Hamburg Portside Sunday Market

Hamburg's port is more than 800 years old, from its era in the Hanseatic League, a Medieval trading system along the North and Baltic seas.

It remains a busy port, but it had room for commute ferries, such as we rode on Sunday.  More than a hundred packed the ferry, which moved up the Elbe River, sometimes crossing the Elbe to a dock to give or get passengers.  Tugboats towed freighters, tour boats passed, small boats passed, the many cranes for loading and unloading container ships drifted by, and we passed a shipyard.  This port seemed bigger and busier than two I know from Canada, Montreal and Vancouver.  We saw from the water the Elbe Opera building.

We got off the ferry at a vast open air market that covered several intersecting streets.  There were clothes, fashion items, and lot of fresh vegetables, fruit, and fish.  Breakfast was smoked salmon on a bun for me, pickled herring on a bun for my sister.  We bought a flat of more than 10 avocados for one euro, about a dollar and a  half Canadian.

Then we found the music.

Inside a cavernous building, people drink and dance Saturday night, through Sunday morning, when they eat breakfast, but can still drink.  We saw plates of waffles go by, beer, and at each end of this 75m  long building a stage.  Bands played for an hour each, music coming from one stage or the other.

We listened to two bands, the first playing old rock and roll, such as "All Shook Up" and "Let's Twist Again," the second, at the other stage, following with newer, more metal-sounding songs such as "Radar Love" and songs by ZZ Top and Guns 'n' Roses.

We rode a ferry back downriver, and went ashore near a Polish Catholic church whose mass was just ending, in a nearby neighborhood, near the red light district   A walk of a few blocks took us to a Portuguese district and great pizza in a sidewalk cafe.  Another short walk took us to St. Michael's church, with its bright blue and white interior.  A nearby grassy park was a good place for a nap, as others found.  Children played, some with soccer balls, and families had picnics.

A couple buses brought us back to this suburb where I type to you, using my sister's laptop.  It is morning and she is not up, but she has been so busy guiding me around this city, speaking German for  me, interacting with the owner of the house we are at, an owner now away on vacation, and visiting with the neighbor who always seems around this house, and feeding its cat, that I am glad she sleeps late.

Without her, I would not have this trip of a lifetime.  Me, in busy, lively Hamburg! 

Hamburg Singalong

The song "Bei Mir Bist Du Schein" has a German title but mostly English words.  I have known and liked the jazzy tune for decades, but this week I heard it sung live for the first time.  My sister played the piano and our host sang the words.  Our host also sang, in its original English, "Summertime," with great feeling.  We three sang "Someone Like You," "Cry Me a River," and other songs familiar in many countries.  She sang "Autumn Leaves," whose tune I know, and whose words I have heard.  My sister played the piano with the creative charisma that has seemed natural to her since she was a little girl.  This was a memorable evening, as are all musical times.    

Translation Titters

Here in a suburb of Hamburg, the neighbor often visits the house owner.  Both speak German to my sister, who also speaks German.  All three speak English, my and my sister's first language.  Translation often produces funny results.

For example, we were talking about poetry, having seen the Heinrich Heine statue in Hamburg.  Philosophy came up.  I said something with the word "philosopher" in it, but the German equivalent sounds very different.  Our host heard "floss" and though I was  talking about the candy floss, or cotton candy, such as one eats.  My sister then said that in the future, when she walks past the philosophy department at the University of Alberta, the university where she worked for years, that she will imagine its people holding and playing with candy floss.

When she explained the work of a psychologist, another word somewhat different in German, she called him a brain mechanic.  The house owner, a special education school teacher, then explained the work of her school's guidance counselor by calling him a child mechanic.

There have been dozens of humorous incidents such as these since I arrived two days ago.

Before  our host left on Saturday afternoon in her motorhome, bound for the North Sea coast, where her boyfriend will meet her, before they board their boat to sail the sea, her neighbor invited us to supper at her place.  We had a nice stir fry of chicken and vegetables with ginger, in a creamy sauce that included peanut butter.  Dessert was a frozen torte we bought a couple days ago.  She suggested various sights to see during our time here, notably Berlin and especially Dresden. 

Hamburg Hot Dogs

Rested in this suburb of Hamburg, in a time zone nine hours later than home, I and my German-speaking sister walked in a hilly, treed area near the house she is to watch until late August.  Humidity was high, we took shelter under leafy trees during rain, and we saw a deer, smaller than deer I see back home in Canada.  Out of the woods, we stopped in the suburb for a hot dog whose wiener was longer than its bun.  We ate on a bench in a pedestrian-only street, watched the world go by, and then she had coffee and I had a rum ball, which we ate sitting on chairs at a sidewalk cafe on that same street.

