Day 8: A whiff of Bavaria

I finally left my mother’s sister’s family in Munich. I think it was a good thing: they say guests, like fish, smell after three days. I've been there seven. Who wouldn't be fed up with me? They were so kind to take me in at my worst: in shock, tired, and ill-adjusted. Still, they fed me, showed me the sights, put up with more than occasional bouts of snappiness, and helped me relearn the same words over and over again. Elke was amazing: she cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, and worked part-time too. I must have been an awful guest, I didn’t see how I could make myself useful until it was too late. Their children were very cute, sweet, and patient with me, and I would have felt really sad to go if I didn’t know I’d see them in Nurnberg again in a week.

I left Munich to go to Bensheim (near Heidelberg) where my mother’s brother lives. I stopped in Ingolstadt, however, to visit my mother’s cousin, who lives in a tiny town nearby called Krut. Frances runs her own publishing agency, is half French, and does it ever show. She’s tall, thin, graceful, and beautiful. She lives with a pig farmer named Georg (yes, gay-org) and they have a 1.5 year old daughter named Lydia (sounds like Ludia), Lily for short. I was so happy to have a long drive between her home and the train station: she told me some great stories.

After a divorce and a heartbreak, Frances met Georg (also divorced) through a set-up by mutual friends. She had never gone on a blind date, but decided, “Why the hell not give it a try?” They had chemistry, and started dating. After a while of weekend dating (he lived in Krut, she in the city of Augsberg), Frances declared, “I need to live with someone to know if we really fit. I don’t want to spend two years dating on the weekend to find out that we don’t fit.” Pig-farming is not a very mobile occupation, so she left the city and moved to Krut. Things worked out well. A few years ago, Frances was debating whether she wanted to have children. She was nearing forty, her biological clock was ticking, so she went to the doctor to find out if she even could have children. He said no. Frances and Georg talked, he already had three children from his previous marriage; the two realized they didn’t need to fight biology, but they didn’t have to be careful anymore either. A few months later, Frances starting throwing up - something that happened when she was first adjusting to living 50m from pigs. Then she realized she had started skipping cycles- something that happened when she had particularly stressful deadlines and such. When her abdomen started feeling full and funny, she went to the doctor fearing ovarian cysts again. Wrong! This is the story of Lydia. I think you knew where this story was going minutes ago.

I learned some things about love and life from Frances. One succinct such lesson is this: “Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende,” or, “I prefer an end with shock than a shock without end.” Sorry ladies, but your next really horrible breakup I may just start quoting to you in German. If appropriate. Maybe not, I’m not so good at gauging appropriateness. Did I ever tell you about the time that I found out my cousins are really religious, so I told them a God joke?

I found their life absolutely fascinating - it was a mix of contrasting things. She’s a high powered publisher, part French, but she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the car she drives. Georg speaks Bayerische (the regional dialect of Bavaria) and drives a fancy and sleek Audi (note: Audi’s are made in neighboring Ingolstadt, every 5th person doesn’t work for Audi, they are extremely common). He runs a pig-farm out of several-hundred year old buildings, and the interior of the house could be featured in Modern Dwelling or Sunset magazine. He spends the day in pig poop and looks like he could be a model for some obscure and very expensive suit-designer: tall, thin, tightly curled dark grey hair, great eyes. They are both divorced, not remarried, and happily have a kid together, and his mother lives with them. The two of them are extremely thin, and yet their daughter could knock out any Gerber baby.

Let me tell you about their house: the walls are at least a foot and a half thick, in some places more. I guess when the house was built way back in the Stone Age, it was easier to just mortar all the big stones from the field together than it was to break the stones into smaller pieces. The kitchen is larger than most German living rooms, half is the kitchen with counters and appliances camouflaged as cupboards, with the other half dedicated to a huge wooden table with benches all around. I am so jealous.

In front of the house is kind of a cobblestone courtyard, and other side of this courtyard the fairytale ends. The pigs reek, and the piglets scream like tortured children. My mom got the gist right when she said, “Maybe you can visit my cousin, she’s married to an organic pig-farmer in the Bavarian hills.” Married no, organic no. After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was so disappointed to see all the piglets had the ends of their tales snipped off. After a two-minute tour of the sow building (piglet birthing and meat rearing are two different operations), my sweater smelled like pig-manure. “A parting gift from Krut,” said Frances.

