BFT23 - We Go to Germany

 

In early March 2020, when the world burned down, Lauren was in Germany.

She’d won a full scholarship to study abroad for the academic year, one of only a handful offered by this particular national-level program, and ended up in Walsrode, a small town in the northwestern part of Germany roughly equidistant from Bremen, Hanover, and Hamburg. Her first host family didn’t work out, but eventually she settled in with a new host family that she really liked and she was looking forward to the rest of her time there.

And then the pandemic hit, and suddenly she was back in Wisconsin.

If you check GoogleMaps it says that the trip from Prague to Walsrode should take between six and seven hours by car, depending on what route you take and what traffic conditions you might find. A good chunk of this is on the Autobahn which has long stretches where the speed limit is “Whatever, dude, just don’t come crying to us if it doesn’t work out well for you” except in German so it is somehow more intimidating, and this meant that in theory it might take even less than that if nothing untoward happened. Midwesterners will gladly drive that distance for no real reason at all, so we decided to take some of the time we had planned to be in Prague and visit Lauren’s host family.

This, of course, required us to rent a car. We’d already had experience doing this in Italy so we figured this would be fine – especially since Kim handled all of the arrangements for it, which meant that it would actually be done well. As is standard in large European cities in our experience, the car rental place was located at the central train station in Prague, not that far from Wenceslas Square. So early one morning Kim and I boarded the tram to go to the trains to get the car.

I don’t know who designs European central rail stations, but my guess is that they are all big fans of M.C. Escher because these things are positively surreal in their ability to fold space and time in new and exciting ways that don’t actually lead to your rental car agency. GPS will not help you. The signs will not help you. The people working in the café that opens in three minutes will not help you, at least not for another three minutes. You are on your own in a world without geometry.

We walked around the station for a while, then we went outside and walked around there for a while and eventually we went down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel underneath the busy road in front of the station, and then back up and around to what turned out to be the rental car parking lot (so at least we knew where that was when we needed it later) where we were told to go back into the station. There was an elevator just sort of poking up out of the ground right by the parking lot entrance that would get us within hailing distance of the rental agency. Eventually we found the agency in a long subterranean hallway in a disused lavatory behind a locked door with a sign that said “Beware of the Leopard” in Czech. The car rental people were friendly enough once we got there, though, and after a suitable amount of bureaucracy involving pretty much every form of ID we had brought to Europe, they handed us the keys to the car. We retraced our steps to the rental car parking lot we’d visited earlier – back through the hallway, past the leopard, up the elevator, and so on – and eventually we got to little shed where we presented our papers and were told where to find the car. It was a Skoda of some kind, significantly larger than the Fiat Speck we’d had in Italy – it would be on the smaller end of midsized in the US – so we were able to put all of our bags in the trunk rather than on our laps.

Already, we were ahead.

We bobbed and weaved our way through the streets of Prague and back to the apartment, where Oliver and Lauren were waiting outside for us. They had elected not to get up early just to watch us sign papers, for which we did not blame them. Once we got the car Kim texted ahead to ask if Lauren could get her a coffee from the shop across the street, which she did and that is how we eventually found out that Costa coffee cups are pretty much useless as beverage containers though they do make it easy to spray coffee over a wide area. But we found each other, got everything and everyone packed in, and then pointed the car to the northwest, out of Prague and toward Germany.

The roads in central Europe are a lot bigger than they are in Italy, and the drive was lovely but uneventful as we made our way out of Czechia. We stopped for gas and snacks at one point – road trips are pretty universal that way – and soon found ourselves in Germany and on the Autobahn.

The Autobahn has variable speed limits, which are posted on digital signs overhead. Sometimes there is a number, which tells you how many kph you can do – it’s usually between 120 and 140 or roughly 75 to 90 mph. Sometimes less if there is congestion. Sometimes more. And sometimes there isn’t a number at all, which is when you’re on your own. Kim did most of the driving as this was something she had been looking forward to doing, though after a long day I ended up driving the last couple of hours.

We zipped along, admiring the scenery, stopping for food and gas now and then. And then somewhere around Magdeberg we hit traffic.

