Europe 2013: Glinde Again After All These Years

August 28, 2013

When I was an exchange student lo these many decades ago, I lived for a time with the Keim family in Glinde. We ended up being good friends, and I visited briefly in 2000 on my carefully choregraphed return through Hamburg from a trip to Vienna for Christmas. It was a good thing I did return through Hamburg, too -- in Vienna, I thought I was going crazy, so little did I understand of the German they were speaking. I got to Hamburg, and suddenly it was like everything snapped into focus, and it all made sense again. I hadn't realized at the time how different the dialects would be.

Today, I woke up after Lissen had already left for the day, and slowly put my stuff together. In the middle of it all, fortunately, I remembered that I needed to tell my future Europe contacts what the upcoming plan was, so I was forced to haul out the map and figure out how I was going to get from here to there, particularly the last bit, where I go very quickly from France to Ireland to catch a plane. I wanted to maximize my time in France to the extent possible, and I was able to find the perfect ferry, which takes off from Cherbourg and lands in Rosslare the next morning, landing a day before my plane takes off. I couldn't really ask for a better situation, so I bought a ticket this morning so I wouldn't have to think about it any more. There were only a few of the cheap tickets left, so I think buying it now, weeks in advance, was the right way to do it.

This also forced me to look at the remaining time I have, and figure out how to parcel it out most effectively. To some extent it means I give up on my "no plan" plan, but I always knew there was going to be some kind of plan, I just wanted to avoid setting it very rigidly. I still have a lot of flexibility.

In any case, I got all my stuff together, and installed on the bike. I took down a few damp paper towels to try to wipe off the worst of the sticky sap that had fallen from the trees (there are some cars absolutely caked with the stuff -- I believe one could date exactly how often a car is driven just by examining the sap strata). It was another bittersweet moment (this trip is pretty much guaranteed to contain a bunch of them) as I locked the keys into Lissen's apartment and closed the door with a stark, final-sounding click.

However, ever forward, and I programmed Glinde into the GPS (recently switched to German, since I was thinking in Germany anyway, and it was weirdly jarring to see "SE on Friedrichsbergerstr." on the screen. I dropped Guenther an SMS saying I was on my way, and set out.

I found the house after a bit of riding here and there in the area, finally making a positive identification by the giant antennas on the roof. Gunther is a ham radio operator (although not much these days, as it happens), and was my original inspiration to get my ham license back in 1996. It was cool to be back in his shack (which was evidently the only part of the house I still clearly remembered). My room is much as I last left it twenty years ago.

Interestingly, I can remember a brief visit (so I said before I'd been back to Hamburg twice -- correct that: three times now) in 2001, just after New Years. I had been down in Vienna for a couple weeks, and decided to return via Hamburg and look up friends. However, the Keims absolutely can't remember the visit, and we've been racking our brains trying to come up with details and information about the trip. It's before any of us had a digital camera, and I certainly don't have any photos from the time with me, assuming I even had a camera on me. It was quite a brief visit, though, only an afternoon if I remember correctly. In any case, it's provided for some consternation.

Catching up with Guenther and Monika is very enjoyable, though, and I've told them about what I've done so far, and what I'll be doing soon. They've told me about some of their trips (it's amazing what producing a map can generate in the way of stories). We've related our lives to each other, and it's nice to re-forge the bonds that had existed before. It's a pity my time here is so short, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Their son Ralf (who was in California during the year that I was staying here) will be here late tonight, so we'll finally get to meet (assuming we didn't meet 12 years ago). It's been cool to just sit on the porch and have tea in sight of the lovely back garden they've clearly been working on for years. Guenther and I also sat down in his radio shack and made a few PSK contacts (PSK is a digital mode that almost magically gets a signal through in the very worst conditions) and lamented the general slow death of ham radio. I still have the same gear lust as ever for the radios, but there's essentially no one I want to talk to on the radio, so I haven't really one switched on in years. I talked to my parents on their boat ten years ago, and that's the last time I seriously used ham radio. I keep the gear around because it will come in very handy after a natural disaster such as, oh, I don't know, a giant earthquake.

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Dinner was delicious, and I loaded up on salad, since I seem to have a hard time finding green food on the road. Ralf came to visit fairly late, it was nearly 10 by the time he got there. It was pretty cool to meet him. He talked a mile a minute, and we covered another wide variety of topics, this time dropping into politics and world events, which was a bit depressing (it always is). Ralf is a part-time teacher, and part time administrator for an organization that runs some college-like schools in Germany. If I got it right, he teaches economics.

I described my trip, both past and future, and we talked about where would be a good destination for tomorrow.

It's strange and cool to be back in this house, where I spent a number of months in the middle of my year in Germany. I only remembered bits and pieces of it, having somehow moved the kitchen around and forgotten how other bits go together. Doesn't matter much. It's a nice house, with a lovely new bathroom, and clearly well cared-for.

One thing I thought was pretty cool was that Guenther and Monika have made a large number of trips with their bicycles, riding around Ireland and a number of other places around Europe. Makes me think I should try something similar, although I normally think of my bicycle only as a way to get from point A to point B.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.