to Steinebach

2009-12-20T23:26:00.017+01:00

On Thursday I bid adieu to the Lutheran church choir, with whom I enjoyed music-making companionship while in Freiburg, and on Friday we said goodbye to the ravioli guy and the produce woman at the St. Urban farmers' market (thanks for the cookies, ravioli guy! Thanks for the pear, produce woman!), but I didn't choke up until this morning, when I told the proprietor at the corner Lienhart bakery that we were leaving. No more cakes, no more tortes, no more accidentally saying Semmeln and Zwetchgendatschi when Freiburgers say Broetchen and Pflaumkuchen, yet being understood anyway. Frau L. didn't know what to do with me, but gave a warm bow and elegantly wished us a good trip.

We managed to pack more social engagements into our last five days in Freiburg than into most of the previous five months (thanks for dinner on Saturday, Familie M.! Thanks for breakfast and the ride to the Hauptbahnhof today, Familie R., not to mention the Plaetzchen for the road! Thanks Paul, Ricarda, Friedi, Johannes, and Anne for being Elias's best pals!), and still found time to thoroughly scrub and scour our apartment before handing the keys over to our landlady and promising to meet up with her the next time we're in town. Stefan traveled by suitcase-stuffed car and Elias and I by train, and I choked up again as I watched the snow-covered hills of the Schwarzwald--and some ruins we hadn't gotten around to visiting--passing by outside the window.

The train ride itself offered some solace, thanks to an ever-changing variety of compartment companions. For the Freiburg-to-Karlsruhe leg, we were greeted by a woman who insisted we had the wrong compartment. "No, you can't have reserved these seats: this compartment is full." I disagreed. "No," she insisted, getting up to show stupid me the electronic reservations sign outside the cabin, "you're wrong. See, it says right here...Oh, wait, you're right. You have that seat. This seat is mine. See, it says right here...Oh, apparently you have this seat too." She got up and took someone else's seat. Eventually she realized that all of the seats in the cabin were taken, and she quietly slunk off to find another spot.

We changed trains in Karlsruhe. Having a bilingual child is a great conversation starter, so I know the woman we sat with until the first stop was training in Freiburg to be a midwife and had dreams of traveling all over the U.S. and eventually ending up in San Diego. "Americans are so open and welcoming," she said wistfully. After she departed, we were joined by a student coming home from Koeln. She had been waiting for late trains all day and was delighted that ours was on time. We gave her a clementine, and she showed Elias how to whistle with four fingers. After she left, a well-dressed older woman with dyed hair and a leopard-spot scarf stepped in and sat down next to Elias in the uncomfortable-looking fold-down seat. "I have to ride facing the direction the train is going," she explained, while I pondered whether German etiquette demanded that I switch to the other side of the cabin so she could have one of the cushier seats. She rode with us until the next stop, where she got off and was greeted with a loving embrace by a man on the snowy platform.

In Ulm, we were joined by two well-dressed but pungent-smelling men who spoke cheerfully to us in a dialect I could barely understand. While they engaged in enthusiastic conversation with one another, I started surreptitiously taking notes in my Sudoku book and suddenly realized their vocabulary sounded familiar--Hoam, guat, da Ding, weida zu bringn. Stefan says if I couldn't understand them, they were probably from Austria rather than Bayern, but the shift from Alemannisch to Bairisch-ish made me feel like we were returning to familiar territory.

On the S-Bahn ride from Munich-Pasing to Steinebach, Elias discovered the joys of static electricity. We also discovered that the S5--the name of the Herrsching-to-Munich S-line for the past 37 years--has been replaced by the S8 and now runs from Herrsching all the way to the Munich airport.

Those little black dots actually mean something

2009-12-20T22:38:00.007+01:00

From the Munich Die Abendzeitung TV guide: a blurb describing an upcoming documentary about how, on Christmas Eve, 1818, in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, Austria, Franz Xaver Grueber composed a melody for a text by Joseph Mohr. "Silent Night, Holy Night" has since been translated into more than 350 different languages and dialects, and is one of the most iconic Christmas songs ever written.

The music the newspaper pulled from the image files to accompany the blurb? Felix Mendelssohn's "Song Without Words" Op. 38, No. 6, ("Duetto").

Snow and sidewalks

2009-12-19T09:59:00.006+01:00

We woke up this morning to discover the Copies had given us a parting gift: a few inches of snow, with nice thick clumps still falling. I left the apartment at dawn, hoping to catch some photographs of the snow while it was still in a pristine state. That's when the evidence became overwhelming and I could no longer deny that Germans are thoroughly obsessed with clean sidewalks.

The first signs were already showing this summer, when we would see people outside on beautiful Saturday mornings, sweeping their sidewalks with brooms. The debris didn't end up in the streets. No no, it was collected carefully, whisked with a hand brush into a dust pan and disposed of properly (in the compost? in the Restmuell? Does street dirt count as recycleable?).

Throughout the fall, people dutifully kept the sidewalks clean, raking, sweeping, or vacuuming up leaves and stinky ginkgo fruits with gizmos specially designed for the purpose. I almost got a photograph of someone vacuuming leaves yesterday, but he kept looking at me after he saw me get my camera out. I pretended to be contemplating the nearby houses instead and told myself I was making too big a deal out of a leaf vacuum.

This morning, half the sidewalks were already shoveled by the time I went out. Some were already undergoing a second round in the early dawn light. I can understand that the Altstadt was thoroughly plowed, shoveled, and salted by 8:15, given the bustling farmers' market; but that the residential sidewalks were also so well kempt, in the dark, on a beautiful snow-muffled Saturday morning, the first day of Winter Ferien (winter vacation), well, that indicates a certain devotion and industriousness I haven't seen before.

Last day of school

2009-12-18T21:46:00.007+01:00

Today was the last day of school before winter break, and Elias bid farewell to his 3rd grade classmates and teacher. The class made a very sweet memory book for him, for which everyone contributed a separate page decorated with pictures, text, photos, etc. Frau F., his teacher, has a son a little older than Elias, and she and I have shaken hands on the idea of a trans-Atlantic child exchange in five years or so.

Largely thanks to being surrounded by kids his age, and fueled by a flourishing soccer card trade amongst his peers, Elias's main accomplishments this fall have been assimilating culturally and learning to speak German. In addition to knowing who the most valuable Fussball players are, he now has a broader German vocabulary than I do and, to Stefan's dismay, is up to date on all the latest playground slang.

For recreational reading this fall, Elias stuck primarily to Asterix und Obelix books in German and to Harry Potter books, Lego catalogs, and The Economist in English. He recently discovered a new source of literary entertainment on our apartment bookshelves: Gymnasium (German college-track high school) English textbooks. The stories are dramatic, short, and bilingual, and the pictures are good.

One last hike in the Schwarzwald

2009-12-17T17:46:00.013+01:00

Elias's school schedule is different every weekday. Thursdays are his longest day, starting at pre-dawn (7:50) and ending at 13:00. Today I took advantage of that: instead of practicing, I left the house at 8:30 for one last long hike in the local Schwarzwald. I headed south through Wiehre and followed the signs toward Kybfelsen, a destination I had seen previously on signs. I don't think I ever made it there, wherever it is, but I did end up high above Guenterstal and Horben en route to Schauinsland. There was no snow down in the valley, but about halfway up the mountainside I encountered snow accumulation on the trail and big clumps of six-pointed flakes falling from the sky.

In the Google Earth map below, the straight line that starts under the "b" of "Horben" and runs down and to the right is the clearing for the cable car up to the top of Schauinsland.

Abmelden

2009-12-16T15:26:00.006+01:00

Earlier today, I drafted a blurb on visiting the Freiburg Bürgeramt (public authorities office), but I decided my description sounded unnecessarily petulant. Suffice it to say, this morning I went to the Bürgeramt to continue to initiate the first step in the process of commencing to bid adieu to what the proper paperwork filled out in duplicate and then submitted to and stamped and dated by a civil servant might, regardless of the temperament of said civil servant that day or any other, justifiably be identified as German Bureaucracy. Schoenen Tag noch.*

Whether I was successful remains to be seen, as I eventually abandoned hope of speaking with a live human being in the Un-Registration office, and instead used my Oblivious Ferner's wiles to convince the woman at the welcome desk to take my form. She looked dubious, because giving her the form meant I would not be able to obtain a receipt. Fortunately, the U.S. government doesn't give a hoot whether I have proof of un-registration from the city of Freiburg.

Afterward, I went out into the fresh air, stood on the corner with a bunch of other people, and pretended to be German by dutifully not crossing the street until the pedestrian signal gave us permission to do so.

*"Have a good rest of the day."

Schauinsland Schnee

2009-12-16T09:11:00.010+01:00

Thanks to the many opportunities in Freiburg to climb high above the ground, my inner acrophobe has retreated to a far corner of my brain, where, muttering peevishly to itself, it sits safely surrounded by four thick, solid walls while the rest of me goes out and risks life and limb.

Yesterday, Elias, Zoe, Michelle, and I rode the Seilbahn (cable car) up Schauinsland to look at the snow. Zoe shares my discomfort with heights, so to soothe her, I calmly explained that the Seilbahn is very, very dangerous, that the cables break and the dangling compartments plummet to the earth on a daily basis, and that because so many people ride them anyway, they're quite useful for eliminating idiots from the gene pool. She didn't believe me.

