The invasion

They're coming.
The invasion has begun.
It's not the undead. The zombie apocalypse is not here yet. What we are facing is a horde of... refugees.
Ok, when you put it like that, it sounds less scary. Some of them are brown people. They are going to need jobs and health care and places to live. Maybe that sounds scarier.

The flood of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans makes headlines here every day, and with good reason. It's the largest refugee crisis since World War II .  Germany is stepping up to the challenge. As Europe's political and economic leader (I guess that could be debated, but nobody messes with Angela), Germany has opened its doors to more refugees than any other EU country. It will accept about 500,000 asylum seekers this year.

Germany's public services are responding. Shelters and tent cities are springing up around the country. In Hannover, a school gym has been converted into a refugee shelter. There are rumors that Waterlooplatz, originally a training ground for the Prussian army, will soon be filled with trailer homes for refugees. 

Some refugee shelters in Germany have already been burned down. As many Germans as there are who want to help, there are plenty who are afraid. There's also a slimy underbelly of those who are afraid and react with violence.

I think that Der Spiegel does a great job of describing the mindset of the German public:

"These are people who are determined to do everything right and to atone for Germany's sins, even 70 years later. They know that they owe something to their collective conscience, and that whenever they give something up, they also gain something in return. That something is the feeling of doing the right thing, the important thing.
 
But there is also the fear of being overwhelmed. It is the fear of people who are willing to give, but only to a point, only as long as it doesn't hurt them. People who are willing to share as long as they don't have to make sacrifices. And that, all generosity aside, is why so many people now feel that limits should be imposed on immigration. They may not know where these limits should lie, but they are convinced that they should exist."

I was subbing in fifth grade last year as the students worked on research projects. One girl was researching refugees. Her survey to the class asked whether Germany should be accepting refugees or not. Most of the ten and eleven-year-olds in the class answered, something like "yes, but..." or 'yes, to a point..." or "yes, as long as...". Even though many of these kids had immigrated once themselves, they (or their parents) wanted to put a limit on just how welcoming Germany could be. 

The flow of refugees might be easier to swallow if all of the refugees came from Eastern Europe. It might be easier if they were not so different, at least on the outside. Dark-skinned people and women in head scarves don't blend in well in small German cities. It's harder to forget they are there.

It's not like my country has a spotless record on immigration either. I am not pointing fingers. We've had our share of failures, racism, deportations. We have just been doing immigration - messy or complicated or illegal or successful - for a really long time. Whether it's been a melting pot or a mixed salad or a tapestry or whatever you try to call it, we have some experience with this stuff. And, not so long ago, some of the refugees we took in were from Germany.

I'm interested to see whether the trailer park goes up in Waterlooplatz. If it does, I wonder how Hannoverians will react. My guess is that the trailers, and the people living in them, will make some locals uneasy. Most will smile and shrug and accept. Only a few will be out trying to stop the invasion. When Angela Merkel spoke in Heidenau, where a refugee shelter was burned down recently, only 200 people booed and called her a traitor. I don't think that Angela gets rattled that easily. She would probably be a good zombie killer.
 

In Hannover, again

Brian and I just returned from four weeks Stateside. Actually, we didn't just return. We've been back in Hannover for over a week. We are back to work already and it seems like that month in the U.S. is already long gone.

I find that I don't write much on visits back home. I'm not sure why. It could be because there are too many people to see and not enough rainy Hannover days pulling me back to the blog. Or maybe since I have a limited time to be in that American part of my life, I put my energy into doing things than reflecting on them.

It's not that I wasn't thinking about you people at all. I did have an idea for a blog post during our trip. In an odd reverse-tourism kind of way, I wanted to take photos of all the odd American things that a German tourist would find interesting. It would have included a mailbox shaped like a fish, a sign on the church doorways that said no firearms allowed, and a whole supermarket aisle full of salad dressing.

But I never got around to taking those pictures. There was a lake to swim in, a taco to eat, a friend to visit. And all those salad dressings to choose from. As much as I was ready to get back to my own bed and my car-free lifestyle in Germany, it was, as always, hard to say goodbye.

I did add a few photos from the trip. None are of fish mailboxes, but you might appreciate them anyway.
And now, dear readers, you are back with me in Hannover again, over and over.

Powers lake

Me and Phoebe

Dad and the nephews

Sunset, Minneapolis

A proud Minnesota moment: T-bone bingo

Brian won meat too - what a night!

"Dragging" the field , St Paul Saints

Americana

One of our favorite places

On vacation

I'll be back on the blog soon!

How I started blogging instead of playing football

I wrote a book in second grade. It was about Mars. That seems strange to me now, because I don't know about Mars or outer space. I don't even like Star Trek. It's entirely possible that I stapled that construction-paper book together because I liked to draw cute aliens.

After that literary debut I wrote in school of course, both because I had to and because I liked it. I was set (in my semi-tomboy way) against the idea of a girly diary with a heart-shaped lock. But kept a journal (which is the same as a diary, sans lock and glitter) off and on throughout my awkward years. As a teenager, I started to write poetry. It was mostly bad. I got a few pieces into my high school's creative writing magazine, which made me feel embarrassed and exhilarated all at once.  I wanted to be noticed, but felt more comfortable being overlooked. In early college, I let Brian read all of my poetry. No one else ever had. This was probably the first sign I had fallen in love.

