Things that I never found...

Okay, so the most obvious thing I didn't bring back from Germany was something cuddly to occupy either of the two empty seats next to me on the plane, and I don't mean something I could win at the Cannstatter Volksfest. There were a few other things I expected to put into my suitcase for the trip home, but which somehow eluded me:

1. Really delicious sour pickles.

For all the hype around Spreewaldgurken and Germany's close proximity to Poland, I was never able to find pickles like Bick's Polskie Ogorki or the varieties of Vlasic Pickles that I love here. The pickles that I either bought or sampled were always too mild, even if they were labeled as "knackig und würzig."



2. Benco distance cards.

One very nifty thing I received from Dad before my trip (along with some Euros in order to borrow a cart in the Stuttgart Airport) was a simple map of Germany printed on a cardboard sleeve with distances marked on a slidable card inside. By sliding the card, you can pick a start location and the distance to a destination is shown through a hole in the card--a nice piece of functional art (and a gift I would like to give--they exist for many countries). The card my dad gave me was from the days of the DDR (distances to East German destinations took the limited number of border crossings into account), making it a great piece of history, to boot. Even the stores I visited which specialized in maps (Schropp in Berlin and Dr. Götze in Hamburg) didn't carry the Benco cards, so I came home empty-handed. A company called Hallwag makes regular folding maps with a distance card integrated into it (branded as Disto-Guide), and make such maps for many countries. I found a map of Denmark for a friend of mine, a nice item which features Danish, French, English and German in its legend.

3. Redoxon Vitamin C effervescent tablets.

For a long time, I've taken my vitamin C in effervescent tablet form, a brand called Redoxon being both available and having an acceptable flavour. The tablets are quite expensive (about $3.00 for a sleeve of 10 tablets) and since they are made in France by Bayer, I was hoping to run across some. Well, no Bayer products, but effervescent tablets are popular in Germany--I found tubes of 20 multivitamin tablets for about one Euro a crack.

4. Germans Under Cover

An earlier post on this Blog from Roy Black and an invitation to meet him in Berlin never materialized, which I suppose, but the worst part is that the great Schlager music he shared (perhaps illegally) is no longer available for download, nor is the savage commentary about it. If you're out there, Roy, please get your commentary back online! The music you posted lives on in my iPod!

In any case, my favourite piece of German cover version Schlager nostalgia is this priceless clip from a 70s German music show, where the duo of Cindy and Bert synthesize contemporary fashion, Arthur Conan Doyle and Black Sabbath.


At the Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin, there is a room filled with TVs where visitors can call up old TV programs, including full episodes of shows like this one. A can't miss for Germanophiles.

Neat stuff: Kurvenbeisser Biker-Salamis

Something I wanted to find in Germany, and was successful finding, were these tasty products.

Sure, the salami quality was what you could expect in a motorcycle store, but the packaging is first-rate: Kurvenbeisser translates as "curve biter", a cheeky double entendre, and there are four packages to collect, each with a description of a suggested motorcycle route in Germany. Very cool, my motorcycling friends really appreciated them.

Something I plan to do as soon as I can is obtain a motorcycle licence (I was prevented from doing so a year ago because of my foot problems)--the roads in Germany are excellent, and the motorcyclists in Baden-Württemberg and in the Alps were having at least as much fun as I was having on my bicycle.

Stuttgart has a sort of "motorcycle row" along Bundesstraße 27, not far from the centre of town, with several shops side by side. If you take the S- or U-Bahn trains north from the Hauptbahnhof, you can't miss them on the west side of the street as you emerge from underground.

