I haven't mentioned politics in a long time, Nancy....
In 1963, President Kennedy delivered a speech in Berlin, Germany that included one of the most famous sentences of his Presidency: "Ich bin ein Berliner" -- meant to mean, "I am a Berliner" -- a citizen of Berlin. The Berlin Wall had just gone up, the city was glaringly divided. So he was saying, We are with you, citizens of Berlin, ready to stand against the division, the Communists, whatever...
But to many Germans, at least supposedly, the word "Berliner" is better known as the popular name of a certain jelly-filled pastry. The legend goes that JFK was inadvertedly saying to the Germans, when translated, "I am a jelly doughnut" (I've wondered what he would have said if Hamburg had been the divided city instead -- "I am a Hamburger"?)..
This week, Barack Obama, candidate for president, is on a tour of various countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq (and some photo ops with the troops), and then on to a couple of countries in Europe, including Germany... I'm not sure what he'll be doing in Germany, but at one point there was discussion of having a rally at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, where he would make a speech in front of tens of thousands of cheering Germans... Now, make no mistake, I'll vote for the dude, and I understand that he is quite popular in Europe (the rock-star thing again), but isn't this a little weird -- and maybe a bit arrogant -- for a U.S. presidential candidate to be making what are essentially campaign speeches in other countries?.. We'll see how this all goes this week.
*****
We said Auf Wiedersehn to our German girls, Jana and Saskia, this past Wednesday and were surprised how much we missed them after they were gone!
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
war stories
It was 40 years ago this week, it has occurred to me, that I was transferred from basic training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina to advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, which was known at that time as "Little Vietnam" because of its jungle-warfare training. I was a two-year Army draftee, it was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, and, when you received orders for Fort Polk, you might as well start taking your malaria pills because it meant that at the end of eight weeks of learning how to kill, you'd be on your way to Vietnam.
I didn't go to Vietnam, as it turned out. At the end of the eight weeks, our graduating week was sent to Germany instead (unheard of for Folk Polk grads), thanks to the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians (What a party we had when we got those orders -- the heck with the poor Czechs!). So we headed to West Germany with our jungle training. We had spent a miserably hot summer surrounded by swamps and bugs and armadillos in backwoods Louisiana, a state that I'll never go back to, but oh who cares. We had been spared.
Vietnam was, of course, a war where we, the U.S., didn't belong, and now we are stuck in a war in Iraq that never should have been. Vietnam was miserable duty for those who served there, and Iraq is awful duty for those who are there. The best thing we could do to support those troops is to bring them home from where they shouldn't be (Take note, Senator Obama -- stop changing your position on ending the war). The second best thing would be to treat them right(which isn't being done): Give them great benefits, give them the best medical care, give them the best educational opportunities, honor commitments to end tours of duty.
Whoops. I almost let myself get preachy. There are enough preachy blogsites.
*****
Day Eight of Jerry's trip with the German girls. Today they are in Arizona. When I talked to Jerry on the phone today, they were heading to Flagstaff, on their way to the Grand Canyon, had just changed a tire of their bus-size rental SUV in 106-degree desert heat. Talk about miserable duty!
I didn't go to Vietnam, as it turned out. At the end of the eight weeks, our graduating week was sent to Germany instead (unheard of for Folk Polk grads), thanks to the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians (What a party we had when we got those orders -- the heck with the poor Czechs!). So we headed to West Germany with our jungle training. We had spent a miserably hot summer surrounded by swamps and bugs and armadillos in backwoods Louisiana, a state that I'll never go back to, but oh who cares. We had been spared.
Vietnam was, of course, a war where we, the U.S., didn't belong, and now we are stuck in a war in Iraq that never should have been. Vietnam was miserable duty for those who served there, and Iraq is awful duty for those who are there. The best thing we could do to support those troops is to bring them home from where they shouldn't be (Take note, Senator Obama -- stop changing your position on ending the war). The second best thing would be to treat them right(which isn't being done): Give them great benefits, give them the best medical care, give them the best educational opportunities, honor commitments to end tours of duty.
Whoops. I almost let myself get preachy. There are enough preachy blogsites.
*****
Day Eight of Jerry's trip with the German girls. Today they are in Arizona. When I talked to Jerry on the phone today, they were heading to Flagstaff, on their way to the Grand Canyon, had just changed a tire of their bus-size rental SUV in 106-degree desert heat. Talk about miserable duty!
Monday, June 30, 2008
what happens when Jana and Saskia visit
Jana and Saskia, the note-in-the bottle girls from Germany, arrived last Thursday, several hours after John and Mary left (In between the two drives to the airport and carrying a big price tag, a replacement for our blown-up air-conditioning unit was installed. It was a busy day!). Jana and Saskia are 18 and 19 years old, respectively, and we were a little nervous that we wouldn't know how to entertain them, since, truth be told, we hardly knew them (see my 6.17.08 post). We needn't have worried. They are fun to be around and are excellent house guests.
Their first impression of this country, on this their first trip to the United States, is that everything is so BIG, compared to Europe: big buildings, big stores, big houses, big cars, etc. Right now, as I write this, they are at the Mall of America, the BIGGEST shopping-&-entertainment center in the country. Tomorrow they fly with Jerry to Denver, where the three of them will start a 12-day road trip adventure in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and then back to Colorado to fly back to Minnesota. There's plenty of big stuff out in those states too, though at least most of it isn't man-made.
