Steven Harper's Blog, page 52

What I'm Doing Wrong

According to the Internet:
--I shouldn't use my debit card at a gas station, grocery store, restaurant, hotel, ATM that isn't at my bank, or to buy anything on-line.
--I'm pooping wrong.
--I get upset too easily about social issues.
--I don't get upset enough about social issues.
--I'm feeding my cat the wrong food.
--I'm watering my plants wrong.
--I'm making cookies totally the wrong way.
--I shouldn't give my phone number out to anyone, especially to a web site.
--I should be using two-factor login verification by giving my phone number to the web site.
--I shouldn't drink sugared soda, diet soda, juice, coffee, hot cocoa, black tea, herbal tea, bottled water, or tap water.
--I shouldn't eat carbohydrates, proteins, or fat.
--I need to eat more vegetables.
--I shouldn't eat kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, peppers, celery, or root vegetables.
--I should be binge-watching all the incredible television and playing all these fantastic video games while thumbing through these 10 amazing apps that will change my life.
--I spend too much time in front of a screen.
--I should clean my house out of everything I own except a thumb drive of documents and personal photos.
--I should relax and not worry if my house is filled with stuff.
--I should exercise more.
--I'm at risk of injury if I exercise.
--I'm still pooping wrong.
Anything else . . . ?

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Germany--Well, Actually It's Switzerland

Before I came over to Germany, JK asked me if I would rather visit Paris or Switzerland during one of the family weekends, when no field trips were scheduled with students. I said Switzerland on the grounds that I’ve never really been a Francophile. So on Sunday we hit up Switzerland.

It’s always strange to American me that in Germany you can reach a whole lot of different countries with an easy drive. To a German, visiting another country is much like a Detroiter popping up to Traverse City or down to Cedar Point. It was a two-hour drive to Switzerland, and we barely slowed down when we crossed the border—no passport check. (See, Brexit people?)

Brief aside. I’ve visited the Appalachian Mountains any number of times in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and don’t like them much. I always feel hemmed in and limited and even a little claustrophobic. And heaven help you if you miss your turn somewhere because it’s three miles before you can turn around. 

And then there are the Alps.

The Appalachians are much older than the Alps and they've been ground down over a few zillion years, which is why they’re relatively stubby little things. The Alps are young and TALL and I loved them immediately. We came around a bend in the road and were suddenly on the shore of Lake Lucern, a calm azure lake between mountains with a town around the shore. The mountains near the lake sweep up to the sky, and behind them are even BIGGER mountains capped with clouds. I would be immensely happy if I could live there.

To get to the top of Mount Rigi, our target mountain, we boarded a rack railway, which looks like a regular street train, except a gear track runs up the center of the track. A gear in the middle of the train turns and hauls the train up, or prevents it from rushing down. It takes a long, long time to reach the top, but you don’t mind because the view is magnificent. The villages fall away, getting smaller and smaller. You pass tidy Swiss houses built into the side of the mountain, and they look crooked because of the angle you’re on. 

At the top is a small hotel and a whole lot of open mountain covered in grass and flowers and grazing cows. The cow bells mingle with church bells, while below the ground falls away, down sheer cliffs to the far-away houses. It occurs to you as you peer down the insanely steep, grassy face that if you went over the edge, you would die, and the mountain wouldn’t even notice. Far distant, the even bigger blue Alps go about their business like giants with their heads in the clouds.

We spent considerable time hiking around and exploring and enjoying the powerful view. Down below, we’d been sweating in shorts and polo shirts, but up here the air carried a bite of chill and we donned hats and jackets. I took three or four thousand pictures and made short videos.

Mount Rigi is 6,000 feet up, higher than Denver. I visited Denver several years ago and spent the weekend unable to run more than a few yards without gasping in the thin air. I wondered how bad it would be on Rigi, but I suffered no ill effects whatever. I had no trouble hiking up and down the trails and slopes. The Alps seem to have a Narnia-like quality to them, granting strength to everyone who visits.

At last it was time to head back down. The train ride down was just as resplendent as the trip up. The Swiss ticket-taker lady who rode the train and checked people in as they boarded was polite and funny with everyone, too. At the bottom, we collected the car and realized a small problem—it was early evening and we couldn’t get chocolate.

