Bikes, the basement and the bubble

In the cellar of our building there 14 bikes in the cellar, plus a couple more parked outside. There are only 15 tenants. This doesn't mean that we live among avid cyclists. We live among a few regular bike commuters and a bunch of people who like to collect junk. Some of those bikes never move. One has had a flat tire for years, and the rest are coated in this layers of dust.

I sold my bike this week. I say that as if I had only one. I had three bikes, and Brian has three also. It's like a little bike Brady Bunch.

We are not alone in our multi-bike household. Germany is the world's #3 country for number of bikes per capita. In 2011, there were about 82 million people in Germany, and about 62 million bikes. How many of them actually get ridden? How many are collecting cobwebs in prewar basements? probably a lot.

The cellar is maybe the coolest part of our building. I like it because it gives you a clue as to how old the place really is. I would like to imagine that it was built 100 years ago, but Allied bombs took their toll on the place and the exterior walls were later replaced. The stairwell and the cellar have to be original. Maybe the cellar was a bomb shelter for the people who lived here. Maybe they hid out in the very spot where our family of bikes are parked.

I had been thinking about selling this bike, paid for with my college graduation money, for a long time. (If you gave me money for college graduation, you probably thought I'd do something practical with it, like pay my rent. Instead I bought a road bike. It lasted much longer and brought me much more happiness than my Minneapolis one-bedroom). I told myself I wasn't in a hurry, that I'd wait until after my summer travels, that it wasn't taking up much space anyway. I was procrastinating. I knew the best way to sell the bike would be to post it online. Germany doesn't have Craig's List but it does have a special version of Ebay where you can post classified ads. I knew that would involve translating my ad, answering the phone and having people come to look at the bike... and really I am linguistically capable of doing all that in German. It's just easier not to.

For this time, anyway, being lazy paid off. I posted an ad for the bike on the Facebook page for English speakers in Hannover, because it seemed easy. I was typing up the translation, looking for the German equivalent of phrases like "or your best offer," when I got a message from an English guy named Jim. He was interested in the bike and wanted to look at it that evening. He showed up, rode it around the block, paid my asking price in cash and took off with the bike.

I took him outside for the photo shoot. This is the photo that lured in old Jim.

It was so easy... too easy? Operating only within the expat community on things like this almost makes me feel like I'm cheating. I am cozy in my English-speaking bubble and can't be bothered, as the English would say, to pop it. I realize this is a dumb thing to feel guilty about. I was in the right place at the right time and now Jim has a new road bike. And I have a wad of Jim's cash. So what if I didn't seize the opportunity to craft a sales pitch in German?

I thought I'd take us dinner with some of the proceeds the next night, but we ended up drinking on the balcony and listening to music and ordering a huge (i.e. American-sized) pizza instead. It was a great time.
Now our bike family is down to five members. There's a little more space in our storage room. And my German language skills have not improved because of the experience.

Just about every day I haul one of my two remaining bikes past that dusty one with the flat tire, out of the cellar and onto the street. I wonder who used to go down there 70 or 80 years ago, and whether they stored old bikes in the cellar too.

Udderly impressive

Travels to decaying cities and other East German sights are over, so it's time to talk about my favorite German invention.

The BMW? the Mercedes-Benz? the pretzel? Lederhosen? the glue stick?

No. It just barely beat out the Christmas tree, but my favorite German invention is the mustard udder.

Imagine this: you are at your favorite fast food establishment, or maybe the ball park. You want to put ketchup on your fries (substitute mayo if you are a German or a Frenchie). There's either a pile of messy packets that are hard to open and squirt out onto embarrassing places (i.e. the crotch of your pants),  or a big pump thing that is almost always empty.

What to do? German engineering has supplied us with the answer, inspired by nature. It's the udder. At sausage stands throughout Germany you will see something like this:

It takes up no counter space, needs no packaging, and is less likely to squirt onto your pants than any other dispenser. I imagine it's also easier than milking a cow.

Also notable packaging inventions are the toothpaste-sized tube of mustard and the very practical tube of tomato paste.

