Heidelberg and Bavaria

After Berlin, we spent three days with my old friend Matt Bush in Schwitzingen, a suburb just outside of Heidelberg. The fact that neither Matt nor I could remember when we last saw each other quickly disappeared into the timelessness of old friendships. It has been something like 15 years, but “you pick up where you left off,” as my mom used to say. Matt and his wife, Clare, have been in Germany now for a decade. Both work as contractors with the United States Department of Defense with schools on a nearby base. I interviewed them both a good deal about their jobs and lives here in Germany. Annette is far more familiar with this way of life than I am. Sounds like a great quality of life, even if they get paid in U.S. Dollars, get U.S. vacation schedules, and spend their days inside a red-tape filled but well-funded bureaucracy with the Department of Defense. And living and working in communities where most of your colleagues, students and families move every few years doesn't sound like such a bad thing either. It seems to keep them light on their feet. And then there is the recent addition of the show stopper. At 20-something inches and 20-something pounds, with bright blue eyes, a smile that will make you blush and new hair that seems to be leaning toward becoming red, five month old Dahlia is a pretty cool baby to hang out with.

We spent a long weekend in Heidelberg with a good mix of baby-friendly activities--hiking and seeing everything from the town to the Palace Gardens in Schwitzingen to the local U.S. military base. We had some good German meals, including jaeger schnitzel (fried veal with mushroom sauce), my first knight pan (English translation) with sausage, gherkins, and red peppers (think small wok with deliciousness inside), and ample amounts of local draft beer. Evenings were reserved for hanging out at the house, drinking and talking into the wee hours, much like we did 15 years ago, except that now a baby can sleep through it.

Our plans to leave Schwitzingen on Monday fell victim to Sunday night's celebrations. When we weren't on the road by 2 pm, we decided to enjoy another day and start again, earlier, tomorrow.

On Tuesday, we drove from Schwitzingen to Bad Windscheim, Annette's preschool home. Without much difficulty, we found the five-story apartment building she used to call home. Actually, we found the playground and triangulated everything from there, including the candy store and preschool. It is funny trying to piece it together from the memories of a five-year old. Everything is bigger than Annette remembers. And closer. The playground is right behind her old apartment building along a great walking path. Like much of Germany, towns and cities are far more walking and biker friendly than car-friendly. If it weren't for the autobahns, I would say that statement holds true for the whole country.

We wandered from the playground toward what looked to be a kindergarten. We walked in expecting an office to find a lobby area lined with little coats and shoes. The building then split into a few classrooms on each side of the lobby. We caught the eye of a female teacher. When Annette tried to explain in English that she though she might have been a student here years ago, the teacher went to find somebody who could speak English. That person was Frau Eckstein. Annette barely got through her first few words of introduction when Frau Eckstein exclaimed, “Annie” and squeezed her cheeks. Yes. This was Annette's teacher twenty years ago. And they used to call her Annie.

After catching up on what brings us to Germany, Frau Eckstein invited us into the classroom. It was crowded, but beautifully designed. One wall was all windows with a big glass door out to the outdoor play area. Wood beams provided storage forming a false ceiling six-and-a-half feet high across half the room. Under that were five tables, each with five or six chairs around it for group activities. The walls had bookshelves and cubbies, and a small kitchen that seemed to be fully working, complete with an oven. The other half of the room had a few steps up to a sitting area for resting and perhaps group story time. A few more steps lead up to a fort of sorts, which is where Frau Eckstein still remembers little Annette perched. Annette walked up there, ducking her head the whole time to look down on the classroom as she had two decades earlier. The visit was short but moving.

After an hour, we were on to the Deutches Touring Yacht Club on the Starnberger See in Tutzing, about 45 minutes Southwest of Munich. Our friend, Micky, who came through New Orleans a bit more than two years ago with Benedikt, whom we had seen in Hamburg, would be our host. Benedikt and Micky met at a regatta and decided to roadtrip the U.S. together. Micky now lives in a suburb just outside of Munich but thought we would be best served by staying at the yacht club, which sounded ok to us.

Micky works designing electric cars for BMW. He was coming from work to meet us. We beat him to Tutzing and dipped our toes in the lake while we waited. The day was sunny. It was a day we had been looking for since our soaking tent in Amsterdam. Sunny and warm enough to swim. Fresh air. Sailboats on the lake. And the Alps calling to me from their perch across the lake.

The Deutches Touring Yacht Club has been Micky's base since childhood. He competes at a level just below Olympic sailing, primarily across Europe. But the yacht club is quiet. It has three stories of small rooms in it above the casino, which is a two-room restaurant. There are maybe thirty boats in the docks, all sailboats except for two. One of these is a beautiful wooden motor boat. Micky and his friend Felix spent nearly two years outfitting it with an electric motor. It runs incredibly quietly off of several lithium-ion batteries. He showed us to a room on the third floor, complete with two twin beds, a fridge, a sink with hot and cold water and a bathroom across the hall. Over wiess beers at the beirgarten overlooking the lake and the Alps, Annette and I quickly declare to Micky, Felix and several of their friends that we may stay a week or two here.