In Switzerland, stores used to be closed pretty much all weekend, but in recent years, the regulations have relaxed to encourage more tourism. However, even the new regs have their limits, and by the time we emerged from the parking garage, everything was closed. How could I buy Swiss chocolate when the stores were shut?

“Don’t worry,” said JK. “We’ll stop at a gas station.”

This we did, and here I feel compelled to point out that gas station chocolate in Switzerland is better than gourmet store chocolate in the USA.  I loaded up on quite a bit of it.

That evening, we arrived late in Stuttgart, too late to consider cooking for supper, so we drove around until we found a Doener place that was still open. Doener are to Germans what Chinese food is to Americans. Much like Chinese restaurants serve “Asian” food invented in America, Doener restaurants in Germany serve Turkish food that was created in Germany. A Doener is made of shaved lamb meat served in pita bread with a variety of vegetable toppings and flavoring sauces, and they’re insanely popular. We picked up a bagful of them and trooped back home for a tasty supper.

All this made for an intensely long weekend for JK after a long week of teaching, with another school week beginning Monday, and I let him know how much I appreciated the delightful outings.

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Germany: Family Weekend

The first weekend, no field trips were planned. This a Familienwochenende, or family weekend, in which the individual families do what they want. We later learned various families went horseback riding, took trips to France, toured Stuttgart, and more.

As for me, JK and AK took me to the Burg Hohen-Zollern. 

The Burg Hohen-Zollern ( https://www.burg-hohenzollern.com/) is a working castle. The prince and his family still live there, and a flag flies at the highest tower to indicate if he’s at home. The place is ingeniously built around a spiral ramp. To get inside, you have to haul yourself up the mountain to the castle itself (thank heavens for shuttle buses), then start up a sort-of driveway that curves around and around in a spiral around the castle and then finally into it. Naturally, if you’re part of an attacking army, there are plenty of places for defenders to throw dreadful things like arrows, hot pitch, and boulders down on you. The modern version is more welcoming, and is festooned with statues of Kaisers and other luminaries of Prussian history.

I love castles, and spend my time in them in a kind of happy haze. I adore trying to figure out which parts are original and which were added or changed. I live for trying to figure out who did what to whom and where and imagining what the place was like after it was first built.  I got to indulge myself fully here. 

Only limited areas of the castle are open to the public (it’s a private home, after all), but I explored everything I could, including the interesting cellars. Many levels wind themselves deep under the castle, connected with stone spiral staircases and low stone passageways lit only by dim electric lights. The original kitchen was down there, and is still used today to store the family china. I followed one passage and found an old guard room, and then another tunnel, and then a door, and suddenly I was outside the castle at the bottom!  I couldn’t get back in, so I had to wind my way around the spiral back up to the top to find JK waiting for me. (He grew up in the area and knows the castle well, so he mostly let me explore.)

Afterward, we had lunch in an interesting indoor-outdoor German/Italian restaurant/musical performance/petting zoo place at the bottom of the mountain. The place is popular for weddings, and during our time there, three sets of wedding parties came through! I had an embarrassing moment in which I insisted on paying for lunch, only to have both my cards turned down. (AK paid, and I later hit a cash machine to pay him back. I called the bank to complain, and they said they didn’t even have a record of an attempt at payment from the restaurant, so it must have been their credit card system at fault.) 

On the drive home, we stopped at JK’s parents’ place for a moment, and I met his father. We bonded over our mutual dislike of Donald Trump.

I have never met a European who likes Donald Trump. Like, =ever=. I was once in a taxi in Ireland and after I mentioned my effusive hatred of the baboon, said driver replied that he had never met an American who supported Trump. I thought about that and wondered aloud if it’s that baboon supporters don’t often travel outside the USA. The driver thought that might be the case, too.

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School Day

The first day after the party (Friday) was a school day, and the students followed their partners through their schedules. We learned that students went swimming in gym class, to the park for a biology lesson, and watched a judo demonstration. As always, they were impressed by the food in the cafeteria, which is prepared and served by parent volunteers and is more like a home-cooked supper than what Americans think of as a school lunch.