Catholic church and Jewish cemetery

2009-12-15T23:47:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I bid adieu to the St. Petrus Canisius organ with a few adrenaline-pumping run-throughs of Franck's Grande Pièce Symphonique and Mendelssohn's sixth organ sonata. While the Mendelssohn should transfer decently enough from the 32-register Rieger to the (oh dear) 8-register Walker at my gig back home, the Franck deserves better and has me chomping at the bit to get back into the demo cycle at Duke. Aeolian and Flentrop organs, here I come.

I was sorry that Complainant Number Two didn't show up to kvetch, as I had been looking forward to congratulating her on finally driving me away from the church forever, never to return. But in her place, a soft-spoken older gentleman appeared behind the organ bench and politely inquired about the practice schedule. I referred him to the secretary and regular organist. One Franck and one Mendelssohn later, there he was, sitting in the back of the church. As I left, he said, "that was lovely, really lovely. Are you preparing for a concert? When will you be playing again?" In retrospect, it was probably good that Complainant Number Two wasn't there, as the meeting of matter and anti-matter would have annihilated the sanctuary.

On the way home, I contemplated whether to stop by the Jewish cemetery, a place I hadn't realized I had been driving past four times a week for the past three months until the BZ published an article on the cemetery a few days ago. I was still waffling when I turned on the car radio, and what should be playing but Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer" in a chamber arrangement by Arnold Schoenberg. Oy gevalt. I took the hint and parked.

The cemetery is relatively new. Between 1424 and 1806, Jews were prohibited from living in Freiburg. In 1863, changes to Baden's laws finally allowed Freiburg's resident Jews to form a congregation. The cemetery was founded in 1870. It is still used today but is nearing capacity.

The cemetery has a noticeable absence of gravestones marking death dates in the 1940s. There is of course a memorial "to the Jewish victims of the Gewaltherrschaft [tyranny], 1933-1945." But the memorial most interesting to me was "to our fallen sons of the World War, with thankfulness and reverence, 1914-1918." I've seen cross after cross honoring WWI soldiers of various towns, but never paused to think that some of the fallen were left off the lists because they weren't Christian.

Update 22 Dec. 2009: A friend insists that Jews were well enough integrated into German society during WWI that their names would have been included in WWI memorial monuments, even on crosses. So I should have said, it never occurred to me that Jews were fighting for the fatherland alongside Christians during WWI, given what followed in the 1930s.

Things I'm going to miss

2009-12-14T13:41:00.009+01:00

In no particular order:

1. Gun control. I have yet to see a newspaper headline about someone being shot in Baden-Wuerttemberg. On the website where I check my hometown news, three of today's regional headlines are about people being shot: a seven-year-old hit by a stray bullet at an ice-skating rink in Charlotte, a Goldsboro teenager hit by a stray bullet while hunting with his father, a Sanford man murdered in his apartment. Germans tend to use knives to kill one another. When people fight with their rivals and wave weapons around to look intimidating, they're less likely to accidentally stab a skating seven-year-old in the knee than they are to accidentally shoot her.

2. Walkability. 90% of what we need here can be reached by foot.

3. A philosophy that discourages befouling one's environment. Germans recycle pretty much everything. The government offers incentives for reducing carbon footprints, from providing affordable mass transit to building extensive networks of bicycle paths. Solar panels abound on rooftops.

4. The idea that it is worth sacrificing excess consumption for improved quality of life. The grocery store on the corner is small, but it has pretty much everything we need, it's innocuous, and we can walk there.

5. Abundant farmers' markets that emphasize fresh local and regional produce. At the St. Urban farmers' market in particular: the ravioli guy, and the produce lady who always has a pear or apple or clementine for Elias, whether he's shopping with me that day or not.

6. Having an elementary school in the backyard.

7. Elias's third grade teacher, who is mature, laid back, practical, and enthusiastic, with sensible priorities.

8. A school system that gives teachers flexibility with classroom curricula, that maintains high enough standards for certification that no one thinks twice about trusting teachers with said curricula, and that doesn't mandate day after day of in-class, multiple-choice testing as a way to answer the question, "is our children learning?"

9. Trail-covered mountains five blocks east of the front door, and the option to walk or bike from any town in Germany to any other town entirely on designated pedestrian and bike trails.

10. The idea that all of society benefits when its members are well educated and in good health, backed up with a general willingness for tax dollars to go toward services that serve people other than oneself.

11. Alemannisch, Bairisch, and Schwyzerduetsch.

12. Rot Spaetburgunder, trocken.

Topziele

2009-12-13T19:50:00.012+01:00

Today we successfully checked off two more items on the Oh-Shoot-We-Still-Need-to list by visiting two TOPZIELE (must-see activities) listed in our Schwarzwald-Sueden magazine. In the morning, we revisited the beautiful Baroque Kloster in St. Peter and took a guided tour of the Festsaal, the library, and the church. The knowledgeable guide, eyes a-twinkle, waxed fondly about the history of the monastery-turned-seminary, explaining how religion, geography, local politics, and Enlightenment progressivism intertwined with the paintings, architecture, and sculptures throughout the buildings.

Then it was on to the Vogtsbauernhofmuseum in Gutach im Kinzigtal. The museum is closed for the winter, but this weekend hosted a Weihnachtsmarkt. My main purpose in going was to see authentic Schwarzwald Bollenhuette, which Stefan insists translates as "round lumps hats," but which might be described more elegantly as "pom-pom hats" or "ball hats." We have only seen real Bollenhuette in action once, from afar, at the closing awards ceremony at the senior world roller figure skating championships. But we've seen photographs of them, most often on milk cartons, butter wrappers, and yogurt containers, upon which the Bollenhut logo proclaims "this quality product came from the Black Forest."

Bollenhuette are part of the traditional Tracht in Gutach. They feature a straw hat laden with wool pom-poms. Unmarried women wear red pom-poms; once a woman is hitched, she wears black pom-poms. The feminist semioticist in me has a lot to say about bright red blooms and deflowerings, but is restraining herself at the moment as this is a family blog.

We did not see anyone wearing a Bollenhut this afternoon, but we had a fine time nonetheless. Stefan helped Elias and Zoe basteln (make handicrafts) in a hands-on workshop, where the toys they built had little to do with traditional Black Forest crafts, but where the activity itself (basteln) was about as German as you can get. There is nothing more fun or wholesome for German kids--with the possible exception of soccer--than basteln. Stefan still has an impressive scar on his hand to proudly show for his own happy childhood basteln experiences.

We also enjoyed some Gluehwein inside an old farmhouse at the Vogtsbauernmuseum. Every available seat was occupied by friendly folk having a cheery time in the cozy, low-ceilinged, fireplace-smoke filled room. When newcomers locate an empty spot, they ask the people already sitting at the table "ist hier noch frei?" ("is this spot still free?"), and then squash in next to them to share in the general conviviality. Like basteln, this is a thoroughly German experience.

In the evening, we went to Elias's third grade class Christmas party. To the parents' delight, the children sang the Christmas carols they've been learning at school. According to the party line, everybody enjoys spending school time learning these songs because everybody is Christian--except for the minority Muslims, Jews, and atheists, of course, whom the system has yet to figure out a way to acknowledge.

Things to do in Basel

2009-12-12T22:17:00.010+01:00

Yesterday evening, to wrap up day two of the Countdown, we went back to the Eugen Keidel Thermal Mineralbad. It was just as swell the second time as the first. After more than two hours of swimming around in hot water, we felt well exercised and relaxed.

Today, we started working on the Oh-Shoot-We-Still-Need-to list by visiting Basel, Switzerland. Basel is located less than an hour away from Freiburg by car, a straight shot south on the Autobahn. Yet despite being so close for the past five months, today was the very first time we drove down to see the sights.

Here are some things I enjoyed doing today in Basel, in no particular order:

1. Sipping on a free sample of warm Weihnachtstee ("Christmas tea"). While the server watched me sip and patiently hoped to make a sale off of me, I awkwardly generated polite conversation by asking what the ingredients were. As a reward, I got to hear the long list of aromatic herbs and spices breathlessly and impressively recited in melodious Schwyzerdütsch. I understood most of the items on the list, if none of the parenthetical commentary, and enjoyed the delightful foray into the world of diphthongs and swishing consonants, all gratis along with the sample of tea.

2. Purchasing a bag of authentic Basler Läckerli at the Läckerli Huus. Basler Läckerli are Basel's version of lebkuchen. They're tough, chewy little rectangular cookies with just the right balance between nuts, spices, and Orangeat and Zitronat (candied orange and lemon peel). "Läckerli," of course, is the Swiss German diminutive noun form of "lecker," and means, essentially, "little yummy thangs." "Huus" is Schwyzerdütsch for "house," which is also a fun find for an easily amused nonnative speaker.

3. Following up on buying authentic Basler Läckerli in Basel by eating authentic Swiss fondue in Switzerland. We were rejected at the first, half-empty restaurant we entered, in theory because they were booked, but in practice, probably for not looking rich enough. At a second, thoroughly crowded establishment, we successfully squeezed into the corner by the coat rack. The fondue wasn't any better than what we make in our little fondue pot at home once every year or two, but my life is more complete for having tried the Real Thing.

