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! TchĂŒss!
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!

Hamburg

Hamburg

by | Sep 17, 2023 | Blog

This week was a start of our new “normal”. I started back to (online) school and Nathan did his (self-determined) studying. We took care of home things like laundry and shopping. We also took care of shopping for a home, since we only have this apartment for about two more weeks. For more about our normal life (if you even care), you can check out the post from earlier this week here.

I was able to get all my homework done, so that means I got to go out this weekend. We hopped on a train early Friday morning and headed north to Hamburg! The weather here is close to perfect, so we just had to take advantage of it.

With the “budget” train passes we are using, we must use the slower regional trains, we can’t reserve seats, and all of Germany can buy the same pass. So, we are learning by trial and error when EVERYONE else also wants to be traveling by train. For example, we thought that when we decided to travel back from Dresden last Friday in the afternoon, we would be avoiding rush hour. Oh no. We were right in the thick of it because everyone likes to get away on the weekend and the train to Leipzig was crazy busy. This week, we thought we would be ok, because we left our apartment at 6:30 am. Well, it was a bit better. But at one of the stations where we needed to change trains, our train got in a few minutes late, there were so many people on the platforms and in the tunnel to change platforms that it was almost too crowded to move. We witnessed a verbal fight that almost turned physical. But at least the train peeps were aware of the difficulty of changing trains at that moment and held the train until everybody could get through. Then, on the train, people were taking up seats with their luggage (very common), so there was nowhere to sit down. There was a group of about 10 ladies who were traveling together and having a rollicking good time. They adjusted and squeezed so that we could sit, so that was kind.

We got to Hamburg and headed straight (well, not straight exactly, because we stopped for some really good, authentic tacos) to the museums for a handful of composers, primarily Brahms. The Brahms Museum is housed in an original baroque building that survived the war. Brahms was born nearby. They have a small collection of items, but with good descriptions in English and it was very nice. The museum next door has rooms dedicated to Telemann, CPE Bach, the Mendelssohns, Mahler, and some others. It was also very good.

We checked into our hotel and went in hunt of some dinner. Hamburg is a big city, the largest “non-capital” in Europe and a port city. So, there are a lot of people and there is a lot of diversity. Not far from our hotel there was a street lined with all kinds of foods from different nations. We opted for Indian. Nathan’s Tikka Masala was yummy. My Korma was meh. But we had a nice meal after a long day.

We headed for the port on Saturday morning and took a boat tour that was enjoyable. We got up close and personal with the container ships and saw the workings of the port and how the city is changing and rebuilding. They have made some cool choices for how to use the real estate to make their city more livable and more beautiful.

We did a lot of walking after our boat tour. We strolled over to the Reeperbahn neighborhood, which is the entertainment and “red light” district. Not normally our top pick, but this is where The Beatles played for hours every night for months and really became musicians…it’s probably the experience that made them “The Beatles”. There is a spot called “Beatles Platz” which is just a few “sculptures” and some song titles on the ground. But it was still fun to see the neighborhood.

After that, we just wandered around town, learning about the city, eating what we liked and watching people. One thing we hadn’t had yet was a German classic and a great street food: currywurst. After WWII, the story goes, it was hard to get supplies. Some enterprising woman didn’t have mustard to serve with brats, but there was ketchup and curry powder. Currywurst was born. It might sound like a strange flavor combo, but it is delicious.

We climbed down about 100 stairs to walk a pedestrian and bike tunnel under the Elbe River. It was built in 1901 for the workers of Hamburg to get to work at the port more efficiently. Then we climbed up the same 100 stairs on the other side so we could enjoy of the city from across the river. Then we went right back across. (I should add that there are elevators, but we had to walk off pastries and currywurst.)

There is a church that was destroyed in the firebombing of Hamburg, but unlike in Dresden where they rebuilt their destroyed church, this one they left the tower and shell as a memorial to the dead and a message about the horrors of war. It’s called Nikolaikirche and it was quite lovely.

We went for dinner, which was of course hamburgers! They were adequate, but the best burgers we have eaten in Europe were in Budapest. Anyway, then we just walked around the busy shopping areas, the city hall (Rathaus), and the different parks and lakes. It was a lovely evening, but we were also biding our time because one thing we like to do when we visit a city is to try to find some live music. Once it was a bit later, we tried a few different possible locations in several different neighborhoods. We completely struck out and finally dragged ourselves onto a bus after a long but satisfying day of sightseeing.

Since we didn’t want to repeat the craziness of Friday’s train journey, and since we are fairly early risers anyway, we headed to the train station around 6:15 am. We easily caught the train, found seats, and avoided the rush as we did the same journey as Friday but in reverse. Things were starting to get busy at the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof as people were heading home after their weekend trips, but we were already home! It was a fun trip to a vibrant, living city.

It was a good weekend, and we are looking forward to apartment hunting, studying, and maybe another adventure this next week. Tchƫss!

