Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Stuck again!

We are now in Rostock, and we’re being held hostage by another train strike! Last time it was southern France, and this time it’s northern Germany. This time, however, we’re not paying princely sums of money to stay at an apartment or hotel. We’re very lucky to be staying with Mark’s second cousin Matthias, who is an orthodontist and has a practice in the nearby city of Bad Doberan.

We arrived in Berlin last Thursday afternoon after a very relaxing train ride from Strasbourg. It took us a while to figure out the S-Bahn (Berlin’s above-ground tram system) but we finally made it to Birkenwerder, a suburb of Berlin, where Mark’s relatives, Horst and Eva, live. On Friday, Matthias (who is Horst’s son) came from Rostock and we had a very nice supper. It reminded me of a fondue, except the cooking apparatus is different: a grill on top for cooking a bit of meat, and then small individual square pans that you stick in the middle for making a gratin. You load up your little pan with small slices of the grilled meat or seafood, vegetables and/or potatoes, then put a slice of cheese on top and stick it in the middle section to broil. The kids had fun making their own dishes, and the adults enjoyed the conversation over the two hours it took for everyone to finish eating. The Germans have a word for this kind of meal – komunikativ – and we spent some time trying to find an equivalent word in English (but never succeeded).

We arrived in Germany at a very busy time. November 9 is a very important day in Germany, both in good and bad ways. It is the anniversary of three major events: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; Crystal Night, when the Jews were burned out of their synagogues and shops before WWII; and the revolution in 1918. November 11, so important to us in Canada as Remembrance Day, is not recognized in Germany. Instead, this November 11 we had a roast goose in honour of St. Martin’s Day.

On Saturday we took the tram back into Berlin and walked down to Checkpoint Charlie, the place where people crossed from the American sector of Berlin to the one under East German control before the wall came down. We had intended to go to the museum but decided not to after reading an impressive display about the Berlin Wall along the street. Saturday night saw us hobnobbing with people in the German entertainment industry, as we were invited to an outdoor party at Dirk and Daniella’s (Dirk is Matthias’s brother). Of course we didn’t know we were hobnobbing because we didn’t know anyone there, but we had some very interesting conversations! There were lots of kids there, and even Cameron and Meghan had fun. At the party one of the parents asked me when our kids would start a third language (kids in Germany start English in fourth grade, then another language of their choice at about age 14). It made me a little sad for the state of language learning in Canada, where many kids don’t ever learn even a second language.

On Sunday Matthias drove us from Birkenwerder to Rostock. During the trip (some of it while traveling 165 km/hr), Matthias told us about the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. He was a student at university in Rostock at the time, and when he heard the news that people would be allowed into West Berlin on that day, he took the train into Berlin. As the weekend wore on, more announcements were made that the wall would be open for a longer time. By the time the weekend was over, the wall was down, and he was the most tired he had ever been, because he, along with many other East German citizens, had spent the weekend celebrating. It gave me shivers listening to his story, knowing that he had personally lived through an event that will be forever written into world history.

Rostock has been fun and a real break for the kids. Since we arrived on Sunday, we’ve been to an English class at a German school with Gina and Tess, the two girls from downstairs; we went bowling with Gina; and the kids have been watching movies (in English!) and playing with Matthias’s PlayStation. They both recently bought themselves inline skates and have been practicing skating around Rostock. They inform us that the cobblestones that line many of the sidewalks here are very difficult to navigate! When we had the choice today to try to make a run for home before the train strike starts, or wait a few days in Rostock until it is over, they both voted to stay.

We don’t have a regular internet connection, so we went for the first time in a week to an internet café yesterday to read our email and check our bank accounts. I was thrilled to see an email from the editor of Frommers.com, who wants to use one of my Flickr photos – the Strasbourg train station – on their website. I’ll be very excited to look at the site to see where the photo ends up!

So now we’re stuck in Rostock until Friday, when Matthias will drive us back to Birkenwerder. The train strike is supposed to be over on Saturday at 2 a.m., so hopefully by Sunday enough trains will be back on the rails that we can get back to Strasbourg. We hear there’s also another train strike happening in France, so we’re not holding our breath at this point!

No new pics on Flickr right now as I can’t download any off the camera until we get home again, but here’s the link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christina-t/

Update 19 Nov 07: We made it home to Strasbourg at 3:00 p.m. Sunday after a relaxing seven hours on the train. German strikes appear to be more organized than French ones! Check out the link above for new Flickr photos.

Email us at christinateskey @ yahoo.ca

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