Sunday shopping: don’t want it, don’t need it.

Dear all,

This happens to me all the time. I’ll be walking around an area of town I visit regularly when suddenly I’ll be forced to stop and gape at an empty space between two buildings. I know I’ve walked down this street dozens of times, maybe had coffee around the corner almost as often, and yet I have to ask myself, “what did the building that once stood there actually look like?” Why can’t I even remember what colour it was? Why did I never really notice it before?

With Germany slowly but surely demolishing laws which set the number of hours per day which stores can be open, this is the feeling I think I will get should the country go all the way and allow Sunday shopping across the board, everywhere.

For most of the time when I was still living in Canada, Sunday was still a day when you couldn’t go shopping or have a drink in the bar. In Vancouver, those who were desperate for a beer but hadn’t the foresight to stock up the day before would drive over the line to Point Roberts, that little finger of the US of A attached to Canada but sticking out below the 49th parallel.

This may have been an inconvenience for some, but for me it was heaven. Finally, one day out of the week when there was so little traffic you could take your bike for a long spin and not have to clean the grit out off your face at the end of it. Finally, one day out of the week when people seemed to have the time to get to where they wanted to go, when we all seemed to have time to visit friends, hang out, play games in the park, go for a walk. Without the traffic of employees heading to work, delivery trucks dropping off wares and shoppers driving to and fro, the noise level in the city dropped noticeably, too.

That all changed with Vancouver hosting a world exposition in 1986. Oh, we can’t have Sunday closures anymore, they all said. They’ll think we’re backward or something. After the circus had come and gone the stores stayed open on Sundays, and for me, the day was never the same. I go back now and can really feel how the peaceful atmosphere of this one day per week is truly gone for good.

That’s one of the reasons why I like living in my backward corner of the world. It’s like stepping back into a time when Sunday had its own feel to it, its own special atmosphere.

I know I’m a dinosaur and the whole of Germany will probably one day be one big shopper’s paradise like the business interests wish it already were. That’s why I try to take advantage of Sundays as much as I can. I never know if I’ll ever get a chance do something like this again: play street hockey with my kid on a supermarket parking lot normally choked with cars.

Wishing you a great Sunday,

Ian

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Berlin zoo: we’re into cute and cuddly, so who needs ‘em?

In a break with format Letters Home to You publishes the first issue of THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT THE DAILY NEWS, a regular feature of irregular happenings.

by Special correspondent Some guy we hauled in off the street
Berlin (DNDN) Officials at the Berlin Zoo say they fail to understand the uproar in the scientific community in the wake of plans to destroy a breeding pair of Aye-aye, a rare Lemur equipped with an unusually long middle finger it uses to dig for grubs and maggots.

“Look, we asked around, and pretty much everyone we talked to agreed that these things are just too ugly and have too many disgusting habits to keep them on display any longer,” said Dieter Doozer, executive director in charge of waste removal. “They have these buggy eyes, scraggly hair for fur, paddles for ears, long skinny fingers - and their breakfast! It makes you want to toss your cookies, I tell you.”

The animals were brought to the zoo three years ago as part of a conservation effort undertaken in cooperation with the government of Madagascar, where loss of habitat is threatening the animals with extinction. The Aye-aye (pronounced eye-eye) used to live in the eastern part of the island nation off southeast Africa. Excessive logging over the past two decades in addition to being stigmatised by the local population, who kill them because they are regarded as a harbinger of death, has added to their plight in the wild.

“Nobody wants to pay good money to see an animal as horrible to look at as this one,” said zoo director Helmut Askew. “We thought of playing up their mating habits and using that as a selling point,” he added, “because they hang upside-down from a tree branch and it takes an hour for them to finish copulating. But this being Berlin, you see that sort of thing all the time.”

Askew added that the zoo has made every effort to get the public to take an interest in the animals, and he’s left with no alternative. “It doesn’t help that they’re nocturnal, either. We used to set an alarm clock for noon every day to wake them up so they’d crawl out of their nests for everyone to get a good look, but that just pissed them off. They’re hard enough on the eye when they’re sedate. You should see them in a fit of screaming rage.”

Zoo officials say the animals will be carefully and humanely dispatched to Butt-Ugly Heaven to ensure they suffer no pain. Their pens are to be demolished to make room for the zoo’s latest addition, a polar bear cub named Knut the media and public just can’t seem to get enough of.

Officials played down any role the presence of the playful, small, white, loveable, cuddly ball of fur that just make you want to say “awwwwww” at the mere mention of his name may have had in their decision to say ix-nay to the Aye-aye.

