Labyrinth in the Forest

Thursday afternoon I rode out to the Music, Theater, and Media Academy to pick up the June/July schedule of concerts. Then I continued on to bike in the Eilenriede, this time just taking whichever paths took my fancy without consulting the map. I figured I'd come out of the forest somewhere and then could figure out where I was and find my way back. It's lovely and green and cool. The paths are muddy, but my bike here has fenders.  I had to keep my mouth closed to avoid swallowing gnats. The paths cross bridges and there are clearings with ponds, playgrounds, restaurants, ice cream stands, and beer gardens. I came to a deserted clearing with a labyrinth with a big tree in the middle and decided to walk the labyrinth. In my experience, labyrinths look sort of silly from the outside, and I always feel a bit self-conscious. But they offer a way to slow down and be in the moment. It's obvious one isn't getting anywhere, but rather just winding around the pattern slowly getting closer to center by the most roundabout route. I'm always tempted to just step over the edging, but it feels like cheating, so I make myself stay on the path. Anyway, I just soaked in the peace of the green, leafy air and offered up prayers for many of the people I love, not asking for anything specific, just holding them up for God's blessing.

Eilenriede Labyrinth

Sign for Labyrinth: Rest (Refreshment) Place - No Dogs!

 

I'm not sure I agree with this sign. Walks with my dog are definitely a source of refreshment/rejuvenation for me. 

 

I had a similar experience several weeks ago when I rode out to the Annateich (Anna's pond). Halfway round the pond there was a gate to a modern chapel. I parked my bike and went to look. Absolutely gorgeous and peaceful inside with simple wood and windows looking out on the forest. I just stood and soaked in the silence and beauty.

Annateich Chapel Outside

 

Annateich Chapel

 

Sandra introduced me to the idea of using quark instead of butter on my bread. I love quark and wish I could buy it back home. It's sort of a cross between sour cream and yogurt. You can buy it with fruit and sugar like yogurt except creamier or buy it plain or buy with green onions and herbs to spread on bread. I've been spreading it on bread and topping it off with sour cherry jam for a treat with afternoon tea. The chocolate ladybug is a birthday present from my recorder orchestra conductor. My treat after my bike ride, though I'm saving the chocolate ladybug. Too pretty to eat.

Quark & Sour Cherry Jam on Bread, Tea, and Chocolate Marienkäfer (Ladybug)

 



 



 

Book Clubs

Someone asked me if I was able to get books here. If I couldn't have found books to read, I think I would have taken the next flight home. My main sources of books have been downloading ebooks from my public library at home onto my Google Nexus and the Anglistik (English) library at the university. A lot of the books that I want to read are not available, so I've been reading whatever I can get my hands on and stockpiling requests for August when we get home. However, some of the books I've happened upon but never heard of before have been good discoveries, e.g.
Songs at the River’s Edge: Stories from a Bangladeshi Village by Katy Gardner, Don't mean nothing: short stories of Vietnam by Susan O'Neill, short stories by a former nurse during the war, and My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese, who also wrote Cutting For Stone. The latter is his story of being the primary AIDS doctor in a small town in Tennessee at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

And I have been able to find some books that my book groups are reading at home or that people have recommended. A friend replied to my Christmas letter suggesting the book below, a journal of what Will Schwalbe read with his mother while taking her to chemo for pancreatic cancer. I usually like books about books.

 

This week I also got to be part of two book clubs. Back in April we had dinner with the German L'Abri representatives and Ruth was intrigued with the idea of book clubs and asked if I would help her start a bilingual German/English book club. I gave her a list of books that were short and I thought would make for a good beginning discussion. She asked me if I would lead. Anyway, we read Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, which I had read before. Some read it in German and some in English, and the invitation she sent encouraged everyone to speak in whichever language was most comfortable. Ruth made fish and chips and apple crumble to go with the British novel. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so. It's witty and easily read in an evening. The queen feels obliged to check out a book from the bookmobile parked near Buckingham Palace and reading changes her life. A lot of the book is her musings on why and how she reads, which led to a good discussion of how and why we read. A little awkward switching back and forth, so German predominated. Ruth and I will do a postmortem on Wednesday before our next meeting.