I had to switch trains in Nurnberg, and as I was searching for the WC, an extremely pregnant woman with a baby in a stroller and red marks on/in the center of her two front teeth asked for money in German. I half-pretended, half really didn’t understand what she said, so when I told her, “Ich nicht spreche Deutsch” (which probably isn’t right in German), she asked, “A dollar. Please. For food.” I know you’re not supposed to give panhandler’s money. There was a slightly dead look in her eyes that may have been drug addiction. However, this woman was pregnant, with a baby. Maybe she was irresponsible, maybe she didn’t have her life together, but who am I to judge and not share what I don’t need as badly as she? I gave her my sandwich. I wish I’d remembered I had more food and given her all that too. She wanted money though, and that I did not give her. Should I have? Maybe she wanted food for her baby, who couldn’t chew schwarzbrot and schinken well. Maybe she had enough food, but it’s hard to describe to strangers, “My last ultrasound showed that I will have a complicated birth. I can’t work anymore because of my very large stomach. My boyfriend kicked me out last month, and I moved in with my senile mother, and they just cut electricity at her apartment and it’s cold and I cannot afford to pay her back bills, and it’s starting to get cold.” What would you have done?

The train from Nurnberg to Frankfurt was extremely full, and extremely late. I started talking to a girl at the station who just finished studying industrial engineering and process design in school, and now she’s working an internship with Audi. She was really nice. We tried to get seats together on the train when the aisles finally cleared (everyone shoved on board and then we stood in the car-junctions with our luggage for over half an hour, waiting for other people to get settled), but no such luck, so I sat next to a slightly unfriendly Dutch man. Thankfully, I did my Deutsch deciphering well enough to figure out what platform my next train was on, and made it on time.

Once I got to Bensheim, I noticed that the car next to mine was offloading young adolescent males. I knew my cousin was on the same train and in the same age group, so I asked a random boy, “Ist sie mit Leo Riesenkonig?” The kid gave me a funny look, like if I was asking him in bad grammar if he was dating a boy, but pointed me toward another boy, one who looks not unlike Harry Potter. I went up to him and told him in my best German, “I call myself Kirsten!” He said, “Ja, my father will be here soon.” Damn, all these English speakers are outwitting my attempts to practice Deutsch.

We ate a late but amazing meal of tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, I in quantities never before seen by man, and something between quiche lorraine, pflammkuchen, and pizza. It was so delicious, especially after eating too many snacks and no schwarzbrot und schinken sandwich. We also drank something called “new wine,” literally that, wine made within the last month or so, cloudy, not yet very fermented. It tasted sparkly without being bubbly, more flavorful than juice, and had a higher alcohol content than you could taste. It was delicious. That was followed with Mirabella schnapps, which I could go the rest of my life without having again, but got my way through. I am very excited, it seems that the entire family is keen on helping me learn German, and will try several times to tell me slowly in German before switching to English. Patience! An excellent quality in a teacher. I must remember this.

Day 7: Now I'm depressed

Today I went to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. It was really… frightening, scary, sad, depressing, shocking, and the like. What took me most by surprise was the beauty in the midst of all the horror. I think some of the architects of the memorial forgot that they didn’t have to make things look warm, comforting, and attractive. I had a hard time capturing the look, but the information building courtyard wall, made to look like a pretty, big, imposing fence, with the red tree leaves and blue sky was beautiful, in a very sad, sad way.

There were also a number of shrines, memorials, chapels, and the like within the main grounds. The Jewish memorial was really well down. To enter, you walk down into the memorial, while the walls rise up out of the ground. There are no lights, but a few candles along the wall, made of huge black stone-bricks. At the very end, when the floor is at the lowest and the ceiling is at the highest, there is a small hole in the ceiling for light to shine down through, giving an immense sense of depth, isolation, and hope.

I remember the Holocaust Museum in DC was really well done (dare I say better done than the Dachau site itself?) The absolutely shocking and horrifying things were displayed in such a way that you could choose to look at them or not, but there were also really moving displays, such as a pile of shoes with a description of what it meant. The Dachau site actually had a lot of the infrastructure - barracks, the bunker, guard towers, crematoriums, and space, a lot of space right near a city with a hunger for real estate. It was very moving and shocking. Any one display or part of the site is worthy of horror and contemplation, but seeing thing after thing after thing that were each individually horrible really painted a picture of how monstrous the machine was systematically (very systematically) and cruelly destroying so many lives.

