April 26 - Flying Home

We spent the morning cleaning up and finishing our packing. Things kept crawling out of nooks and crannies all around the house and space for packing became a critical issue. I jettisoned the pair of boots that had a ridge inside the toe, which apparently had been rubbing the holes in the toe of my socks (what do you expect for $16 boots?) as well as the three water bottles we had brought with—fortunately Aldi accepted them for recycling. Monika jettisoned a pair of pants and tried to add our plastic recycling to our neighbor’s since we wouldn’t be there for the official recycling day, but all she got for her pains was a good German lecture by the ever-vigilant neighbor. Thoroughly chastened, we packed up all of our paper and glass recycling and carried it over to the recycling center by the liquor store in the correct German fashion. Monika spotted a clothes and shoes donation box where I later dropped off my sock-killing boots hoping that someone with a foot just a little smaller than my (now) size 13s could get some good use out of them.

I had, by this time, reconciled myself to having size 13 feet. I have steeled myself for the inevitable “Big Foot” or “Sasquatch” jokes and even the German version that runs, “Next size larger is a child’s coffin!” That illustrates, by the way, the hard edge that typifies some of German humor, perhaps best shown in the cabaret satirical tradition. Some of the humorous TV commercials also had that hard edge. One showed a woman tending a beautiful garden while a man is on a bridge over the goldfish pond smoking a cigarette. The man deliberately tosses the cigarette butt into the goldfish pond whereupon a killer whale leaps up out of the pond and bites his head off. The woman finds his toupee floating on the water, delicately fishes it out, and calmly goes on with her gardening.

Hoping no Shamu would leap up at us from the bathtub, we also cleaned and swept the house as best we could while listening to the radio (station 90.3 in case you’re ever in Hamburg and want an “oldies” station) all the while. I heard about the 100th birthday celebration for the Hamburg’s harbor on May 1, which puzzled me a bit as that harbor is at least 4 centuries old. However, Monika told me it was the customs-free harbor zone that was established in 1904 and had really developed the international part of the harbor business. But what I really regretted about missing it was that they were going to let the public make emergency exits from ships in the middle of the Elbe into lifeboats of some kind. Apparently you would don a life vest and then go zipping down an emergency exit chute of some kind into the lifeboat (or the river if you missed) and then be brought back to shore by the Coast Guard. Wow! As a Human Factors professional, I would take, of course, scientific interest in the techniques used for evacuation, but it would also be just a whale of a lot of fun. But no, Monika said we had to get back to the U.S. so we continued to pack and clean.

Thinking back about our visit, Monika remarked that when we came here at the end of February everything was bare—the snowbells peeked out but that was about it, and one day it even snowed just to show us it was Still Winter. But now by the end of April everything was greening and many things were blooming like the cherry trees on the Alten Land. On the lot in Reinbek, the apple tree and the rhododendrons were not quite ready to bloom, but otherwise everything looked like spring.

It was interesting watching the progression of the yearly cycle from Still Winter to Road Construction. Seriously, as Kim suggested the month of May is basically the springtime in this area of Germany and might be a more reasonable time to schedule a visit if you like blooming flowers, moderate temperatures, and so forth. It is also definitely the case that many things a tourist might be interested in were not yet open or running before May 1st. Among many other things, we never got to the railroad museum in Auhmuehle that I wanted to see, we didn’t climb the tallest mountain in the Harz chain, and we couldn’t take a canal cruise from Lauenberg up to Luebeck that sounded like a lot of fun. Of course, you probably won’t get cheap tickets like we did if you come during the summer time, so that is something of a trade-off. Maybe it depends on how much you want to visit a country in northern Europe during Still Winter!

Heinke and Gustl were going to drive us to the airport, bless them, and they stopped by about 11:30 for a final chat and Mittagsessen; Heinke had found some really fresh white asparagus grown in Germany and brought along a creamy sauce. Monika had peeled our last potatoes for our contribution, and it was a great meal. When you get the really fresh white asparagus, you don’t have to cut off much at the bottom and don’t have to peel as much of the skin off of it before boiling it. Plus, it has much more flavor. It cooked in about the same time as it took to boil the potatoes, after which we all sat down for a nice lunch.

After lunch Monika and I weighed our luggage and found we were over the 32-kilo weight limit, so we had to discard a few more tools plus take our Caribou fleece jackets out to make the limit. We also took one last look around the house and said good-bye to our home for the last two months, wishing the ghosts of Aunt Size and Uncle Hans-Henning well.

Then we packed the car with our luggage and headed for the airport. It was drizzling and I was glad Gustl was driving and not me when we hit some heavy traffic on Ring 2, but we made it there 3 hours early. We hurried to drag all 64 plus kilograms of our luggage into the terminal, only to be told that in Hamburg the boarding time for international flights was only 2 hours early! Resigning ourselves to a longish wait to check in, we said good-bye to Heinke and Gustl and settled into some fairly comfortable chairs surrounded by our luggage for the duration.

The flight back was uneventful and I took some nice pictures of Hamburg as we departed, the English coastline, and central London as we landed at Heathrow to switch to the trans-Atlantic flight.

>British Airways planes were on time, the personnel were courteous and efficient, and all the airplane meals were good except for the low-fat breakfast on final leg into Dulles International Airport. This breakfast featured a weird sandwich that said it had asparagus—all I could see and taste was red and green bell pepper slices on soggy wheat bread. That was a particularly odd thing to eat for breakfast when one is jet-lagged, but I was so hungry by that point that I forced down my sandwich and half of Monika’s (she couldn’t finish it). The message I got immediately afterward from my stomach was, “What kind of breakfast was THAT?”, and I felt distinctly queasy for a while until we landed. This was, to be fair, the exception to generally quite good low-fat meals provided by the airline.