Banana Kuchen and Bach

This will be my last post! Tomorrow we’ll spend the day following the sun west to Minnesota, and resuming "normal" life. It’s been so nice to hear that some folks have been reading this — thank you for sticking with it!

Last night we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary at the Schiffergeschellschaft restaurant, a few blocks from our flat. The building dates back to 1535 and hasn’t changed much since then. Here is what the interior looked liked in the 19th century:

.... and here's what it looks like now, along with a happy diner:

Today (Thursday, Feb 14) was our last full day here. This afternoon we took our final bittersweet walk in Lübeck. Our destination was the Dom cathedral for a free half-hour organ concert of Mendelssohn and Bach. Poor Gary — this is not his thing at all — but he obliged me and I really enjoyed it. I think a Bach sendoff was appropriate! Here is the Dom, a very old cathedral:

This church was founded in 1173 by Henry the Lion, completed in 1230. It stood for 700 years, and then was partly destroyed in WWII. Here is what it looks like on the inside. Not bad for a Lutheran cathedral!

The Dom had to be rebuilt following WWII.  The bombing of Lübeck is something I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s such a sad story because it was so unnecessary: the citizens of Lübeck refused to allow Hitler to campaign here in 1932, and he never forgave the town after being slighted. So choosing Lübeck as a bombing target was a terrible mistake in every way. 

Lübeck was the first German city bombed by the British Royal Air Force. Lübeck’s location between two rivers, which reflected moonlight under a full moon that night, made it an easy target. 234 British bombers dropped about 400 tons of bombs early on Palm Sunday, 1942, killing 301 people, leaving 15,000 homeless, and destroying much of the city center.

After the bombing raid, the air force commander said of Lübeck:  “It was not a vital target, but it seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city.” And that is how the decision was made to bomb this lovely old city.

Fortunately, this was the one and only bombing raid on Lübeck in WWII, but the results are apparent today. The center of the city has new buildings, surrounded by the original older ones. I would have loved to have seen Lübeck on Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday, in 1942.

*  *  *

On a happier note, after the concert we went to one of our favorite bakeries for our favorite kuchen, their banana kuchen. It even has a little marzipan banana on each slice. Not too sweet, lots of whipped cream with a hint of banana -- it's just perfection:

And that is the end of our story! We'll be leaving tomorrow morning for Hamburg Airport, then on to Amsterdam and to Minneapolis. 

The Countryside with Peter B

Peter B and I at the Baltic shore. It was brisk, but so clear and beautiful!

Our friend Sally back in the States arranged for us to meet another of her friends, who lives in Lübeck, also named Peter -- so now we know two people in Lübeck and both are named Peter. He was kind enough to pick us up in front of our flat yesterday and take us for a day-long drive out in the countryside nearby. As you can see by the photo above, it was a breezy day, but sunny and perfect for a day out in the country.

We started out by visiting a megalithic stone burial site:

... and Peter told us that there used to be many of these sites -- called Huenengraeber (giants' graves) -- scattered around northern Germany but the farmers who owned the land they sat on took them down! Argh!!! This set of stones used to be covered with a mound of earth, and underneath these stones is a small room where they buried people. Peter is showing me above how the people back then, 5500 years ago, used a tunnel in the side of the mound for access.

We also visited a large tourist shop (shown below) that's based on strawberries, where they make everything there in plain sight: bread, jellies and jams, soap -- you can even paint on ceramic and have it fired there. And of course oodles of things to buy! So I picked up a set of napkins with birds on them, for serving with kaffee & kuchen (which I have grand plans to do with friends when we get home, if I can learn to make a good kuchen).

I didn't take photos of all the places we visited, but we got around, and spent most of our time  in what used to be the GDR, or East Germany, which was Soviet-controlled until 1990. As I mentioned in my blog from the last time we were here, Lübeck was the only large city that sat on the border between East and West Germany, so the border was up-close and personal for people living here.

One thing we noticed as we drove around in the former GDR was the "allees": roads lined with trees.  They used to have these same kinds of allees in Western Germany, too, but as they continued to expand in the West during the Cold War time, they widened the roads. In East Germany they didn't do any improvements of that kind, so the trees are still intact.

We went for one last walk along the wild Baltic Sea, where development hasn't consumed large sections of shoreline like it has in former Western Germany. And we had lunch in a pretty resort town, Boltenhagen, northeast of Lübeck.