Like clean streets, safe drinking water, oodles of sick leave and cheap ice cream, Germans probably take the udder for granted. Whether it holds ketchup, mayo or mustard, it's one of those little signs of a higher quality of life. That, and pants free of mustard stains.

Wismar

I had read that Wismar is beautiful but, as part of the former DDR (East Germany), a little run down and not packed with tourists. This was not entirely true. Contrary to what you might think, the Internet can be wrong sometimes.

There’s a part of Germany tourism that Brian has labeled “the EPCOT effect”. It’s when the city is pretty, almost too pretty, like no one really lives there. Hannover has it. Our old town was reconstructed after World War 2 by moving the intact historic buildings in from other parts of the city. They were reassembled in one designated area - almost an outdoor museum to what Hannover could have looked like long ago.

Now that Brian and I have been in Europe enough to see a lot of big churches, sidewalk cafes and statues, it’s usually our goal to avoid the EPCOT effect. That’s what this whole trip was about. I know, we are tourism snobs. At first glance, Wismar could be the home of ‘it’s a small world after all’.

 

Wismar, along with Rostock and Lübeck was one of the first Hanseatic cities. What I have learned about cities that were in the Hanseatic trading league is that they were really rich for about 200 years. They usually have a big tall church on every block or two. After that era ended, Wismar was part of Sweden for about 150 years. Then it industrialized and became a shipping center. During World War 2, Wismar was bombed ten times. But the bombs hit their industrial targets and only about 26% of housing was destroyed (in comparison, 90% of Hannover was destroyed by bombings). That means that the picturesque old buildings are the real thing, not Mickey Mouse’s version.

Wismar's old town doesn't show much evidence of the East German era, and seems to thrive on weekend tourism now. But it’s still the home of a working port and lots of places to buy fish sandwiches.

Wismar was not just home to rich medieval merchants and Swedes. It was also the home of Klaus Störtebeker, pirate and beer drinker. Störtebeker and his gang, called the Victual Brothers, were mercenaries hired by Sweden to fight against the Danes in the late 1300s. After the war, they turned into pirates,  capturing and robbing Hanseatic ships on the Baltic Sea. Störtebeker's name means something like "to drink in one gulp," since he could reportedly down a 4 liter mug of beer without coming up for air. When he was finally captured and beheaded in Hamburg, legend states that his headless body got up and walked past 12 of his crew before the executioner tripped him. Today, we mostly know Störtebeker because there is a beer named after him. 

Wismar was a real working city, and in most ways it still is. But like Störtebeker's story, might have been polished a little over time. But I think it'll be a while before there is a Störtebeker themed roller coaster here, with Goofy greeting you at the entrance. "Pirates of the Baltic" does have a nice ring to it, though.

Rostock in the rain, and restaurants

On Thursday we rolled into Rostock.

We came to for the Hansesail festival – the tall ships. There are tall ships festivals in Chicago, Duluth and Hamburg, but I have never been to one. What I didn’t realize about this one was that it also featured kiddie rides, bratwurst stands and band shells. Brian thought I had tricked him into attending some kind of a county fair.

It rained much of the afternoon, but we dried out enough to enjoy some of the ships.

 

We could have seen more of Rostock with another day and clearer weather, but we did eat at a really cool restaurant. It was built into a building that is probably 300 years old, and Brian had the best turkey sandwich of his life. The more we travel to big towns and small towns, to places in Germany and other countries, the more I realize that Hannover's restaurants stink. I do have a place in my heart (rather, my stomach) for the Indian restaurant across the street and for our Turkish kabob shop. But on the whole I have not found anywhere to eat here that is really really good. 

Hannoverians, I know there's a few of you out there. I challenge you to recommend to me the best restaurants in Hannover. I haven't given up yet. 

Prora

On our second day in Sassnitz, Brian and I rode creaky rental bikes to Prora. 

It seems idyllic – a family-friendly resort, looking out to the Baltic Sea from the quiet island of Rügen...except it was built by the Nazis. Prora was designed by the KdF, the Nazi branch in charge of leisure activities. The letters stand for Kraft durch Freude, or strength through joy. 

Prora was meant to be a vacation destination for as many as 20,000 people at a time. The buildings stretch almost 5km down the beach. It would give the people an affordable vacation, all under the government's control. The idea was a little like an all-inclusive resort, minus the swim-up bar, plus a little extra surveillance.

