Deutschland, Part 4 (Weimar and Auf Wiedersehen)

The traffic on the way from Munich to Weimar, our final stop before heading back to Berlin, was the worst yet. There really didn't seem to be a single part of Germany that was not being reconstructed. David and his high school exchange student, Lucas, had made plans to meet up in Weimar, and David had to call him several times to push back our arrival time. When we finally pulled into our hotel two hours late, Lucas joked that the Autobahn has no speed limits, but you can never really go very fast, so it doesn't matter. Oh well, the long drive gave me the chance to finish my second book and take lots of drive-by pictures of hops growing in the fields that lined the road.

David was able to identify these strange vines as hops. Who knew?  (David, apparently.)

Weimar is a lovely place. It is very well preserved because both Goethe and Schiller lived here, and so it is viewed as a sort of cultural hub for the arts in Germany. It's a great place to stroll around.  

We spent our first evening wandering around Weimar looking for a restaurant, finally settling on one in a lovely garden. There was a covered area set up nearby, but no one was sitting in it because the evening was too nice. All that changed very quickly, however, and we ended up seizing our plates and glasses and dashing into the tent moments before a downpour started drenching the outdoor tables in earnest. The poor waiters had quite a time trying to figure out who had moved where and ferrying trays from the kitchen and the bar through the garden to the tent with one hand while holding up umbrellas with the other.

Pre-dinner/pre-downpour beers with Lucas

The next morning, however, was lovely, and I finally got shot of the solar panels we saw everywhere in Germany. Remote farms would have whole roofs covered with the things, which was pretty striking, because the few houses that have them in the States have only about a quarter as many. Apparently there was some kind of government grant a few years ago. I read on the balcony before breakfast, savoring one of the only nice days we had while in Germany.

Solar panels, taken from the balcony of my room

We spent our last morning in Weimar walking around the town, looking into shops and exploring the marketplace in the central square. I bought chocolates to bring back to the office and a necklace with a silver ginkgo leaf hanging from it; Goethe wrote a poem about ginkgo trees and now the town has latched onto the leaf as its symbol. Once we reconvened, we headed to a nearby park which led us to a view of Goethe's garden house where he used to write and, according to Lucas, entertain lots of comely local lasses. "I think," Lucas commented, "he was a bit of a bad boy."

The marketplace in the center of Weimar

Goethe's garden cottage

Finally, it was time to bid Lucas goodbye and load up the van one last time so that we could return it in Berlin by the time we'd promised. In keeping with tradition, we got pretty lost coming into the city, though Jane and Anthony made the experience instructional by pointing out neighborhoods to which they'd traveled to visit friends we'd never met or restaurants we'd never heard of. Our final meal together in Germany was at an Indian restaurant, our third Indian meal while there. (German food is pretty heavy, and we could only handle so much of it. Our favorite spots were a Pakistani restaurant in Berlin and a Greek place in Munich. Go figure.) David headed back to Oregon very early the next morning, I left a few hours later, and my parents hung around for another week to see more of Berlin and spend more time with Anthony and Jane.

It was a whirlwind trip, but we had some great bonding time (well, bonding time anyway) in the van, and I discovered that, from the East Coast, the trans-Atlantic trip to Germany is pretty manageable. I can go directly to Berlin from JFK. So in a few months, I plan to determine whether Anthony and Jane were just being nice when they told me that I should come back.

Yachts, Mansions, and All Things Newport

As I have yet to sift through Weimar pictures, I'll divert to last weekend, which I spent in Rhode Island - final segment of my Germany trip will be next!

Ed and I were excited about going rock climbing in upstate New York last weekend, but about two hours before we were scheduled to leave on Saturday morning, we had to refigure our plans. It was scheduled to pour rain, which makes camping and climbing a lot less enjoyable. Since we already had a car reserved for the remainder of the weekend, Ed suggested Newport, Rhode Island, so after some quick adjustments to my suitcase (Leatherman: out, strappy sandals: in), we were off. 

Traffic was horrible, which was unexpected for a Saturday - I'd have thought the roads would have been more congested on Fridays and Sundays. The worst of it was after we'd finally gotten to Newport and had to sit in long lines of barely moving traffic before finally parking at our hotel. The hotel was lovely and right on the water in the middle of the harbor area, so it was easy to start exploring just a few minutes after we finally arrived. The congestion, it turned out, was not limited to the roads; the sidewalks were packed as well. Ed has spent quite a lot of time in Newport over the years - his father loved sailing and used to have a boat there - and he said he'd never seen it so crowded. We walked around and Ed pointed out points of interest in the town. It's a beautiful spot, and the weather was perfect. My favorite part was watching sailboats and yachts cruising by, however. Ed taught me a lot about how they operate, pros and cons of different types, etc. We shared drinks and a platter of oysters at an outdoor restaurant before dinner. "Idyllic" has never been a more appropriate term. I could certainly get used to that sort of thing.

