The guy who is leading our research project lives in Italy, and so we booked our tickets from the Middle East in and out of his town, and figured we'd fly to Germany from there. We joked that Italy is becoming our second home in Europe. This was our third time there in a year. No complaints, though! We had our meetings and planned our time in Germany and got everything all ready to go.
In the meantime, I had to buy new house slippers, so we went shopping one day. While out, I found this GINORMOUS orange, blue, and white scarf. (It may not look orange in the photo, but I promise it was.) I joked that I felt like Aubie the Tiger was giving me a bear tiger hug.
When I was home for Christmas in 2014, I bought a puzzle as a gift for a family gift exchange. My mom thought that people didn't enjoy puzzles much anymore. Oh man. Ever since then, I've met a bunch of people who do! Maple is crazy for them. While we were in Italy, MommaMia pulled out this one and she and Maple went to town on it for a couple of days.
Once we'd had our fill of pasta and tiramisu, we headed to Frankfurt. While I've flown through there a thousand times, I'd never been to the city itself. The guy we were meeting with gave us a short tour, and took us to a mall that besides having the second longest escalator in the world (?!), it also had a huge satellite map of the city on the floor. I joked that I walked all over Frankfurt that day, hahaha.
There's a reason you don't hear of people going to Frankfurt for tourism...there's nothing to see or do there. I can say that it had Chipotle, though! Yum yum. While there, we also went to a smaller town for an afternoon/evening of work and had the most fascinating interview with a refugee on the train ride there. I marvel at the things that are normal life for them, and that we can't imagine living through in our own little safe world. Thank God for His mercies.
Next on our tour of Germany was the city of Bonn. We had considered being based out of Cologne, but this was only a few weeks after the New Year's Eve attacks (which the media focused on them in Cologne, but they actually happened all over the country). Bonn was closer to the people we needed to meet with, and made us feel safer to not be in the city that had all the hype of the attacks on women. It was a small town, and we felt like by the time we left that we'd seen the whole place.
For some reason, I didn't take many touristy photos when we walked around the first day to get the layout of the city. Bonn is the birthplace of Beethoven, so there was a statue of him as well as his home. I walked by both and never took a photo. I did take one of this pretty wall in the middle of the city.
And of course I took a few door photos.
From Bonn, we took three different day trips to other smaller towns. Like our time in Frankfurt, our interviews were so fascinating and we learned so much. We really felt God's favor on us as we were connected to many different kinds of people and some of high influence. I'll tell you what--the refugee situation is so complicated, but I am so amazed to see all the things people are doing to welcome them and help them get settled into Germany and feel safe after all they've been through.
We were in the Rhine region just before the beginning of Karneval...and apparently Cologne, after Rio, is the hub of Carnival. Who knew?! We saw grown adults dressed in what looked like Halloween costumes. Tigers, witches, clowns, cowboys, and more. I picked up this mask to join in the fun for a few minutes one day. Hehe.
Next we headed over to Berlin. I'd never been before. On our way to dinner our first evening, we passed this section of the Berlin Wall. They have little segments of it up around the city.
I'll write more about Berlin (and then Munich) in another post, since we actually took an afternoon off there to walk around and see some of the touristy sites. This building near our hotel had been mostly destroyed in the war, but they left the rest of it up, and I found it to be so beautiful.
While getting to travel and see all these neat places is really cool, I think people have a erroneous view of our suitcase life. We stay in cheap hotels, are constantly lugging our suitcases around (not fun), have to decide where and what to eat every day, and during our trips, we never have any privacy. We're always in a two twin bed hotel room that might have one chair at a desk. After weeks of that, we get a little tired of not having our own personal space, even for how much we enjoy other. So when we checked into our Berlin hotel, we literally did a happy dance when we saw that we had a divider! This bamboo wall would slide open and closed, and would completely separate the two of us. I tend to get up earlier than Maple, who stays up later than me. With that glorious divider, neither one of us disturbed the other for several days.
I joked that I didn't like the divider because I felt like it was putting a wall up in our relationship. She quipped back, "That's what happens when you come to Berlin." That's why we make such a great team.
Life carried on while we were traveling, and so this sweet guy began crawling! The internet was pretty awful in all our hotels, so I didn't get to Skype with him (or anybody else) for a month, but I did get a sweet video of the crawling.
I found this sale bin of rubber duckies and wondered if they're going out of style, or these were defunct and couldn't squeak, or what? Whatever it was, sweet baby JOC would probably love that bin, since he loves his rubber duckies!
After Berlin (and a weekend trip to Warsaw, which will be yet another post), we headed to Munich. We caught up with colleagues, which was great. We went back to Italy, finished up writing our report with our colleagues there, and then headed on home. It was a great trip. I keep thinking it was the best one yet, then I remember how awesome the other ones were too. Hmmm. I guess they're all just different, but each one has been so good in its own way.
I saw this brochure at one location during the trip and picked it up to see what it said. It fascinated me from an ethnographer's point of view. It thought it was extremely well done. It was written in three languages (German, English, and Arabic), and had simple things explained about German culture and way of life. Things like how to greet people, German views on time, holidays, and so much more. German and Arab culture couldn't be more opposite, so I thought it was so kind of someone to take the time to write up something simple like this to help a refugee in the beginning. I also would like to say that the stereotype I had of Germans in my mind got blown to pieces. Nearly everyone we encountered spoke English and spoke it well. People were friendly and helpful, and even went out of their way to help us without our asking. The idea of a stiff, unfriendly, almost rude, rule-following German who spoke either no English or very accented English just didn't seem to be true...and that was across the board, no matter which of the 8 cities we were in. Pretty cool.
