Letter from Espargal: 11 of 2008

We are back from Berlin, of which more follows.

Sadly, we learned while we were away that Stoopy, our elderly dog, who was very close to Jonesy, had fallen ill. Our house-sitters took her to the vet, where she was sedated and placed on a drip. When we went to see how she fared the morning after our return, we learned that she had died overnight. I don’t doubt that it was for the best. She’d been growing increasingly stiff and erratic. We brought her home and, with a little help from Mario’s digger, buried her nearby. It hurt. If we didn’t love them, I guess we wouldn’t miss them.

Following a heart-stopping incident with my tractor just before our departure for Berlin (See the following paras) I stopped off at Vitor’s workshop to see how the vehicle was faring, I found it in two parts, separated by the clutch-box. What had been the clutch-plate was a burned-out mess. The repair was not particularly complicated, Vitor informed me; the problem was getting the parts. The model was unusual and there were no representatives in the Algarve. So we wait.

[Two neighbours arrived for a quick tractor lesson - given that they would have to move the tractor out of the garage during our absence in Germany in order to get at the boxes housing Fintan’s possessions, which were piled up behind it. As Olly had driven tractors before it was just a question of showing him the particulars. After a quick induction, I invited him to drive it down the steep incline to the road, warning him to use the engine to control the speed – not the brakes.

Olly climbed into the seat, put the tractor in gear and, the next moment, hurtled down the concrete roadway towards Fintan’s car, which was parked at the bottom. Mercifully, he managed to avoid both the car and killing himself.

When he’d recovered his composure, Olly complained that there were no gears to engage. I checked. So did Idalecio and finally Vitor, the village mechanic. No gears! So we pushed the tractor to the side of the road to enable cars to pass and I arranged with Vitor to have it carted off to his workshop.]

Back to the present - Natasha called from the bus to ask us please to meet it promptly at the bus-stop. She was penniless and needed the cash to pay the driver – after losing her purse to a sneak-thief while walking Alex in Loule. She said she’d lost a week’s wages. Ouch! She is hugely thrifty and saves all she can.

What follows is the letter I was working on during the flight back from Germany.

We have seen and done more memorable things in a week than may easily be described in a brief letter. For me the highlight was a visit to Wittenberg, the town where Luther challenged the might of the Roman Catholic Church and, unlike his rebellious predecessors, lived to tell the tale. We visited the much-rebuilt church where he preached (and was later buried), and then the house – once part of an Augustinian monastery and now a museum - where he settled down with an enterprising former nun and fathered a family. Since the collapse of the DDR, the German authorities have taken immense pains to restore the buildings and to give visitors a vivid idea of life in Luther’s household.

I was fascinated to read the detail of how Luther was spirited away by his protectors from the church authorities, who were ready to send him up in smoke, and the gusto with which the denizens of monasteries and convents took to his teachings. Within 3 years of his rejection of many church teachings and practices – famously, the granting of indulgences - monks and nuns had fled their cells for a more congenial life. Doubt is cast over whether the famous 95 theses were ever nailed to the wooden church door which, like much else, fell victim to fire and war. The current door is cast in brass, with the theses spelled out (in German) for those with the patience to read them through.

Our excursion was part of a 3-day outing from Berlin, focused on the cultural-historical centre of Weimar. We drove south across the German plains through a forest of wind farms, heading for a delightful hotel in the little town of Apolda where Cathy had secured us a romantic-weekend special deal. Jones and I found ourselves directed to the spacious honeymoon suite. There awaiting us we found great scatterings of rose petals across the bed and furniture and a bottle of chilled sparkling wine.

The special deal included dinner on both nights and entrance tickets to a spa half an hour away. Cathy had booked a massage for me at the spa. Lacking her fluency in German, I had some difficulty in making myself understood to the receptionist and the masseur. It was clear that English-speaking visitors were a rarity in that part of Germany. After the massage I proceeded to the pools.The first confusing element for foreign visitors is the changing-room set-up. Although there are signs – in German - for men and women, these apply, as I discovered, just to the toilets and showers. For the rest there is no gender separation.

One changes in small booths (larger booths are available for families) with two unboltable swing-doors and then places one’s possessions in an adjoining locker. (It took me five minutes to figure out how to extract the key.) At the end of the corridor women chatter while they dry their hair. Off the main corridor to the pools, the shower room doors swing open from time to time to reveal, for anyone who may be interested, the naked forms of those showering within. Although devotees clearly find it all very relaxing, the system would cause our prudish New World cousins to faint dead away.

I found Cathy and Jones floating in a pool from which piped music issued underwater – best heard with one’s ears below the surface. The mineral content of the water was so high that floating proved quite effortless. It was sinking that took an effort. One could choose to float around in any of half a dozen spacious pools, one of them outside the large dome that protected the rest from the winter weather. A café bar offered clients a range of refreshments. It was quite an experience, and clearly a popular one among the local people.

CATHY
In the evening we would repair to the hotel dining room for 3- and 5-course nouvelle cuisine meals, served with local wines. We guessed that the hotel had been constructed after 1989. Most of the towns and roads in the region had clearly undergone a post-merger facelift, financed with the swingeing taxes paid by west Germans to assist their compatriots in the east. Of the smoky Trabants that had once chugged along Thuringia’s roads and the dirty cement buildings that had lined them, little sign remained. In fact, it was a lovely part of the country, typified by wide-open spaces and gently rolling hills.

We spent a day and a half visiting Weimar, a city that I knew only from the name that it gave to the ineffective German government that oversaw such a disastrous period of pre-war inflation. The only reminder of this period that I came across was a series of framed bank notes in the Bauhaus museum, with nominal values of one million to one-hundred million marks. Cathy told me that they were on display only because the artist who had designed them belonged to the movement. For the rest, the city celebrates its links with the giants of German literature and music.

The highlight of our visit to Weimar was a 2-hour tour in a facsimile 1925 Talbot bus, made for the purpose by VW. It was conducted partly by the driver/owner of the bus, a knowledgeable man with a dry sense of humour, and partly with the help of a trilingual video programme that was played on screens at the front of the vehicle.

Our trip ended, as it had begun, in Berlin. Initially we stayed with Cathy, who moved into the living room to give us the luxury of using her bedroom. For the last two days, when Rolf had returned from one of his frequent business trips, Cathy booked us into a suite in a hotel nearby.

Under Cathy’s guidance we hit the Berlin trail. Worthy of special mention among our visits were a tour of the KPM porcelain factory (we came to understand why the stuff is so precious), a Dali exhibition and a display of Hitler’s grandiose plans for the development of a vast stone-built city (Germania) within Berlin.

Another highlight was a mime performance, entitled Infinita by a group calling itself Familie Floez. Actors dressed as infants and geriatrics, mimed scenes that might have taken place in the first and last years of life. They were simply amazing. I was astonished at the end to discover that the entire performance had been given by just four people and that all were male. If ever you see the Familie Floez playing in your neck of the woods, go along.