Schauinsland Schnee

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.

The countdown begins

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

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.

It's a small world

We had company for dinner this evening: Elias's buddy Anne and her parents and three siblings. After Kaffee (the ritual 4pm German carbohydrate and caffeine fix), the kids went over to the school playground to expend some energy. When the doorbell rang a short while later, Stefan got up to let the kids back in--but they weren't at the door. Instead, he encountered the brother and sister-in-law of our new upstairs neighbors. The neighbors moved in yesterday, while we were still out of town.

The brother and sister-in-law live in Heidelberg, about an hour and forty minutes north of Freiburg by car. They rang our doorbell because they recognized our names on the mailboxes outside.

Thus it was that we happily reconnected with Mary Beth and Hans-Walter, our former housemates from Tucson, AZ--folks we lived with some twenty years ago, and whom we haven't seen since 1995. MB runs her own copywriting, copyediting, and proofreading business; Hans-Walter is a director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg. Contributing to the small-worldness of the evening, Anne's father knows Hans-Walter's brother.

In novels and films, such coincidences seem contrived ("of all the apartment buildings gin joints in all the towns in all the world..."). In real life, they're amazingly cool.

More on the Muenster

My parents left this morning following a good visit and quality bonding time with Elias. As she departed, my mother passed her Maternal Nurturing Baton to Stefan's mother. The baton went from the kitchen to the bathroom, from making soup and doing all the dishes to dusting every horizontal surface and scrubbing sinks we didn't even know were dirty. I fear Elias will never have it as good when he's grown up and I'm on baton duty.

My parents, both avid photographers, also passed one of their older digital SLR cameras on to Stefan, and he has been taking some wonderful pictures with it. He managed to combine the right f-stops and shutter speeds with a steady enough hand to capture some of the figures over the Muenster door without also capturing the distracting pigeon-restraining wires.

Over 500 figures surround the cathedral entrance, which was built between 1280 and 1300. In an age of high illiteracy, the statues conveyed stories and lessons to the masses. They also served as a useful method for identifying Freiburgers. Who other than a Freiburger would know that a devil wrings his hands over the Muenster doors because--as the angel's scales illustrate--good souls always outweigh bad souls, even when bad souls cheat to tip the balance. To the left of the angel, good souls help lift one another out of their graves (notice the skulls); to the devil's right, bad souls are weighed down with heavy stones.

While Mary and Jesus sit front and center above the entrance, the allegorical Ecclesia and Synagoge stand on the left and right sides of the portal. Ecclesia, wearing a crown, holds a cross and chalice. Synagoge, blind to the coming of the Messiah, holds the broken law of the Jews.

Overview

Once upon a time, back in the sepia-tinted olden days, Stefan was a student at the University of Hamburg, where one of his friends in the Holzwirtschaft program was named Matthias. Yesterday, Matthias, his wife Bettina, and their kids Jona and Lina visited us in Freiburg. We did the touristy thing and went on a double-loop downtown meander. In addition to the requisite farmer's market shopping trip, Muenster tower climb, Gummibaerchen purchases, and Schlossberg hike, we also enjoyed the annual bread market at the Rathausplatz, where Stefan bought a round loaf a good two feet in diameter, and Elias tried his very first, long-coveted "Spaghetti Eis"--vanilla ice cream extruded to look like noodles, with strawberries (tomato sauce) and grated white chocolate (parmesan cheese) on top.

I'm pleased to report that, having survived climbing the Muenster tower last month, I gamely climbed it again. I learned that it is much easier to climb steep, narrow stone stairs when you do it with other people, as instead of imagining plummeting through the protective wrought-iron fence onto the hard cobblestones several stories below, you are forced to focus on the Arsch ahead of you lest you bump into it.

Which reminds me that Elias's peer-taught cursing vocabulary has progressed from "Mist" ("manure") to the slightly more expressive "Mist Haufen" ("heaping pile of manure"). The Badische Zeitung had an article on Saturday that refered to the pastoral odor of the Bavarian town Wahl, where the early morning air smells specifically of "Kuhmist" ("cow Mist"). Apparently there's a vast array of different Mist bouquets waiting to be smelled in Germany.

The article on the village Wahl (where, barring accidents, they expect 100% turn-out of all seven or so registered voters) was in honor of the national elections (Wahl/Waehlen) being held today. Germans vote on Sundays, when few people work and almost every business is closed, so no one has an excuse not to vote--except Stefan, alas, for reasons having to do with changes of address, non-fucntioning websites, and a slow postal system.

<-- Blooming artichokes, Batman!

