Living in Lübeck

This week was a quiet one; we just lived in Lübeck as if it's a normal thing to do. Gary wanted to help Peter start installing a new walk-in shower in our flat.  The two of them removed the old tile and carried it in buckets down the stairs, while I continued working on the illustrations for a children's book I'm writing (and illustrating) with a friend of mine. It's been a productive week for us all.

Wednesday night we walked all the way to Peter's bistro (about 20 steps from our flat) to hear a group called RoadBird: two excellent guitarists and a vocalist with a powerful, lovely voice. Peter snapped this photo of us while we hung out as if we belong here. The trio was entertaining and professional -- really fun -- and all of the original songs were in English, so we understood every word! 

Gary and I at Essig-Fabrik Bistro

After the show, we walked all the way back to our flat, and got here in no time!

Today we decided to visit a big-box hardware store, called BauHaus. The nearest BauHaus is only 2 km away, so we walked there. We discovered that after you leave the old town of Lübeck -- passing the Trave River harbor and the old river warehouses (slowly being renovated and turned into restaurants and office space), and crossing over the railroad yards, you are in suburbia. It's faster and newer and louder there -- but you can see the cathedral steeples of Lübeck in the distance, so it's okay.

Here's our destination:

Except for the fact that all the tools are metric, the appliances are 230 volt, the prices are in euros, and it has a backerei, it was just like Home Depot. There was another big-box hardware store nearby, so we visited that one too. They had these cute bird feeders with thatched roofs:

.... and these stylish wood stoves:

... but I felt I could have just as well have been at any L&M Fleet store in Minnesota when I came upon this familiar guy, browsing in his favorite department:

Hamburg

Yesterday we took the train to Hamburg to see for ourselves what all the fuss is about. I've read that some people consider Hamburg the prettiest city they've ever lived in, but up to now I hadn't seen that side of it.

First, a little history in a nutshell

Hamburg began in 808, when Charlemagne had a castle built in the marsh between two rivers (the Alster and the Elbe), to fend off the Slavic princes who were living to the north, in what eventually became Lübeck. The Romans and the Danes each controlled Hamburg for the next 500 years or so, and it became an important trading power. Then, in the 13th century Hamburg joined with the then-more-important city of Lübeck, as part of the Hanseatic League. 

(Twenty years later, the Hamburg senate passed an interesting law, for a reason I'm not able to find. The law stated that anyone caught beating to death, shooting, eating, or insulting (??) a swan would be severely punished. It was said that Hamburg would be free and prosperous as long as there were swans living in the lake formed by the Alster River. The swans of Alster are still protected today, and are even brought each winter to a special enclosure so they can spend the winter in safety.)

Like all European cities, Hamburg has been through a lot. It survived a major fire in the 13th century, the Black Death in the 14th century (which killed off half the population), and witnessed the Lutheran Reformation and an influx of immigrants over the next several centuries. In 1842 a fire destroyed much of the city. A hundred years later, WWII nearly finished it off.  Toward the end of WWII, British and American bombers destroyed entire districts of Hamburg, killing about 42,000 German civilians (the Nazis killed a good share as well, of the largest population of Jewish citizens in Germany) until the Nazi regime surrendered in 1945. 

As a result of the 19th-century fire and 20th-century bombing, Hamburg no longer has a traditional city center like most German cities do, and is a labyrinth of canals and streets.

Our tour begins . . . 

We started our Hamburg visit yesterday with a 90-minute guided tour on a double-decker bus, one of those "hop on, hop off" deals (although we didn't hop off; we stayed on the bus). It was a good way to get a feel for the city's size and see the highlights. It's a huge city -- the second-largest in Germany -- and it's obvious that there's a lot of money there. Apparently it's become such an expensive city to live in, people without loads of money are having trouble finding places to live. 

One of the first places our bus tour took us was around Lake Alster, where the rich people live. The houses were immense and looked as if they'd been dipped in money. The whole scene -- the lake in a city, the expensive houses, the view of the skyline -- reminded me of Bde Maka Ska (Lake Calhoun) in Minneapolis, except that in Hamburg the houses are larger, there are several marinas and rowing clubs on the lake, and the skyline of Hamburg is dominated by cathedral steeples rather than skyscrapers. 