And here we are on Sunday night at the Deutches Touring Yacht Club. I love Bavaria. It feels like the playground of Germany. It will make you forget that Hitler came to power in these parts in Munich. The Alps are closer than they appear. Thirty minutes of driving fun windy roads and we are in the mountains. We have done day trips from here. We rode a gondola up Herzogstandt and hiked for the better part of a day to views across the valley and deep into the mountains across to Austria. Well-maintained and well-worn trails welcomed us, even as we hiked half a kilometer across the spine of a mountain maybe one meter wide, with dramatic drops on both sides. We returned from rain in the mountains to sunshine and evening swimming in Sternberger See.

The next day, we dismissed the dreariness of the gray clouds outside our window and the weather reports to drive two-and-a-half hours southeast to Birtchesgaden, another of Annette's childhood memories. We visited the salt mines the walls of which she remembers licking as a child. The overpriced tour through the top three stories of a still-active mine provided a fascinating history of salt mining in Bavaria that dates back nearly 1,000 years. Most of the salt is actually extracted by flooding the mines and then removing the salt from the brine. The tour also provided some carnival-like surprises including a few “miner's chutes.” These 50 to 100-meter slides elicited screams from Annette each time we slid down them. And then there was a light show on a mirror lake underground that would make Pink Floyd proud. Despite the signs forbidding pictures, I brought the camera with the flash turned off and the shutter speed extra slow to document what I could. The tour guide wore a uniform, spoke German and didn't smile. It gave me a rush and some joy to take pictures, feeling like I was rebelling against some Nazi. I imagined if I got caught, they would drop me deep in the mine, a maze I could not find my way out of. We ended the day hiking around the Konigsee. Parts of the trail were no longer maintained and provided some entertaining rock hopping to a waterfall, far beyond where most hikers had turned around.

BMW only requires its employees to work 35 hours per week. So Micky took off Friday to take us to Neuschwanstein, the medieval castle crazy Konig Ludwig II built to honor Wagner in the late 1880s. He was declared mentally ill well before its completion and shortly after was found dead with his psychiatrist in the Sternberger See. The castle is the most touristy place we have visited yet, with tours every ten minutes in English, German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Italian and audio-guides from so many countries that we spent most of our time in the forty-minute ticket line guessing which flags go with which countries and which languages. We hiked around a bit and visited a biergarten before our thirty-minute tour arrived. The wood carvings and details of the castle are enough to declare insane the guy who paid for them and supposedly bankrupted the royal family. By the end of the tour, Annette is convinced that Wagner was Ludwig's secret boyfriend. We hike a bit farther to a bridge across a gorge 80 meters above a waterfall with postcard views of the castle and the waterfalls below.

We end the day in Andechs Closter. This is a monastery and a brewery. Monks across Germany have been brewing beer for centuries. Beer drinking does seem to be a religion here. Apparently swine eating is too. I had the schwinesaxe, a pig shank, presumably a femur or the arm's equivalent. The meat is deliciously tender and juicy with crunchy tasty skin around it. Cracklin' is the English word. Not sure what the German word is for the skin, but it has never tasted so good.

We rested up Saturday for a heavy night of drinking in Munich with Micky and a few of his friends. After a few beers, the night really started at Hofbrauhaus with a great meal and a one liter stein of beer each. It turns out we cannot drink like Germans can, as we stumbled from bar to bar, carried around warm beer we couldn't finish and fell asleep in the cab ride home at 1:30 a.m. (The night was far more fun than it sounds!) It left for a slow and sleepy Sunday of watching Formula One racing, eating pizza, and heading back to Tutzing for dinner and an early and rainy night around 6 p.m.

This week, we look forward to a few sunny days with hiking around Garmisch and the Eibsee, visiting some thermal baths, Dachau concentration camp, and heading to Prague. Then south to Croatia or Italy or both.

Berlin

I have been reading John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley for the last two months. It is a good traveler's book, soft-covered, light, frayed at the edges but still well bound. It was appropriate accompaniment for our road trip across the U.S. His writing inspires writing, reflection on the nature of journeys, and attention to the odd details that make no two journeys alike and no two journeyers alike, even as they travel together through the same peoplescapes and landscapes.

When I arrived in Europe, I put it down for a week. It seemed no longer appropriate, overly American at a time when the focus of our experience is Europe. As we have found ourselves driving East in Europe, it has found its way back to the top of my bag. Rainy days have made for good reading and writing. Traveling east in Europe feels like traveling west in the U.S. We drive away from the major cities into more open space across the continent, more unknown lands whose languages and native stories weren't taught in our schools.

