March 30 - The Butterfly Garden in Friedrichsruh

This was the day we were scheduled to pick up our rental car, and after breakfast we all walked down to the Reinbek station. Lois bought some stamps at the Post Office and worked her way back thru the shopping district to our house while we took the S-Bahn in to the Berliner Tor station and walked back along the Eiffestrasse until we found the Avis car rental center at number 420. The numbering for the Eiffestrasse started at 10 at Berliner Tor and I was surprised that by the next block the numbers had only increased to 16 and by the block after that to 38. At that rate, I calculated that we were going to be walking at least a couple of miles more to get to 420, and I was beginning to really miss having a bathroom. But when we crossed the next street the numbers jumped from about 80 to 380 and the Avis place at number 420 was in the middle of the next block. Ah, those crazy Germans and their humorous street numbering! I had forgotten the cardinal rule of finding someplace in Germany, which was “find it the day before with Grosse Reiseplanner so you know where it is!” You really need software that will pinpoint streets and numbers because the numbering can be, as we found out, extremely idiosyncratic and streets also change names at the drop of a hat.

The Avis folks were very polite, friendly, and efficient, which was nice, and there were no hidden surcharges to our bill of 472 Euro for a 2-week rental, which was even better. In Wanderung 2 I had been unpleasantly surprised by the 15% airport surcharge plus the 16 % Mitwertsteuer (value-added tax) that had increased our car rental bill by hundreds of dollars. The 472 Euro rate included Mitwertsteuer (as well as the Collision Damage Waiver) and there was no surcharge for that outlet. My advice to folks who rent a car to drive around Germany is to avoid renting from either airport or Hauptbahnhof outlets because both of those had the additional surcharges while the other outlets didn’t.

The car turned out to be a very small, 4-door Opel hatchback. The interior was about the same size as the Volkswagen we rented last year (see Wanderung 2) but the rear trunk was noticeably smaller. It only had 7200 kilometers on it and had been manufactured in January, so it was essentially a new car, and wonder of wonders it did not have any noticeable cigarette smell! Hurray! The back seat also had the weekend edition of a German economic newspaper called “Handelsblatt” (Mercantile paper) that seemed to be the equivalent of the U.S. Wall Street Journal. Underneath the paper was a “Maxim” magazine for men that featured Hot Pam on the cover, a well-built model who, to judge by the pictures, went roller-skating in her underwear. Doesn’t everybody? Of course, since I only picked up the magazine to read the articles, I didn’t even really notice that. Ahem.

The Handelsblatt focused on economic news coverage and had a front page article on the U.S. reaction to the European Union court’s anti-trust decision against Microsoft. The judge had ordered a hefty 470 million Euro fine plus forcing Microsoft to publicly reveal the secrets of how to interface with the Windows operating system so that competitors had an equal chance to design efficient software. The neo-conservatives in the U.S. Senate were calling this decision another part of the “trade war” with Europe and were threatening “unforeseen consequences” in retaliation, all of which greatly surprised the EU folks. They were under the impression that they had been working hand-in-glove with the U.S. government’s anti-trust division in the fight against Microsoft’s abuse of its monopoly on the PC operating system, and now the U.S. was denouncing the outcome. Ah, politics. Exactly how did these Senators think the U.S. should retaliate? Not inviting the EU to participate on our next War of Righteous Indignation such as searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction in, say, Syria? Making Europeans forgo Fords and Chevrolets in favor of Mercedes and BMWs? Not letting the EU buy Boeing planes but instead forcing them to purchase Airbuses? Do we really think we can bring them to their knees with this kind of Congressional bluff and bluster for a pet U.S. monopoly? Do they think the European Union will faint and swoon at their threats? As Al on “Tool Time” put it in his immortal words, “I don’t think so, Tim!”

