Schwebebahn und Brake

In Wuppertal, their public transportation includes the Schwebebahn instead of a normal train. This train hangs from a rail that travels above the streets. Ginette took me to Wuppertal last week and we got on the Scwebebahn and took it all the way to the last stop and then back again. Wuppertal is well known for its wide variety of churches, most of which are "sehr schön" (very beautiful). It was a lot of fun riding all through the city looking at the architecture. I'll post some pictures of the Schwebebahn on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation

Friday, right after class, we loaded up with backpacks and our trusty terrier sidekick Paul and took off for a weekend at Oma's (Grandma's). Ginette's mother lives in a town called Brake near Hertford and Bielefeld. It's about a two hour drive north of here on a good day (more on that in a bit).

Brake is about as rural as it gets here I think. The population is probably somewhere from 3-5 thousand. I can never tell though. Unfortunately Germans don't put population signs up, and the people are squished into much smaller spaces than they are in the United States. A town here may have the area of a very small city but the population of a much larger one. Brake has quite a bit of farmland around it where they harvest corn, asparagus, beats, etc. But even farmland is way different. Some of these farmers have to try to squeeze a field into an area the size of a Nebraskan's back yard.

Oma's home is a very large, very old house. It was built in the 1800's and was once a bakery. Since then, they have renovated it into a home, but kept much of the original style. She now rents parts of it out. I put a few pictures on getjealous. It was really nice staying there for the weekend. We had a wood stove burning and bird feeders outside. I woke up before everyone on Sunday morning and sat with a cup of tea enjoying the quiet and watching the Nuthatches and Chickadees bicker amongst themselves for the bird seed. It reminded me of Sowbelly Canyon in Western Nebraska. Oma is a splendid cook, and it's just like visiting Grandma in America. You always eat too much, sleep better than you would at home, and are never ready to leave.

There are several things I learned throughout the weekend at Oma's:

1) How a two hour trip becomes much longer: Ginette's car is rather old and objects to hills. The minimum speed limit on the autobahn is 60km/h. At times we were going 50. Poor little Mitsubishi. This is one way to extend the length of a trip. Another is a 16km long traffic stand still. Ginette always gets off right away and drives around through towns on smaller highways until she sees an on-ramp that's not backed up. This saves more time than the cars still on the autobahn, but still lengthens the trip considerably.

2) If at all possible you should avoid making regular potty breaks at autobahn rest stops. Why? Because there's a 70 cent fee to use the bathrooms. My stall was even out of toilet paper. What a rip-off! They do give you a little 50 cent coupon to buy something, but they know that 80% of the people won't actually use it... they're sneaky alright! This was probably the most shocking experience I've had in Germany thus far.

3) How to efficiently peel a hot Kartoffel (potato) after it's been cooked. They don't eat baked potatoes here, they eat boiled potatoes. And they don't eat the skins. They boil them and then skin them afterwards.

4) Cutting your potato with your knife is an absolute NO NO! It's considered very rude in Germany. You may only use your fork to dissect your potato. It made me giggle when Kolja was scolded at the dinner table for this... nobody mentioned it when I did it the night before, but I'm glad I learned this with my family and not in a more formal situation.

5) Hedgehogs are abundant in Germany. And terriers love to hunt them. It's virtually impossible for a dog to catch a hedgehog before they roll up into their tight little balls. When they're rolled up they can't be harmed by the dog. Well, I've learned that Paul has supercanine powers. He is somehow able to catch hedgehogs before they roll up. He's obsessed with it too. Even when his mouth is bleeding from the spines, he will not let a hedgehog go. Oma loves hedgehogs and feeds them so they stay in her gardens. I think you all see where this is going. We had a bit of a dramatic incident as we were loading up to go home. Pouring water on Paul was the only way to get him to release the poor critter. But after the battle was said and done, the traumatized hedgehog was not mortally wounded, and Paul received absolutely no sympathy for his bloody gums. He was repeatedly called a "Dummkopf".

All in all it was a splendid weekend. Today I began my last week of German Class. We are officially speaking only German around the house now. I'm getting along pretty well, but require everyone to speak VERY slowly... and to be patient with the lag-time while my brain translates German to English (what I can translate that is), processes a response (consisting of very few words due to my meager German vocabulary), translates it to German, and tries to get my tongue to utter the foreign sounds. I'm sure I appear to be lacking intelligence when this sequence takes place, but they are all very understanding.

Wednesday will mark a whole month in Deutschland! It's baffling how quickly it's going.

First Inbound Orientation

Today was my first inbound orientation. Dr. Probst and Dr. Staeding from my host Rotary club took me to Bonn for the meetings. There are about 75 students from all over the world in district 1810. We all introduced ourselves by country and then were oriented on the Rotary rules... again... Then we were allowed to mix and mingle and meet everybody. It was a lot of fun, and I exchanged a lot of pins! My jacket is filling up quickly! =) I posted a picture of the whole group on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation.

