It’s fall today. Overnight the trees turned colour quite a bit. It rained and the temperature dropped after the summery weekend. Was that the last hurrah? The train ride from Eggolsheim to Lichtenfels today was beautiful. The lush, green fields that I saw when I first arrived in Europe now look quite different; more browns and yellows from overturned earth, or drying corn, or harvested hay, grains…The colours of the trees aren’t as brilliant as in Ontario, at least not yet. Yellows and oranges seem to be the going colours here. The sky is cloudy and grey though with some blue patches in between. It’s a nice day for a train ride. Even if it is the Bummelzug/the milk run.
My visit in Eggolsheim with the Stolles was very nice. I arrived Saturday evening, Rüdiger picked me up, we stopped off at the Biergarten where the family was still having dinner after their day of cycling with Rüdiger’s colleagues. Reinhard (5 ½) and Dagmar (2 1/2) quickly started playing with me. They’re so open and friendly and way too cute. Irmela(9)and Hellrun(8) searched their memories of me and things slowly started coming back. Sunday was a relaxing summer day in the garden on their terrace that’s not yet an official terrace/deck. But we picked out the tiles/bricks that will become the terrace. The kids and I played some boardgames, I read, adults got caught up on each other’s news. We went for a walk in the little village of Eggolsheim. (It’s about a half hour train ride north of Nürnberg.) BBQ dinner in the evening with friends of theirs (Simone and Peter and kids), who had spontaneously dropped by. We sat outside late into the evening even after it was already dark and cool.
Monday morning after everyone had gone off to school or work, Dietlinde, Dagmar and I headed into Nürnberg. We walked through the beautiful “old town” for a bit, went up to the medieval castle and looked around and admired the view of the city. Then after a quick stop at Starbucks (Dietlinde likes to remember their Oregon days) the two of them headed back home and I inspected more of the city.
The weather was beautiful and it was nice just to walk through the streets, stop in some stores, enjoy the market. I visited one of the churches there (St Sebald) and they had an interesting exhibition of pictures of the city before the war and after the war. The destruction of that city was phenomenal. They’ve done a pretty good job of building up their old town again but it’s somehow not the same. The buildings around the Markt look too architecturally new even though they fit in. The old pictures show such beautiful old buildings that seem to bring quite a different atmosphere to the place. A neat story I read about at the church is of the concert of Haydn’s Creation that was given in July 1945 in the ruins of the church with thousands of people listening in the church and on the platz/piazza outside. Apparently this concert gave them the first hope that their city could be recreated.
I did meet a man from Uganda at one of the market booths. He invited me to their Uganda Day celebration on Oct 13. Alas, I think I have a wedding to go to that day. :-)
In the evening, we got all organized for bed so that we could watch the slideshow of our Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks adventure in 2003 when Rüdiger got home. I hadn’t seen the pics before and it was fun to remember and neat to hear Irmela and Hellrun remember certain things too, things I’d forgotten. While we were waiting for the slideshow to begin we had a big photo shoot. The kids were all enthralled with my camera and all took turns taking pictures and then looking at them and sometimes erasing them if they didn’t like them. They were quite artistic about it. It was quite fun. This morning they put their orders in for which ones they’d like me to develop and send. So I have things to do when I get home.
The send-off at the train station was a perfect Stolle event. After having a relaxing morning once everyone was off to school and work, we ended up in a hurry in the end after all. It was inconvenient that the piano-tuner who had arrived 2 hours earlier was finished the job at the same time I needed to be leaving for the train station. So departure from the house was later, hurried and adventurous. When we got to the train station it was so late that the..the..Schranke…(can’t think of the English word…the bar that crosses over the road not allowing you to drive over the tracks anymore)…had already closed. And we couldn’t get across. Fortunately the train hadn’t arrived yet so we ducked under the Schranke passing my luggage underneath too and made it in time to still say our quick goodbyes before the train arrived. The Schaffner/conductor pulled me on to the train, the steps were high up as the train station is so small there isn’t even a platform. Dietlinde ran back over the tracks to get Dagmar out of the car so that they could still both wave me off as the train pulled away. It was a lovely dose of adrenaline. Dresden is the next stop!
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