One of Steinbeck's last chapters sounded a clarion call of familiarity at its first sentence. "While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school." There it was on page 249. I had never read this book before, nor realized that such a benign book as Travels with Charley, Steinbeck and his poodle, dealt with such situations of gravity.

I had read this chapter multiple times in its entirety twelve years earlier in the wooden chairs of the Amistad Center Research Library at Tulane University. Nothing in that library could leave the library's walls if you were a student. At that point, I was piecing together exactly what happened and why in the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools. It was one of those term papers that becomes far more than just about writing a paper and getting a good grade. The subject enveloped me against the backdrop of my own experience volunterring in the still deeply (but not by direct law) segregated New Orleans public schools. At the time, Steinbeck was an interesting source. Among news clippings and legal declarations and edicts, minutes from the school board, NAACP and state legislature meetings, there was Steinbeck. It was a curious account written by a passer-through who stayed no more than two hours in New Orleans to observe the chaos first-hand before driving on. And what were Steinbeck's opinions and pre-disposition? I didn't know much about him at the time, just that he was from Monterey/Salinas California. Still perhaps I don't. It was more of a literary account anyway. At best, it would make its way into my paper as a one or two sentence quotation describing the mobs or the mothers screaming invectives.

And when I came across this chapter in my travel book, I put it down for another time. It was a bit too grave for the ease and joy I was experiencing in Hamburg. But it sat there, awaiting inevitable deeper examination like the trip stones of Germany. These trip stones are no bigger than a two of clubs, bronze squares at the doorsteps of homes across Germany. Each has a Jewish name and dates inscribed, memorializing the lives of Jews who left home for their deaths in the Holocaust.

Yesterday, Annette and I explored Berlin, much the same way we do with our first full day in any city. We walked, a map sometimes looked at to guide us, teach us, but not restrict us. After the requisite visit to the historic city gate and surrounding buildings of the state, we walked to the Memorial to the Murdered European Jews. Here is one city block of different sized rectangular pieces of granite. Each is rectangular shaped and polished on a grid, both directions. It looks somewhat like an above-ground New Orleans cemetery, except with a uniformity and namelessness and facelessness. On the edges of the memorial, families sit on these sarcophagi-like pieces of stone, snacking, looking at maps, resting from the weight of sightseeing. But as we walk further in, they rise ten feet above our heads in all directions. The solemnity of the scene quickly crashes into playfulness, as people of all ages play hide and seek with varying levels of enthusiasm among the stones. The large and modern U.S. embassy seems to stand sentinel at one side, overlooking the memorial. The only discouragement of playfulness is on a small plaque at the entrance forbidding drinking alcohol, running and loud noise. But there is no enforcement. And the memorial stands across the street from where the Berlin Wall was no less than 22 years earlier. In its shadow, enforcement of such rules feels offensive.

As we walk on, we encounter a 10 meter long section of the wall that is still standing. It is an exhibit of sorts, with displays recounting some of the wall's history and the future plans for memorializing this history. The wall is concrete, maybe 18 inches thick, 10 or 12 feet in height. Like most things, it is much smaller in reality than imagination.

Throughout Germany, we have talked a bit about when the wall fell. It is one of those moments like when Kennedy was shot. People can recount exactly where they were. I was in Mr. Horowitz's social studies class, maybe 5th or 6th grade. I was ten at the time. I remember spending several weeks on the subject as Mr. Horowitz attempted to convey the significance of this event to disinterested middle schoolers. The Heidemann girls only remember David Hasselhof standing on the wall, singing in a jacket covered with lights. We laugh now at the choice of entertainment. Pink Floyd would have been a better fit, but perhaps they were no longer unified when Berlin was. Katrin told us at dinner Monday that older Germans in Hamburg regret not driving to Berlin to see the wall crumble themselves, see East Berlin, and experience history.

The wall's path now sits at the foot of huge modern office buildings like KPMG. Clearly, it became an architect's playground. And capitalism has prevailed.

The wall, like much of Berlin, is covered in graffiti. Much of it is unintelligible to an only English-speaking observer. "Love your enemies. It pisses them off," it says in one section. But the wall has been defiled in a way far more powerful, defiant and subtle than graffiti. In a true act of collective resistance, people from all walks of life, all reaches of the globe, have placed their discarded chewing gum on the wall. Thousands of pieces, mostly old chewing gum gray in color, decorate the concrete of the wall.

From the wall, we found a walking path through parks, past a performing arts center, under a six-story building with a mural on its side. The mural stands nearly 100 feet tall, with Hitler near its top masturbating, ejaculating missiles toward a business man holding onto a Mercedes sign while flying through the air, his briefcase blown open to reveal an AK-47. Less subtle than gum of graffiti, but a form of resistance nevertheless.