What I wished I had seen more was an address to the psychology of the machine. As sad as and horrible as the crimes were, as much as every life needs to be individually mourned, we cannot just say, “Never again” (one of the many memorials said this), and leave it at that. How can we be so sure that the same horrible things will not happen again, or is happening, just on a smaller scale? The same ingredients exist today that existed then: fear and lust for power, maybe a little bit of self-righteousness and just-look-out-for-yourself mentality. I don’t even know what’s happening in Darfur other than it makes people buy bumper stickers. Both baby killers and gas-guzzlers have names to call each other.

There were many heroes of the Holocaust, who risked their necks to help others, ease suffering, or help destroy the machine, but there were many, so many more who kept to themselves, used the weakness of others to strengthen their own position, or blithely were caught up by the propaganda. This still happens every day.

I finally found a quiet spot next to a mass grave along the well-manicured and landscaped trail leading away from the crematorium, and buried my face my hands and tried to process everything I’d seen that day. A nice old man (who from the back at least looks like my uber-boss, Steve) came and patted my head as he walked by. It startled me at first, but that moment of a stranger’s kindness stuck with me, and helped temper all that I saw today.

I finally left, and not ready for bouncy happy children or trying to muster a smile about anything at all, I walked to the nearby city of Altstadt, which is supposedly over 1000 years old. After walking for nearly an hour with a heavy book bag that was killing my back, all I found was a two- or three-hundred year old church that looked like it belonged in Mexico. There were gilded figurines everywhere, and some were really cheesy. I sat down in the pews, and thought about the Holocaust some more, and then nearly laughed when I saw the angels on each pillar: angel with sword, angel with spear, angel with scythe, angel with battle axe, angel with hacksaw?

So I left, and got directions to the nearest S-bahn (subway) station from a kindly old man who spoke clearer English than most Americans, and left. Right as I got to the station, a train headed in the right direction was leaving. I got help to buy the ticket from a girl waiting for the train in the other direction, and between her little bit of English and my ein bissien Deutsch, I got the ticket. Then I waited. And waited, and waited. Finally, after maybe half an hour or more, I got worried that there were no more trains, and found a time table. The right train only came every hour, and the next one was in 10 minutes. The train was a little local one and would take me to a station on the main S-bahn line: a station I could have walked to in maybe 15 or 20 minutes. So, I took the train to the S-bahn, and got on the line that would take me a little closer to main Munich so I could switch and get on the train that took me to Elke’s. There, with a pushing crowd, I followed the signs for Gleis 1 and hopped on the train just arriving, but only once the doors closed did I see it was the wrong train. Going in the out of Munich. For a long time before the next stop. So, I had to wait to get off, take the line back into Munich, and finally catch the right train to Moosach. I hated myself just a little bit.

Before all this though, I met a blogging-friend of my mothers. Turns out my mother never physically met the woman, but since we were both in Munich, I got to serve as an ambassador. I’m really glad we did. We met for breakfast (good bread, bad eggs, expensive orange juice) and talked and talked and talked. Laura (code name Honeypiehorse) and Elke both worked for the same employer at different times, and Laura and I both are from the states and know how much my mom kicks ass. Breakfast lasted past noon.

Laura did bring up a very interesting thing to cogitate on: being an au pair. An au pair is a foreigner who provides some childcare and basic housekeeping in exchange for room, board, and an allowance. I know a friend of my step dad’s had a daughter who wanted to be an au pair, and this was looked down upon. It’s not a good life ambition (neither was being a princess, it turns out), but it seems to be a great way to travel to a new country, try out a new culture with a family as a guide, and have a good standard of living with reliable stipend too, all with a term limit. I have an engineering degree and student loans, by all means I should be getting a real job, but… a real job is really important when one has a spouse, a mortgage, a kid. I know I have a domestic streak a mile wide; I want a garden, babies, and unlimited access to a fabulous kitchen. Why not move freely, adventure, explore, and live up the single life while I can, so I have no regrets about not misspending my youth when I’m older?

Day 6 Part 2: Salzburg

Damn, I missed that train too! I really suck at this. The next train was already in the station though, so I got on to prevent any more time slippage. Sheesh.