Yesterday I attended the International Women's Association  English Literature Group discussing Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book about the Biafran civil war. I had read it before, but reread it. A sense of doom pervades, which means it certainly isn't a fun read, but it's a fairly good portrayal of the cruelty, insecurity, and starvation. I kept thinking of parallels to the situation in Syria, since the Biafran rebels kept hoping that the world would come to their aid, but arms were supplied only to the Nigerian conquerors. An interesting assortment of women from Germany, Austria, Scotland, England, and one other American. The German woman who gave me a ride also participates in a French book club, and she writes children's books, so I enjoyed chatting with her in the car.

My current bookshelf contains Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which my Claremont book club is reading, and Stoner by John Williams, which was mentioned in the NY Times as a book that didn't sell well when it came out because its style was out of fashion in the 60s, but it has now been republished and is getting some attention. I just started both, so it's too early to tell, but I like both so far.

Birthday Weekend: Swing Jazz, Sundial, Waterwheels, Cheesecake Competition, Portuguese Fireworks (continued)

The Wennigsen sundial includes just about every possible way to interpret every planet and references as many astronomers and cultures that built sun calendars as they could pack onto it. They call it a super-sundial.

Sundial, Wenngisen

 

Double Helix Sculpture

We enjoyed a craft exhibit in this old firehouse. Rich bought a small cream pitcher for me.

 

Tree in bloom, slate & tile roofs

Half-timbered brick house, Wennigsen

 

Sometimes one sees round shields on houses signaling that the owner won a marksmanship contest of the local Schützenverein. The Schützenverein is the local militia and the winner must sponsor drinks all round and is hailed in the yearly Schützenfest in a parade through the streets. In Wennighausen, instead of just a round shield with the name and year, the shields included markers showing where each shot landed on the target.

Schützenkönig Shield

  

In order to make it back into town in time for cheesecake, we finally tore ourselves away from the sights of Wennigsen. We rode along some intensely green wheat fields with bright yellow rape-seed fields and the Diester hills in the distance.



Line of Trees along Wheat Field

 

We tried to ride fast, but it was uphill through the forest and by this time we were getting hungry and thirsty. We stopped at a small pond for a picnic,

Picnic Spot, Pond in Deister Forest

and then on to the waterwheels. These are charming. In the middle of the forest, someone has built 23 brightly-painted whirligigs powered by waterwheels: men sawing, a gondola ride, Max and Moritz figures being threatened by a lady with a broom, carousels...

 

Waterwheel Toys

 

The sign changes from "Wir Wünschen Ihnen" to "einen erholsamer Tag in Deister,"

which mean we wish you a refreshing day in Deister.

The link below to a youtube video of the opening day for 2011 gives you some idea, but it shows a very different kind of day: crowds, speeches, a German band playing, and people dancing. Yesterday it was a rainy day and there were only a few people.  

 Wennigsen Wasserräder

 

We took a different path through the forest back and then raced the rain to get to the cheesecake competition before all the cheesecake was gone.

Homemade Cheesecake Assortment

 

We sat under a pop-up during the drizzle and chatted with our neighbors across the table sampling 3 different kinds of cheesecake. Then we stopped to see if the church was open, since we had 45 minutes till the train. They were getting ready for a wedding, so we snuck in to see the monastery church, an old pilgrimage site from the 13th century.

 

We were glad to take the train home to hot tea and dry clothes. We weren't soaked, but damp and cold. We decided to forgo tickets for the Portuguese fireworks competition celebration, since it was cold and rainy and went to a piano-accordion concert at the Leibnizhaus and skyped with Sarah and my mother. We took the streetcar up to the palace gardens at 10:00 and watched the fireworks from outside the walls. All-in-all a very nice birthday. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday Weekend: Swing Jazz, Sundial, Waterwheels, Cheesecake Competition, Portuguese Fireworks

