European Diary - 1

11/16/05 Bad Rothenfelde, Germany, a tiny spa in North Germany. The health part of the spa is thorn bushes coated with salt. One walks by the huge wooden edifice that contains the ancient salt-encrusted business and breathes the air. Inhale. Exhale. And so forth.
This part of the world has not yet had a frost and the roses still bloom, some trees have leaves, the bright red holly berries give a foretaste of Christmas, and the heather is rampant.

How did the train conductor know we spoke English? It couldn't be the jeans because everyone wears jeans in Germany. He couldn't see our shoes, usually a dead giveaway. True, I had an English brand coat on, but not so common as to be immediately recognizable. First big mystery.

The house of ill repute by the railroad tracks running into Dusseldorf is still there, still with a number by each window and (usually) with a woman in underwear or lingerie lingering in the window. This place has been there forever, and I wonder if these are the daughters of the original women I saw.

One of my least favorite words, "wellness" is uber alles. Yuck! Pizza, the generic kind, is also uber alles. I see hordes of Americanos wandering around twenty years ago and asking, "where's the pizza?" and lo, there is pizza, but of course it is not quite like ours because they can't bear to eat it in a two-fisted manner, but it has to be cut into pieces or eaten out of a paper container so one's hands don't actually touch the food. You will never get spare ribs and corn on the cob in Europe.

Pink is the big color. Damn! And I left a new pink sweater sitting in the drawer, thinking it will get dirty right away.

The bare poplars look like fish skeletons. They are the first thing I see when we come down out of the clouds that covered the Atlantic all the way from Logan. So absolutely right.

Now Grapeshot is off to the grocery to replentish the larder which is exceedingly bare, and suffering a bit of turkey, stuffing, cranberry, mashed potato and real-gravy-with-no-stupid-cornstarch- shortcuts deprivation. Much of Europe is still a meat and potatoes and sauce kind of place where the the calories are served up with pride and there aren't any of those funny little red hearts on the menu to direct one to the most tasteless fare.

More anon.