Auf dem Eis mit den Tiefkühlschränken

One of the stranger aspects of German sporting life is the nicknames of the teams in the DEL, or their top ice hockey league. There are examples of

1) Nicknames in German

* Augsburger Panther
* Eisbären Berlin
* EV Duisburg "Die Füchse"
* Kölner Haie
* Krefeld Pinguine
* Adler Mannheim

2) Nicknames in English

* DEG Metro Stars
* Frankfurt Lions
* Hamburg Freezers
* Hannover Scorpions
* Iserlohn Roosters
* Straubing Tigers

3) No nickname at all

* ERC Ingolstadt (note that they do have a Panther in their team crest)

4) Nicknames combined with a sponsor

* Sinupret Ice Tigers

5) Nicknames on drugs

* EHC Wolfsburg Grizzly Adams

The Hamburg newspapers sometimes refer jokingly to their local team as the "Tiefkühlschränke" (the word for the applicable household appliance); I'm curious to know if the nickname relates to ice in an
arena or if it's an allusion to Hamburg's fame for warehouses and storage.

I talked a friend of mine from my German class, Gérald (a Swiss who is now a Canadian citizen working in Québec) into going to the game. According to Gérald, the wonderful atmosphere in the ColorLine Arena was what you would expect in a European arena (but maybe not as boisterous as in Lausanne, where the team he supports plays), but definitely better than that in the Montréal Forum. I had to tell him that the fans in Montréal are historically among the more vocal in Canada!

Gérald and I showed up at the rink over an hour before the game started and tried to find two seats together in the fanblock (north end of the Arena) and it took some time to find them--fans in the fanblock get there very early to claim seats (normally by putting their scarf across the seats) and then go into the concourses to socialize. We found some down fairly low in a corner, next to the Holsten Fan Couch and I did my best to get in the camera shots of the guys who were lucky enough to sit there. The fanblock does not stop singing for the whole game, and we were on our feet the whole time. I have never had so much fun at a hockey game!

As usual, I was looking for souvenirs. I almost bought a scarf which featured the title of a song they play in the rink when an opponent gets a penalty, "In Hamburg sagt man Tschüss". (It's cute. They alternate playing that song with some punk song for which I'm still trying to find the title.) Nearly everyone in sight had a scarf (one guy had enough scarves to make a dress out of them) but light blue and 15 Euros just weren't my colour. Something I could have used, and didn't think of at the time, was a Freezers jersey, especially since I plan to play more hockey outdoors and on the ice.

Addendum: Back home, I was quite stunned to find that a friend's copy of NHL2007 has DEL teams in it, including my beloved Freezers!

Blog updating

Sorry about the lack of entries, but I haven't found it easy to sit at a keyboard and write. I am making notes and taking some pictures, and my upcoming schedule looks like this:

Week of

August 13 Paris sightseeing

August 20 Paris-Brest-Paris

August 27 Lage (Hannover/Bielefeld area) visiting relatives

September 3 Hamburg-Goethe Institut German studies

September 10 Hamburg continued

September 17 not sure

September 24 Stuttgart UCI World Road Championships

October 1 Packing and returning home

Best wishes to everyone who has visited this site, there is much more I will tell you.

Michael

PS A highlight of my trip was visiting my cousin Volker in Freiburg--this picture was taken from the Schlossberg in Freiburg--the fellow who more closely resembles the men in my family is on the left--that's Volker. Volker works at the airport which can be seen in the background.

Volker's mom took us on a driving tour on the Swabian Alb later in the day, and the kloister church we visited in St. Trudpert and the view from the Schauinsland were spectacular.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.--Mark Twain

Part of my experience this year was to improve my German, and I think I have. A little bit, anyway.

For the past four weeks, I studied German at the renowned Goethe Institut in Berlin. Every student's German knowledge is a little different. My German was learned at home, almost entirely informally, the exceptions being my attending German schools on Saturdays until I was about 15, which I never enjoyed, and one high school correspondence course, which I learned to dislike. (When I was 18, I started reading German magazines during the 1986 World Cup and have kept reading them, and other German material here and there, since.) The result of my German education, if we I can call it that, is that my pronunciation is quite good (I am sometimes mistaken for a Swiss person when I'm having a good day), my understanding of German is fairly good, my vocabulary is reasonable and my grammar is pretty atrocious. I have to say that everything, including my grammar, is a little better now.

The course was entertaining--aside from the grammar exercises, we discussed current events, listened to music, gave presentations (mine was about the € Euro) and there were plenty of opportunities to explore Berlin with other students.

