DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The weather in Germany is frequently rainy. Citizens seem to embrace this, as dismal as it is. Perhaps they’ve all chosen to remain here because the grey skies give them something to be displeased about. (Complaining is a national pasttime.) (Hmm, come to think of it, I’d fit right in.)

Yet for six weeks over the summer, there was no rain. The dry spell did not affect the vegetation, so far as I can see — the countryside is as lush and green as pond water downstream from the phosphate factory — but the rivers have shrunk appreciably.

Now the Rhine has an extra 20 feet of shore on each side, revealing about a zillion clamshells and a few discarded tires. Not far from the eastern bank stands the Dom, the Köln Cathedral, imposing like a nun at the back of a grade-school classroom, ruler in hand, veil not quite hiding the dark scowl. The huge church is oppressive in spite of its coating of thousand-year-old grime.

Rhine Stones
I never pass an opportunity to stack river stones into sculpture — order from chaos, balance in defiance of gravity, art using raw materials from nature. (Yes, I’m a fan of Andy Goldsworthy.) Faintly visible in the background are two gondola cars from the Kölner Seilbahn.

Urban Recycling
The modernization of the German steel industry has orphaned a number of steelworks. We visited one that has been uniquely repurposed as a tourist attraction, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. An artist (Jonathan Park) was commissioned to create a permananent installation of primary-colored lights, which at night transform this enormous, hundred-year-old industrial blight into surreal beauty.

This is an exhibition that would last about 24 hrs in America, because that’s how long it would take a visitor to fall down one of the poorly-lit metal staircases and sue the park owners into bankruptcy. The passages and stairs have to be dark, or else the effect of the colored lights would be lost. The Germans pick their way through carefully in spite of the danger, and the exhibit is much better for it.

Not pictured, but equally impressive as an example of urban recycling is the ~80 foot tall Gasometer (storage tank) on the premises. It was scrubbed clean, filled with water, and is now the classroom for a scuba diving school.

Rotweinwanderweg
The Ahr Valley is home to a number of small picturesque villages and a greater number of wineries. The towns, and the train connecting them, fill the valley. Climbing the steep hillsides are row after row of grape vines.

The “red wine hiking trail” runs along the ridgetop. Every few kilometers, a side trail descends to a town, which offers regional fried specialties in any number of charming restaurants.

The trail is not a loop, but the train in the valley makes one-way hikes easy. We hiked up the valley for two or three hours, stopped for lunch, hiked on to the next town, and then rode the train back to our car.

In the town of Altenahr we passed the local Metzgerei. The logo leaves little question about what happens inside.

As has been documented previously, I don’t speak a lot of German. My trips to the Motherland, by which I mean my wife’s mother’s land, bring long periods of introspection for me. I’ve come to enjoy the solitude; I use the time to reflect on events, organize thoughts, synthesize data, and establish defensible arguments on the superiority of US versus German leisure-shoe design.

I compose many of the stories you’re reading here while pretending to follow dinner conversations.

On this trip, our first visit was to my wife’s closest friend. She’s a healer, which I mention for no reason other than that it affords me the opportunity to link to yet-another journal entry from years ago. She and her husband have two adorable kids, ages 2 and 4, and if you think that staying with the four of them on a day defined by the dark depths of jetlag would be a spectacularly bad idea, it’s only because you haven’t experienced these kids. They’re smart and funny and surprisingly mature for their negligible years.

When we visited two years ago, I was reading a bedtime story to the little girl, then just two years old and scarcely more fluent in Deutsch than I was. I had studied the language for six semesters, and although my vocabulary never grew beyond the inventories of kitchen appliances and sports in the textbooks, I always prided myself on what I thought was a knack for pronunciation. And besides, I remember thinking, she’s only two — and this book only has about seventeen words in it.

After I read the first three pages, the girl hopped out of my lap, took the book and walked from the room. She came back a moment later with a different book for me to read to her. It was written in English.

On this visit, the little boy adopted me immediately. His mother was surprised as this is somewhat unusual for him, but for me this was not completely unexpected. Little kids are often fascinated by me. Of course, this usually takes the form of hiding in their mother’s arms, alternately peeking out and crying until I go away.