After the meetings, we drove to the hotel where the UN Conference on Afghanistan was held in December 2001. It's a really beautiful hotel with a fantastic view of Bonn and the Rhine River. There's also a random castle nestled into the hillside visible from the patios of the hotel. There are pictures on getjealous.

It was beautiful weather for the orientation, but it just started raining again as we were getting home. Typical.

Future events:

Sept. 16 I will attend my first Hilden-Haan Rotary Club meeting. Topic: J.S. Bach =)

Sept. 17-19 Weekend visiting Ginette's mother

Sept. 23 The final for my German Class in Düsseldorf

Sept. 24-26 The District 1810 Rotex Club is throwing all the inbounds a slumber-party weekend. =)

Sept. 26-27 Haan Kirmes! The annual 4-day fair of Haan. It actually goes from Sept 25-28, but I will be at the Rotex weekend until sunday morning, and then will have school on Tuesday. Gymnasium Haan doesn't have school on Monday because of Kirmes.

Sept. 28 My first day at Gymnasium Haan!

Oct. 2-3 Hilden-Haan Rotary club's sister club from England is visiting. We will attend a French Impressionism art display! =)

Kleine Unterschieder

I've established a list of kleine Unterschieder (little differences) that may seem quite trivial, but I found them interesting.

1. Emergency exit signs are not red, they are green with a little man running toward the exit.

2. Stop lights not only turn from green to yellow to red, but also from red to yellow to green. I've decided this must be because nearly all cars here are manuals. An extra second before you can go gives them a chance to put it back in gear...

3. Door 'knobs' are non-existent here. I have yet to see one. They are all handles. Ginette told me that she saw a door knob one time and it took her a long time to figure out how it worked. That made me giggle.

4. Windows here don't usually have screens. They also have two opening options. I haven't seen a window that slides like most American windows. Instead they have option one: turning the handle 90 degrees will open a window out like a door. Or option two: turning the handle 180 degrees will keep the bottom of the window in place and the top will fall in toward you a few inches. Straaaange, but option two conveniently keeps the rain out.

5. Window shades are on the outside with a pulley contraption from the inside to lower them. If you're real sophisticated they might be automatic with just a button. =)

6. Right on red is not legal. But most people do it anyway.

7. Chevy's are really rare, but I saw my first one yesterday. It was a blazer. I've only seen two pickups since I got here. One was some sort of metro pickup. The other was a Dodge Ram. I never thought I'd be excited to see a Dodge, but I was.

8. All the light switches here are those ones that are like plates that work like teeter-totters. But I think they're backwards from the ones in America. You push in the bottom of the plate for on and the top of the plate for off. I don't know if I explain it well enough but I can't find the name of the switch. But they don't have the up and down switches that a lot of Americans have.

9. Public bathrooms are usually two separate rooms; one for the toilet and one for the sink. This is rather efficient for one-seaters, because the next person can go in while you're washing your hands.

10. Toilet flushers are never handles. They're like big buttons and they always have a little picture of a hand and water waves just to makes sure you know the function.

11. Many people don't have dryers. They hang their clothes out to dry. Except it's usually raining so they actually hang their clothes IN to dry. They make clever use out of stairway banisters and the backs of chairs.

12. Hardly anybody drinks normal water here. It's almost always carbonated mineral water. I'm starting to get used to it, but it makes me burp. Nobody else seems to have that problem so I must just be strange. Or maybe they have a discreteness I could benefit from acquiring.

13. In Germany it's not three-ringed binders, but TWO-ringed. It's actually not so bad. I would normally worry about the corners flying so free, but when their in the binder they're fine. It makes hole punches much more compact. (I know, trivial, but interesting)

14. In German, bitte means please and you're welcome, and danke means thank you. However, in restaurants, the waiters say bitte as they hand you your food kind of as a "here you go. enjoy." It was really awkward the first time this happened to me because it was like they were saying you're welcome before I got the chance to say thank you. I just stared at the waitress in confusion for a minute and then mumbled "danke??" I'm getting used to it now, but it still seems so backwards.

Neanderthals, Hombroich, and Architecture

On Saturday, Ginette took me to the dig-site of the oldest man found in Germany. The Neanderthal museum had several nature trails with modern art dispersed throughout. The site was in a cave when he was found, but was dug out and the cave is no longer there. Afterward we had tea and visited a graveyard in a historical neighborhood. Cemeteries in Germany are a bit different than in America. When you buy a plot in a cemetery, you actually own it. You can plant a little mini garden around your stone and put whatever you want in it. I included a picture of a plot on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation. I apologize if you are new to my blog and want to see the pictures from earlier posts. Getjealous gives me a limit on the number of photos I can post so I have to delete some of the older ones.

