I just lost my entire email because my computer crashed. I suppose that I will have to start writing these in Microsoft Word, where I can save them more frequently than I can in GMail, which is supposed to automatically save email drafts every minute or so. I absolutely hate computers.
I suppose that I will tell this differently from the way in which I planned to tell it. I woke up today to light rain, which was a relief. By "light," I mean something like ten tiny droplets, but it was better than nothing, and the whole sky was clouded over - southern Germany was finally going to get some cooler weather.
I got up late today, an hour later than yesterday, and once again felt well-rested. Once again I took the tram to the train station, this time without any help, and I bought a Baden-Wurtemberg (regional) train ticket that would take me to Baden-Baden.
What followed was a continuation of failed interactions that had begun this morning. When I went across the street to get a pastry this morning and the woman working behind the counter asked if I wanted to have it there or to go, I said, after a failed attempt to say "to go," "No here. No here." I can reliably repeat the words "to go" right after hearing them, but I have a hard time doing so unprompted, and the woman herself had not said them. When she seemed confused by my answer, I said "I to eat not here," at which point she asked, in English, "So you want to have it here?" When I replied that I did not want to eat it there (partly because I did not want it at that very minute, and partly because one pays extra to eat on site rather than taking one's food with on), she asked if I wanted it wrapped in a paper bag. I would have told her, "No, I'd like to smear sugar and pastry dough all over everything in my backpack," but I was pretty sure that that would make the situation worse.
The failed communication at the train station was partly because of my linguistic ignorance and partly because of the railway personnel's mistakes. When I had gotten my regional train ticket from a machine, I went to the information desk to ascertain the schedule of trains going to and from Baden-Baden; while one gets one automatically when one buys a ticket at the counter, one has to do so separately when one uses a machine. The first woman with whom I talked refused to tell me anything until I had proven to her that I already had a ticket, at which point she started telling me about my ticket rather than giving me a schedule. When I had finally convinced her to give me a schedule, I said that I wanted to "go to Freiburg" at six or seven o'clock PM, as I did not yet know the word "to arrive" (I should have said "return," as I already knew that word.). As a result, she gave me a schedule that would have me leaving Baden-Baden between six and eight o'clock in the evening, which was useless to me.
I learned the word "to arrive" very clearly and explained what I wanted to a second person working at the information desk, highlighting my desire to return to Freiburg at five or six PM. (This is a fine point - I decided to name earlier times because, if I decided to stay in Baden-Baden for longer, I would end up taking whatever train was next when I got back to the train station regardless; however, if I decided to leave earlier than planned, I would want to know the train schedule in advance, as I could choose a target time to meet rather than waiting for longer than necessary in the train station.) The man confirmed that I was talking about trains from Baden-Baden to Freiburg and printed me a schedule of trains going in the wrong direction, which I only noticed when I was standing on one of the platforms.
None of these individual instances was by any means a disaster, but they combined to put me in a rather foul mood. The first one in particular was frustrating, as I felt that I was being treated as Parisians stereotypically treat foreigners, refusing to speak French to them unless they have a perfect command of it. Given that I managed over a week ago to arrange with a woman at the railway station who spoke no English to give me a ticket that would take me to Oppenheim, allow me to see the city for a couple of hours, and then take me back to Frankfurt, I felt that the woman in the bakery should have trivially been able to understand my request today, now that my German is better. While it is not these people's fault that I do not speak their language, I feel that they should be able to respond to me at least as easily as I do to people in Vancouver who speak basic English and need directions or help. It seems to me that people here, at least in restaurants and cafes, get exponentially dumber with respect to their knowledge of English; I have had no trouble talking to people who speak no English, yet those who speak some English almost always have diminished understanding of my broken German.
