A furnace of hot yellow in the beech forest

Why is it that every autumn seems to be more brilliant than the last?  Or is the intensity I’m seeing in colours this year thanks to an effort to look at the world at a slower pace?

Taking off for a weekend just the two of us to a spot in the middle of a beech forest might have something to do with it.  We boarded an ICE train in Hamburg late Friday afternoon bound for a weekend in Kaiserslautern, arriving at our hotel close to midnight after a short taxi ride.  If the journey was merely a black tunnel slashed with fleeting smudges of white and grey as the train fled south through the German countryside, the sight which greeted us from our first-floor window the next morning made up for it:  A woman walking four draught horses across a field, their breath puffing in the morning mist, splashes of yellow in the wet grass.

Out the door and down a path after breakfast, within minutes we were surrounded in the intense yellow of the beech forest.

The forest near Kaiserslautern is part of the Naturpark Pfälzer Wald, and forms the largest area of continuous forest in Germany.  Though we were only minutes from the border of a small city and from the lookout tower could see a German Premier League and 2006 World Cup soccer stadium, we walked as if the still of the path had been reserved in advance for us alone.

Though every corner brought a new combination of colour as the beech gave way to larch, European and American oak and evergreen pine, what struck me the most was its clear floor and general uniformity.  On the west coast of Canada the underbrush is so thick you can’t see  to either side of the path, while in Eastern Canada the greens, yellows, browns and reds of the dying maple leaves turns the forest into a jumble of hue.  Here the forest floor is a flat carpet of brown beech leaves, the sky above yellow.

We had to go into the city only once, and were glad we did, because its surprisingly unattractive, charmless streets  made us want to return to the beauty of the forest that much sooner.   We’d never have gone to Kaiserlautern had we not been invited to a friend’s birthday party, and it’s lucky for us she chose to hold it at Bremerhof,  where we stayed.  I can’t stay right now whether we’ll go there next fall to enjoy the forest all over over again, but it would sure be worth it.

Questions I never got asked

Are memes dead? If yes, hooray! It’s safe to go blogging again.

I took part in memes once or twice, but cringed while doing so.

Not because I think they sucked like so many chain letters that promised good luck if passed along and eternal damnation if you didn’t, but because the questions posed either didn’t interest or didn’t apply to me. Many were aimed at 16- to 30-year-olds living in some suburb somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA and packed with questions about tattoos, the local mall, school, dating, your parents, God, baseball, and your last holiday in Jamaica. In other words, written with a separate species in mind.

So here’s a meme I never took part in, because it never arrived my way. An expat meme, with questions I might have answered had anyone bothered to ask them. Now it’s too late.

How long have you lived away from your home country? Going on 20 years.

Do you still feel like you’re just visiting? All the time. I’m serious.

What do you notice the most has changed about your home country when you go back for a visit? More American influence in media, language and culture in general.

If you were to move again, would it be back to your home country? Without a doubt.

Do you ever get homesick? Only in the run-up to a holiday back home. You can tell right here because I start to write memory-laden posts about the old days.

If you read the news, do you read it in your native language or that of your host country? English mostly, but German and French as well.

What do you like the most about Germany? The amount of free time I have. It’s something I value very highly. That and no Sunday shopping. One day a week where consumerism has to hit the brakes.

What grates you the most? Whiners who bitch and moan about Germany but refuse to leave, offering up a dozen excuses for not doing so. Get the hell out if you don’t like it. What are you waiting for? Someone to decide for you?

Did you speak the language of your host country before you arrived? Not a bit.

How long did it take before you felt comfortable speaking the language? I’m still not completely comfortable unless I’ve had a couple glasses of beer.

If people switch to English when you speak to them in their language, how do you react? I like it! It means they’re reaching out for a connection, which is good, so I usually say something back in English to see how far it will go.

What has been the biggest change you’ve had to make in leaving your home country? In Hamburg, I can’t go hiking in the mountains.   There’s no skiing or mountain biking worth getting excited about for a thousand km, and I can’t just drop by a tennis court anytime and start playing.

If there were a button to improve anything about your expatriate life, what would it say on the button? For free flights home, press here.

**So, that’s it.  You are not required to pass this on.  You may, however, look closely at that photo and tell me what’s weird about it.  Aside from the guy on the right.