Yesterday afternoon I took them over to a German restaurant in St. Paul, the Glockenspiel, to watch the Euro2008 soccer final match between Germany and Spain, which would have been more fun if Germany had won, but it was a packed-house full of enthusiastic, German-speaking fans. Jana, smiling, said to me at one point during the game, "Right now, this does not feel like America!"
Their first impression of this country, on this their first trip to the United States, is that everything is so BIG, compared to Europe: big buildings, big stores, big houses, big cars, etc. Right now, as I write this, they are at the Mall of America, the BIGGEST shopping-&-entertainment center in the country. Tomorrow they fly with Jerry to Denver, where the three of them will start a 12-day road trip adventure in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and then back to Colorado to fly back to Minnesota. There's plenty of big stuff out in those states too, though at least most of it isn't man-made.
Yesterday afternoon I took them over to a German restaurant in St. Paul, the Glockenspiel, to watch the Euro2008 soccer final match between Germany and Spain, which would have been more fun if Germany had won, but it was a packed-house full of enthusiastic, German-speaking fans. Jana, smiling, said to me at one point during the game, "Right now, this does not feel like America!"
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
the note-in-the-bottle story
in case you haven't heard this story...
It was December 31, 1999, Y2K Eve (and, co-incidentally, a year to the day from when Jerry and I had met, but that's another story)...
Jerry and I were on the beach in Anguilla, an island in the Caribbean near St. Martin... We were staying in a house on the water where we had a beach all to ourselves... Jerry, being Jerry, had brought along a box of large trash bags, and he has an unusual habit, as part of his vacation de-stressing routine, of walking along and picking up trash, cleaning up the beach. There was plenty of trash on the beach that day because there had just been a hurricane hitting the island a month before.
I was sitting in a beach chair nearby, reading a book (of course), when he came running over to me, all excited. He had found an old bottle containing what appeared to be a note inside. He broke open the bottle, and we tried to read the writing on the brittle old piece of paper. It was in German. Being Americans, we of course are not bi-lingual, so we brought the old note back home with us to find somebody to interpret.
The note, as it turned out, had been written in 1995 and signed by a five-year-old girl named Jana, put in the bottle and tossed in the ocean in the Canary Islands. The bottle had somehow made it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and ended up on that beach in Anguilla.
The note contained Jana's address in Germany, so of course Jerry wrote to her. Soon he got an email back from Jana and her parents. Later that year, June of 2000, we were going to be in Germany along with Jon and Tom (we were celebrating Tom's graduation from high school), so we arranged to meet Jana and her family in Cologne. Jana by then was ten years old.
We hit it off with the parents and became friends. We visited them two other times when we were in Europe and stayed at their house one of those times.
Anyway, where I'm heading with this is that Jana, now 18 years old, and her older sister Saskia are visiting us here in Minneapolis for three weeks, arriving a week from Friday. Part of that time, about ten days, they and Jerry are traveling to the American southwest, and I'll tell you more about that later. This will be their first time in the U.S.
By the way, the note from the bottle is now framed and hanging in our living room.
And arriving this Friday are my sister Mary and brother-in-law John from New Jersey. They'll be here for a week, and we are very much looking forward to their visit. I'd tell you more now, but this post is already too long, and, besides, they deserve an entry all their own. :-)
It was December 31, 1999, Y2K Eve (and, co-incidentally, a year to the day from when Jerry and I had met, but that's another story)...
Jerry and I were on the beach in Anguilla, an island in the Caribbean near St. Martin... We were staying in a house on the water where we had a beach all to ourselves... Jerry, being Jerry, had brought along a box of large trash bags, and he has an unusual habit, as part of his vacation de-stressing routine, of walking along and picking up trash, cleaning up the beach. There was plenty of trash on the beach that day because there had just been a hurricane hitting the island a month before.
I was sitting in a beach chair nearby, reading a book (of course), when he came running over to me, all excited. He had found an old bottle containing what appeared to be a note inside. He broke open the bottle, and we tried to read the writing on the brittle old piece of paper. It was in German. Being Americans, we of course are not bi-lingual, so we brought the old note back home with us to find somebody to interpret.
The note, as it turned out, had been written in 1995 and signed by a five-year-old girl named Jana, put in the bottle and tossed in the ocean in the Canary Islands. The bottle had somehow made it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and ended up on that beach in Anguilla.
The note contained Jana's address in Germany, so of course Jerry wrote to her. Soon he got an email back from Jana and her parents. Later that year, June of 2000, we were going to be in Germany along with Jon and Tom (we were celebrating Tom's graduation from high school), so we arranged to meet Jana and her family in Cologne. Jana by then was ten years old.
We hit it off with the parents and became friends. We visited them two other times when we were in Europe and stayed at their house one of those times.
Anyway, where I'm heading with this is that Jana, now 18 years old, and her older sister Saskia are visiting us here in Minneapolis for three weeks, arriving a week from Friday. Part of that time, about ten days, they and Jerry are traveling to the American southwest, and I'll tell you more about that later. This will be their first time in the U.S.
By the way, the note from the bottle is now framed and hanging in our living room.
And arriving this Friday are my sister Mary and brother-in-law John from New Jersey. They'll be here for a week, and we are very much looking forward to their visit. I'd tell you more now, but this post is already too long, and, besides, they deserve an entry all their own. :-)
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