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A Journey to Poland

A Journey to Poland

by | Oct 22, 2023 | Blog

One place we knew we wanted to visit while we are living here in Germany is Poland. We sat down a little over a week ago to plan a little trip to Kraków and then we looked at the weather. It looked good for the next day and the weekend and then COLD and SNOWY after that. After a chilly November trip to Canada a couple of years ago, we learned that you can be a tourist when it’s cold, but it’s more fun when it’s not. So, we decided on Friday afternoon to buy train tickets and leave first thing Saturday morning. Kraków is a beautiful city that has hundreds of years of history and culture. We got there in the evening and wandered around town a bit to get the lay of the place. It has a huge central square lined with shops and restaurants. The buildings have a lot of character and flavor. There are gorgeous churches all over and the Polish people are still quite religious compared to other parts of Europe, so the churches are well maintained. One of our favorite things about the city is the Planty. When they took down the fortifying wall around the city, they filled in the moat and planted trees and it’s now a park that goes around the entire city center. We did a self-guided walking tour, stopping at the most interesting spots. The only remaining city gate, St. Mary’s Cathedral, and the Jewish Quarter were all interesting. We had to bundle up and fortify ourselves with warm drinks since it was definitely feeling wintery and we also munched our way around town, trying some Polish classics as well as some other delicious meals. We had a truly excellent dinner one night—maybe the best we’ve eaten since we arrived in Europe. We marked off another square on our Composer Bingo card and went to an all-Chopin concert. Although Chopin was from Warsaw and spent all his adult life abroad, the Polish people are very fond of his music. The pianist that performed was phenomenal. We visited the castle and cathedral of Wawel. It’s a gorgeous complex on top of the hill looking over the city and the Polish people count this place as their heart and soul. We also checked out the museum that is housed in Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory. It has a really good exhibit about how the citizens of Kraków were affected by World War II. The population of Kraków was about 25% Jewish before the war and there was good cooperation between the different peoples. After the German invasion and occupation, the Jewish Quarter and the Ghetto were pretty much erased and subsequently neglected. When Steven Spielberg was making “Schindler’s List”, he decided to film in the city where the story takes place and it revitalized interest and investment in the history of the area. The museum shares details of the resistance and how Kraków miraculously escaped being leveled like Warsaw as the Red Army liberated Poland. We visited Auschwitz-Birchenau on a tour, even though we had initially thought we would skip it. We visited Buchenwald just a week before, so we weren’t sure that we were ready for the emotional weight of another concentration camp. Our guide was a woman from the town Oświęcim, which the Nazis Germanified to Auschwitz. She repeatedly reminded us that the original camp was for forced labor and political prisoners. The bulk of the systematic slaughter of people actually took place at Birkenau. The museum and memorial are so well-done and it is truly chilling. Concentration sites outside of Germany are preserved by the victims of the cruelty and carnage, so there is more emphasis that these people were murdered, especially the women and children. It was a long and difficult day, but nothing compared to the true suffering that happened to those people and continues to happen in the world to this day. We also visited the 13th-century Wieliczka Salt Mine. It has been functioning for centuries and also welcoming tourists for several hundred years. It was so awesome to see the mine shafts and tunnels. The mine has nine levels and we saw bits of three of those. There are wide open chambers where the miners spent decades clearing out big chunks of rock salt. Some have water at the bottom. Some have carvings of mythical characters, religious figures, or famous people that visited the mine. A couple are huge and there is one that is a big chapel with salt statues and chandeliers made of salt crystals. The guided tour was excellent and we really enjoyed our time there. Kraków was a great place to spend a few days and we are so glad we took the opportunity to visit. We will definitely return to Poland in the future if we have the chance.
Wir sind Leipziger

Wir sind Leipziger

by | Oct 16, 2023 | Blog

Hello, from Krakow, Poland! This week’s post will be a quick one, because we are having trouble finding time to write about adventures while we are having adventures! 😀

Two significant things (and one less than fun thing) happened to us on Monday.