25 things about 25 days in British Columbia

1.  Drinking in the lake water while swimming naked at midnight
2.  Driving straight into a severe lightning- and hailstorm, doing a U-turn on the highway to outpace the hail while having a thunderbolt crash into a light pole right beside us, sending sparks flying in all directions.
3.  Hanging out with old friends Sherry and Dale, Laurie and Dan, Brad, Nando, Dave and Florence
4.  Hanging out with the whole family on a camping trip during a record-breaking heat wave
5.  Climbing the third peak of the Chief with the little red-haired girl

6.  Hiking to the Elfin Lakes and swimming midst a backdrop of an extinct volcano, glaciers and mountain heather

7.  Seeing my mother again and how well she and her grand-daughter got along
8.  Exploring all alone – just the three of us – at the base of Shannon Falls early the first morning getting over jet lag
9.  Taking the stunning, new Peak-to-Peak lift between Whistler and Blackcomb

10. Paying 18 bucks for a salad on Blackcomb.

11. Falling hopelessly in love at first sight with the sport of kiteboarding.  If I were 30 years younger, I’d be in serious danger of becoming a kiteboarding bum.

12. Teaching the little red-haired girl how to dive
13. Diving into the churning waters of a rushing river

14. Walking with my two brothers along part of the old Kettle Valley Railway through the four Othello tunnels near Hope, BC

15.  Getting a taste of BC’s most famous herbal remedy for the first time in 15 years
16.  Riding in the back of a pick-up truck on a steep and winding dirt road while an old friend regales us with a shared tale of UBC Rowing team initiation rites
17.  Getting away with K just the two of us for a holiday-within-the-holiday

18.  Getting over my fear of long distances by swimming out to an island in the middle of a lake and back – the longest swim I’ve ever done in my life
19.  Mountain biking at Sun Peaks, near Kamloops

20.  Groggy from a day of mountain biking and not thinking straight, walking through a screen door and utterly destroying it
21.  Eating wild raspberries creekside near McLure, BC in the middle of one of the province’s largest forest fire burn sites
22.  Driving the new Sea-to-Sky highway

23.  Two perfect meals at the Pink Pearl, a Vancouver restaurant that brings us straight back to our days in Hong Kong

24.  Aside from the thunderstorm, sunny and warm weather every day except the last

25.  Realising you can come home again, if only for a while

Weekend massacre leaves thousands of wasps dead, cherry trees plundered

Thousands of wasps were too stupid to find the exit over the weekend, dying a horrible death by drowning in a trap filled with a mixture of warm water and honey. The wasps entered the trap carefully placed over the entrance to a nest they had built in the garden of Oma’s place out in farming country near Osnabrück, Germany.

“It was a wasp massacre,” said police spokesman Igott Heimweh, “but just looking at them, you just have to shake your head, cuz damn, they’re dumb.  I mean, they flew into the hole at the bottom, OK?  But then they didn’t turn around and fly out.  And once they hit that water, game over. They just flailed around a bit, then drowned.”

The bodies started to pile up almost immediately after the bell-shaped jar filled with sweet, alluring liquid was placed over the nest.  By next morning it was so full of dead or dying insects, it had to be emptied.

“‘Absolutely disgusting,’” one child with red hair was overheard to say as the dead insects were poured out.  “Iggit-iggit.”

The jar is a clever way to kill wasps without using the traditional Canadian methods of bombarding them with chemical insecticide sprays or smashing the nest open with a hockey stick to stomp on the enraged insects with lumberjack boots.

In a related weekend incident, a marauding band of cycling summertime fruitarians plundered Oma’s two nearby cherry trees.  The mostly immobile nonagenarian could merely sit back and watch as the intruders placed an extendable ladder to their upper reaches to gain access to the ripest fruit clustered on the heavily laden branches.

After stuffing as many of the dark, juicy orbs into their mouths as they could in a 48-hour period, the bandits filled their packs and set off on the train again north for an evening of cooking them up with a mixture of sugar and pectin.  Ten jars of the darkest, richest, most delicious cherry jam you will never, ever find on German store shelves are now safely stored in the basement of an undisclosed Hamburg location, to be consumed sometime over the next few months.