Part of the reason for my ire over today's failed communications was my having fairly high expectations for my interlocutors. Due to the fact that tons of Germans seem to know everything that a tourist would want to know about their cities and to be generous with their knowledge, I have come to expect a great deal of help from most people with whom I talk. When people fail to live up to my expectations, I feel that I am not being rewarded for my attempts to speak German, when, in reality, I am rewarded most of the time. As is often the case in life, it is the negative instances that make a stronger impression than the positive ones, so that one feels as though people who fail to understand one are intentionally vexing one and thumbing their noses at one. I said this in a more interesting and succinct way in the email that my email provider cruelly destroyed.
Baden-Baden itself was a royal disappointment. The train ride there did not take me through the Black Forest, as I had expected that it would, but, rather, took me through mostly-flat farmland and industrial regions crowned by gentle hills. I saw a great many vineyards and the ruins of one castle up on a hill, and some of the cities along the way had nice churches, but I did not see any more of the Black Forest until we pulled into Baden-Baden.
When I got off of the train, I looked at the map of the town, which was illegible, and decided to set off at random. I passed through residential areas, bought a sandwich (which I ate immediately - more on this later), walked through another residential area, walked past a construction site, asked someone for directions, walked back to the train station, and left. I was unable to find the city center, anything even remotely related to the historic city center, or even any information that might help me find any of those things. I would call Baden-Baden a nice area in which to live, as it is chock full of trees, but I could not find a single bench, water fountain, or bathroom in any of the parts of the city that I traversed. The city highlights were a small statue of a dancer, a standard-issue church, and a stream.
I came back to Baden-Baden feeling mildly defeated but not altogether unhappy. I got a good view of the Black Forest and saw another castle ruin (in the hills) while in Baden-Baden; the trip to Berne would have been much longer, more tiring, and more expensive than the one to Baden-Baden; I could not have predicted that it would be so miserable and, thus, did not make a bad decision (only an uninformed one) in deciding to go there; and Konstanz, like Berne, would have been too far out of my way to be worth seeing today, as I should get a chance to see it, and Berne, on a different trip. I felt somnolent as I returned from Baden Baden and dozed off on the train ride back, and I got to read for awhile as I waited for the train. What I got out of my trip to Baden-Baden was a rather expensive walk and an excursion that gave me something to do but did not drain too much of my energy.
The reason for which I ate my sandwich so quickly today was that I almost had to pay for some poor dietary choices yesterday. My first mistake was to leave a sandwich containing mayonnaise in my backpack for four hours before eating it, and my second one was to drink a small carton (something like 250 ml - half of a pint) of coconut milk yesterday evening. I had gotten worried about getting food poisoning after eating the sandwich and had drunk the coconut milk mostl for the sake of novelty, as I like some foods that have coconut flavoring. Unfortunately, I ended up feeling queasy for the rest of the evening, as I should have been able to predict would happen given my sensitive stomach. I had some black bread later on to try to neutralize my stomach's contents, but it was a little acid and may not have helped. To make a long story short, I went to bed sweating profusely and wondering if I would be violently sick during the night. I got up feeling fine, and, since more than twenty-four hours have passed since I ate the sandwich and drank the coconut milk that might have given me problems, I now assume that I am fine. I have been taught an inexpensive lesson not to play with fire when choosing what to eat and will avoid future such mistakes (at least, in the immediate future, after which I will either forget or stop caring until I have another such episode as last night).
I have a whole bunch of notes and not much time to try to cover them all before I go to bed; I want to get plenty of sleep (which will be easy, as I do not have to be at the train station until midday) before tomorrow's visit to the oral surgeon, as I will have a long, expensive trip to Nancy after the visit and two very full days of travel starting on the following morning. I plan to see both Metz and Nancy, in an unfortunate (somewhat) turn of events, on Saturday - I call this unfortunate because it is a lot for one day, though, given their propinquity to each other, I should have no difficulty spending an hour getting to Metz, three hours walking around it, an hour coming back, and the rest of the afternoon and early evening seeing Nancy; it will merely be a lot of sightseeing for one day - and Luxembourg on Sunday. I had been hoping to see Nancy and Metz on separate days, making my stay in Nancy more leisurely, but I will not get the chance to see any of the city tomorrow, as I will not reach it until the evening, perhaps even towards sundown. While my timing and the geographic particulars of this part of the trip are far from ideal, no long-term trip passes without some hiccups, and things should turn out fine, especially once I reach central Europe, where everything will be cheaper. I still have to find out how to get from Budapest to Eger and from Eger to Kosice, but once I have done that, I should have no further logistic problems. My only worry is that I may have scheduled too much time for Leipzig, but that might just mean that I get to relax a bit before moving on to Berlin.
