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Wanderung 5

Happy Haus for Holt’s in Hamburg.

February - April 2004

April 7 - The Etruscans

The second part of the Etruscan exhibit was in a museum annex right next to the Rathaus, and our tickets were still good for that part on the next day. But the museum annex didn’t open until 11:00, so we made morning run to the Mini Mall for skim milk and checked our email before taking the trains over to the Rathaus. This part of the Etruscan exhibit featured more of the beautiful, Greek-inspired pottery plus about 5 complete renditions of ancient Etruscan tombs. One of the tombs had the real slabs of rock with ancient frescoes on it while the other four tombs were reconstructed facsimiles, but done so well that I could not tell until I read the description.

I guess old things impress Americans such as myself who constantly deal with the ever-changing hurly-burly of the modern world, and there aren’t many things older than these 600 BC tombs. The themes were quite different in the 5 tombs. One was definitely a party scene with drinking, dancing, and flute-playing all depicted quite clearly. That struck me as a happy way to move into the afterlife, something on the order of an Irish wake. Another tomb had the sea as its motif with fishermen, dolphins in the sea and birds soaring above it, more mundane, perhaps, but still cheerful.

But the tomb with real slabs of rock came from the period when the Etruscans were struggling with the nascent Roman Empire. That tomb featured mostly scenes of stabbing, bleeding, and either taking or freeing prisoners of war. The only break in that dreary motif was a scene with a father beside his son who is holding a bird, which was a welcome relief. I doubt if I’ll have a tomb of any kind, but if I do I certainly wouldn’t want scenes of warfare on it; I honestly think most normal folks who really experience warfare would not want to be reminded about it during the afterlife.

The Etruscan pottery at this part of the exhibit was almost all of the Greek black on ochre type, featuring flowing realistic figures in the beautiful classical Greek style. One of the more interesting bowls depicted a husband and wife relaxing together over a saucer of wine. This plus other pieces depicted women together with men on an equal status, which apparently scandalized the Greeks with their severely patriarchal, male-oriented society. Another fun piece featured a boar, I think, that was depicted in mid-stride. It was so realistic that it almost seemed about ready to run off the vase, and I think that was quite an achievement for some potter—artist 2,600 years ago. His or her work has survived to enchant us folks in the distant future, and I doubt very much that anything I do or write will be entertaining folks two millennia hence. So my hat’s off to whoever that was—creating things of durable beauty that outlive the creator by centuries is a mark of a truly deep, creative genius in my opinion.

After filling up on culture, we walked across the fleet and found a restaurant to fill up on food. I had the daily special, a turkey breast stuffed with spinach and served with a pepper sauce. As has been regularly the case when we order the daily special in German restaurants, it was delicious. Certainly it is not something I would have thought of doing myself, but delicious nonetheless. I think I can safely recommend that if you are visiting Germany and see something on the daily special that looks good, you can safely order it. You might want to first check what kind of meat is involved and whether it is raw or cooked, because a fair number of German delicacies involve raw meat, but if the special is acceptable you might want to try it.

After lunch we wandered thru a mini mall located beside the fleet and were caught by a bookstore where Lois finally found an English book section. Heaving a great sigh of relief, she bought a book to tide her over to the airplane trip the next day—she reads about a book every day or two and was almost going bookless which, in her case, might lead to withdrawal symptoms. Not being immune to this familial disorder, I broke down and bought a book by Michael Palin about traversing the Sahara desert. I have watched his TV travel specials in which he traveled around the world or from North Pole to South Pole, but had not seen this one. Besides, I wanted to see how he wrote and get some ideas for improving my writing, or putting more “pizzaz” into it as Robyn might say.

Escaping the bookstore, we continued in the general direction of Damtor to a very high-class Steinway music store (yes, that Steinway) that fortunately has a bargain basement section for sheet music and music books. We immediately went to the back of the basement where they sold old sheet music by the pound or kilo—20 Euro per kilo, to be exact. Lois was searching for oboe music and found about a pound of the cheap stuff plus another piece where she had to pay full retail price, an exigency to which she will stoop only when forced by circumstances. In this case, the circumstance was that finding sheet music for classical oboe works is not, shall we say, a number one goal for most Americans and, consequently, finding those scores in the U.S. is quite difficult.

I found myself stuck in the German folk music section much like a fly trapped in a spider web. I wriggled and wriggled but couldn’t avoid coming back to that shelf to look at other collections. Monika helped me pare it down so that we finally ended up buying only 4 collections of folk music plus a book with easy piano pieces! You might not realize it, but that represented quite a bit of restraint in the face of many very tempting books. I bought one book with German comic songs, one with songs from Hamburg, one with songs from Schleswig-Holstein, and one with a generalized collection of German folk songs. I turned down one book with 240 songs for 12 Euro because the generalized collection had 236 songs for 7 Euro, which was clearly a better ratio of cents per song!

We finally staggered out of the music store, but not before Lois was enticed back in by two 6.95 Euro CDs in front, one featuring oboe music, for which she had to return to the basement and pay the piper, or more aptly in this case, the oboist. We next passed by the site of Monika’s old German boyfriend—that is, he was a boyfriend in her old Germany days, not a current boyfriend who is an old German, although he would probably by now actually be an old German, I imagine. We found that the building had been razed and replaced by a new one, much to my satisfaction. Along the way we were further distracted by a Russian knick-knack store and Monika bought a painted egg and Lois found some nice silver earrings that we took along.

By now we were pretty bagged up, but fortunately the Dammtor S-Bahn station was close by. So we just hopped the train back to Reinbek. We walked back up to the house because Lois wanted to stop at the bakery and buy some more torten (fruit-topped cakes) and chocolate rum balls for the evening. Not wanting her to starve, we helped her pick these out and I carried them reverentially the rest of the way home. The torten served as the centerpiece for Kaffeetrinken and then, when we got around to dinner an hour later, did double duty as desert. It certainly is nice having extra meals during the day, especially as the extra meal featured tee, coffee, or hot chocolate and deserts!

The evening TV news, unfortunately, carried reports of the U.S. bombing a mosque in Iraq and killing 40 people in order to try to assassinate a radical cleric. That was, apparently, in response to the radicals killing some U.S. civilians and dragging their bodies thru the streets a la Mogadishu. I was very glad to have missed that telecast; I am, after all, trying to keep my blood pressure down and that would have absolutely positively made it skyrocket. But the Bush administration seemed to be entering a cycle of atrocity for atrocity much like the French did in their occupation of Algeria. I was very sad to see my country stoop to the level of Israel and simply murder innocent Moslems worshipping in their church in an attempt to kill a targeted person. What exactly separates this kind of reprisal from the terrorism we are trying to discourage? Does the Bush administration really think that making a martyr of that leader will stop a popular groundswell of religious opposition to the U.S. occupation? I was very disappointed to see the Iraq war get, as I had expected, dirtier, and the chances of a really good outcome to the war seemed to me to be getting dimmer with each new event. It was a depressing way to end the evening.

Copyright 2004 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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April 2004
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