April 18 - Soerup and Eckernfoerde

We got an early start and successfully caught all the local and regional trains in the chain up to Soerup, a village between Eckenfoerder and Flensburg near the Danish border. We ate some sandwiches and carrots we had brought along during the final leg of the trip to Soerup so that we would have some energy for the walk that we expected would take about 2 hours. The address of the start point was 40 Schulstrasse (School Street) and the town was less than a mile across, so I thought that the start point would just have to be somewhere right in the middle of town. Boy was I wrong! I asked a local resident and found the school was located only a block from the train station, but when we followed School Street it kept going past the church right out into the countryside. A good kilometer out from the center of town we finally came to some kind of agricultural business with silos and a parking lot (it seemed to be farm services of some sort) in the middle of nowhere, and that turned out to be the start point.

While signing up for the walk, we admired two decorative plates they were using as paperweights at the start table, and the folks there told us that the plates were awards from old walks but were for sale. We immediately signed up for one of them for each of us, figuring that one or the other would serve to complete our set of fancy plates hanging on the fireplace chimney back in Reinbek. Then we set off on a 10-kilometer walk that was almost purely through the countryside, as we were already out of town when we started off.

The first thing I noticed was how much the crops had already grown in a few short weeks. Some crops were already over a foot high and I had seen nothing growing in the fields in northern Germany at all during our walks no more than three weeks previously. The days lengthen very rapidly at these northern latitudes, so we were already having sunshine (when we HAD sunshine) from 6 in the morning until about 8 at night even though we were only about 1 month past spring equinox. The plants obviously go crazy with the light and grow as quickly as possible.

While we were walking in the countryside I was also looking at the farm equipment and wondering what the names for all the implements were. That got me to thinking about they way the German language uses compound words for new objects, concepts, and so forth. It is a very efficient system because once you have the basic vocabulary of nouns down pat, you can understand the names for a huge variety of more complex objects with minimal guessing. However, the component words used for these complex objects are not predictable from their English names. For example, a hubcap is a Reifendeckel (Wheel cover) whereas if you tried to translate directly from English you would come up with something like Axelkappe (Axel cap). Similarly, I was looking at a weed whacker in a Baumarkt and I found the name was Rasentrimmer (Grass trimmer) whereas the translated English would come up as Unkrauthauer (Weed chopper). So understanding complex German objects from their German base nouns is easy, but translating English phrases into compound German names will generally NOT work out—I usually got puzzled looks when I tried this. Sometimes, though, the German compound names seemed much more appropriate to me than the English ones. I found out that “endorphins” were called “Froheitshormone” (happiness hormones) in German, and somehow that name communicated the real meaning to me better than the English word. Similarly, the German word “Schadenfreude” (joy at the misfortune of others) has no single word translation in English, but is an apt description of the reaction to certain situations. The German words that are particularly apt for a situation will sometimes spontaneously occur to me even when I am completely in an English context—I would often like to go ahead and use the German word, but of course no one else would understand so I do not.

But I can’t really express how different the dialects in Germany really are. The difficulty Germans have understanding their regional dialects was shown by a commercial for Flensburger beer that is brewed in the far north of Germany near the Danish border, about 20 kilometers north of where we were walking. The commercial showed the backs of two men sitting on a bench on the type of wide, gently sloping beach found on the north coast of Germany, watching the sea in the distance. The man on the left is dressed in lederhosen (leather shorts) and the traditional Bavarian hat while the man on the right is dressed in northern German garb and shipper hat. The man on the left says in a deep Bavarian accent something like:

• “Do you think I’m really no longer a real Bavarian?”
• The man on the right answers in pure Plattdeutsch:
• “What, just because you’re drinking Flensburg beer?”
• “Yes”
• “No”

But to make this commercial understandable to the rest of Germany, they had the dialect dialog echoed at the bottom of the screen in High German with subtitles! That really was necessary because of how different these two subtypes of the German language were. Even on normal TV programs, Monika sometimes could simply not understand folks when they started speaking in dialect or even dialect-accented Hoch Deutsch (High German—the U.S. High School standard).

In general, a much higher percentage of the commercials in Germany seemed to be oriented toward humor than in the U.S., which is not something you might expect from the cultural stereotypes of both cultures. One automobile commercial showed a young man trying to impress a young shop girl by leaping into his convertible and driving away after work each day. He leaps in a different way each day, often quite athletically, until Friday when he tries a backward flip into the car only to discover that he had left the top up that day. So he has a spectacularly ungraceful slide back down to the pavement while the young woman, who has watched all this, breaks out in giggles.

Anyway, we finished our first walk, collected our display plates, and had our second lunch of the day. I had the pea soup plus some of Monika’s potato salad. The pea soup served by the Volksmarching groups is definitely not for vegetarians (sorry, Robyn!); it had both chunks of ham plus slices of hotdogs cut up into it so I really felt I didn’t need any meat. We had sufficient time to take it easy walking back to the train, but we weren’t too tired so we decided to go head and take the 7-kilometer walk in Eckernfoerde on our way back.