On our way southward from here, we were passing a farming village when Peter said that somewhere around this area is a flock of rheas (nandus) from Argentina, which have established themselves here after a few escaped from a private owner years ago. No sooner had he said it than we spotted a flock of them in a farmer's field! They were standing there just like whooping cranes do in Minnesota, perfectly at home in Germany. Apparently there are about 600 of them living in the area near the Wakenitz River. Peter said he had never seen a flock this large, so it was a treat for all of us.

From there we drove down to Schlagsdorf, southeast of Lübeck, to visit an interesting museum about the Soviet occupation in this area.

The maps below show where the border fence (or a wall in some areas, topped with broken glass) used to run. As you can see, it ran right along the water's edge in places, which blows me away. Living next to a lake with a deadly electrified fence between you and the water seems like unnecessary cruelty to those of us with Minnesota sensibilities. The map below also shows the places where there were border crossings between towns on the east and west. But crossing wasn't a possibility for people living in the east.

The museum also shows what the border fence used to look like, with electrified barbed wire, grenades, and of course the inviting watchtower. Back in those days you wouldn't be standing around so casually here. There was a buffer area of several kilometers along the border, and they even made people in nearby towns on the east side leave their homes to create a no-man's land there.

Some signs that used to be placed along the border

From there, as the sun was going down, Peter drove us down to a beautiful little town south of Lübeck: Ratzeburg, whose old cathedral and an assortment of elegant old buildings sit on an island in the Ratzeburger See. I wasn't able to capture the scene well with a photo so I'll use a stock photo from YouTube:

The Ratzeburger See is a long lake, running for miles north to south, and part of the eastern shore was abutted by the aforementioned border wall back in the day. Peter said that if you were out sailing or kayaking in a strong easterly wind and inadvertently ended up stuck on the eastern shore, you could expect to be apprehended and held for a few days, and that getting your boat back was a real problem. I imagine that messing about in boats on this lake has improved greatly since 1990.

Apparently you can travel from Lübeck to Ratzeburg by boat, with one transfer near a sweet little restaurant at the north end of the Ratzeburg See.  Gary and I really should visit this area in the summertime sometime!

England, Part II: Bath

Me, clutching my tour interpreter device, at the Roman Baths,
with Bath Abbey in the background

We've been wanting to visit England for a long time. The only place either of us had ever been in England was London, and it's been decades since then. A friend back in Minnesota (Sally, who used to live in England), asked her British friends for recommendations of places other than London for us to visit. The list was long and fun to think about, but one place came up quite often: Bath.  So we decided to check out Bath.

We spent a couple of days there, staying in an Air Bnb in the central part of the city. We didn't have any plan, just walked around, admiring things, and that's really all you need to do in Bath. There was a lot to admire; the town is old and beautiful and full of interesting shops and pubs that aren't corporate chains. The history is a bit mind-blowing, as Bath was the westernmost town in the Roman Empire. It really puts things in perspective, to think that the United States is (hopefully not was) just a short blip in the grand arc of history.

On one of our walks, we climbed the 212 steps to the top of the Bath Abbey and got a tour of the bell and clock tower:

Down a narrow passageway in the Bath Abbey tower you come to the back of the clock, which is about 6 feet across. The tour guide told of a tour a few years ago when a little boy pushed on one of these mechanisms behind the clock, inadvertently putting the clock out of commission for months and requiring about 20,000 British pounds to fix. I was surprised they still let tourists anywhere near these clockworks, but all they did was warn us, "Please don't touch anything," which is very trusting of them. We made sure we didn't touch anything!

Our tour guide at the Bath Abbey, playing a hymn on the big bells on this "keyboard". Perched near his right shoulder is the "sheet music": a stack of simple hymns to play on the bells, some of which weigh several tons. The bells also have long thick ropes that can be pulled when the bells are set to pealing all together; it requires a whole group 
of people to do it. 

We also walked on the Pulteney Bridge over the river Avon. The bridge was lined with shops, and looked like this from the back:

. . . and we had fish & chips & peas for lunch in the centuries-old Guild Market one day. Apparently serving peas with fish & chips is a thing there:

... and we spotted this interesting assortment of wild animal food in a window:

... and we met friends of Sally's and her husband Frank's: Phil and Helen, who live nearby. And would you believe I completely forgot to get a photo! We met at the Pump Room restaurant next to the Roman Baths and had an elegant lunch there (which Helen graciously sneaked off and paid for without us realizing it; eating out is not cheap in England!), accompanied by a pianist at a grand piano. Phil & Helen had to rush off to pick up their grandchildren, ages two and five, from nursery school (they were watching the grands for a few days) but we had a lovely and funny visit with new friends, which is always a treat.

