Hannover Day 2 - evacuation and a castle

Second full day in Hannover, Sunday, we slept even later, 11:30 a.m., phew, jet lag, wow. The day before, after many calls, we have heard from the airport that they will deliver our checked back to Hartmut and Martina's place. Cool. That will be so cool if it works out. While we went on all of our excursions on Saturday, the neighbor kindly agreed to watch for any luggage deliveries. Today, Barbara, Hartmut's sister, also known as Bobsy, is here, and she has kindly agreed to stick around and watch for our luggage. Today is Hartmut's birthday. I'm not sure if Bobsy is here for the birthday or for an evacuation. They explain, unexploded ordnance from WWII is still found now and then (like a few times a year), and neighborhoods are evacuated while a special crew comes in, digs it up, attempts to remove the explosive part, and if they can't, to contain it in some way and explode it. Bobsy's neighborhood has been evacuated for just this reason. The bomb is just 200m (I think) from her house.

Everyone seems pretty chill about the giant bomb like, oh you know, that happens sometimes. Apparently, they find the ordinance by comparing records from the allies who did the bombing with their own records about where explosions did (and did not happen). What an interesting job that must be. We found out later they could not remove the explosive part safely, so they contain the whole thing in some kind of water containment system and blow it up there. Apparently the roofs of a couple homes were damaged, but otherwise, it was all just fine.

So anyway, while Bobsy hung out waiting for our big red suitcase, we went off on another excursion, this time to Marienburg Castle, built between 1858 and 1867 as a birthday present by King George V of Hanover to his wife, Marie of Saxe-Altenburg. It's a little unclear to me (and maybe others) who currently owns it now. It was for a long time owned by Ernst August, Prince of Hannover, who was married to Princess Carolyn of Monaco, but then maybe it passed to his son Ernst August, Hereditary Prince of Hannover, but then maybe he gave it to the state of Hannover because it needed so much money to repair it after decades of neglect by his father who is also known as the "pissing prince" (and a raging alcoholic) because he was caught urinating on the Turkish Pavilion at the Expo 2000, leading to a complaint from the Turkish embassy accusing him of insulting the Turkish people. Apparently the son has sold as much art and furniture as possible in hopes of raising funds to repair the place, but then all those funds had to be spent on his father's debts. Ah, royalty. There are more twists and turns to the story, but maybe you get the idea. Our most scandalous American celebrities can barely keep up with European royal descendants. 

Anyway, the castle is lovely, with still many interesting furnishings, architecture, and great views. We had lots of fun roaming around it. Sorry I didn't get more good photos. I was just enjoying it. And I also neglected to get a photo of Bobsy who stayed home watching for our luggage. 

Next up, a post birthday dinner surprise from Hartmut and his children ...

Hannover Day 1 - Part 3

Oh! I'm going too slowly, aren't I? In realtime, it's June 27th, day 13 of this trip and here I am still telling you about day three of the trip, which was day one in Hannover. I'll have to speed up if I'm ever going to catch up to the much faster Instagram posts (and I'm even behind on those)!

Well, day one of Hannover is taking three parts because we did so much that day. Hartmut, our guide, is maybe one of the most energetic people I've ever met. He's a teacher, like Robert, but also he's a musician, and an avid collector and reader of history, and before becoming a teacher, he had about a hundred different odd jobs so he just knows lots and lots of random things he likes to share. I regret not getting a photo of him just being excited about something because I think that must be his natural state all the time. Robert told me, "He's curious about everything, like you." He really likes to talk about music. The morning of this long day - or maybe it was another morning, I can't remember now - he excitedly introduced me to a Swedish band called Junip that's been around since the late 80s by playing some of their music. I talked about the density of the music but because of Hartmut's accent, I heard "dancety" but maybe that's what he meant, though I doubt it because his English is impeccable, but anyway I liked the sound of dancety and it's wonderful to listen to him talk about music. He has a digital radio show he produces now and then full of history and insight into music around various themes.

