Hey everybody! Short update!
After Clausen, we took the train up to Hamburg and got to hang out with a friend from HOME, Tracy! We went out for dinner and brew and good conversation, spent the night in the lovely flat she is living in, and then had breakfast the next morning before catching our flight to....
Ireland! We saved a few pennies on the first 2/3 of our trip so that we could really treat ourselves on our last week. We are staying in the dreamiest B&B - Daly's in Doolin. We have our own queen sized bed, our own bathroom with our own shower and bathtub, along with what feels like our own gravel road, our own moon and our own field of cows. A major improvement on the hostels of the last 2 weeks.
More coming soon.
Love,
Hayley and Thayer
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Monday, October 2, 2006
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Europe Update - The Clauser Haawe
Hi everyone! This update includes only one day, but a very special day it was!
After Interlaken, we took the train to a city called Pirmasens, where we were picked up by a very sweet man named Manfred Sand. He lives in a neighboring town called Clausen and owns the guest room that Thayer and I would be staying in that night.
Clausen is a tiny town in Germany near the French border, just north of the Black Forest. It has a population of about 1600, one restaurant that you need a reservation for, one bakery, one church that the whole town attends, one cemetery…etc. Everyone knows each other. No one speaks English.And, funnily enough, the dialect of German they speak (Platt Deutsch) is one that even Thayer could barely understand.
Also, Clausen happens to be the town that my forefathers came from back in the mid 1800s. When we got home from the train station, a traditional German lunch was waiting for us. We sat down with Manfred, his wife, Hilga, and their son, Peter, to a lunch of bratwurst, potatoes and peas and carrots. At every meal we ate with the family, Hilga made it clear that we were expected to empty every plate or dish before we got up.
After lunch Manfred took us for a walk around the town to see the "new church" built in 1903, the footprint of the old church which is likely where my great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather were married. After that, he took us to a church meeting attended by about twenty women over the age of 90 who were a-buzz with excitement over our presence in their town. They all wanted to give their stories to us, but of course all at the same time and all in the same unintelligible (to us) dialect of German. Our heads were spinning but we did get to meet Frau Müller, whose son Franz Josef wrote a comprehensive book on Clausen families between 1466 and 1806. Since the Sand family also had a copy of the book, I was able to match the information I had with the information in the book and even trace the family line back two more generations. Very exciting!
Manfred also took us to the town cemetery where we expected to find graves of my ancestors. We found plenty of Germanns but we couldn't find any prior to the 1900s. Manfred didn't seem sure, but he thought perhaps the old graves just "went away." Thayer and I thought this was ridiculous so we continued the investigation on our own and found a tiny chapel up a mountain in the woods with all the stations of the cross but no graves.
On our way back home, we ran into Frau Müller and we thought if anyone would know where the graves were, it would be her. She confirmed what Manfred had said. Apparently the old graves were simply done away with when more than 30 years had passed since their deaths and new people were willing to pay for the land for new graves. We found this terribly disappointing but at least we had a definitive answer. We also came to understand that the cemetery in Clausen is less about history and more about immediate family being able to honor and remember their dead and also to show their family pride by impeccable upkeep of the gardens above their plots.
Manfred and Hilga treated us like family, and we felt like very special guests in their home. The day we left, Hilga was feverishly searching through her kitchen. She brought out a clay pitcher, what is known in Clausen as the "Clauser Hawe" (KLOW-zuh HAH-vuh). It is a unique symbol of the town. In fact, there is a fountain on the main street with three pitchers pouring into each other, and Manfred and Hilga even have these pitchers on the metal gate to their driveway. She gave us a hawe to remember the town where my family came from, a gesture so kind it brought tears to my eyes.
We had an amazing time, and hope to return again someday, as Manfred and Hilga told us we would always be welcome.
Another update will be coming soon!
All our love,
Hayley and Thayer
**Memorable Trip Quote**
Manfred: [telling a story… takes a pause so Thayer can translate to Hayley]
Thayer: Something about the devil and paradise and Adam and Eve and it's funny, so laugh when I finish talking.
After Interlaken, we took the train to a city called Pirmasens, where we were picked up by a very sweet man named Manfred Sand. He lives in a neighboring town called Clausen and owns the guest room that Thayer and I would be staying in that night.
Clausen is a tiny town in Germany near the French border, just north of the Black Forest. It has a population of about 1600, one restaurant that you need a reservation for, one bakery, one church that the whole town attends, one cemetery…etc. Everyone knows each other. No one speaks English.And, funnily enough, the dialect of German they speak (Platt Deutsch) is one that even Thayer could barely understand.
Also, Clausen happens to be the town that my forefathers came from back in the mid 1800s. When we got home from the train station, a traditional German lunch was waiting for us. We sat down with Manfred, his wife, Hilga, and their son, Peter, to a lunch of bratwurst, potatoes and peas and carrots. At every meal we ate with the family, Hilga made it clear that we were expected to empty every plate or dish before we got up.
After lunch Manfred took us for a walk around the town to see the "new church" built in 1903, the footprint of the old church which is likely where my great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather were married. After that, he took us to a church meeting attended by about twenty women over the age of 90 who were a-buzz with excitement over our presence in their town. They all wanted to give their stories to us, but of course all at the same time and all in the same unintelligible (to us) dialect of German. Our heads were spinning but we did get to meet Frau Müller, whose son Franz Josef wrote a comprehensive book on Clausen families between 1466 and 1806. Since the Sand family also had a copy of the book, I was able to match the information I had with the information in the book and even trace the family line back two more generations. Very exciting!