4. Visiting the beautiful Basel Kunstmuseum (Art Museum), where we saw works by Klee, Miro, Picasso, van Gogh, Rousseau, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Braques, Chagall, Calder, Pissaro, Rodin, Holbein, Breughel, Cranach, Dürer, Grünewald, Schongauer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Dali, Kandinsky, Marc, Giacometti, Böcklin, and many, many others. Elias and Zoe went gamely through all of the rooms with us and pretended to listen with interest to my and Michelle's non-stop lessons on art history.

5. Seeing a gold spray-painted mime on a cobblestoned pedestrian-zone shopping street taking a smoke break in a doorway. Not that I particularly enjoyed watching him smoke, just that I don't usually get to see metalicized street performers out of character.

6. Hearing eight organ grinders in succession in the Rathaus entryway. Stefan and I decided that if we ever buy a street organ, we'll go for a model by Josef Raffin in Ueberlingen--such charm, such sprightliness, such timbral variety!

Who was that guy again?

2009-12-10T23:53:00.016+01:00

I appreciate pedagogic zeal, but what has the world come to when Germans--Germans!--need the namesake of Beethovenstrasse explained on a street sign? The signage department's one-word description of the man's profession seems woefully inadequate, given the effort it must have taken to include it in the first place.

- Beethovenstrasse -
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827
Composer

And speaking of stating the obvious, the sign under this peeing statue in the Altstadt reads "Kein Trinkwasser" ("not drinkable water").

The countdown begins

2009-12-10T23:01:00.003+01:00

We will be leaving Freiburg for Steinebach in ten days. We're happily taking advantage of Zoe and Michelle's visit to say farewell to some of our favorite places. This afternoon, we repeated the Ruins Paydirt Tour at Kastelburg and Hochburg. Despite the forecast for rain and clouds all day, we had some brilliant sunshine.

France still seems to be trumping Germany in the weather department. Clouds coming from the west glide gently over the Rhine valley and then collide with the mountains of the Schwarzwald, where they unpack their bags and settle in for a while. We're finally learning that the late autumn status quo forecast--"rain likely"--means anything from "get out your galoshes, it will pour all day" to "rain might fall for a few minutes sometime over the next 24 hours."

This summer, we also saw a lot of rain in Bayern, where temperatures were unseasonably cold. The weather there was so unpleasant for so long that forecasters started publishing predictions like "today the rain will be warmer."

Sehr lecker

2009-12-09T18:05:00.004+01:00

We have friends visiting from the U.S.: Michelle and her daughter Zoe. We picked them up at the Hauptbahnhof this afternoon, brought them back to our apartment, and immediately took them to the Lienhart bakery on the corner.

"We have guests from the U.S.," I told the proprietor, "and we are here for their first Cultural Experience. What do you have today?"

"Oh, of course!," she replied. There followed a loving description of all of today's best and freshest cakes and cookies, including the "Badisch Christmas specialty, Linzer Torte."

"Linzer Torte is Badisch?" I said, attempting to sound like an inquisitive foreigner who didn't have a blog entry riding on the answer. "Please tell me about this. I thought Linzer Torte came from Austria--from Linz."

The proprietor's hackles were a wee bit raised. "No, Linzer Torte is a particularly Badisch specialty," she said. Then she paused and conceded, "yes, it is possible that the Ur-recipe came from the city called Linz, in Austria, but for at least 150 years, bakers in Baden have been making the real Linzer Torte."

After we chose five different pieces of cake, she added a gift to our order: a small spiced chocolate covered Gugelhupf cake, also a regional seasonal specialty, sehr lecker.

Lecker, by the way, is one of my favorite German words. It means "yummy," which is probably a good enough reason to like it, but what I most enjoy is the inflection people use when saying the word in advertisements on radio or TV. The accent goes on the first syllable, which is quickly and deftly flicked off the tongue in order to move on to the leisurely, drawn out, unstressed second syllable: 'LECK-aaaaaahr. The English equivalent would be something like pronouncing "yummy" as 'YM-eeeee." Of course, people who aren't advertising anything on the air usually simply say 'leck-er, but it isn't anywhere near as entertaining.

Here lived...

2009-12-08T21:43:00.008+01:00

I keep finding Stolpersteine on my walks around Freiburg. Some critics have argued that the sidewalk stones are an inappropriate memorial--that it is crude and thoughtless to allow people to trample on the names of Holocaust victims. I'd argue that the victims were already trampled on long ago. The stones remind me that they were individuals, not just anonymous numbers.

Here lived Dr. Georg Pietrkowski, born 1874; 1933 forbidden to work; flight to Italy; 1940 Spain; Cuba; survived in USA.

Here lived Henny Schmuckler, born 1878, deported 1940 Theresienstadt; murdered 1942 Auschwitz.

Here lived Frieda Katz, born 1879; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered 1942 in Auschwitz.

Here lived Max Meyer, born 1888; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered in Auschwitz.

Here lived Abraham Neumark, born 1861; deported 1940 Gurs; dead 14.4.1943 in the concentration camp Noe.
Here lived Ludwig Meyer, born 1862; deported 1942 Theresienstadt; dead 14.9.1942.

Here lived Adolf Besag, born 1873; deported 1942 Theresienstadt; liberated--survived.
Here lived Pauline Besag, nee Maier, born 1875; deported 1942 Theresienstadt; murdered 23.10.42.

Here lived Albertine Haas, born 1875; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered 27.12.1941 in Recebedou.
Here lived Karoline Haas, born 1867; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered 20.2.1942 in Recebedou.
Here lived Sophie Haas, born 1872; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered 23.12.1941 in Recebedou.
Here lived Thekla Haas, born 1884; deported 1940 Gurs; murdered 3.1.1941.

Here lived Berthold Daube, born 1882; flight 1937 Holland; survived in hiding.
Here lived Frieda Daube, born 1889; flight 1937 Holland; survived in hiding.
Here lived Jakob Daube, born 1916; deported 1942; murdered in Auschwitz.

Here lived Prof. Dr. Robert Liefman, born 1874; deported 1940 Gurs; dead 20.3.1941 in Morlaas.
Here lived Martha Liefman, born 1878; deported 1940 Gurs; survived in Zürich.
Here lived Dr. Else Liefman, born 1881; deported 1940 Gurs; flight 1942; survived in Zürich.

Freiburg University

2009-12-08T18:56:00.010+01:00

The University of Freiburg was founded in 1457 by the Habsburgers and is the fifth oldest university in Germany. In a 20th-century addition to signify the pursuit of knowledge, statues of Aristotle and Homer (by C.A. Bermann, 1915) keep watch outside the hallowed halls of the Jugendstil Kollegiengebäude I. Inside the Kollegiengebäude III, a depressing, poorly lit assembly of cast bronze female figures--the Nine Muses (by Bettina Eichin, 1986)--reminds students of the unparalleled joys of higher education.

Germany's students aren't particularly thrilled with their universities at the moment. For the past few months, they've been holding demonstrations to protest the rising costs of tuition and a shift in degree programs to something more akin to American bachelor's and master's degrees. Freiburg students have been holding a sit-in in the Audimax lecture hall since mid-November.

Tuition at German universities costs a few hundred Euros per term. Is that a burden students and parents, or all tax-payers, should bear? Many tax-payers here think society as a whole benefits when its individual members are well educated. Of course, these are the same tax-payers who think society benefits when everyone has access to affordable health care. That just goes to show what kind of dangerous thinking a quality education can lead to.

Review: The Nature Museum

2009-12-06T20:54:00.014+01:00

The Augustiner Museum, Freiburg's gem, contains works by Hans Baldung Grien, Matthias Grünewald, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, among other significant artists. We have not visited the museum because it has been closed for renovations our entire time here. It will reopen in February 2010.

Freiburg's Naturmuseum similarly has been closed for renovations, but following 20 months of work, it reopened on Friday. We walked to the Altstadt this afternoon to enjoy the results.

It was probably worth the couple of Euros admission price to experience one of the most puzzlingly nonsensically designed exhibits ever. The best parts of the museum were a small room on mineralogy and a larger room with fossils on the Erdgeschoss (ground floor), and the front doorknob. The erste Stock (second floor) houses a temporary exhibit on Evolution, comprised mostly of a couple hundred clear plastic boxes representing multiple evolutionary timelines. The boxes contain occasional fossils and pieces of wood. Every once in a while, to represent periods of mass extinction, an entire column of boxes is filled to capacity with small pink plush-toy hippopotamuses. In one hands-on area, you get to lift the lids of the boxes to gaze through a second protective plastic lid at the items displayed underneath (e.g. a cotton ball, a stalk of wheat, a shirt).

When we got home, I looked up the Badische Zeitung's review online and learned the museum is a significantly pared down revision of an earlier natural history and ethnography museum. It is still very much a work in progress: while the ground floor exhibits are permanent, the upper floors are awaiting additional funding. Thankfully, the plastic boxes will be moving on.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the BZ review was the readers' comments section, as it proved that Germans can pontificate just as annoyingly, illogically, and self-righteously as Americans. Nobody mentioned the plastic boxes, or criticized an educational system that had produced such curatorial mediocrity. Indeed, no one mentioned the museum at all. Instead, the polarized debate was over Evolution ("That's why they call it a THEORY!") and Creationism ("You religious fanatics always ignore science!!"). Why I expected a higher level of discourse just because the language is German rather than English is beyond me.

