West Cork

In Ireland they use the work 'walk' for what a good sedentary-living American would call a hike. So for few days in the far southwest corner of Ireland, we did a lot of walking up hillsides, through sheep pastures, along the coast and through the mud.

To balance out all the Clonakilty fun, we stayed in a quiet self-catering cottage and went to bed early. Our plan was to check out the scenery and get plenty of fresh air.  I had even contacted the local bike shop about renting bikes. But with steady showers, tall hedges, and the best views being from in between grazing cows in a field, it seemed like walking was a better plan.

Brian drove our trusty Micra out to the Beara peninsula, where we found some Bronze Age wedge tombs and stone circles, a manor house that had been burned down during the revolution in 1921, and Ireland's only cable car out to Dorsey Island.

On our second day out in West Cork, our eighth wedding anniversary, we took a ferry from the town of Baltimore out to Cape Clear island. We hiked around for most the day, checked out the coastal views and the O'Driscoll castle, and saw a seal in the harbor on our way back. That night we tried to go to the pub in the nearest village for dinner. It was closed. We tried the next village - everything was closed there too. Finally, we made it the town of Skibbereen which had both a pub and a Chinese take-out place open. We were in luck. Last year on our wedding anniversary we flew to Istanbul and ate falafels on the sidewalk. I consider myself very lucky. Some people just go to the Macaroni Grill.

The sun came out on our third day in the country and we went to lighthouse at Mizen Head, at the tip of the Mizen Peninsula. The cliffs are spectacular, and they have also caused a lot of shipwrecks over the centuries. And we saw more wedge tombs.

Finally we hiked near Lough Hyne, a marine nature preserve. It's a salt water lake that fills up during high tide but is landlocked at low tide. We climbed up to see the best views.

We were certainly off the tourist track on this trip. We were away from the major attractions and it's the off-season, so a lot of hotels and restaurants were closed. There was not a sweater shop or a leprechaun hat in sight. On the drive back to Dublin we stopped for lunch in Kinsale, and were reminded of what we were missing. Kinsale is a tourist town and has been for a few hundred years. It has a beautiful harbor and lots of cafes and souvenir shops. Brian and I guessed that besides us, there was a bus full of American tourists and a bus full of British tourists, and maybe some Germans thrown in the mix. I usually defend fellow Americans, especially those who travel, but they can also be really embarassing. Here's the conversation we witnessed at lunch:
Older American man in shorts tries to order Jameson from the waitress. It's 11:45am. Then he turns to the people at the next table and says, "HOW'S THE FISH AND CHIPS?" They speak quietly so he thinks they must be Irish. "IS IT THE BEST IN TOWN?" (he is, of course, really loud). They say oh yes, it's good, or something like that. He detects a non-American accent. "ARE YOU LOCAL?" No, they are from South Wales. "WE'RE FROM NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES." They probably know that New Jersey is in the United States, even if he doesn't know where Wales is.

Suddenly I was extra happy that we had spent our trip among some actual locals, or at least away from most tourists. I was happy to give up the sweater shops and instead watch soccer on TV while eating at the only pub open Skibbereen. As for our friend from New Jersey, he might have been happier at the Macaroni Grill.

Weekend in Clonakilty

On day two we headed to Clonakilty.
Back in 1999, when Brian spent a semester abroad in Cork, he worked at a bar with Jason Collins. They lost track of each other but just this year, through the miracle of Facebook, got back in touch. I make fun of Facebook sometimes, and get annoyed at people who post about eating oatmeal for breakfast or jogging .78 miles yesterday, but it can be a great way to connect with people you haven't seen in a while. That's how we ended up with Jason, singing karaoke in an Irish cop's basement at 3am.