I could always write when I needed to, but as my teenage moodiness disappeared, so did my bad poetry. In my twenties, I stopped writing for a while. There would be a furious bout of journal writing every year or so, followed by silence as I searched for jobs, moved apartments, tried to figure out the future. I didn't feel an urgency to write often because being a writer wasn't something you could really DO. It might be easier to make it as an NFL player than as a famous author. And I can't catch.

This blog is a little like my grown-up version of that construction paper book. Of course I enjoy it, but I can also make it cute and colorful and hold it up proudly for you to see. Posting in cyberspace is ultra-public, but private because no one is here at this moment but me and my keyboard. I can pretend it's no big deal. I guess as shy as I once was (still sometimes am) about what I've written, I do my best when I've got an audience. And let's face it, that NFL career was never going to happen.

and to Berlin

You may be tired of me writing about Berlin.
I don't care.
I've written about Berlin before but it's one of my favorite places and I'm going to write about it again. So there.

We wrapped up our trip with Luke and Jackie in Berlin. Our days of cathedrals and quaint half-timbered houses and Christmas souvenirs were over. We stayed in East Berlin hipster-ville, where grafitti is part of the landscape, where buildings are Stalin-esque, and where the hardest ethnic food to find is German. In Berlin we ate Sri Lankan food, rented bikes to ride from east to west, visited the 1936 Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens triumphed over Hitler.

And while there were hundreds of bars and restaurants and dark thumping techno clubs to visit, it was the end of our trip. Our friends had been on the road for three weeks. We had been traveling hard for one. So on the last night we went back to a familiar place. There's a Cuban bar that made Brian and I feel warm and welcome one February night a few years ago. It offered live music and cigar smoking and bar tenders who wanted to talk baseball. That's where we took Luke and Jackie. We'll save the techno club for next time... maybe.

Smoky Bamberg

On the way to Bamberg, a Turkish samba band boarded our train. They had flown in from Istanbul for a music festival in a quaint German village. These sorts of things don’t happen when you rent a car.

Bamberg is famous for beer. It's most renowned for Rauchbier, or smoke beer. 'What is smoke beer?' you ask. Imagine biting into a ham sandwich. Not just any ham, more like leftover Easter ham. Now imagine that the sandwich is not a sandwich. It's actually beer. And you’re not biting it, you’re sipping it. That is what Rauchbier tastes like. They make it by smoking the malt before the beer is brewed.
 
We smelled the malt roasting when we got off the train in Bamberg, right behind the Turkish samba band. So under this haze of smokey malty aroma, Jackie, Luke, Brian and I started to explore the town.

Bamberg is still in Bavaria, but not by much. It’s in the north Bayern region of Franconia, where Frankish is still sometimes spoken.
Remember that Germany hasn't been one country for very long. Franconia was its own kingdom until 1803. Then it joined in with those redneck Bavarians but never quite gave up its own identity.
That's how the Frankish language survives today, with lots of words ending in a pretty-sounding "la". This would never happen in German, whose words often end with a clunky "gung," "lich" or "chen".

Our foursome’s energy level was a little low after three nights out in Regensburg, but that suited Bamberg just fine. It’s a small city, good for slow wandering and church gazing. There’s a 12^th century convent on a hill, a cathedral where a pope is buried, a riverfront with old bridges, cafes and breweries, of course.
This is postcard Germany.

Though any postcards from Bamberg should really be scratch 'n sniff. They would, of course, smell smoky. 

Crystal ship - Regensburg

Inspired by our elderly countrymen and their Danube cruises, we set out from Regensburg on a river boat trip of our own.

We headed to a place called Walhalla, but more on that later. 

When I went to buy tickets for our boat ride, the woman in the ticket booth glanced at the screen and her eyes lit up. “You are in luck,” she explained, like maybe I’d won a door prize. “Today the Crystal Queen is cruising to Walhalla.” The Crystal Queen, she explained, was the flagship of the fleet. It is inlaid with Swarovski crystal elements and even has an on-board crystal museum. I guess many people would be amazed at the luck we had. Brian was not impressed. He looked longingly at the creaking wooden ship with picnic tables on its deck.

When I was a freshman in college, some of the guys on my floor built a ship out of some old boxes and dorm furniture. They called it the crystal ship and sailed it down the hallway every night for about a week. They were taking a lot of drugs. I don’t think that ship could have made it to Walhalla. 

The  Crystal Queen lived up to her billing. There were crystals in the stairs, on the walls, encrusting the bar, and even a strobe light in the bathroom stall to show off crystals on the stall door. It was a lot more bling than I am used to seeing in Germany. Would this have been a hit in Texas?

Aboard the crystal ship

Crystal stairs

Creepy bride mannequin in the crystal museum

Walhalla is a monument built by a king of Bayern, King Ludwig I. He’s the grandfather of crazy King Ludwig II, who built the Cinderella castle at Neuschwanstein and bankrupted his kingdom in the process. Like his grandson, Ludwig I liked to build things big, and shiny, and impressive.  I imagine him wearing cowboy boots and a huge crystal-encrusted belt buckle.

Walhalla is named after a Norse temple and built to look like the Parthenon (it's also the name of a town in Texas).  It’s filled with busts of important Germans in history: scholars, scientists, writers, politicians. Most impressive is the location - it stands on a steep hillside overlooking the Danube.

After a picnic and a some time to enjoy the view, we boarded our boat and sparkled all the way back to town. Unlike with the crystal ship of my college days, it was smooth sailing.