The best part of the course was that I now have a pretty good understanding of what I have to work on: grammar. Sounds obvious, but it's pretty clear now that I have to learn German grammar from the ground up. And if that sounds like fun, you might want to read Mark Twain's account of German Language which is not surprisingly called The Awful German Language, and someone has collected even more quotes from Twain about German. Enjoy!

Another wonderful part of the course is that my eyes were opened up to a little bit of literature. Our class read Remarque's Der Nacht in Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon), and I also learned that my favourite author, David Foster Wallace, has been translated into German, including an essay of his, the titular essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (translated as Schrecklich amüsant, aber in Zukunft ohne mich, or "Terribly enjoyable, but next time...without me"). DFW has an affinity for the Oxford English Dictionary, and it will be great fun to read the article again merely to see how it was translated. Not only will I read some DFW in German, but it's about time I read some Mark Twain as well. Twain's account of his travels in Germany is beautifully illustrated by a 20th century German cartoonist, and A Tramp Abroad is something the the GVPL has at home.

Later this year, I will return to the Goethe Institut (they're located throughout Germany) to complete an examination, probably at what is known as the B2 level. My class was the C.1 level, and although I was far ahead of many in my class in some areas, it was clear that most of my 13 classmates had learned German systematically, and recently (most of the students were between 18-26). There was a short control exam at the end of the course, and I did very well, but the B2 exam should be challenging.

Berlin: Juxtapositions

Hello from Berlin, Germany,

It's going to be a long summer as far as Internet access goes. I've just found an Internet Café about 15 minutes from home which does not allow smoking and damn right I'm pleased. Too bad I'm leaving Berlin in a couple of weeks...

So, what can I say about this vast metropolis. Well, I was prepared long ago through the words of Henry Rollins, who visited the Berlin Wall many years ago and was staggered at the sight of it. Solid stone walls adorned with barbed wired and armed guards everywhere on patrol with orders to shoot to kill anyone who entered the zone between an inner and outer wall. Inside the zone, with no predators to worry about, were bunnies. Oppression and bunny rabbits. The wall is essentially gone, but the juxtapositions still exist.

Before class today, I went on a tour with my schoolmates at the Goethe Institut of a number of sites along the wall, with our final destination being a checkpoint at the northwest corner of Berlin, the Bornhomer Brücke (Bridge). A remaining section of wall still stands at the right of the photo; the site where I took this picture was where visitors from West Berlin had to pass through East German customs.

Back to juxtapositions... the Soviets built the TV tower at the Alexanderplatz to be the second tallest building in Europe behind only the TV tower in Moscow (how appropriate!), which of course makes for this wonderful shot I took:

In the foreground is the Berlin Marienkirche, which features a monument to Martin Luther, and behind it extending into the sky is the symbol of Communist supremacy, the Berlin TV tower. Unfortunately, the sun wasn't shining on this day, so we can't see what is known as "The Pope's Revenge."

An even better juxtaposition found on this day was the European School of Management and Technology, supported by multinational corporations with courses conducted completely in English. Not that unusual, save for the fact that inside the building is this stained glass display:


Yes, the ESMT is located in the former East German"Staatsrat" (National Council), and the stained glass mural depicts communistic ideals. Parked out front on the Straße den 17. Juni are luxury cars and Trabant Safari taxis.

That's all for now...

Neckartalradweg and first cycling impressions in Germany

Since my arrival six days ago, I've had opportunities to cycle on cycle paths and roads for about 200 km. Shortly after I built up my bike (only a few scratches from the baggage handlers), I rode a 60 km loop counterclockwise from Riederich to Bad Urach, up the hill to Hülben, northwest to Neuffen through Frickenhausen to Nürtingen, then back southwest through Bempflingen back home. Frickenhausen is, of course, where Dr. Evil was eventually able to obtain fricken lasers to put on the sharks' heads. I did not see Frau Farbissina.

Google Map (sorry, I wish I had GPS software to show you exactly where I went) which shows the area. If you zoom in, you can find the smaller towns I mention here.

