Home, Home on the Industrial Park-North

The Badische Zeitung is a swell newspaper. It has just the right balance between serious news--international, national, and local--and small-town human-interest fluff. Most of the fluff can be found in the Stadtteile (city districts) section, which includes a daily calendar of events in Freiburg and across the wider region.

A photograph in today's Stadtteile section caught my eye. It shows a group of smiling middle-aged to senior men decked out in cowboy outfits (wide-brimmed hats, vests with pocket watch chains, handkerchiefs, boots), enjoying a cuppa in front of their covered wagon. Germany has had a long-running fascination with "Cowboys and Indians" and the Wild West, due in good part to an immensely popular series of novels by German author Karl May (1842-1912), and the photo seemed to demonstrate this enthusiasm in action.

The BZ article was entitled "Wo Maenner noch echte Kerle sind" ("Where Men Are Still Real Men"), and to my delight, the place where the testosterone flows was immediately revealed in the sub-headline (in the print version only): "The Dakota Cowboys enjoy the smell of the campfire on their ranch near Ikea."

Badische Zeitung

There is an article in the local newspaper this morning about the camp Elias has been going to. The camp is one of several new, city-sponsored summer programs for kids. In addition to playing outside a lot, the kids have been working on a play in which two German reporters travel the world, learning about what children enjoy and what languages they speak in other countries. Several of the kids bring their native-language skills to their roles. The paper notes, "Der achtjaehrige Elias Zausher zum Beispiel begruesst die Gaeste aus Deutschland in Sydney in fliessendem Englisch" ("eight-year-old Elias Zausher [sic], for example, welcomes the guests from Germany to Sydney in fluent English").

Can you find the top of Elias's head in the photograph? (Fourth standing kid from the left.)