Friday afternoon Isabella and I walked over to the plaza in front of the train station to hear a French swing jazz band. (Isabella is a French mathematician who lives upstairs; she plays flute in a jazz band back in Toulouse and we've been getting together to play recorder duets. Yesterday we played alto-tenor duets with our new tenors, switching parts so we could each play tenor.) Anyway, yesterday was SWING-Night, commemorating a jazz performance and jam session 65 years ago, the first public revival of jazz after the war. Of course, the mayor gave a speech, recounting how jazz fans wrote the numbers of records they wanted on their fingers to buy the records under the counter without saying anything and jazz bands switched timing mid-measure from swing to march time when police entered a club. Jazz was considered decadent by the Nazis and went underground. After the war, Hannover was in the British zone, but an American jazz band from Frankfurt came in 1948 for a concert and afterwards the jazz musicians of Hannover gathered for an all-night jam session broadcast by the local radio station, bringing jazz out in the open again.

The first band was a guitar-bass trio playing French swing from the 40s. A Lindy-Hop Club showed up, some dressed in period costume and put on a show. They danced from the first song till the last band. We danced a bit also. The plaza was surrounded by a French market, and Isabella helped us choose cheese and duck sausage. Rich and Isabella's husband, Philippe, showed up and they invited us home for wine, cheese, sausage, and olives. Afterwards, Rich and I walked back to hear some of the last band and the Lindy-hoppers were still going strong.

SWING-Night, Train Station Plaza

Lindy-Hop Club Dancing at SWING-Night

 



The weather report for Saturday was not encouraging, so we had made no plans, waiting to see what the day would bring. We decided to chance it and took the bikes on the regional train to Wennigsen to ride from there to a brook in the Deister hills where someone had built a series of waterwheels that run fanciful whirligig toys. Other than that, we had no plans and not even a decent map. When we got off the train, there was a billboard with a local map and a poster announcing a town cheesecake competition at 2:30! Since I usually ask for cheesecake for my birthday cake, we wanted to make sure that we got back in time to buy some. However, it was hard to get on our way, since the village was full of fun things to see: a 13th century monastery, an over-the-top sundial, a double helix kinetic statue, a watermill, a local craft exhibit, and wonderful brick and half-timbered houses.

Cheesecake Competition Poster

Wennigsen Monastery

 

 

This post won't let me load any more pictures, perhaps because of the video, so I'll continue on the next post.

 

 

 

Ups and Downs

I accidentally let slip to the person who drove us to the Moeck factory that my new tenor would be an early birthday present. She told some of the other members of the recorder orchestra, so on Wednesday the two altos on either side of me said happy birthday and asked me what day it was. I said Saturday. Isolde handed me a gift and told me I should unwrap it. It's a crocheted decoration for my bike bell. Anyway, that was all very nice, although I was a bit embarrassed. At the end of the rehearsal, which was a whirlwind of trying to sight-read music from my neighbor's stand an octave below where alto recorder notes are usually written and trying to remember that fis means F-sharp, the conductor announced the birthday of one of the tenors. The birthday person gets to choose a piece they all play. Afterwards, my neighbors started whispering to me that I should choose a birthday piece. Since I don't have most of the music, I was asking them to ignore my birthday while they were waving their hands trying to get the conductor's attention. The conductor wished me happy birthday and asked me to choose a piece and asked in front of everyone when my birthday was. I said Saturday the 25th and then they all realized that my birthday was the coming Saturday, not last Saturday. A dead silence. Then my neighbors told me that next Wednesday they would wish me happy birthday and that I should rewrap the present, although they said it nicely. A bit humiliating.

Crocheted Bike Bell Flower

In Germany the birthday person brings cake or candy for everyone, so next Monday in choir I'm supposed to bring something. They sit the birthday person in a chair in front of the conductor and the birthday person picks a song and the choir sings it. Again, there are several songs and I don't know them all. I'm glad that last Monday was a holiday, or I would have had the same mix-up in choir as I did at recorder rehearsal. I left the space for my birthday on the "contract" for joining the choir  blank on purpose, but the choir leader came up to me to ask after practice to ask when my birthday was, since I'd left it blank. Don't travel if you can't stand embarrassment.