On Monday, I rode a clockwise loop north to the Neckar river, rode northeast along the Neckartalradweg (Neckar Valley cycle path) to Wernau, and then southwest to Lenningen, then up the hill to Hochwang, back down from Hülben and stopped for a cool treat in Bad Urach. Bad Urach is where my aunt has had medical treatment--a nice little place. I bought my mom a beautiful handmade birthday card for her 75th birthday which is only 9 days from today. It was then 30 minutes home to Riederich.

On Tuesday evening, some people my aunt knows do a weekly ride of about 90 minutes through the countryside, and we sat and talked for about that long afterwards at a local pub. I got some good advice from them, one man named Heiner (Heinrich, presumably) even lent me some maps for the week.

Some observations:

The good:

• The scenery is beautiful. It's only minutes from the countryside no matter where you go.
• There are tough climbs nearby. The Swabian Alp up to Hülben and to Hochwang involves climbs of about 4 km with 7% grades. The Hochwang climb from Lenningen was particularly stunning, with evergreens all around and fruit trees in bloom.
• It seems like everybody rides a bike here--it's hard to believe at first. It truly is an option here for people who don't want to walk or drive everywhere. Bus service is sparse where I'm staying. When I look out the window of the house where I'm staying, some cyclists will ride by every few minutes.
• The roads in the countryside are in outstanding condition. I thought the roads in France were good, but these are unbelievable. They are mostly some kind of chip seal, but smooth. They have no shoulders, but as I've said over and over, that is good--all the debris falls off to the side.
• Drivers are used to delays, especially in towns, and they drive carefully. There are people on bikes, rollerblades, on foot, other drivers, etc. everywhere. I did have one encounter while riding during business hours--a truck driver used their horn while following me on a congested road. It so happened that an ambulance with lights on came in the other direction, so I pulled off to the side which allowed the truck driver to pass, so I'm not quite sure whether it was simply to alert me to their presence or something else. Anyway, didn't matter.
• Roundabouts!
• There is no mandatory helmet law so I have made several short trips ohne Helm and have let my flowing locks blow in the wind and left my helmet at home. My aunts believe that there is a helmet law for some reason (totally contradicted by local practice) and have mentioned that wearing a helmet is something they have no interest in doing, which contributes to their cycling days being over. Tell that to your local bicycle advocate.
• It's easy to find the way to e.g. Nürtingen when you can see Nürtingerstrasse. Along with the large yellow signs at the intersections, it's a snap.

The bad:

• drivers are somewhat agressive which means they will travel in platoons, meaning that drivers are very eager to overtake. This is the same thing I encountered in France four years ago. Tailgating is fairly common, so when you approach oncoming traffic, you've got to pay attention to an oncoming driver possibly making a mistake.
• travel by bicycle can be slow when the cycle paths have to be used--it can be confusing travelling through intersections and descents can be hairy when you can't see what might be at the end of the hedgerow. I was out for about five hours on Monday and between cycle path/road interchanges and pulling out my now beaten cycling map of the area I only rode about 80 km. I suspect that my first truly enjoyable 100 km+ ride will be in an area where the towns are not so close together.
• many bike paths are mandatory for cyclists, or at least are posted that way. Many times I and other cyclists have used the roads with no problem. It is confusing to have special cycling infrastructure present when it is clearly much safer and convenient to use the roadway. Ahh, just like home!
• Metzingen is a maze of streets. I thought I had a good sense of direction until I arrived here. I know where the main street and the train station is but that is about it.

After 4 flat tires in the past 400 km or so, I've just bought some wider tires for my bike--a pair of 28mm race Continental Grand Prix 4000s. One local bike shop ordered them in for me special and reluctantly sold them to me using my credit card. Metzingen is a small town but there are three bike shops, and the one with the business hours I'm accustomed to has received my business so far.

Happy riding, and kids, wear your helmets. I'll try to take more pictures--I'd love to ride a tandem some day so that the bike would have a navigator/photographer in the back.

