The Aerie
Okay.
Well, given a couple of days' rest and some time to work on it, I've managed to get all my photos to date up and in galleries online. Looking to the right --> you will see that I have thoughtfully arranged them for your viewing pleasure in a special section! That's me, Mister Thoughtful.
I still need to do a bit of editing, there are a lot of duplicates and too many shots of misty mountains, but just getting them in place was a lot of work and I'll leave that for later.
Otherwise its been a couple of quiet days here. Yesterday my big accomplishment was to mow the lawn. It has been cool and very rainy here and apparently those are ideal conditions for German grass, because the house was barely visible from the road. And don't even ask about the mushrooms and snails. We knew that one of our hosts' parents was due to come by and mow the lawn, but I didn't know if they would actually have a chance to because it was raining so much
So I hauled the mower out of the garage, and figured out how to start it (press the button, THEN squeeze the deadman switch on the handle). Soon I was mowing away. Very quiet mower. It featured a built-in clippings bag, so I frequently had to empty it into the compost. Still, once I got the hang of it the chore was rather fun. I was 95% done when sure enough our hostess' father arrived, in vest and buttondown shirt, to mow. He seemed a little put out that I had done most of it, but was happy enough to accept instead the task of paying the 5-Euro parking ticket I had gotten last weekend. I didn't realize that "3 Std" meant "3 hours".
Anyway we had a nice chat, and he showed us how to use the parking tag in the car. An odd little invention: when you park in a time-limited zone, you adjust the tag to the current time: when the officer checks your car, they can tell how long it has been there. He stayed for about half an hour and as he left the rain began again: he would have gotten about 20% of the yard finished.
Since my birthday the prior day had been spent in first gear, wrangling a minivan through hours and hours of stop-and-go traffic on the autobahn, the family decided to take me out for a donut. We went to "Der Beck," which is to Germany what Caribou is to Minnesota. We had a very nice time having our snack, and afterwards drove randomly around Neumarkt, stumbling serendiptiously upon the one store that sells peanut butter. In Germany, you don't have peanut butter, you have Nutella. Peanut butter here is as hard to find as Vegemite in the U.S.
The evening was spent quietly at home. It was a nice break. I worked on my photographs, which continued until today. But now, I'm finished, and we're all going to go for a walk. Tomorrow is another quiet day, and then on Monday we leave for Paris...
Posted by Albatross at August 12, 2006 8:27 AM | TrackBackThe visit to Dachau must have been emotionally wrenching. I was most moved by the interior of the barracks, the still-bright red bricks of the ovens, and that very small door leading to "The showers". I've always imagined them as large, double doors, sort of like a warehouse entry. However, that might have allowed some of the Zyklon to escape.
Chilling
Then you have that gorgeous photo of the bright flowers and the butterfly. Surely a zenith of irony.
The photos are really great.
Posted by: Patricia Dean at August 12, 2006 5:37 PM