I will have to keep my remaining notes genuinely brief, though I often say that. I find it interesting, as I tried to note the other day, that German towns on the border with France are so distinctly German and French towns there are so distinctly French. I do not much know how national identities are formed or how they are inculcated in people - rather, I have an idea of their modes of formation and their ties with history and societal values, but I am still fascinated by the degree to which they show up, even in cities that have historically enjoyed a great deal of cultural crossover (due to the Alsace's having been German for awhile). I also found it curious when, on the bus trip to Dinkelsbuhl, I saw a department store and thought of it as being American. I am sure that there are people who study the history of consumer architecture, as somebody has to decide how to decide a supermarket or gas station, and people surely put thought into their design, as better design should increase profits. I think that Americans are the kings of large-scale consumerism and first came up with the idea of the shopping mall, which may be why I immediately thought of the department store that I saw in Germany as being less German than the buildings in the surrounding villages - I saw it as American in spirit. I would be curious to know if one basic blueprint for department stores (that is, for their exteriors) was conceptualized some years ago and has copied ever since.
I suppose that I should fill you in on some of the people whom I have been meeting; specifically, I should tell you about the professor (of something) whom I met the other day. When I walked into the kitchen yesterday, a woman sitting at the table said hello to me and asked where I was from. She told me that she was from Harrisburg, Pensylvania, and, when I mentioned that I had considered applying for a conference there, we got to talking about my work and summer plans. The woman, whose name I never learned, said, "You poor thing!" when she learned that I had moved from Vancouver to Fayetteville for graduate school, as she had done her graduate degree in Athens, Georgia, another miniscule college town in the South. It was refreshing talking to someone who has seen enough of the world to know that Fayetteville is a cultural backwater and curious to me, as it always is, how easy it is for academics (for I can consider myself an academic for the time being) to find a common tongue. I have found it easy talking to a wide variety of types of people in hostels until now, but there is nothing quite so effortless as striking up a conversation with someone else from the academy. I suppose that universities collect a wide number of like-minded people - i.e., people of a similar intellectual disposition - though, like anywhere else, there is a wide range of people who work at them, with some of whom it must be quite difficult to talk.
My final comment is that my trip is one-third of the way through, which is encouraging. I am not ready for it to be over, and I am not tired of travelling, but I have to admit that it would be tough to keep this up forever, as it involves a lot of rushing about and logistic challenges, such as getting from Nancy to Salzburg on Monday (which will cost a pretty penny). I feel good about the way in which this trip is going overall, and I mostly feel secure about seeing so much of Germany rather than venturing into other countries. I sometimes feel anxious about the idea of focusing so much on one country at a time, as someone with different goals from mine could have found time to see parts of Italy, Spain, Greece, and even Turkey in the time that it will take me to see only a few countries. With luck, I will get to see every one place that I want to see over the next few years and will not suffer for being so thorough in my exploration of individual countries. I often feel anxious about fulfilling my travel wish list and think that the only reasonable way to quell this anxiety is to assume that everything will turn out fine and to trust in my planning. The only other alternative would be to sit and worry, which would do me no good. (Rather, a third alternative would be to jump from country to country, which would burn a hole in my pocket, as I am going to learn tomorrow and on Monday.)