Pondering the unpleasant ramifications of a Trans-Atlantic trade war, I drove home without incident—the Opel had taught suspension and surprisingly heavy steering but no real quirks or problems. We walked down to the Mini Mall for skim milk and then Monika fixed a wonderful lunch of pork chop slices, white asparagus, and potatoes, after which we drove over to the butterfly garden. Or at least I intended to drive over there, but for the longest time I couldn’t get the car into reverse gear to back out of the driveway! I even checked the owner’s manual, but it only covered full automatic and quasi-automatic transmissions, giving no hint of how to get the manual gearbox into reverse. I tried pushing down on the shift lever, which had worked for the Volkswagen last year, but no luck. So I tried the opposite of pulling up on the shift lever and going thru the gate, but still no luck. After another fruitless consultation with the owner’s manual I started using Power by Armstrong and seeing if I could manhandle it into the reverse position. I had no luck with that, but as I was grabbing the shift knob in a death grip, I felt a plastic ring below the knob move a bit. Out of pure desperation (Monika and Lois were waiting patiently in the driveway all this time) I pulled up on that plastic ring while pushing the level into reverse and that did the trick. For god’s sake you think they could either put the instructions in the manual, label that ring with “reverse”, or at the very least make it a different color from the black plastic shift knob. That way you could at least see that it existed and try to guess its function once you found out you couldn’t get into reverse gear. Those engineers should transfer to the Royal Castle Division and design secret passageway entrances!

More than slightly irritated, I drove off only to find I had left the camera back at the house. So I turned back, retrieved the camera, and even more irritated I drove over to Aumuehle, where I missed the turnoff for the parking lot. Now highly irritated, I continued on to a turn off for the Butterfly Garden and simply parked there. Ah, but now I got to relax and see a charming collection of butterflies in a really hot house. Now that was relaxing, kind of like a sauna with live entertainment. I was trying to take pictures of the butterflies, of course, and at one point a very pretty one simply landed on the camera housing. I tried not to startle it and it stayed there for about half a minute before deciding it wasn’t going to get any nectar and flitting off for the greenery, but I never did get a picture of it.

Other butterflies were more cooperative and posed nicely on various bowls of fruit or flowers that were growing in the greenhouse.

It was really quite hot, however, and about halfway around we went out into an adjacent “bamboo room” to cool off a bit. That room featured bamboo decorations around a central rock with water troughs leading to it, somewhat in the fashion of what I imagine a Japanese garden would look like. After cooling off we returned to the main hothouse were I took pictures of a pile of turtles in the central pool as well as some more portraits of butterflies.

We also walked the landscaped area around the hothouse, and it was clear that they were still really preparing for the main season. A secondary greenhouse that featured butterflies native to the area was closed and they were constructing a new pond on the other side of a rose garden right beside the hot house. We also visited another greenhouse with a restaurant off to one side and a pool with large white and gold carp type fish swimming in it (but no butterflies). Cascading water was used to power bamboo containers that were connected to wind chimes and a gong, so while we were sitting there the chimes and gong would sound at irregular intervals. Hearing that and watching the fish swim was really relaxing and quite a nice way to work off some of my earlier irritation.

We stopped off at the gift shop on our way out and bought a lace butterfly to hang in the window of our travel trailer back in the U.S., and then walked a kilometer down the Aue River and back just to get Lois worn out before driving back to Reinbek. The problem with having the car was that if we used it we would not get the ordinary activity of running down to the train and back that we got using the mass transportation network. So I figured that we would have to be more careful to schedule in walking intervals on the days we had the car or we’d get out of shape.

That evening we changed the Normal Order Of Things and had a light Abendessen followed by Kaffeetrinken. That order let us eat the serious meat and cheese sandwiches first followed by the sweet rolls for desert, which felt “right” to me, somehow. We caught up with what was happening on “Berlin, Berlin” and watched the Quiz before catching our 15 minutes of misery and finishing off the evening with reading and crossword puzzles. A rather low-key existence for the evenings, I admit, but it seemed to suit the three of us pretty well.