The path winds on to our current destination, the Jewish Museum. The building is made of dark metal with gashes for windows to suggest scarred skin. Before we enter, we stop for currywurst and a broccoli casserole of sorts to supply some stamina for the museum. Inside the Jewish Museum is a history of Jews in Germany, rought 1,950 years of history, told mostly chronologically. The museum has three intersecting corridors at its entrance--the axis of exile, the axis of death, and of continuity. Only the axis of continuity leads to the exhibits, up 100 stairs or so. The stairs continue up six of seven steps past the entrance into a blank wall. Empty walls are incorporated throughout the exhibits as a memorial of sorts to the many missing Jews.

The exhibit winds fromt the top to bottom of the building with highly interactive tales of great teachers and scholars, tradesman and merchants, horrible oppression, and Jewish life and culture. Individuals are highlighted through history, too many to name. One comes through the 20th century on the bottom floor to find the Holocaust had its roots long before Hitler was born. The museum presents a continuity of Jewish oppression in Germany, climaxing but not ending with the Holocaust. The chronology of events in the Holocaust I know well from my research for high school and college papers. The aftermath I do not. There were some moving videos that showed parts of the Auschwitz trials and interviews both with leaders of the efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice and secure reparations for those affected, as well as every day Germans on the street in the 1950s and 1960s. The Nuremberg trials were seen in Germany as the "victor's justice," and mostly not attended nor respected by many Germans. It wasn't until the German-led Auschwitz trials of 1961 that Germans showed the willingness to begin to enact justice for the horrors committed. I thought of Annette's work with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Mississippi and what the trial of Emmet Till's murderers nearly fifty years later must have been like. For as horrible as human beings can be, the power of reconciliation is incredible.

I awake late this morning to a rainy Berlin day with my mind on resistance and its many forms. In some ways, I even think the night life of Berlin, with its pumping bass among huge graffitied warehouses and clubs that don't open until after midnight and don't close until after sunrise, as a form of resistance. Closer to graffiti than chewing gum perhaps, but resistance nonetheless.

So I picked up Steinbeck and read what he had to say about Ruby Bridges and the mobs that challenged her and the people who watched them and the people who seemed to do nothing. And I know nothing but that the journey is unfolding as it should and their is insight in the themes and patterns of it.

There is Joy in Hamburg

We arrived in Hamburg close to midnight Wednesday weary from the road and rain. We slept in the car the night before because we left the windows open in the tent for ten hours of steady Dutch rain. But Hamburg welcomed is with a warmth far beyond its mostly 16°C gray rainy days. Our friend, Nancie, whom I have known for about 12 years now, welcomed us to a top floor flat in Altona. In the last year, she joined the SGI Buddhist international community. The flat belongs to fellow SGI members who offered it to Nancie while they are on holiday in the South of France. It is small, simple, peaceful and comfortable. As is Altona, which is a neighborhood that is recently gentrifying stretched out along the Elbe River just West of the city center.

On Thursday, we didn't venture out further than the Altona grocery store for some basics (beans, rice, bell peppers, zucchini, a chicken to roast, onions, salami, cheese, a baguette). We cooked spaghetti with the veggies and tomato sauce, which was little more than seasoned tomato paste and water. We did laundry, checked e-mail, paid bills and enjoyed the basics of a home on a rainy day.

By Friday afternoon, I had heard back from Hanna Heidemann and we made plans for dinner at her parents house with her parents, Doris and Hugo, and older sister, Katrin. After dinner, we would meet some additional friends for drinks and a taste of Hamburg's night life.

Hamburg's public transportation szstem is great. It is clearly marked. Trains have comfortable seating and you can get anywhere with one switch of train and a half hour at most. They also rarely check tickets, so Annette and I have been riding for free all across Hamburg. So, after a brief accidental stop at the Hamburg Airport (we seem to need to get lost at least once in any new place), the girls met us at the train station. We were the only ones getting off at that stop and Hanna had stayed with Annette and I in New Orleans in 2010. Within a few minutes drive, we made it to the Heidemann's beautiful and quiet home near the end of the S-Bahn train. Their garden was bursting with flowers, thick from the rains.

Doris greeted us on the front porch with the abounding spirit of a mother. She is a primary school teacher in her late 50s with beautiful shortish blond hair and a stylish eyeglasses. Once inside the door, we are greeted by Hugo, the man of the house (and only man in the house). He is a wiry physician, the humble head of internal medicine at one of the Hamburg hospitals and a professor of medicine as well. It turns out he is also quite a chef, world traveler, canoe-builder, a hobbied historian, and a wine connisoeur. He has a grandfather clock in his living rooms that is older than my hometown.

The menu was the back of the lamb, fennel with slice of hard, but sweeter, parmesan-like cheese, potatoes, broccoli and carrots, all roasted. All that after a first course of champagne, sourdough bread and butter, and a wonderful mixed green salad with a creamy dill dressing.