Due to the rain and the early hour, this square was deserted on Sunday morning - the day  before it was jammed with tourists.

The next morning was gray and drizzly. We had breakfast, then boarded a schooner (I think it was a schooner...) for a tour of Newport from the water. It was chilly and windy once we left the protection of the dock, but it was fascinating to watch the crew operate the sails while the captain steered from the stern. We cruised by houses that used to belong to Jackie O's family, the Eisenhowers, and various other noteworthy, wealthy families.

Our boat, pre-voyage

This is the only shot I got from the boat itself; I was too busy trying to keep my raincoat wrapped around me to get any pictures once we were underway.

Before we headed out of town, we drove through the mansion-lined streets for which Newport is famous. Most of these houses are open for tours now, but it was fascinating to try to imagine the way they must have looked when they were residences. Ed's favorite was the Breakers, which I was keen to see, since it was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The tour was fascinating, though we were a bit rushed because we had to get back on the road, and my only complaint was that my beloved university was not mentioned once (which, I suppose, made sense because it was completely irrelevant. Still.). The sheer opulence of this place was pretty staggering, as you can probably deduce for yourself by checking out the dining room below. It reminded me a bit of FiLoLi and Hearst Castle. We went through bedrooms, the kitchen, the library, etc., and it was difficult to imagine anybody actually living here. Much of it was so decadent that it was pretty impractical - Mr. Vanderbilt's bathtub was made of thick marble, which made the bathwater get cold so quickly that it often had to be refilled with hot water multiple times before he started to bathe just to keep it warm for more than a few minutes.

Our ride home was pretty eventful. The rain made visibility pretty bad, particularly considering I haven't spent a whole lot of time behind the wheel lately. A spur-of-the-moment impulse to follow a ramp meant that I drove us over the George Washington Bridge not once but twice. Well, the view is nice, so it wasn't a total wash... The traffic, rain, and my propensity for picking ill-advised routes made it nice to get back home. But I was, understandably, sorry to leave Newport, despite the weather. I look forward to going back sometime when we have more than one night to spend. I imagine the drive would be beautiful in the fall, when the changing leaves will make being stuck in traffic more pleasant. And I look forward to Ed - whose navigational skills are, like most of the adult population of the world, better than mine - finding his driver's license so that I can relax in the passenger's seat.

Deutschland, Part 3 (Mittenwald and Innsbruck)

Retrieving the van from the garage was much easier than depositing it into the garage, and so our trip out of Munich went smoothly. For about three minutes. Then we got onto a main road where there was some pretty serious construction going on. We sat in traffic for ages, glaciers whizzing by us on all sides. (Well, they could have, anyway.) At some point, the monotony got the best of me, and when I woke up a few hours later, we were just outside Garmisch-Partenkirche, where the scenery looked a lot like this:

A house next to our guesthouse

I had been to Garmisch before and decided it was my favorite part of Germany. Mittenwald, I decided, was even more charming.

We saw a lot of churches in this part of the country with the onion-shaped dome, though we never did figure out how   the trend got there - it was the sort of style I associated with far-away Russia.

Mittenwald's charming downtown area, at the foot of the mountains

Mittenwald is in a valley, with dramatic mountains rising up seemingly out of nowhere on all sides. I am accustomed to foothills, like the kind we have in California, that lead slowly to steep mountains, but that's not the way it works in this part of Germany. The downtown area was pleasant, but rather more dominated by boutiques than I would have liked. We discovered a pair of men's swim trunks designed to look like Lederhosen in amongst the fashionable scarves, bright shoulder bags, and chunky bracelets.

It seemed that every building in Mittenwald had flowerboxes under the windows, elaborate murals adorning its outer walls, or both.

Our first hour in Mittenwald was lovely. After settling into the guesthouse, which was run by a proprietress who was gruff but, we decided, appropriately German-ly so, we walked to the center of the town where the boys promptly bought beers at a local bar. And then it began to pour. We split up and tried to look into various shops for a while, but it wasn't turning out to be a very pleasant experience, so we regrouped in a small, cozy restaurant, had lunch, and retreated to our guesthouse where I wrote postcards and everyone else played a board game.