From this we learned two things. First, when traffic comes to a standstill on a highway in Germany everyone moves to the shoulders in order to clear a center lane for any emergency vehicles that need to pass through. And second, GPS can always find a way to get you through as long as you’re willing to drive on ever smaller roads through ever smaller towns. And since a) we were tourists and seeing more than just the highway sounded like a good idea, and b) we wanted to get to our destination by a reasonable hour, we figured we’d try it.

There were some interesting turns and some congested little towns – we weren’t the only ones who had this idea, after all, and I have distinct memories of one little town that a) required us to slalom our way through a fair number of residential areas and b) had a single traffic light on the road out of town that backed everything up for a thoroughly absurd amount of time – but eventually we found ourselves on the road into Walsrode, and a few minutes later we’d found Lauren’s family.

Gerd and Sonja were kind enough to take Lauren in after the first host family didn’t work out. They have a son, Neil, who is about Lauren’s age – which is how she got to know them, as they were in school together – and a daughter, Jella, who was actually an exchange student herself while Lauren was there so we all got to meet her this trip. I can see why Lauren felt so comfortable with them. They were incredibly kind and welcoming, and we enjoyed our time with them immensely. We look forward to seeing them again – either here or in Germany or, perhaps, both.

When we got there Gerd, Sonja, and Neil welcomed us into their home and we sat together at the table, sharing food and stories and getting to know each other. Eventually we moved over to the living room, where Jella joined us later

After a while we went back to the table for dinner and we stayed there until well after midnight, with conversations flowing back and forth across different groups. We shared a great many stories and some local liqueurs, which only made the stories brighter. It was a wonderfully comfortable evening, as if we’d known each other forever. At one point I remember pausing as the different conversations went on around me and noticing that I could barely hear myself think above the noise of it all, and if that isn’t the definition of a lovely evening I don't know what would be.

They also brought up from the basement a box full of things that Lauren had left behind back in 2020 when she’d been given just a few hours to get packed and onto the train to the airport, which was really thoughtful of them. We packed it up and took it back to Prague with us and then distributed it among our suitcases for the trip home, so now they have their basement back and Lauren has some of her old stuff. Win all around.

Gerd had to work the next day, so we said our goodbyes to him that night. And the next day we went out with Sonja, Neil, and Jella to see the town.

I enjoyed having a chance to explore Walsrode after only hearing about it for so long. It’s a strange thing to send your child off across the world without you, to live in a new country for a while. You ask how things are but unless there is an absolute catastrophe the answer is always “fine,” and you hope that’s true even though you know there’s not much you can do from that distance if it’s not. But now I’ve been there, and it really is a very nice place. So I feel retroactively reassured that way.

It's not a big town but when you walk through the streets it seems neat and well kept, though you can tell that people actually live there. We walked through the neighborhoods for a while until we got to the school that Lauren attended.

Sonja got us inside so we could walk around a bit – they were doing some renovations, so the place was open even in the summer. It was interesting to see how different it was in some ways from American schools and how much wasn’t that different at all.

Although sometimes the cross-cultural gap is a bit wider than people think.

We even found the statue that what would have been Lauren’s class donated after they graduated.

It’s got a pretty little downtown with a bunch of shops that we explored here and there, including one place that sold us the world’s best Fanta soda – a lemon and elderflower blend that really needs to catch on in this country and likely won’t until Americans decide they will accept paprika potato chips too.

We stopped into the big Lutheran church in town as well. It’s really astonishing how easy it is to tell a Lutheran church from a Catholic cathedral even without considering the size. It just has a completely different feel to it.

From there we wandered over to a nearby convent. The Walsrode Abbey was originally founded by Benedictine Nuns in 986 CE – yes, that’s a three-digit year – and it has had a long and fascinating history. It was plundered during the Thirty Years War, occupied by Napoleon, and has a refectory endowed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the guy who was in charge of Germany during World War I. It’s run by Lutherans now, as one would expect in northern Germany, and it’s really a lovely and peaceful place. You can wander around the grounds for a bit, and go inside some of the buildings. And they have an apple tree by the exit that has really tasty tart apples.

We also found this, which was a nice little break.

Eventually it got on toward lunchtime and there was no other place to go but Lauren’s favorite old haunt from when she was there, a doner kebab shop called Torino – they’ve moved to a new building since Lauren was there, but it’s the same people serving the same food. We ordered doner, of course, and took it back to the house. It was really good.