Construction on the complex of buildings at Prora started in 1938, but was never finished. World War 2 broke out instead. When Rügen became part of East Germany after the war, the Russian army used some buildings at Prora for military training. They even brought in military leaders from countries where the Russians were encouraging Communism to grow, like Cuba, Nicaragua and Cameroon, and educated them at Prora (sort of like the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, except for the other side). 

 

This place was entirely creepier than the abandoned army based we’d seen a couple of days earlier. The disturbing thing is that it's not abandoned. It’s being used… almost just as the Nazis intended. A Christian youth group was there, camping and playing team-building games on the lawn. In front of these vacant bulidings, with peeling paint and shared bathrooms where no one has ever showered, hundreds of East Germans played on the beach. They set up their umbrellas and built their sandcastles, all in the shadows of the place Hitler and his people had made for exactly that purpose.

I did not swim in the water at Prora. But later in the day, back in Sassnitz, I went about waist-deep. The rocks were sharp and the air wasn’t so warm. I waded deep enough to say that I’d been in the Baltic, but I still didn't find the swim-up bar.

Like a real German in Sassnitz

Next we headed toward the island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea. If we’d been experiencing the ‘real Germany’ by staying away from other tourists and visiting small towns, we were now traveling head-first into one of the biggest tourist destinations in this part of the country. This is also the ‘real Germany’. It's where East Germans go on vacation. 

Sassnitz harbor

I tend to think that all Germans are like the ones I meet in Hannover. They are either educated city types, immigrants, or wealthy small towners who keep a few horses at home. In Rügen we were surrounded by another sort: Germany’s middle class, working class even. Social divisions are easy to notice here. How does this look? A few missing teeth, some beer bellies, lots of short, spiky haircuts on women, and socks with sandals, of course. In Germany, even your hair dresser or supermarket cashier gets a paid vacation.  Full-time employees legally must have 5-6 weeks of paid vacation time per year.

Oh, you mean what does the place look like? We were in Sassnitz, which is a lovely harbor town. There are ships and seagulls and cafes along the coast. But it’s a bit like a Lake of the Ozarks for Germany, a Wisconsin Dells even. Everyone’s walking down ‘the strip’ and they are all shopping for tacky T-shirts. I keep expecting to see a sign for a Kozy Kountry Kitchen around the corner. We stayed in a hotel attached to an appropriately kitschy but cute seafood restaurant. It overlooks the harbor – pretty great, actually.

Sassnitz coast

This is where we stayed in Sassnitz

There are benefits of going to a place, even a touristy place, that's not in the Rick Steves guidebook and where few foreigners dare to tread. Mostly it’s great for my German language skills. No one tries to talk to me in English. And if I pronounce a word wrong in German, no one stares at me as if I am speaking in Martian, or Pig Latin, or Esperanto.  They just answer me back. They don’t speak English, so there are no other options. The other benefit is that I feel like we are doing what people who live in Germany do in the summer. Not the people who head to Mallorca, but everyone else. They pull out their short shorts and their sporty sandals (socks optional) and head to the coast.

On Tuesday we hiked into Jasmund National Park, just outside of Sassnitz, and walked along the chalk cliffs.  8.5 km later, we reached the end of the trail. After eating the fish sandwiches we’d bought off a boat that morning, we got on the bus back to town. That’s right, the city bus. Public transportation in Germany is awesome. 

In Jasmund National Park

Chalk cliffs at Jasmund National Park

Sassnitz used to be the main terminal for ferries heading across the Baltic. The terminal is now a museum, since the ferries moved a few miles down the coast years ago. You can see where the cars drove off the ferries up to the swanky high-rise hotel, with its indoor swimming pool and its small but tasteful Lenin memorial. Now the memorial is overgrown, and the hotel is still open but crumbling. 

The old ferry terminal

The Hotel Rügen, past its prime, memorial on the bottom right

If you look closely, you can see Lenin's profile on this stone

There are swankier resorts on the Baltic Sea coast, and even nicer ones on the North Sea. But I was glad we went to Sassnitz - it was pretty and offered a lot of places to buy a tie dyed T-shirt that says "good girl gone bad". 

