Day 30 of my trip has not disappeared. Rather, I got the dates of my last post were wrong. I have since righted the ship.
I wish that I had more time for these! When I last left off, I was leaving Brussels, a regal city with a bigger collection of beggars and drunks than the whole rest of Belgium, seemingly. Some of the touts in Brussels worked as a team, moving like a swarm of midges. They approached everyone whom they saw asking if they spoke English. Those who stopped and replied affirmatively were shown a clipboard and told that the tout only needed a few more signatures for some sort of humanitarian fundraising (I know because it worked on me in Paris; I gave someone 50 cents and learned to ignore such people.). Touts here show an animal frustration when one ignores them or gives them less money than they want.
Another problem in Brussels is the number of pickpockets. In Brussels I bumped into the young Malaysian man with whom I had dinner in Ghent, and he told me that someone had tried to steal his cell phone but had not quite managed to get it out of his pocket. There is a sign outside of the main cathedral in Brussels stating that pickpockets work in and around the cathedral, and one suspects that they worked in and around the cathedral at Cologne.
My arrival in Cologne brought me, like my trip to Lyon, from a small to a big train station. Brussels has several train stations, each covering different types of routes, as a result of which its main train station has only six tracks. This makes travel through it quite pleasant, as it is not crowded, but it can also be hugely confusing: I would have missed my train from Brussels to Cologne if a woman working at the hostel at which I was staying had not told me to check my ticket, which said that I would be leaving from the South Station. That same woman sold me an umbrella for 7 Euros, which has been a fantastic investment.
My only real impressions from Cologne were of walking the fifty meters from the train station to the cathedral, listening to a drunk German man yell things at no one in particular as I ate lunch on the steps outside, and checking out the cathedral itself. Practically everyone inside the cathedral had a phone (or old-fashioned camera) out and was taking pictures. While I do not take pictures inside churches, I take them outside, and I visit churches (and cathedrals) for the same reason as everyone else. While it is enriching to visit buildings of religious significance, that they turn into a spectacle is a little unnerving. I do not know what further to make of this, but I noticed it more acutely than anywhere else at the cathedral in Cologne.
At this point, I have a mass of notes to sort out, and, since I have little time to reread them, I will attempt to reproduce the last five days according to memory and fill in the gaps later. Hanover was not that interesting a city, though it did have an interesting historical tie with Great Britain and very nice church bells. One of the most interesting things about Hanover was that I was truly forced to use German there. While using German is usually a choice made to try to immerse oneself in one's surroundings, relatively few people in Hanover spoke English. The woman working at reception in the hostel in which I was staying did not speak a word of English, nor did the woman working at the pharmacy that I had to visit in order to get eye drops, as I had lost the ones that I brought from home. Thankfully, Lonely Planet phrasebooks are comprehensive enough to include words related to health care, as a result of which I was able to get eye drops without difficulty.
My health was generally poor towards the end of my trip to Hanover. For one thing, my allergies have gotten worse since I arrived in northern Germany, and for another, I ended up getting sick in such a way that I had to urinate every 20-30 minutes. This is not the type of thing that one usually wants to read about in a blog, but it had, naturally, a substantial effect on my travels. I tried to solve my problem at first by drinking little water, and, when that did not work, I tried to rehydrate myself and assumed that the problem would solve itself. I must have eaten or drunk something that my body did not like; I have been fine since yesterday evening.
Reflections on micturition aside, my trip through northern Germany has been just as interesting as I could have wished. I cannot, unfortunately, corroborate the common perception that northern Germans are less friendly than those from the south. I have found Germans all over the country more or less equally friendly. People have offered to helped me with directions here, asked me for directions, spoken very civilly with me in train stations, smiled at me (when I initiated conversation and smiled at them), and even invited me to a feast, an event that deserves further description.
I wish that I had more time for these! When I last left off, I was leaving Brussels, a regal city with a bigger collection of beggars and drunks than the whole rest of Belgium, seemingly. Some of the touts in Brussels worked as a team, moving like a swarm of midges. They approached everyone whom they saw asking if they spoke English. Those who stopped and replied affirmatively were shown a clipboard and told that the tout only needed a few more signatures for some sort of humanitarian fundraising (I know because it worked on me in Paris; I gave someone 50 cents and learned to ignore such people.). Touts here show an animal frustration when one ignores them or gives them less money than they want.