And then it was time to go. We said our goodbyes, at least for now, and then piled back into the Skoda and headed off back to Prague. It was a pretty drive with no traffic this time and we ended up chasing rainbows all the way back to Czechia.

Things got complicated once we arrived, though. We got back about an hour too late to return the car so we had to park it somewhere in Prague until the next morning, and if you know anything at all about trying to park a car in a large European city you know that this was going to be a great deal easier said than done. There are all sorts of regulations covering this, many of which involve what color paint is on the ground in the place where you think you’re going to leave your car. In Prague you want white paint, because you’re allowed to park there. Blue paint is for residents only. Yellow paint means you can park there for fifteen minutes, which was not terribly useful for our situation. There are other colors and they probably mean everything from “tow away zone” to “we will find you and squeeze lemons into all your bread flour.”

We thought we’d gotten lucky right off the bat with a spot just across the way from our apartment but it turned out to have blue paint that had been hard to see in the dark. We dropped off Oliver and Lauren so they could make their way back to the apartment and continued our search. Kim and I then found a fifteen-minute spot even closer to our apartment and just took the rest of our bags inside so at least that part was done. When we got back to the car we asked a server at a place across the street where we could park overnight and she said there was one street nearby where you could park for free as long as you got out by 8am, which was perfect since we needed to return the car by then anyway. What’s the street called? “Kovel Street,” we thought she said. This turned out not to be true, and we spent the next 45 minutes alternately looking for that street – a process that at various points included downloading an app for a spot we eventually decided against, nearly getting trapped in a tiny little piazza full of cars with only one way in or out, and Kim doing a masterful parallel parking job on a spot that turned out to be reserved for other people – or trying to find a parking garage. One garage we drove into, got our ticket, and found no actual spots where we could park. We were grateful that we actually could get back out. Another place we called and managed to get a reservation even though the guy actively discouraged it, and we were on our way there when we found a street full of white paint that we could actually park in. We tried to pay for it and only managed to pay for 4 minutes of parking due to a misreading of the dates (American style vs European style), but then a passerby told us that we’d actually found Kovel Street (or whatever it was called) and could park there for free.

So it was a bit of an end to the day, but that did nothing to take the shine off a lovely visit to Germany with some wonderful people.

We did get the car back in time the next morning, after all that.

Birthday Wishes

It’s Lauren’s birthday today, and now even in the US she is allowed to have a glass of champagne to celebrate.

That’s what she asked for. And really, she deserves it.

She’s doing well in college. She’s got plans and ambitions. She surrounds herself with good people. She’s fun to hang out with. What more could a parent hope for?

She had her birthday party on Friday last week over at Main Campus University so tonight will likely be a little quieter, though it is Halloween on a college campus there so probably not that much quieter. You never know. I suppose we’ll hear the stories, or at least some of them.

We’re in Our Little Town, passing out candy to the younger kids trick-or-treating at our door and wishing her well from here.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I’m proud of you.

News and Updates

 

1. You forget, three and a half years into a pandemic, that there are such things as colds. Especially when you’ve already scheduled a flu shot and a Covid booster on top of everything and you can’t really reschedule them and – BAM! – there you go. So yeah, it’s been a fun week around here.

2. It’s the middle of the semester and it’s been a fun week that way for pretty much everyone, as far as I can tell. This is the point where the stress starts to get to students and we just try to be there for them. Sometimes all it takes is a friendly voice telling them that this is normal and here’s what you do next and why yes we do have a form for that exact situation, in fact.

3. At some point I will get back to reading books again. It’s been that kind of year. I actually have good books I want to read. I’m in the middle of a book on Douglas Adams for which I was one of the Kickstarter sponsors – have been in the middle of it for over a month now – and last week I managed to see John Scalzi when he came to Madison. He was gracious as always and very funny and I came home with yet more books that I really will read at some point.

4. I will also get back to the BFT posts, as there are – by my count – three more I need to make. I’m glad that there are people who find them entertaining. I try! But mostly I just want to get the stories down before I forget them, which happens faster and faster every year. Maybe someday I’ll get all this whole blog printed out as something more permanent than electrons on someone else’s server, and my descendants will enjoy all these stories too. One can hope.