Clonakilty is a small coastal town, famous for being Michael Collins' home and a summertime resort destination. Jason considers himself lucky to be a policeman there. He's not the kind of cop that wants to see a lot of action in a high-crime area. Clonakilty's cases are minor thefts and traffic accidents, and Jason knows everybody in town.
On Friday we checked out a few of the sights around town
Incheydoney Beach:

Birthplace and childhood home of Michael Collins:

Galley Head lighthouse:

The lighthouse was closed for the off-season, but Jason wasn't worried. He decided we would just jump the fence. There was a van far off heading down the road between cow pastures, but were pretty sure it wasn't coming all the way to the lighthouse. We also came up with the plan that if anyone asked what we were doing there, Brian would play the loud American tourist and say something like, "HI THERE, I'M AN AMERICAN, HERE TO FIND MY ROOTS. THIS IS A GREAT LIGHTHOUSE YA GOT HERE, BUT IT WOULD BE EASIER IF YOU UNLOCKED THE GATES." Our plan was fool-proof. And wouldn't you know it, as we started walking back toward the road, we saw a white-haired lighthouse keeper getting out of the same van. Brian started to stride up with a little cowboy swagger, ready to recite his lines, but Jason choked and went with honesty instead.

He told the lighthouse man that he's a policeman (Garda) in town and we were visiting and wanted to see the lighthouse, sorry for the trouble. The lighthouse man went on to explain that it's so lovely out here and he wishes it could be open year-round but the trouble is that someone came out here to walk a dog once when there was construction work going on, and the health and safety board got worried about people falling off the wall and such, and if that happened then he would have to take the blame for it and be in a tough situation. But it really is a shame and he's glad we enjoyed the view and Jason can come back anytime he likes, just give the lighthouse guy a call and he'll come and open it up.
 (If something like this had happened in Germany, we would have just gotten yelled at).
We saw the lighthouse keeper in town the next day, walking down the street with his wife. It's good to be nice to people in a small town since you will certainly run into them again...

We happened to be visiting during the retirement and 50th birthday celebration (that's right, retiring at 50) of Tim, Clonakilty's most popular police officer.  Tim looks about 38, goes tanning regularly, spends most nights at the bar and most mornings at the gym. He eats fish and drinks seaweed smoothies. He has traveled the globe. He may have been the inspiration for the TV ads about the most interesting man in world. We got to be part of the weekend-long event in Tim's honor. Friday night we took over a pub in town and had a lock-in, which means that instead of closing at 12:30 like the pub is supposed to, they lock the doors and everyone stays until they have long forgotten what time it is. Technically this is illegal, but since most of the law enforcement in Clonakilty and neighboring towns was there with us, I felt pretty safe.

On Saturday I got to see my first hurling match. Jason is on the Clonakilty team through the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) and it was one of their last games of the season. In hurling you hit the ball with your hurley stick to a teammate. You can catch the ball with your hand, usually aided by the hurley, and you can run with it for a little while if you balance it on the hurley. If the ball goes through the posts (field-goal style) then it's worth 1 point, but a ball in the net scores 3. That's about as much as I learned about hurling anyway. And then it poured rain and I ran for the car. The game was a tie at the end; they have to play a rematch.

Saturday day/night was a party at Tim's house, part 2 of the birthday and retirement extravaganza. It involved a lot of karaoke in the basement. Brian stole the show.
I had a great time Friday night, but struggled a little on Saturday between 12 and 3am . Eventually I found a second (or fourth) wind somehow.

It was a great weekend, and I felt more like visiting I was an old friend than being a tourist in a foreign country. So the next time I go on Facebook and get annoyed at a picture or someone's dog trying on a new leash, I will remember that it can be useful too. Without Facebook and Jason, we would have never me the most interesting man in Ireland.

Glendalough and St Kevin's cave

As we flew into Dublin it was hard not to recall our last trip there, two years ago. It was the day that our shipment of stuff finally showed up after we waited three months, made few dozen phone calls, and sent several mean emails that got us nowhere. Since July it had probably been stuck on a container ship or forgotten at the back of a deserted warehouse in some English port. Two hours before we had to leave for the airport the movers came and told us they couldn't unload because the people we'd hired to block off the street had never showed up. We got them to leave our boxes at school (unloading a lot of them ourselves) and took off for the flight, realizing when we got to Dublin that Brian had left his wallet and drivers license at home and I don't know how to drive stick. Then we got lost in the dark leaving the airport, on the left side of the road.

