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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 31, 2005 - Tucson, Arizona

Debbie had selected some crackerjack walks and tours for us to do while visiting, but with Monika's ankle being so painful we had to give up any thought of walking other than to and from the car. Instead, Debbie was nice enough to drive us around and do errands, a mundane but necessary component when you travel for periods of a month or more. So after breakfast we spent the morning bouncing around Tucson dropping off a prescription Monika needed filled, searching for a 256 megabyte Olympus brand memory chip for my camera, and shopping at Trader Joes. The chip was on sale, for one thing, but the real reason I wanted it was to allow me to take as many panoramic photographs as I wanted. Since each panoramic sequence required up to 10 separate pictures, I quickly filled the 65-megabyte chip that came with the camera and that was truly frustrating. I hoped that the combined ability to take over 500 pictures each day would be sufficient to satisfy my yen to record our travels. Does the Gentle Reader think that is excessive? I expect many folks don't take 500 pictures in their lifetime much less in a single day, but I'm otherwise in good health.

Trader Joes had the dry cereals we needed to restock our larder, and while I was at it I bought some low-fat Gouda cheese and dried blueberries, which gave us a change from raisins. Finding space for it all in the trailer's refrigerator was challenging, but I finally stuffed it all somewhere. We picked up Karl from his after school chess club meeting, and after giving him a tour of the trailer-he was properly appreciative-he and I went walking in the unfenced section of their lot. That was more adventurous than a typical excursion into a suburban lot, because the unfenced section of their lot was filled with an assortment of spiky cacti, thorn bushes, and prickly shrubs. Karl and I walked as much or more sideways than straight ahead as we worked our way down the hill and back up to the house, but we had fun. Along the way we spotted a family of quail skittering around the cacti in front of us, and heard some other birds singing or scolding us for invading their turf.

We also exchanged the previous night's movie for another German flick, entitled "Nowhere in Africa" in English. After dinner and checking our email, we watched that for the rest of the evening. It turned out to be a rather gripping account, supposedly true, about a German Jewish family that fled to Kenya in the 1930s and their experiences adapting to a non-western culture. The pivotal viewpoint character was the 6-7 year old girl they take with them and how she adapted to the new environment. I enjoyed the film a lot, and I don't think it was just hearing some more spoken German. For one thing, the film had absolutely stunning photography of rural Kenya in Africa. Both this film and "Good-Bye Lenin" were just head and shoulders above the typical movie fare in the U.S., being sensitive, thought-provoking treatments of difficult topics. No wonder foreign films tend to win the international awards.

But at the end of "Nowhere in Africa" we were all interested in whether the original book (or a sequel) traced what happened to the girl when they finally decided to return to Germany after WWII had ended. Debbie's lack of success finding an English version of such a book suggested that it had not been translated, which has been the fate of a great deal of German literature. From my own extremely limited experience, I have read interesting works from several German authors where I could not find any translated version. That is frustrating to me, because often I think these authors really have something to say about their world that will never be known on this side of the Atlantic, and what a shame that is. Wise (or funny!) folks can occur in any culture, and it would behoove the rest of us to really read and understand what they have to say about life and the human situation. In any case, we retired to our suite after the movie and worked on our computers a bit before turning in for the night.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 05
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February 2005
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