After Phil & Helen left, we took a tour of the Roman Baths.

(stock photo from European-heritage.co.uk -- better than anything we could have taken)

The site of the Roman baths, which were built on a natural hot spring, was used by the Celts in the Iron Age as a place to worship a goddess named Sulis. After the Romans invaded and conquered this region in 55 BC, they spent about 300 years building the complex bath system (the United States still isn't 300 years old). The various rooms — separate for men and for women — consisted of a hot bath (caldarium), a lukewarm bath (tepidarium), and a cold bath (frigidarium). 

Amazingly, after the Romans withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century, the elaborately engineered bath system fell into disrepair, and through a series of floods was lost under silt and forgotten. But the supposedly curative waters of the hot springs continued to be used over the centuries as a place of healing.

It wasn’t until the year 1880 that the Bath city surveyor architect discovered the remains of the Roman baths. The site has been excavated and extended ever since. They're still excavating, and heaven knows what all they’ll eventually discover under the streets of current-day Bath.

You can still get a free drink of Bath water (which tastes just as bad as it sounds) at the Pump House restaurant.

We really enjoyed England; it's ancient and beautiful like Germany, but they speak English -- like a dream about a magical place that turns out to be real! 

England, Part I: Calne

This past Sunday, 6:30 a.m., we took a bus from our flat to the Lübeck bahnhof, a train to Hamburg bahnhof, another train to the Hamburg Airport, flew to Gatwick Airport in London (EasyJet: 70 eu total for the two of us, round-trip), then took a train to Chippenham (pronounced Chip'-in-im) where we were picked up by our Air Bnb host and driven to a little town called Calne. This trip took us from 6:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.  A lot quicker than when the Romans first settled in this area.

The little town of Calne isn't known as a hot tourist spot. It has been a market town on the road from Bristol to London since the 11th century, but its more recent history is based on bacon. In the late 1700s, pigs raised in Ireland were shipped to Bristol and herded to London. On their way they passed through Calne, and an enterprising fellow took it upon himself to buy pigs that weren't going to make it. By the end of the 20th century, Calne had became known for its large pork processing industry. The processing plant closed its doors in the 1980s, putting thousands of out of work. Since then the town has been clawing its way back up, and now is thriving again. We thought it was very pretty, to our American eyes, but apparently not everyone in that area thinks so. (They have never seen certain small Minnesota towns in winter!)



The reason we went to Calne, however, was to visit an illustrator, Christopher Dunn, whose work I've been admiring for a long time. His illustrations of forest animals are done in realistic style -- except that they are wearing pants. He's currently working on a fully illustrated version of Wind in the Willows. His website is here (https://www.chris-dunn.co.uk/) and I encourage you to take a look because it's a joy to see. 

Anyway, Christopher put out an unbelievable invitation on his website: that anyone visiting Calne should stop by for a visit. So we made it a point to visit Calne, arranging a visit beforehand, and his invitation was for real:  not only did we get to meet Chris and his wife and see his studio, we were even served tea. *sigh*  The whole thing was so overwhelming for me I don't even know what to write about it. I have so much to process. Hearing him talk about how he thought of this and how he did that, while standing in his studio looking at his sketches and one of his paintings in progress, was the highlight of my entire stay here in Europe. Like I told him and his wife, it was like meeting E. H. Shepard or Beatrix Potter.  Looking at the photo below, I still can't believe I was there!

Christopher Dunn and ME, in his studio, looking at the original pencil sketch of one of my favorite paintings of his, The Duke of York, which is now finished and is on his website

We stayed one night in Calne at an Air Bnb that was originally a carriage house. This place used to be owned by one of the Antiques Roadshow experts, Clive Farahar. Apparently the room that was now "our" bedroom was so packed with antiques the new owners couldn't even walk in it. And speaking of celebrities, we also learned that the nearby home of a friend of Prince Charles was the "secret" meeting place for Charles and Camilla back in the day. 

Our Air Bnb was the little house attached in the back here:

The proprietors of this place, John & Kathy, were so welcoming, they even left a fridge full of food (and Guinness!), and cooked us a lamb curry dinner! We had a good chat over wine afterward about our respective countries' politics and found that we were on the same wavelength. John and their dog Dexter even helped Gary look at properties for sale around the area:

From Calne we had to return to Chippenham to take the train to Bath, and John generously offered to drive us there. On the way, he stopped by two local towns, Avebury (Ave'-bree) and Lacock (Lay'-cock), which Christopher had mentioned to us as good places to see. Avebury is part of the Stone Henge system and has large rocks circling it. (Many people prefer it to Stone Henge, which is now overly commercial, they say.) It was a quick drive through, and it was raining, so I snapped some photos out the car window, approaching Avebury: 

... and some of the large, Stone-Henge-like rocks of Avebury:

(As you can see, they had just had a big snow, and the rain was melting it that day.)

