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| 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.
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| 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!
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