This trip was smoother than that.
We started at Glendalough (pronounced Glendalochkgkch or something like that), in Wicklow Mountains National Park. Our most stressful moment was trying to find the hiking trail without get hit by a car. St. Kevin found it relaxing there too. In the 5th century he walked to Glendalough, found a cozy cave in the beautiful valley, and lived as a hermit for seven years. We arrived in a Nissan Micra and stayed at a B&B for one night, but we thought the valley was beautiful too. A monastery was built on the site in St. Kevin's honor, with most of the buildings dating from the 12th century. The cemetery is still in use.

On our hike up the hills we saw some lanky soldiers-in-training with their combat boots, pretend rifles made of wood and heavy packs topped with flourescent caps. The first few soldiers moved at a steady pace, even talked to each other and said hello to us. The last few let their wooden rifles hang, heads bobbing with every step, and barely grunted as we passed. The Wicklow Mountains were the heart of the 1798 Irish rebellion, where defeated rebels hid out in the hills for years. St. Kevin probably climbed all the hills barefoot and foraged some berries along the way. I don't think these last few troops would have been able to keep up. 
We just hiked a while and then jumped back into the Micra on our way to Clonakilty.

We're in Ireland now

So there will be more coming soon. Check back in a week or so...

The Butcher of Hannover

Halloween is approaching. Today I unpacked our Dracula nutcracker and hung the trusty orange skeleton on the living room door. It seems appropriate, then, to tell you the story of the Butcher of Hannover. His name was Fritz Haarman, and he was one of the worst serial killers of all time - right here in quiet little Hannover.

Warning: This is a gruesome story. If you can't make it through an episode of Dexter, you should not read on.

Haarman enlisted in the army as a young man but was discharged for his mental instability. Soon after getting a job at a cigar factory, he was arrested for molesting children and committed to a mental hospital, but he managed to escape and flee to Switzerland. He enlisted in the military again under an alias, but was again discharged for medical reasons. Haarman tried working again but seemed to adjust better to life as a thief and a con-man in Hannover.

After serving four years in prison for theft and fraud, Haarman was released in 1918 at the end of World War 1. All of Germany was struggling, and many young men came from the country to Hannover in search of work. Haarman would seek out teenage job-seekers, runaways and vagrants. He lured them back to his apartment with a promise of food and a place to stay. After seducing them, he killed his victims by biting through their throats (yes, with his teeth). He then dismembered their bodies and dumped the bones in the Leine River that runs right through the middle of town.

During this time Haarman met Hans Grans, who became his romantic partner as well as his partner in crime. Grans would help Haarman choose some of his victims, and later sold their clothing on the black market. Though it hasn't been proven, Grans is also believed to have sold the victims' flesh as pork.

In 1924, children playing along the Leine found a human skull. Another turned up a few weeks later. Police dragged the river and found over 500 human bones, belonging to at least 22 different people. They suspected Haarman and got him to confess after finding blood-stained walls and victims' belongings in his apartment. After a two week trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death by beheading. His head was kept for scientific study and is now preserved in a jar at the medical school in Goettingen. Grans served 12 years in jail and lived in Hannover until his death in 1980.

It's a creepy story, and a true one. Haarman, who lived before there was a term for 'serial killer', was called a werewolf, a vampire and the Butcher of Hannover. He makes Dexter seem tame, and might have you thinking twice before you take another bite of pork.

A castle, sugar, stalkers

When I write a whole post about water, I realize that I am running low on inspiration. Brian and I leave for a week in Ireland on Wednesday, so I promise you more interesting stories soon. But for now, I will tell you a little about what we saw on yesterday's bike ride.

1. Old woman in motorized wheelchair scooter by the side of the road, under an apple tree. A young boy (either her grandson or some poor passerby too polite to say no) climbing up an apple tree and trying to knock down the apples with the handle of the woman's umbrella. It seemed like there must have been an easier way to do this...

2. Schloss Marienburg in Fall. This is the castle built by George V, the last king of Hannover for his wife Marie. Construction started in 1858 but they only spent a year there before the Prussians came and the royal family fled to Austria. I wrote about it in this post when we first saw this castle in May. Now, with the leaves changing colors, we rode all the way up the hill (perhaps the only hill in the state of Niedersachsen) to the castle and had a look around.