It was still raining as we sat down to breakfast, and the weather report did not look promising, so we elected to drive over the Austrian border to check out Innsbruck for the day. Things cleared up as we drove, and while it was initially cloudy when we arrived, by the end of our day in Innsbruck it was sunny and beautiful. Innsbruck is a famous skiing city, and I found myself wishing it was winter. We strolled around the old city and had lunch at a cafe.

Downtown Innsbruck

By the time we got  back to Mittenwald, it was sunny and beautiful, and we decided to ride up a gondola to the top of a nearby mountain peak. At the last minute, Dad suggested that we hike down. The guy selling tickets was very against the idea, as it was already 5:00 and the hike down took, he said, 4 hours, which would leave us hiking in the dark. Dad was confident that we could do it faster than that, and eventually the man threw up his hands and sold us the one-way tickets anyway, against his better judgement. The views from the gondola were lovely. (Jane, again, chose to sit this one out.)

The hike down was nice, but it was hard to enjoy much of it because I was a bit worried. If one of us turned an ankle, we'd have been in big trouble. (I felt better when Anthony successfully called Jane from the mountain; at least rescue was an option in case of injury and no one would have to climb down for help, leaving part of the party on the chilly, rocky mountainside.) We hiked down a scree field for the first two hours. It was rough going. We'd slip and slide on the rocks whenever the slope was especially steep. David was the only one who had on shoes with appropriate ankle support, and we had no water and no flashlights. I kept thinking about wilderness accident stories, and many of them, it seemed, started out just like this.

It was also not very pretty. We hiked by a patch of snow and lots of large rocks. Then, at last, we came around the side of the mountain to see the valley below us in the evening light. It was beautiful, and quite a relief.

Our terrain. The bottoms of my feet were aching by the time we got to the bottom because my shoes had thin soles and it seemed I could feel every rock!

We were all pretty relieved to get to the more pleasant path. We had seen some sheep on a hillside about an hour before, and Anthony walked ahead, then hid behind a bush and baa-ed as we came around the curve, causing Mom to get very excited about seeing a mountain goat at such close range. He emerged, to her astonishment, and passed the next few minutes tossing small pebbles at me from behind. The brother-sister relationship doesn't change with age, it seems.

Almost there!

The next morning, before we piled back into the van to drive north to Weimar, I took a short walk by the river that ran along the edge of Mittenwald. The water was a pretty incredible powder blue color from some mineral in the light-colored rocks, and there were some lovely wildflowers. It was all very peaceful, and I was sorry to go, though new adventures in Weimar awaited!

Deutschland, Part 2 (Munich)

It must be admitted that our arrival in Munich was the low part of the trip. Traffic was terrible and was not easy to navigate from behind the wheel of a 9-seater van. The hotel was somewhat difficult to find and the streets were crowded and felt narrow. When we finally found the hotel, they had no record of our reservation. Jane got down to business, negotiating with the desk clerk in polite but somewhat terse German, and Dad, Mom, David, and I ferried all of our bags from the van to the hotel, which did not provide parking. Then Anthony and I took off on a frustrating voyage through the heart of the city, sampling several parking garages over the course of an hour before we found one that was high enough to accommodate the van, and scratching the roof and the left rear fender in the process. Oops. Tempers were running high by the time we got back to the hotel. Happily, things were all downhill from there.

After a beer on the pleasant patio of our hotel, we set off to walk through the old center of Munich, a walk we repeated the following day. 

The old Rathaus, or city hall. Every few hours, people gather in the square to watch the Glockenspiel, or mechanized  performance of figurines set to music, which was handcrafted hundreds of years ago. It plays out in the upper part of the square tower on the right edge of this picture.

Munich is very aware of what tourists want to see. I've never seen so many people dressed in traditional German costume, all of them employees of touristy restaurants and shops. This band, completed with pint-sized dancers, appeared out of nowhere to play polka music in the square.

We wandered into this lovely church.

Jane and Anthony enjoyed it less than I did.

Jane did, however, enjoy the massive pretzels available at the Biergarten under the Chiniesiche Turm, or Chinese Tower, in the city's largest park. We saw some locals threading a forearm through the pretzel in order to free up hands to carry mugs of beer back to their tables.

Mom enjoyed the beer.

David enjoyed being incognito.

After refreshments, we walked by this artificial river in the park, where surfers take advantage of the waves created by fast-moving water through an uneven channel. They lined up on either side, and when it was their turn hopped out into the waves and rode back and forth until they fell and were carried out of the wave.

