Rosskopf, Windmills, Chapel

24Feb08

Despite muscle pains from receiving a thrashing at badminton last night, this morning I walked up to Rosskopf to get a closer look at the windmills I see from my kitchen window. The weather was like mid-summer and everything was gorgeous beyond reason. Here’s the Dreisamtal - with some snow showing still on the Feldberg:

On the way, I passed a woodland chapel in a clearing, probably dedicated to St. Wendelin (since I was on St. Wendelingsweg).

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Authenticity, toys, Janosch, tiger ducks

17Dec07

 

Here’s one of the beautiful toyshops which so charmed us when we first got here with our two gorgeous full of life daughters. The toys, like many other aspects of Freiburg, appeared “old-fashioned” in terms of the materials used. Namely, many wooden toys. Solid, no marketing needed, pretty, “authentic” one might say. We used to buy loads of wooden “Haba” food, and the kids made their “big games” which sometimes lasted days.

 

 

Wooden toys and Janosch the truly wonderful quixotic character who wrote the masterpiece “O wie schön ist Panama” and consequently had a generation (or several) of german kids dragging around their “tiger-ducks”: 

 

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Going to the cinema in switzerland and germany

17Dec07

Since I spend a reasonable amount of free time in cinemas, here is my handy guide to the differences between going to the cinema in Switzerland (Basel, Zürich) on the one hand, and Germany (Freiburg) on the other. 

In Switzerland:

• Films are shown in their original languages, with subtitles in three languages
• There is always an interval 
• The popcorn is salty 
• A ticket costs something like 12 euros
• There are adverts for local businesses
• Kids matinees

In Germany:

• Films are always dubbed into german! Yeuch! 
• No interval
• The popcorn is sweet
• A ticket something like 6 euros
• No local adverts, only Marlboro Man etc.
• No kids matinees

National borders are just abstract things, but they have the strange power of determining whether the popcorn is swwet or salty. What funny animals we are. I prefer sweet popcorn, but the germans should quit ruining films with their terrible “synchronizations”.

 

 

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Lights in the Freiburg Dusk

24Nov07

I knew the Augustiner museum was being renovated, but I didn’t realise they were going to go quite so far.

Meanwhile, a charity fund-raising campaign lit up the Augustinerplatz.

Under the orange umbrella (centre background) outside Stiegler, a pianist and violinist accompanied the scene.

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Tags: Augustinermuseum, Austinerplatz, candles, Freiburg

Hot roasted chesnuts

24Nov07

For info see Just Hungry

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Tags: chesnuts, marroni, Zürich

Bronze memorials underfoot

22Nov07

In Freiburg the pavements contain attractive mosaics, and also bronze blocks:

It happened like this, apparently. There was an operation at dawn one day in October 1940. All German jews who had remained in Freiburg were taken from their homes and exported over the French border (which ran west of Alsace at this time). The French then put them in the camp at Gurs, in the extreme south-west of France, in the pyrenees, near the Spanish border. The camp was originally a refugee camp for people escaping from the Spanish Fascists.

A Freiburger, Hugo Ott, has written a novel which dramatises and personalises the day of the deportation through the experiences of a single deportee. Laubhüttenfest 1940: Why Therese Loewy had to die alone. The novel takes you there, to that morning, and let’s you see and hear the town as it is waking up – the bakers, etc. – a completely normal day in Freiburg, except at certain flats and houses (where there are now bronze blocks in the pavement outside) some people are told to pack just a few clothes quickly and come along. Most were in Gurs less than two years before being transferred to extermination camps in Eastern Europe in summer 1942

The family of a pal in England, my Best Man indeed, were Freiburg jews. They fled to England in time. I rang his dad to get my pal’s latest number a few years ago. His dad happened to say “where are you calling from?” I gulped and said “Freiburg”. He said: “you lucky man”.