So anyway, we're still on our first full day in Hannover, and our first in Germany, after two days of travel, jetlagged, missing our main piece of luggage, flabbergasted and thrilled to find ourselves here but a bit groggy and on yet another adventure after dinner. Off to the Herrenhäuser Gärten, an immense Baroque garden and palace dating back to the 17th century. We were there mostly to appreciate this great garden designed by Sophie von der Pfalz, also known as Sophie of Hannover, also through some political turn of events the unexpected heir and now sole progenitor to the crown of England. Most of that last part doesn't make much sense to me, but anyway she designed a hell of a garden, apparently in the Dutch baroque style, influenced by her childhood in the Netherlands. 

Hedges and fountains and statuary, oh my. It's just stunning. Hartmut made sure to take us to a statue of her where he explained she died in her garden, stumbling in a rainstorm late at night. We were there at night ourselves, a little later than expected, so moving quickly, because dinner conversation made us lose track of time - a pattern that repeated throughout our entire visit - anyway, we were there to enjoy that once in a while they turn on all sorts of lights throughout the garden, behind statues, in fountains, in various colors, bringing the already beautiful garden to a state of enchantment.

In the U.S., despite how much space we have, we don't have many spaces where we devote vast swaths of land to public art and thoughtfully designed places of contemplation and rest. We have our national and state forests of course. And we have monuments and memorials and government buildings and public art. We even have botanical gardens. But the sheer spaciousness of these carefully designed and forever maintained spaces of cultivated gardens, statues, and public spaces, celebrating ideas and beauty and history are so different from what I'm used to. Maybe it's unique to places that had royalty, but anyway, it makes my eyes wide and my breath deep and my sense of wonder expanded to stand there imagining hundreds of years of other humans calmly, joyfully wondering and smiling as they walk arm in arm, gaze at a statue, peeking around a hedge, listen to birds high in the trees, smell a rose, and cool off alongside a fountain. I love our American places of rest and contemplation too, but the walkways are just so much wider here, it's really luxurious. (Just a moment to say the Europeans didn't invent enormous luxurious gardens, the Chinese and the Egyptians did it too. I'm just saying we don't have them in the U.S. and now that they exist in public spaces available to more than royalty, well, they're nice.)

So anyway, we skipped along to Baroque music piped in through speakers I couldn't see, gasping again and again at every turn of a hedge to reveal a beautifully lit statue or secret sitting place. Photos below with captions to explain. Before we left the house, Hartmut enlisted my help toting along little bottles of sparkling wine in my purse, and the peak of the evening was when we arrived at the largest fountain of all, he fished out cups from his pockets, and we all slurped wine in the dark and marveled at 72 meters of water shot into the sky, lit from below. What a treat, I wonder if Sophie could possibly have imagined how many people would enjoy her work so long after she left. Thanks Sophie! Thanks dear Hartmut and Martina for sharing!

Fountains!

Fountains!

and more fountains!

Vastness!

There's a "grotto," originally built for the royals to cool themselves from the garden. Then it was a shop for a while. Most recently it's been completely filled with the art of Niki de Saint Phalle, most known and beloved for her "Nanas," curvy exuberant lady statues that appear all over the world.

An outdoor performance stage, the wings made by statuary and topiary. It seats 500.

The grandest fountain of all.
To sit here and sip sparkling wine with friends
while music plays all around, what a lovely night!

Hannover Day 1 - Part 2

And then we went on a bicycle ride though a forest and around a lake. Neither the forest nor the lake were small. I was so excited to be bicycling through such a beautiful forest I neglected to take a single photo of the forest, the lake, or us bicycling. I'm sorry, I failed at the photography part of this adventure, but I really was just so overjoyed and stunned it didn't even occur to me to take out my phone. 

First of all, I was riding an eBike for the first time. Wow, this might be life-changing. I've just read that Minnesota just passed a transit bill that will give a rebate on eBikes next year, I'll have to research when I get home, I want one! Here, the infrastructure for bicycles is everywhere! It seems to have precedence over every other form of transit. They have their own ribbon of a lane anywhere else anyone is moving. They have their own traffic lights. They have their own high-speed lanes for fast-moving bicycles. Everyone of every possible age, carrying any amount of day-to-day things is on them. I'm in love with all of the bicycling. I feel so boastful about how many bike lanes we have in Minnesota, but compared to here, we are like a dirt road to a highway.