But we got along famously. We had a lot in common — vocabulary size, for example. We share a disdain for authority. I’m obviously a lot older, and he’s somewhat more likely to smear Nutella all over his face. Otherwise, we’re right in there together.

I’ve been trying to speak more German on this trip. It has been challenging. By the time I struggle to the end of the sentence, where the verb goes, I’ve forgotten what I was talking about. Fortunately everybody knows what I intended to say, and they all say it in chorus, which is great because I wouldn’t have known the correct form or how to pronounce the word anyway.

I had a proud moment tonight: I ordered my own dinner. I was so nervous about performing in front of the table that I put my elbow down on a bread plate, knocking a butter knife to the floor in the middle of my spiel. I think the clatter and subsequent commotion covered most of the case-markers and genders I was mangling.

Whenever we fly, we phone in advance to request special meals. Airlines are wonderfully supportive of various oddball religious and ethical dietary requirements — except mine, ironically. We’ve tried calling the airlines to request “low-salt, non-wheat California organic vegan, with an occasional piece of fish so our friends don’t stop inviting us to dinner.” The airline telephone reps don’t have a checkbox for that. We settle for whatever sounds least likely to put us in mind of festering globules of animal protein, and the debilitating effects thereof on leg-cramped passengers struggling to lift a suitcase after having not even stood up for 11 hours.

This time out, the entree of choice was advertised as “Asian Vegetarian.” My wife reasoned that any nonspecific veggie meal would invariably be manicotti or lasagne, some kind of heart-choking pasta of clotted cheese and cream, designed to appease by sheer fatty heft the heavyset passengers thinking that a $700 plane ticket ought to entitle them to more than 2 oz. of warm food.

Special meals on airlines are always accompanied by a side serving of anxiety, because the delivery of these meals is haphazard. The stewards have a passenger manifest with meal requests documented, and yet their success rate is only about 70%. Hence the anxiety — maybe my food will appear, or maybe it won’t.

Years ago, when I was less strict about my diet, I’d be occasionally afraid that the airline would have my special meal. Sometimes those chicken-in-sauce entrees sounded pretty good, swimming in lipids and lab-fresh flavoring agents. But these days I’m anxious that my meal won’t show up, because if it does not I’d be relegated to subsisting on the handful of almonds in my sachel, inside a baggie labeled “For emergency use only — break open in case of cheese.”

(Yes, the almonds are raw.)

The beginning of dinner service brought a typical round of confusion, with one steward frantically flipping pages, and another peering at sloppily-scribbled seat numbers on the meal packages while holding steaming trays of what purported to be Asian Vegetarian delicacies just moments away from being inhaled by ravenous passengers, e.g. me. But arrive the food finally did, and I was grateful for it.

What do Asian Vegetarians eat, you ask? If Lufthansa Airlines is any sort of authority, a typical AV dinner consists of:

• chopped fruit salad, heavy on the melon
• a yeasted white roll bearing all the symptoms of commercial handling and underfermentation: generic flavor profile, unblistered skin, tight crumb, generally low appeal
• single-serving package of Promise, a trans-fatty acid based margarine spread convenience-food butter replacement product
• flavorless Indian spinach with little blocks of something that might be either feta cheese or tofu; chemical analysis still pending (assuming they first prove to be organic in origin)
• a scoop of tender white rice, 12 hours later, having been flattened and compressed in packaging and then left to dry out into a single coagulated cake of starch with a sauce-absorption index approximately equivalent to that of high-density polyethylene (plastic #2)

Perhaps Lufthansa doesn’t fly to Asia. That’s the best explanation I can offer.

Breakfast was even less Asian. Maybe this provides evidence that cultures can evolve more quickly than previously thought:

• chopped fruit salad, heavy on the strawberries
• white roll and Promise, left over from dinner?
• a croissant (very popular breakfast bread in the Mandarin region of mainland China)
• single-serving bucket of applesauce
• flavorless baked tofu, sauteed okra with cumin, and a traditional Asian snack enjoyed by monarchs and dynasty leaders all the way back to 1974… Tater Tots.

I noticed that within two meals Lufthansa had managed to serve the three white starches famous for being the first to go in any diet plan: white potatoes, white rice, white bread. I tend to avoid all three, when I have a choice. Probably the last time I consumed all three in a single sitting was in college, where I degreed in refined grains and potatoes (not to mention whole milk). There’s little wonder why I slept through all those classes.