Another problem in Brussels is the number of pickpockets. In Brussels I bumped into the young Malaysian man with whom I had dinner in Ghent, and he told me that someone had tried to steal his cell phone but had not quite managed to get it out of his pocket. There is a sign outside of the main cathedral in Brussels stating that pickpockets work in and around the cathedral, and one suspects that they worked in and around the cathedral at Cologne.
My arrival in Cologne brought me, like my trip to Lyon, from a small to a big train station. Brussels has several train stations, each covering different types of routes, as a result of which its main train station has only six tracks. This makes travel through it quite pleasant, as it is not crowded, but it can also be hugely confusing: I would have missed my train from Brussels to Cologne if a woman working at the hostel at which I was staying had not told me to check my ticket, which said that I would be leaving from the South Station. That same woman sold me an umbrella for 7 Euros, which has been a fantastic investment.
My only real impressions from Cologne were of walking the fifty meters from the train station to the cathedral, listening to a drunk German man yell things at no one in particular as I ate lunch on the steps outside, and checking out the cathedral itself. Practically everyone inside the cathedral had a phone (or old-fashioned camera) out and was taking pictures. While I do not take pictures inside churches, I take them outside, and I visit churches (and cathedrals) for the same reason as everyone else. While it is enriching to visit buildings of religious significance, that they turn into a spectacle is a little unnerving. I do not know what further to make of this, but I noticed it more acutely than anywhere else at the cathedral in Cologne.
At this point, I have a mass of notes to sort out, and, since I have little time to reread them, I will attempt to reproduce the last five days according to memory and fill in the gaps later. Hanover was not that interesting a city, though it did have an interesting historical tie with Great Britain and very nice church bells. One of the most interesting things about Hanover was that I was truly forced to use German there. While using German is usually a choice made to try to immerse oneself in one's surroundings, relatively few people in Hanover spoke English. The woman working at reception in the hostel in which I was staying did not speak a word of English, nor did the woman working at the pharmacy that I had to visit in order to get eye drops, as I had lost the ones that I brought from home. Thankfully, Lonely Planet phrasebooks are comprehensive enough to include words related to health care, as a result of which I was able to get eye drops without difficulty.
My health was generally poor towards the end of my trip to Hanover. For one thing, my allergies have gotten worse since I arrived in northern Germany, and for another, I ended up getting sick in such a way that I had to urinate every 20-30 minutes. This is not the type of thing that one usually wants to read about in a blog, but it had, naturally, a substantial effect on my travels. I tried to solve my problem at first by drinking little water, and, when that did not work, I tried to rehydrate myself and assumed that the problem would solve itself. I must have eaten or drunk something that my body did not like; I have been fine since yesterday evening.
Reflections on micturition aside, my trip through northern Germany has been just as interesting as I could have wished. I cannot, unfortunately, corroborate the common perception that northern Germans are less friendly than those from the south. I have found Germans all over the country more or less equally friendly. People have offered to helped me with directions here, asked me for directions, spoken very civilly with me in train stations, smiled at me (when I initiated conversation and smiled at them), and even invited me to a feast, an event that deserves further description.
I left for Celle on a cloudy day on which I would have been happy to stay in my hostel and read a book. I was tired out, if I remember correctly, and felt a little lethargic. I saw heavy storm clouds moving in when I first got there, and I was worried that Celle would be one of these tiny towns that is disappointing in the end.
My worries immediately proved unfounded. I can only hope to communicate the feeling of walking through Celle by reference to the peculiar joy of being in Germany. The trains and train stations here work wonderfully; the cities here are clean; in small towns, one sees very few buildings besides churches that are more than two or three storeys tall; often, these cities are built on rivers or at least have canals running through them; they are quiet, modest, and calm. Celle was chock full of the half-timbered houses with which I have fallen so much in love on this trip; it is one of the few historic cities in the north of Germany that was not leveled during World War II. Everything in the city is smaller-scale than in more modern cities, as though one were walking through Legoland; much of the city center was pedestrian-only, and its other sections had so few cars that one barely even noticed them. Celle was like a stripped-down version of a modern city, free of all of the clutter of recent development (I am speaking strictly of the old town.) that obscures one's view of what life used to be like in it. It was easy to find the city's churches, historically-important houses and buildings, schools and administrative buildings, and castle. Finally, my arrival in Celle was opportune: I had come on a Sunday specifically because I thought that there might be a market, and it turned out that I was present for a festival that happens only once per year.
