February 29 - Volksmarch in Wedel

We knew we had to catch the 9:11 a.m. train out of the Reinbek train station, so we hustled our breakfast along and left the house by about 8:50. Our choice was to take a bus from one of the three bus stops located a block north, south or west from us, or simply walk to the train station. The buses were an unknown quantity in that we weren’t sure which line went which way from each of the stops, so we decided on the slow but sure method of walking to the station. Since we had timed that walk at 15 minutes on a test walk the previous evening, we were almost certain we could walk to the station and buy our tickets in time to take our train.

It went as we expected except for being momentarily bamfoozled by the automatic ticket machines—no humans at a ticket counter anymore! Unlike the Metro Farecard machines back in Washington, you had to choose what type of ticket you wanted before it would accept any money. Before we figured this out we were feeding it 5, 10, and 20 Euro notes in every possible orientation as I nervously watched the minutes tick by. Until we worked our way down thru the menus to the ticket we wanted to purchase, it obstinately refused to even start to pull the bill in. Dutifully choosing our ticket and then paying our 7.40 Euros, we grabbed the printout and quickly crossed under the tracks to the platform to catch the S21 train, one of the Hamburg S-Bahns or surface trains.

We took the S21 west to Hauptbahnhof, the central train station in Hamburg, and then changed over to the S1 train to continue out west to Wedel. Along the way we passed Bahrenfeld where Monika had lived for many years and even saw her old grade school. We didn’t stop—after all, we had visited Monika’s old stomping grounds on our last trip (see Wanderung 2 for more details) and we were dead set on taking that Volksmarch in Wedel. From the train station the Volksmarch club had already marked a trail to the starting point—boy were we happy to see those signs!

All together we figured it took us a little over an hour to get from Reinbek to Wedel, but based on our experiences driving with Gustl and Heinke in the Hamburg area we estimated that it would have taken about an hour by car. That’s assuming, of course, that you were driving in nice, empty Sunday morning traffic—you just wouldn’t want to drive thru Hamburg in rush hour at all! Given the extremely high cost of gasoline here, between $4.00 and $4.50 per gallon, driving would have been more expensive than the Strassen Bahn just for the gasoline alone. As it was, we arrived a whole lot more relaxed than we would have been after driving thru stoplight after stoplight in the core of Hamburg, plus we didn’t have to search for a parking lot at the end, which is often quite difficult in Germany. I could easily see why some people lived without cars in Germany, and why some folks didn’t even bother to learn to drive.

I let Monika do the talking at the starting point—my German tends to get tongue-tied in public—and we paid 1.50 Euro each to participate and get an official IVV stamp. That works out to about $1.85, which was noticeably cheaper that the $3.00 apiece we now pay for a Volksmarch in the U.S. The German clubs also seem to all put out a 20 kilometer as well as a 10-kilometer walk route, so if you can manage the longer walk the price per kilometer is really much lower than the U.S., about nine or ten cents per kilometer compared to 30 cents. I imagine it may strike some people as hilarious that we pay people to walk on public paths, but once you make the basic decision to do that it only makes sense in my opinion to get those kilometers as cheaply as possible. I suppose we could just say that the miser in me was satisfied, and let it go at that!

The walk itself was a beautiful route thru the farmland surrounding the village of Wedel. The weather was cold, in the 30s, but the sky was a great clear blue and sun was shining with at least a little bit of warmth, which made it much more bearable. When a cloud covered the sun and the wind kicked up, however, we really did get chilled—net result was that we walked really as fast as we could in part to keep warm (and partly because everyone else was walking fast, but more about that later). We passed thru field after field of a tree nursery that had the trees standing row on row. The German for nursery, “Baumschule”, translates literally as “tree school” and the trees certainly resembled rows of children in a classroom listening to their teacher. Some trees were even being trained to grow up straight by being tied to poles in the ground, which fit right in with the classroom analogy.

We also passed fields that were probably asparagus fields because they had very neat rows of heaped up loam about a foot high. German asparagus is white because it is grown underground in those loam ridges, and the absence of sunlight prevents the chlorophyll from forming which in turn prevents the stalks from turning green. What you get is long, pale white stalks usually carefully cooked and served with buttered potatoes. In her childhood Monika spent some time on a farm and learned how to cut off the asparagus stalks below the ground at the base of the hill. This white asparagus is a true German delicacy and altho expensive it seems to taste better than the green variety in the U.S., but that could also be due to the careful preparation or cooking.

Some of the farmers had given up on growing crops, however, and instead had converted their land to horse pastures and training grounds. Land is too precious in Hamburg proper for horse farms, but at the edges of the city like Wedel and, in the other direction, Reinbek, some farmland has been converted to riding schools. My nephew Detlef once had a horse for several years on the outskirts of Hamburg, and I guess the farmers who do this are counting on the economic drive from the citizens of Hamburg to support such an endeavor. Also, when you consider how much back-breaking work farming really is, caring for a few horses probably seems a lot easier!

We walked in a steady stream of Volksmarchers, and my informal impression was that the crowd was similar to the U.S. Volksmarchers with the exception of having perhaps more families and children. One other noticeable difference is that I saw a couple of smokers, which I have only seen a couple of times in many thousands of kilometers of walking in the U.S. In general, smoking is much more common in Germany than the U.S. (see also Wanderung 2), but at least the local trains and busses are all non-smoking now and that makes it a lot easier on those of us who are allergic to cigarette smoke.