KL and I usually pop out to Esslingen proper for coffee and to plan upcoming events or solve problems. I always love coming to European cities, myself. The architecture, the narrow streets, the cobblestones, the wide variety of shops, the food, the street markets—every bit of it is wonderful.

In the afternoon, we met with the students, where they reported what they had done that day, with a certain amount of excitement and interest. 

That evening, I was wiped!

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Arriving in Esslingen

We rode the train to Esslingen. This was a six-hour deal, but I like traveling by train. Way more room and less stress than flying, more comfortable than by bus. The only problem we had was how to stash the luggage. German mass-transit is wonderful about a lot of things (cleanliness, ease, speed),  but they can’t seem to figure out how to design a train car with adequate luggage space for travelers. We had 26 people, all with two bags. There was literally no room for all the suitcases in the luggage racks, and we were forbidden from using the open area between the cars. In the end, we stashed bags behind seats and piled them in an extra seat that we’d bought for someone who ended up canceling. This also meant figuring out some serious logistics—the trains stop for three minutes at each stop, and if you and your luggage haven’t de-trained by then, you’re off for the next city.

We ended up doing a fire brigade. When the train stopped, a bunch of students debarked and the remaining students literally threw the suitcases onto the platform to them. We barely made it!

At Esslingen, a handful of students met us with SM, one of the teachers I knew. Joyful reunion! Then we gathered up our stuff and hoofed it about half a mile through hot, sticky sunlight to the school, where the rest of the families awaited us.  More joyful reunions! (Remember, the students all knew each other from the American end of the exchange.) The parents had brought a potluck supper and we had a little welcome party in the school’s cafeteria.

Here, I met JK for the first time in person. JK (I use initials because many Germans are more leery of social media) and I had been corresponding for several months by email. He was supposed to come to the American exchange to stay with Darwin and me, but he got injured and couldn’t fly at the last minute. (This is how we met and befriended CE, his substitute.)

Anyway, Jan and I got to meet and it was a fine thing. We got on quite well.  

The party ended early—everyone was tired and wanted to get home.  I saw the students off and hopped into JK’s car. In JK's apartment in Stuttgart (a short but winding drive away), I got the chance to settle in. JK is a biology teacher and a comic book geek (yay!), so the apartment is filled with exotic plants, fish tanks, and other interesting animals (including poisonous frogs, geckos, and a variety of insects). The apartment building overlooks the valley where Stuttgart lies, and the view of the mountains is striking in every way. On the balcony in the morning, we eat a breakfast of bread, cheese, and tea and listen to the church bells in the distance. You don’t get more German than this!

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Rushing About Berlin

KL is of the opinion that the students need to be tired out every day so they don’t have the energy to get into trouble in the evening. To that end, she requires everyone to walk everywhere, and quietly fails to let them know it would be possible to take the bus or train. The trouble is, I have very bad feet, and even the most powerful arch supports only take me so far.

By the end of one day, we had walked so many kilometers, my FitBit was jumping for joy. At the Reichstag Building, our final stop for the day, I was limping badly and wasn’t able to walk up the spiral ramp to the top of the famous glass dome that tops it. That was when I learned KL intended to have us walk back to the hotel—a 45 minute perambulation. I had to put my foot down, physically and metaphorically, so I drew KL aside.

“This is me telling you that I physically can’t walk back to the hotel,” I said quietly. “I know my body, and I’ll get at most a third of the way there before I won’t be able to take another step. So we have a couple choices. I can take the bus back alone and you can usher the students back to the hotel. Or we can split into two groups: bus riders and walkers. Or we call all take the bus.”

She offered up a fourth choice: let the students decide. “I’ll bet most of them want to walk,” she said. 

Well . . . 

When we put the choice to the students, every one of them voted for the bus. :)

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Concentration Camp

 

 

While in Berlin, we visited the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp  It was one of the bigger camps, though unlike many other camps, the main point wasn’t extermination (though over 10,000 people were murdered there). No, the point of this camp was work people to death.