The festival that I attended in Celle was, for lack of other terms, a breakfast festival. Simply put, masses of people convene in the city's central square to have breakfast together. Local singers and musicians perform, tables are laid out, and dozens of families cover them in traditional German spreads. I did not stick around to see it at the beginning of my visit, as I was afraid that it would start raining, but, when I had seen the whole of the old town, I figured that I may as well see if it was still going on. I saw a table of people that seemed especially lively, asked if an empty space next to someone was free, and was invited to join them. I got out a dessert that I had bought at a bakery that morning in hopes of making at least a small contribution to the table's food supply.
As it turned out, no contribution was needed, as everyone at the table had already eaten, and they were only too happy to have another mouth to feed. In a combination of German and English, we introduced ourselves and fell into conversation. I had happened to sit down at the table occupied by members of Celle's German-Polish Culture Club, and, as such, was both treated to a combination of German and Polish food and lucky enough to be able to talk to other people interested in travel. Several of them had been to Canada, and one of the couples there even owned a cottage in Nova Scotia. We chatted for about two hours, at which point most other tables had emptied and the weather was starting to look iffier again. My prandial companions sent me home with more food than I could eat (I finished it on the morning of my departure form Hanover.) and invited me to join them at the same place and same time, the last Sunday of June, in two years' time.
I wish that I could ascribe the extraordinary goodwill of the people of Celle to some sort of exclusive German trait, but there are, in fact, a great many well-meaning people in the world, and I would not be surprised if this same type of thing -- as much as I would like to aver the contrary -- could theoretically have happened in Slovakia or Poland, as people there seemed exceptionally friendly, and Eastern Europeans in general are known for their hospitality. A German whom I met in Hanover, and whom I might see in Lubeck on Friday, suggested that northern Germans were perceived as cold because they did not like to travel to the south, and another German, whom I met here, in Hamburg, corroborated her. The climate here is hideous; it is possible that northern Germans are considered unfriendly simply because people have negative associations with the north as a whole; but the people themselves are very nice.
Braunschweig and Hildesheim were both historically-fascinating cities that I do not have time to adequately discuss. I got look at a picture-perfect church, which is, I believe, on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and listen to a little organ music (I am warming up to it.) in Hildesheim; I do not have too many other outstanding memories of either city except for getting lost multiple times in Braunschweig, finding it a city of enormous cultural wealth, and finding yet another Asian food market there. There seem to be many more such markets in Germany (in any part of Germany) than in France and Belgium combined; Germany is definitely much more to my liking. (The number of Russians here is also vastly greater; I have enjoyed listening to their speech in trains and, occasionally, on the street.)
I am tearing through this lack of notes! Luneburg was a very pretty medieval town, complete with, if I am not mistaken, the cit's first hospital (I am probably mixing it up with somewhere else.) and a thirteenth-century mill. I forgot to mention Bruges' having a bunch of religious cloisters in a previous post, as I did having not found time to see Mechelen except through the train window. I skipped Gottingen and Goslar on this trip, just as I have missed out on other potentially-interesting cities in past trips. I am getting increasingly more comfortable with the impossibility of seeing everything and am very much enjoying the glimpses of other countries that I am getting in the cities that I have time to see.
I do not know where to start with Hamburg except to say that many people, those who prefer large, living cities, would call Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich the only livable cities in Germany. I saw relatively little of Hamburg the other day, as I was tired out and needed to get groceries, but my short walk took me to the docks, with their view of the port's endless cranes and derricks, and, unbeknownst to me at first, through Hamburg's red light district, which was horrifying. The red light district was a strip of sex shops, strip clubs, casinos, corner stores selling only cigarettes and liquor, and moneylenders stretching for block after block, the sidewalks littered with broken glass and homeless alcoholics. I did not feel unsafe at any time during my walk, but I was also depressed by the turpitude that imbued the whole area like a poison gas. Toothless, tattooed women rattled by with shopping carts, and many of the bums were passed out or too tired even to beg.
