Melatonin did its magic once again, in a new way! I cannot remember EVER having a “normal night’s sleep” the first day after coming to Europe. But last night, I took the melatonin (which I have been taking for the past 6 months to conquer insomnia, an approach that has worked about 95-98% of all nights) before we crashed at about 9 pm after the endless travel day, and even though I woke up twice to go to the bathroom, I fell right back asleep and then slept until just before 7 AS IF IT WERE A NORMAL NIGHT and not the day after a transatlantic trip!
Then, while Mark had tea and read his news, I went for a run, my first ever on a German visit–I have walked here plenty, but I wasn’t so dedicated to my running, so all running routes in Germany are new to me. This is delightful to me–I tried a path I have walked many, many times. I ran along several cobblestone streets with gorgeous, elegant townhomes built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like the house that has my mom’s condo in it, gets to the heart of “country scenery” in the middle of Osnabrück: uphill and “to the left” to a park and farmland, known as the Westerberg (Western Hill) and returning along the botanical garden and through a little woods, and back home through the residential neighborhood, in a large rectangle. Over the next few days, I will have to find a way to make it just a little longer, because I had to run down to the end of the street and back to make it the full 3 miles. But it was so nice–green and lush and also very up and down, which of course I am not quite used to!
We then had breakfast with Imke (who hadn’t noticed we were already up and had been extra quiet!) and had a quiet day, with gray skies and sprinkles at first, but the rain stopping in the early afternoon. We went to downtown Osnabrück for the usual errands–getting cash, looking for various minor things–including strange little halogen lightbulbs for a light fixture in Imke’s bathroom that is broken and that (OF COURSE) the incomparable Mark was able to fix. We also got gelato at our favorite gelateria, Fontanella, and it was just a glorious welcome-back treat.
When we came home, we sat around in Imke’s lovely enclosed garden under the apple tree for a while, and had a lovely dinner of vegetables and pasta with chicken. After dinner, Imke joined us for a walk that almost exactly tracked my running route from that morning, which turns out to be very close to my mom’s usual daily walk of about an hour. We did go to bed pretty soon after that, because the day had worn us out.
The familiar walk through downtown Osnabrück brought a lot of thoughts to mind that I just wanted to put down on paper, so here they are (TL/DR):
Shopping Memories
Downtown Osnabrück is a strange place when it comes to memories, because this is not my hometown–and yet, ever since I was little, my family would come here from our nearby small town, Fürstenau, for big-city shopping and the occasional events. Later, as a teen, I would go alone or with friends to get things you couldn’t in our town, and I would also come for Sunday matinees at the city theater, where high-school students could get an incredibly cheap subscription and a free special bus ride paid for by my hometown’s city government. So Osnabrück was “culture,” but it was also “the mall” writ large for us, with specialty shops for any number of our hobbies and interests. But these trips I took in my teens mean that downtown Osnabrück generates memories that are very different from remembering the place you grow up in. And on top of those memories from long ago are my memories of the city as an adult, coming to visit after Imke moved in with Hermann (in January of 1998), and especially the daily life of an adult *with* children in two–with children who were visiting here ever since they were little, and who lived here for a year, too, but who nonetheless don’t quite think of this city as their own “home,” but as their German grandmother’s hometown.
This mix of sameness and difference makes it a challenge not to confuse and confound very different memory layers. When I walk through this downtown, they are all activated and intertwined, and since I never came here to party or go to see bands like some of my peers, I mostly flash back to something I don’t do as much anymore: shopping for coveted things rather than for necessities. There are the shops that the kids loved to go to–Kai to the comic shop and Kati to some of the clothes stores and make-up stores. So as we walked by it today, I remembered going to Inside Out, where Kati insisted on buying a fancy homecoming dress two months ahead of time after much negotiating and bargaining with me, so she would have a German homecoming dress–it looked almost . I could not bear to part with it and it’s in my closet. (Maybe Jupiter will want it in 10 year’s time for her homecoming.) We also walked by the youth center where Kai took a computer class that I took him to every week for a while, and where he made a friend at some point whom we even had over for a playdate–a rare event. And there are those few stores that are still there that I also visited for hours as a teen when we would spend a Saturday or a vacation day in the pedestrian shopping district–especially the stationary and art supply store called Prelle, and a book store called Wenner that I no longer find nearly as interesting as I did when I was a dorky 15-year-old who loved to buy books–Wenner had English paperbacks!–along with notebooks, stationary, and fancy pens. But so many other stores are now closed: there was a big record store in an underground passage, a sort of strip mall, that does not exist anymore, and we’d spend hours looking at vinyl records. There was a big, busy department store, initially two of them next to each other (Kaufhof and Horten), and then, even as recently as two years ago, still one (Galleria Kaufhof). But today, as we walked by, it was clear that they had closed–that business model has just completely vanished, as has the idea of “Passagen”: underground or side-street strip malls, basically, where a bunch of smaller stores would be grouped together in some shortcut from one street to another, through buildings or in a pedestrian underpass. These are just not popular anymore and somehow seem downright creepy now. And of course many other stores have come and gone, and many food places as well. I remember a Chinese restaurant upstairs in one of the shop buildings that my dad sometimes took us to–one fancy enough to have real table linen and fancy dark wallpaper–and how I once went on my own, at 15 or 16, to have something off their lunch menu, and felt very grown up. But in its place there is now a Japanese restaurant, and there are very different windows, too. Another place that had Indian food is now Chinese, and the fast-food places have done their usual round-robin. Some chains, like Kochlöffel, do not seem to exist anymore; others have just changed locations–who knows where Subway is now? It’s weird enough that they have it. But there are the food places that have stood the test of time, and others that I discovered over time in Osnabrück, above all the all-time favorite gelateria Fontanella that Mark and I still visit every time we come (and where we already had our first Eisbecher today).