Weeks 16, 17 and 18: kind of winding down (Weimar/Prague/Borgholz-where?)
Hi my dears!
I've been away for four months now.... September and October will be pretty much England, Scotland, and back to Ireland .... so the adventure in continental Europe is (for now) coming to an end.
But here I am at the moment, near the small town of Borgholzhausen, in the hamlet of .... well, it's not even really marked! Using the wonderful place location app 'what3words' (recommended to me by the lovely Ralph Cochrane) you could find me if you typed in "pressing.shadow.lynched". Here are some of the local views that I've been seeing while cycling and walking round here over the last couple of days:
We're not quite sure about the ostrich but he was looking quite photogenic in a field on our bike ride today.
So why am I here? Well, this is the 'spontaneity' thing!! I read a few travel blogs before I set off and the one thing that I was aware of was that if you make plans, you'll regret them... you should wait to see what happens. And in fact most of the train tickets that I've booked along the way, I've either changed, or regretted that I couldn't change! So at the Yiddish Summer Weimar dance class 3 weeks ago, the idea suddenly popped into the head of a lovely woman called Stefanie that she should invite me to stay with her. Neither she nor I knows why she decided to do this, but we both now think it was a WONDERFUL idea! She lives, as I said, in a little hamlet near the town of Borgholzhausen not far from Bielefeld in Westfalia - 350 kilometers from Weimar where we were at the time, and nearly 650 kilometers from Prague where I was going to be .... so I thought - well, why not! My next stop is the UK for a few days before going back to Ireland, but I didn't want to get back there before 4th September (to do with picking some stuff up from a friend in Oxford who wasn't going to be home till then), and I didn't want to stay in Prague for more than six nights.... so a weekend in a random village somewhere in Germany sounded just fine and dandy.
And it turns out that it is absolutely beautiful - it is miles from anywhere, calm, peaceful, gorgeous, the weather is mild but not too hot, you can see as far as the eye can see (as it were). There was an Israeli dance day yesterday in Bielefeld but Stefanie (who has been a contract researcher but at the moment is a waitress - that's how it is for sociologists the world over, I assume! [Spanish verbs work well for this sort of thing - you can say: "Es" investigadora; pero "esta" camarera]) was doing a night shift at a local hotel and couldn't come to the dancing day. So I cycled to the station, locked the bike up at the station, got myself onto the train and to the venue, had a LOVELY TIME (note to self, must do more dancing when I get home, not just Klezmer but all kinds!!!!), and got a lift home. So the bike spent the night at the station.
I set off this morning on foot the half hour walk to the station to collect the bike, at which point I realised I'd taken Stefanie's keys instead of mine, which meant that I didn't have the bike key with me... :-( and so I walked back, feeling a bit stupid. My mistake had a lovely result though: once Stefanie had woken up, we walked back to the station with her bike, then she took me on a gorgeous bike ride through the lovely narrow road ways and cycle tracks to the moated 'schloss' (sort of castle or stately home that you can see in the pix) where her 19 year old daughter is working as a waitress.
We had a cup of tea, chatted to a local knight (as you do)
then tried to pay. The usual argument when you're staying with someone: "I'll pay. No, I insist, I'll pay" etc etc was short circuited by the management saying that we didn't have to pay, as long as we listened to the manager playing the accordion.... (well I think that's what the deal was, my German isn't very good....)
Those of you who are reading these blogs closely (thank you Claire but I know there are others, and not just my mum) will remember a rather pointless little story about how I tried to get up a hill in northern Sardinia to find out who was playing traditional Sardinian tunes on the melodeon, but I couldn't find my way up there..... well, it turns out there's a theme! The man with the accordion also had a melodeon - but it was at home, and he would have LOVED me to play it, but it was half an hour away by car, and Sundays are very busy days at the cafe.
And... in Prague, we found a cafe with THREE gorgeous looking button accordions lying around - so I got very excited and rushed up to play one of them... but they were unplayable, with shot-away bellows. Ah well. The moral - take your own melodeon with you if you want to play (which of course I will be doing, again, once I set off to Ireland in a couple of weeks).