5. I have nothing in particular to say about the current situation in the middle east, because I do not really keep up with goings on in that area and there is already enough uninformed nonsense out there that I don’t feel any pressing need to add to it. The history behind all of this is more complicated and less decisive than either side is willing to admit and there are sins and atrocities aplenty to go around.

6. Meanwhile, Kyiv still stands.

7. Over here in the Land of the Free™ the House GOP managed to select a leader even worse than the sexual predator or the open racist that they tried to elect before this guy, which is an astonishing achievement but it is a target-rich environment that way – really, all they had to do was toss a beanbag at one of their meetings and the odds of hitting someone worse were pretty good. The new guy is an avowed theocrat who thinks his personal faith is more important than laws, morals, the Constitution, or you; who is perfectly happy to abandon our allies abroad and anyone who isn’t exactly like him here at home; and who has exactly zero experience with any responsible post in Congress. So we got that going for us. At this point the chances of a complete trainwreck are somewhere between Absolute and Already Happened.

8. The bunnies are in for the winter now, as we are about to head into a solid week of below-freezing overnight lows and that’s just not good for their water bottles. They’re down in their newly reconstituted basement lair, where it will be warmer but rather less interesting visually, though I’m not sure how important that is to a bunny when all is said and done.

9. The Phillies lost in the NLCS, and there was much sadness. They were an entertaining team this year. On the other hand, the Eagles are leading the NFL, the Union is in the playoffs, and the Flyers are, well, working hard. The Wolves haven’t been relegated out of the Premier League yet, and none of the other sportsball teams that I follow in whatever vague ways I follow them seem to be doing too badly. So that’s going well.

10. I am really looking forward to a period of downtime where I have nothing pressing to do. I suspect this may happen in June. We’ll see.

BFT23 - Kafka

 

Pro-tip: If you’re going to go to Prague you really should become familiar with Franz Kafka.

Kafka was an insurance lawyer who through hard work and incessant effort rose to complete obscurity as an author in his lifetime but became famous for it later (the writing, not the insurance) in a way that he would have found perfectly understandable and grimly humorous. He hovers over the city in much the same way that Marianne hovers over Paris, John Bull over London, and Gritty over Philadelphia. He is the spirit of the city, its daimon, the city made manifest.

It isn’t every author whose name becomes an adjective in common English, after all. Especially if that author didn’t originally write in that language.

As part of our preparation for this trip Kim required us all to read The Metamorphosis, a short story in which an office drone wakes up one day to discover he has become a large cockroach. “Loaded with laughs,” as the old comedian Shelley Berman once noted. It was a chore, really, but I suspect that Kafka intended this as part of the message of the story so you have to hand it to him on succeeding. I’ve read other things he’s written, some of which I inherited from my grandmother when she passed away back in the 80s, and those I enjoyed more.

You’ll find Kafka pretty much everywhere you go in Prague, often in the strangest places.

On our first night in the city, after we left Wenceslas Square and the Golden Chicken had done its thing for us, we found him on one of the street signs that Europeans insist on putting high up on buildings rather than lower down on posts the way Americans do.

 

This discovery introduced us to two things. First, the ubiquity of public art in Prague, as the bronze artwork on the wall was more than what would have been required for just a street sign. And second, the equal ubiquity of Kafka.

If you’re interested, according to Google Translate (as loosely retranslated out of the computerese by yours truly), the signs read:

Franz Kafka Square, Old Town – Prague 1

And

A native of Prague, a German writer, a lawyer by profession at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Company. He left behind a simple but prophetic body of work, such as The Metamorphosis.

I have to say that I really love the description, “simple but prophetic.”

Kafka was born in 1883 where the Square now stands, and he lived there for a couple of years before his family moved elsewhere in the city. The house was torn down during his lifetime when that part of town was cleared in 1897. We passed by this corner a few times during our stay there, and every time we felt a certain obligation to note this fact. It seemed appropriate.

We also found Kafka at Prague Castle.

After you’ve gone through the courtyards and the Cathedral and the various other bits and bobs that make up the Castle complex, you find yourself on a small road known as the Golden Lane, lined with even smaller houses, many of which now have been turned into shops. Toward the beginning of this road there is a light blue one, No. 22.

Kafka lived here for a while in 1916-1917. Like everything else in Prague you’re not really supposed to take photos of it and like everything else in Prague everyone does anyway. It’s an unassuming little place, but well marked.

