April 15 - The second Volksmarch in Eckernfoerde

The morning radio program had another interesting snippet about a little girl who was hit by a bicyclist and had spent some time recovering from her injuries. Her mother said that one of the most difficult aspects of the accident is that she had acquired a fear of talking to strangers and it had taken her mother a long time to teach her that it was OK to speak with strange adults! The view the mother expressed that strange adults speaking to her daughter was OK was so 180 degrees opposite to the current parental paranoia in the U.S. about strangers looking at much less talking to their children that it seemed like a complete contrast. When I asked Susanna, Heinke and Gustl’s daughter-in-law, about this she said that German parents were far more watchful than they had been 10-15 years ago even if they seemed more laid back by U.S. standards.

But on the whole the children we met seemed to be uniformly happy in Germany, and that surprised me. We saw, of course, the mommy-won’t-do-what-I-want tantrums a couple of times, but other than that the children were always cheerful and outgoing from the youngest toddlers to the pre-teens. In the U.S., the children I see seem to be about 50% of the time tense, anxious, and definitely afraid of strangers. Why this difference? One reason may be that the mothers themselves are more relaxed and happy. In all our travels in Germany we saw a lot of mothers with younger children, and I saw only 1 unhappy one out of at least 50 I observed. That particular mother was on a crowded subway in Hamburg with two active 2-year-olds playing the “ask mommy questions constantly” game while wandering around the subway car—that mother seemed hassled and tense they way I perceive many U.S. moms to be. The German welfare system gives mothers a 1 year fully paid leave of absence to raise their infants (and I think another year unpaid leave), compared to 6 weeks of unpaid leave that is grudgingly given in the U.S. may be at least part of the basis for more relaxed, happy, relationship I observed between mothers and their children in Germany.

After breakfast we trained it up to Eckernfoerde to try out another of the Volksmarches there. This time, however, our train to Kiel was 5 minutes late and the train to Eckernfoerde had already left. We had no alternative but to wait for the next train an hour later, so we spent 50 minutes looking at the harbor area of Kiel. The harbor is still in use for at least a ferry service to Denmark and possibly as a port for cruise ships—we saw one tied up further down the harbor. Sailboats were also tied up along the quay, including some rather large, old wooden ships, and the ubiquitous fishermen lined the pier trying their luck, so all together the harbor was a charming interlude on our trip north to Eckenfoerde. There doesn’t, however, seem to be much of an old town section to Kiel, possibly it was destroyed during WWII, so you basically have the harbor on one side of the train station and a new shopping center plus condominium section on the other side.

After wandering around a bit and buying a couple of apples for a snack, we made it back to the train station on time to catch our train to Eckernfoerde. This time we decided to take the route “7” walk that looped northward from the center of the city out into the country. We got turned around once right at the beginning in the section zigzagging thru the old part of the city, but that might have been because I was looking for a bench to sit on and eat our sandwiches. The old town and old harbor area were quite interesting and picturesque. We learned that Eckenfoerder fishermen had specialized in smoked herring, an industry that supported the town for over a hundred years.

We also had a bit of a problem with the trail at one point toward the end, but that was because I didn’t believe a sign that indicated the route was heading straight back into what looked like a concrete plant. Instead, we walked past a McDonald’s store to the right and caught up with “7” on the other side of a small shopping center, so there was a small path that went thru that plant somehow. This was definitely my error rather than any fault of the trail marking, and overall I would have to say that the trail really was well marked by German standards.

As we looped out into the countryside, we walked thru a bunch of farms, occasionally dodging farm tractors. We saw several pastures with sheep, ewes and lambs, both black and white. When I started going ‘baaah’ the ewes responded and started to come to the fence with their lambs behind them. I am not sure what they were looking for, but they seemed disappointed when all they saw was two humans. I, however, was proud to seemingly having communicated with another species and now feel equal to my sister who whistles to the birds. Of course, sheep are pretty dumb and maybe easy to fool, but I’ll take what I can get.

The country part of this route was mostly along wide-open fields and paths. That was a nice way to enjoy the warm, sunny day and it also offered a completely different feel from the route “5” we had walked the day before that was about a third in heavy forest. However, almost the entire trail was paved and that was a bit tough on our feet—I ended up a bit footsore.

The section right at the end led along the shore of a “Noor”, really a large enclosed bay of the fjord. A canal still gave some flow of water from the fjord to the bay, but the bay was slowly turning from salt to brackish and fresh water. The last section of the “7” walk lead back past the train station and across the tracks to the beach and the information center where we time-stamped our start cards.

We were both pretty tired and hungry after the walk, so we had a quick meal at a Backerei (bakery) on the way over to the train station. That gave us 15 minutes before the train arrived that I used to sign on to our email account and send off another piece of the journal back to our reading public back in the U.S. (both of them). The key chain 250 megabyte disk drive I bought back home was proving to be very useful indeed—I had also backed up the folder of pictures that Monika had selected for the journal. Fortunately the machine I was using had a version of Windows 2000 that automatically recognized and installed the virtual disk drive. That made the file upload to my email server much easier.

Since I was trying to do things as fast as possible, I particularly noticed how working in the German version of a Windows operating system was slowing me down. I was used to the English version where my response to most pop-up dialog boxes was just “notice-recognize-respond”, taking less than a second as a rule. Working with the German version that cycle became “read-translate-understand-choose-respond”, and that cycle took a whole lot longer, often a half a minute or so for a simple dialog box. One thing that became crystal clear, however, was which machine in the Internet network was giving me these prompts. If the language was German, my local machine was giving the prompts whereas if it was English, the server in the U.S. was giving the prompts. Anyway, I finished just in time to catch our train back to Kiel.

The chain of trains back went like clockwork, but the first train from Eckernfoerder to Kiel was so full that I had to stand all the way. That really wasn’t too bad, but I was between 12-14 year old girls in the seat in front of me and about two seats back, and they were carrying on absolutely nonstop chatter. They were sometimes carrying out the conversation by using their cell phones, and I was surprised both that they all seemed to have cell phones and that they used them for absolutely trivial conversation and games. Expensive fun for the parents, I thought, and the constant giggle-chatter-giggle was pretty wearing for any adult in the area, I can tell you. But we found seats on the train from Kiel from to Hamburg and the kids took a different train, so my ears could relax and the girls were free from the old curmudgeon standing in the midst of their conversation.

After we returned to Reinbek, our evening routine went pretty much as normal, but we were both pretty tired and stiff. I was irritated to find that despite keeping my toenails carefully trimmed I had worn a hole in the toe of my new Cool Max socks. I said “Darn it!”, but in this case using the literal meaning that I would have to darn the hole in the sock rather than the metaphorical meaning. I don’t give up an expensive sock that easily, especially one that was successfully preventing blisters despite all this walking. Actually, I had to learn how to do the darning, but having seen folks do it made it a lot easier to pick up. There are many different ways of going to bed, but on this evening I just collapsed onto my mattress and I think I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.