Second of all, the forest (Stadtwald Eilenriede) is the biggest so-called "City Forest" in Europe, twice the size of New York's Central Park at 1600 acres with 50 miles of walking and 24 miles of bicycling paths. And truly a forest, with tall tall old trees, dense brush, so so green. Every once in a while a little surprise field or picnic area or bridge or stream or soccer field or biergarten or zoo, and then more forest. Hartmut kept up a fast pace and it was a joy to fly along, enjoying the cool breeze, birdsong, and sights along the way.

Thirdly, the lake. Also in the city, not far from the forest, the Maschsee is an artificial lake, about 200 acres in size, with every kind of water craft you might imagine except no motors, and lots and lots of people walking and jogging and biking around. Several lovely pavilions. lots of places to eat. Building it was an employment program of the Nazis. It's still a nice lake. 

We enjoyed some kind of flatbread thing that looked a bit like a pizza but was nothing like a pizza. In Robert's effort to indicate to the chef that I needed something lactose free but his own preference was "normal" somehow they started talking about being normal vs. being a foreigner, the chef being from Persia he said, and the next thing you know, they were hugging enormously. I'm still not sure how that happened, but it was just one of those traveler kind of moments of great friendly joy when two outsiders see the outsider in each other. By this time, I'd learned my first (and as Hartmut said, most important) German word, lecker, which means delicious, and which I proclaimed again and again as I ate my flatbread and slurped a delicious German beer.

I finally remembered to take a photo. This was before the flatbread arrived.
The fries come with ketchup and mayonnaise. Also delicious.

Along the way to the lake, we stopped at Aegidienkirche,
a church destroyed in the war - no roof, only walls - a monument.
This is a peace bell donated by Hannover's sister city,
Hiroshima, to remember the victims of war.

Hannover Day 1 - Part 1

Breakfast

We slept late. Something like 10 or 11 hours. Woke up still groggy. Hartmut and Martina have patiently waited to have breakfast. Breakfast is bread, rolls, cheese, meats. Coffee. I'm lactose intolerant. At home I never get to eat cheese. I eat Vegan cheese these days and try to pretend it tastes like cheese. It doesn't really taste like cheese. I miss cheese so much. More than I miss ice cream or sour cream or really any other dairy thing. Also, at home I spoil myself with a cappuccino every morning in which I use oat milk because it foams - one particular kind of oat milk, the only kind that foams. I've been bracing myself for this month to be spent in Germany and France, places where dairy is used a lot, and where I've been fearful they might not have any substitutes for full dairy everything. I've been imagining trying to explain why I can't eat anything. 

To my delighted surprise Robert has warned them and Martina has found laktosefrei everything! Laktosefrei 3.8% milk which they foam to a thick froth in their enormous foamer. Laktosefrei cream cheese with herbs de provence. Laktosefrei gouda. Laktosefrei ham salad. Breakfast is the three of them catching up in German, with lots of translation by Hartmut and Robert for me, which I barely hear because I'm quietly squealing the word "laktosefrei" over and over again. As I rub my belly and survey bread crumbs everywhere, I think no amount of walking will keep me from getting fat on this trip as I am reunited with my long lost love, cheese.

Old world

After breakfast we drive to Celle, a town dating back to the Middle Ages, and the site of hundreds of intact half-timbered houses lining cobble stoned streets. While Martina drives, Hartmut asks me how does all this German language sound to my ear. I pause. I want to be honest. A little sing-songy I say, more musical than I expected. But I add maybe that's because there is that up-lilting at the end that happens when one is talking to a foreigner, the implied "Do you understand" question mark. I say also, though, it sounds like chewing on broken glass. I impersonate what that might sound like. They laugh. I want to be more honest. I tell them I didn't grow up hearing German. It's not so common in Southern California. I want to be more honest. My mother was Jewish. Her mother was Polish. Her uncle - my great uncle - was a Holocaust survivor. Others did not survive. I grew up with only one association for the German language.

I've talked about this with Robert. I understand there is more to associate with Germany. But it looms large for me. Germany never topped the list of places I dreamed of visiting. If not for Robert - who speaks the language, who has lived there, who taught German in high school for many years and brought students on month-long visits - I would probably never have come.

