March 22 - Shopping for cheap CDs in Hamburg

I was glad to find the blister on my left foot had gone down over night altho it was still there and in an unusual place: on the sole of my foot at the base of the toes. Over the years I had been plagued by blisters on my toes, and I finally experimented with buying size 13 shoes rather than size 12. Maybe I was held back by my vanity, but I had always thought size 12 feet were large enough and was somehow reluctant to move on to size 13. The increased length was better for avoiding toe blisters, but the increased width seemed to allow some sideways movement of the ball of my foot that gave the blisters on the sole, which were really irritating because they were hard to bandage.

But why did I now need size 13 shoes rather than size 12? Maybe my high arches (think McDonalds, Roman aqueducts, etc.) were collapsing into low ones (think rainbows, Potomac River bridges). That would do it, I imagine, but the orthopedic inserts I had worn for the last several years were supposed to prevent that. On the other hand, was it possible my feet were still growing? On the face of it, that seemed unlikely, but other parts of my body were still growing or shrinking in unexpected ways, so maybe my feet were just following suit.

It was particularly galling that my nose was growing since I found out at the same time my height was shrinking! I mean, read any newspaper’s personal ads section and you’ll find that height for men is a Good Thing (altho for women, apparently, it is a Bad Thing). It reminded me of how the Wicked Witch of the West shrank when Dorothy threw water on her, and I began to suspect that all those showers were shrinking me a bit, also. But the fact remained that I had lost ½ an inch somewhere in the last decade. So here I was with my height shrinking to 6’ 1” and my nose steadily growing—can you imagine what I would look like in 40 years if those trends continued? (I’m thinking a hunchbacked, gray haired version of Pinocchio.) Maybe then I could just give up and rent myself out as a garden gnome and scare off birds and small children. Pick up some spare change with it, at least.

In any case, I could console myself that I was still a foot taller than Monika, and aside from the disadvantage of having a permanent crick in my neck, which I had gotten used to, this 1-foot height differential had a number of advantages. One thing is that I can always look right down on her pretty hair and that’s always fun. One of the best uses of the top of Monika’s head is to prop up my head when I’m tired. My chin just fits perfectly right over her hair and it’s really comfortable (for me). And just recently in the Altona Museum, I thought of another possible use for the head of my Petite Potato (sorry, Monika!). Like many museums, the Altona Museum allowed pictures but no use of flashes for photography. The problem is that museums are often dimly lit inside, so you have to take long time exposures to get good pictures, and that is very hard to do without a tripod, which is usually also not allowed. But the bright idea occurred to me that I could use the top of Monika’s head as camera tripod! She claimed her head would be too unstable, but I thought I’d like to take a shot at it, so to speak!

Which brings us back to Germany and the weather outside that was —surprise, surprise— cloudy and cool with occasional showers! We decided on traveling downtown to do some more shopping since we needed a cereal bowl for my sister Lois’s visit (we only had 2), Monika thought we needed cloth handkerchiefs, and I was still looking for more German folk songs. That’s a pretty thin justification for a shopping trip, but on a cloudy, cool, and rainy day it was enough!

We walked to Reinbek station, took the usual S-Bahn to Hauptbahnhof, and walked south into the business district. Our goal was Kaufhof, but we saw a new place called “Saturn” across the street that seemed to specialize in computers, electronics, and appliances, and we decided to check it out first. “Saturn” had a selection roughly similar to Best Buy stores in the U.S. Comparing size is difficult because Best Buy stores are all one floor and this Saturn store had a smaller footprint but was 5 stories high. On the whole I had the impression that the total sales space of Saturn was somewhat larger and they also seemed to have a wider selection than comparable stores in the U.S., which was unusual. The huge selection of CDs was a big bonus for me, however, since that had a whole sales island about 9 feet long dedicated to German folk music. You might expect that from a German store but they also had at least 6 big shelves for international folk music, and that surprised me quite a bit—U.S. stores don’t seem to stock much folk music at all in my experience.

So Monika and I rooted around in their folk music collection like pigs in clover, and it was really hard to make a final selection. I tried to pick CDs that showcased the folk music of different areas of Germany or Austria because the language and traditions of the different areas are much more distinct than is the case for most areas in the U.S. Except for things like the Cajun music of Louisiana and maybe the Gulla musical tradition of the southeastern coast, most areas of the U.S. speak at least understandable versions of English. In Germany, people speaking only the different regional dialects cannot understand each other very well at all. I still remember driving my motorcycle into a campground in Bavaria in 1973 and being greeted by the owner. It was my first visit to Germany and I couldn’t understand anything, but I was confident Monika could so I asked her for a translation. All I got was a quickly whispered, “I can’t understand a word he said, either!” Other things equal, price played a deciding role for picking my CDs and I ended up with a total of 12 CDs of German folk music for about 22 Euro, which I felt was quite a bargain.

Down in the computer software section I found a multi-language translation software for 29 Euro that I bought for the possible use of translating things like these journals into German so that my German relatives could also read them. If it would even work approximately, it would save me an enormous amount of time on what would otherwise be a daunting investment of time and effort. Monika found dictionary, grammar, and spell-checker for German that could be used with Microsoft Word for 10 Euro and a Skat playing program for 3 Euro. Skat is a 3-person game particularly popular in northern Germany that I learned to play with Monika and her mother. It has bidding for the hand somewhat like bridge but the winner of the bidding plays the other two players who cooperate as a team. I also found Skat faster-paced than bridge, not so serious and so for me, at least, more enjoyable.

Having stocked up on cheap folk music CDs and software, we also checked out some of the electronic gear in the store. I found self-contained stand-alone DVD players (ranging from 250 to 1,000 Euro) and external DVD drives for a PC (129 Euro). Either of those would have resolved the problem of playing the German-produced Region 2 DVDs that I had run into on my computer, but we put that decision off, partly because we were running out of cash! So our next stop was Dresdner Bank for some cash, after which we went to the Alster Haus located conveniently next door. In the sale section for dishes, Monika found a gravy boat and small serving bowl that would fit in with our Hutschenreuter porcelain set back home (10 Euro) and I found a cereal bowl for my sister Lois for 3 Euro! All of that was about ¼ of the normal price, so we once again had that gratifying feeling of finding what you want really cheaply! Or as Merlin used to say, “A creampuff at a lemon’s price!” Yahoo!

It is surprising how tired both Monika and I get when just strolling around and shopping. It is not the same muscular exhaustion we get after 3-4 hours of fast walking, but we still get weary in the feet and joints. So it was time to get home and we hopped a train at Jungfernsteig (literally: Young maiden’s promenade), transferred at Hauptbahnhof, and arrived at Reinbek just in time to pick up a bus that drove us back up the hill to the bus stop at Aldi’s. I carried our loot home while Monika stopped off at Aldi’s for two small pizzas that we warmed up for lunch.

I spent another hour or so trying to clean up woodpiles in the back yard and chopping logs into kindling. As a city boy, I’m really unskilled at chopping and I’m trying to avoid amputating any more limbs or digits, so I took it really slowly and carefully, and tried to chop only when it wasn’t raining and slippery outside. Since we were continuing to build fires at the rate of one per day, I had some hope of getting rid of a lot of the old, rotten logs lying around—some even had shelf fungi growing out of them! Cleaning up those woodpiles plus having the fun of the fires made the whole business a “two-fer”, or killing two birds with one stone kind of thing, which was nice. We enjoyed the evening fire while watching a live broadcast of pairs ice skating competition from Dortmund, but I gave up and went to bed shortly after 9.