That's german for "choo choo".
Sister and Smart Car.
The tourist towns on Rügen all seemed to have the little reproduction locomotives to ferry tourists around. We rode on one when we visited a castle. We also saw a lot of Smart Cars. They've been sold in Europe for a number of years. Daimler-Chrysler announced last week that they would soon begin selling them in the U.S. They are cute but I'd be afraid to drive one here with all the SUVs on the road.
Baabe was another small resort town not a mile from where we stayed in Sellin. The most impressive thing about Baabe was the Strand, the street that led to the beach. When my father was young the street was lined with giant trees. During the war he had to march up and down the street after he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth.
There's only a couple of buildings in Moritzburg. There's a port that can handle a few small boats and a ferry to Moritzdorf across the inlet. It is the only hand-rowed ferry left on Rügen. Ring the bell and a guy on the Moritzdorf side rows across the inlet, picks you up, and rows you over to Moritzdorf. Moritzburg is where my father learned to swim. Hitler Youth swim lessons consisted of being thrown off the dock and quickly learning how to swim.
From Büsum we took the train back to Hamburg and then switched to an eastbound train to Stralsund, on the Baltic Sea near Poland. Our destination was the island of Rügen, Germany's largest island. There are several small towns on Rügen that became resort towns about a century ago. We rented half a house in the beautiful town of Sellin. The pier turns 100 years old on August 2nd! It was mostly destroyed by ice in 1924, rebuilt, survived the second World War, fell into disrepair under Communist rule and finally rebuilt in the 1990s after reunification.
The building contains a restaurant and party hall. There were two weddings going on while we walked around. The end of the pier serves as a ferry terminal. Travelers arriving on the ferry would walk up these stairs to Sellin's main street, which is lined with turn-of-the-century pensions and restaurants. After we climbed the stairs two guys rode mountain bikes down them.
There were hundreds of wind turbines in northern Germany. In the last several years Germany has been strongly promoting energy efficiency and developing renewable energy resources. A September 2003 US Energy Information Administration report stated that Germany "has the most installed wind power capacity in the world". About half the more than 16,000 wind turbines in Germany are in the three coastal states of Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.
The second stop on our trip was the town of Büsum, on the North Sea. We left the cousins behind and my aunt, uncle, father, sister and me went north by train. Büsum has a commercial fishing fleet and is also a resort town. My grandmother lived there for several years and her grave is in town. My father was not able to return when she passed away in 1982 so we went to pay our last respects.
Aunt Helga and Dad
Dad and Uncle Rainer
The German side of the family
The day after we arrived in Germany was my Aunt Helga's birthday, the first of three birthdays to be celebrated during our visit. I hadn't seen Tante Helga since I was four or five years old, and I'd never met Uncle Rainer or their kids. We had a great time catching up, looking at old photos, and trying to communicate in Germlish.
It has been thirty years since my father visited his family in Germany. He grew up in the northeastern part of the country. It has been sixty years since he and his family fled the Russians at the end of World War II and he hadn't returned to his home town in sixty years. This past winter, after several years of trying, my sister and I, but mostly my sister, convinced him to go for a visit.
Judy arrived in Frankfurt around noon. My dad and I arrived two hours later. I then amazed everyone with my ability to buy three train tickets from a german ticket machine. An hour later Aunt Helga and Uncle Rainer were meeting us at the train station in Karlsruhe.
There were also many bikes:
Taking off from JFK. See the A train?
Island in Jamaica Bay
Sunset over the clouds
The trip to Germany begins!
Rose-colored glasses in Morningside Park
I have returned. Mostly. I'm still a little jet-lagged.
Germany was great! I saw my aunt for the first time since I was five, and an uncle and cousins for the first time. My father met a friend he hadn't seen in 60 years. There was much riding of fast, clean and on-time trains. I visited the Rhine and Neckar rivers as well as the North and Baltic seas. Plus there was a surprise encounter with Paris Hilton! Well, sort of... Details to follow.
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