3. Sugar processing plant below the castle. The funny thing about living in Europe is that there may be a Claire's Boutique in the ground floor of a 16th century half-timbered house (saw that in Celle), and there is a sugar processing plant with the best possible views of the Marienburg castle. Sugar beets are grown all over northern Germany and here's one of the places where they turn into sugar. The beets are sliced and soaked in hot water to get the juice out. Then the juice is boiled down so that the water evaporates and sugar crystals are left behind. Leftover pulp from the beets is ground into pellets for animal feed.

4. Bike stalker. We have stalked in the past, but yesterday we were being followed by a lost cyclist. I guess he wasn't trying to be too sneaky, since he wore neon yellow. He was probably just lost. Toward the end of the ride he caught up to me and asked (in German) if we were going toward Hannover. I said yes, and then, in a surge of self-confidence, didn't stop there. I told him that the Maschsee (Hannover's big lake) was to the right. It was actually to the right then the left and we were taking a back-road way to get there. What I should have done was just told him to follow us, because we lost him a few minutes later. He may still be riding around looking for Hannover or maybe he stumbled across the naked lake and decided to stay. I felt a little bad about that - not the naked lake part but the not inviting him to come along. Sometimes when my brain is focused on operating in German, all common sense I may have had once disappears...

5. Solitary naked man on the shores of the naked lake (no photo for this one). It was a chilly day to bare it all.

That's the report from yesterday. It's also proof that not having anything to write about does not keep me from writing.

Bicycle harvest

It's harvest time in Hannover.
One of the things that I like about living here is how easy it is to get out of town on the bike. It takes all of ten minutes to get from our urban apartment to farmland. I didn't grow up on a farm, or anywhere near one, but I am learning a little by riding past them and alongside Brian, who is a closet agriculture nerd.  As a geography teacher it's part of his job to understand how and where things are grown. As people who eat, we should all know more about it too. Around the Hannover region, farms are growing lettuce, potatoes, celery, corn, canola, wheat and, of course, the sugar beet. This kind of variety is lacking in many parts in the U.S., where soy and corn take over and other produce comes from farther away.
Here are some photos we took on the road:

pumpkins

Lettuce and cabbage

Sugar beets

This is the time of year that tractors are pulling the crops out of the ground and putting them in huge piles until someone comes with another machine to gather them up and take them off to be sold. There are much more technical terms for all of these things but I don't know what they are.
During this process, there are a few odd vegetables that roll away. So when I found some potatoes lying on the bike path last week, I couldn't just let them go to waste. I picked a couple up, put them in my pockets, and rode off. We ate them a few days later.

Yesterday, I saw a whole row of pear trees that had dropped their fruits by the side of the road. I rescued three to let them ripen on my kitchen counter. I am not a thief, really. I shop at the farmers market every week and buy local stuff at the supermarket too. But when a potato is lying there, vulnerable to passing traffic, someone has to rescue it.

The jersey has three little pockets. They are filled with three little pears.

I do not have a farm. I don't even have a backyard anymore. But if I want to know what's in season or how tall the corn is getting, I don't need to travel far to find out. Now I just need pockets that are big enough to take home a stray pumpkin.

Happy Einheit.

Yesterday was the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, the holiday commemorating when East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. Hannover celebrated by... sleeping in. There was nothing going on here, so we tried making our own fun at Andrew and Katja's garden. Unfortunately, Andrew, Katja and baby Juno were home sick. So our friend John mowed the grass, I yanked out some dead zucchini plants, and Brian made the fire. We celebrated the only way we know how to celebrate a national holiday - with grilled meat and several beers.

Happy sort-of birthday to you Germany, in your latest political configuration. You're all right.

Oktoberfest, dirndls and pride

Its Oktoberfest time in Germany. There is the big, crazy, internationals festival in Munich, and then there's the one in Hannover. Much like our beloved city, it's not so big, but it is cozy, easy to navigate, and fun with the right people around. At Oktoberfest you can eat fair food - we had candied almonds, but you can also get crepes, sausages (of course), pizza and Schmalzkuchen, which is like little squares of funnel cake. You can ride the rides, play carnival games, and visit the beer tents. I went with my friend Ulla last Saturday and we tried almost all of it, including bumper cars (called auto-scooters in German):

The beer tent featured an oom-pa band playing oom-pa music beside some Bavarian flags in front of a huge mural of Hannover's famous Rathaus. They were serving beer of course, but it was Hannover's Gilde rather than a Bavarian brew. It was a bit of an identity crisis in there. That didn't stop people from having a good time, though. There were even a couple of tables of people dressed in lederhosen and dirndls. 