In short, I will try to trust that my plans will be fulfilled and not to doubt the propitiousness of the choices that I have made. My next email to you will be from my hotel in Nancy.
I am sorry to have added a postscript to this email, as I have already promised to end it, but I may as well bring up one final point. My hearing a baby's cries as I wrote the email that my computer's crash destroyed reminded me how much I despise small children. I consider it a pity to dislike them, as, in theory, they are delightful and arouse unequalled amounts of love in us, but I cannot help thinking of them as selfish nuisances. I wonder if it is more a product of my temperament or of my age and lifestyle that leads me to dislike babies to such a degree. Perhaps past generations' love of babies was culturally instilled, or perhaps loads of people never liked babies much in the past but could not voice their dislike because of gender roles. It is partly common to eschew child-rearing until ones thirties these days because of changes in the workforce, while it seems that the expectation that every married couple have kids is also weakening, freeing people who are uninterested in them not to have them. What I am trying to say is that, in the past, one had them whether one wanted to or not, while one has them only if one wants to (at least, in the areas in which I have lived) now. I tend to hear an inhuman note in the shrieks and squeals of young children that make them totally uninteresting to me despite my analytically recognizing them as growing, incredulous beings. My disinterest in nurturing children reminds me of my disinterest in teaching: I lack a passion for helping the weak get stronger. It is possible that this will pass, while it is possible that it is a fundamental part of my character. As in many things, only time will tell.
Now I am truly done!
God damn it! I forgot to mention how hard it is to get a good look at birds through the window of a moving train. I have seen (and heard) some phenomenal birds on this trip, but I most often only get a second or two to see them through the window. I only caught a glimpse of the gigantic hawks that I saw, for example, and, when I saw a smaller hawk with white markings on the undersides of its wings (which I found fascinating; the idea that the underside of the wings could have specialized markings makes my jaw drop), I wished that I could have looked at it for longer. I have seen a great many hawks and birds with light-brown or hay-colored feathers, but I have seen very few of them for long enough to tell what they were.
I am, for the umpteenth time, done with this letter.
I suppose that I will tell this differently from the way in which I planned to tell it. I woke up today to light rain, which was a relief. By "light," I mean something like ten tiny droplets, but it was better than nothing, and the whole sky was clouded over - southern Germany was finally going to get some cooler weather.
I got up late today, an hour later than yesterday, and once again felt well-rested. Once again I took the tram to the train station, this time without any help, and I bought a Baden-Wurtemberg (regional) train ticket that would take me to Baden-Baden.
What followed was a continuation of failed interactions that had begun this morning. When I went across the street to get a pastry this morning and the woman working behind the counter asked if I wanted to have it there or to go, I said, after a failed attempt to say "to go," "No here. No here." I can reliably repeat the words "to go" right after hearing them, but I have a hard time doing so unprompted, and the woman herself had not said them. When she seemed confused by my answer, I said "I to eat not here," at which point she asked, in English, "So you want to have it here?" When I replied that I did not want to eat it there (partly because I did not want it at that very minute, and partly because one pays extra to eat on site rather than taking one's food with on), she asked if I wanted it wrapped in a paper bag. I would have told her, "No, I'd like to smear sugar and pastry dough all over everything in my backpack," but I was pretty sure that that would make the situation worse.
The failed communication at the train station was partly because of my linguistic ignorance and partly because of the railway personnel's mistakes. When I had gotten my regional train ticket from a machine, I went to the information desk to ascertain the schedule of trains going to and from Baden-Baden; while one gets one automatically when one buys a ticket at the counter, one has to do so separately when one uses a machine. The first woman with whom I talked refused to tell me anything until I had proven to her that I already had a ticket, at which point she started telling me about my ticket rather than giving me a schedule. When I had finally convinced her to give me a schedule, I said that I wanted to "go to Freiburg" at six or seven o'clock PM, as I did not yet know the word "to arrive" (I should have said "return," as I already knew that word.). As a result, she gave me a schedule that would have me leaving Baden-Baden between six and eight o'clock in the evening, which was useless to me.