Anyway, all things considered I was generally pleased with my AVMLs. In a time where people’s enjoyment of air travel is defined by a bare-bones minimum level of expected service — e.g. passenger and luggage arrive at intended destination intact and within an hour of each other — anything so exotic as an edible meal constitutes pampering. I really shouldn’t complain.

“Blah blah blah blah,” announced the voice over the PA system, although in German the words actually had meaning, or at least, I assume so. The message (I’m told) directed passengers to note the “zone number” printed on their boarding cards, to facilitate the boarding of the airplane. My wife translated the anouncement as she extracted our boarding cards from a carry-on bag full of sensitive electronic equipment. “That’s Lufthansa for you,” she gloated, “German efficiency.” She was feeling her heritage.

A few minutes later, preboarding began. Teeming crowds of families, apparently from countries that don’t espouse birth control, with too many bodies and more suitcases than legs, swarmed the gate and were slowly absorbed through the doors.

We would board with zone 4. Given our high row number I assumed we’d be among the first unencumbered passengers on the plane. But no, the gate scientists of Lufthansa are beneficiaries of advanced degrees in crowd-control technique. Their ways are not the ways of common sense. Ice is a fluid, sherbet has only 1 ‘r’, and no matter what you might believe to be true, sometimes boarding the rear of the aircraft first is not the efficient way to do it.

“Now boarding zones 1, 2, and 3,” said the PA voice in two languages.

Err, what? Why would they go to the trouble of assigning zone numbers if they don’t intend to use them? Well, it’s Lufthansa, we considered. They must have a reason.

So we waited. Many people pressed through the turnstiles. The crowd size dwindled. Soon nobody was left in line, although some still occupied seats and a handful more, edgy-looking types, hovered around the periphery in hopes of being first in line for their respective zones. I approached the desk. “Are you still boarding only zones 1 through 3?” I inquired. “You can board,” came the reply, with a look that said (after translation) “you have a dumb question only asked!”

We passed through the gate and walked down the jetway to find about 100 people queued up, waiting to get on the airplane. A brief survey revealed nearby passengers bound for all five zones on the plane. It took us a long time to reach the door to the aircraft.

Why were we waiting in line in the jetway? Why did the gate agent call three rows at once and the other two not at all? These are the mysteries of professional German plane-filling. You might think that by boarding the rear first, they could cut down on the time people spend waiting for the aisles to clear. But this is precisely why you’re sitting in your chair reading my journal rather than calling zone numbers for Lufthansa. Face it, some people just don’t have what it takes to compete at the international level.

I knew this would be a bad week way back in June. That’s when I booked a 17-day vacation in Europe and simultaneously learned about a huge development project that was due to launch on August 15. I’m not so cynical that I automatically think every work project will be three-plus weeks late, but in this particular case, I was exactly that cynical.

The problem was that the big development project had a bigger prerequisite… something bigger than we’d ever done. Something that could easily take a couple or three weeks longer to deliver than the projections claimed. Something that could keep me working nights and weekends for a month in a vain attempt to meet what I’ve increasingly come to think of as arbitrary deadlines.

The bigger prerequisite went live last weekend — Labor Day weekend, a three-day holiday for most of the country, but an overtime extravaganza for me and my team. We put in a 19-hour Saturday, a few hours on Sunday, and a full workday on Monday.

Somewhere in the midst of that weekend, I discovered that our water had gone bad: it came out of the faucet cloudy and brown, with little bits of unidentified muck suspended within. A peek into the holding tank confirmed my fears: our well had pumped out 1500 gallons of murk.

Then on Tuesday night, as I sat upstairs briefly decompressing from the day’s stresses, my wife started up her workstation. I wouldn’t have known this, half a house away, except for the terrible screeching sound, audible and soul-scarring even at a distance. I thought she had a songbird in a bench vise. I knew immediately that her computer had lost a disk drive.

Wednesday and Thursday were less hellish, but still I am extremely relieved to be getting the heck out of town.

I plan to write over the next couple of weeks. Travel usually inspires a story or two. Check back soon.