I didn't know what a dirndl was before I moved here. It's that traditional dress that the St Pauli Girl wears: laced up the front, apron and puffy sleeved white blouse showing variable levels of cleavage. It's the traditional dress of Bavaria and the Alpine regions, and a must-have if you are going to the Munich Oktoberfest.

I have no frame of reference for the dirndls. There's really no traditional American dress. The closest we come is the traditional clothing of our immigrant ancestors. And since my family has ancestors from a lot of different places, there's no easy answer. What would I wear? A square dancing outfit? A cowgirl costume? The dirty homespun dresses of immigrants who just spent weeks on a boat to escape the poverty of their homelands? That's not very festive.

Of course, if you are an American Indian it's a different story. Your traditional dress is so famous that the Germans use it as the theme for some kind of a log ride at Oktoberfest. I'm sure you are proud of them for that.

Note the totem poles and the Indians holding guns.

Dirndls, however, are cool. At least they are starting to be cool again. I read a New York Times article stating that one major dirndl distributor's sales have increased 750% in the last ten years. It seems that their popularity reflects how much national pride the Germans are feeling at that moment in history. They were popular in the early 20th century among Bavaria's wealthy ladies, then came back into style as the Third Reich asserted Germany's national identity. Hostesses at the 1972 Olympics in Munich wore blue ones, and they were popular again during Germany's World Cup in 2006. So why now? Why would dirndls become fashionable again? Maybe it's the Euro crisis and the feeling that Germany is bailing out all the other countries in Europe. Maybe it's globalization in general - American movies, Japanese cars and the idea that the "made in Germany" slogan doesn't carry the weight that it used to. Maybe it's because incomes in Germany are pretty high and people can afford them. A nice dirndl costs around 200 euros, without the blouse. Of course, there are the cheaper, costume party variety for around 50 euros. They are definitely made in China.

So while the rustic Alpine women used to dress like this:

 

The girls at Oktoberfest are probably dressed more like this:

 

Of course, that happens in the south of Germany, where they really like to have a good time. Here in the north, we only sort of like to have a good time. So whether you show up wearing a dirndl or not, you can still drive the bumper cars.

Beer

What do purity, the middle ages, hallucinogens and foam have in common? The correct answer is beer.

This is part three of the posts about beverages, and it's time to talk about beer. Germans drink more beer than anyone in the world other than the Czechs.

But walk into a bar and ask for a Belgian ale or an IPA or, heaven forbid, a light beer, and you'll get a blank stare that has nothing to do with your poor German language skills.

German beer is consistently good and it's no mistake. They have a law about it, or used to. The Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law, was first enacted in Bavaria in 1516. It stipulated that the only ingredients that could go into beer were water, hops and barley. After yeast was discovered, it became the fourth legal ingredient. In the 1500s, people were putting herbs, fruits, roots and other stuff into beer to increase their profits. Sometimes the herbs and such were toxic, and sometimes they were even hallucinogenic.

The Reinheitsgebot was meant to protect the consumer and it even set a standard price for beer. The law survived the creation of the German state and was the oldest food-quality regulation in the world until it was repealed in 1987. Even though the purity law has been replaced by standard EU regulations, many brewers in Germany still abide by it.

So when you show up at the bar in Germany, you have two choices in beer: Pils or Weizen. Pils is 'normal' beer, and Weizen is wheat beer. If it's a really fancy place they might also have bottled beer, which is also a Pils or a Weizen. Your beer is not complete unless has a nice foamy head on it. While an American bartender may tilt the glass to keep the bubbles at a minimum, the Germans pour it on in. Your German word for the day is Schaum, which means foam.

It's a good time to write about beer, since Oktoberfest is happening now, both in Munich and, to a lesser extent, in Hannover. More on that later. Here is a picture of Ulla and I drinking beers in the tent at Oktoberfest. The bartender laughed at us for ordering beers that were so small. He did not skimp on the foam.