Last week my friend Alison came to join me in Prague for six packed days. I recently listened to a wonderful travel podcast in Hayden Lee's Travel Stories Podcast series, when he talked about how it's not such a good idea to look at photos of a place if you're going to go there - go there with a completely open mind! So I'm not going to share my millions of pix of Prague which is the most photogenic city ever - there's something amazing and art nouveau or op art or cubist or strange or beautiful round EVERY corner. It is the most beautiful and wonderful place - we went on an excellent tour that were recommended by friends, a four hour E-bike trip round the high spots which was fab, a tour of the puppet museum (ok here's one pic),
a fab Black Light Theatre performance... we sat in some lovely cafes, and I was able to get some podcast editing and other stuff done on three mornings in the very friendly and reasonably priced "DeskRoom" coworking space. I'd be happy to give personal recommendations if you're going. Go!
I'd booked a cheap hotel (it was actually a VERY NICE hotel it turned out, a five minute walk through a WOOD from the subway station) and then I noticed it was a twin bedded room, the same price for 2 people as for one - so I emailed all my neighbours at Lancaster Cohousing to ask if anyone wanted to come, and posted it on my facebook page. All the rest of my travelling has involved sailing, or milking goats, or being part of a music festival... so 'being a tourist on my own' was going to be a bit strange, though I was kind of relishing the challenge I suppose. But it was absolutely lovely sharing the week with Alison - we were pretty much out from 9 am to 10 pm every day and felt we'd done Prague proud by the end of the week.
The editing I did at the coworking space last week has led to me being able to publish the first of my podcasts from the Yiddish Summer Weimar - it's called "Getting to know the "Other"" and is an interview with Alan Bern, the director of the Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Other Music Academy which hosts it. If you want to know why it would be a good idea to chat to (or play music with) people you don't think you'd have an affinity with... or if you'd like to hear a feelgood story about the Ku Klux Klan (!) or to think about ideas like how culture shouldn't be a commodity, and how you can give people "creative control" of their lives, then you need to listen to this interview. Hear it here on my podcast-page! Alan was an absolute joy to interview and the recording was a cinch to edit - he's fluent, articulate, fascinating and speaks in lucid paragraphs with a beginning, middle and an end - and sometimes with numbered headings! Here's Alan, on the left of our dance group at the festival. (I'm not in it as I'm taking the pic. The alternative is one with me in it, but Alan took that one :-( )
Editing the interview has made me realise that I've been spending the last five weeks 'getting to know the "other" myself. I read East West Street while I was in Weimar. It's won the 'non fiction book of the year' award, very deservedly. It's a fantastic and very personal and readable book centred around the Nuremberg Trials (sounds strange but you have to read it to find out how Philippe Sands links the legal and the personal). I visited the Jewish Quarter in Prague, where all the 80,000 names of the Czech and Moravian Jews who were murdered by the Nazis are written on the walls of the Pinkasova synagogue. The Nazis pretty much got their way, of making the Prague Jewish quarter a museum - all but one of the city's synagogues are in fact part of the extended Jewish museum area. Being surrounded by all this history, in Germany and the Czech Republic, has been significant for me. But at the Yiddish Summer Weimar, being among really lovely German speaking people of all ages who were committed to learning Yiddish language and song, Klezmer dancing and music, has really changed the way that I feel hearing German and being here - and it's an **absolute pleasure** being in Borgholzhausen. Stefanie actually took me to see the local Jewish cemetery which looked remarkably peaceful.
Unusually it hadn't been destroyed - I note on the International Jewish Cemetery Project website that it was in use "from 1750 to 1937" - those dates tell a horrible story. But it was good (I think) to hear that Stefanie's daughter visited the cemetery with her school (and the Prague Jewish quarter was full of Germans too). There is no sense that the events of the war are being forgotten - and I feel VERY comfortable being here. And will be sad to leave Germany (for now) tomorrow.
Next time hopefully I'll have news of more published podcasts and maybe something about ....
- Halton Mill - Luneside's 70th Birthday - "elephants and engineers"
- the London Podcast Festival and Podcast Maker Weekend
- Yom Kippur in Dublin
and the continuing saga of Cleire Goats
with much love from Fiona
ps I'm happy (for them) to announce that my tenants have now bought the house 6 doors down from mine at Lancaster Cohousing, so I can't persuade them to extend the tenancy, so I can't extend my trip..... Ah well. There's always next year. And my cat will be happy to see me back at the beginning of November I'm sure.