Manfred also took us to the town cemetery where we expected to find graves of my ancestors. We found plenty of Germanns but we couldn't find any prior to the 1900s. Manfred didn't seem sure, but he thought perhaps the old graves just "went away." Thayer and I thought this was ridiculous so we continued the investigation on our own and found a tiny chapel up a mountain in the woods with all the stations of the cross but no graves.
On our way back home, we ran into Frau Müller and we thought if anyone would know where the graves were, it would be her. She confirmed what Manfred had said. Apparently the old graves were simply done away with when more than 30 years had passed since their deaths and new people were willing to pay for the land for new graves. We found this terribly disappointing but at least we had a definitive answer. We also came to understand that the cemetery in Clausen is less about history and more about immediate family being able to honor and remember their dead and also to show their family pride by impeccable upkeep of the gardens above their plots.
Manfred and Hilga treated us like family, and we felt like very special guests in their home. The day we left, Hilga was feverishly searching through her kitchen. She brought out a clay pitcher, what is known in Clausen as the "Clauser Hawe" (KLOW-zuh HAH-vuh). It is a unique symbol of the town. In fact, there is a fountain on the main street with three pitchers pouring into each other, and Manfred and Hilga even have these pitchers on the metal gate to their driveway. She gave us a hawe to remember the town where my family came from, a gesture so kind it brought tears to my eyes.
We had an amazing time, and hope to return again someday, as Manfred and Hilga told us we would always be welcome.
Another update will be coming soon!
All our love,
Hayley and Thayer
**Memorable Trip Quote**
Manfred: [telling a story… takes a pause so Thayer can translate to Hayley]
Thayer: Something about the devil and paradise and Adam and Eve and it's funny, so laugh when I finish talking.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Europe Update - Berlin
Hello Everybody. It's time for another update.
We are on a train headed for Prague after 2ish fun days in Berlin.
Berlin is the home city of our recently wedded friends, Brian and Claudia. They put us up for three nights in the living room of their new apartment on WarschauerStrasse (Warsau Street) - a bustling street in East Berlin. There is scarcely an un-graffitied surface in East Berlin. Every wall and every window of every street level store or apartment building is covered. Brian said sometimes people paint over the graffiti, but it just gets graffitied again as soon as the paint dries, so most people have given up the fight. Berlin has the most well-behaved dogs we've ever seen! They're everywhere and they don't wear leashes, they just follow their humans wherever they go.
On Tuesday, Brian showed us around his quaint-yet-busy neighborhood. We also walked over the Oberbaumbruecke, an old bridge that used to be closed because of the wall. Then we took a stroll down the longest stretch of the old Berlin Wall that still stands, called the East Side Gallery. It is covered by gigantic, beautiful paintings, and of course graffiti. We also walked through the Brandenburger Tor, one of the most famous symbols of Berlin.
A few years ago, in school, Thayer read about the building of the Holocaust Monument. In Berlin, we got to see it, and it was a pretty intense experience. It is a huge uneven plot of cement holding rows and rows of rectangular cement blocks (reminiscent of graves or smokestacks, perhaps) in sizes ranging from flush with the ground to fifteen feet tall. The shorter blocks are around the edge of the monument, so as you walk toward the center, you seem to be walking down, down, down, and the blocks get higher and higher and higher until you feel completely overwhelmed by the scope of the monument and the weight of knowing what it is for. The name of the monument is Denkmal fur die Ermordeten Juden Europas - Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. A must-see if you ever go to Berlin.
Yesterday, Thayer and I went to Treptower Park and saw the (also giant) Soviet Monument, dedicated to the soldiers of the Red Army who died between 1941 and 1945. Those Germans sure know how to say Thank You.
It was really nice to be staying with friends for the last few days. Most of the time we will be on our own, so we really enjoyed spending some quality time with Brian and Claudia and getting to know some of their friends.
Current favorite memory:
Drinking wine with Brian, Claudia, and their friends Anna, Sandra, and Mathias. Thayer and Brian in heated discussion over organized religion, Claudia and Hayley reminiscing about Catholic upbringing and the joy of Christmas in a Catholic church. Inevitably, Hayley and Claudia break in to Stille Nacht (Silent Night, the only German song that Hayley knows) and try to drown out the rest of the conversation.
Poll time
It's a long trip from Prague to our next stop in Switzerland, so we want to break it up by stopping in either Vienna or Salzberg for one day and night. Which one should we go to and what should we see---- I cannot find a question mark on the keyboard, so you don§t get one.
It§s been great hearing from you guys. We will send another note out as soon as we can.
Cheers
Hayley and Thayer
Memorable trip quote:
(Brian's friend Rafael telling story about a man who ate a Snickers and drank a Coke every day, and then sued Snickers and Coca Cola for giving him diabetes...)
Tanner= "What are they supposed to do, put a disclaimer on Snickers that says WARNING, THIS IS NOT A BANANA"?
Please note the immense effort it took us to edit this because of the keyboard differences, and symbols like +ìšèáøužéíáý§ù.
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