After our museum visit, we walked through the Weihnachtsmarkt, along with the entire populations of Switzerland, France, and Italy, who arrived by bus this afternoon.

Chilling out

2009-12-05T21:20:00.007+01:00

After I made fun of the God Copy Shop yesterday, the Copies were displeased and frowned upon our efforts to go for one last long mountain hike today. When we checked the weather forecast this morning, we abandoned all hope of hiking the wet, windy Belchen. We decided instead to aim for something closer and lower, and drove to the base of the Hoernleberg, near Waldkirch. As soon as we got out of the car, the sleet began.

With no sign that the weather would let up, we got back in the car and headed home the long way, over the Kandel, figuring at least we might encounter a little snow. From the top of the mountain, we gazed longingly across the Rhine valley at bright, sunny France. The dark roiling clouds above the Schwarzwald ended precisely over the international border. The Copies were obviously pleased with themselves and laughing heartily.

We don't remember whose idea it was, or how it popped into whomever's head, but at some point on this cold, wet, gray day, we realized we should go find out what the Romans thought was so great about this part of Germany. Late this afternoon, we drove toward the southern end of the Tuniberg, to Freiburg's Eugen Keidel Themal Mineralbad. There, we immersed ourselves in soothing baths filled with natural spring water.

According to the literature, the water emerges from its source at 45^oC; the pool temperatures we enjoyed ranged from 34 to 38^oC. The water fizzes gently; it's chock full of minerals and trace amounts of heavy metals, with sulfate, hydrogen carbonate, calcium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and potassium taking the starring roles.

We began our visit in the well heated changing rooms, went through the well heated showers, and emerged in the well heated indoor pool room. We spent much of our time swimming in the "Movement Pool" and appreciating the remarkably strong water jets that line half its circumference. Each pump is marked with a sign identifying the part of the body that will receive the theraputic water massage: feet and ankles; lower leg; knees; upper leg; buttocks; lower back; upper back/neck; and then the cycle repeats. You settle in front of one of the spouts, and when an innocuous chime sounds a few minutes later, you and the entire semi-circle of fellow water-massage recipients along the pool wall shift one jet counter-clockwise.

Another indoor pool is a gateway to the outdoor pools. You step in, walk between the strips of plastic hanging over the egress, and then you're outside with your head in near-freezing air and your body in stimulatingly hot water. The first pool leads into a cooler one that opens, in turn, into a larger circular one. Pumps along the latter's wall create a swift current that people ride in sweeping circles around a cental, walled bubble pool. Lights in the water illuminate the huge clouds of steam that billow into the dark night sky.

We left the baths feeling well-exercised, refreshed, and toasty, and glad in the end for the cruddy weather that drove us to discover this winter oasis.

God Copy Shop

2009-12-04T15:33:00.007+01:00

I saw this store yesterday near the bridge that connects the Altstadt to the Hauptbahnhof. I didn't go in to ask what their tagline is, but the imagination reels:

"Serving Freiburg's polytheists from time immemorial."

"Perfect copies every time!"

"Services from alpha to omega."

"Bring us your smallest rib and we'll turn it into a presentation you can be proud of."

Help me out here, folks...

Six-pack abs

2009-12-03T19:49:00.004+01:00

It is lovely having a child who gets out of the bathtub, sees his reflection in the mirror, and gasps, "Look! I have abs!," and who, when he learns he'll need to put a special cream on his peeling toes, observes with satisfaction, "cool, I have an athlete's foot."

Correction: Wadlstrümpfe

2009-12-03T09:28:00.011+01:00

This just in: I sent Helen a postcard of Kandinsky wearing Wadlstrümpfe, and she sent back a note saying Wadlstrümpfe are regular knee socks, and that the footless calf-warmers are called Loferl. Naturally, this has thrown the editors of this blog into a whirlwind of surfing activity.

It appears that the term Wadlstrümpfe most often refers to Tracht knee socks (as opposed to everyday knee socks*, which would be Kniestrümpfe or Wadenstrümpfe), occasionally to Loferl alone, and occasionally to the combination of Loferl plus matching footie or short sock. An online Bavarian dictionary that is thorough enough to spell "Bairisch" four different ways (Bairisch, Bayerisch, Bayrisch, Boarisch) defines Lofal/Loferl/Loifal/Loiferl as Wadlstrümpfe zur Lederhose. An essential part of the Chiemgauer (vs. Huosigauer) Tracht, Loferl are thus a specific subset of a more general category of calf stockings, and the socks in the photograph I posted in July would correctly be referred to as Wadlstrümpfe.

The editors apologize for any confusion this error may have caused.

*Unless, of course, one wears Tracht every day.

More on Linzer Torte

2009-12-02T22:58:00.004+01:00

During dinner last night with our neighbors W., C., and T., while we were eating a sorry excuse for brownies (you just can't make brownies using German Backpulver and an uncontrollably hot electric oven), I mentioned the Sunday Edeka advertising supplement's claim to Linzer Torte. W. said the idea that the cake originated in Baden isn't so far fetched: there's a region in Baden-Wuerttemberg, near the Bodensee, called the Linzgau ("Linz region"). Technically, a torte from this region would be a Linzgauer Torte, not a Linzer Torte. Nonetheless, I want to do right by both Baden and Linzer Torte, so I did a little fact checking.

According to the Upper Austrian State Museums' extensive online discussion of the history of Linzer Torte, the oldest known recipe for the delectable treat dates to 1653 and is in a cookbook known as Codex 35/31 at the Stiftsarchiv Admont, in the Austrian state Steiermark. The recipes therein were collected with "great industriousness" and "over many years" by "Frau Anna Margarita Sagramosin, born the Countess Paradeiserin." The Paradeisers were members of the nobility of Krain in Innerösterreich (Inner Austria).* [Linz was part of not-so-distant Oberösterreich (upper Austria), while Linzgau was far, far away in Vorderösterreich (the Austrian borderlands).] The countess had recipes for Linzer/Lintzer/Linser/Linzerischen Tortten/Turdten/Taig, but none for Linzgauer Torte.

In case you want to make some Linzer dough, here's one of the four oldest known recipes:

Daß Linser Täg

Nimb 1 fihrtl mehl 3 fierting zukher 3 vierting Butter ain halb lb gestossene mandl Reibs unter ein ander ab das der Butter woll zerriben würdt hernach schlag 3 ayr Khlar undt 2 Dutter ist er zu fest so schlage noch eins mach den täg geschwündt zusamb, walge ihn ein halben finger dikh auß lege ihn auf die schißl lege dariber schön gewirztes giter bachs gar khill.

*To our delight, Google Translate thinks this bit of information should read, "The sex of the 'tomato' was part of the inner-Austrian nobility, it was established in Krain" ("Das Geschlecht der „Paradeiser“ gehörte zum innerösterreichischen Adel, es war ansässig in Krain"). For entertainment value, Google Translate is almost as good as Schlager.

Restmüll

2009-12-01T21:46:00.007+01:00

Check it out, folks. Pictured here alongside two very impressed German chickens and a pair of women's size 40 feet is the sum total of all the Restmüll we've accumulated since August 1.

Restmüll is garbage--what's left over after all the paper goes into the paper recycling bin, all the non-Pfand glass bottles go into the glass recycling bins, all the food scraps go into the compost bin, and all the packing materials go into the wondrous gelbe Sack, the catch-all for packing materials (plastic containers, butter wrappers, bubble pack, milk cartons, styrofoam, toothpaste tubes, you name it).

Our Restmüll consists mainly of bicycle handlebar tape, dryer lint, an old polyester shirt, used razor blades, bike-grease infused rags, my hair, and a full vacuum cleaner bag we inherited from the previous tenants.

When we registered with the city of Freiburg a few months ago, we received a form for Restmüll collection. Garbage service for one year would have cost us well over 100 Euros, a hefty price to pay for about one cubic foot of trash over a six-month stay. Maverick Americans that we are, we didn't pay.

We considered driving our sack all the way back to Steinebach at the end of this month and combining it with Helen's garbage, but she doesn't pay for Restmüll service either, and we didn't want to have to, oh, I don't know, leave it in one of the trash receptacles at the local train station or something--not that we've ever even thought about doing such a thing for Helen before, let alone done it this past summer, of course. We considered sneaking it over to Elias's elementary school under cover of darkness and hefting it into one of their industrial trash containers--a method clearly used by other system abusers on our street--but taking advantage of young children's designated garbage space just seems so wrong.

We figured we'd wait until we moved out of our apartment to see how the situation panned out, but this evening, our new neighbors (HW's brother's family) came over for dinner, and they kindly invited us to cram our Restmüll on top of theirs for pickup tomorrow. Thus tonight, at long last, we bid adieu to four months worth of accumulated garbage.

