A gorgeous autumn day in Hamburg

Our trip to Kaiserslautern last weekend to attend a friend’s birthday party turned out to be equally as memorable for the two days of walking through a beech forest in all its autumn brilliance.

A Hamburg October can be as dreary as anything Vancouver can throw at you, but the day we left for the weekend was stunning.  I’d been waiting for two weeks waiting for the sun to come out, hoping I’d get a chance to take a few photos before all the leaves were gone.

I managed to squeeze in an hour of cycling with the camera.  Though it was my day off, I went to work – though not inside the office – to take these shots of the maples just outside our window.

One of them had bunches of spikey seed coverings, kind of like chestnuts only smaller with longer thorns.  Can anyone tell me what kind of tree that is?

The last part of that outing I spent just around the corner from our place admiring the curling advance of flame on the black slate facing of an office building.   They knew what they were doing when they planted those vines.  The effect of the turning colours on the massive charcoal grey background is stunning.  It’s difficult to convey the effect in a photo of just one part.

To the holocaust deniers: come to Buchenwald

It was perhaps fitting that we should come upon Buchenwald through damp drizzle and fog, the autumn cold another burden on the stark emptiness of the place.

We’d been in nearby Weimar a week already, but until then had somehow found excuses not to go.  Now we were there, hesitating still, the half-open entrance gate with its cynical message, “to each his own” staring at us, if not inviting us in.

Nothing here invites you in.

An empty sweep of concrete foundations, each with a lone, low marker, some draped in flowers, are most of what is left.  That and the main museum, where the stories of who lived and died there, the perpetrators and the victims, are told in words and silent remnants, some in minute detail.

Thousands of buttons unearthed from a dump are displayed in a long, low case along with combs, dental retainers, shaving brushes – the wood rotting, the remnant brush a mere stubble.

Cold, hard metal cases enclose photos of men and women in prisoners’ garb, frontal and profile: mute, dead.

An empty cart used to carry bodies to the crematorium lies open and gaping.

Though Buchenwald was more a forced labour camp for the production of munitions and not designated a death camp, death lingers here like foul mist.

Sifting through the displays and wandering among the desolation, I kept recalling the words of Barack Obama as he stood in Buchenwald this past spring:

“To this day there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened.  This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”

I’m glad we went to Buchenwald, because I also learned something you don’t usually associate with the place.

The Soviets used the camp for five years after the war as a kind of ready-made prison of their own, warehousing former Nazis but also those who opposed the new repressive regime that was slowly overtaking the old.  Buchenwald was one of 10 camps the Soviets operated in that way.  I didn’t know any of that story before coming here.

It was only upon realisation that the existence of the camps would have seriously imperiled the new East German government’s image that they were dismantled.  The East Germans prefered to hush up talk of those years, but since German reunification that story, like thousands of others, is now being told in a relatively new museum opened in 1997.

A memorial to the un-named Soviet victims unearthed many years later is just beside the new museum.  As you enter the forest, you’re confronted with an array of randomly spaced stainless steel poles.  Each stands as a silent reminder that a body was found on that spot.  There are so many,  I couldn’t count them all.

Power kiting in Hamburg fun til the cops show up

On a sunny and warm summer afternoon the other day I discovered that power kiting is LOTS of fun. With nothing more than a few square yards of lightweight fabric, ultra-thin yet strong cord and a bit of wind, you can have a blast.

A friend of mine has been taking a set of kites of different sizes to Hamburg’s Stadtpark for the last three years. When the wind is strong and steady enough, he’ll strap on a harness and fly a six-square-metre kite that gathers enough wind to pull him along the grass on what looks like a fat-wheeled skateboard.

I was hoping we’d get to see him ride it when I showed up for the first time to watch how it’s done, but the wind wasn’t blowing hard enough, and was never very steady.

But we had a great time anyway. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun.

That is, it was fun until the cops showed up.

“I think they’re not here to offer us tips on how it’s done,” I said as they got out of their van and strolled toward us.

They were friendly enough about it, but firm.