John also drove us through Lacock, which is a national historic site (the entire town). In medieval times, Lacock was started near the banks of the river Avon at the edge of Melksham Forest, one of the royal hunting forests. The inhabitants were tenants of the Abbey, which was founded in the 13th century. To pay rent, they paid tithes -- plant crops, fleeces, etc. -- which were collected in a building called the Tithe Barn. The barn is still standing, and they say that except for a new roof, it has changed little since then:

The entire town of Lacock is old and seemingly untouched by time. It's the location of scenes from Harry Potter movies and Downton Abbey, and other shows and movies. I'd definitely like to return there, if I ever get back to England. 

However, we had a train to catch so we pressed on. 

Copenhagen

As you can see by the train schedule at the Lübeck bahnhof, shown above, the train to Koebenhavn (Copenhagen, 4th from the top) leaves Lübeck each day at 10:06 a.m. I've looked at this schedule board many times and have longed to be on the train to Copenhagen sometime. This past Monday, January 28th, we were on it!

Before we departed, I bought myself a bit of lunch (a little pizza) from one of the take-aways at the Lübeck bahnhof, for eating on the train. I have yet to see lunch counters or fast food places use styrofoam for to-go orders: they pack everything from sandwiches to pastries in biodegradable paper bags like this.

Our visit to Copenhagen was short: just two days. We figured we'd hit the high points and see if we liked it there, and as it turned out, we should have stayed longer, because we loved it. We felt at home there, probably because the Danes speak English well (they actually apologize if they speak Danish to you before realizing you don't speak Danish, which made me feel bad), but also because it's elegant and pretty, and because the Danes named the main street through town Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard. 

The train ride to Copenhagen is a four-hour trip from Lübeck (shown by the blue line below), a journey that requires a 45-minute ferry ride from Puttgarden, Germany to Rødby, Denmark. The entire train goes onto the ferry, and everyone disembarks and enjoys the ferry's duty free shop and sea views. 





Here's the view out the train window as we headed into the ferry:

And here's our train on the ferry, on the train and truck deck (can you tell I'm fascinated by the idea of a train on a ferry? I suppose Europeans think it's no big deal):

We walked along this narrow corridor to a door leading up via stairway to the passenger part of the ferry, which looked like this, with a cafe and a duty free shop:

We wandered around on the ferry and looked out the windows and stood out on the deck until it was time to go back down to the train. And then we were in Denmark, where the terrain was much like the terrain in northern Germany (and in Minnesota, for that matter): flat, with a few trees here and there, and lots of farms.

When we got to the Copenhagen bahnhof we did what we normally do: we found the Tourist Information office and asked about various things, including how to find our hotel. Unfortunately we didn't listen very well:  we took a long, circuitous route to our hotel and we eventually found it, about a block and a half from the bahnhof.

We stayed at an inexpensive but new hotel called SteelHouse, which is actually a new style of hostel. We used to stay in hostels in Europe before the invention of Air Bnb, but this one was a cut above what we've been used to. It had a big modern kitchen surrounded by windows, where people can cook their own food, and a game room and house-concert room for the younger folks. You can check in online at a bank of computers in the lobby, and everything is run by your room card, even the elevator. If you don't scan your room card in the elevator, you don't go anywhere, we discovered, until someone clued us in. 

Our room was teeny tiny: just a queen bed and bathroom, and a little bit of floor space so you could walk from one to the other. What does a person really need a floor for at a hotel anyway? The room had a TV and good internet and a shower and a hairdryer; the mainstays of life in the 21st century. The lights were automatic; you didn't have to bother yourself with turning them on and off, but I noticed that you had to flush the toilet and run the sink tap manually. Someday I suppose even that will be automated and we'll never have to touch anything again, just walk around making water taps run and lights go on and off. 

I admit, I felt bad for the housekeepers, though, as making the beds at this place requires kneeling on the mattress and tucking the sheets along the wall. I hate making beds like that, and can't imagine doing it every day, many times over! I hope they have a trick to make it easier.