On Sunday, we visited Museum Insel Hombroich and Raketenstation Hombroich near Neuss. On the way there I saw a tractor tilling a field. It reminded me of home! Hombroich is out in the country and is an artist haven. It's full of modern architecture that houses several artists who display their work all around the grounds. Sunday was beautiful weather, so we strolled leisurely through the parks to see all the beautiful architecture and art. I've posted a few pictures on getjealous. The architecture was extremely modern. They were all either brick or glass with edgy designs. One structure that was different than the rest was the Musik Palast at Raketenstation Hombroich (a former NATO base). This abstract building was going to be exactly what it sounds like, a music palace for musicians to live and perform in. It is, however, not finished because Karl-Heinrich Müller (the founder of this artistic corner of the world) died. Construction will hopefully resume soon, but funeral preparations, ceremonies, and mourning have been first priority for some time now. Müller was a musician and is now buried on the grounds of Museum Insel Hombroich. One of the artists living there built bird houses all around his grave "so he will always here the music of the birds".

At Raketenstation Hombroich, there is an amazing garden. The garden has a cement wall probably 7 or 8ft high built all around it. The wall goes about 17in into the ground to keep pesky rabbits and rodents out. This wall virtually eliminates wind in the garden, so it gets very warm. It's a perfect environment for growth. The layout of the garden is in a Japanese style with a maze of stone pathways through the vegetation and a large square pool of water in the center. The garden has only existed about three years, but it already produces spectacular plants. The produce like pears, tomatoes, grapes, apples, nectarines, and squash are all extremely large (and delicious looking)! The lady that was working in the garden was very passionate about her job. She was so excited to share all the information she knew about the plants and the museums. She would dash from plant to plant having us try different herbs and vegetables.

We ate lunch in the cafeteria at the Museum Insel Hombroich. They had delicious potatoes, breads, and homemade marmalades from the fruits of the garden at Raketenstation Hombroich. YUMMI! Then we meandered around through the modern buildings, looking at the different art displays. There were large displays outdoors like "Parliament" (a large circle of huge metal chairs) and a ring of stones with pictures carved into them. The mixture of nature and art made a delightful Sunday afternoon.

Ginette decided to take me through Düsseldorf on our way home to see the modern architecture of the Harbor. These were huge office buildings with very unique styles. One building had interesting patches of color in the glass windows. Another had these strange colorful creatures crawling up the walls. Pictures of some of the more interesting things are on getjealous. The craziest of them all were the three buildings side-by-side that were built by architect, Frank Gehry. Their shapes are out of control! One is white and one is a reddish brown color, and right between them is a building that knocked my socks off! It looks like waves and is covered in chrome plates that have interesting dents so it reflects the light in all sorts of directions. These buildings made me dizzy. I would get lost inside them. We drove by a more classical building that is an art institute. Ginette said they put on a big open-house every winter and that we will definitely go see it. Then she showed me a street of city houses. On one side of the street it looks like a place you should avoid at night. On the other is a row of houses painted with murals and bright colors. One house had very realistic bugs painted on it. Others were cartoon characters. The story behind this area is neat. These buildings were abandoned at one point, so a few people moved into them and fixed them up. They weren't paying rent because nobody knew who owned them. When the city started getting things together they came knocking on their doors saying they needed to pay rent, but the residents refused. They fought for a long time and won. They still don't pay rent. They only pay for their utilities, as opposed to the other side of the street. Ginette has a friend that lived there.

So after a wonderful weekend of site-seeing, I'm back in my German class trying to remember which article goes with which noun. I'm just not sure what they were thinking when they decided to stick random articles on nouns without any rules! I've also decided that Germans have officially overused the "sh" sound. I was looking in the dictionary for a word starting with sd today, and in a normal dictionary you get to sch and you start going one page at a time because you know you're close. Not so in the German dictionary. Sch goes on FOREVER! It seems like ever other word in conversation is sh this and sh that. It makes picking out different words even harder. But I've been really trying to learn as much German from this class as possible so I usually spend several hours trying to memorize vocabulary words. I fell asleep in the process today.