Bonding

2009-11-30T18:29:00.007+01:00

This morning, I was standing outside the St. Petrus Canisius administration building next to the church, waiting for the secretary to arrive so I could pick up the organ key. The weather was cold, windy, and wet. Complainant Number Two shuffled down the sidewalk, hunched over her walker but looking surprisingly sprightly in her clear plastic rain cap and clear blue plastic slicker.

"What, is nobody inside?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"But they have Sprechstunden [visiting hours with the priest] starting at 9:00."

"No, starting at 10:00. It's 10:05 now."

"What?! They ought to be punctual!," she declared, indignant that I should be made to suffer so.

"Yeah, but it's cold, and it's raining. Someone will come."

She shook her head disapprovingly, wished me a "schoenen Morgen noch" ("nice rest of the morning"), and to my horror, she entered the church. Clearly she hadn't recognized me as the disrespectful organist who thinks the sanctuary is a practice room.

A minute later, the secretary arrived and gave me the key, and I went into the church to practice. As I walked past Complainant Number Two, I heard the gears click inside her head. "Ach, she's the organist," she muttered.

She shuffled up to the organ. I had already rehearsed what I was going to say to her the next time she complained, things about Psalm 150 and making a joyful noise with loud clashing cymbals, and it's right there in the Bible, so shut up and deal with it, you old bat. I braced myself.

"Excuse me, but may I say something?" she began, as she always begins.

"Yes, naturally," I replied, as I always reply.

"What do you think of the advent candles here?" The change in script caught me off guard. "They're white. What do you think of white advent candles?"

I looked at the advent wreath and observed, "white's the wrong color, isn't it?" Suddenly we were on the same side, united in our knowledge that someone who should have known better had screwed up. You don't mess with tradition.

"They're supposed to match the liturgical colors," Complainant Number Two complained gruffly, settling into her element. "They should be yellow or blue."

"Or purple. In the U.S. they could be purple."

"Purple? Really? What are these people thinking? White is for celebrating, not for preparing."

"Easter, right, not Advent. But I believe the rules about liturgical colors date back only to the 19th century, so it hasn't always been this way."

"I don't understand you."

"Sorry, I'm from the U.S., my German's not so good. But I think the rules about the colors aren't all that old."

"Hunh. OK. Well, enjoy your practicing."

And that was that. Maybe we'll find something else to complain about together next week.

Heidelberg

2009-11-30T12:31:00.010+01:00

One of the nifty things about Germany is that you can walk from any town to pretty much any other town almost exclusively on designated pedestrian and bicycle paths. And so, just because it can be done, on Friday morning I set out on foot for Heidelberg, some 190 kilometers to the north of Freiburg. I made it as far as Koendringen, north of Emmendingen, when Stefan and Elias pulled up and offered to drive me the remaining 170km.

On my walk, I confirmed that the Rhine flood plain is flatter than central Illinois; that engineers have made the river Elz just as disturbingly straight as the Dreisam; that downtown Emmendingen is depressed and a little seedy; that J.S. Bach must have been quite the athletic young musical genius in 1705 when he walked 400 kilometers from Arnstadt to Luebeck to meet and hear Buxtehude; and that I will never run a marathon.

We were headed to Heidelberg for a pun-filled visit with Hans-Walter and MB that culminated in an ex-pat Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. In addition to catching up with long lost friends, enjoying their wit, culinary talents and beautiful home, and cooking and baking and eating and watching everyone else cook and bake and eat, we found time to explore Heidelberg a bit. We followed in the footsteps of professional thinkers by taking a walk on the famous Philosophenweg, where our profound thoughts focused mainly on finding Elias a drink of water and locating the multiple-degrees-of-freedom swing H-W had recommended. Afterward, we climbed down the hillside and crossed over the old Neckar bridge into the Altstadt, where we were overwhelmed by a tsunami of other tourists and lived to tell the tale.

Following a thoroughly tasty gourmet Thanksgiving meal, Hans-Walter wiped the floor with Elias.

Neuf Brisach and Colmar

2009-11-29T22:25:00.011+01:00

We made a spontaneous visit to Colmar this afternoon. The Badische Zeitung has been plugging Colmar's Weihnachtsmarkt in assorted articles of late--we suspect Colmar's newspaper is likewise plugging Freiburg's market, all in the spirit of promoting international commerce--so we thought we'd go check it out and pass through Neuf Brisach on the way.

Cross the Rhine in Breisach and continue west a few more kilometers, and you reach Neuf Brisach. As the names suggest, France's Neuf Brisach is much younger than Germany's Alt Breisach. In 1648, France took Breisach from Austria; Louis XIV had the military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, strengthen the town's fortifications. A 1697 treaty returned Breisach to the Habsburgers, so Louis gave Vauban the task of building a new fortress to defend the French border. Thus was born Neuf Brisach, surrounded by an octagonal defensive system of walls and gates that remains remarkably well-preserved today.

Neuf Brisach is probably right swell, but we couldn't find much to recommend it today. From the vast expanse of concrete that comprises the center square, to the piped-in organ music in the austere 18th-century Church of St. Louis, to the alcoholic in the Santa hat getting soused on a lonely park bench on a gray Sunday afternoon, Neuf Brisach offered one depressing view after another. Our ADAC guide to Elsass says the best way to see Neuf-Brisach is from a bird's-eye view, and we're convinced that's true.

We continued on to Colmar, where we drove around for half an hour with hundreds of other cars looking for a place to park. The Colmar Weihnachtsmarkt was clearly the place to be. Of course, it was the only place to be for miles around for those wanting to celebrate capitalism, since pretty much every regular store in Europe is closed on Sunday afternoons.

We barely dipped our toes into the market before deciding it was time to retreat. Whereas Freiburg's market offers an abundance of handmade crafts, Colmar's offers an abundance of factory-made seasonal kitsch. Whereas Freiburg's features real live buskers, Colmar's offers cloying pre-recorded Christmas music pumped through tinny speakers. And whereas Freiburg's offers a coordinated display of Christmas lights demonstrating German precision and restraint, Colmar's offers a multicolored array of blinking bulbs demonstrating a somewhat dizzying enthusiasm for the season.

Thankfully, Colmar also offers the stunning Unterlinden Museum, housed in an old abbey, where we withdrew for a glorious foray through 14th and 15th-century art. We especially enjoyed seeing how the gilded paintings and carved statues told us as much about Biblical stories as about 15th-century sensibilities. From one depiction to the next, Mary had long, wavy red-gold hair and pale white skin. The infant Jesus was always a miniature adult. Backdrops occasionally included European castles perched upon hilltops. In one panel, a unicorn resting in Mary's lap proved her virginity.

The crowning jewel of the collection is the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Originally designed as a set of overlapping panels with wings that folded open to reveal multiple scenes, the altar has been disassembled so that museum visitors can view all of the layers in succession. The details are vivid, and the images are simultaneously beautiful and grotesque.

Later in the evening, we had the good fortune of stepping into the Église des Dominicains, where the exquisite, radiant altarpiece "Maria im Rosenhag" (Mary in the Rose Garden) took our breath away. Painted by Colmar's own Martin Schongauer (ca. 1450-91), the central panel is surrounded by gold-leaf filigreed wings. It is one of the most stunning paintings I've ever seen.

Weihnachtsmarkt

2009-11-26T13:14:00.018+01:00

Towns all over Germany know exactly how to drive away the bleakness of interminably gray late-autumn skies: they open festive Christmas markets decorated with thousands of teeny tiny little lights, where you can find Gluehwein and gifts to warm your body and soul against the chill.

Situated primarily around the Rathaus plaza, Freiburg's renowned Weihnachtsmarkt commenced on Monday and runs until December 23. And believe it or not, the clouds parted this week, and the sun is shining upon Baden-Wuerttemberg once more.

I'm usually pretty cynical about capitalism-centered longer-than-advent gearings up for Christmas, but I'm finding the market a pretty and fun place to nosh and gawk. Most of the stalls match one another in size and color, their dark brown stained wood exteriors adorned with stapled-on forest green pine branches. The lights--mostly small white bulbs, but also large, pointed German-Moravian Herrnhuter stars--do a lot to generate cheer after the sun sets (well before 17:00 these days). The goods sold are predominantly (though by no means exclusively) handmade crafts, including functional and decorative pottery, fancy feather-quill pens, brightly colored felted wools and textiles, elaborate cookie press molds, natural soaps, and baubles, toys, and kitchen items made from gorgeous woods. Some items are made on site: hand-dipped beeswax candles, blown glass ornaments, elegant little lathe-turned wooden tops. The food is affordable, and in addition to the satisfaction provided by the mere act of eating, there's also delight to be had watching a vendor make you your very own warm-applesauce-and-cinnamon-sugar-filled crepe hot off the griddle.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the market is that it turns Germany's natural order topsy turvy. So powerful is the urge to celebrate, so strong are the forces of Christmas commerce, that the impossible becomes possible: the market is not only open daily until 20:30, it's also open on SUNDAYS.