There are lots of canals in Hamburg, this one in a residential neighborhood

Our bus tour brought us past elegant governmental buildings

City Hall (Rathaus)

A more impressive, stock photo view of the Rathaus (photo by Daniel Schwen)

. . . and past remnants of WWII, like this bombed-out church tower in the heart of downtown Hamburg that's been left as a memorial to everyone killed in that war:

Stock photo of St. Nicholas church, by Joaquin Ossorio-Castillo

. . . and through the seedy-looking Reeperbahn, which is well known for being the place where the Beatles learned their performance skills and got their haircuts. John Lennon once told a reporter, "I may have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg." The Reeperbahn is famous, and some people say it's a must-see, but I contend it's a must-miss: just a nondescript street full of sex shops, nothing you can't see in the sleazier parts of any city in the world. I suppose it might have its merits; it's hard to know by just driving through it on a two-story bus. 

Downtown Hamburg is truly impressive, built on a foundation of canals.

Part of downtown Hamburg

The warehouse district -- the Speicherstadt -- was my favorite: an area of huge old brick buildings that's mainly now a tourist area with several museums. These massive old warehouses are still used as warehouses; for some reason our bus tour guide mentioned that there are a lot of cabinets from Asia being stored here. 

I'm going to cheat and use a stock photo, to show why the warehouse district is so impressive. Hamburg is the Venice of the north, but not as romantic. 

Hamburg Speicherstadt © JFL Photography / Fotolia

At the end of our bus tour, we set out on foot, and walked our feet off the rest of the day.

Our first stop was, naturally, an antique mall that we had spotted earlier, called Antik Center. We had  a fun look around, and bought a teapot.  

Our second stop was the retail shop of the Swedish clothing designer, Gudrun Sjödén. I was determined to get to this store, and thanks to Gary's map-reading skills we finally located it in the maze of downtown Hamburg. (There are lots of diagonal streets and no city center, so it's a really difficult city to navigate.)

And here I am at last, at Gudrun Sjödén, ready to shop!

And here I am again, shopping at Gudrun Sjödén:

And now I've gotten that out of my system, much to Gary's relief, I'm sure. After my visit to my fashion Mecca (which, by the way, I noticed was being visited mainly by older women), we visited the Maritime Museum, in this beautiful old warehouse:

Stock photo, Hamburg Maritime Museum

This museum was on our wish-list -- it had been highly recommended and sounded promising -- but we found it disappointing: 99.99% of the descriptions were in German only, and there were a LOT of model ships. Way too many model ships. 

By this time we were pooped out and it was getting dark, and it was time to head back home. Hamburg is impressive, and beautiful in parts, but it was nice to get back to the people-sized architecture of Lübeck. 

Duking it out at Oxfam, and shopping for mustard

The day after Christmas -- St. Stephens Day, when shops are closed in Germany -- I spotted a sweet antique sugar and creamer set in the window of the local OxFam thrift shop. The next day, before our walk, I looked up the translation for "I would like to buy something in the window" and after much practice, said to the clerk at the OxFam store that afternoon, "Ich möchte etwas im Fenster kaufen." I was told that all of the items displayed in the window are put on sale at a specific date and time, and were scheduled to go on sale a couple weeks from that day, which happened to be today. (Which is something I would have known if I had read the sign in the window, of course.) 

I put my dreams on hold for a couple of weeks, and today at 11 a.m., the designated time when I could finally buy the sugar and creamer set, we went to the OxFam store.

Things looked a bit hopeless when I saw the crowd that had gathered there. I was afraid they might have a live auction for the window items, which I would definitely fail at, not knowing German well enough to think clearly in a pressure situation (I would probably mistakenly bid 200 euros when I meant to bid 20!).

We milled around, trying to look disinterested, and at 11:00 one of the store clerks wheeled out a cart with all of the items that had been displayed in the window: crystal goblets and aperitif glasses, silver trays, a pewter tea set, beaded evening gowns, and my sugar and creamer. Everyone surged -- politely -- toward the front counter, where the clerk held up the first item, a silver tray, asking in German something that was very likely, "Is anyone interested in this?"  Several people raised their hands. She told them to each come up and shake a cup holding dice. Whoever rolled the highest number got to buy the item. So that was how it was done -- sheer luck! The pressure was on: when my sugar and creamer came up, I was ready to roll.