Villa de Hügel

Yesterday Ginette took me to visit Villa de Hügel in Essen. It's a mansion that belonged to the Krupp family. It was built by Alfred Krupp in 1873. The Krupps were a family of industrialists who were very prominent for their steel production. The mansion was their home as well as a representation of their industry. The home passed down through several generations. During WWII, it was under Bertha Krupp who married Alfred von Bohlen und Halbach. Alfred allied with Hitler (probably because a man with his fame had no chance of keeping it if he wasn't part of the SS). You know Big Bertha? Yeah that was named after Bertha Krupp. The mansion was extremely modern for the time. It had the most up-to-date heating system. It was similar to those used today. This was EXTREMELY modern for the time. I'm posting pictures on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation. The interior is mostly wood. It's a little dark for my taste. But the libraries are really nice... unfortunately they aren't completely full of books. But I dream of having a library like that someday. =) What I like most is the upper level with a railing in the library. The mansion consists of two "houses" that are connected with indoor passageways on two levels. The smaller house is a museum with displays history of the Krupp family. The larger house was where the family lived and has original furnishings.

The rooms on the main floors are very large. But in the upper level, the bedrooms and living space are rather small. The point of the house was to hold up their reputation. The entrance and dance halls are all on the first floor. On the second floor are more guest areas as well as a huge living room with a dome ceiling. The ceiling is made of many windows, so to save from always having to clean them, they built another area with a roof and lots of vertical windows above the dome. This protected the ceiling from the elements. While we were walking around the grounds I noticed this extra area with many windows and was really interested to know what it was. Turns out it has no usable space. What a waste of an amazing location and so many windows. For future reference, I would never do that. It should be an astronomy area or something cool like that.

The Villa sits on a very large acreage. In the days of industry, it was much larger with beautiful gardens and many houses for workers. The Krupps also built many houses in Essen for their workers. They even provided health insurance for their employees. This was very rare at the time. The mansion sits on the Ruhr River and Lake Baldeney. They had large private boat to take out on the lake.

After visiting Villa Hügel, we went to the lake and found Schloß Baldeney. It's a small castle right on the lake that's for sale for €4 million. It has it's own chapel and everything. I've been saying this whole time that I want to buy a castle while I'm here. This would definitely be a nice one. It needs a lot of work, but Dad could run the parish and Mom volunteered to be the grounds keeper. When I'm an architect I could manage the renovations. It sounds like a splendid idea to me. ;)

On our way home we drove by a HUGE Catholic church in Essen, so we stopped and looked around. Construction of this church began in 1250. It's amazing what kind of structures they could make before they had modern technology.

Ginette is really interested in architecture as well, so we talk about dream homes and renovation ideas. It's a lot of fun! We've both decided that a dream home is nothing without amazing gardens, so they landscaping is always included in our brainstorming. =)

Benrath

German class is going well. It's a little slow for my liking but it's good. Yesterday we visited Benrath. It's a pink palace (pink symbolized celebrity at the time) and gardens that were completed in 1770 for the Palatine Elector-Prince Karl Theodor. It was meant to be a summer/hunting estate, but he never really lived there at all.

French architect Nicolas de Pigage designed this mansion with the theme of nature in mind. It was extremely important to French architects at the time to have complete symmetry. So much so, that if there was a door on one side of a room but no door opposite it, they would make a blind door (area on the wall that looks just like a door but really leads nowhere) just to keep in symmetric. Opposite every window must be a mirror. I've been known to be obsessive compulsive about symmetry, so I really enjoy classic French architecture. The estate itself is also symmetric. With the main building in the center, two identical long buildings to the sides, and two small buildings on the outsides. The gardens are very important in the estate, with a French garden on one side and an English garden on the other, as well as ponds in front and back. They also have a moat! =) I'm posting pictures on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation because it's difficult to describe. We got a private tour of the interior, but pictures weren't allowed (I'm including some google images on getjealous). The palace has two identical sides (hence the symmetry). One side of the first floor belonged to Karl Theodor. It consisted of his private sitting rooms, bed chamber, and hall to entertain guests. The opposite side of the first floor belonged to his wife. It has an identical structure. In the center, is the entry, a sitting room, and the ballroom. In the ballroom, the ceiling is the hight of the entire house. There is a large opening in the center of the dome and you see a separate ceiling higher up with natural light, but you can't see the windows. This is a hidden room for the orchestra. The stairway to this room is upstairs. The point was to make guests feel like the orchestra was invisible and music was just there magically. Upstairs is the guest area with two guest suites on both sides (4 suites in all). The suites include a bedroom with 3 sitting rooms. In between the two suites is a larger sitting room for the guests to meet each other. This "second floor" is actually the third of 4 floors in the house. Between the first and third floors, and above the third floor, are servant floors. This allowed servants to move from room to room undetected by guests. Many of the doors leading to their stairways were camouflaged into the wallpaper. The floors are hidden by low ceilings on the main floors and the windows stretch through two floors giving the appearance of only two floors from the outside. Nicolas de Pigage was tricky! ;)

After a wonderful day feeling like I belong in a Jane Austen book, we hit the ice cream parlor. I had a blueberry citric liquor sundae. Of course I had to include a picture of that on getjealous too. =)