I learned the word "to arrive" very clearly and explained what I wanted to a second person working at the information desk, highlighting my desire to return to Freiburg at five or six PM. (This is a fine point - I decided to name earlier times because, if I decided to stay in Baden-Baden for longer, I would end up taking whatever train was next when I got back to the train station regardless; however, if I decided to leave earlier than planned, I would want to know the train schedule in advance, as I could choose a target time to meet rather than waiting for longer than necessary in the train station.) The man confirmed that I was talking about trains from Baden-Baden to Freiburg and printed me a schedule of trains going in the wrong direction, which I only noticed when I was standing on one of the platforms.
None of these individual instances was by any means a disaster, but they combined to put me in a rather foul mood. The first one in particular was frustrating, as I felt that I was being treated as Parisians stereotypically treat foreigners, refusing to speak French to them unless they have a perfect command of it. Given that I managed over a week ago to arrange with a woman at the railway station who spoke no English to give me a ticket that would take me to Oppenheim, allow me to see the city for a couple of hours, and then take me back to Frankfurt, I felt that the woman in the bakery should have trivially been able to understand my request today, now that my German is better. While it is not these people's fault that I do not speak their language, I feel that they should be able to respond to me at least as easily as I do to people in Vancouver who speak basic English and need directions or help. It seems to me that people here, at least in restaurants and cafes, get exponentially dumber with respect to their knowledge of English; I have had no trouble talking to people who speak no English, yet those who speak some English almost always have diminished understanding of my broken German.
Part of the reason for my ire over today's failed communications was my having fairly high expectations for my interlocutors. Due to the fact that tons of Germans seem to know everything that a tourist would want to know about their cities and to be generous with their knowledge, I have come to expect a great deal of help from most people with whom I talk. When people fail to live up to my expectations, I feel that I am not being rewarded for my attempts to speak German, when, in reality, I am rewarded most of the time. As is often the case in life, it is the negative instances that make a stronger impression than the positive ones, so that one feels as though people who fail to understand one are intentionally vexing one and thumbing their noses at one. I said this in a more interesting and succinct way in the email that my email provider cruelly destroyed.
Baden-Baden itself was a royal disappointment. The train ride there did not take me through the Black Forest, as I had expected that it would, but, rather, took me through mostly-flat farmland and industrial regions crowned by gentle hills. I saw a great many vineyards and the ruins of one castle up on a hill, and some of the cities along the way had nice churches, but I did not see any more of the Black Forest until we pulled into Baden-Baden.
When I got off of the train, I looked at the map of the town, which was illegible, and decided to set off at random. I passed through residential areas, bought a sandwich (which I ate immediately - more on this later), walked through another residential area, walked past a construction site, asked someone for directions, walked back to the train station, and left. I was unable to find the city center, anything even remotely related to the historic city center, or even any information that might help me find any of those things. I would call Baden-Baden a nice area in which to live, as it is chock full of trees, but I could not find a single bench, water fountain, or bathroom in any of the parts of the city that I traversed. The city highlights were a small statue of a dancer, a standard-issue church, and a stream.
I came back to Baden-Baden feeling mildly defeated but not altogether unhappy. I got a good view of the Black Forest and saw another castle ruin (in the hills) while in Baden-Baden; the trip to Berne would have been much longer, more tiring, and more expensive than the one to Baden-Baden; I could not have predicted that it would be so miserable and, thus, did not make a bad decision (only an uninformed one) in deciding to go there; and Konstanz, like Berne, would have been too far out of my way to be worth seeing today, as I should get a chance to see it, and Berne, on a different trip. I felt somnolent as I returned from Baden Baden and dozed off on the train ride back, and I got to read for awhile as I waited for the train. What I got out of my trip to Baden-Baden was a rather expensive walk and an excursion that gave me something to do but did not drain too much of my energy.