Bremen was a little bit underwhelming, especially given its relative size; while it had some interesting buildings in its historic center, and it was full of plaques relating the history of many of those buildings, it had very little to see, overall. As I was wandering through its cathedral, it struck me that people interested in the history of painting would probably have a ball visiting cathedrals in a place like France or Germany, as they could trace the gradual development of style and conceptions of beauty and worthiness reflected in paintings from different areas. The adornments inside churches seem to be broken down into straight displays of wealth (gold ornaments, &c.), architectural filigrees meant strictly to be visually pleasing (fancy staircases), representations of saints (often, framed by marble columns), scripts detailing important events in the church's or town's history, representations of Christ, stained glass, organs, and tributes to former priests, sometimes including their gravestones. The cathedral in Bremen had a whole wall covered in such tributes, each one with its own crest. It also had excellent stained glass representations of Christ getting his ass kicked shortly before his crucifixion and of his shaking an admonishing finger at some of his disciplines for either their sins or their ignorance. I guess that my inability to take this stuff seriously is obvious at this point; I wish that churches had historically been meeting grounds for discussion of important civic issues, natural philosophy, and the like, but such ideals usually have consequences that one could not have foreseen, and that was not how things happened in reality anyway, so who cares.
I got back to Hamburg at 4:20, as there Bremen did not take long to see and there are frequent trains between the two cities. I had a great time walking through it -- Hamburg is an excellent city for walking -- and, instead of trying to see every important historical monument in the city, I made a small list of monuments that I wanted to see (almost all churches -- Hamburg has tons of them) and decided to focus more on the feeling of walking through the city than of documenting its cultural riches. I discovered, on this walk, that Hamburg had a significant Iranian population, that there is a smaller red light district near the main train station, and that the vast majority of its cheap fruit and vegetable markets are Turkish; the east Asian population here seems low. Hamburg is full of youth and development; it appears to be the greenest city in all of Europe, based on my experiences; and it is clearly a city of great financial turnover, though it is full of mendicants. The most impressive monument that I have seen here is a church that was bombed out during World War II and subsequently turned into a museum about Nazi atrocities during the war. While I did not see the inside of the museum, as I got there too late in the day, I looked at the statues and plaques there. As in every large German city, people here are committed to remembering their past.
Some scattered notes: I got to listen to a free choir concert at one of the churches here this evening; Bremen's plaques have no direct mention of the war, only mentioning renovations following it; Hildesheim has the best memorial to the persecution of the Jews that I have ever seen, a statue on the top of which is a miniature representation of the synagogue that formerly stood there; much of Belgium smells of ordure; and, as a Russian sitting near me on the train from Brussels to Cologne said, everything is "swimming in verdure." Northern Germany's hideous weather is excellent for plant growth, and it even has a strange pleasantness of its own. While I miss, to some extent, the heat of which I complained so much, I kind of like feeling the cold on the edges of my nostrils (how is that for poetry...). Both the Brussels and Cologne train stations have recycling bins for glass, paper, and plastic in addition to garbage bins everywhere, and the train station in Brussels even has an escalator that detects movement near it and stops moving when no one is on or near it. Many people here drive smart cars, and a great many of them bike, as I have probably already mentioned.
Some of my most enjoyable experiences over the past little while have involved meeting people in the hostels in which I have stayed. The German whom I met a few days ago explained the tension between Germans and Turks here; a Frenchman at the same hostel told me that extreme right political groups were gaining traction in France due to the country's weak and unstable economy; a German whom I met today told me that Braunschweig suffered so much damage in the war not because of strategic importance, but as it was one of Hitler's favorite cities; I have met Canadians who have talked about other parts of Canada with me; I have heard young English women misuse the word "literally" in every other sentence; I met a young English man here who seems quite pleasant; and I have liked literally, in the literal sense, every Australian whom I have met on this trip.