The leather cup on the counter holds a pair of dice, to determine who gets to buy the nicest items displayed in the window at the OxFam store

They sold off a number of items, and my palms were sweating, waiting for them to bring out the sugar and creamer. I wondered how many people I would have to beat, and prayed that I wouldn't roll a 1 and a 2, like some poor souls were doing. When the clerk finally pulled the sugar and creamer from the cart, to my great relief/dismay, no one else wanted it! I don't know if that means we have terrible taste or what, but the important thing is that the sugar and creamer set is now ours. It's so unusual and pretty -- metal on the outside, enamelized on the inside. Next time you come to our house, I'll serve sugar and cream from these:

The long-awaited sugar and creamer set: ours at last!

And now we know how the bidding wars at OxFam work.

On a less dramatic note, I shopped for mustard yesterday. I failed to look up the translation for "mustard" beforehand, but figured I'd just go to the catsup/mustard aisle, choose whatever was yellow, and all would be well. I wasn't expecting the array of choices. 

This one? Nope, that's curry sauce. 

This one? Nope -- that's mayonnaise.

This one? Probably, but I'm not exactly sure what "Hamburger Sauce" is, so better not.

At last I found it: Senf! It's the one in the blue or red container -- of course?!

Fun times with the Hanseatic League

This weekend we visited the European Hansemuseum, just a few blocks from our flat. It's a fantastic new museum featuring one of the oldest cultural influences of Europe, the Hanseatic League. The latest museum technology lets you program your visit according to what you're most interested in, in your preferred language. 

To start the museum tour, you ride an ultra-modern, polygon-shaped glass elevator slowly down to an archaeological excavation of the earliest structures built in Lübeck, in the 1100s. 

The excavated structures of early Lübeck dealt mainly with water, poo, and trash which continue to this day to be an issue for concentrated populations. (Getty Images photo of the elevator descending)

As you walk through the restored structures that were built 850 years ago, the background music is a low bass sound backed by a chord progression than never quiiiiite resolves -- designed, I'm sure, to keep you on edge, just like people back then obviously were most of their lives. 

Bear with me: I love this stuff so will present to you the history of Lübeck -- learned at the Hansemuseum -- in a nutshell:

Things started gearing up in this part of Europe in the 700s, when Slavic settlers moved to this area (near what's now Denmark), and minor Slavic princes built a fortress on the land where Lübeck now sits. After a couple hundred years and a series of wars, they abandoned it all, and in 1143 a man named Adolf II, Count of Schauenberg (whoever that is) decided to start a new town at the old fortress site. 

The count wanted to start a new trading center here, but needed people, so he sent messengers out to other lands to tell people that if they wanted "the most beautiful, the most spacious, the most fertile fields, replete with fish and meat," they should bring their families here. So they did, and that was the beginning of Lübeck. 

As the populations around the area grew by the 12th and 13th centuries, merchants were having a rough time getting goods to everyone who needed them. There were so many ambushes and killings back then, the only way for merchants to succeed in trade and live to tell about it was to band together and travel in groups, using wooden boats to ship their goods. 

Because navigation was so rudimentary, they had to stay within sight of shore in daylight, which was dangerous but necessary for survival. They only ventured onto open sea (the Baltic) at night, when they could see the Northern Star and keep their bearings. 

These merchants established the Hanseatic League, a group of traders all around the Baltic Sea, and this was the beginning of Europe as we know it to this day. The areas they traded are shown in gold in the map below, but they also bought and sold goods inland as far as Asia (but not yet to the New World, of course, as Europeans hadn't realized it existed yet). When you visit the cities of this map today, you can see the influence of the Hanseatic League in the architecture: houses built side-by-side with brick facades.

The goods they traded give you a feeling for what life must have been like when the hottest commodities on the market were fish, salt, timber, resin, furs, birch bark, amber, wool, and wax. They were also already trading spices, fruits, and silks from Asia and Africa by this time, which goes to show you, globalization is nothing new. 

