March 7 - A snowy day.

We slept thru until 8 and awakened to a beautiful winter landscape. It was only about an inch or two of snow, but the wind was calm so the snow covered everything in a nice, even blanket of white. I thought Aunt Size’s house looked very nice in its winter coat, so after breakfast I slipped out to take a couple of pictures before we settled in to watch a rebroadcast of the Austrian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne. Since this RTL channel was one of the commercial German TV channels, we had some breaks for commercials, but otherwise the entire running was shown in “real time” just like the biathlon coverage we had watched previously.

We’ve always enjoyed Formula 1 racing and we both found this first race of the season fascinating, altho to other folks I’m sure it seems about the same as watching grass grow. The Formula 1 cars are just such extremely high-strung examples of the road racing art. The have these on-board TV cameras now, and the view from the cockpit is somewhat scary if you really put yourself into their position. The acceleration rate, braking and cornering ability of the cars are really amazing. During a pit stop I got a quick glimpse of the disk brake when they popped off a tire, and it was the biggest disk I’d ever seen in my life—it really looked like it was two feet in diameter! When they showed the tachometer of one car in the middle of a lap, I saw it vary only between 17,000 and 19,000 rpm, which explains why these cars shriek like banshees. Boy would it be a gas to drive a car like that, assuming I could get used to the button-on-the-wheel shifting. Actually, that looked like fun—how many gears do those cars have, anyway?

After the race we took a little walk around Reinbek to see the snow-decked version and take some pictures. I was also interested to see what percentage of people shoveled their walks, which they are supposed to do by law in Germany. As best I could estimate, about 80-90% of the people had shoveled or were in the process of shoveling their walks, which is a far higher percentage than in Virginia but by no means universal. I recalled that while growing up in northern Illinois that shoveling your walk immediately after every storm was a strong social norm, and as I recalled almost everyone did it. But maybe that’s just the rosy glow of an inaccurate memory of “the good old days” that seems to be part of the problem with aging. Still, I wondered if there are places in the northernmost states of the U.S. where the proportion of people shoveling their walks reaches about 100%. Maybe I’ll check on that next winter in the northeast when we visit Judson and Sarah and in Wisconsin when we visit my sister Lois.

I was searching in the local paper for flea markets, thinking that we might get some more furniture cheaply there, and I chanced upon the personal ad section. You can learn quite a bit about a culture from these ads, I think. The first thing I noticed was that there were 50 “women seeking men” ads compared to 43 “men seeking women” ads, a pretty even division. What is that split like in the U.S.? Even with Monika’s help I had trouble figuring out what some of the abbreviations stood for, but the basics seemed about the same as the last time I looked at personal ads in the U.S. The content of some of the ads, however, I thought would doom them to failure, like the man who said, “Is there still any woman for whom truthfulness and faithfulness still mean anything? If so, contact me at…” I would think most women would be offended by the tone of that ad, don’t you? Another one ran, “Which women will try to give me back my belief in love?”, which could charitably be construed as romantic but also, I think, interpreted as just needy or whiny, either of which would send most sane women running in the other direction.

Even more interestingly, 10 of the 43 “men seeking women” ads mentioned their astrological sign whereas only 1 of the 50 ads placed by women did so. Surely the men should pick up the clue that most women don’t really believe in that junk. I kind of thought the “What’s your sign?” pickup line went out of style with the 60s (which was the last time I was dating!), so I really was surprised that so many men were still using that nonsense in their ads. But before I go too far, maybe I should first check what the rate is in the U.S. personal ads for males and females. It is amazing how hard it is to get rid of nonsense once it gets established in a culture—witness the persistence of chiropractors in the U.S.

Chiropractors, homeopaths, and other forms of quackery also seemed to flourish in Germany, however. I still remember Monika’s mother extolling the virtues of drinking honey mixed with vinegar, a particularly awful concoction that was supposed to be a sovereign remedy for all ills. On the plus side, this wide-open medical arena has the advantage of also allowing medical advances to be disseminated quickly without being held up by agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For example, Monika saw an article in the newspaper about a vaccination for pancreatic and breast cancer being available. The article reported that they took cancer cells from a person with cancer, cultured a vaccine of dead cancer cells, and inject the vaccine back into the person. The article reported positive preliminary results, but of course gave no scientific references. That made me wonder whether it was possibly true or not, and how great it would be if it were true. Since I haven’t heard a word about this approach in the U.S., I have grave doubts about it being true, but on the other hand it just might be and wouldn’t that be exciting?

Of course, we watched some more sports, this time the track and field world championships from Budapest, the table tennis world championship from Qatar, and ski jumping from Finland. It was quite a mix but we liked watching all of it. Really well built folks won the track and field events, really Chinese folks won the table tennis championships, and really crazy folks won the ski jumping. Monika particularly enjoyed the variety of sports telecasts that were available in Germany.

We did another 4 kilometer walk before a light supper—in Germany it pays to keep in shape so that you can at least try to keep up with the crowd rushing to get to a bus, train, or subway. We did that by taking short “wind sprints” where we quickly walked for 30 to 60 minutes. This time we walked westward thru a small industrial district over toward the neighboring town of Glinde, and along the way we found another builder’s market that was closer to us. That really would be useful if I had to get something awkward like 2 x 4s, bed frames, or doorjambs home on top of my bike but I was sincerely hoping I wouldn’t have to.

That evening I built the second fire of the day; it really seemed to help warm up the living room where we spent out evenings and that is important as we had the whole house down to about 65 degrees. Actually, there was no thermostatic control in the house’s hot water heating system. Instead, we had large valves with the numbers 1 thru 5 that directly controlled how much hot water was flowing in the pipes. For anyone else who may have to cope with such a system, remember that “1” is the coldest setting and “5” is the hottest. The system in Aunt Size’s house had one master valve down in the basement and separate valves on the heaters in each room. To get the house comfortable, we had to turn the master valve up to “4” and then adjust the valves in each of the areas according to how much heat we wanted. In our upstairs bedroom and bathroom, for example, we had the room valves turned to “3” whereas in the old library and second bedroom that we were not using we had it turned down to “1”.

Those settings made things it bearable for me—I’d estimate we our bedroom was between 65 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit—but I never felt really warm. When German visitors like Kim, Heinke, and Gustl came to visit us, however, the very first thing they remarked on was how warm the house was! Like the English, I think the Germans tend not to use central heating quite like Americans but rather keep things cooler and wear more clothing to keep warm. Kim said she had also had to turn the house heat up when her mother came to visit her, but when I asked how much, she said she had only turned the master valve in the basement up to “3”! I shuddered to think about how cool she kept the house normally, but I also fully expected that we’d be socked with quite a natural gas bill at the end of the month. But it certainly was nice to have a warm bed to crawl into every night, especially when you compare it to a tent!