Other ups and downs this week: It's back in the 30s and 40s with lots of rain. I pulled out my fake uggs and gloves yesterday for a cold, rainy ride down to our church home group last night. We used to play a story game with the kids called Fortunately, Unfortunately. Fortunately, there are going to be Portuguese fireworks Saturday at the Herrenhauser Gardens as part of a fireworks competition. Unfortunately, the soccer final at Wembley is Sat. night. Fortunately, because of the soccer match, there are still tickets to the fireworks. Unfortunately, the weather forecast says 100% chance of rain.

The biggest downer this week was that I got word that my long-awaited new writing center space is being given to someone else. This after a meeting in January with plans laid out and buying some furniture for the new space. This is the second time that promised space for a writing center separate from my office has been given to someone else. Also, trying to arrange plane tickets for Ross and his friend is too much like going to Vegas. One minute I find a great fare, then I email to see if that fits with them, and then that fare has doubled. The 9-hour time difference doesn't help. I'm off upstairs to play recorder and fill my mind with beautiful music. Wednesday there was a flute, cello, and piano trio concert. The flautist was absolutely top-notch. Two pieces I had never heard before were wonderful:  trios by Bohuslav Martinu and Astor Piazzolla. Rich said we should count concerts the way we used to count castles visited when on sabbatical in Scotland.

Pfingsten Wochenende (Pentecost Weekend): Bad Bentheim, Nordhorn, Lingen, Moor Museum

Pentecost is a 3-day weekend here. Saturday we had a long, lazy brunch with two of our upstairs neighbors. It rained most of the day and we were glad to have a day to lay low. It cleared at sunset and we had a beautiful bike ride exploring southwest of the Maschsee with ground mist rising from the fields and a crescent moon. Sunday we caught an early train to Bad Bentheim, due west of Hannover very close to the Dutch border. Werner and Inge, old friends from Marburg days, met our train and took us to tour the castle, originally 11th century, but, of course, destroyed and rebuilt many times.

Burg Bentheim

It was a very satisfying castle with all the usual fortifications, dungeons, etc., but also with very beautiful stained glass windows, ironwork, and elaborate wood carvings and ceilings.

Canon

View from Ramparts

Gargoyle over Doorway

Stained Glass Window - Library

Castle Ceiling with Chandelier

 

After touring the castle, we met Werner and Inge's son, daughter-in-law, and the most beautiful grandchild in the world for lunch. I won't post a picture due to privacy concerns, so you'll just have to take Inge's word for it. We all had spargel, a white form of asparagus that Germans go mad for in May. There are spargel stands everywhere. It's good, but also I think by eating spargel Germans celebrate the arrival of warmer weather and May holidays.

Eating Spargel with ham and potatoes

  

After lunch we decamped to Christian and Amira's apartment for coffee, tea, ice cream, and cake + continued admiration of the grandchild. German has a wonderful word, Stadtbummel, which means to bum around the city, just go for a stroll and enjoy the town. Nordhorn is partially an island surrounded by the river and canals. Christian even took us up to the top of Norhorn's "mountain," artificially made with cast-off earth from the weaving/spinning manufacturing industry and only a few stories tall. Nordhorn is very flat and very quiet, pretty much of a ghost town on the Sunday of a 3-day weekend.

Nordhorn Canal Boat



 

We stayed overnight in a youth hostel in Lingen. In the morning, after a very generous breakfast, we also did a Stadtbummel of Lingen. I especially liked these fountains.

Lingen Fountain

Close-up of happy monster with frog on his belly

Lingen Waterwheel Pump



 

 We met Christian at the Moor Museum, displaying the history of peat cutting and the natural history of the local landscape. The pictures below give a good idea.

Cotton grass, Mormuseum

Peat & Birches

 

We got to ride a small train that originally carried peat from the cuttings to wherever it was stored and dried. They had lots of old peat-cutting machines and tools. I love local country museums. All the signs were in Dutch and German, but no English.

Peat-cutting Machine

Special shoes for walking on soggy ground (They also had special shoes for the horses.)