Shortly after we sat down, the evening Hamburg sun emerged to light up and warm up the dining room through its two walls of glass doors and windows. Regardless of the rain or general grayness, the sun seems ot burst through for a late goodbye to Hamburg each evening. It often comes out after its bedtime, which seems to be as late as 10 pm in the northern European summer.

This was our first sit-down meal at the home of locals in Europe. And the hospitality would give Mississippi a run for its mightiness. Dinner was complete with some Portuguese dessert pastries and more than a sampling of after dinner drinks, including German, Spanish and Italian wines, a Napoleaonic cognac, a Senegalese home brewed schnapps, thick and sweet with lots of floating things in the bottle, and a bootleg something or other that is rumored to cause blindness, or at least put hair on your chest.

By five minutes to nine, we found ourselves piling into the Fiat for Mama Doris to drive us to the train station. Not before making 11 am plans for paddling the city's manz canals in Hugo's canoe the next morning.

We spent the rest of the evening blindly attempting to "keep up with the coach"--Katrin's (field) hockey coach since her teenage years. Needless to say, no one can succeed in this Olympic of feats. We tasted many German beers, some shots, some outdoor clubs, some indoors with dancing. We found ourselves stumbling home happily under a full moon round about 3 a.m.

A hangover greeted us in the morning as we worked our way back to the Boczweg stop on the U-Bahn train the next morning to meet Hanna and Hugo for our promised canoe trip. In a bit of brashness, the night before, I bragged about how I like to paddle. So, after drinking 5 or 6 glasses of water before leaving the house, I was the canoe's silent motor. We were all pretty silent, actually. Hugo guided us through the myriad canals of Hamburg. We an incredible way to see the city! We stopped for coffee and ice cream on the edge of Außenalster, the larger of Hamburg's two lakes.

There we met up with Benedikt for coffee and ice cream, another German traveler we had hosted in New Orleans. He came a month after I proposed to Annette. After a couple of nights of drinking with him, I ended up with a "Game Over" shirt with an Atari-like image of a couple at the altar. We talked a bit of sailing and the triathlon he was competing in the next morning. We made plans to meet up that evening at the "Dialogue in Darkness" museum before we paddled on our way.

We paddled across the lake in the middle of the city and back through the canals under the bridges. Supposedly Hamburg has more bridges than Amsterdam or Venice, but Hamburgers are skeptical about whether this is rumor of fact. Regardless, that is a lot of bridges to count.

We made it back to Altona for a late lunch with not quite enough time for a much-needed nap before heading back out to meet Benedikt and Doris at the museum. Doris and Benedikt had already made reservations and there was some question about whether the tour would be full or not. We arrived before them only to find that we couldn't get a spot on a tour until Tuesday morning. But, at five minutes to five, when we met Doris, she said she had called in advance and got us a spot on an 8 pm tour that evening. And that we could wander a bit and they would join us for the 8 pm tour and translate a bit for us (as it was in German). So we wandered around HafenCity and Speicherstadt.

Speicherstadt is the world's largest warehouse district, according to Lonely Planet. Each warehouse has water on one side and a road on the other. Goods mostly come in via water and out via road. Cranes built into the roof help lift goods up as many as six stories from water craft delivering rugs, coffee, etc. The long brick buildings are each around a century old.

Then there is HafenCity--a behemoth redevelopment of the waterfront costing in the billions of dollars and two decades of time. When all is said and done, it is supposed to house 6,000 people and employ an additional 20,000. The area is an architect, planners, and perhaps a certain kind of tourist's dream. Otherwise it seems the opposite of Hamburg's charm with its huge modern glass buildings.

The Dialogue in Darkness is a 90-minute simulation of blindness. It is a tour led bz a woman named Cindy (at least our's was), who is 90% blind. And it is dark. For the whole tour, I cannot see my hand one inch in front of my face, despite my best efforts. There are about 10 people in our group and the tour is led in German. Annette and I are the only non-Germans. Benedikt and Doris translate some of what is said for us--primarily instructions about the next room, where the door is, follow the wall, follow Cindy's voice, etc. We are each issued canes at the beginning to feel our way and then we enter utter darkness. And what was there at the beginning of the tour for me was fear. At first, my eyes strain to see. But they can't. I realized I usually still rely on my eyes even in darkness. Usually the darkness is not complete. My eyes adjust and I can see and feel my way through. Here there was no seeing at all.

We started by walking through a simulated forest, grass beneath our feet, birds chirping. We worked our way across a wooden bridge over a stream and then over a larger hanging bridge. We crossed a street in traffic. We rode a boat. We walked through some sort of spice factory. We went to a bar and bought a Fanta and had a seat in the dark. We listened to music. There was dialogue throughout about the experience, little of which I understood.