The house owner is still here but planning to go for a holiday; hence my sister's presence.  The owner is a special education teacher, speaks fine English, and told us the challenges of her job, challenges which echo challenges that teachers face in Canada.  Her niece is here, studying toward a doctorate in chemistry, and working in a laboratory.  A neighbor, a nurse, has visited a few times; she towers over me and I am six feet two inches tall.  She is six four at least.  The house cat catches and eats mice in the yard behind the house, a yard which has a fish pond whose fish elude her by staying in the centre.

Now to supper, in this brick house in this quiet neighborhood.

Hamburg Arrival

I am about to go to bed in Hamburg, in a time zone eight hours ahead of Beiseker, the last place I slept, about 36 hours ago.  My sister Maryanne is house sitting here until near the end of August, and the house owner and her adult niece and a neighbor were here tonight.  Owner and niece like Maryanne so much that they let her stay, although the owner will be here for a few days, and the niece for Maryanne's whole stay, I think.

Today, my likeable sister brought me by commuter train, and bus, from the Hamburg airport to this cozy suburban house.  All here except me speak German as well as English, but they spoke more English than German for my sake.

Supper was scrumptious and you can see that I have internet access, but I cannot sign onto my Yahoo email account.  When I tried, I got a message asking me to verify my identity before it would let me sign on.  I got on that account in Iceland, but I cannot in Germany.  The places I am to find the verification code that Yahoo sent were my daughter Chelsea's Gmail and her phone.  I managed to sign onto my Gmail account or I would not be typing to you now.  I hope Chelsea checks her Gmail, whose password I forgot, gets the access code, and sends it to my Gmail, michaeljosephwynne@gmail.com.  I suspect there's a time limit for doing this, and I've passed it.  I will therefore call Chelsea's phone on Skype on Friday, August 5 at noon her time, which is 9 PM my time here, if I have internet access at that hour.   

In other news, Hamburg seems clean and its downtown was full of pedestrians, buses, and bicycles this afternoon.  This suburb has good buses and seems more like a town than a suburb.

I will add to my arrival story after I sleep off my jet lag.  Good night.

Gotta Fly Now

Boarding pass in hand, I found wifi and a plug in for the Android, two and a half hours before a plane flies me away.  This blog entry title is from the Rocky films.  I left Beiseker at ten this morning, returned the rented car by its 2 PM deadline in Edmonton, and the car folks drove me to Belgravia LRT Station.  I rode a train to Century Park, the end of steel, and I rode a city bus to the airport.  Today is part bus, train, car, and plane.  Harold gave me stuff for Maryanne when I stopped the rented car to meet him en route to Beiseker yesterday.  Baldersons were great, and Dorothy packed me two sandwiches and a banana for the road.  Lorraine fed me Tuesday lunch before I got the car.  I bought trail mix for the plane, on which they fed nobody last time. Eight hours to Iceland, two to Hamburg, and I will see Maryanne. 

The car my brother helped rent got me from Edmonton to Beiseker to visit our aunt, 87, and our uncle, 91, before I flew to Germany the next day.

The Edmonton Heritage Festival and World Peace

Who doesn't want world peace?

Meet people from different cultures, trade ideas and dreams and nonsense with them, and come to respect them enough never to fight them, nor to let your leaders fight them in your name, be those people from Israel, Romania, Iran, Wales, Ireland, or Syria.  I spoke to people from each of these countries today.  They, and people representing dozens of other cultures, set up pavilion tents and stages in Edmonton's Hawrelek Park for the Heritage Festival, the biggest annual event in this city of a million people.  More than 300 000 attend.

At the entrance to the Israel tent, behind a stage where Israelis danced for the public, beside a tent selling Israeli food, I met an 18-year-old man from Israel.  In Edmonton for a few months to help with this festival, he told me he is from Nazareth.  I diplomatically did not mention that Nazareth is in Palestine, not Israel.  Indeed, all of Israel is in Palestine.  When I asked him if he would do his mandatory military service soon, he said he would, said he was not worried, and said he wanted to be in combat situations, in his country or elsewhere in the world.  "This Canada of yours is so big; it has so much room and so few people," he observed.  He was a nice young man and I wished him well, then walked away thinking that he has a different view of land than I have, or does he?  He lives in a settler colonial state, as I do, on land taken from others.  In each state, the settlers want more control over the stolen land.