Alongside the market, the downtown Christmas scene has been providing some mild local dramas. Controversies have included how late into 2010 the outdoor ice-skating rink in Karlsplatz will remain open, given the unseasonably warm weather (the compromise: mid-January); and how it could possibly be that merchants on Kaiser-Joseph-Strasse--the snazziest shopping street in all of Freiburg--are too cheap and disorganized to hang decorations on Kajo Street, denying shoppers a treasured seasonal joy for the first time in 55 years (tsk!), while smaller stores in li'l old Herdern have found funds to hang red Herrnhuter stars over a good stretch of Habsburgerstrasse. Public shaming in the media is extremely effective in Germany: the Kajo merchants are putting lights up this weekend.

New Horizons in Schlager Appreciation, Episode 3

2009-11-25T21:10:00.008+01:00

In 1999, when I was a professor of music theory at Big Plains State U., I was asked to teach a class called Music Theory for Non-Musicians. After a unit on motivic uses of rhythm, I asked my students to choose a short passage from a favorite piece and present it to the class. One student brought in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and said, "in order to understand today's music, you need to understand the classics."

With this dictum in mind, I introduce you, dear readers, to Jan and Kjeld Wennick's 1959 Schlager hit, "Banjo Boy," which reached the number one spot in the German Hitparade and spent 29 weeks in the Top 40. Not bad for two young brothers from Denmark.

As is the case with other Schlager songs we have encountered thus far, "Banjo Boy" is cheerfully nostalgic for an exotic land far, far away ("Tennessee"). It includes some geographically ambiguous twangs that perhaps sound more tropical than suth'n or country, but what the heck, Other is Other, right? There's also a fine trumpet lick that alludes to the long jazz tradition that, um, Tennessee is so famous for. Yodeling would be semiotically inappropriate given the lyrics, but Jan and Kjeld never seem too far from their European roots. Enjoy!

Jeden Abend geht er durch die Strassen
In der kleinen Stadt in Tennessee,
Und die grossen und die kleinen Leute
Kennen alle seine Melodie...

[Every evening, he walks through the streets
in the little town in Tennesse,
and the big and the little people
all know his melody...]

Sing ein Lied, sing ein Lied,
Little Banjo Boy
Banjo Boy, Banjo Boy.
Denn Musik, denn Musik,
Little Banjo Boy,
Banjo Boy ist unser Glueck.

[Sing a song, sing a song,
little Banjo Boy,
Banjo Boy, Banjo Boy,
for music, for music,
little Banjo Boy,
Banjo Boy is our happiness.]

So ein sing sage dige dage
Sing song unterm blauen Himmelzelt
Ist das sing sage dige dage
Sing song Allerschoenste von der Welt

[So a sing-saga-digga-dagga-
sing-song under the blue tent of the sky
is the most beautiful sing-saga-digga-dagga-
sing-song in the whole world.]

Faces of Wiehre

2009-11-24T20:04:00.013+01:00

Situated south of the Dreisam River and incorporated into Freiburg in 1819, the former suburb Wiehre recently celebrated its one thousandth birthday, having been mentioned first in written documents in 1008. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Wiehre experienced a housing boom that yielded some expansive Jugendstil constructions and revealed a stylistic penchant for faces under, over, and next to windows. Today, Wiehre is one of Freiburg's poshest neighborhoods.

Another brewer's star...

2009-11-23T23:38:00.003+01:00

...can be found in Colmar. I think I'm going to start noticing these emblems everywhere now.

A mystery solved

2009-11-23T19:54:00.012+01:00

A few weeks ago, I took a long walk from Herdern to Guenterstal, a village in the valley of the same name. As I passed through the Freiburg neighborhood Wiehre, I was on the lookout for Stolpersteine and sculpted faces on the sides of buildings; Wiehre has an abundance of both.

Near the corner of Zasiusstrasse and Brombergstrasse, I was surprised to see an ornate six-pointed star on the side of a building. I looked around for a plaque that would tell me something about the building and Jewish history in Wiehre, but I found nothing.

Later I searched the internet for various combinations of Wiehre, Juden, Davidstern, Zasiusstrasse, Brombergstrasse, and Cafe au Lait (the name of the coffee shop that currently occupies the space), and again found nothing. I thought it odd that so obvious a symbol wouldn't have some online documentation.

I searched again this evening, and when I left Juden out of the equation, I finally got a hit. It turns out the star isn't a Davidstern at all: it's a brewer's star, a guild emblem that has been used in southern Germany since the early 15th century.

In his 2002 thesis on the history of brewing signs, Matthias Trum explores whether there is a historical connection between the evolution of the brewer's star and the Star of David. He concludes that a relationship might indeed have existed, originating in an earlier, more widespread use of the hexagram as a symbol for protection. For Jews, the star became a military shield; for brewers, it was a shield against fire and demons.

This information of course changes how I see the Wiehre star. The cornucopia above on the left and the hops above on the right suddenly appear glaringly obvious. And that the structure formerly housed a brewery also helps makes sense of the three smiling faces over a door further along the side of the building. A satyr, Ceres, and Silenus perhaps? In any case, they look like they're having a pretty good time.

Cuckoo clocks

2009-11-22T21:06:00.014+01:00

Today we saw the "World's First Largest Cuckoo Clock" in Schonach, next to Triberg, near Furtwangen. It was the first of its kind until it was preempted by the World's Subsequent Largest Cuckoo Clock, located who knows where. The good people of Schonach earn points for their honesty.

Unfortunately, by the time I saw the sign for the clock and pulled off the main road, Stefan had a raging headache, and Elias was tired and didn't want to get out of the car. Thus it was up to me alone to visit this important landmark. I grabbed my camera and trudged the half block from where we had parked, through the cold, damp, high-altitude air, only to discover that the clock is closed until "at least December 13." More points for honesty.

Despite my disappointment at not being able to enter this monument to kitsch, our trip demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Americans don't have a monopoly on goofy roadside attractions. Indeed, you could probably fit quite a few jackalopes and world's-largest-hairballs inside Schonach's claim to fame.

Schonach was a likely place to find a World's Largest thing of this type. We ended up there because rain thwarted our plan to hike the Belchen. (According to all our tour guides, the Belchen "is reputed to be the most beautiful mountain in the Schwarzwald." I'm intrigued by the repeated use of "reputed" around here--as in "Freiburg is reputed to be the sunniest city in Germany" and "Linzer Torte is reputed to be the oldest known torte in the world"--as though no one can think of standards by which to objectively evaluate any of these things). We browsed through our reliable guide to the southern Schwarzwald and decided to take in a little local culture by visiting the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum) in Furtwangen.

Furtwangen has been a clock-making center for centuries. During the Industrial Revolution, the town's residents found themselves unable to compete with new factory-produced clocks. In 1850, Furtwangen's Baden Grand-Ducal Clockmaking School sponsored a competition seeking a more modern clock aesthetic--and thus was born the Bahnhaeusle-Kuckucksuhr ("wee train house clock"), a wooden cuckoo clock designed by architect Friedrich Eisenlohr and modeled on a railway signalman's house.

By the 1860s, Eisenlohr's design had pushed laquered metal shield cuckoo clocks and picture frame cuckoo clocks off the market, and had paved the way for the ornately carved wooden cuckoo clocks famous around the world today. The popularity of the clocks played a major role in pulling Furtwangen, Triberg, and other Black Forest communities out of poverty during the 19th century.

One of the many other interesting things we learned at the clock museum today was that prehistoric Stonehenge was a dangerous place to be a sheep.

Skype

2009-11-21T15:47:00.007+01:00

We've been having mixed luck with trans-Atlantic mail here. Items we send from Germany typically arrive safely in the U.S., but a postcard costs about $3.00 a pop, and letters cost about $7.00. On the receiving end, we're happy when snail mail from the U.S. reaches us here. But some items have gotten lost, some have been returned to senders after a few months en route, and some have gone to the customs office rather than our mailbox, with dire warnings about import taxes that we subsequently learned we didn't need to pay once we went out of our way to pick the items up.

So we're glad that the wonders of modern technology have produced Skype. The software is free, and computer-to-computer calls are free as well. Calling from Germany to a land-line telephone in the U.S. costs mere pennies. Still, we use Skype only for special occasions, as our Vodafone internet service is predictably flaky. There are only so many disconnections we're willing to tolerate before giving up.

We're especially glad that we can use Skype to hook Elias up with friends in the U.S. When he got bullied in the park here the other day, we put in a call to a friend back home who has experience with such things. Quinn offered some advice ("whatever they do, just say 'back atcha!'"), and then the kids proceeded to more important topics. And really, what better therapy is there for an eight-year-old than a good half-hour video call consisting almost entirely of underarm farts and booger talk?

Linzer Torte

2009-11-20T15:01:00.012+01:00

Having previously stereotyped Bavarians, the Edeka grocery store's regional Sunday advertising supplement now lays claim to one of the oldest cake recipes in Europe: Linzer Torte. We had assumed the torte originated in Linz, Austria, what with the name and all. The Linz tourism website agrees and provides a brief history of the torte, along with a recipe. But the Edeka flyer declares the torte "Ein Gedicht aus der Region" ("A Poem from the Region") and suggests the region is Baden: "It is reputed to be the oldest known torte in the world and is a Badisch pleasure-highlight--the fine Linzer Torte."