As we continued, I found myself settling into the experience without sight. I felt safe, realizing they designed the whole museum for people who usually see to walk through without seeing. So, trip hazards, shin-breakers, and places to bump my head would be minimal. With that in mind, I began to explore and feel what I could find, smell, hear, taste. The learning curve for somebody losing their sight must be incredible. The amount of available information out there, and able to be stored in one's memory to use when there is no sight is tremendous. Mostly we ignore it or don't notice it.

After the museum, we said goodbye and thank you to our hosts, wished Benedikt luck on his triathlon and headed for Altona to sleep off the night before in time for the weekly 5 a.m. Sunday morning Fischmarkt (Fish Market).

The next morning we made it there before 7 a.m. in a light drizzle, in time to see a healthy mixture of drunk people still out from the night before and families just waking up. The Fischmarkt has everything from purses and pigeons to smoked salmon and fishburgers for sale. It serves beer or coffee (the latter with our without alcohol in it). Food can be eggs and home fries (3 fried eggs on a heaping plate of home fries) or fish for breakfast. The main building in the mostly outdoor market is a four-story brick hall, about 150 meters in length. It has stages at both ends with bands alternating from 5 until 9:30 a.m. The band we caught played British rock and punk. They were middle-aged rockers with ample energy and a smoke machine on stage. They played tracks like, "Summer of '69," "We Are the Champions," and "Rebel Yell." "With a rebel yell, she cried more, more, more!" we shouted alongside 100 or so others. So, we danced the sleep away, ate fish sandwiches and pondered if it was too early for a beer. A security guard chided me for drinking from my water bottle, making it seem illegal in the Fischmarkt.

We warmed up on the dance floor and moved outside to walk what turned out to be easily 2 km, as the fish market continued from Altona to St. Pauli along the Elbe. Most of the booths were the backs of trucks with sides that fold down. Crowds gather around a plant "auction" for lack of a better word. Another around a fish truck. They gather not so much to purchase goods as to enjoy entertainment. The truck becomes the stage and the vendor is quite the improv comedian. Even without speaking German, it is heavily entertaining.

We left the fish market with full and warm bellies and spirits, despite the drizzle. We crossed over the bike leg of the triathlon to get to the S-Bahn stop back to Altona, for a liesurely Sunday morning of napping, watching movies and roasting a chicken.

Amsterdam: The Lost Blog

I am learning to be lost. For most of my life, I have prided myself on being smart, on knowing. I skipped kindergarten because I knew my letter people. I did well on tests and got scholarships. I won awards for being smart. I think of myself as a quick study, who can navigate a place, situation, even people with ease to get where or what I want. So, I am practicing not knowing. I am practicing embracing being lost. And of course, Europe provides lots of opportunities. Now that we have a little car (Renault Wind Coupe Convertible) with maps by country (mostly not detailed enough to navigate many of the major cities) and street signs we mostly cannot read, we find ourselves triangulating directions at best. And generally we find our way. It is probably not the quickest way, but who cares.

We spent two days in Amsterdam before the cold and rain chased us from a wet tent at Het Amterdamse Bos campground in Amstelveen to a warm house where our friend Nancie is staying in Hamburg, Germany. I have now been to Amsterdam twice and cannot explain it. I know the city is designed in the shape of an amphitheater with Central Station occupying center stage. Canals and streets go out from there to form aisles and rows. And the major museums occupy the place the sound booth often is in the middle of the audience, half way toward the back of the seats from the stage. And I know a lot of English is spoken there, far more than in Paris. But that’s about all I know. You can find some of the best marijuana anywhere for sale in coffee shops across the city. But, somehow, you cannot buy alcohol in the same place you can buy marijuana. And magic mushroom shops dot the landscape. As far as I can tell from the pamphlet, they sell “truffles” which are the psychedelic mushroom roots, but not the mushrooms themselves, which somehow makes them legal under the Opium Laws. Mostly, I don’t know what the laws are in each country, and hope they are similar to America and follow some sort of common sense. So, we tried a bit of everything, along with some French fries with mayonnaise and the ever-present doner kabob stands. And it was an adventure, sometimes fun, often confusing. It didn’t make sense in any way I am used to, but I think it is good to be lost. And with some psychedelic assistance, Amsterdam made some impressions on me, but mostly I made my impressions of Amsterdam, and this is a sampling of them.

I am scared of Amsterdam. It is a place where marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms and prostitution are legal and a major part of the economy (so far as I can tell). It is like I have a dark side that is at risk of being unleashed if I stay in Amsterdam too long. I will get lost and stuck and never leave. I will be high and working my life away in a coffee shop selling weed to pay for my habits or pay off my debts. There was a coffee shop there which was designed like a jail, and it felt like it was a jail veiled like a coffee shop. And in my hallucinations, beautiful women lead high men into the back room where there is a series of dungeons. The guys end up broke and never find their way home. And it is all like an M.C. Escher painting, where the entrance is the exit is the entrance. When you go up to the top of the stairs you end up at the bottom, so you can never find your way out. Fortunately, I just needed to hold Annette’s hand and she led me to the entrance, which was a door that seemed to me to move every time you head in its direction. Upon reflection, Amsterdam must be Wonderland, perhaps making me little Alice.

