Today, we had a farewell breakfast with Andrea and Peter and then took off to go from Hamburg to Oldenburg, a town approximately the size of Osnabrück two hours southwest of Hamburg, where our friend Uschi lives. The drive was fine, but we did have to beat the GPS into submission, because it would show us the massive traffic jam by Bremen that would cause us a 50-minute delay, but no detours that would avoid it. I found us a pretty reasonable detour, and we were still in Oldenburg by 11 after leaving at 9. Uschi guided us from her house to a free park & ride parking lot, and then we walked back from there to town through the idyllic city park, formerly the park belonging to the local regent‘s palace (now a museum). Since the park, hothouses and beautifully landscaped beds and lawns and all, is right across the street from Uschi‘s apartment, it is her backyard and she takes quite a bit of pride in the care the city takes to make it so pretty. We then walked through the outer areas of said palace, which features a city museum and two nearby buildings with additional art museums (paintings by the expressionists from the Bridge / Brücke movement (Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, Emil Nolde, etc.) and the artists living in the artist colony Worpswede near Bremen, especially the awesome Paula Modersohn-Becker, are on display there). But we decided the weather was simply too gorgeous to spend our time in the museums, so we walked on to the downtown area of Oldenburg, which I have always loved—a generous pedestrian „zone“ with lots of little shops in 18th- and 19th century houses, in an oval-shaped area around the main church. Uschi mentioned that this was one of the first pedestrian shopping areas in the country, created in the mid-60s, and I remembered that we sometimes came here as a family in the 1970s because that was still rather special then. (My hometown is only about an hour away by car.) She showed us some of the special gems that we would not otherwise have found: a building with a crazy painted ceiling from the 16th or early 17th century that is now simply a Birkenstock shoe store. The ceiling represents the then-known four continents, and we were highly amused by the presumed Native American riding on a presumed giant armadillo! „America“ also featured animals looking very much like camels, while „Asia“ had a unicorn… European colonialism/exocitism at its most bizarre! We also took a peek into the church and were in for a surprise: the outside looks like a standard Northern European red-brick Gothic church, and one would expect the classic cross-shaped layout with a big rectangular nave—but inside is a pantheon-style neoclassical dome from the late 17th century, while with beautiful details on the ceiling, and a room behind the altar that has various sarcophagi and coffins of rulers on display. Uschi‘s favorite is a guy in full armor who has a blissful smile on his face—and his right hand directly over his crotch. Hmmm….
After our city tour, which also included a stop for coffee at a little market cafe, we went back to Uschi‘s apartment, which is in one of the most beautiful streets of all of Oldenburg, with gorgeous whitewashed town homes, mostly from the 19th century, and with very pretty features. She has a gorgeous ground-floor apartment with a balcony looking out on the street and another out back, and we had a lovely lunch of sausages, jacket potatoes, and salad, with Quark (untranslatable German dairy dish, a bit like yogurt) for dessert and coffee and chocolate! Very sumptuous.
We sat and talked for a bit, and then it was already time to leave—Uschi walked us back through the park and we took it from here, and were on the road by 4 pm—convenient because Germany was playing in a World Cup soccer game (their last, as it turned out, since they lost against South Korea in overtime) that started right then, and the freeway was relatively quiet, except for the many many trucks that had to keep moving, soccer or not). We got back to Osnabrück in a little more than an hour, and hung out at home for a while. But we had an evening commitment at 7:30 (after a hush settled over the city because the soccer loss)—we all went to see my former high-school teacher Detlev Brandt, and his husband Heinrich, because they had invited us for a little get-together, partly to give Kai a chance to talk music with Detlev. They live in this same neighborhood, in Katharinenstrasse, and like Imke, they live on the ground floor of a historic town house, with access to their own little garden nook. So we sat outside with wine and beer (Kai sampled both) and bread and cheese and talked, mostly in German, but with the occasional bit of English (I think it was a bit boring for Mark). Detlev took Kai to his stereo at some point and played him the Appassionata by Beethoven, and otherwise, we just talked about music, life, and—briefly, since the topic is so depressing—American politics. (Mostly, people are just baffled by what is happening in the States, as are we. Since the news of Anthony Kennedy retiring from the Supreme Court came right in the middle of our evening, we three Americans were especially mopey and dispirited and actually steered the conversation elsewhere fairly quickly). We left Detlev and Heinrich at about 10 pm and I went straight to bed—I was pretty tired!