Day 11 - Twee villages and fluorescent dog collars
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
12
14
Trip End
Sep 13, 2008
Uelzen,
Germany
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I stopped at Tangermünde this morning as I had heard it was a picturesque town with an attractive old centre. I must say I wasn't let down. The centre was all cobbled, and almost every building had some fabulous feature to make it photogenic. Some were a bright colour, such as pink, yellow, orange or lime green. Some had old wooden beams visible (thankfully not painted black), or plasterwork with attractive features. Some had wooden carvings such as eagles, owls and geometric patterns. Some had inscriptions saying who built in, and when, and some fable or local saying, written in the old Gothic script on the beams. And some had all of these. In fact this place had the most attractive Woolworth I have ever seen, the interior all ultra-modern being so incongruous compared to the medieval exterior. Plus in the centre were a couple of impressively tall redbrick towers. Not too sure what they were for, but by the fact that the only windows were thin and well high up, defence must have been an important factor. In fact I later discovered driving out of the town that there are some substantial redbrick town walls still visible. Not as high as those in York, say, but equally as impressive.
The place seemed to have only two types of people. Groups of retired people with their tour guides, and the shopkeepers. Well OK, plus me. I didn't see anyone who looked like they actually lived there.
What a fabulous place. On a banner across the main central street it said that the town is 1000 years old in 2009, and there is to be a week long festival in September. Guess who is going to that?
By the way, two silly things. One, I parked on a street called Arneburger Strasse. Arnie-Burger - good eh? Also I saw a sign for a builder or Baumeister, whose surname was Schitthelm. Thank goodness he doesn't try to do trade in the UK. A bit like a British Mr Fick trying to live in Germany - look it up in a good dictionary.
Other smaller places well worth another visit were Stapen (not even on my atlas) and Apenburg. This place had one shop, one school, and rows of fabulous biscuit-tin houses. That is not to say, of course, that they were made of biscuit-tins.
This area is remarkable for the number of apple trees growing along the sides of the roads. The fields may contain wheat, root crops, cattle or sheep. But the apple trees are always there. Big juicy ripe red apples, some just falling to the roadside. I saved myself a lot of money by picking up about 20 of them.
Also the area has a lot of wind turbines, which is a bit strange really as this area is not particularly high up. But it is good to see them all the same. In the UK their construction is thwarted by claims that they adversely influence bird flight patterns. Here they are much more sensible about the whole thing, and just put them up anyway.
Heading west towards Uelzen I stopped in a huge parking place, all concrete and with lots of markings on the ground. Unmistakeably, this was an old east-west Germany border crossing. It was now all covered in weeds, nobody particularly bothered about keeping it tidy, and rightly so. Any possible souvenir had long since been ripped out, but there were still three rusty and stripped out metal sheds, and a huge concrete base with steps which obviously was the foundation for a substantial building of some sort, now dismantled. The markings on the concrete were lines for vehicles to park in while waiting for their journey to be processed and approved. Which goes to show the attitude of the old DDR border patrols - make them wait, and make them as uncomfortable as possible in their dealings with the "other half" of Germany. Some of the poor sods must have had to wait for many hours to have their papers processed. Now the only evidence of activity was a Polish lorry parked up, the driver asleep, and graffiti on the smashed-up huts.
I am now staying at a gorgeous campsite just a few hundred metres from this border crossing, a little to the east of Bergen. You can tell we have moved into the west. Facilities are excellent, showers are unlimited and free, the toilet block is impeccably clean, and the owners actually speak English, of a sort. But I am glad of my experiences in the east over the past week, and it is obvious that most of them want a better standard of life, and are gradually getting there. Like I said on an earlier entry, most east Germans I spoke to seem to regard the whole DDR thing as a bit of a bad joke, now only good for raising a bit of money from tourists wanting a DDR car sticker, or flag, or the like.
Tomorrow - west to Celle, a place I last visited in 1991, and which I am really looking forward to.
Oh yes, the fluorescent dog collar thing. I was coming out of the loo block when it was getting dark, and I felt something brush against my legs. I didn't see the black dog, only the pink fluorescent dog collar. You can imagine the start it gave me. Are these common? I have never seen one before. Certainly you come across them at outdoor music concerts and so on, but never on a dog. What a sensible idea!