And along the trip in Amsterdam with my minds thoughts magnified, I figured a couple of things out. 1. Stop trying to figure things out. Get out of my head and enjoy the moment. 2. Being an overly careful or fearful traveler gets in the way of good travel. Use common sense precautions, but not everybody is out to take my stuff. 3. Follow your wife. Even if she gets us lost, it beats the alternative (me getting us lost and/or her being unhappy). 4. Getting lost is good sometimes. It leads to growth and new experiences and it makes getting found even better).

So, in the rain and cold yesterday afternoon, we headed for Hamburg. I expect we will be here for a while.

Paris

 “The way you start is the way you end,” was a saying Kyshun used often in talking about our work at Operation REACH. I don't think that will be true this trip. Tomorrow morning we pick up our Renault Wind Coupe Convertible and exit Paris for Amsterdam, leaving our first international stop behind us. With it, I hope to leave the weight of the first stop. As one who has committed to a year of traveling, planned for months, talked about it for even longer, budgeted, interviewed people, discussed, debated, decided and decided not to decide yet on many things related to “the trip,” the first stop carries a lot of weight. Behind our daily decisions is the subtle but driving goal to be good at traveling, to have done the right thing, to know our way around, make good decisions. Because, after all, if we cannot navigate a metropolitan city like Paris, how will we travel in the Gambia or Calcutta? And during the brief moments I stop judging my own decisions (Am I spending money wisely? Am I reading maps right? Are we missing some important sight or place we will regret later?), I am busy judging my travel partners ability to navigate a foreign country. And somehow in my judgment, all people I know and love (including myself) deserve death, but all strangers deserve the compassion and forgiveness of a saint. Funny how that works. And so with that perspective, I will write about our last few days in Paris.

Paris is an absolutely beautiful city, particularly in the summer time. One can't help but feel like the urban planners of days gone by far exceed today's. The parks, the cobblestone, the cathedrals, the architecture, the metro system. It all reveals a wisdom and foresight far beyond today's standard. And the people are generally beautiful too. All of them, Parisians, Italian tourists speaking their boisterous and beautiful native language, the Africans selling Eiffel Tower key chains, the French military armed with machine guns patrolling the Eiffel Tower for potential terrorism, black folk from all parts of Africa and Europe, Tunisians, Turks, throngs of tourists of all races photographing the Mona Lisa, the Sammy Hagar-looking German dressed in the white linen of some spiritual practice, Moroccans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Pakistanis with their fruit stands at the entrance to the Olympiades metro station, the Jews at the Chez Hannah self-proclaimed “best felafel in the world” (perhaps they own it, because they don't work it, but the Stars of David are everywhere). Well, perhaps except the American college student. I have always felt that exchange programs for the most part float the American college fraternity and sorority bubble overseas for a semester in a different setting with the same experiences as home.

The Notre Dame is a magnificent Cathedral. Hard to imagine it being built in a time without power tools, trucks or computer design programs. The Sacre Coeur is equally as beautiful and sits on the good shoulder of the city above the windy streets of Montmarte with a saintly view. And the Louvre, where one finds oneself alternating from admiring the art installations to the building and architecture itself. The various gardens with their fountains and ample chairs, the Luxembourg, the Eiffel Tower, the random old buildings, the cobblestone streets, the creperies, the boulangeries, the trattorias, the epicuries, the brasseries with their chairs crowded along the sidewalk, all facing toward the street and overflowing with people drinking at happy hour, the Seine elegantly winding through the city's center with its tourist-packed tour boats and its evening lovers stretching out on its banks. It is Paris. Far better authors than I have described it far better than I in poetry, music and prose of days gone by.

Suffice it to say that all in all, we did Paris well. We walked it for hours each day, always stumbling into something beautiful and special. We found good live music daily, ranging from street musicians with drum sets and pianos to a free concert in the park with charming female folk guitarist Lail Arad (“Everyone is Moving to Berlin”) and local rock band Shaka Ponk (Annette doesn't want me to describe them as a French version of the Black Eyed Peas, but they seemed to have similar theatrics, lights and video). (Of course, that description is based on one hour watching Shaka Ponk and seeing the Black Eyed Peas Super Bowl half time set last year and one of their videos). We drank wine and ate crepes and baguettes in various parks while watching people of all ages play ping pong (next time I come to Paris I am bringing my paddle.) Yet despite all of the charm and beauty of Paris, I cannot help but be struck by how much of the history is a history of imperialism and egotism (leaving some impressive physical legacy). The Louvre would take days to explore, and seems to be an advertisement for how great its various Kings and other creators were. And the magnificence of Christianity is on full display in the cathedrals, just in case anybody was wondering if this religion was legit. The Sacre Coeur has a 20 meter Jesus blessing all races on the inside of its incredible dome over the altar, seeming to make a case for proselytizing further, wider and with more force. These buildings are decorated with knights and warriors on horses, lions and chariots. As the British Museum taught me many years ago, national museums are often showcases for the spoils of centuries of victory. France's is impressive and filled with depictions of Jesus bleeding.