“OK, let’s put it this way. It was a choice between spending additional resources to expand Knut’s area while keeping this repulsive creature around but out of sight, or just saying, ‘what the hell, nobody cares anyway, let’s save a few euros,’” Askew said. “You can’t blame us, really. it’s market forces, and besides, they fling their poo. It gets on your clothes and stinks like hell. My employees bitch about them all the time. Our cleaning bills are going through the roof.”

The zoo has been thronged with visitors since Knut was first shown to the public. A trashy newspaper has even offered 1000 euros for the best photo of Knut sent in by readers.

“Knut is just so plushy and cute, I want to take him home with me,” gushed zoo visitor Greta Lessa, an employee with the Berlin city government. “As soon as I read that they were going to show him, I called in sick — wait, that thing’s not on, is it? OK? Good. Anyway, let’s just say that I rushed down as fast as I could. I just love him.”

That little girl down there, she’s like a madwoman!

Dear all,

Time is short and I have to dash off to the salt mines, so a quick wrap of the last couple of weeks:

The weather was iffy the first few days (see previous posts) but unrelentingly beautiful the second week. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting to wake up to another fogged-in nightmare, but every morning the sun would bathe the peaks in a succession of pink, orange and yellow light.

One of the advances in skiing over the past couple of decades is the massive increase in lift capacity. The flipside of that is:

Somehow I managed to get myself through that sloping pinball machine of legs and bodies. Luckily that’s the worst I saw of it, and it’s not like that everywhere, every day.

================

Something must have sunk into her bones and muscle memory over the past year, or maybe it’s a stark reminder that kids grow up a lot faster than you think, or that you actually do learn to swim out of the pool over the following winter and ski over the summer, because I’m telling you, the little red-haired girl is now unstoppable on boards. I overheard a British lady say to a friend half-way down a run: “That little girl who passed us, she’s like a mad woman!” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m her old man. I can barely keep up.”

I was amazed how she suddenly started a rough parallel this year - most of the time, anyway. She does sit back sometimes, and I can’t seem to convince her that the Canadian method of HANDS STEADY IN FRONT instead of flailing out at the sides like some Austrian is the better way to go, but there’s always next year.

I managed to stop her on the lift long enough to explain that I wanted to film her skiing. I’d go behind her, she’d show me what she can do so we could look at it later. Again, she got away from me.

I was going to be trendy and buy carving skis, but stuck with my reliable 200cm racers. Easier to spot in a crowd.
After a few days I decided to pay 35 euros for a base, edge and wax job. What a difference! Not that they were heavily gouged or beat up or anything, but it was like stepping into a new pair of skis the next morning. Easier turning, more precise edge control without being grabby, and fast-fast-fast.

Funniest sight of the trip: I walk into the men’s and there’s some little kid, must have been no more than four years old, teetering precariously on the toes of his ski boots in front of a grown-ups’ urinal because the kids’ one is marked “defekt.” He’s just about ready to let fly when his grandfather I guess grabs him away toward the biffies saying,, “you’re gonna have to grow a bit before you try that again!” As he did so I instinctively jumped back, expecting an arcing jet of yellow to splash in my general direction, but luckily that didn’t happen.

Could go on, but I’ve had enough of skiing for one year, and perhaps you have too.

cheers,

Ian

© 2007 lettershometoyou

This is a long, long way from the old Whistler gondola

Dear Bruce especially,

So the lift I eventually made it down to that foggy first afternoon wasn’t the one I was expecting to find, though it was in the right place. Inching my way down through the soup, I was thinking of how much I was going to enjoy lining up with a bunch of wet and exhausted skiers and snowboarders, patiently waiting for the privilege of cramming into a creaky old aerial tramway like matches in a box, trying hard not to brush up against their dripping Gore-Tex or get a full-face blast of lunchtime garlic sausage or smoker’s breath that could knock a buzzard off a shitwagon at 50 paces as they blabber on their cellphones or try to send a text message with their gloves on or complain about the weather and how it was much better last year wasn’t it? So much more snow and don’t you think it’s time they replaced this old crate, it’s 50 years old if it’s a day, think it’ll make it down? Then approaching the mid-way support pylon, the reassuringly friendly announcement of, “You are now approaching the tower. The car will swing. Don’t scream.” Meanwhile if you’re stuck in the middle of this mass of arms and legs and skis and poles and unable to peer out the window and who the hell could because it would be hopelessly fogged up anyway, you’ll just have to close your eyes and be thankful the weather is so bad that the American Air Force isn’t out for a little low-level aerial acrobatics to hasten your arrival 170 metres down to the cliff bottom.