There was a lot of German spoken on that train, so much, in fact, that there was no English. Suddenly everybody got off even though we weren't in Salzburg, and I didn't really know what was happening, but a woman was emphatically trying to tell me something and to get off the train. So I did. Someone else pantomimed to me that something was being repaired, so we had to get on a bus to go to another train station. I got separated from the crowd, and wandered aimlessly looking for a bus that might take me to another thrain station that might have a train going to Salzburg. An old man started talking to me, and I had no idea what he was saying, but there's a slight chance he was hitting on me. When he figured out that I didn't speak much German beyond what I use to trick people into speaking German to me, he settled on repeating, often and loudly, "Du bist wunderbar!" and things of that nature. Maybe he was telling me to get on the bus behind me, but when I left to get on a bus, he said a long trail of goodbyes, such as "auf Wiedersehen" and "tschus" and "bis dann" and "tschau" and another, "Du bist wunderbar" for good measure. I think I’m flattered. Maybe he was telling me that I’m really entertaining since I couldn’t even figure out where I was or what I was doing.

Anyway, I got on the bus that was driving by since the driver shouted, “Salzburg!” at me. It could have been a conversational greeting, but I figured it seemed like a good shot. We drove through the countryside, and it was breathtakingly beautiful. Postcards hardly do it justice. I didn’t get any photos, however, because my camera battery is low and I’ve discovered the hard way that high speed phototography just doesn’t work on my camera. I asked the couple across from me if they spoke English, and they said no (all in German, I do know that much). About ten minutes later, I realized that I did know enough German to ask if we were in Deutschland or Osterreich (Austria). Still in Germany. It was comforting to know what country I was in.

The bus dropped us off in a town that may or may not be Traunstein, I saw that on a lot of signs and advertisements. The train departure board told me that I had half an hour to kill, so I found a backeri (bakery). The “bretzen mit kase” (pretzel with cheese) looked tasty, but I ended up getting a piece of ciabatta with soft cheese, roasted vegetables, and more cheese melted on top. I knew enough German to get me through the transaction, but I stalled when she asked me if I wanted it warm, and then she had me figured out and switched to English. She told me that she was from Holland, so we should speak English. I wish we had stuck to German (I held up my end) because I need the practice desperately, but tough cookies, I got a really tasty hot lunch out of the deal. Waiting for trains may soon become my biggest source of calories.

While I was there, I also got a postcard to send my dad. It’s his birthday today. I have not yet gotten him a real Deutsch birthday present, but I can write a paragraph about him right now. What better gift than a paragraph in a blog for your second 49th birthday? Dad and I have had a somewhat rocky relationship at times. It sounds like maintaining a good relationship with one’s parents is a difficult task at best, and doing so with double the number of parents due to divorce is even harder. Thankfully, in the last few years, I think we’ve both grown up a bit. Speaking for myself, I’ve grown up a lot. He’s helped bring a second only child into the world (a do-over? Self-punishment? First round was so fun he just couldn’t resist another?) Now, as best I can tell, we’re back to peas and rice. I’m always so happy to see him and spend time with him. I realize now there’s so much I have yet to learn that my parents have already learned the hard way. Can you imagine telling me as a teenager that one day soon, I’d regard my own father as super-cool and a key highlight of my life?

He’s a very civically engaged person, if I ever run for any office, you can probably blame him, his voice is definitely the narration when I do such wild and crazy things as writing letters to the editor or contacting my elected officials. I think his political soul is best described as a Green Libertarian, but he’s found his efforts are slightly better rewarded in a better known party. He works tirelessly to win small and large victories for the underdogs. He’s also a pretty staunch atheist, one might go so far as to say that he’ll soon be knocking on doors asking people if they really can justify their belief in the exist of a god. This summer, we visited his old Lutheran summer camp, where he made some of the happiest memories of his life. Watching him twist and turn, torn between the joy of the place and good things done there, and the God factor, was quite amusing for me. And so, to celebrate his birthday, I went to church.