Origins aside, I saved the recipe, as my attempts to realize favorite American desserts in Germany have been falling flat, literally. I assume this has to do with differences in available ingredients. Consider:

Baking powder: The key ingredients in baking powder are baking soda (a base), an acidifying agent, and a starch. Differences in acidifying agents make German Backpulver single-acting and American baking powder double-acting. Backpulver produces bubbles when it meets liquids; American baking powder produces bubbles when it meets liquids and also when it meets the heat of the oven.

Baking soda: In Germany, sodium bicarbonate is called "household soda" and you use it to counter acid in rhubarb, to soften water, to drink as an antacid, and to clean surfaces. If you put it in a banana cake, your guests will try not to look too horrified when they sputter, "really? You really put Natron in the cake we're eating? The cake we're eating right now?"

Butter: German butter comes in 250g packages. It has a higher fat content than American butter (about 83%, versus 80%), which makes it quite soft even when cold. It's often made from cultured sour cream, which contributes a nice flavor. It's lecker (really yummy).

Brown sugar: According to de.wikipedia.org, Brauner Zucker "is the collective name for sugars that are brown in color." The bag we have says it is "made from select sugar beet and cane sugar syrups, which give it its vigorous aromatic flavor." It doesn't pack, and frankly, it doesn't taste all that vigorous. In the U.S., brown sugar is typically quality-controlled by cheating--by adding molasses to refined white sugar. It packs, and its moisture content differs from that of German brown sugar.

Vanilla: Vanilla extract is liquid in the U.S., made by soaking vanilla beans in alcohol. In Germany, you use Vanillezucker--dry white sugar with vanillin mixed in.

In addition to differences in ingredients, there are also differences in how those ingredients are measured. Americans measure by standardized volume: cups, tablespoons, teaspoons. A cup is a cup is a cup, regardless of what fills it. Germans measure ingredients by weight, volume, and guesstimates: grams, liters, teaspoons, and Messerspitze (knife tips). The volume of 200g of nuts differs from the volume of 200g sugar, so you need either a kitchen scale or a special measuring cup that has different marks for different ingredients.

I have made several banana cakes this fall, and they've all turned out like buttery banana pound cakes--tasty, but not up to Joy of Cooking standards. I did succeed in making cornbread out of polenta meal, but only because I added a ton of Backpulver and threw the pan into the oven right away.

So when the Linzer Torte recipe showed up in the Edeka flyer, I decided "when in Baden, do as the Badisch do." I couldn't find a pastry wheel or a proper baking form, so my Linzer Torte wasn't as pretty as the one in the photo accompanying the recipe, but it tasted mighty fine regardless.

If you'd like to make your own authentic Badisches Genuss-Highlight direct from Linz, Austria, here's the recipe:

50g ground walnuts (walnuts make my tongue hurt; I used almonds.)
200g ground hazelnuts
200g flour
1 heaping teaspoon cocoa powder (heck--I used a whole tablespoon.)
200g butter
150g raw cane sugar (I used Brauner Zucker.)
1 packet bourbon-vanilla sugar ("bourbon" meaning real vanilla, not that imitation stuff. Use 1 tablespoon liquid extract.)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 knifetip allspice (I didn't have any around and the torte was fine without it.)
1 knifetip ground cloves (all I could find in the pantry was "ground mace nut," which I presumed was nutmeg, so I used that instead.)
1 teaspoon single-acting baking powder (I guess I'd reduce the amount if I were using double-acting powder. Linzer Torte isn't supposed to be fluffy.)
2 eggs
1 eggwhite
4 tablespoons Kirschwasser (I honestly don't think this does much for the torte, as the spices, nuts, and raspberry jam dominate the flavor. Maybe you're really supposed to drink the Kirsch instead of mixing it in.)

200g raspberry jam
1 egg yolk + 1 teaspoon cream, for brushing on before baking (Stefan accidentally threw out the egg yolk, so we skipped this part altogether)
1 teaspoon powdered sugar for sprinkling (feh, skipped that too)

Baking form (~26 cm)
Baking paper (feh, reduce waste and just butter the pan)

To abbreviate the details: mix the dry ingredients together, cut in the butter, add the wet ingredients up to and including the Kirschwasser, smush it all together with your hands, and stick it into the fridge for at least an hour to chill. Divide the dough in half. If you want to be elegant and you can find a rolling pin in your rented kitchen, roll out two rounds; put one into the baking form, and use a pastry wheel to cut the other one into strips. (Can't find your pastry wheel? Have you checked your pottery toolbox? Maybe run the wheel through the dishwasher before you use it for the torte.) Or just press half the dough into the pan and use the coil method for the strips. Slather the bottom crust with the jam (a little extra never hurts), arrange the dough strips artfully on top, glaze if you really want to put in the effort, and bake ~25 minutes at 175 oC. If you're going to sprinkle it with powdered sugar, you need to let it cool first; otherwise, you can start sampling it while it's still warm.

Fists, knives, and guns

2009-11-19T08:10:00.010+01:00

The Badische Zeitung is reporting today on a crime in Bergkamen, near Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen. A 16-year-old 9th-grader who had been suspended from school burst into his classroom yesterday, accompanied by a 14-year-old companion. They were armed with Schreckschusswaffen, gas pistols that look threatening and make a lot of noise when fired, but that don't shoot bullets. In front of the other students, the perpetrators beat the teacher and then fled. They were quickly apprehended.

Since our arrival in Freiburg in late July, we have read numerous newspaper articles about teenagers robbing people on trains, and about teenagers beating up people on and off trains and beating up the good Samaritans who come to the rescue. There have been fatalities in some these beatings, including a tragic case in Munich in late July.

We have read about murders. In the hotel on top of the Blauen, where we comfortably ate french fries and ice cream a few weeks ago, a Swiss man in his 50s was recently stabbed to death by another man in an act of jealousy over a woman. And in a case that drew international attention, a Dresden court recently sentenced a man to life in prison for stabbing a pregnant Muslim woman to death and seriously wounding her husband inside a courtroom last July, when he was on trial for defamation against the woman.

Knives seem to be the weapons of choice for lesser crimes as well. Earlier this fall, a robber held a cashier at knifepoint at one of the Lienhart bakeries in Freiburg; the robber was taken down by a punch to the jaw from master baker Christian Lienhart.

Occasionally we read about school shootings. There was one in Winnenden, Baden-Wuerttemberg, in March 2009, when a 17-year-old killed 15 students and then died in a shootout with police. But attempts by German students to do one another in don't typically involve guns. In mid-September, in Ansbach, Bavaria, a teacher and nine students were seriously injured when an 18-year-old student attacked the school with five Molotov cocktails, a knife, and an axe. Burning schools down also seems to be relatively popular amongst Germany's disenchanted youth, especially when they're drunk. Many people in nearby Merzhausen were shocked recently when two teenagers who set the Hexentalschule on fire in February were sentenced only to 60-120 hours of community service.

My thought reading the newspaper article today was that had the crime happened in the U.S., the weapons would have been guns with bullets, and the teacher and probably a few students would be dead. The homicide rate in the United States is roughly four times that in Germany; the U.S. rate of homicides involving firearms is six times higher than Germany's.

The lower murder rate here can be attributed to a variety of cultural and historical factors, including that Germany has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. That difference makes the idea of staying in Germany permanently quite compelling.

A flock is born

2009-11-18T13:56:00.007+01:00

Photo: Two American delegates (left) greet the newly hatched flock of the Freiburg Huehnergesellschaft fuer Kunst, Kultur, und Vegetarismus.

Warning: Do not lick the German chickens. Six of them are coated in a toxic glaze, chock full of copper and barium. I chose the glaze because I saw it adorning various bowls and mugs on a shelf at the Keramik Werkstatt, and it looked like it had character. Someone In Charge probably should have told students that lining bowls and mugs with heavy-metal laden glazes is not a good idea. Since the chickens are not food surfaces, I think they're reasonably safe to Hendl.

Freiburg to St. Peter

2009-11-17T17:26:00.015+01:00

As a community, St. Peter came into existence with the founding of a monastery in the late 11th century. The present baroque church dates from the 1720s. While the exterior of the church is rather reserved, the recently renovated interior is bright, airy, and ornate--the best of the baroque.

Because my husband is kind and generous, and because he's finally back after a two-week stint in California, I was able to hike from Freiburg to St. Peter today. I didn't intend to do that when I set out for a walk early this morning. Had I planned on it, I would have taken the topo map that includes St. Peter, rather than the one that includes the Rhine valley; I would have headed to St. Peter directly from Herdern, rather than first walking a few miles north to Zaehringen; and I would have brought some water along. But thanks to my handy GPS device, my cell phone, and Stefan's willingness to meet Elias after school and then come pick me up, a spontaneous idea became a reality. And so this morning I ended up tromping along the Kandelhöhenweg, a trail that follows mountain ridges and connects Freiburg to St. Peter.

The early part of my hike was on the path beside the train tracks from Herdern to Zaehringen; this was because I initially meant to revisit Heuweiler. But at a T-intersection, a road veering east beckoned, and I headed through Wildtal instead. This turned out to be quite worthwhile, because otherwise I never would have gotten to see the American Saloon and Buffalo Ranch located in the figurative middle of nowhere deeper in the valley.

Where the paved road ended, the forest trails began, and I headed to the top of the nearest ridge, the Wildtalereck, and then on to the next highest point, the Hasenkopf (608m).