This was my second encounter with this young man, my first having been interrupted by a fellow visitor who pointed to a mistake on a map displayed inside the Israeli tent.  I'd meant to read more of the text with the maps, especially post-1917; but instead I went to the Romanian tent.  This second time, I did read the Lord Balfour, British Mandate Palestine map and blurb, after telling the young Israeli my reason to return.  I quipped, "Maps are important in your country."  I think of the David Rovics song "Israel Geography:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfaaD-UpqY

Romania?

Ah, you were thinking, as I was when he accosted me, that this map man was a Palestinian, Arab, or someone else from one of many places opposed to Israeli acts near and far.  But he was a Romanian, showing me a mistake on a map of the Ottoman Empire, which for centuries controlled vaster land than Israel now controls.

Not all of Romania, though.  

"The Ottomans never conquered all of Romania, but this map says they did," he explained.  "They only conquered the south," he continued, narrating a province-by-province tale of Ottomans here, Austrians there, and Russians elsewhere, but never Romania's entire land subjugated at one time.  We chatted about the Roman Empire, Romania's military support of it, the 1453 Muslim conquest of Constantinople and therefore the Roman Empire's end in the east, a millenium after the western empire fell.  "Go see the maps in the Romania pavilion," he advised me. 

I traipsed the kilometre to the other end of the festival site, and read my way through the Romanian history display.  Sure enough, at no time in its history was all of Romania under foreign control at one time.  

Iran, another country with a long, proud history, had a tent full of beautiful carpets, poetry, art objects, and clothing, including a stunning dress on a stunning woman.  She let me take her photograph, after a man from Istafan, an old city in Iran, showed me a glossy book of photos of amazingly-detailed artwork on mosques and other buildings.

Next door, however, the Welsh were waiting for the Iranian stage music and dance to subside so they could re-enact, on the grass in front of their tent, jousts connected to some Welsh war, probably with the English, who had no tent this year.  Neither had the Scots.  Did the Welsh and Irish drive off the English, or did they vote themselves out of the Heritage Festival as they had voted themselves out of the European Union?  

As the armored men milled around, medieval weapons in hand, I moseyed up to an organizer and said, "Perhaps your men should invade the Iranian pavilion and quiet the dancers and music so you can get on with your war.  You're better armed."  But he and his battlers patiently waited for the end of the Iranian performance.  One warrior should have waited through the war because another poked him in the face with a sword, blunted but still with a pointy metal end.  Can there be too much cultural authenticity?  I've little proof one way or the other, for my Android battery died just after I started photographing this battle:  collateral damage?

The twinkly-eyed Welsh-speaking man, 65 or so, manning a display table within the tent, was born in Swansea and seemed an encyclopedia of all things Welsh, including my Welsh last name.  "Wynne means white, and it can be Gwynne or Wynne."  He gave me a sheet of last names, mine the last on it, and told me that an internet search would show the density of population with that name in various times and places.

Across the park, a twinkly-eyed Irish man, 65 or so, born in Dublin but not back in 40 years, rejoiced when I told him of the peaceful country I found when I was there in 2015.  As we yammered away, his table mate, a woman descended from Irish people born north of Dublin, interrupted us to get him to help detach a large lacework from the tent wall behind.  Someone wanted to buy it.  "You're here to sell, not talk," I ended our natterings as he leapt into service.

Natterings by people suspicious of those from far away might fade to welcome silence if xenophobes heard the Syrians drum and dance in the Centre for Newcomers, a pavilion tent that held them, and people from Togo and Barbados.  This was my second visit to this tent; on my first, a Syrian sitting at a table in the tent gave me a bookmark on which he wrote my first name in Arabic.  

This second visit, I sat in the shade of trees on a hillside behind the tent, eating two pakoras and a samosa from the nearby Bangladeshi tent.  The back of the tent was open, covering a 3m wide circle of 8 or so chairs, on which sat Syrians, including the mother of the bookmark giver.  Notice those Arabic numerals in the last sentence.  

As I chewed in the shade, and Somalis gathered around me for some rendezvous they planned, and I moved out of its way, drum music and singing and dancing broke out in that small circle of Syrians.

What a joyful noise they made.  These seem like people happy to be in Canada.  

I thought, "How lucky Canada is, to have these lively, cultured people move to it."

We are one species in one world.