Your Questions Answered

Your Questions Answered

by | Sep 13, 2023 | Blog

So, some of you asked some questions after last week’s post. Here are some answers!

What are you studying?

I am in my last semester of an online Bachelor’s Degree in Professional Studies through BYU-Idaho and Pathway Worldwide. Professional Studies is just a way to be able to offer a degree with more than one focus. My two areas of focus are Administrative Assisting and Graphic Design. This semester I have Adobe CC Basics (which I should have taken a year ago, but I think they really just added a few months ago), Organizational Leadership, (which is a business class), Professional Projects (which is kind of like an internship, but more project-based), and Teachings of Living Prophets. I stuck in a photo of the project I did this morning. I had to prove I know how to use Adobe Illustrator, so I had to build a robot out of assigned shapes. I have been able to do classes in these areas that I already had experience and interest in, so that has been great. I have absolutely no plans for my degree after graduation, except that I want to continue to be available to offer my expertise to my family, friends, and community. The Pathway program has been great because it has been entirely online, meaning that I can (and have!) completed my coursework from wherever I am, whether that is at home or not. It’s also super affordable. I was kicking around during the pandemic, digging around for projects to keep myself busy and one day I just thought, “I have a degree that I never finished. Maybe that should be my project.”

What does a typical day look like? How do you pass the time in the evening?

Well, much like a day a home. We get up fairly early, like 5:30 or 6:00. We exercise; Nathan often goes for a run and I do a workout of some sort at home. We get ready for the day and then we study. Nathan listens to podcasts, reads books that interest him, practices an instrument or two, studies languages, watches lectures from Wondrium (The Great Courses) or Masterclass. I work on my courses. Sometimes I listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I work on design projects. We take periodic breaks and have something to eat or drink. It’s flexible so that if the grandkids call or we need to go run an errand, we can break away. Sometimes we are in separate rooms and sometimes we are together. At the end of the “work day” we will do things that need to be done, like shopping, food prep, or other chores or projects. I might draw for fun or do some knitting. We make dinner together and maybe watch something on Netflix or some other streaming service. We will often take a walk. We also have to do research and planning for whatever travel or outings we have coming up, which actually takes a surprising amount of time and discussion. We head to bed around 9:00 because (let’s face it) we aren’t spring chickens.

Where do you shop for food?

This is actually a hard one to answer. Since we are still newish to Germany, we are still figuring out how to get our hands on some of the things we want or need and how to do that without spending a ridiculous amount of time or money. We have been to maybe 5 different grocery stores in the two-and-a-half weeks since we arrived. We have also gone to the pharmacy AND the drugstore (because those are two different things) and (to no one’s surprise) bakeries. We have figured out that Lidl has the nicest produce and nuts, but there are more choices for other things at a store (kind of like Target) called Kaufland (which means “Land of Buying”). Sometimes we can’t find something for a long time, like some sort of non-coffee, non-tea, non-sugary drink mix. Sometimes we stumble on something excellent, like a 1.5L bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero (my fave). We are slowly figuring it out just in time to move to a new apartment and probably a new neighborhood in a couple weeks.

What’s your apartment like?

The apartment is, as I mentioned, on the 5th floor of a building much like every other residential building in the city. It is brick and stone and many of them are covered in stucco. They are old enough that they have nice trim and accents around the windows and doors and they have tile roofs. There is a set of big double doors at the street entrance so that when they are both opened, a vehicle can drive in. That leads through a passage to a courtyard. Most courtyards seems to have common garden space. Ours has a tiny garden with one little table, but mostly it is used by the construction company that occupies the first floor of our building for their vehicles and inventory (windows and doors). The building has about 15 apartments in it and all of the windows face the street. We walk up and down old wooden stairs that are sturdy, but so creaky. The building is surprisingly quiet and we don’t hear the neighbors much. The apartment itself is newly renovated and decked out with IKEA furniture and fixtures almost completely, which is very common here in Europe. Usually, if you are renting an apartment, it doesn’t come with kitchen cabinets or appliances. You are responsible for putting that stuff in and you take it with you when you move. There is an entryway and the kitchen is directly across from the entrance door. It’s a narrow galley-style kitchen with a small refrigerator (about my height) with a freezer below. There is a cooktop and a small oven. There is a dinky microwave and a teeny tiny countertop dishwasher, which seems like a luxury. There is also a small washing machine, another luxury. To the right of the entry is the living room, with a couch, some book shelves, and a dining table with chairs. To the left of the entry is the bathroom and then the bedroom. One odd thing about the bathroom is that the vanity mirror/medicine cabinet is mounted really high. I can only see my face from about my eyebrows up.

Thanks for asking questions! You can ask questions for Nathan, too, and maybe we will be able to convince him to write the next one!

Saxony

Saxony

by | Sep 10, 2023 | Blog

This week, we decided to take advantage of the good weather and the fact that my courses haven’t started yet and try to get out for some adventures.