Updated Itinerary

We fly out tonight to Paris. Our itinerary for the next few months looks like this:

July 7th - 11th: Paris
July 12-20th: Amsterdam and Hamburg
July 21st-28th: Bergen, fjords and Norway
July 29th-August 1st: Stockholm, Sweden
August 2nd-5th: Gdansk, Poland to Berlin, Germany
August - Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal
September/October: Morroco, Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso
November: South Africa, Nimibia, Botswana
December: East Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt
January: India
February/March: Southeast Asia
April-June: South and Central America.

Traveling On

It’s interesting how travel changes your perspective on what’s important. When we flew back from Mississippi last week we had to detour through the Upper East Side of Manhattan for 15 pounds of Kosher ground beef at $10/pound. This was for a party she was catering nearby (Carlucci-Simons Catering). While I languished at a prolonged layover in Atlanta airport, Annette took a cab to get the meat from a man named Malachi, then on to Grand Central terminal to catch a two-hour Metro North commuter train to Wassaic where we picked up our car and drove another hour to my dad’s. We got the kosher ground beef to the catering kitchen the next morning. Grand Central, by the way, is a culinary delight. I have never seen such good food and food choices in any station, terminal, airport or other travel hub.

This morning as we prepared to depart my dad’s house in Ghent for the final trip via Grand Central station for international lands, Kyshun called. He updated me on all that has been happening in the two months since I left Operation REACH in New Orleans. What seemed so important to me only a few months ago already felt like a distant world. One that I once knew but now wonder how I could have been so intricately involved and interested in it all.

This morning I found myself preparing a travel repair kit—wrapping a golf pencil in duct tape because it’s not worth the weight of the whole roll, wrapping extra backpack straps with rubber bands to keep them compact and organized. I wondered if my backpack zipper would hold, or rather for how long before it would blow out again. These little details seemed like they might become mighty important over the coming year.

As we rode the train to the subway to my sister’s place in Brooklyn for one final night before our Icelandic Air flight, I reflect on the last few days. I managed to swim every day for the last six days. Perhaps a good life can be measured by the number of days one goes swimming—or the number of times one gets to go in the water per day (more is better). My brother-in-law Rob, who did the around-the-world trip with my sister, Ellie, about 15 years ago that inspired ours, advised that when travel gets hard, there’s always a beach not far away.

Annette and I spent the last three nights in the Adirondacks at Lifwynn Camp, 80 acres accessed by boat on Upper Lake Shattagay. The camp is 90 years old. It is pretty civilized—with cabins and wood stoves, a springerator and pumped water—for having no electricity and an open-sided outhouse with a flag to let people know it is occupied. There were about twenty of us in all, including my sophomore year roommates and several of their families. Lifwynn means the joy of life and is aptly named, as sometimes the joy of life includes large amounts of biting flies. The sounds of the loons are magical. The smell of the moist morning forest seems to touch every sense. And then there are the stars. These were the kind of stars that turn us all into amateur astronomers, connecting dots of Cassiopeia, the dippers, Pleiades, a scorpion whose name I don’t know. They are the kind of stars that call you to paddle the canoe into the middle of the lake and lie on your back. But you still can’t see them all. Stars above and a lightning storm on the northeastern horizon, accented by clouds that glow with each strike. After twenty minutes or so, the lake reminded us of its power. The wind picked up. Waves rocked the boat. Suddenly the storm seemed near and Derek and I paddled for shore in the darkness to see the end of the campfire and say goodbyes and goodnights for our morning departure.

Hill Country Weekend

June s26^th, 2011

Hill Country Weekend

2,000 people, 28 Boston butts, more than 600 pounds of pulled pork sandwiches, 100+ pounds of catfish and chicken each, four restaurant pans of cole slaw, more than 20 bands, and about six versions of Hill Country standards like “All Night Long.” The 2011 North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic added up to maybe 12 hours of sleep for the whole weekend. We partied hard and worked harder.

It used to be that Annette would talk about our inheriting Foxfire Ranch someday and my eyes would glaze over. It always seemed like far too much work for the reward. And I would need to learn how to drive a tractor. But after this weekend, I saw how much fun it can be and how much potential it has. And the weekend provided plenty of opportunities to contribute. I also see how critical a role it plays as a large and small outdoor venue for the Hill Country Blues. Annette’s parents opened it in 2009, a few months after Annette and I started dating.