But instead of getting the nostalgic and slightly risky thrill of once again riding in the alpine equivalent of the horse and buggy, the top station which loomed up out of the fog looked somehow… different. Yes, they had indeed replaced the old tram with a brand-new gondola! So no lift line. No standing there for 10 minutes on a stairway waiting for the next tram. Just the biggest gondola cars I’ve ever seen, with seating for 12 along three sides and room for another 12 standing. Capacity: two tonnes. Departure: every 25 seconds. Even before stepping in, the first thing you notice is that it’s suspended on a pair of parallel cables. Never seen that before, but apart from that, the ride is smooth and frankly unremarkable. The car latches imperceptively onto the cables and soon you’re racing away down the mountain. It’s when you get to the bottom that the fun begins. I’m looking out the window facing downhill as we approach the bottom station. We enter the building and suddenly we slow down. Done it a million times.

But wait! Why aren’t the doors opening? And where’s the platform? Why are we dangling way up near the ceiling? Why do I only see a grid of catwalks immediately below, no place to get out, and at least three storeys down to the surface? I look around in confusion and think, WE’RE DOOMED! We’ve been sidetracked! Then I see - can’t believe I hadn’t noticed them already - the most enormous steel wheels I have ever laid eyes on, two giant four-spoked circles rotating in one direction, two in the other.

Like I said, I don’t usually go ga-ga over feats of mechanical engineering. Loyal Arts Student to the end, I too participated in counter-demonstrations during UBC Engineering Week, ever vigilant to remind those doorknobs as they paraded a naked lady around on a horse that Gears Practise Coprophagy.

But I couldn’t help myself. Surrounded as I was in the middle of this enormous machine, this open-air clockwork, I let out a long, loud HO-LY SHIT and - good thing there were only five others in the car - started darting from one side to the other to get a better look. Because with a precision that defies belief and which left me marvelling at the sheer genius of its design, we were transferred gently to the wheels and, exactly like on a ferris wheel, slowly brought down to ground level, where the door opened, I grabbed my gear, and walked out. Well, not before taking a few pictures and a video or two. I know I should get out of the house more, and maybe this isn’t the first one of its kind in the world, but nevertheless: I think it’s brilliant. It even looks good from the outside.

Wanted to insert a video, but I’m way too spazzy for that just yet.

See you,

Ian

PS. Here’s my stab at video. No apologies for quality. It’s a cellphone, OK?

PPS: No surprise that it’s a Doppelmayr. A comprehensive overview can be found here.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Simple postcard

You’ll notice there isn’t a lot of snow this year. Taken on a walk in the woods on our day of arrival, this photo shows a lot more snow than is left right now. The mountain still has a load of it, so we’re doing fine.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

We now join this ski trip already in progress

Dear Bruce, Gordon, Trish, Vincent, Brooke et al,

I made a vow when starting this blog never to mention our cat, what we had for dinner, what our cat had for dinner,
any recent purchases, any recently purchased dinners for our cat, or the weather. But since the enjoyment of this sport is so much dependent on the last being at least bearable, I simply can’t avoid it.

You remember that story of how I - working as a volunteer ski patroller! - got lost in a snowstorm in the Golan Heights in that winter of ‘80 - ‘81 and how they only found me hours later, down the embankment and walking through the snow away from the road toward the Syrian (or was it the Lebanese?) border?

Though I wasn’t in nearly as much danger, I had a flashback more than once to that day as I inched my way down the last
run of the first day, more by braille than any recognised ski technique.

The morning had started out clear and cold, one of those days where sharp-edged cornices mark the boundary between cobalt blue and ice-blind white. The snow was icing sugar, weightless, the turning effortless. But sun-dogs around 10 were the first signs of the change to come, and by one o’clock - not long after flat light had erased any enjoyment the day had promised and around the time the wise pair in our trio decided to pack it in - I took one more ride up alone to the top.

Mistake.

OK, I know my way around St. Anton enough by now that there was really no danger that I’d fall off a ledge, but as I slipped away from the lift the fog was so thick, the air so silent, it was only by scraping along the barely discernable tracks left by others before me that I managed to find the markers at the edge of the run.

Did I say the edge of the run?

Yes, what we in Canada leave to that guy Cliff to demarcate, here in Europe’s Tower of Babel, they throw up a pictogram.