 

All in all, a very pleasant weekend, with time to catch up with old friends as we poked around and explored the local sights. I originally had great plans to go to Venice, the Pyrenees, and Serbia, but so far we've been having a very nice time seeing friends and Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony).



 

 

 

 







 

 

 

 

 

 



Flowers & Flutes

I went on two different tours this week. Tuesday I went on a tour of the Herrenhauser Garden with the International Women's Association of Hannover. There are actually 4 gardens, but our tour guide just took us through a small part of the baroque Great Garden, built by Sophia in the 17th century. Lots of statues in a Greek style, formal knot gardens, fountains, grottoes, an outdoor theater, with a moat running round the whole garden. Leibnitz helped design the waterworks for the great fountain, which, depending on the water pressure, can reach 70-80 meters. Because the winter was so long and it suddenly became warm, all the spring flowers are in bloom at once: lilacs, tulips, rhododendrons, pansies, and peonies are all in full bloom.

Hercules Statue, Großer Garten

 

Knot Garden, Großer Garten

 

I was taking this picture, and, all of sudden, I saw a palm tree moving along. Very strange. Then the tractor emerged from behind the hedge. It's finally warm enough to bring the palm trees out from winter greenhouses.

Tractor Pulling Palm Tree Out For Summer Display



At lunch, I sat next to someone whose husband had worked in Houston for several years. She invited me to join her and some other members for a tour of the Berggarten and then on to her house for a meeting of their English reading group. The Berggarten is a smaller, but less formal and more varied garden with a rhododendron garden, a marsh, and greenhouses. I had always wondered why it was called the Berg Garden, since berg means mountain in German and there is certainly no mountain there. In fact, if anything, it has a slump in the middle. Anyway, originally there was a small hill, but it subsided with all the digging. The building was built to house the master gardener, but he decided it was too small (!) and lived somewhere else, so other gardeners lived there.

Berg Garden Building

The English reading group is reading West Side Story aloud and listening to some of the songs on CD. We each read parts and sang some of the songs. I can still remember most of the words to all of the musicals we sang growing up. The text had footnotes to translate 50s slang into German, so I learned some new German vocabulary. Although they read English books aloud, the discussion is in German. The members are from Peru, Russia, and Germany. I asked if there were German musicals that most Germans know and can sing the songs to, which started a discussion of how the Nazis used the popular German folk songs and culture for Hitler youth, so after the war no one sang them anymore. Very sad to have one's culture hijacked for evil. Also, they said the  stereotype of Germans singing while hiking is false, since most Germans are too private to sing aloud in public.

Yesterday someone from my recorder orchestra took me and the French mathematician upstairs with whom I have been playing duets to the Moeck factory in Celle. We had a detailed 2 1/2 hour tour with lots of information on the qualities of the different woods, why the Germans have their own fingering system, and the history of the recorder. I felt like a pilgrim on a visit to the Vatican, since I already owned a soprano and alto Moeck. He gave 4 of us unfinished recorders, and we got to walk them through the process of stamping the name on and getting the holes drilled and the cedar inserted for the mouthpiece. We even got to push the buttons on some of the machines. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures in the factory where the machines are, since they adapted and invented some of the machines themselves. There is a lot of specialized hand labor, and I was impressed that he did a lot of the steps himself on the recorders we were carrying through the process.

Tour Guide with Subbass

 

 Here are a series of pictures of the instrument I walked through to the final quality control and note test with a strobe.

Without holes

 

Before Cedar Insert

With Cedar Mouthpiece Insert

Cutting the Mouthpiece

Last Clean-up

Testing the sound quality and note accuracy with a strobe

 

Margrit had called ahead to say that I was interested in perhaps buying a tenor. We were given boxes of different tenors in different kinds of wood in a private room. Both Margrit and Isabella were very patient as I played them over and over before (with much trepidation) finally deciding on one. I'm thrilled! Everyone who knows me knows how hard it is for me to spend money on myself, so I'm still in shock that I bought myself such an expensive birthday present when I have years of gift cards at home that I've never used. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. 

My New Tenor