Gruß aus Deutschland

Willkommen in Deutschland

Hello to all my friends at home,

I arrived in Germany safe and sound. I've obviously found Internet access--it's in an Internet "Café" in Metzingen, in Baden-Württemberg, about 2 km from where I am staying in Riederich. I have to believe that the German economy is fuelled by Internet Café surfers who have to learn a new kezboard lazout and spend countless time hitting the backspace kez. Dammit!

My seatmates on the planes were perfectly well behaved, the most crucial seatmate (that being for the 9 hour and 26 minute flight from Calgary to Frankfurt) was a late 40s woman dressed somewhat age-inappropriately (hello, Cleavage), reading a Cosmo and dying for a cigarette, but she turned out to be pretty cool. She was on her way to spending seven months in Serbia, flying to Belgrade after her hop in Frankfurt. Must be nice to have seven months off, I think....

My aunts, or more accurately my aunt Ursel and her housemate Gerlinde, were waiting for me at the Stuttgart airport, and with a grand stroke of luck, my bicycle wasn't there. Lufthansa told me my bike was still in Frankfurt and would be delivered within 24 hours or so. What a coup! It turns out it wouldn't have fit in Gerlinde's car, anyway. Whew!

Do I miss anything yet, other than my friends? Well, suffice it to say that the air in Victoria is far better than here--Germany hasn't quite gotten to clearing public spaces of cigarette smoke (oh, man, does it hit you in the airport, and my eyes are burning a little at this terminal). Is smoking common here? When was the last time you saw a cigarette vending machine on a residential street?

Also, I will have to learn to eat sausages without cucumber relish--I don't think it exists here. My aunts have never heard of it. On the plus side, I bought my first Ritter Sport chocolate bar for about $1 Canadian. If I buy 1500 of them, I will have saved enough money to pay for my trip! The land of chocolate!

Thanks again to everyone for their kind wishes for my safe and enjoyable journey and for those who took me in when I was homeless. I hope to write again soon.

Michael Poplawski in Riederich, Baden-Württemberg

BDR Super Cup

Something that caught my attention a few years ago was the large number of Radmarathons on offer in Germany including some that are part of the BDR Super-Cup series.

Radmarathons are typically 200+ km rides, and clubs hosting them usually offer shorter routes as well.

The BDR Super-Cup is a selection of Radmarathons made by the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer for their general appeal, challenging routes and good organization.

While I'm in Germany, my plan is to ride five of the seven Super-Cup events, and it just so happens that completing five Super-Cup rides earns a rider a special jersey as a keepsake for the accomplishment, like this one from 2002:

The five rides I'm doing are (distances in km, climbing in m)

23. June 7. Super Cup Warburg Westfalen 242/ 2800
07. July 3. Trierer Moselland-Super Cup 212/3000
04. August Gregor Braun Schwarzwald Classic 202/3020
01. September Tour de Oppes 210/3000
23. September 8. symBadischer Radmarathon 201/3700

There are two other rides I can't do:

27. May RHÖN-Ramarathon 210/3500 (happens while I'm in Berlin)
18. August Rund um die Festspielstadt Bad Hersfeld 250/2700 (this is while I'm in France)

How to act at PBP (Paris-Brest-Paris)

(posted to randon@googlegroups.com)

In this thread I've seen some comments which suggest to me that the "Culture Shock" and similar series of books would be a good read for anyone planning to visit France this year, even if it's only for a few weeks.

In each country there are behavioural traits and knowing them will help you possibly avoid frustration with the locals. I think it's just as important to study this type of material as language material. You will gain some insight on how the locals think and look at the world, and also how some of their systems work.

Of course, learning basic expressions in any local language is a very good idea, but so much can be accomplished by being patient and using hand gestures. I found the expressions s'il vous plait, merci beaucoup and j'ai une probleme very good to know, especially the last one--a french speaker knows right away that you need help, and I was pretty amazed at how helpful they could be.

Reverting to your native tongue really is not that useful unless your conversation partner can speak it, and switching is very frustrating to a listener and can be very upsetting. Learn as many words as possible, and one entertaining way to learn is to use Wikipedia--look up something you know and then look at the left column for a link to the same topic in French.

