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Wanderung 5

Happy Haus for Holt’s in Hamburg.

February - April 2004

April 19 - A Day at Home.

Monika had an appointment with a notary public in the morning, so we had a good excuse for not planning another walk, which was just as well! In fact, since Heinke and Gustl were going to be in the area we invited them for Mittagessen and had a really nice visit. Heinke and I used the rest of some two-part epoxy putty that she used on their sailboat to patch the leaks in the house gutters. I had marked the leaks the last time it had rained, so I just had to dry out the area around each hole, scrape it with coarse steel wool to get a clean surface, and then put on the putty and press it into the hole. We entertained ourselves doing that while Monika fixed some goulash and side dishes, and then we all sat down for a nice meal. It was fun just to be able to sit with Heinke and Gustl and chat about family, friends, and things in Germany like the Hamburg Marathon that Heinke had watched as the runners passed thru her neighborhood the previous day.

Gustl has a tremendous range of knowledge about many aspects of German culture, including the laws about hunting. The German law recognizes the hunting rights to a piece of woods as a distinct aspect of ownership in somewhat the same way that mineral rights are legally separate from basic land ownership in the U.S. That is, the hunting rights are usually owned by a separate person who then controls all hunting in the given plot of woods. That seems to hark back to the way hunting was treated as a province of the royalty in the Middle Ages in Europe, and is very different from the way hunting is viewed as a basic right in the U.S. But the kicker is that a hunter in Germany is legally responsible for all the wild animals in his plot of woods. It those animals wander out and damage some farmer’s crops, the hunter is then legally liable for the damages! As Gustl put it, the hunter has to either “Kill the critter or pay for its damages.” I thought that was a really different way to view hunting, but I wondered how you ascertain whether the damage caused by say, some deer, would be deer belonging to a particular hunter’s territory. Nevertheless, it was a very intriguing idea and apparently led to a much more controlled hunting process. Heinke and Gustl were surprised, I think, at the mostly unregulated U.S. deer hunting process that occurs in places like Wisconsin and seems to hark back to the frontier heritage in U.S. history.

Similarly, we heard on the news that evening that the German Supreme Court had upheld a new law that allows an insurance company to not cover the collision damages to a car if the driver is judged to cause an accident due to reckless or inconsiderate driving. The liability coverage will still be effect, of course, but the driver could lose up to the full value of his car if the accident is due to bad driving. I rather liked the intent of that law, even if again I could see problems in judging whether the accident is due to reckless driving or not. But when I considered some of the really reckless driving I have seen over the years in the U.S., I warmed up to the idea of more punishment for the idiots causing unnecessary accidents (see also “Schadenfreude” above). The curious fact is that I saw less really reckless driving in Germany than in the U.S. To be specific, I saw no weaving in and out of lanes and no passing on the right.

Tailgating is, however, a custom in Germany that is every bit as strong as in the U.S. and even has its own set of social norms. The faster car is supposed to tailgate and then blink their lights like crazy. In response to this, the slower car in front should immediately pull over to the right hand lane if possible, and almost always does so. This custom was rigorously adhered to in the driving situations I observed on the Autobahn, and that is in stark contrast to drivers in the U.S. who drive slowly in the left lane while paying no attention to any signals whatsoever and who dawdle along without any consideration for the folks piled up behind them. Merlin used to do that because he thought the pavement in the left lane was smoother, but he stopped after reading an article written by a long haul truck driver that succinctly stated the irritation that truckers feel about such drivers. Having said that, I must add that German drivers were certainly driving fast and pushing the limits of the law in other ways, but not in a completely unpredictable fashion that makes things really dangerous in my opinion.

Of course, being certified Old Fogies, we also got to discuss fascinating topics like burial plots and gravesite care during Mittagessen. This plus pastimes like comparing the scars we have from various operations (the Fogy version of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”) we find as entertaining as MTV and music groups are to the teeny boppers. It turned out that Tante Size’s burial plot will come up for renewal in 2007, and Heinke and Gustl were surprised that plots in the U.S. were used in perpetuity. Gustl qualifies for a WWII veteran’s cemetery plot, but in Germany the spouse cannot also be buried there. In contrast, the common practice in the modern U.S. veteran cemeteries such as the one at Union Grove where Merlin is buried to have space designated for the spouse on the same gravesite, which also surprised Heinke and Gustl.

Alternative burials like cremation and burial at sea are gaining popularity in Germany as they are also in the U.S. as I understand, and that is one way to avoid burdening the younger generation with the care of gravesites. Heinke told us that some of the things she had planted at one of the gravesites she is tending had been stolen, which confirms the radio report on massive thefts from gravesites I had heard earlier, and certainly that is discouraging to the caretakers. I really cannot imagine stealing flowers from the dead in the same way that I really cannot imagine taking candy from a baby. Could you really live with yourself and say, “Well, tonight the weather is nice so I think I’ll trundle the old wheelbarrow down to the cemetery and steal some more flowers to sell!”? Obviously some folks can live with it, as Heinke’s experience attests, and she said that one alternative offered by the cemetery was to have all the plantings removed and grass seeded instead. Apparently no one steals grass!