First, we became official Leipzigers! We have the complimentary coupons and keychains to prove it now. Oh yeah, and the official documents that we have been waiting for, too. Through Nathan’s diligent efforts to gain an appointment at the registration office, we were able to register at our new address and we are now official. Fun fact, this whole registration thing in various countries in Europe is a holdover from the Roman Empire. Now, Nathan has moved his focus to the next goal, residence permits so maybe we can stay longer than our allotted 90 days.

The second thing was less fun. Since we had been gone on our last trip for a few days, our cupboards were bare. So, we stopped after getting registered to get some groceries and have some lunch. However, while we were waiting for our sandwiches to (slowly) be made, the heavens opened and there was a pretty good rainstorm that we then had to walk home in. We were soaked, the groceries were soaked. It was soggy.

The third thing was that Monday was October 9, the day that Leipzigers celebrate the beginning of the end of Communist rule in East Germany. It was on the 9th of October 1989 when tens of thousands of Leipzigers took to the streets in peaceful protest and demanded more freedom of movement. They were threatened with violence from the police but started with what had become the weekly prayer meeting in the Nikolaikirche followed by a completely peaceful march. The police didn’t really know how to react, so they allowed the march. Germans across the country saw a glimmer of hope that their efforts were working and would maybe progress would be made. Protests continued and a month later, the Berlin Wall came down.

The celebration consisted of different art installations in some of the city’s plazas and people carrying lit candles and placing them in the plazas to show the collective power of hope and action. It’s called Lichtfest Leipzig and it was fun to be out amongst the people of our new home on a meaningful night.

I will save the report of our impromptu trip to Poland until next week. Tchüss!

P.S. If you would like to help with my service project, you can go to the Utah Food Bank website here, make a cash donation, and then send me a text or email and I’ll include your donation in the team totals!