The reason for which I ate my sandwich so quickly today was that I almost had to pay for some poor dietary choices yesterday. My first mistake was to leave a sandwich containing mayonnaise in my backpack for four hours before eating it, and my second one was to drink a small carton (something like 250 ml - half of a pint) of coconut milk yesterday evening. I had gotten worried about getting food poisoning after eating the sandwich and had drunk the coconut milk mostl for the sake of novelty, as I like some foods that have coconut flavoring. Unfortunately, I ended up feeling queasy for the rest of the evening, as I should have been able to predict would happen given my sensitive stomach. I had some black bread later on to try to neutralize my stomach's contents, but it was a little acid and may not have helped. To make a long story short, I went to bed sweating profusely and wondering if I would be violently sick during the night. I got up feeling fine, and, since more than twenty-four hours have passed since I ate the sandwich and drank the coconut milk that might have given me problems, I now assume that I am fine. I have been taught an inexpensive lesson not to play with fire when choosing what to eat and will avoid future such mistakes (at least, in the immediate future, after which I will either forget or stop caring until I have another such episode as last night).
I have a whole bunch of notes and not much time to try to cover them all before I go to bed; I want to get plenty of sleep (which will be easy, as I do not have to be at the train station until midday) before tomorrow's visit to the oral surgeon, as I will have a long, expensive trip to Nancy after the visit and two very full days of travel starting on the following morning. I plan to see both Metz and Nancy, in an unfortunate (somewhat) turn of events, on Saturday - I call this unfortunate because it is a lot for one day, though, given their propinquity to each other, I should have no difficulty spending an hour getting to Metz, three hours walking around it, an hour coming back, and the rest of the afternoon and early evening seeing Nancy; it will merely be a lot of sightseeing for one day - and Luxembourg on Sunday. I had been hoping to see Nancy and Metz on separate days, making my stay in Nancy more leisurely, but I will not get the chance to see any of the city tomorrow, as I will not reach it until the evening, perhaps even towards sundown. While my timing and the geographic particulars of this part of the trip are far from ideal, no long-term trip passes without some hiccups, and things should turn out fine, especially once I reach central Europe, where everything will be cheaper. I still have to find out how to get from Budapest to Eger and from Eger to Kosice, but once I have done that, I should have no further logistic problems. My only worry is that I may have scheduled too much time for Leipzig, but that might just mean that I get to relax a bit before moving on to Berlin.
I will have to keep my remaining notes genuinely brief, though I often say that. I find it interesting, as I tried to note the other day, that German towns on the border with France are so distinctly German and French towns there are so distinctly French. I do not much know how national identities are formed or how they are inculcated in people - rather, I have an idea of their modes of formation and their ties with history and societal values, but I am still fascinated by the degree to which they show up, even in cities that have historically enjoyed a great deal of cultural crossover (due to the Alsace's having been German for awhile). I also found it curious when, on the bus trip to Dinkelsbuhl, I saw a department store and thought of it as being American. I am sure that there are people who study the history of consumer architecture, as somebody has to decide how to decide a supermarket or gas station, and people surely put thought into their design, as better design should increase profits. I think that Americans are the kings of large-scale consumerism and first came up with the idea of the shopping mall, which may be why I immediately thought of the department store that I saw in Germany as being less German than the buildings in the surrounding villages - I saw it as American in spirit. I would be curious to know if one basic blueprint for department stores (that is, for their exteriors) was conceptualized some years ago and has copied ever since.