I've been away for four months now.... September and October will be pretty much England, Scotland, and back to Ireland .... so the adventure in continental Europe is (for now) coming to an end.
But here I am at the moment, near the small town of Borgholzhausen, in the hamlet of .... well, it's not even really marked! Using the wonderful place location app 'what3words' (recommended to me by the lovely Ralph Cochrane) you could find me if you typed in "pressing.shadow.lynched". Here are some of the local views that I've been seeing while cycling and walking round here over the last couple of days:
So why am I here? Well, this is the 'spontaneity' thing!! I read a few travel blogs before I set off and the one thing that I was aware of was that if you make plans, you'll regret them... you should wait to see what happens. And in fact most of the train tickets that I've booked along the way, I've either changed, or regretted that I couldn't change! So at the Yiddish Summer Weimar dance class 3 weeks ago, the idea suddenly popped into the head of a lovely woman called Stefanie that she should invite me to stay with her. Neither she nor I knows why she decided to do this, but we both now think it was a WONDERFUL idea! She lives, as I said, in a little hamlet near the town of Borgholzhausen not far from Bielefeld in Westfalia - 350 kilometers from Weimar where we were at the time, and nearly 650 kilometers from Prague where I was going to be .... so I thought - well, why not! My next stop is the UK for a few days before going back to Ireland, but I didn't want to get back there before 4th September (to do with picking some stuff up from a friend in Oxford who wasn't going to be home till then), and I didn't want to stay in Prague for more than six nights.... so a weekend in a random village somewhere in Germany sounded just fine and dandy.
And it turns out that it is absolutely beautiful - it is miles from anywhere, calm, peaceful, gorgeous, the weather is mild but not too hot, you can see as far as the eye can see (as it were). There was an Israeli dance day yesterday in Bielefeld but Stefanie (who has been a contract researcher but at the moment is a waitress - that's how it is for sociologists the world over, I assume! [Spanish verbs work well for this sort of thing - you can say: "Es" investigadora; pero "esta" camarera]) was doing a night shift at a local hotel and couldn't come to the dancing day. So I cycled to the station, locked the bike up at the station, got myself onto the train and to the venue, had a LOVELY TIME (note to self, must do more dancing when I get home, not just Klezmer but all kinds!!!!), and got a lift home. So the bike spent the night at the station.
I set off this morning on foot the half hour walk to the station to collect the bike, at which point I realised I'd taken Stefanie's keys instead of mine, which meant that I didn't have the bike key with me... :-( and so I walked back, feeling a bit stupid. My mistake had a lovely result though: once Stefanie had woken up, we walked back to the station with her bike, then she took me on a gorgeous bike ride through the lovely narrow road ways and cycle tracks to the moated 'schloss' (sort of castle or stately home that you can see in the pix) where her 19 year old daughter is working as a waitress.
We had a cup of tea, chatted to a local knight (as you do)
Those of you who are reading these blogs closely (thank you Claire but I know there are others, and not just my mum) will remember a rather pointless little story about how I tried to get up a hill in northern Sardinia to find out who was playing traditional Sardinian tunes on the melodeon, but I couldn't find my way up there..... well, it turns out there's a theme! The man with the accordion also had a melodeon - but it was at home, and he would have LOVED me to play it, but it was half an hour away by car, and Sundays are very busy days at the cafe.And... in Prague, we found a cafe with THREE gorgeous looking button accordions lying around - so I got very excited and rushed up to play one of them... but they were unplayable, with shot-away bellows. Ah well. The moral - take your own melodeon with you if you want to play (which of course I will be doing, again, once I set off to Ireland in a couple of weeks).