Inmates were used for slave labor, especially in the brick factory, where conditions were the harshest. They were used as subjects in medical experiments, and more experiments were performed on their corpses. They were injected with cocaine and forced to run mile after mile after mile to test army boots. They were told to stand still to be measured for uniforms, then shot in the back of the neck. And more horrifying atrocities were visited on them.

The camp was also a major end point for gay men. This fact grabbed my attention more than anything else. 

The camp is a thousand-acre triangle, with some of the original buildings still standing and other buildings shown as outlines on the ground. It’s like walking through a park, except you keep finding reminders that thousands of people were tortured to death there.

I found on one wall set of photographs and stories about the gay men who were murdered there. One was a famous dancer. Another liked to dress in drag. Yet another had just met a boyfriend and was arrested moments later. It made me teary and angry and deeply mournful all at once. These were my brothers, and they had been tortured to death. More of them went to the brick factory than any other group.

The students had brought roses to place on one of the memorials by the ruins of the crematorium. I pulled from my backpack some chocolate—the most valuable substance in a concentration camp. Scattered about the lawn were huge ash trees, ones clearly far older than the camp itself. They must have witnessed everything. I put pieces of chocolate among the roots of one tree as an offering to my dead brothers and cried over them.

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Arriving

For the month of July, I helped chaperone a group of American exchange students through their trip to Germany. I didn't have time to post blogs while I was there, so I'm backposting them now. Enjoy!


We made it to Germany! Almost without incident, too.

Shepherding 24 teenagers through the airport and onto an international flight is always at least a bit of a challenge, especially with group good-byes and photos and such. But KL (the other teachers) and I managed it, and everyone made it aboard the flight.

The flight was boring and uneventful, just the way you want flights to be. But it =was= late, and when we landed in Frankfurt, we discovered we only had about half an hour to make our connecting flight to Berlin.

We were at Gate Z1. The connecting flight was at Gate A21. I’m not kidding you.

All 26 of us literally ran the entire length of Frankfurt airport, doing OJ Simpson wind sprints. We arrived, panting and sweaty, at the connecting gate just in time. 

In Berlin, we gathered up our luggage—no one’s was lost—and hopped a charter bus for the hotel in Alexanderplatz. The hotel caters to a lot of American tourists, and all week we heard a lot more English than German! However, there was also an international archery tournament on, so we also ran into a number of other countries. One day I got onto the elevator with a short Asian man. The two of us went down a couple floors, and the elevator stopped. Three men wearing Ukrainian archery uniforms boiled into the elevator. These guys were huge! It was like sharing the elevator with a herd of bulls. The other man and I were squished up against the elevator wall for three more floors. Then the Ukrainians bumbled off the elevator and we could breathe again.

We spent three days in Berlin, and KL and I shepherded the students around to various sites. They saw the remains of the Berlin Wall and the famous art painted on it. We took a bike tour of the city with a very good tour guide who explained quite a lot of Berlin to the students. We shopped along Kurfürstendamm. We visited the ruined/restored Gedaechtniskirche. 

I also got a little lost.

It’s true. We were all on an intercity train returning from a visit to a concentration camp (more on that later) and I was on a bunch of headache meds. I fuzzed out at the wrong moment and failed to get off the train with the group.

KL doesn’t have international calling on her phone and is only reachable when she has WiFi.  However, I was able to reach one of the students, who told me they were heading for the Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm. So I said I would meet them there. Fortunately, the German mass-transit system holds no mysteries for me, and I was able to work out a route, though a quirk of my location meant I had to take another train and then a bus. I arrived at the church after the students had seen it and had split up for some free time, so I window-shopped on the Ku’Damm and got some curry wurst from a street vendor. Heaven!

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Gay Book Reviews Reads Kevin

 And another Kevin review! Gay Book Reviews calls it “a story that is equal parts gut wrenching, life affirming and incredibly moving.” Yay! https://gaybook.reviews/2019/07/01/crabbypattys-the-importance-of-being-kevin/

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Guest Blog: My Fiction Nook

 I did a guest blog earlier this week, but my schedule in Germany is a little hectic and I haven’t had time to share it: https://www.myfictionnook.com/2019/07/blogtour-the-importance-of-being-kevin-by-steven-harper.html I have some truly strange and useless skills! 


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