I am almost through my notes! (I have also surely left a great deal out, but such is life.) I saw haircuts in Bremen advertised for up to 73 Euros and cuts of halal meat in a Turkish grocery store for up to 18.49 Euros per kilogram. I am getting wiser with age, having discovered that, as Zev likes to say, money can be exchanged for goods and services. Specifically, while I used to be willing to walk miles in any weather in order to save a few dollars, I am now content to pay for a subway ticket in order to avoid being wet, tired, and miserable. Finally, even going to an ATM here can be interesting. Not only do ATMs dispense money in 50-, 20-, and 10-Euro notes, they also contain slogans in English (when one chooses that language for the display), such as, "With over 100 offices in Germany, there will be one near you," that show the difficulty of translating tone as well as content into another language.
While northern Germany has been just as historically interesting as I would have liked, it has failed to capture my imagination as Lake Kostanz has done. While Lake Constanz is seemingly so insignificant, there is something about it that makes it incredibly pleasant to be there. I am going to visit Schwerin tomorrow and Lubeck the day after tomorrow, and I expect to continue enjoying myself, as I will not be buying any haircuts or halal meat. I have not, in fact, bought any baked goods here since I was in Celle, as I have enough groceries to last me until Saturday evening. I have made loving eyes at every bakery that I have passed here, and I have looked at what was inside them, but, alas, I will not have occasion to buy anything from them, it seems. Perhaps that will change on Friday, as Lubeck is, apparently, known for its marzipan.
Also, this is an interesting time to be in Europe, as people go nuts after their soccer teams win. It is almost midnight, and I have exhausted both my notes and my patience for writing at the moment. I will hold off on writing tomorrow in order to get some work done and will write a letter in two days about both Schwerin and Lubeck.
My worries immediately proved unfounded. I can only hope to communicate the feeling of walking through Celle by reference to the peculiar joy of being in Germany. The trains and train stations here work wonderfully; the cities here are clean; in small towns, one sees very few buildings besides churches that are more than two or three storeys tall; often, these cities are built on rivers or at least have canals running through them; they are quiet, modest, and calm. Celle was chock full of the half-timbered houses with which I have fallen so much in love on this trip; it is one of the few historic cities in the north of Germany that was not leveled during World War II. Everything in the city is smaller-scale than in more modern cities, as though one were walking through Legoland; much of the city center was pedestrian-only, and its other sections had so few cars that one barely even noticed them. Celle was like a stripped-down version of a modern city, free of all of the clutter of recent development (I am speaking strictly of the old town.) that obscures one's view of what life used to be like in it. It was easy to find the city's churches, historically-important houses and buildings, schools and administrative buildings, and castle. Finally, my arrival in Celle was opportune: I had come on a Sunday specifically because I thought that there might be a market, and it turned out that I was present for a festival that happens only once per year.
The festival that I attended in Celle was, for lack of other terms, a breakfast festival. Simply put, masses of people convene in the city's central square to have breakfast together. Local singers and musicians perform, tables are laid out, and dozens of families cover them in traditional German spreads. I did not stick around to see it at the beginning of my visit, as I was afraid that it would start raining, but, when I had seen the whole of the old town, I figured that I may as well see if it was still going on. I saw a table of people that seemed especially lively, asked if an empty space next to someone was free, and was invited to join them. I got out a dessert that I had bought at a bakery that morning in hopes of making at least a small contribution to the table's food supply.
As it turned out, no contribution was needed, as everyone at the table had already eaten, and they were only too happy to have another mouth to feed. In a combination of German and English, we introduced ourselves and fell into conversation. I had happened to sit down at the table occupied by members of Celle's German-Polish Culture Club, and, as such, was both treated to a combination of German and Polish food and lucky enough to be able to talk to other people interested in travel. Several of them had been to Canada, and one of the couples there even owned a cottage in Nova Scotia. We chatted for about two hours, at which point most other tables had emptied and the weather was starting to look iffier again. My prandial companions sent me home with more food than I could eat (I finished it on the morning of my departure form Hanover.) and invited me to join them at the same place and same time, the last Sunday of June, in two years' time.