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Tags: deporation, Freiburg, Gurs, Jews, memorials, war

Raw materials for xmas put in place

18Nov07

On Friday afternoon, they were constructing the xmas market in Zürich main station’s large concourse.

When I first saw such markets, I was surprised at the solidity of the natty sheds. Fully kitted out, they are well lit and well-heated. Probably better insulated than our old house in Leicester. You get a similar impression from allotment sheds in Freiburg – they look like well-appointed holiday chalets to me. So where can they store the manure?

Anyway, there are big xmas markets like this in Freiburg and Basel and Strasbourg in particular. And, of course, Birmingham.

In Basel Market Place, the tree was up, but as yet in a similarly undecorated state:

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Tags: Basel Marktplatz, xmas market, Zürich station

German rail strike strands poor commuters

16Nov07

Friday again, but this time a disturbance to the routine …

Some colleagues who, like me, live in Germany and work in Zürich during the week have to stay in Zürich this weekend because of the German rail strike. I would have been very unhappy to miss out on my weekend at home. Luckily for me, I had my car parked in Basel and could drive back to Freiburg.

.	I park my car near one of Basel’s great icons: the Spalentor (seen left). I drove back to Freiburg through France, passing the Basel-Mulhouse Euro Airport and the Usine Peugot-Citroen near Mulhouse, crossing the Grand Canal d’Alsace and the Rhine about 20 miles north of Basel.

I often drive into Basel this route since the main German-Swiss border crossing (from the A5) at Basel is packed each weekday morning with a massive tailback of HGVs from all over europe, waiting to cross through Switzerland. This massive through freight traffic led to the new Lötschberg tunnel.

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Tags: commuting, spalentor, strike, trains

Largest party in Swiss parliament is a racist party

16Nov07

German or Swiss politics usually pass me by, but in the past couple of months the Swiss scene has been impossible to avoid noticing. There was even a riot in Bern.

Here’s a poster I walk past every day on my way into work:

This is a poster from the SVP (Swiss People’s Party) which, since the recent election, is the largest party in the Swiss parliament(!)

What pisses me off most is the extent to which a debate goes on about whether this party is racist or not. I wonder if even the BNP or the Front Nationale could get away with a poster as crudely racist as this one?

The Swiss who don’t take such a question seriously are not particularly happy with the SVP:

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Tags: politics, racism, SVP, swiss

Lüüt und Sproch

15Nov07

The real reason why this region forms a “region in the mind”, is because, at the collapse of the Roman Empire, a germanic tribe called the Allemans drove out the Romans and Celts and settled the region. They hung out on both sides of the Rhine, in the Voges and Black Forest, and right down south as far as the Alps. Their language, “Allemanisch”, is still dominant here. There’s even a wikipedia in Alemannisch.

Though Alsace has been frenchified since the war, the Alsatian form of Allemannisch is still around. An Alsatian friend of mine says Arsene Wenger’s first language must have been the Alsatian dialect. You can tell from his French, apparently.

In the university town of Freiburg, the Black Forest metropole, you mostly hear standard High German. But if you go even just a couple of miles out into the country, linguistically it’s a different world.

But there’s a special thrill to be had in hearing the people south of the Rhine. Swiss germans seem have no mercy with the language. It gets twisted and stretched just as they wish. It may be incomprehensible to Germans. As demonstration, here’s an interview with Basel-boy Roger Federer, subtitled – in German.

Swiss German has no written form, so maybe it changes quickly, and certainly there are massive regional variations. Despite being referred to as a dialect, it is still the national language of the swiss germans. If a cabinet minister is interviewed on TV, he’ll more likely than not be speaking this extreme dialect.

The language seems to have the flexibility of old gloves. It sounds like a language made for joking in and enjoying life. In contrast, one can imagine Mr. Spock feeling comfortable with High German.

It is probably best not to be able to understand the Swiss German in this extremely naughty version of Pingu:

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Tags: language, people, swiss german