Here, There, and Everywhere

Here, There, and Everywhere

by | Oct 8, 2023 | Blog

Hi, all! What a week! We did a bit of normal and a whole lotta different. We learned from RadioLab this week that novel experiences make you “live a long life”. Here’s hoping! The week started off with a guided tour of Leipzig. “But,” you say, “you’ve already been there for over a month.” Correct, my friend. But a very sweet, if slightly odd, fellow that we met at church offered to give us a special tour of the city, so we just had to take him up on it. We wandered around the city center while he gave us the history of the place. He is obviously enthusiastic about his home and loves to share that. We enjoyed seeing the city through his eyes a bit and we learned a few new things as well. On Tuesday, it was a national holiday here. I think I’ll save the historical details until next week’s post, but here I will mention what the holiday vibe was around here. It was crazy crowded with lots of energy…on Monday…not on Tuesday. On the holiday, it was a snooze-fest. I think they just celebrate quietly by having a day off. Certainly not the loud, bombastic, fireworks-a-palooza that we think of for a national bash. Anyway, we did attend a concert that night in the famous concert hall, the Gewandhaus. It was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (very German) with a 40-minute prelude of some guy (politician?) talking and talking and talking. At least the music was good! Wednesday wasn’t anything too crazy. We went to the central library to study. We found on our last visit that they have a large collection of printed music up on the top floor as well as two electronic pianos. So, I worked on school while Nathan practiced away. On our way home, we stopped to check out an Asian market that Nathan found on Google because he wanted to find some kimchi. Now you can choose your own adventure. To hear a ridiculous story about a 4-year-long quest for a certain bottle of sriracha, read the next paragraph. To skip right to the rest of the post, skip the next paragraph. Once upon a time, we went to Budapest for a whole week in 2019 because we could rent an Airbnb for $25 per night and we thought, “Why not?” Then, we kinda fell in love with the place. Hungarian food is awesome, the people are so nice, there is beautiful architecture and history, the language is absolutely bonkers, and they have fun live music. But also, THE MOST AWESOME HAMBURGERS! So anyway, we went to this one burger joint in an old building where we sat in a window (not by a window, IN the window) on the second story and ate a mind-blowing meal. At said burger joint, as expected, they had various condiments on the table, one of them being a bottle of sriracha. “So what?” you reply, “Sriracha is not that strange.” But how about black pepper sriracha? Huh? It was delicious and we thought, “we should get some of that.” So, every time we went grocery shopping, we were looking for it. We knew the brand (Flying Goose) and we kept finding the regular sriracha, but never the black pepper. We searched all of Europe (well, the parts we went to) for the next 3 months and never found the stuff. I googled it when I got home at the end of the summer and found out that they do indeed ship the stuff, but not to the U.S. Foiled again! I dreamed up elaborate schemes around shipping a bottle to some acquaintance in Europe and then having them send it on to us, but never had the guts to actually do something so dumb. Every once in a while, I’d search again with no luck. Until Tuesday. We rode the escalator down into an Asian market in the basement of a shopping center in Leipzig. Nathan asked, “do you want anything besides kimchi?” And at that moment I looked over to a shelf with sriracha bottles and I thought, “I wonder if….” AND THERE IT WAS!!!! Anyway, after searching for it for 4 years, did it live up to our memories of it in Budapest? Of course not! Was it a tasty addition to our (kinda boring) seasonings at home? Definitely. 😀 It’s an extra spicy barbeque sauce with soy sauce added in. And now back to the market…We bought microwavable ramen (except we don’t have a microwave) and these crazy crunchy peas that taste like spicy Trix cereal. It was a fun diversion. During all of this stuff, Nathan was wrestling with the red tape of getting us registered at our new address and hopefully getting us residence permits so we can stay longer. (No one else will appreciate this reference, but it’s here for my sister: “There’s enormous red tape in the bush.”–another dumb movie reference…see “The In-Laws”.) He got the required document, he made copies, he did his research, he collected our passports and trekked to the office to start the process, and…came right back home because there were 200 other people there doing the same thing. So, he’s going to change his strategy and try again tomorrow. Pray for us. So after our less-than-pleasant experience with the weekend crowds on some previous excursions (see Dresden and Hamburg) or travel tactics has been to leave Leipzig on Friday morning and return before Sunday afternoon. So, this week, we headed southwest to Eisenach, Erfurt, and Weimar. Never heard of them? I hadn’t really either, but all three cities turned out to be pretty cool. For one thing, we got to see something we’ve been missing at bit: hills! Eisenach is the birthplace of Bach (yes, him again). Since we already had a pretty good experience with the Bach museum here in Leipzig, we felt like out time was better spent seeking out the other super-famous resident, Martin Luther. After he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, he retreated to Wartburg Castle in Eisenach under the protection of Frederick III. (Just an