I wish that I could ascribe the extraordinary goodwill of the people of Celle to some sort of exclusive German trait, but there are, in fact, a great many well-meaning people in the world, and I would not be surprised if this same type of thing -- as much as I would like to aver the contrary -- could theoretically have happened in Slovakia or Poland, as people there seemed exceptionally friendly, and Eastern Europeans in general are known for their hospitality. A German whom I met in Hanover, and whom I might see in Lubeck on Friday, suggested that northern Germans were perceived as cold because they did not like to travel to the south, and another German, whom I met here, in Hamburg, corroborated her. The climate here is hideous; it is possible that northern Germans are considered unfriendly simply because people have negative associations with the north as a whole; but the people themselves are very nice.
Braunschweig and Hildesheim were both historically-fascinating cities that I do not have time to adequately discuss. I got look at a picture-perfect church, which is, I believe, on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and listen to a little organ music (I am warming up to it.) in Hildesheim; I do not have too many other outstanding memories of either city except for getting lost multiple times in Braunschweig, finding it a city of enormous cultural wealth, and finding yet another Asian food market there. There seem to be many more such markets in Germany (in any part of Germany) than in France and Belgium combined; Germany is definitely much more to my liking. (The number of Russians here is also vastly greater; I have enjoyed listening to their speech in trains and, occasionally, on the street.)
I am tearing through this lack of notes! Luneburg was a very pretty medieval town, complete with, if I am not mistaken, the cit's first hospital (I am probably mixing it up with somewhere else.) and a thirteenth-century mill. I forgot to mention Bruges' having a bunch of religious cloisters in a previous post, as I did having not found time to see Mechelen except through the train window. I skipped Gottingen and Goslar on this trip, just as I have missed out on other potentially-interesting cities in past trips. I am getting increasingly more comfortable with the impossibility of seeing everything and am very much enjoying the glimpses of other countries that I am getting in the cities that I have time to see.
I do not know where to start with Hamburg except to say that many people, those who prefer large, living cities, would call Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich the only livable cities in Germany. I saw relatively little of Hamburg the other day, as I was tired out and needed to get groceries, but my short walk took me to the docks, with their view of the port's endless cranes and derricks, and, unbeknownst to me at first, through Hamburg's red light district, which was horrifying. The red light district was a strip of sex shops, strip clubs, casinos, corner stores selling only cigarettes and liquor, and moneylenders stretching for block after block, the sidewalks littered with broken glass and homeless alcoholics. I did not feel unsafe at any time during my walk, but I was also depressed by the turpitude that imbued the whole area like a poison gas. Toothless, tattooed women rattled by with shopping carts, and many of the bums were passed out or too tired even to beg.
Bremen was a little bit underwhelming, especially given its relative size; while it had some interesting buildings in its historic center, and it was full of plaques relating the history of many of those buildings, it had very little to see, overall. As I was wandering through its cathedral, it struck me that people interested in the history of painting would probably have a ball visiting cathedrals in a place like France or Germany, as they could trace the gradual development of style and conceptions of beauty and worthiness reflected in paintings from different areas. The adornments inside churches seem to be broken down into straight displays of wealth (gold ornaments, &c.), architectural filigrees meant strictly to be visually pleasing (fancy staircases), representations of saints (often, framed by marble columns), scripts detailing important events in the church's or town's history, representations of Christ, stained glass, organs, and tributes to former priests, sometimes including their gravestones. The cathedral in Bremen had a whole wall covered in such tributes, each one with its own crest. It also had excellent stained glass representations of Christ getting his ass kicked shortly before his crucifixion and of his shaking an admonishing finger at some of his disciplines for either their sins or their ignorance. I guess that my inability to take this stuff seriously is obvious at this point; I wish that churches had historically been meeting grounds for discussion of important civic issues, natural philosophy, and the like, but such ideals usually have consequences that one could not have foreseen, and that was not how things happened in reality anyway, so who cares.