“You can’t fly a steerable kite in the Stadtpark,” they told us. “You’re only allowed to fly kites that have only one string, not two.”

Hmmm… if we can steer them, isn’t that better than if we can’t?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that we were right under a runway approach to the Hamburg airport, and they’re afraid one of us might trip, fall and drop not one but both handles while the winds suddenly gust up at that precise moment to rocket the kite about 1000 metres skyward to be violently sucked into a passing jet’s engine, resulting in the agonizing deaths of hundreds of people as they’re consumed in a flaming ball of fire in the ensuing crash over a populated area?

I bet it does.

So we stood around for a while, threw the frisbee back and forth for a bit, packed up the kites, and headed off to grab a pizza and beer.

My friend in the meantime has done a bit of research. Apparently, if your kite weighs less than one kilo and has no metal parts, you can fly it in the Stadtpark.

So there, cops. See you next time it’s sunny and windy.

Finally picked up a new mountain bike

So many good people have had their bikes stolen lately.  Recent victim Yelli in Berlin says she’s hoping I’ll post something on how to keep a bicycle safe.   I plan to do that over the next week, but in the meantime, a bit of fun:

A couple of weeks ago, I finally bought myself a new mountain bike.

Fifteen minutes through the travel category here will show you I have no problem spending money, as long the only thing to lug home are memories.  But toys and gear don’t grab me.

I can’t even stand shopping for stuff that will add to the simple pleasures I get out of life, which is probably why I have a 15-year-old bicycle, 10-year-old skis, a 4-year-old computer and iPod, and why it took until only two years ago to finally pick up a digital camera.

But after convincing myself that getting a new bicycle would give me that extra kick in the butt to get out riding again for the simple joy of being on wheels for its own sake instead of merely a way of commuting, and having given up on Angela Merkel ever getting back to me with my idea about a bike-scrapping rebate, and reminding myself that in less than a year I’ll be turning 50 and officially a crotchety old geezer, so why not give myself an early birthday present to lessen the pain of it,  I went shopping for a new ride.

One stop at one shop was enough to convince me that I didn’t need to look any further to buy a decent bike.  It took a couple of weeks for the frame to arrive from the factory in Italy, but as soon as it did they called me over so I could watch them build it.

If it’s true that you should buy quality and moan only once, I was moaning like hell two hours later at the till, but only half-way through my first spin down the Elbe the sticker shock was far behind.

It felt like flight on wheels.  What a difference from the old one!  It feels so light and fun to ride I was thinking: why didn’t I do this a few years ago?

Actually, I’m glad I waited.  Bike technology has been flying ahead along with everything else, but since I’ve been out of the market for so long and not really paying attention, I’d missed all the new developments.

The biggest change is in the brakes.  I’d first discovered the amazing quality of disk brakes while on a raging blast on a rental bike through the Whistler Mountain bike park during my trip to Canada two summers ago.

As long as you keep oil and grease away they grab no matter if you’re going through rain or mud, though they’re so responsive, you stop too abruptly if you apply the same force as with the older rim brakes.

I’ve been told they’re practically maintenance-free: no rubber brake pads any more, no more fiddly adjustments, no constant wear on the rims, which if you leave too long without checking can actually wear through.

And no cables to snap when you least expect it, either.

Instead of a metal wire, the cables are filled with a fluid that looks a lot like motor oil.

Most of my riding is on the city streets, but the mountain bike tires are too slow on pavement, so I also convinced myself to dig a little deeper and pick up an extra set of front and back wheels, onto which I installed some narrow and light road-racing tires bought in Canada on that last trip.  So you might say I bought a bike to fit the tires, instead of the other way around.

The thin tires make it look rather strange.  With the fat, nobby ones it’s just a regular mountain bike.  Slip on the skinnies and it’s as spindly as a spider web:

Fat tires or thin, it’s been a lot of fun so far.

I’ve even had fun junking things we’ll never use again to clear a spot for a safe place to park it overnight.  Yes, we’ve learned our lesson. A thief is going to have to break into our building past three locked doors just to get near it, and then he’s going to have to break through a damn good lock.  More on that later.