Of course, we had to carry our two new plates with us for this walk—no lockers at the train station—but the young lady at the store there gave us a bag for free so it was easier to carry them along. We followed the trail for walk number “7”, which circled around the city of Eckernfoerde. Monika got turned around once right at the beginning due to missing a marker, but after that it went fairly smoothly with occasional pauses to find the right way. This trail had a couple of places where we thought they could have used an extra marker or some extra phrases in the instructions like “wait until you see the second pedestrian tunnel and take that one”. I also had a hard time orienting myself by the map until I checked the GPS and found out we were really walking counter-clockwise around the loop as Monika thought rather than clockwise as I had thought. It’s really embarrassing to be that kind of completely, 180-degrees wrong, but it keeps me humble. This walk did not feature the old town district of Eckernfoerde but rather the more recent outer ring of the city. I did, however, enjoy seeing a stained-glass studio with some really nice examples displayed outside. Stained glass always looks better when illuminated for the back, and they had placed a spotlight behind one of the pieces so it could be lit up at night—from what I could tell of the pieces on display it would look very nice.

We were, however, all the while getting gradually more tired and footsore since this walk was completely on paved paths and sidewalks. So when a Burger King hove into view about 1/3 of the way around the loop, we stopped for our third lunch. We split a grilled chicken sandwich, French fries, and large Coke, and the price 5.30 Euro, which is maybe a little more than what we would pay for the same meal in the U.S. What was funny was how after walking over 3 hours my body was craving the caffeine plus sugar of the Coke. I mean, I really wanted to slurp it all down right then and there. But I didn’t, partly because there are NO FREE REFILLS in Germany. It’s just not an idea whose time has come in that culture. In fact, you’re lucky if you get more than a shot glass size serving of cola, as I had found out to my chagrin in some of our earlier meals in Imbisses. The specified serving size for our meal was exactly a half-liter and, this being Germany, they had filled the paper cup precisely to the half-liter mark on the side. I had to resist the urge to go back to the counter and ask for a free refill and also the urge to go buy another half-liter, but I was grumbling inwardly about the high cost of soda relative to beer and liquor in Germany.

We made a pit stop there, of course—never pass up a free bathroom in Germany—and I was struck by a time sheet on the wall of the men’s room. This time sheet was for checking the physical condition of the bathroom and supplies, and it was marked off in half-hour intervals. Since each half-hour had been initialed in by one or another of the employees, it was clear that this bathroom was really inspected every half-hour! I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think the bathrooms get that kind of regular inspection at Burger Kings in the U.S. Truly it was sparkling clean in there—about as nice a bathroom as one could wish with the nice sturdy German doors and deadbolt locks, etc.

Our third lunch gave us the energy to complete the walk. We really had some nice views of the fjord on our way back to the beach, but our feet were really getting sore by that point. I wouldn’t say we were limping, exactly, but we certainly were walking gingerly by the time we stamped our start cards at the Information Center and then walked back to the train station.

Since we had a half an hour wait for our train, I paid 1.50 Euro for 30 minutes of Internet time at the Internet café there and then signed on and caught up with my email. But 4 or 5 people sitting at a nearby table were smoking, and by the end of the 30 minutes the smoke was so pungent that I was just starting to get sick. So it was with more than a little relief that I signed off and somewhat slowly and stiffly walked over to the train to Kiel. At Kiel we switched to the express train to Hamburg, and for some reason we had to thread our way thru at least 10 to 15 couples doing the hug-kiss-goodbye type of thing. Really, there were so many that I wondered if I was in some Twilight Zone version of the Love Boat where it had been turned into the Love Train. Can’t you just see the Captain making a commercial for the German train network where he says, “It’s not just a train, it’s the Love Train!” Seriously, I wondered if all these parting couples were just coincidence or did girl/boyfriends regularly come up to Kiel from Hamburg for the weekend and then have to leave to get back at the beginning of the next week? I didn’t know and just couldn’t bring myself to interrupt these tearful good-byes solely to satisfy my cultural curiosity—that would have been quite impolite. It does raise the issue, however, of whether I would see the same kiss-and-ride phenomenon on U.S. train stations on Sunday evenings.

Be that as it may, we wended our way thru the many intertwined couples to the head of the train where we found an unoccupied set of opposing seats. The great thing about these seats was that as long as no one else occupied the opposing seat, we could take off our boots and put up our feet. Oh heavens did that feel good after something like four steady hours of walking. The train filled up as we worked our way south to Hamburg, but no one chose the seat opposite us and our feet had a good rest. That was good since there was no bus at the train in Reinbek and we had to hoof it home the final stretch. It had been a long day and since we had already consumed three lunches I just drank some juice and munched on cucumber and tomatoes and Monika had a light supper before we watched the 8 o’clock news and turned in (carefully! We were rather stiff.) for the night.