Everyone in the car is nodding. They seem to understand. Hartmut begins to speak slowly and thoughtfully about what it is like to have lived his entire life in a country that is reckoning with the most shameful possible past. About his parents' stories. About his own efforts to understand and face this legacy. About memorials and reminders in every city, alongside every church, about Stolperstein (stumbling stones), about genetic memory. About vows to never start a war from this soil again. His voice shakes and his face is quickly covered in tears. I can't do justice to all of his words. Except to say that I am inspired to think that the U.S. could use some reckoning of its own.

Robert, Martina, Hartmut posed in front of the fountain in the Französischer Garten on the walk into the old part of Celle. It is a "French Garden" that has been reshaped a few times and looks a bit more like an English garden now. You can't really see in this photo, but there is a sculpture to the right of the fountain that looks like a swimmer floating in an inner tube.  

And then we pose too

Look, so old, 1534!

Nestled among the old, something modern

Finally caught a photo of the postal delivery by bicycle.
So much bicycling here in Germany, everywhere. More on that later.

Robert among the cobble stone streets.

Arrival in Germany

 Friday, 16-June, 2023

Later Gram

Hello, I'm writing this a week later looking back because the days have been so full of sight-seeing and visiting and eating and talking and pointing and smiling and nodding and trying to pronounce German words, and then each night collapsing into bed exhausted to write much at all. But I scrawl a few notes in my journal, take a lot of photos to remind me where we've been, and so, I try, to keep a record, because my memory is fleeting. It feels a little like age has changed travel for me. At 55, the exhaustion at the end of the day is much deeper, and in the morning, the memories of the day before a little hazier. 

Just getting here

Look, you know you're not over the States
because the farmland isn't square anymore.

So, to continue the transit saga, we flew first to New York, then from New York to Paris, then Paris to Hannover. It was cheaper and/or easier to use Robert's miles this way - I haven't been terribly attentive to the details, only grateful he had the hindsight a couple years ago to start using a Delta card for everything. I was skeptical at the time: "An annual fee! I'm not paying a fee to use a credit card!" But then he got all our tickets for hardly anything at all. Ah, I see.

Alas, the flight from JFK to CDG was delayed by a mechanical problem, turning a 5 hour layover into an 8 hour one, and making us guaranteed to miss the flight from Paris to Hannover. Damn. We had the whole layover in JFK for Robert to book an alternate flight to Hannover, which cost a fortune, though not more than we would have spent w/o those nifty miles anyway. It was basically two days of travel, and I was so groggy I left my beloved new Kobo eReader (loaded up with books I now can't imagine when I would have had time to read) in the pocket of the seat ahead of me on the flight to Paris. And our one checked back got separated from us, so we were left to hope the luggage would show up in Hannover eventually. Luckily, Robert suggested we each take a carry-on with enough to survive a weekend should the checked bag get lost ... Oh, I see. I've already spent a lot of this trip saying, Oh I see.

Old friends

Martina and Hartmut (more and better photos in my next post!)

Robert met Hartmut at Kalamazoo College in Michigan a long long time ago, and they've remained friends ever since. They haven't seen each other in 16 years, and Robert has told me how excited he is to finally see him again about a hundred times in the last couple months. Hartmut and his wife, Martina, picked us up at the airport with many hugs and tremendous joy. They are both teachers, like Robert, though Hartmut is now retired, and Martina intends to retire next year. They both teach at a school for the blind. Hartmut's English is astoundingly good. Martina's is more limited though way better than I'd expect for someone who apologizes and says she doesn't really speak English. Lucky for me they all are willing to do a lot of translating.

To be honest I don't remember much, except that they hugged us a lot and smiled a lot, and our luggage didn't make it, but a stern lady took our report that we'd like to know when it did arrive, thanks. And then H&M drove us to their lovely house, fed us, and we crashed into sleep like a train hitting a wall. I remember saying "I think I've never been so tired as I am right now." And then we slept about 12 hours.

Adventures in Hannover next ...