It never struck me at the time, preoccupied as I was just to avoid slipping beyond the sign and making it down to the next marker, but as I looked at it again the next day in somewhat friendlier weather, I had to wonder: what the hell are they
trying to say here?

Attention! The mountains bring extra heavy danger! You may fall head over heels in love with a rock face and be forced to
pitch your tent with only one hand!

I guess they felt it was an improvement over what was underneath, because upon closer inspection - you can’t see it
in the photo - I discovered that they had painted this notice over a multilingual sign warning that perhaps it wouldn’t be such a good idea to hang around on the edge of a cliff, and that grave dangers /dangers graves / pelligrosos / Gefahren / §omethingInCyrillic /await those Euro-tourists foolish enough to slide beyond this point. Maybe someone pointed out to them that by the time a Swede, say, found the warning in his language among the 28 others present, he’d already be half-way to a swift impalement on a sharp tree stump.

I eventually did make it down of course, otherwise you’d be reading about me elsewhere:

Canadian skier living in Germany missing in Austria. Early snow melt to aid in search.

And the place I made it to? A new lift about which I will absolutely RAVE in my next letter. I don’t usually go ga-ga over
feats of mechanical engineering, but I sure did that day.

see you,
love,
Ian

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Talking about pictures of naked girls in a newspaper

Dear all,

OK, full disclosure: in contrast to other “Talking” posts, this conversation hasn’t happened yet, but I think it will one day.

==========================

Daddy, there sure are a lot of pictures in this newspaper, and the writing is so big!

Yeah, that’s what they call it Bild-Zeitung. Picture-Newspaper. Lots of pictures, not much writing. I guess they figure people are too busy to read much these days.

How come they always have a picture of a naked girl on the front page?

Ummm… I think it’s because they tried it once, and found that it started to sell more newspapers. Look through it and you’ll probably find another one or two as well.

But how can a picture of a naked girl sell newspapers? I thought there was supposed to be news in a newspaper, not pictures of naked girls.

Well, you’re right. But since there isn’t a law that says you can’t put a picture of a naked girl in a newspaper, someone figured they would try it out, and it worked. They sell more newspapers than any other paper in Europe. Eleven million people read it every day. All that for a paper with such a lousy reputation, a lot of us call it Blöd-Zeitung (Stupid paper).

But if that’s what people buy the paper for, why don’t they just buy a paper that has got lots and lots of pictures like that?

I can’t figure that out, either. The first time we came here, it was after living in Hong Kong, and there it’s really, really strict what you can show in a paper. The people are more conservative, and don’t think it’s right to show pictures like that all over the place. It’s the same in Canada and in the States. But here, it’s different. It’s more open. I was kind of surprised, though, that they would put those pictures on the front page.

Do the girls get money for doing that?

Yes, they do. I’m not sure how much, but they do. I guess they figure that if everyone sees them in a newspaper like that, then they will be better known and it will be easier for them to get work like modelling or something. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though.

Yeah, their moms and dads might see them!

Well, yeah, but it’s more than that, eh? Did you ever wonder what those people look like in real life?

What do you mean?

I bet if you saw one of those women on the street after seeing her photo in the paper, you wouldn’t recognise her. They do all sorts of things to make them look what everybody thinks a woman should look like. They put on all the right make-up, they get the lighting all perfect, they take hundreds of pictures, and then after choosing the one they want to print, they fix it up in the computer so that she looks as perfect as possible. They do that for advertisements, too. What you see in the picture isn’t real.

Sure it’s real. It’s a naked lady!

Well, yeah, but very, very few women actually look like that. And the problem with that is, people forget that and think that’s what a woman should look like. So women start to feel unhappy with themselves because they might be a bit overweight, or because they think they’re too short, or getting old, or their nose is crooked, or their bum is too wide, or their breasts aren’t big enough, or too flat, or too pointed, or too saggy, or whatever. They pay specialist doctors thousands and thousands of dollars to change themselves on the outside, just to make themselves feel better about themselves on the inside. Who told them there was something wrong that needed to be fixed in the first place?

All for now,

Ian

PS: I was going to put in a link to the newspaper showing a picture of a naked lady, but I don’t think there’s really a need…

PPS: The newspaper article behind the link is (gasp!) old, but it’s a good backgrounder.

PPPS: An award-winning blog keeps a watchful eye on Bild, helped by people like you. Even the venerable Economist had this to say in its praise.

© 2007 lettershometoyou