I got back to Hamburg at 4:20, as there Bremen did not take long to see and there are frequent trains between the two cities. I had a great time walking through it -- Hamburg is an excellent city for walking -- and, instead of trying to see every important historical monument in the city, I made a small list of monuments that I wanted to see (almost all churches -- Hamburg has tons of them) and decided to focus more on the feeling of walking through the city than of documenting its cultural riches. I discovered, on this walk, that Hamburg had a significant Iranian population, that there is a smaller red light district near the main train station, and that the vast majority of its cheap fruit and vegetable markets are Turkish; the east Asian population here seems low. Hamburg is full of youth and development; it appears to be the greenest city in all of Europe, based on my experiences; and it is clearly a city of great financial turnover, though it is full of mendicants. The most impressive monument that I have seen here is a church that was bombed out during World War II and subsequently turned into a museum about Nazi atrocities during the war. While I did not see the inside of the museum, as I got there too late in the day, I looked at the statues and plaques there. As in every large German city, people here are committed to remembering their past.
Some scattered notes: I got to listen to a free choir concert at one of the churches here this evening; Bremen's plaques have no direct mention of the war, only mentioning renovations following it; Hildesheim has the best memorial to the persecution of the Jews that I have ever seen, a statue on the top of which is a miniature representation of the synagogue that formerly stood there; much of Belgium smells of ordure; and, as a Russian sitting near me on the train from Brussels to Cologne said, everything is "swimming in verdure." Northern Germany's hideous weather is excellent for plant growth, and it even has a strange pleasantness of its own. While I miss, to some extent, the heat of which I complained so much, I kind of like feeling the cold on the edges of my nostrils (how is that for poetry...). Both the Brussels and Cologne train stations have recycling bins for glass, paper, and plastic in addition to garbage bins everywhere, and the train station in Brussels even has an escalator that detects movement near it and stops moving when no one is on or near it. Many people here drive smart cars, and a great many of them bike, as I have probably already mentioned.
Some of my most enjoyable experiences over the past little while have involved meeting people in the hostels in which I have stayed. The German whom I met a few days ago explained the tension between Germans and Turks here; a Frenchman at the same hostel told me that extreme right political groups were gaining traction in France due to the country's weak and unstable economy; a German whom I met today told me that Braunschweig suffered so much damage in the war not because of strategic importance, but as it was one of Hitler's favorite cities; I have met Canadians who have talked about other parts of Canada with me; I have heard young English women misuse the word "literally" in every other sentence; I met a young English man here who seems quite pleasant; and I have liked literally, in the literal sense, every Australian whom I have met on this trip.
I am almost through my notes! (I have also surely left a great deal out, but such is life.) I saw haircuts in Bremen advertised for up to 73 Euros and cuts of halal meat in a Turkish grocery store for up to 18.49 Euros per kilogram. I am getting wiser with age, having discovered that, as Zev likes to say, money can be exchanged for goods and services. Specifically, while I used to be willing to walk miles in any weather in order to save a few dollars, I am now content to pay for a subway ticket in order to avoid being wet, tired, and miserable. Finally, even going to an ATM here can be interesting. Not only do ATMs dispense money in 50-, 20-, and 10-Euro notes, they also contain slogans in English (when one chooses that language for the display), such as, "With over 100 offices in Germany, there will be one near you," that show the difficulty of translating tone as well as content into another language.
While northern Germany has been just as historically interesting as I would have liked, it has failed to capture my imagination as Lake Kostanz has done. While Lake Constanz is seemingly so insignificant, there is something about it that makes it incredibly pleasant to be there. I am going to visit Schwerin tomorrow and Lubeck the day after tomorrow, and I expect to continue enjoying myself, as I will not be buying any haircuts or halal meat. I have not, in fact, bought any baked goods here since I was in Celle, as I have enough groceries to last me until Saturday evening. I have made loving eyes at every bakery that I have passed here, and I have looked at what was inside them, but, alas, I will not have occasion to buy anything from them, it seems. Perhaps that will change on Friday, as Lubeck is, apparently, known for its marzipan.
Also, this is an interesting time to be in Europe, as people go nuts after their soccer teams win. It is almost midnight, and I have exhausted both my notes and my patience for writing at the moment. I will hold off on writing tomorrow in order to get some work done and will write a letter in two days about both Schwerin and Lubeck.
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| For once, my camera took a photo right-side-up, |
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