April 8 - Good Bye Lois!

Our main task for the day was to get Lois to her plane on time, so we drove off around 9 and arrived at the airport about 10, which gave us plenty of time. We were sincerely glad of that time cushion when we saw the huge line for baggage screening at the Lufthansa section that was handling SAS flights. In Hamburg they screen the luggage first and then do the ticketing, whereas in the U.S. I have always had to check the luggage first after which it is screened. I like the German system better because we can open the luggage and help explain anything that looks suspicious rather than have them rooting around in my luggage. I had loaded my sister’s luggage with the two voltage transformers that I had never used in Germany, so certainly there were “interesting” things showing up on the screen but she got thru that part of the screening OK.

After getting her boarding pass, we all looked around a magazine store for a while before she headed off to her gate. Monika found a couple of books on crocheting that she was very happy to buy and I found an issue of the Kitplanes magazine I usually like. But it didn’t seem to be worth the $5 they were asking for it, so after a quick look at new aircraft power plants I put it back. Lois didn’t buy anything as she had a couple of our books and maybe one crossword puzzle left to tide her over until she reached Chicago, and we parted at the final screening to get to the gates. Lois set off the detectors with her metal ankle, but after using the wand on her they let her continue to the gate. The two weeks of her visit had passed by so quickly, and we were sorry to see her go.

On the drive back to Reinbek, Monika once again got confused by one of the large yellow German signs giving information for an upcoming road intersection. She told me the reverse order of the upcoming left turns, but I stole a quick glance at the sign and took the correct exit to get to Reinbek. We discussed why she was consistently getting these signs wrong and I was getting them right, and I think we discovered why. These signs combine a graphical depiction of the lanes and possible exits from them together with lines of text describing the towns you reach by taking each exit. I was focusing first on the graphical depiction of the turns and secondly on the information of the destination towns. The mental operation I did was to mentally rotate the map down 90 degrees to be in the plane I was driving in. That is the same operation I always use when flying an airplane and reading graphical information from a map such as runway orientations, configurations of landmarks, and so forth, so I had no problem with it. Then I mentally attached the towns for each exit and tried to figure out which one to take—not always easy if I was whipping up to the intersection at 70 kph or so, but at more moderate speeds quite feasible.

Monika, on the other hand, apparently reacted to these signs as if they were pages of text. She then read them from the top down just as she would a page of text and she kind of assumed the exits were in a top down order. Typically, the road is shown proceeding from the bottom to the top, so the real order of the exits is from the bottom up. For any Human Factors graduate students reading this, a simple comparison of the errors made with U.S. exit information signs versus the German versions might be very interesting and easy to do Masters Thesis. A deeper look at the cultural differences in the construction and interpretation of these signs would require, of course, more work and could be a nice Ph.D. project. Good luck to anyone who will be looking at these cross-cultural differences in real tasks because I think we really could find better ways of doing things that way. Not having any systematic research to rely on, I would just like to caution any other folks trying to drive in Germany to be very careful with these signs—we had trouble with them last year in Wanderung 2 and were still having trouble this year. I can advise having a full-time navigator in the right front seat if you have a spare person. That person should have knowledge of all the large and small towns along your intended route memorized, and then do a quick scan of these yellow signs to yell out the correct lane and exit for the driver. The driver should, as always in Germany, be paying absolutely full attention to keeping the car centered in the correct lane, keeping speed adjusted, and watching for stray pedestrians and bicyclists.

In terms of renting cars for driving in Germany, an automatic transmission might take one task off the driver and give more concentration for lane control, and if you drive an automatic at home you should definitely not try learning to drive a stick shift in Germany! But I learned to drive on a 56 Ford with a stick shift (those were my legal lessons—Lloyd had taught me earlier in an old Packard on some back roads, as I recall), so a manual transmission posed no problem for me. I also found that particularly with the tiny engines in the cheap rental cars (e.g. 1.2 liter) the standard shift is useful for accelerating quickly enough to keep up with traffic, which is pretty important with impatient Germans behind you. You might as well forget about cruise control on any car your rent (called “tempomat” in German), because most of them don’t have it and you will almost never use it even if it’s on the car. You might as well resign yourself to constantly adjusting speed depending on speed limits that are constantly changing, and traffic that is changing its pace even faster.

In any case we stopped off at the Obi builder’s market at Glinde for some electrical outlet caps and rubber gloves before we arrived home in Reinbek. I pushed the wires back into the wall in the kitchen using the rubber gloves so that I didn’t have to worry as much about being zapped with 220 volts while doing it. Then I put the new plastic caps on them so we didn’t have to stare at strands of raw wires pushing out of the wall like snakes from the head of Medusa any more. I always get nervous around exposed electrical wires and the higher the voltage the more nervous I get! During all this Monika fixed Mittagessen and we could finally sit down and eat. We really missed my sister being there during lunch. I missed her whistling at odd times, most often on key and never anything other than classical music phrases, about what you’d expect from an oboe player, I guess. When we were walking, Lois would often whistle imitations of birdcalls, and she was surprisingly good. At least a couple of times she got some German birds irritated enough at the unknown intruder that they engage in a chirping contest with her. That impressed me since I cannot do that at all. The best I have ever managed is to get some horses to pay attention to me by neighing. I’m not sure that counts for much—after all, horses are pretty pro-human and would tend to pay attention to humans even if we don’t neigh. And despite repeated attempts, I’ve almost never had a cow pay attention to one of my “moos” and, for example, come on over and moo back, or try to give me a cow kiss. Of course, if a one-ton Holstein tried to do that, I would be in trouble for sure.