aside here: I was always under the impression that tacking his points onto the church door was an extra bit of rebellion. Not so. The door of the church was basically a town’s bulletin board.) While cloistered at Wartburg Castle, he translated the New Testament into German (more dangerous behavior), thereby making it available to the common people and standardizing the German language. I’m no Lutheran, but I do appreciate his efforts. Here’s a thought from Luther for you: “You can’t keep the birds of worries and cares from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.” The castle was pretty great. I know I said that we don’t do every castle, but this one was worth it. It has a thousand-year history of construction and reconstruction. There are amazing mosaics from the 19th century in a medieval style. It’s perched on a rock over some gorgeous countryside. We hiked up to the castle and enjoyed a very good tour in English by a (very) German tour guide, which was fun all on its own. We also had a great conversation with another guide about William Tyndale–he also did his Bible translation in Germany! So cool. But he did not have the good luck of Martin Luther and died for his efforts. After Eisenach, we stopped in at Erfurt. Here is another Luther town, where he became a monk. It was also a trade town, making its fortune on woad dye. The town is really charming and still has a medieval vibe without feeling like a cartoon or a tourist trap. It’s still a living place with plenty of regular, working Germans. We spent some time wandering around, ate some crazy bar-b-q, and watched the sunset over the twin churches from the walls of the citadel. Then we hopped on the train for a quick ride to Weimar. We found our little accommodation and hit the hay. Weimar is the birthplace of “German Classicism” and was the home of Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, and the Bauhaus movement. Unfortunately, all that intellectual and artistic glory can’t counteract the fact that it is also home to the former Buchenwald concentration camp. We visited the site of the camp and the memorial there on Saturday morning. It was sobering, of course. Saturday was a gray, cool, and windy day. The camp is up on a hillside, overlooking the surrounding woods and valley. It felt like another layer of torture to me: being able to see the beautiful countryside and being trapped behind barbed wire. According to Wikipedia, “[Buchenwald] was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.” It’s estimated that 280,000 prisoners passed through the gates and 56,545 of them died there. The purpose of the camp changed over time, starting out with Germans who needed to be “retrained” and then transitioning more to Jewish prisoners, other “enemies of the state, and POWs when the war started. Prisoners were forced to work, manufacturing arms and other things for the war effort. The conditions were especially horrific for the Jewish and Romani prisoners. “In early April 1945, as US forces approached, the Germans began to evacuate some 28,000 prisoners from the Buchenwald main camp and an additional several thousand prisoners from the subcamps of Buchenwald. About a third of these prisoners died from exhaustion en route or shortly after arrival, or were shot by the SS. The underground resistance organization in Buchenwald, whose members held key administrative posts in the camp, saved many lives. They obstructed Nazi orders and delayed the evacuation. On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation, prisoners took control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald. Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp.” (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) Then, the Soviets used the camp for five more years to imprison their own prisoners (another 28,000, some 7,000 of which died). The thought we had over and over was not just, “This is horrific.” It was more like, “This is horrific and how many other people are in terrible circumstances now that we don’t know about?” There are an estimated 50 million people in the world TODAY living in some form of slavery and 1.2 million forcibly displaced or stateless refugees RIGHT NOW. I think that we hear the stories of the holocaust and we are shocked and dismayed and we think, “What a waste. I’m glad that is behind us.” But it’s not. I don’t know how to solve the problem, but I do know that we can all reach out to someone who is different from us, to someone who comes from somewhere else or from a different background. Learn their story, and then they will be a person to you instead of just “other”. That’s a start. Sermon over. We then visited the house where Liszt lived until his death (but he didn’t die there) and the house where Goethe lived until his death (he did die there). Then we lucked into a free concert of choral and orchestral students from the Franz Liszt Institute in the city church (Stadtkirche Sankt Peter und Paul). They performed 3 cool choral works and Psalm 42 by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The entire concert was conducted by students and the music sounded so good in that space that the pieces were meant for. We left in the dark and rain the next morning to catch an early train back to Leipzig and beat the crowds. We walked at least 4.5 miles on Friday and 9 on Saturday, so we are glad to be back for a bit of a rest. But we’ll be back at it again soon. One last thing (if you’ve made it this far). I have deliberately not gone on and on about all the yummy food we’ve been sampling, since that’s not everyone’s jam. But if you would be interested in an “extra” about the nibbles, comment below and I will see what I can do! Tchüss!
Move it on Out (Girl)