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris-Brest-Paris has a click-through link to the same topic in French at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris-Brest-Paris_Randonneur

Now to the bookstore, or the library:

Culture Shock! France
http://www.amazon.com/dp/155868929X

The French Way
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071428070

France-Culture Smart!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1857333071

Xenophobe's Guide to the French (this one is essentially for fun)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1902825284

Dorling Kindersley Visual French Dictionary
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0756612977

I'll leave it you to find your own speaking/listening material for
learning French!

--
Michael Poplawski
BC Randonneurs Cycling Club
Victoria, BC Canada
Ancien 2003

PS My favourite story about French helpfulness was at a grocery store. In France, produce is usually weighed and priced by the purchaser using the honour system, and I didn't know this. The person behind me in line at an Auchun (a huge multidepartmental store) took my produce to the scale about 50 metres away and about 5 minutes later came back with my fruit and vegetables priced. I could not believe it--this exchanged happened with me simply being a Canadian schmuck not knowing what to do in a mall. The PBP experience featured its own helpful highlights, too.

Phone Cards

After my experience with WinTel, a service which provided me with inexpensive long-distance service until they started charging me a monthly access fee totally out of the blue, I found myself once again facing Telus Mobility long-distance charges, and even the spectre of not being able to make calls to Germany at all from my phone. It's a cell phone, and by default they are not able to make overseas calls, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you happen to leave your phone somewhere and someone unscrupulous picks it up.

I called Telus Mobility to have my phone activated for overseas calling. The customer agent was intelligent (and honest) enough to tell me what I should look for is a calling card, and after she explained where I could find one, I didn't have to get my phone switched over after all.

This being 2006, there is now a whole industry relating to calling cards with byzantine rules and rate schedules. In fact, the card I bought allows me to use two different plans from the same company using the same PIN--the card features a hybrid of two plans called Liberty and Premier Plus. For about 4 cents a minute, I can call Germany. (When I had a long-distance relationship with someone 200 km away in 1998, I was paying several times that, and by the time I moved in with her, I was broke!) Thank you, Internet!

Odds are very good that this will all be obsolete by the time you read this, but if you are interested in making long distance calls for reasonable prices from any phone, have a look here.

After the headache of figuring out what a phone call was actually going to cost, I called my aunt to tell her how much progress I was making with my trip preparations. It was very nice to speak to her for 16 minutes, and all for 67 cents. The world gets smaller!

Flüge gebucht! Deutschland, ich komme!

Flughafen Stuttgart-Echterdingen

Ich habe heute meine Flüge gebucht--ich fahre fast direkt zu Riederich, wo meine Tante wohnt.

Ich bin froh dass ich nicht nach Vancouver mit der Fähre muss und dass der Flughafen Stuttgart (Echterdingen) nicht zu weit von Riederich ist für die Freundin meiner Tante mich vom Flughafen abzuholen.

Abfahrt von Victoria ist am 13:35 Mittwoch, April 11 und ich lande in Stuttgart 14:10 Donnerstag, mit Umsteige in Calgary und Frankfurt. Die Fluglinien sind Air Canada Jazz, Air Canada und Lufthansa, hin und zurück, also, das übliche Kanada-Deutschland Fahrt.

Ich war auch etwas überrascht wegen den Preis meiner Karten... in August 2003 bin ich nach Paris geflogen, Rundfahrt, und es war ziemlich teuerer, wahrscheinlich aufgrund die Jahrezeiten (August, gegenüber April u. Oktober).

Willkommen! Welcome!

Hello, Guten Tag,

As you may know, I'm from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and have six months leave from work in 2007. I will be visiting Germany (and spending some time in France, as well) to improve my German fluency, to upgrade my French, to cycle, to cheer on the eleven, to enjoy the country, to visit bookstores, libraries, etc., etc., etc. There will be no shortage of new experiences.

This site will be both a place for reference for me (see the links on the side of the page), a way for me to keep track of where I've been, and also, if anyone is interested, to see what I've done, and maybe even inspire someone out there to do the same thing.

I'll be writing in both English and German depending on what I'm writing about, or how I feel that day.

Also, jetzt geht's los!