Salzburg, Austria, has churches everywhere . They range from the small and cozy to the ancient and crumbling to the luxe and glittery. I didn’t notice any American televangelist-style mega churches, but I wasn’t looking in the warehouse-like cheap buildings, but the stone ones with really tall steeples. The first I wandered into was magnificent. I haven’t seen any big Italian churches, or come to think of it, many churches at all, but I was amazed. There were frescos all over the ceiling, beautiful paintings and intricate marble carvings. I wanted to get a picture of me standing with my head twisted way back and mouth agape, but I didn’t feel like it was appropriate to draw so much attention to myself in a church. So I laid down on the floor. I circled the church, and found an entrance to the crypts below. Since WWII, some architect or another did some fancy things with red, white, and grey marble. He found creative ways to entomb long-dead archbishops and other such important Catholic characters. He worked the ancient foundations of ancient and long-gone buildings into the rooms though, which was cool. In some places, it was positively eerie. I liked those places, the magic of a church needs to be balanced with a reminder of all the terrible things done in the name of an all-mighty, all-knowing, and benevolent god. There was even a mini-chapel, all art-noveau/modern, which felt out of place in the setting for Blair Witch Project II: Old World.

At the base of Hohenfusting (literally, high-fortress) is Nonnberg Kirche. It was all rough stone and stucco rather than shiny shiny marble and metalwork. I had the sense that the faith of the place was very much alive. It may be a monastery, I’m not sure why I think so though. I reached the door seconds after it was locked, so I wasn’t able to go in, but from the entrance way and the build (doorways for shorter people, low arched ceilings), I felt like it was older than just a few centuries. Maybe 400 years? On my way back to the train station, I stopped into the completely empty and unlit St. Michael‘s Kirche. It was really small, and felt really old, it looked like it had been sandwiched between two newer buildings a century ago. I didn’t take any pictures there because it felt sacrilegious. I did sit my stuff down and take a quiet moment to think about what I want for the world and humanity, namely, be saved from The Saved.

The oldest church I visited today was the first building, and cornerstone of Hohenfusting. I guess the emperor and pope were fighting back in the early 1000’s and the archbishop had to make himself safe, so he chose the really steeply sloped hill in the middle of what is now Salzburg as the site for a very defensible fortress. What do archbishops build first in their fortress once walls are built? A church of course. This church unfortunately went through a lot of make-overs, including one by a king/emperor who had a taste for the decadent, so this little pint-sized chapel got marbled and gilded over. Now it’s either a ruined mess, or archaeologists have pulled off all the flashy stuff trying to dig down to what the church was once like. It didn’t feel all that spiritual.

The rest of Hohenfusting was pretty cool too, from what I could see. What I couldn’t see through barrricades I used the stealth camera technique: stuck my camera and arm through the hole and used it to look around. I mostly saw construction sites or empty rooms, but there were some cool things too.

Beyond the thumb screw exhibit, the private quarters were really interesting. Everything was ornate and decorated, painted dark red or deep blue. The carvings were so intricate. They just don’t make them like they used to anymore. It was funny seeing an outhouse just off to the side in the tower’s tallest building.

Those of you who are my parents may remember the era in which my life’s greatest ambition was to be a princess. Once I got inside the fortress walls, I resisted the urge for about 3 minutes, and then utterly gave into my imagination. I was happy to figure out that my imagination has slightly matured: I was only half-princess, the other half a Dan-Brown character solving an ancient mystery.

I loved the sense of history in the place. Alaskans don’t know more-on houses until they see Salzburg. Looking down from the festung it seemed like all the buildings were very carefully, if haphazardly, stacked up the hillside. All in a row or block would be super old and super new buildings. The oldest buildings are really unassuming, then the younger they become, the more grandiose they get, and then the quality of engineering and construction goes noticeably downhill in this century. In Europe, rather than in LA proper and Hollywood studios, really old and really new are all together at once.

Many people talked about all the Mozart stuff in Salzburg. Yes, Mozart stuff, because that is what it is to me. I feel about classical music the way I used to feel about jazz: vaguely disinterested. Upon being forced to listen to jazz for up to 5 hours a day (occupational hazard of dating a jazz musician), my opinion of the genre developed into a much more solid sense: I hate it. I don’t want to get to that point with the music that makes up the soundtrack of my own dear mother’s life. I figured I should go, just in case my mind had changed about classical music without my realizing, since I’ve been listening to bluegrass and 80’s rock like it hasn’t yet gone out of style. My brother is a whiz-kid on the cello too, so I felt some familial obligation. Thankfully, the museum was closed for its lunch break when I walked from the hauptbahnhof (main train station) to the historical area, and closed again when I passed it on my way back that night. Whew, utter boredom averted.