We did, of course, also discuss more cheerful topics like German traffic, which is at best congested and at worst creates traffic jams of legendary proportions. The radio always reported on the location and size of traffic jams on the roads in and around Hamburg, and only once on a weekend morning did we hear them say that there were no traffic jams in the area. Gustl also explained the completely puzzling signs we had seen at almost every intersection along the Autobahn and major highways. The signs were blue and about 1 foot square marked with a white “U” and then some two-digit number. We kept trying to find some rhyme or reason for those numbers and utterly failed, so as usual we asked Gustl, our font of information for all things German. He explained that these signs were permanent signs for detours from the Autobahn when the horrendous backups occurred! The government has already marked the alternative routes with the unique two-digit numbers and these routes were broadcast on the radio when the backup occurred. The net effect was to divert traffic onto the secondary roads in a planned and orderly fashion as quickly as possible. The radio would just announce “Backup on the Hamburg-Berlin Autobahn at so and so, use U-76 as an alternate.” I thought that was a very good system for congested areas of the U.S. such as Washington D.C., and I hope that any of the Department of Transportation folks reading this will pick up on it.

Of course, after the meal we had to have desert, and what Monika had found for us was a real German kringle! That’s the German “kringle” as in pastry, of course, not “Kringle” as in Kris (alias Santa Claus). Curiously, this is the one German pastry that we have been able to get only in Wisconsin in the U.S., and it’s really good. For the uninitiated, a kringle comes from the Germans and Scandinavians who immigrated to the Racine area of southeast Wisconsin in the 1800s. Some of them opened bakeries and kept baking these traditional rings of pastry filled with fruit, nuts, or Marzipan and topped with streusel. They are delicious but you certainly don’t find them everywhere even in Germany, so I was happy to see one appear for desert. In Germany Monika paid 1.50 Euro for the kringle at Aldi, but that was cheap because in the U.S. and at bakeries in Germany they ran more like $4.00 each. I read that Wal-Mart was trying to crack the German market (there was one near Reinbek somewhere that we never found), but with competition like Aldi I thought they really would have their work cut out for them!

We rounded out the day with a visit to Tante Carla, the 95-year-old aunt who we visited last year (Wanderung 2). She had recovered from her injuries and was much more mobile now than she was on our previous visit and she was mentally as sharp as ever, which was wonderful. So we chatted a while with her and her daughter Erika before walking back to the house for the evening. Monika later saw a woman walking around the house and invited her in to see it, and she was enthusiastic about it. This was, of course, after I spent some more time on the ladder fixing the gutters, so I really think that cleaning gutters is some kind of real estate magnet for customers! Anyway, we referred her to the realtor for more details and settled in for the evening with two episodes of “Grosstadt Revier” (Big City Police Station, shot on location in Hamburg, apparently) and the evening news. The evening news reported that, as I had expected, the new Spanish administration will be withdrawing all their troops from Iraq by June. The new Prime Minister said that they should never have sent the troops against the wishes of the UN and against the wishes of the Spanish people. In any case, the victory of Al Quaeda in getting Spain to withdraw from Iraq is now complete and the radical leaders certainly looked smug and self-satisfied on the TV clip. They were now calling for all other foreign troops to also withdraw, which would be basically the U.S. and Britain.

It began to look more and more likely to me that the net result of our Iraq adventure would be a radical Islamic regime in Iraq, perhaps along the lines of the militant mullahs in Iran or, god forbid, the thugs of the Taliban. It seemed a shame that the Iraqis will lose so many people and end up just trading a murderous secular regime for a murderous sectarian regime, but that might become the bottom line. Would they be better off, I wondered? Women would lose what rights they had under Saddam’s regime and probably end up treated like cattle as they were by the Taliban in Afghanistan. I was especially appalled by the blatant wife-stealing that the Taliban chiefs engaged in when they couldn’t find a suitable spouse. That reminded me of cattle rustling in the West back in the 1800s except with women, and was totally repugnant to anyone with a Western point of view on individual rights. I still have not heard any Islamic cleric denounce the killing of one of the Italian hostages taken in Iraq a week back; in fact, I saw in a newspaper headline that one of Iraq’s clerics was declaring “Democracy is the work of the devil!” If that represented a common view among Iraq’s population, then a secular democracy would just not seem to be in the cards. And if there will be no ultimate democracy, then what exactly has the U.S. been spending so many lives and so much money for?

After the news we watched “Millionaire” and I finally won something valuable, a “Get Out Of Argument Free” card. A question came up on what was lacking on Manx cats, and I thought it was the tail while Monika thought it was the fur or something else. We bet on the outcome, and sure enough the answer was that Manx cats lack a tail, so I got my wish, which was for the “Get Out Of Argument Free” card. Someday when we have one of our vigorous disputes and I think I’m losing, all I have to do is use the codename “Manx cat” and I get a free 24-hour delay in the argument. That will be sufficient time either to marshal sufficient evidence to win the argument if I’m right, or to find a way to gracefully exit if I’m wrong, so I think this is great card. If I had lost, of course, I would have been cooking a Sunday dinner, so it’s probably a good thing for both of our sakes that I won and Monika will cook the Sunday dinner—less likelihood of food poisoning that way!

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

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