Jane, who does not like heights, did not join us for the trip into the tower of a large church. She missed a lovely, 360-degree view of Munich from above, as well as a very narrow, winding staircase.

Munich has a great outdoor market where one can buy exotic fruits, truffles, baked goods, sausages of every description, honey, and really almost anything else. 

David and I went into the famous Hofbrau Haus, strictly for research purposes. This is a Mass locker, a place to store your liter-sized glass safely behind a padlocked door so that it will always be in the beer hall when you want it. There were a lot of these lockers in the Hofbrau House, and every one of them was completely full.

And a happy ending: For those of you concerned about the fate of the van, a lucky accident ensured that the problem of the damage to the paint was easily resolved. When the guys at the car rental agency asked my father, whose German is minimal at best, about insurance, he told the them that his credit card would cover him in case of an accident. He told them this in English, and held up the card to make his point. Reading his gesture, rather than his words, the agent dutifully charged him, via his credit card, for insurance, and so the scratches on the van were not a problem when we returned it to Berlin about five days later.

Next stop: Mittenwald!

The Book of Mormon

A brief hiatus from the Germany series to fill you in on other great things I've been up to:

About a month ago, Ed surprised me with tickets to The Book of Mormon. I was completely over the moon about it, because they're extremely difficult to get and I've been dying to see it. However, my elation quickly turned to crushing disappointment when I checked my calendar and realized that the weekend he'd picked in October was the same weekend my dear friend Shannon, who I've known since second grade, was scheduled to tie the knot in D.C. After considering some rather desperate solutions, one of which may or may not have involved attempting to sabotage the wedding in hopes of a postponement, I told Ed I wasn't going to be able to go. (This is the downside to planning surprises for people.) My fortunes took a turn for the better, however, when Ed's mom decided to make a somewhat impromptu trip to New York and wanted to see The Book of Mormon. Ed's mom, it seems, is good at getting what she wants. A few days out, she and Ed had secured four tickets to the hardest show to see on Broadway, and last Tuesday we all arrived at the theater with Ed's cousin Sandy, feeling (at least I did) rather like lottery winners must.

A bit of background: The Book of Mormon is a musical written by the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in collaboration with Robert Lopez who co-wrote Avenue Q, one of my favorite musicals. It's been getting rave reviews since day one and won nine Tony awards this year, one of them for Best Musical. Ferran, after entering the ticket lottery every day for more than a week, got tickets just days before he left for Spain, and he called it "the best thing he's ever seen." Critics have been gaga over it. Just out of curiosity, I checked out TicketMaster today to see what it takes to get to see this thing, and the first available seats are for a performance on January 26th. That's how popular it is.

And for good reason. My cheeks and my stomach were aching by the intermission for laughing so hard. In the story, two Mormon missionaries are sent to Uganda, where they attempt to convert the locals, who are being terrorized by a brutal warlord, a perfect recipe for any comedy. (Er...) Classically, one of them is the perfect Mormon, whom everyone expects to convert the entire continent before dinnertime, while the other is a hopelessly clueless klutz with a tendency to lie compulsively. As one would expect from the creators of South Park and Avenue Q, it's completely irreverent, profane, and cringe-worthy, replete with toilet humor and sex jokes. It's also whip-smart, clever, and relevant. As the clip I've linked to (below, in the final paragraph) demonstrates, The Book of Mormon mixes a sizable dose of sensitivity into its lambaste of, well, everyone. Mormons are not the only ones mocked here. While the Mormon church is, obviously, the butt of its humor, it pokes fun at religion in general. This, in my opinion, is the root of Stone and Parker's genius: They start with the kind of general ridicule that anyone can produce, but then, surprisingly, reveal the other side of the argument in a reflective, insightful way. Just as in the real world, no one ends up with clean hands, and this is the way it should be.

The response from the Mormon church was not at all what I expected, though apparently Stone and Parker weren't worried at all as they developed the musical. The head of PR simply said that while the show might entertain people for an evening, the real Book of Mormon would enrich your life forever. Stone and Parker said they were confident that the church would "be cool about it." I must confess that I wasn't, but I have to hand it to them for being good sports about the whole thing.