Templin, Vogelsang, and what the soldiers left behind

Our next stop was Templin, where flowers were blooming and people rode to and fro on their bicycles. Where Wittenberge was limping along, little Templin skipped ahead.

We didn’t come to see Templin, however, but to use it as our base for exploring another base - the one at Vogelsang. The Russian army had a base here for almost 50 years, housing up to 15,000 troops. It was the third largest Russian base in East Germany. 

To get somewhere 'off the beaten path' you have to stop and ask directions. The army base was more like 'off the barely visible trail of footprints and broken sticks that leads you into a woods you might never find your way out of'. If you wanted to keep your place secret, this would be a good location.

This is the entrance to the base road

To get there, we took a train about 15 minutes from Templin and got off at Vogelsang, a place so small you have to push a ‘stop’ button on the train to get off, like you would on a city bus. Then we walked into a path in the forest, found the old road heading to the base, and hiked about 30 minutes in. It’s not illegal to go there, but no one is out front selling tickets, either. It didn’t take long to find the traces of the old base – a guard station, barracks, a school, a cafeteria, garages, showers, even an underground bunker. 

In the school

In the school

Barracks

The base was self-contained, so the soldiers didn't leave and the Germans didn't come in. It housed tank regiments. And in 1959, twelve nuclear weapons were stored here, pointed at various European targets. When the Russians left this place in 1994, they took everything that could be carried, including weapons and furniture and lighting fixtures. What’s left now are the shells of buildings themselves, with peeling paint and rotten floors and windows broken by 20 years of visitors before us. If you want to know more about how the base was used, this BBC article is worth reading, and has a short video too.

An underground bunker

Russian newspaper insulation

In the soldiers' canteen

It was hard to shake the feeling that the Stasi (East German secret police) might pop out from behind a corner and ask for our papers and drag us off to be interrogated somewhere. Of course that couldn’t happen, there are no Stasi spying on people anymore. Now it’s just Americans who are spying on Germans instead.

This part of the trip was, as you may have guessed, Brian’s idea. But I liked it. I felt like we were uncovering a past civilization. Of course it was only 20 years ago that the place was abandoned. But as you can see from the photos, nature doesn’t need long to take over again. 

Power station

Wittenberge

Our first stop on the trip around lackluster sites in former East Germany was Wittenberge. It’s not to be confused with Wittenberg, home of Martin Luther. Wittenberge, located just barely east of the former East/West German border, may have instead been the home of Marvin Lüther, canola oil magnate.

Wittenberge is most remarkable for its lack of people. Located on the Elbe River, it survived on shipping, the oil mill and the Singer sewing machine factory. But since reunification, these industries are gone and so are the people .  In 1990, there were 30,000 residents in Wittenberge. Now there are just 18,000 people and the number continues to drop.

“If anyone asked why we came here,” Brian advised me, “just say it’s because we wanted to see the real Germany.”

That meant I shouldn’t say, “we were searching for dying cities and yours showed up on a top ten list,” which is actually the truth.

Entrance to the Oberstufenzentrum, with some socialist workers on the gate

The old Singer factory

Every fourth or fifth building in Wittenberge is boarded up and we were among the youngest people around. I imagine there are no jobs here, but the people remaining still try to have fun. Wittenberge on a summer Saturday night pulled out all the stops. The restaurant with biergarten where we ate was packed with a 50^th birthday and a 75^th birthday, and the plaza across from our hotel featured a band playing John Denver covers and a performance from the local belly dancing class.

What are East Germans like? There’s a stereotype that they are backward, less cultured than other Germans, a little bit redneck. All I can tell you from the first night in Wittenberge is that they wear a lot of sandals with socks. If you thought Minnesotans were frequent offenders on the sandals with socks front, you are wrong. Wittenbergers take the cake. And they prefer black socks with outdoorsy velcro sandals. I think it's because Marvin Lüther wore them too.

Along the Elbe

Heading East

Today we leave on a vacation entitled "lost cities of the East," "decay and the seaside in East Germany," or "places in Germany where Rick Steves won't dear to tread". Stay tuned for more...