If you just want the highlights of this week, here they are:

We started exploring some musical sites. From the Handel House and a Beatles Museum in Halle to the Bach Museum and Thomaskirche in Leipzig, we have had a fun time starting to track down some of these composers that we came for. We also attended a free organ concert and an amazing piano concert in the Gohliser Schlösschen.

We were finally able to get our hands on the Deutschland Ticket, a magical pass that gets us all over the country for 49 euros each for the whole month. So we put it to good use and explored some different parts of Leipzig, the neighboring city of Halle, and we took a day trip to Dresden.

We had a few other experiences. We went to church, we visited the Stasi Museum, we wandered around Leipzig, and we ate some tasty food.

That’s this week in a nutshell. It turned out to be busier that we thought, but it was pretty good!

If you want the details, read on


It was a struggle to get our transport passes. It’s a pass designed for residents, not necessarily visitors, so it took a while before we found out how to get them with a credit card. Once we did, we were on the train the very next day to the next city over, Halle.

Halle is where Georg Friedrich Handel was born, so we went to the Handel House Museum. It was well done and we learned some new things about him. They also have a section of historic instruments that was interesting.

In doing some poking around the night before we left, Nathan found out that there’s a Beatles Museum in Halle, so we decided to try it out. It was surprisingly extensive, with details that most people wouldn’t really care about. There were a lot of wacky collectors’ items and merchandise that was entertaining to see. We ate Turkish for lunch, which was good, and our train home was delayed by an hour, which wasn’t good.

We are here in Leipzig in what happens to be the year of celebration to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Bach’s appointment to Kapellmeister of the Thomaskirche. We went to the Bach Museum and walked through the Thomaskirche. The museum is very well done with tons of information about Bach and his family. They have an awesome app that you can download and do a virtual tour. This is the city where Bach did most of his composing for choirs, composing a cantata every week for a time.

Near one of the beautiful parks, there is an 18th century palace called the Gohliser Schlösschen. We wandered around last week and this week we went to an amazing piano performance by Yeram Park. She played works by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Allan, and Stravinsky. It was an amazing concert and we got in for only 20 Euros each. We also caught a free lunchtime organ concert at one of the churches nearby our apartment.

Dresden is the biggest city nearby and we knew we wanted to visit. Along with Leipzig (and other cities in Germany), it was largely destroyed during World War II and then neglected during 40 years of communist rule. The rebuilding that has taken place in the city since 1990 is truly astounding and is still continuing. The baroque palace, the churches, and the buildings that house the museums are F-A-N-C-Y.

I will take just a moment here to warn you about our present travel style. We don’t visit every museum, every castle, every cathedral, or every historic site that we meet. There are just too many and we have seen most of the biggies. There is a point that you reach when you just can’t take another collection of armor or another solid gold whatever. So, I’m warning you now that we won’t be taking the “Grand Tour” of Europe that others might pursue. Now, back to Dresden.

With that in mind, we did choose to do a walking tour of the Old Town (Altstadt) and the New Town (Neustadt). It was very interesting and informative. (If you are visiting Europe on your own, I highly recommend Rick Steves’ books and excellent phone app.) We also chose to visit the Frauenkirche, the church that burned in 1945 and collapsed in a heap and was untouched until German reunification after 1989. It’s been rebuilt with some of the original stones in their original positions. In one of the photos, you can see a placard on a piece of the rubble that resides in the square outside the church, indicating where it came from the dome. The church is such a powerful message of recovery and rebuilding. There is also a cross on the altar with a wonderful message. It is made from two nails taken from the cathedral in Coventry England, which was firebombed by the Germans. The cross was a gift from the people of England as a symbol of peace. Simply beautiful.

Here in Leipzig, we visited the museum that has been built in the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. It’s in a distinctive building called the “Ronde Ecke”, or round corner. We learned more about the extensive surveillance that the East German citizens suffered at the hands of the Stasi and a huge network of their neighbor informers. It was astounding. We also learned how the “Peaceful Revolution” that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the regime actually started 7 years prior in Leipzig’s Nickolaikirche with weekly prayer meetings. The citizens continued their vigils and they grew over the following years until in 1989, there were completely peaceful demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. Moving.

We also went to church and that was another adventure. Everything was in German, except for the opening and closing prayers, which were offered by English-speakers. We sang the hymns in German (our experience with singing Swiss songs came in handy!), we took the sacrament, and we enjoyed being with people while we tried to pick out words that we know (Nathan understands far more than I do). The young women presented the program and that was nice. Coincidentally, they sang the same song that Nathan played with Lauren and Sarah a few weeks ago. We talked to a few people after the meeting, so that was good and we will visit again.

That’s about it for this week. I start back into school work tomorrow, but I’m hoping that I can confine my study to Monday-Thursday so that we can have some adventures on the weekends. We have some things to figure out this week so that we can take steps toward registering our address and getting me a longer-term visa. More to come.

I would love to hear from you! Do you have any questions about what’s going on with us or questions about Germany? Leave a comment with all the things you are wondering about!