I had phoned Stefan from Wildtal to make sure that if I ended up on the wrong side of a ridge or broke a leg or something, he could be home in time to meet Elias after school. I was passing a sign that mentioned St. Peter and half seriously/half jokingly suggested we meet there for lunch; but Stefan said he needed to work. Oh well. Then, past the Hasenkopf, as the first Kandelhöhenweg sign appeared on the trail, Stefan called back and suggested we meet in St. Peter after all.

But St. Peter wasn't on my map, and I hadn't been following any signs toward St. Peter since Wildtal. Stefan googled "Kandelhöhenweg," looked up my GPS coordinates in Google Earth, and got me headed in the right direction. After that, I was able to follow trail signs the rest of the way.

A fascinating feature about trail signs in the Black Forest is that the distances they indicate have very little to do with the distances you actually traverse. For example, a sign might say that St. Peter is 8km away. A mile later, the next sign will tell you St. Peter is still 8km away. Half a kilometer further on, your destination might have drifted an additional kilometer away or leapt a few kilometers closer. It is encouraging to find a sign that tells you St. Peter is a mere 2.4km away, but somewhat disheartening, after you emerge from the woods and walk an additional twenty minutes down the road, to encounter a sign that tells you that you are no closer--or that St. Peter would be equally close if you went back the way you just came.

As I approached St. Peter, the forest gave way to verdant meadows dotted with horses, cows, and sheep. At last, the two towers of St. Peter's baroque church poked out over a hill, and the town gradually came into view down below.

It was a lovely day for a hike. All morning, the weather alternated between rain and commendable efforts at sunshine, and the trail varied beautifully, ranging through grass covered meadows, along rocky leaf-strewn ridges, through evergreen and deciduous forests, and along muddy logging roads, with occasional vistas of the valleys down below.

I waited for Stefan near the Kloster square. He drove up, looking debonair in his spiffy biking duds and with his road bike in the back seat of the car. After lunch, I drove home and he went for a 62km ride through the Schwarzwald. There's a lot to be said for being on sabbatical.

Amazing Sprudel

2009-11-17T16:04:00.005+01:00

St. Peter is an old and beautiful town that lies about 12 miles east of Freiburg. I will write more about today's visit there shortly, but for now, I want to share this photograph of a 1,5L bottle of Mineralwasser perched on the wall outside the Kloster square. At the tiny grocery store in St. Peter, this bottle of Sprudel cost .23 Euro cents plus .25 cents Pfand (bottle deposit). I offer this image as proof that amazing things can happen in even the most unexpected places.

Totenkoepfe

2009-11-15T19:19:00.009+01:00

If Totentaenze in the cemetery aren't your thing, consider Totenkoepfe...

Be merciful to us in the scooters

2009-11-15T17:26:00.012+01:00

Nothing cheers up a mourner like a good Totentanz (dance of death). The tradition of these allegorical depictions of Death doing his rounds dates back to the 14th century. The charming frescoes below--20th-century restorations of 18th-century originals--can be found outside over the entrance to the St. Michael's chapel in Freiburg's old Friedhof, where they teach us that Death works hard, plays hard, and spares no one.

The couplets were obviously painted before German spellings and noun capitalization were standardized. While Stefan and I were trying to decipher the rhymes, we ran the whole shebang through "Google Translate." The results were not very helpful, but the program did generate the line "Be merciful to us in the scooters," so it was clearly worth the effort.

Hier schlafft das kindt, dort ewig wacht,
weil ihm den Todt ein Music macht.

[Here sleeps the child, there wakes eternally,
for Death makes music for him.]

Das ABC kaumb schreibt der Knab,
Ruefft ihn der Todt schon in das grab.

[Hardly has the youth written his ABCs
when Death calls him already to the grave.]

Beim Haar der Todt ergreift den Kopf,
Zu diser Wueth taugt ihm der Zopf.

[Death grips the head by the hair,
the braid is useful for that anger.]

Zu fechten, zu spihlen, die Jugendt ist gwohnt,
dem alter der Jugendt der Todt nit verschont.

[To fence and to play, youth is accustomed,
Death spares not the youth for his age.]

Mit aschen Zierth der Todt das Haupt,
Die besser als der puder taugt.

[Death decorates the head with ashes,
which are better than powder.]

Der Todt allein das Creutz abnihmbt,
Das ihm der Ehemann selbst bestihmbt.

[Death alone removes the burden
that the bridegroom himself dictates.]

Sey uns doch gnaedig
in dem Gricht,
und nit nach maaß der suenden
Richt!

[Be merciful to us ~~in the scooters~~ in judgment,
and don't judge by the measure of sin!]

Der eigne kopf macht lauter Zanck,
Dem Todt darumb vor disen danck.

[Your own head stirs lots of trouble,
for which Death is thankful.]

Zu fahren zu reuthen der Todt ist bereuth,
Damit er den Adel erhalte zur beuth.

[Death is prepared to travel by foot or horse,
so he can gain nobility as his loot.]

Dem betler in der Hungers not
Der Todt ihm ist das liebste brod.

[For the starving beggar,
Death is the best of bread.]

Die schwarze Mehs lis ich vor dich,
Die Huelf darvon hof ich vor mich.

[The black Mass I read before you,
and for that I hope to receive help.]

Beim pflueg der Baur das Brod gewint,
Beim pflueg den Baur der Todt auch nimt.

[By the plough, the farmer wins his bread,
By the plough, Death also takes the farmer.]

Du Narr, was huelfft die gelt begier,
Heunt kombt der Todt, was nimbst mit dir?

[You fool, how does the lust for money help you?
Today Death comes, and what do you take with you?]

Not a typical Saturday

2009-11-14T22:11:00.020+01:00

Today has been one long day of visual stimulation: Die kleine Hexe, buskers, an anti-Nazi demonstration, and the 54th World Roller Figure Skating Championships (Junior division).

Elias's class is going on a field trip in February to see a stage production of Die kleine Hexe. The play is based on the classic 1957 German children's novel by Otfried Preußler. We'll be back in the states in February, so Elias told his teacher, Frau F., that he regretfully couldn't see the show with the class.

At about 9:45 this morning, Frau F.'s husband rang the doorbell to deliver a note from her: would Elias like to be her guest at the private showing for educators today at 10:30? The answer, of course, was a resounding YES.

While Elias was at the play, I strolled several times through the Saturday farmers' market, admiring the assortment of stalls and carefully mulling all the broccoli, lettuce, and egg vendors before finally making my purchases. And then, suddenly, ringing out from afar: the best busking my ears have ever heard. The Kiew-Brass-Quintett was performing just off the Muenster plaza, drawing an enthusiastic audience and raking in donations for needy children in Kiev. They were goosebumpingly good.

Elias and I returned to the Altstadt later this afternoon on our way to the skating championships across town. As we approached the Schwabentor, we encountered a gathering crowd of several hundred people, along with at least 100 police officers looking mighty intimidating with their big black batons and white helmets. The demonstrators, members and supporters of an anti-fascism group (Antifa), were protesting increased Neonazi activities by the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), including recent bomb making in Lörrach, a city south of Freiburg. The large police presence was in part because the protest was organized without city permits; but two different people on two different ends of the street also told us that "the police and the Left have a tradition of not getting along in Freiburg." Elias and I left before things got ugly.

By the time the clashes started, we were safely away in the Schauenberghalle watching the last day of the junior division roller figure skating world championships. The hall was small enough that athletes and trainers sat mixed with the general public. When we arrived, members of the Japanese team were sitting in front of us, and the Brazilian team behind us. By the end of the evening, we were surrounded by members of the U.S. team.

It was a thorough pleasure watching all those young, athletic, coordinated, bespangled bodies accomplishing impressive jumps and turns. It was interesting to see the difference between the lyrical skaters, the aggressively athletic skaters, and the skaters who could successfully combine artistry with technical prowess. There was no comparison between those who were good and those who were great. Italy's skaters stole the show, from the women's and the men's long programs to the couples free dance; they were followed close behind by skaters from Brazil and France.

The take-away lesson of the evening: if the world championships of anything ever come to your home town, go.

The prophesy fulfilled

2009-11-12T21:44:00.005+01:00

Years ago, when the speed limit on Illinois freeways was still 55 mph, I used to accompany my dad on assorted trips and say things like, "Dad, you're speeding: the speed limit is 55 and you're going 62." He would say, "I'm going 7 mph faster than the posted limit. It's OK. Stop giving me a hard time." I would say, "no, it's not OK. You're breaking The Law. The Law says 55, and you're going 62." I would pester him until he got so pissed off that it was clear he wasn't in a good frame of mind to appreciate my constructive admonishments, even though they were for his own good.

Now I am all grown up, and I'm in the driver's seat. My safety record is superb. I am alert and defensive on the road, and I have been receiving "accident-free" discounts from my auto insurance company for well over a dozen years. And I have an eight year old who sits in the back seat and says, "you should have turned left there. You're in the wrong lane. You're not signaling. Why didn't you take that parking spot? What, you think this car is so huge it won't fit? Can't you drive this thing? You're going too fast."

Someday, when Elias has a child of his own, he will tell me his version of this narrative, and I will gloat.