Departure

 Departure
15-June, 2023

I'm so pleased this blog still lives out here all on its own with no tending. I'm reviving it because it’s handy for travel. I can post pictures and stories without getting sucked into social media which seems like a vast waste of time once one has flown all over the planet to get away from the usual shit. I’m on a plane. This is my first trip to Europe in almost 25 years. 

Other people prioritize visiting distant countries much more than I have so far. I’ve favored roadtrips so much I’ve visited every state in the country, many of them several times. I like roadtrips because they require much less planning, and I don’t worry that I’ll offend anyone with my ignorance of language and custom, or that I’ll get lost or hospitalized. Maybe you think it’s weird I included “hospitalized” in the list of things I worry about, but the number of times that’s happened when I’ve left the country or continent is a little exceptional. (See my Jan 29, 2007 post for reference.)

I also favor inner trips - changing what I’m thinking about by changing how my mind works for a while. One of my best trips was to Joshua Tree for a silent 10 day meditation course. After the course, I rented a convertible at the Palm Springs airport and drove it to Pahrump, Nevada to see my Great Aunt Betty not long after my Great Uncle Rod - my #1 favorite relative - had died. The drive through dramatic desert landscape, blissed out on 10 days of alpha waves and altered states was otherworldly in nearly every way I can think of that matters to me. Upon arrival in Pahrump, lunch at a casino buffet while my Aunt Betty chain-smoked Eve Lights and told me about my uncle’s death was an almost equally surreal shift in perspective. 

I loved it. I haven’t prioritized any kind of travel as much since switching careers from being a software engineer to being a theater artists. I switched careers to be happier. I love my life. I don’t need to leave to be surprised, or find joy and fulfillment. 

So why go at all? I could say that Robert is really, super, duper excited to go. 

Look, he's even smiling sitting here at JFK
while he talks to Air France about how our
suddenly delayed flight to Charles de Gaulle
means we have to switch our flight from
there to Hannover.

He has prioritized travel in his life. His teaching job wipes him out hard enough to need a vacation, and conveniently comes with summers off. But I’m not going just for his sake. I’m going because once I leave, I always love travel too. Vacation bends time, but travel bends space, like the zoom function in a GPS app. 

I remind myself often - almost daily - that the world is big and I am small. I do it when I’m overwhelmed by perfectionism and when I am infuriated by Minnesotan drivers. I do it to keep my ego and entitlement in check. It’s a coping mechanism though, not a real experience.

To travel, especially to a place where everything works differently, where people care about entirely different things, where everyone moves about differently, where different plants grow from the cracks of different infrastructure with entirely different history is to remember how much variation there is out there from what feels fixed and forever where I live. 

To fly in an airplane, to watch the horizon tilt, to get above clouds and weather systems, is to truly see and feel in the center of my little human gyroscope just how big this planet is. I always try to get the window seat and I spend a lot of the flight craning to see out, my temple pressed hard against the dirty glass like a dog on a car ride. 

I’m embarrassed how my world shrinks to something the size of a suitcase as I prepare to go on a trip like this. I obsess over what I”ll need, try to anticipate every possible unplanned circumstance including lost luggage, illness, injury, plane crash, terrorist act, war, and apocalyptic disaster. Simultaneously, I try to pack as little as humanly possible, irrationally equating compactness with righteous nobility and wisdom. I pace my apartment at least a hundred times, packing and unpacking things, asking myself alternately “What will I need if it all goes to hell?” and “Would the Dalai Lama pack that?”

Once the luggage is stowed, and the plane lifts off, I always laugh at myself as I realize all I need is my passport, wallet, phone, and good shoes. On this flight, the first leg of three from Minneapolis to NY to Paris to Hanover, I also grab my partner’s hand and realize I need him too. 

And then I look around at my fellow passengers and imagine myself stuck on an island with all of them after the plane crashes (I’ve been finally watching Lost, 15 years after everyone else), and I try to imagine caring about all of them. I notice they’re all plugged into music, TV, their favorite digital escapes, doing their own world shrinking and expanding. I decide that a lot of them probably got weird and anxious while they were packing for their trip too. 

Humans are funny and I love them. I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of them whose daily world is very different than mine. Fewer guns, more cobblestones. Whee, here we go!