Daily life continues

This morning I took my mother to the closest of the two corner pharmacies to help her buy a new bottle of potassium supplements, a prescription drug in the U.S., over-the-counter in Germany. The straight-laced, soft-spoken pharmacist smiled faintly, apologized that they didn't manufacture such small doses in Germany, and politely suggested my mother try a glass of apple juice instead. When we returned five minutes later with the right dosage information, the pharmacist pleasantly sold us the box of previously-offered tablets and, because this is the way of things in Baden, tossed in a complimentary packet of tissues. The most unusual thing about the experience was that the pharmacist was not a female wearing a white lab coat, like the vast majority of German Apotheker(innen), but a man wearing a fuzzy light brown suit.

I dropped my parents off at the bus station for the next step of their Grosse Reise (Grand Tour). Getting to the station is straightforward, but getting home is complicated by one-way streets and downtown pedestrian zones. I cleverly gave the Altstadt wide berth--so wide, in fact, that I got to see part of the highway to Offenburg, most of the University clinics on the outskirts of town, and a mysterious foggy suburb I'll never be able to find again.

Autumn mist

My parents have been here for about 24 hours, and my father has already struck up more conversations with the natives than I have in my entire three months here--and in English, no less. Yesterday, we walked over to the farmers' market on the corner, and it happened that one of the local candidates for the SPD (Social Democrats) was there schmoozing for votes. His supporters--dressed in bright red and handing out bright red pencils, balloons, and political info--were happy to chat with the camera-wielding tourists about how great it is that Obama has cancelled plans for an American missile shield in Europe and to ask why Americans can't get health care right. At a Thai restaurant in the Altstadt, my dad struck up a conversation with the Philippino waiter about linguistic similarities between Tagalog and Malay. Oh, to be an extrovert.

Today's itinerary included a stop at the Lienhart bakery to see if my blog-reading mother could tell the difference between Kuchen and Torte; and the Best-of-Ruins-Reachable-by-Car tour, featuring Hochburg and Kastelburg.

Thanks to a week of school, Elias now knows how to say "snap" in German. For those of you who came of age a generation or more ago, "snap" is the current American elementary-school version of "drat." German kids say "Mist." (I looked up "Mist" in a German-English dictionary, and the dictionary said it meant "Bugger! [Brit]." I haven't told Elias what "bugger" means, but he heard the word and now thinks "Mist" means "booger," a substitute he finds sufficiently scatalogical).

Presents!

My parents arrived from the U.S. this afternoon for the start of their Grosse Reise (Grand Tour), and they brought presents!

Wind instruments

The mighty 1957 Braunschweig: two manuals, pedals, 15 ranks. All two reed stops are in the pedals. Thanks to the Lutherische Kirche for permission to practice on it.

In other wind instrument news, Elias is practicing for a future career as Alphornist by blowing up balloons through four-foot-long cardboard tubes.

Last night, the stream of visiting relatives began. Stefan's brother and sister-in-law came for an overnight stay before heading off this afternoon into the rainy Schwarzwald for a multiple-day bike tour. Statistically, Freiburg is the sunniest city in Germany, but the forecast this week is for almost constant rain. We'll have a warm bowl of Flaedlesuppe waiting for them when they return.

Schauinsland

Some Schmetterlinge (butterflies) from Elias:

On the possibility that dirt might in part be comprised of cow poop: “That’s what haunts me about dirt.”

On fundamental forces: “That’s what I don’t like about gravity: If you’re walking downhill on a rocky path and gravity pulls you down, you can get hurt.”

On seeing the two-time Bulgarian national acrobatics champion at Circus Roncalli Saturday afternoon: “I used to be really good at that.”

On Sunday we hiked up Schauinsland, the highest mountain near Freiburg (1284m). “Schauinsland” means “look into the countryland." We chose one of the noisiest possible days to hike up, as there was an antique car race up the mountain and none of the cars had mufflers. We encountered two ADAC officials when our trail through the woods crossed the race road. The men suggested we should have known today wasn’t a smart day to hike, and Stefan explained we weren’t from around here. Their response: “what, you can’t read the papers?” Tsk. The race ended at the two gigantic windmills about two thirds of the way up the mountain, so things were a little quieter heading to the top.

Elias enjoyed his first cuppa decaf ("Kaffee Haag"--Haag is the brand name) when we made it back to our starting point in Horben, then bounced off the walls until 10:30 p.m.

Today we head back to Helen's in Steinebach, to visit her once more, to welcome our friend Susan (our first visitor from the U.S.--and we don't have our own place in Freiburg yet, alas), and to pick up the rest of our suitcases and Stefan's bike. Stefan will drive our stuff to Freiburg on Friday and will sign our lease. Elias and I will join him by train on Saturday, and then we'll call Freiburg "home" for the next few months.