 |
| looking hopeful and holding an unplayable melodeon in Prague |
Last week my friend Alison came to join me in Prague for six packed days. I recently listened to a wonderful travel podcast in Hayden Lee's Travel Stories Podcast series, when he talked about how it's not such a good idea to look at photos of a place if you're going to go there - go there with a completely open mind! So I'm not going to share my millions of pix of Prague which is the most photogenic city ever - there's something amazing and art nouveau or op art or cubist or strange or beautiful round EVERY corner. It is the most beautiful and wonderful place - we went on an excellent tour that were recommended by friends, a four hour E-bike trip round the high spots which was fab, a tour of the puppet museum (ok here's one pic),
I'd booked a cheap hotel (it was actually a VERY NICE hotel it turned out, a five minute walk through a WOOD from the subway station) and then I noticed it was a twin bedded room, the same price for 2 people as for one - so I emailed all my neighbours at Lancaster Cohousing to ask if anyone wanted to come, and posted it on my facebook page. All the rest of my travelling has involved sailing, or milking goats, or being part of a music festival... so 'being a tourist on my own' was going to be a bit strange, though I was kind of relishing the challenge I suppose. But it was absolutely lovely sharing the week with Alison - we were pretty much out from 9 am to 10 pm every day and felt we'd done Prague proud by the end of the week.
The editing I did at the coworking space last week has led to me being able to publish the first of my podcasts from the Yiddish Summer Weimar - it's called "Getting to know the "Other"" and is an interview with Alan Bern, the director of the Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Other Music Academy which hosts it. If you want to know why it would be a good idea to chat to (or play music with) people you don't think you'd have an affinity with... or if you'd like to hear a feelgood story about the Ku Klux Klan (!) or to think about ideas like how culture shouldn't be a commodity, and how you can give people "creative control" of their lives, then you need to listen to this interview. Hear it here on my podcast-page! Alan was an absolute joy to interview and the recording was a cinch to edit - he's fluent, articulate, fascinating and speaks in lucid paragraphs with a beginning, middle and an end - and sometimes with numbered headings! Here's Alan, on the left of our dance group at the festival. (I'm not in it as I'm taking the pic. The alternative is one with me in it, but Alan took that one :-( )
Editing the interview has made me realise that I've been spending the last five weeks 'getting to know the "other" myself. I read East West Street while I was in Weimar. It's won the 'non fiction book of the year' award, very deservedly. It's a fantastic and very personal and readable book centred around the Nuremberg Trials (sounds strange but you have to read it to find out how Philippe Sands links the legal and the personal). I visited the Jewish Quarter in Prague, where all the 80,000 names of the Czech and Moravian Jews who were murdered by the Nazis are written on the walls of the Pinkasova synagogue. The Nazis pretty much got their way, of making the Prague Jewish quarter a museum - all but one of the city's synagogues are in fact part of the extended Jewish museum area. Being surrounded by all this history, in Germany and the Czech Republic, has been significant for me. But at the Yiddish Summer Weimar, being among really lovely German speaking people of all ages who were committed to learning Yiddish language and song, Klezmer dancing and music, has really changed the way that I feel hearing German and being here - and it's an **absolute pleasure** being in Borgholzhausen. Stefanie actually took me to see the local Jewish cemetery which looked remarkably peaceful.
Unusually it hadn't been destroyed - I note on the International Jewish Cemetery Project website that it was in use "from 1750 to 1937" - those dates tell a horrible story. But it was good (I think) to hear that Stefanie's daughter visited the cemetery with her school (and the Prague Jewish quarter was full of Germans too). There is no sense that the events of the war are being forgotten - and I feel VERY comfortable being here. And will be sad to leave Germany (for now) tomorrow.
Next time hopefully I'll have news of more published podcasts and maybe something about ....
- Halton Mill - Luneside's 70th Birthday - "elephants and engineers"
- the London Podcast Festival and Podcast Maker Weekend
- Yom Kippur in Dublin
and the continuing saga of Cleire Goats
with much love from Fiona
ps I'm happy (for them) to announce that my tenants have now bought the house 6 doors down from mine at Lancaster Cohousing, so I can't persuade them to extend the tenancy, so I can't extend my trip..... Ah well. There's always next year. And my cat will be happy to see me back at the beginning of November I'm sure.
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Amazing visual travelogue. Can't find " getting to know the other" podcast yet. More from me later xx g
ReplyDeleteLove your attitude...I need to learn from your spontaneity - I so overplan our travels!!!
ReplyDelete