Small Towns, Big Towns
Friday June 2, 2006
WEIMAR, GERMANY - Okay, the entries here have been quite sporadic lately. I hope to send more on a regular basis during my time in Berlin, which starts tomorrow. I’ll join the eleven other journalists taking part in the RIAS German-American journalist exchange there.
I’m glad, though, that I started my trip by staying in Weimar. I’ve been able to see how a smaller-sized German city functions, as well as seeing nearby Erfurt and Jena. Jena is the college town that is probably more like Bloomington—diverse population, and rather dynamic. Erfurt has a college, but is dominated by its downtown tourist attractions. Weimar is all about the past, centering its promotions on who has lived here at one time or another, which include Martin Luther, Franz Liszt, Bach and Goerthe. Its history is enmeshed in the cobblestone streets and beautiful architecture of the town.
All of these places gave me a sense I wouldn’t have for the “heartland” of Germany had I started the trip in Berlin. I spent just a few hours there on Friday, and Berlin seems big, with a lot of things going on, but it’s as much like Weimar on first glance as Chicago is like Bloomington. Coming from the heartland of the Midwest in the U.S., the smaller cities are really the ones that have appeal for me.
Thursday and Friday were spent doing interviews in Jena and Berlin. I followed up with the IU group finishing its time in Germany with a trip to the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. offices in Berlin. They now move on to Poland to wrap up four weeks in Europe. You’ll hear from those students on the June 22nd WEEKLY SPECIAL talking about the connections they’ve made, and how important this trip is to their future careers. Most of them want to be in positions similar to the people they’ve met during this time.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the invaluable assistance of a guy who has practically led us around Weimar by the hand. I don’t know if he’d like it if I mentioned him by name on this blog, but I can tell you you’ll see him in a future piece I’ll be doing on my time here. He’s living here in Weimar now and will soon be back in Bloomington for a period of time. I have managed to get myself lost so many times here in a week and a half that without someone to point me in the right direction, I couldn’t have found anything. I owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Now, more fun with food from my journeys. It was quite an adventure the other day when I went into the local Burger King in Weimar, apparently just opened a short time back, and tried to order a cheeseburger plain. The non-English speaking cashier couldn’t understand what I was getting at, so I said “fleish”—the word for meat—then made some sort of “Safety Dance” like motion with my hands to indicate a bun, and said cheese in a strangely loud fashion, because of course volume increases understanding. Remarkably, the wonderful young lady got it exactly right.
Yes, you can order a beer in McDonald’s in Germany.
Something interesting from my journey into Berlin Friday…National Public Radio is available at around 104 on the FM dial. NPR has established a station there that carries all NPR programming.
German television hasn’t exactly caught my fancy yet. Hard to watch a lot of shows you don’t have any clue about. I have determined that the satellite dish I at my apartment right now does get what appears to be the home channel for Germany, an MTV type channel, and sundry other things. None of it makes any sense to me at the moment.