Move it on Out (Girl)

by | Oct 1, 2023 | Blog

Ignore the title if you wish, but to appreciate the extremely obscure, late nineties cultural reference, I give you this clip from “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”.

Ok, now that is out of the way, I need to throw myself on the mercy of you good people. One of my projects for the semester requires me to head up a service project. As you can imagine, that might be a little tough as I’m in a foreign country where I barely speak the language. So, I’m thinking I can do it virtually, assuming that I can get some help from a few of you. If any of you would be willing to collect funds or food and donate your collection to your local food bank, we can collectively do some good for a few folks. I’ll post our group’s stats on a snappy little webpage and we can have a long-distance high-five. If that sounds like something you could do during the week of October 15th, leave a comment here on this page or just send me a text or email and I will contact you with further details. Thank you, a million times.

Ok, now that both of those things are out of the way, here is another installment of “This Week in Leipzig”. We did a lot of studying/practicing and enjoyed the early autumn weather with some nice walks in the parks around here. We also wandered around a couple of markets and enjoyed the energy of people out and about and enjoying good food and shopping at various stalls on the Marktplatz.

We finally got to enjoy some of the different music offerings here in Leipzig. We caught the final free organ concert of the season at the Michaeliskirche. This one included a soprano for some of the pieces, so that was a nice addition. Nathan tracked down an eatery that offers live music just about every night, so we went this week and saw a guitar duo and had a bite to eat. They played some DEEP cuts from the eighties and they only had one gear (lively), but it was fun to be part of the crowd. The restaurant is tucked into a courtyard-type area in the middle of the city, so it feels like it’s a bit of a secret, even though it’s not. The one thing we don’t especially enjoy about sitting outside at restaurants here (and all over Europe) is that people are often smoking. As we are not smokers, that is kind of a bummer.

We also attended an excellent chamber music concert at the Mendelssohn House Museum. We heard the Mendelssohn D-minor piano trio along with more Mendelssohn and some Brahms. It was so fun to be in the same room where Mendelssohn probably also played music with his family and friends. We also enjoyed the excellent museum offerings there. We are really getting a feel for just how much music is going on here in this area every day. It’s a lot of fun.

The biggest news of the week is that we moved into our more permanent apartment. We dragged all of our stuff a couple of blocks to our new place. We now have only 65ish steps to climb instead of 85, but we also have an elevator if we are just too tired to haul our carcasses up the stairs. We like our new place–non-squeaky floors, a sweet little balcony, and nice, new everything. The building is so new that they are still putting the final touches on the outside this week. But there is a nice little slice of green space just outside and the neighbors across the street have some lovely window boxes full of the flowers that we are enjoying while they last.

We had to go shopping for bedding and a few kitchen things, so that was another bit of business. Nathan was a rockstar for figuring out the rental contract and the banking system. Now that we have an address, we can tackle getting residence permits and having mail delivered. Sometimes the prospect of jumping through the bureaucratic hoops just seems too daunting, but then we remind ourselves that thousands of people do it too, and we continue on. We will definitely be here in Leipzig at least until the end of December. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

Have a great week!

Laying Low in Leipzig

Laying Low in Leipzig

by | Sep 24, 2023 | Blog

This week was pretty tame compared to last week. The biggest news is that we found an apartment! We will be moving one whole street to the east and one whole block to the north. It’s a brand new building and we will be the first occupants of the flat. It’s going to be nice to downshift again from “travel mode” and park ourselves for a few months.

The rest of the week we mostly did our regular routine. The weather was really nice and we are enjoying temperatures in the 60s and 70s during the day. We talked to all the grandkids, we went to church (all German this time, but we’re getting bits and pieces), we bought tickets for some future concerts and planned a November trip to Berlin.

On that topic, for cities that we have visited in the past, we’re taking the approach of visiting for an event, instead of just because. So we are on the lookout for concerts, festivals, or other things that might make a return trip more worth the travel.

We played tourist in our own town on Thursday. We took the tram to the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations). In 1813, a joint effort by armies from Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Sweden defeated Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Leipzig. It was the largest battle fought up to that point in history and remained so until WWI. The battle was a turning point and the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s quest to own Europe. There is an absolutely massive monument built on the site of the former battlefield. It was built at the beginning of the 20th century, became a favorite site for Hitler speeches, and then grudgingly allowed to remain during the East German era. It’s kinda cool, but as with most battle monuments, kinda depressing. The only inspirational part was the sheer determination of the people of Leipzig to build and then restore the thing.

One thing about Germany (and some other European countries) that I wanted to share is the Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones. As a memorial to the many people who were unjustly arrested or sent to concentration camps, small brass bricks have been placed in the pavement near where they last lived or worked. Sometimes there will be a whole cluster of them signifying a family. The one that I have included here is in our neighborhood. It reads “Hier wohnte Rudolf Opitz” or “Here lived Rudolf Opitz”. It includes the date he was arrested, the camp he was sent to, and the date he died. It is a remembrance for each one of those who were unjustly executed and another way that Germany has refused to turn its back on their painful history and have tried to make amends.

I compiled some of our travel memories for the month into a video. If you choose to watch, I hope you enjoy coming along on some of our adventures! I appreciate that you are with us for even a part of it…the distance doesn’t seem as great when I think that some of you are experiencing some of this crazy experiment. Have a great week!