Anyway, in our tiny room we set down our little shared backpack (we travel light) and headed out for a walk around Copenhagen. We walked past the Tivoli Gardens (the second oldest amusement park in the world, closed in January) and along a pedestrian walkway that wound along for blocks. It felt very safe and was lively with people.  

After about a kilometer of this, we arrived at our destination: Nyhavn, a collection of old houses from the 17th and 18th centuries along a canal with swans in it (who appeared to be doing some mating dances -- heavens!). 


Here's me at Nyhavn:

And here's Gary, looking like a character from some Danny Kaye movie, admiring the clear water in the canal:

From here we walked through the Christianborg Palace (seat of Danish Parliament), and started looking for a place to have dinner. We noticed two helicopters hovering overhead, and the main road was blocked off by the police. My royalty radar was on full alert, even though I knew I wouldn't recognize the Queen of Denmark even if she rode past in a horse-drawn carriage. We came upon a gathering of people in front of the town hall who were waving Danish flags and cheering, and we learned that Denmark had just won the 2019 IHF World Men's Handball Championship, and that the team would be appearing on the balcony at any moment. So that was what all the fuss was about! We didn't know anything about handball or the team, so we continued on, happy to see so many people so happy.

Day Two in Copenhagen

On our second and final day in Copenhagen (we would have stayed longer if we knew we'd love it there so much), we visited the National Museum of Denmark, where they have an amazing collection of Viking artifacts -- we had no idea so much has been unearthed from that era -- and a great history of Denmark from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages too -- right up my alley. I was too busy gawking to take many photos, but I managed to get a photo of these things:

I thought these were part of a modern art installation set inexplicably in the middle of the Bronze Age exhibit, but I learned that these are Lurhorns, "used to create an atmospheric background for Bronze Age rituals." This strikes me as very odd: they had all they could do to make bronze items just to survive through a day, and they made these fanciful horns? So bizarre. All of these lurs were found in bogs around Denmark (as were most of the items in the Danish pre-history part of the museum, including a few human bodies).

We had lunch of open-face Danish sandwiches and beer in the museum cafe, then walked over to the Bertel Thorvaldsen museum. I had never heard of Thorvaldsen: he was a Danish sculptor (1770-1844) who was extremely prolific in his lifetime, carving what seems like hundreds of marble statues, busts, and reliefs, which can be found all over the world. He carved marble in a classical Greek style, such as this one:

... and he's buried in the courtyard in the middle of the museum, which was his request. 

After this, we had to say farewell to Copenhagen, sadly, as we had tickets for the ferry back to Germany that evening. We went to the bahnhof and bought tickets for the train to Malmö over the new (since the year 2000 anyway) 4-km bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden. We arrived just as the sun was setting, so we had to wander around Malmö in the dark. We saw enough of it to see that it's a pretty little city, but next time I definitely would like to see it in the daytime!

I managed to find in Malmö what I had hoped to find: semlor! They used to serve this heavenly little cardamom bun -- filled with not-too-sweet whipped cream and marzipan and dusted with powdered sugar -- only between Shrove Tuesday and Lent. But now it's available in bakeries shortly after Christmas. Halluliah!!! (This reminds me, we didn't see many pastry shops in Denmark, which was a surprise considering that the Danish was invented there, I presume.)

We had a busy and somewhat hair-raising evening in Malmö: we had to be at the ferry terminal by 9:00, and we knew we had to take a bus to get there. But we couldn't find a travel information office at the Malmö train station, which would have provided information on where to catch the bus, which bus to take, how much it cost, and how to pay. By asking around, we got a variety of wrong answers and enough correct ones to get us to the remote ferry terminal just in time to board the ferry for Travemunde. It was a good thing we didn't follow through on our idea to grab a bite to eat at the ferry terminal, and had our dinner instead in Malmö, because the ferry terminal consisted of a ticket counter and a too-brightly-lit waiting area with a row of plastic chairs and a vending machine full of candy bars. 

A van drove us and the other "foot passengers" (two girls from Holland) to the ferry and dropped us off next to an elevator on the car deck, which we took to the reception area to get directions to our cabin. The ferry was full, but it was mostly truckers and car drivers. We had a glass of wine (for me) and a Bailey's (for Gary) in the ferry bar, and watched the departure.

After saying goodbye to Malmö (we hardly knew ye!) went back inside, picked up a bottle of cloudberry liqueur at the duty free shop (this is unavailable in the U.S.), and hit the hay, waking up just in time to disembark in Travemunde and head for "home."