I won't belabor this, but suffice it to say that the work and innovation that went on for hundreds of years to build northern Europe left us exhausted and ready for lunch. 

We finished up by learning about the end of the mighty Hanseatic League: in the years following the Reformation and the Thirty Years War (which ended in 1648) it had become obvious that the formerly powerful merchant class could no longer control much of anything. The Hanseatic League died out from lack of interest. Much like our oil men of today, some of the Hanseatic merchants, who used to be such hot-shots around town, refused to believe their way of life was ending. It was kind of pathetic, really: they'd hold meetings, and no one would come. New markets opened up in the New World, Spain took over as a major economic force, and trading solely around the Baltic Sea suddenly wasn't such a big deal anymore. I believe we're witnessing the same thing with our fossil-fuel-based economy, slowly grinding to a halt while a new economy gears up. It helps me to know, from learning history, that this kind of transition can take over a hundred years. I might not live to see it but it will happen.

One more note about this history: It was interesting for me to learn that it was the Thirty Years War that was the death knell for the Hanseatic League, because that war played a big role in my own family history, too. My father's side of the family originated in what became Estonia and ended up in Germany in the 1600s. This was a mystery to me, as travel wasn't easy and you didn't just willy-nilly move from Estonia to Germany in the 1600s. We recently learned that our Estonian ancestor was drafted into the Swedish Army and sent to Germany during the Thirty Years War. So THAT was how he did it! He deserted the army in southern Germany, and a couple hundred years later his descendants emigrated from Germany to America, and so we thought we were of German descent until recently.

I'll end with a set of photographs. In the museum was a photo of the street near our flat in Lübeck, taken in the year 1868:

Grosseburgstrasse in Lübeck, 1868

Today I took this photo:

Grosseburgstrasse in Lübeck, 2019

. . . and here's the back side of it:

Heidelberg, January 2

New Years Day we spent on the train to Heidelberg to visit Christof & Cordula Dörfer. Christof is another former colleague of Gary's. They live in a little town, Bammenthal, just over the hill from the Heidelberg Castle.

I remember when the Dörfers visited Raspberry Island about 14 years ago, they were talking about their plans to build a house on a hill lot in Bammenthal to accommodate them and their four little children, and here is the result. It's a beautiful modernistic house, with lots of light and open spaces:

The Dörfer home

The dining area

The back garden

Now those four little kids that visited our island are grown and most have a boyfriend or girlfriend and a successful career (architect, doctor, classical music festival organizer, and one undecided as of yet). They've turned into lovely, good people -- very engaging and fun to talk to.

Christof and Cordula on the far end, and from left to right: their son Mattias, Elizabeth's boyfriend Robin, Gary, Christof, Cordula, their daughter Ellizabeth, their son Johannes, Johannes's girlfriend Sophia, and Sebastien (a cousin) (Missing from this photo is their daughter Rafaela)

The next day, we visited the grounds of the famous Heidelberg Castle overlooking Heidelberg and the Neckar River:

The former gunpowder tower, which was blown up by the French in the 17th century and never restored. The authors and painters of the Romantic period loved Heidelberg's ruined castle just the way it was. Even Mark Twain wrote about this tower.

We also spent the afternoon with a friend from Minneapolis, Anna Hampel (96) and her sister-in-law who lives nearby, but I failed to get photos!

Later that evening, Rafaela arrived home from spending New Years Eve with friends on the island of Föhr, just off the coast of Germany, up near Denmark. Because that's what kids here do: they go to these interesting, out-of-the-way places in Europe that we Americans have never even heard about, much less visited, and they don't even give it a second thought. Lucky kids! She told us about the New Years Eve tradition on that island: people dress up in costumes (she saw men dressed as chickens, for instance, and someone dressed as Donald Trump) and go from house to house, singing. The reward is a shot of schnapps. Sounds like an interesting place!

Rafaela and Johannes on our final night in Bammenthal

We had an all-too-short visit before heading back up to Lübeck, a six-hour train ride. Before I end this post, I have to show you a Dörfer tradition that I think I'll start doing, too. When Cordula serves a pastry, like apple strudel, she serves it with ice cream, whipped cream, AND vanilla sauce. This would work well for pumpkin pie, too, I think.