My only criticism, one Ed shares (validation!), is that the clueless missionary was unbelievably clueless. I know the show is a comedy and it's not supposed to be too terribly realistic, but he over-played his role in the beginning quite a bit, and I was torn between thinking he was funny and wishing he'd get off the stage. As the plot unwound and his character gained complexity, however, he settled down and became extremely likable and, if not believable, at least entertaining rather than annoying. All four of us really enjoyed it; Sandy said it was the funniest musical he's ever seen, and I agree. Ed's mom said she liked it a lot, but, having grown up in the era of musicals like Carousel, found it to be a bit startling. Put that way, I suppose it would be.

Here's a clip of one of the songs that was performed at the Tony Awards ceremony. It's probably the least funny song in the whole thing, actually, but it contains the least profanity and sums up some of the central themes of the show nicely, two great reasons to choose it for an awards show. I can't recommend The Book of Mormon highly enough to anyone who is not offended by excessive profanity and has about six months to kill before they actually get to see it.

Deutschland, Part 1 (Berlin and Regensburg)

Be patient with me, liebe freunde. It will probably take me a while to get all of the pictures from my recent trip to Germany up. For those of you who have concerns other than my vacation plans, some background: My brother Anthony lives in Berlin with his wife - they are both in graduate school there - and my father, mother, brother David, and I flew out to visit them. I was the last to arrive, and after just one day in Berlin, we piled into an enormous purple van and drove south. Regensburg, was our first stop.

Believe it or not, this photo of the painting in my parents' rented apartment is the only picture I took in Berlin, thus I had to include it. 

Regensburg is a very old city. It used to be walled, and the Altstadt, or Old City, has very narrow, cobblestone streets. It is famous for being on the Danube River, having a very old, very beautiful cathedral and Rathaus (city hall) and being picturesque in general. One of the highlights of our trip was having dinner at the Alte Linde (Old Linden), a beer hall/garden recommended by my friend Michael who used to live in Regensburg. It is right on the river across from the city, so it has a great view of the skyline, which is punctuated rather dramatically by the cathedral spires. Another cool thing we saw were the padlocks lining a bridge with pairs of names carved in them to signify the strong bond of the lovers' relationships. I'm not sure if this is a German thing or if it's specific to Regensburg, but I thought it was pretty cool. (We spotted one that said "Dirk [heart] Bier" (Dirk loves beer). David bought a hat, in an attempt to blend with with the Germans. I don't think it really worked.

Don't you hate how you can never get far enough away to fit the whole cathedral in one frame?

Before we could stop her, Jane ordered a Mass (a one-liter tankard) of beer for everyone at the table. Well, when in Regensburg... 

Dapper Dave

It's less blue than you'd think, considering the song and all.

Shooting in my Neighborhood

(I will post about my trip to Germany soon. As things stand now, I have not even gotten my pictures off my camera.)

As I was walking to work this morning, I noticed that there were "No Parking" signs taped up all over the place and an awning with people busily setting up a table under it. My first thought was that there was going to be a summer block party, but that seemed a little strange for a Tuesday. Walking on, I saw lots of trucks, rolls of thick wire, and what appeared to be a random assortment of pieces of scaffold and other equipment. Ah, another movie.

A young man with an unruly beard smiled at me from one of the many trucks lining the sidewalk as I passed by. "Are you all shooting something?" I asked him. (I know enough people involved in theater to say "shooting" and not "filming," and also not to be horrified when I hear someone say, "I shot a herd of lions in Africa," or "I shot an actress last night.") "Yeah, it's a show called Tutu," he replied. "Like ballet?" I asked, wondering why they'd pick this particular stretch of street. He laughed, "Sounds like it, but it's two-two like twenty-two, Precinct 22. It's a new cop show." 

I kept going, and as I rounded the corner I saw the cameras and several very attractive people dressed in full make-up and unusually spotless police uniforms hanging around a stoop, apparently waiting for things to start rolling. A middle-aged black man passed me, muttering to himself, "They got to take up the whole sidewalk, make people walk in the street." It did seem a bit presumptuous. I noticed a sign posted against a fence warning passers-by that if they ventured past that point, they were liable to end up in the background of the shot and may end up on TV, and that by proceeding any farther they were giving their consent. On the next block, there were a series of trailers lined up. One of the window shades wasn't pulled down completely and I caught a glimpse of one of those mirrors bordered by lights for doing theater make-up. Interesting. 

This made me consider my neighborhood. It's in an interesting state of flux, because no matter how many expensive brownstones are renovated, there's no getting rid of the huge housing projects just a block or two away. I've never felt that it was unsafe, and I like the mix of people inherent in a neighborhood that has both abundant low-income housing and a Whole Foods and a Sephora. And it makes for interesting experiences on the way to work.