The smoking was particularly noticeable at the checkpoint where people stopped for a snack. The German checkpoints usually offer a variety of drinks, including alcoholic ones, and some type of snack. The first checkpoint offered drinks, bratwurst, and cake for desert. Monika wasn’t hungry, so taking the advice of Marie Antionette to heart, I settled for a piece of cake before we continued our walk down the country lanes.

But now I must relate something that is, ahem, embarrassing. Back in the U.S. we are among the faster walkers. We were occasionally passed by males in good condition, but we held our own with pretty much everyone else. Things were somewhat different here in Germany—we still were maybe faster than most, but we were passed by a variety of people. In particular I recall we were passed rather handily by a grandmother with her approximately 9 year old son. That was embarrassing enough, but when we reached the route division for 10 versus 20 kilometers shortly thereafter, we wimped out and took the 10 kilometer branch while the grandmother and grandson resolutely marched down the 20 kilometer route! Talk about feeling small! But we felt much better, when another Volksmarcher taking the 10 KM route just remarked: “After all, we are older; we don’t have to prove anything anymore!” So on we walked past a little pond with ducks and swans.

But at least we did finish the walk in good order and found more food back at the finish point. In fact, the place was packed wall-to-wall with folks having a well-deserved lunch. After checking in and having our books stamped—they puzzled over the English—we joined the food queue. We settled on a plate of thick pea soup with a Wiener-style hotdog (over a foot long but only about 1” in diameter) on top, and that turned out to be a great choice. After lunch we also bought a couple of Volksmarching key rings, and a Volksmarch shopping bag plus collecting a list of upcoming Volksmarches and brochures for upcoming walks from clubs in the area, just like we would do in the U.S. So as it turned out the German Volksmarches do in fact still feature beer and bratwurst as well as offering a great way to see parts of the country.

This was the Sunday for the regional elections in the city/state of Hamburg. The percentage of people voting in what would be a state election in the U.S. was 75.5%, which we found astonishingly high. People also took it completely in stride—nobody mentioned it during the day at all and yet ¾ of the people took the trouble to get out and vote. Hamburg has, like the rest of Germany, a parliamentary type of` government. The people in fact vote for a party rather than individual representatives. The party that won would provide the next mayor of Hamburg.

The results of the election were interesting in that the socialists went down a bit, the green party went up a bit, but the big winner was the Christian-Democratic Party (CDU). The CDU won a plurality in the election, 46%, the socialist party (SPD) lost votes, receiving only 31%, and the Green party (environmental focus) received 13%. Note that this only adds up to only 90%. That’s because several small parties received under 5% percent and therefore are not going to be represented in the parliament. The “5% rule” is a result of the failure of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which suffered from gridlock due to many splinter parties. Since the parties under 5% are completely excluded and usually “die” by the next election—in fact, the leader of one of those splinter parties stated publicly that he was going to immediately emigrate to South America!! That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a politician make a statement like that (altho Ross Perot might have), and it certainly gives a new meaning for “sore loser”. In any case, due to the 5% rule the CDU ended up having an absolute majority in the Hamburg parliament. That would allow the CDU party to rule Hamburg without making a coalition with the Socialists or the Greens, and that will in turn probably make it easier to coordinate the city government. It also, of course, will make it clear where to point the finger if things go wrong!

I was once again impressed with the announcement of the election results in how precisely oriented to time the German culture is. The rule was that they could not announce projected results of the election until the polls closed at 6 p.m., so on the evening news they projected the time like a stopwatch display of hours, minutes, and seconds in the upper right hand of the screen. Then the announcer made small talk about related political topics until the “stopwatch” counted down to precise 6:00:00. No kidding, right on the exact SECOND of 6 p.m. he started his announcement of the projected results. This is, after all, a country where all of the official clocks are precisely synchronized to the correct time and many people purchase special alarm clocks and wrist watches that also receive those synchronizing time signals. The net result is that everyone runs on the same time right down to the millisecond.

Given the approximate plus or minus 5 minutes of U.S. clocks, this precision is amazing. We were walking in a U.S. town once and around the central town square we could see three big, official clocks that were all at least 2-3 minutes different from each other. It was so funny to Monika that she broke up into a fit of the giggles. Also consider the effects of this slaphappy view of time on common tasks like videotaping a show for later viewing. In Germany you could set the start and finish times to the exact second and be certain you would get the program, the whole program, and just the program you wanted. In the U.S., in contrast, to be sure I get the program I want I have to set the recorder to start a minute or two before the listed starting time. At the other end, I usually set the timer to let it run five to 10 minutes later to be sure to really get the end of the program. How irritating is that? Basically, if you get used to this precision you will waste a lot less time waiting around for busses, trains, or any scheduled event, which I found quite pleasant.

Kim came over that evening to pick up her bicycles and some plants, so we had a chance to chat with her a bit. She had moved into the center of town to be more “near the action” I gather, which certainly reminded me of Martin moving into downtown Chicago for much the same reason (and Tanya happens to live only two blocks away, but that’s just a bonus I guess). Anyway, Kim had a new studio somewhere downtown and she invited us to visit sometime, which we wanted to do in order to see her new artwork. We brought up one of her older paintings from the basement to cheer up the place a bit, and there was still one painting hanging in the kitchen, and not every kitchen has original artwork in it! After Kim left we watched some TV and enjoyed another fire while Monika crocheted and I wrote in the journal until it was time for bed.