Silvester

We've been away from Lübeck the past five days, visiting friends and ringing in the new year. Happy New Year! We arrived back in Lübeck by train this afternoon: Thursday, January 3, 2019.

Before we left the U.S., I was under the impression that the Internet in rural America, where we live, is the worst in the whole wide world. I discovered this past weekend that I was wrong: it's also bad in rural Germany. This is why I wasn't able to work on this blog for the past few days. I apologize to my sister Sara for putting a scare into her when I suddenly stopped communicating. We're fine!  :-)  

Before we left town, we met up with a former student of Gary's and her family, at a little cafe near our flat that Peter recommended, called Frau Brömse. They make their own kuchen there, all the china cups and plates are charmingly mis-matched, and it looks like this from the outside, next to the children's skating rink I mentioned earlier:

Frau Brömse Cafe

After a visit with Imke and her sisters and nieces and brother-in-law . . .

Imke, Michel (Imke's son), Ute, Birte, Gary, Antje, me, Andy, and Kirsten

. . . . we walked down to the main Christmas market for:

Gary and a former dental student, Imke

Feuerzangenbowle!  This is hot wine made with a loaf of sugar that's been soaked in rum and set afire so that it drips melted sugar into the wine. The fire in this case had been done before we arrived at the Christmas market, but we still enjoyed the last hot wine of the season together before parting ways. This was our last visit to the famous Lübeck Christmas market this season; it's now been dismantled. 

The next day, December 30, we boarded the train and headed toward Lüneburg, east of Hamburg, to meet Gary's former colleague Georg and his wife Angie at Georg's family farm. I talked about this farm in my previous blog (germangetaway.blogspot.com). This is the farm with the big combination barn/house that's been in Georg's family since the 13th century. It's where we would be celebrating Silvester: New Year's Eve. 

The night we arrived, Georg & Angie treated us to an elegant goose dinner at a nearby restaurant.

We were happy, spoiled campers. (Angie, Georg, me, Gary, Maria)

The next day, New Years Eve Day, we went for a long walk around the farm. Across the fields you can see little villages nearby, like this one:

And this one:

 . . . and also a few pferde:






When we got back after our walk, we had gluhwein out on the patio:

. . . and then Maria asked us over to her combination house/barn for kuchen. She served us apfel kuchen, chocolates, and stollen at this table:

We then had time for a nap before Silvester started. At 7, we met in the kitchen at George & Angie's house to meet the other guests, Henrick and his family. Henrick is a chef who brought all of the ingredients, pre-cut, for raclette:

Pears, olives, herbed butter, shrimp, raclette cheese, tomatoes, 

and a variety of wild game: hare, wild boar, venison . . .

... and peppers, white potatoes, blue potatoes, brötchen, smoked pork, liver, guinea fowl . . .

. . . which we all cooked ourselves at the raclette grill in the center of the table. (Gary and I now also have one of these at our island, and serve raclette to guests in the winter, thanks to Georg & Angie showing us how it's done. In the U.S., you can buy raclette cheese at Trader Joe's at Christmastime, but any good gouda or Swiss will do). 

Cooking meat on top of the raclette grill, with trays
broiling cheese-topped ingredients underneath

Fieder, Birgit, Maria, Henrick, Angie, Gary, me at the raclette table

At midnight, Fieder put on an impressive fireworks show outside, along with people in the villages all around us (during which the local fire brigade was called upon, apparently, to put out a fire in an awning). 

After that, Angie served Berliners (we call them bismarks), and then, around 1:00 a.m. Maria's served us chocolate mousse! Ach du lieber! There was no sign that the Germans were slowing down, so at 1:30 this exhausted and wimpy American announced she was going to bed. The rest of them stayed up until 3 -- and then got up the next morning at 8 a.m. to serve us früstück . . . 

Georg at the breakfast table

... and to drive us to the nearest bahnhof, about seven minutes away. 

I hope they napped all day New Years Day, because they deserved to after such a grand Silvester!  

We were headed next to Heidelberg, which I'll cover in the next post.