I also missed Lois insatiable curiosity about all things German, and particularly anything musical. She continually asked us for translations of posters, advertisements, street signs, food labels, and almost everything else. For anything having to do with music, however, she would notice it immediately and seemed to be able to understand it without any need for translation. I mean, consider that my sister is a retired schoolteacher who knows maybe 10 words of German. We are walking along in an S-Bahn station when all of a sudden she stops dead in, stares intently at a nondescript advertising poster, and says, “Hey, there’s a classical music concert with oboe solos at Reinbek Palace next week—let’s go to that!” You could have knocked me over with a feather, but her eyes just seemed to gravitate to anything with “musick”, “konzert”, “symphonie”, “oboe”, “Beethoven”, “Bach”, or “Brahms” on it and she would jolly well stare at it until she could figure out the rest. (For those compulsive readers who are keeping count, I think her other three words were “Bitte”—please, “Danke”—thank you, and “Toiletten?”) She was the one who found out about that concert that we attended in Reinbek the previous weekend and had she stayed thru Easter weekend I am quite certain we would have been attending some Easter concerts!

Now there are two distinct ways to visit a foreign country. One is just to go and see the sights. You can tell this kind of tourist because they make one-way comments like “Wow, that’s a big pyramid!”, “Say, that tower really does lean!”, or in the case of Hamburg something like “Gee there are a lot of boats in the harbor!” My sister is definitely an example of the other way to see a country, and that is to try to understand the culture and its people. Having that as her goal, Lois would pepper us with questions and requests for translations. When that happened, either Monika would translate or I would give some kind of incorrect translation and then Monika would correct me. Anyway, it was far too quiet during lunch without Lois, so we turned on the radio and listened to some oldies as well as the news.

After lunch we attacked the gutters, which were packed full of leaves and debris and had been annoying me for the last month. In the back, the ivy had grown into the gutters and under the roof tiles (think southwest U.S. adobe house style roof tiles), and it took me a while to cut all that apart and pull it out. The problem with the front gutter was that the roof above it was also filled with debris accumulated in the grooves made by the tiles. I didn’t want to walk on the roof for fear of breaking those tiles, so I attached a brush to a long wooden spade handle with a burgee cord and used that to scrape off the accumulation. While working on the gutters, I was also removing any moss I found growing up on the roof, which was especially luxurious on the northern, shady side—that old rumor about moss growing on the north side must be at least partly true! I was surprised to find that the moss had sunk its roots into the clay tiles and had eaten away the surface! I didn’t know moss would do that, but I suppose that if moss and lichen can erode bare rock, the baked clay tiles of our roof would be a piece of cake. The moss seemed to be turning the baked clay back into dirt, in fact, and thoroughly enjoying the resulting growing environment (remember it’s rainy, cloudy and cool at least 4 days out of 5). Well, what with one thing and the other, that took the rest of the afternoon.

The hilarious aspect of this otherwise rather tedious task was that while I’m up on the ladder attacking the gutters two different people stop by and ask about the house being for sale. To put this in context, the house was for sale for three months before we get there and apparently only one person looked at it. We live there for the first month and another person looks at it. Frau Hein, our realtor, finally puts up a sign out front and one more person looks at it (they don’t always do signs here when selling things, apparently). But when I get up and clean out the gutters for a few hours, immediately both of the people passing by want to look at it. Was it just watching someone else work that attracted them? Was it the obvious sign of industriousness? Do I just have good-looking legs? I have no idea why this happened but at the end of the afternoon I was thinking about renting myself out as a combination gutter-cleaner and advertising sign. I figured I could wear one of those board things with the realtor’s name and phone number on my front and back while cleaning the gutters, and that should at least triple their traffic for a house! Awkward, perhaps, but possible effective.

With that chore done I felt very virtuous when Abendessen rolled around, after which we settled in for an evening of TV watching starting out with “Berlin, Berlin” and ending with another one of those folk music specials they have on national television every two weeks or so. It was particularly nice to have something pleasant to counteract the depressing news of the Iraq war on the evening news. This special focused on the 25 favorite German folk songs of all time (counting down from 25 to number 1), and it was very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed seeing a TV clip of Udo Juergens singing “Life begins at 66” back in 1978—it was a real hoot to watch and see it. Number 16 was “Herzschlag fuer Herzschag” (Heartbeat for Heartbeat). They ended up at number 15, “Du hast mir heute nicht gekuesst” (You didn’t kiss me today)—the numbers 14 down to 1 will apparently be at the next edition of this program and I hope I am still here to see it.