I suppose that I should fill you in on some of the people whom I have been meeting; specifically, I should tell you about the professor (of something) whom I met the other day. When I walked into the kitchen yesterday, a woman sitting at the table said hello to me and asked where I was from. She told me that she was from Harrisburg, Pensylvania, and, when I mentioned that I had considered applying for a conference there, we got to talking about my work and summer plans. The woman, whose name I never learned, said, "You poor thing!" when she learned that I had moved from Vancouver to Fayetteville for graduate school, as she had done her graduate degree in Athens, Georgia, another miniscule college town in the South. It was refreshing talking to someone who has seen enough of the world to know that Fayetteville is a cultural backwater and curious to me, as it always is, how easy it is for academics (for I can consider myself an academic for the time being) to find a common tongue. I have found it easy talking to a wide variety of types of people in hostels until now, but there is nothing quite so effortless as striking up a conversation with someone else from the academy. I suppose that universities collect a wide number of like-minded people - i.e., people of a similar intellectual disposition - though, like anywhere else, there is a wide range of people who work at them, with some of whom it must be quite difficult to talk.
My final comment is that my trip is one-third of the way through, which is encouraging. I am not ready for it to be over, and I am not tired of travelling, but I have to admit that it would be tough to keep this up forever, as it involves a lot of rushing about and logistic challenges, such as getting from Nancy to Salzburg on Monday (which will cost a pretty penny). I feel good about the way in which this trip is going overall, and I mostly feel secure about seeing so much of Germany rather than venturing into other countries. I sometimes feel anxious about the idea of focusing so much on one country at a time, as someone with different goals from mine could have found time to see parts of Italy, Spain, Greece, and even Turkey in the time that it will take me to see only a few countries. With luck, I will get to see every one place that I want to see over the next few years and will not suffer for being so thorough in my exploration of individual countries. I often feel anxious about fulfilling my travel wish list and think that the only reasonable way to quell this anxiety is to assume that everything will turn out fine and to trust in my planning. The only other alternative would be to sit and worry, which would do me no good. (Rather, a third alternative would be to jump from country to country, which would burn a hole in my pocket, as I am going to learn tomorrow and on Monday.)
In short, I will try to trust that my plans will be fulfilled and not to doubt the propitiousness of the choices that I have made. My next email to you will be from my hotel in Nancy.
I am sorry to have added a postscript to this email, as I have already promised to end it, but I may as well bring up one final point. My hearing a baby's cries as I wrote the email that my computer's crash destroyed reminded me how much I despise small children. I consider it a pity to dislike them, as, in theory, they are delightful and arouse unequalled amounts of love in us, but I cannot help thinking of them as selfish nuisances. I wonder if it is more a product of my temperament or of my age and lifestyle that leads me to dislike babies to such a degree. Perhaps past generations' love of babies was culturally instilled, or perhaps loads of people never liked babies much in the past but could not voice their dislike because of gender roles. It is partly common to eschew child-rearing until ones thirties these days because of changes in the workforce, while it seems that the expectation that every married couple have kids is also weakening, freeing people who are uninterested in them not to have them. What I am trying to say is that, in the past, one had them whether one wanted to or not, while one has them only if one wants to (at least, in the areas in which I have lived) now. I tend to hear an inhuman note in the shrieks and squeals of young children that make them totally uninteresting to me despite my analytically recognizing them as growing, incredulous beings. My disinterest in nurturing children reminds me of my disinterest in teaching: I lack a passion for helping the weak get stronger. It is possible that this will pass, while it is possible that it is a fundamental part of my character. As in many things, only time will tell.
Now I am truly done!
God damn it! I forgot to mention how hard it is to get a good look at birds through the window of a moving train. I have seen (and heard) some phenomenal birds on this trip, but I most often only get a second or two to see them through the window. I only caught a glimpse of the gigantic hawks that I saw, for example, and, when I saw a smaller hawk with white markings on the undersides of its wings (which I found fascinating; the idea that the underside of the wings could have specialized markings makes my jaw drop), I wished that I could have looked at it for longer. I have seen a great many hawks and birds with light-brown or hay-colored feathers, but I have seen very few of them for long enough to tell what they were.
I am, for the umpteenth time, done with this letter.
Baden-Baden had a lot of trees.
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