There’s also this statue that Kim and Oliver ran across when they were exploring the Jewish Quarter of town. It’s tucked between the Spanish Synagogue and a church, and there seems to be some debate in the various sources I’ve looked at while writing this over which of the two figures is actually Kafka or if neither of them are and it’s just the spirit of the whole piece that is meant to evoke Kafka, and this is another thing I suppose he’d find funny.

But if you’re going to explore Kafka, the place to go is – not surprisingly – the Kafka Museum. Because of course there is a museum for him, although this one isn’t really that old and you have to wonder what took them so long to set one up.

The over/under on the opening of the Gritty Museum in Philadelphia is 2032 by the way. You heard it here first.

Lauren was the one who really wanted us to go to the Kafka Museum but it took us a couple of tries to get there. We’d thought about visiting after our trip to the Castle, but the timing didn’t quite work out – it’s hard to tear yourself away from the Castle, and the Museum does eventually close – so we made a concerted effort to get there the next day.

It’s an unassuming place from the outside, highlighted by a pair of statues that you have to look at twice just to make sure that you’re actually seeing what you think you’re seeing.

There are two things that may not be obvious about these statues from the photo.

One is that the pool they’re standing in is shaped like Czechia. You’re looking from north to south in the photo, so the northern border of the country is actually at the bottom of the picture, and the guy on the right is standing more or less on Prague while the other guy is standing near Brno, the second largest city in the country. The fact that they’re pissing on the rest of the country is probably a statement of something.

The second thing is something I learned by watching the innumerable tour groups that walked by. The groups would circle up around the statue while the tour guide would go into long explanations of things in languages I didn’t understand (admittedly a wide range) and after a while the tour guide would reach over to the nearest statue and move its dick. Yes! The dicks go up and down! And they never stop pissing! This is how you know it’s Art.

Lauren and I watched these statues for a while, taking it all in, both before we went into the museum and after we came out since we didn’t stick together in the museum and we had some time to sit on the bench outside and just observe while Kim and Oliver finished up their more thorough examination of the displays. This is where we found out that Lauren actually got the job she had interviewed for when we were in Irsina, so she and I went across the way to a little bakery and bought celebratory gingerbread.

You can’t actually buy your tickets for the museum at the museum – you have to do that across the courtyard in the little gift shop, which is a lovely little absurdist touch when you think about it. We spent a fair amount of time and money in that gift shop afterward, and we regret nothing.

There’s also the giant K statue just outside the door, and you have to appreciate that.

Speaking as someone who has run a museum, the Kafka Museum is really well done. It’s dark and twisty, much as you would expect given its subject, and it is packed with information about Kafka’s life and times. Whoever put together really loved their job and understood the assignment. It’s not a place that will take you more than an hour or two, but it is definitely one you should put on your list if you find yourself in the city.

If you open the drawers in that room full of filing cabinets, sometimes you find phones where you can listen to things.

After we left the Kafka Museum we mostly wandered around the city for a while, stopping to look at grocery stores and various bits of artwork before we stumbled into our final bit of Kafka.

For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom but which probably involved a fair amount of distilled liquor, sometime in 2014 the city installed an 11-meter (36-foot) high statue of Franz Kafka’s head made entirely out of horizontal slices of highly polished steel, which means it looks a lot like the pissing guys by the museum except those are bronze. This is not a coincidence, since both were done by the same artist, a man who seems like he’d be a lot of fun late at night in a rundown bar. Each slice moves on its own, and every few minutes the whole thing starts rotating at different speeds so for a while it looks rather disheveled but then it all sort of magically snaps back to the original shape, though usually facing in a different direction from before. And then it does it again a few minutes later.

We watched it for a while and then realized two things: first, that it was raining a bit harder than it had been for most of the day, and second, that we were hungry and standing in front of an indoor shopping mall that had a food court in it. So we went inside and, for the second time and in a second country on this trip, we ended up at a McDonald’s. It’s slightly different in Czechia than either Italy or the US and for that reason more interesting, but not all that different really. Sometimes you’re just hungry and wet and happy to have something hot and familiar.

There are very few experiences I’ve had in my life that have been more surreal than sitting in a McDonald’s on a grey rainy day in Prague and watching the giant motorized head of Franz Kafka slowly spin around and around. It makes you question things, yes it does.