Strawberries and Exams

In two weeks, the university seminars will be officially over, except insofar as there are two essays to write (Greek history, Greek/Russian literature) and one exam (Greek language) before I will receive credit for my courses.

Besides feeling apprehensive about a class presentation where I am supposed to compare a Spanish and a Portuguese Renaissance epic, I feel apprehensive about the spoken Spanish exam on Thursday. That said, I've learned a few tricks from past failures. Firstly, half the battle is won if I've gotten enough sleep the night before, because vocabulary magically comes to mind and I can present neatly structured material then. Secondly, re-reading the news articles and re-watching the videos that the professor shared with us a) refreshes the information, and b) ensures that I never run out of material to talk about. But as there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, as the saying goes, the most important trick is to remember to take my own advice.

It's been delightfully cold — and one might say autumnal — since our descent into the infernal a week or two ago (I am trying to repress the memory) by way of 38°C peak temperatures. That said, the windy weather has made me a little less enthusiastic about cycling.

'My' tree has still only had about 15% of the rain that it needs over the past 30 days. That said, the agricultural realm seems to be doing well, and the usual German strawberries, blueberries and red currants are thronging into the shelves of the grocery stores.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Seven

Carpenter Creek, New Denver
September 13, 2024
All rights reserved.

AFTER we visited the Japanese-Canadian internment centre in New Denver, we walked back toward the inn. First we passed through the thinly sprinkled trees at a campground beside the lakeshore. As we wandered along the beach and over the large smoothed pebbles, as crickets chirped and woodsmoke floated on the air.

For dinner we went to the restaurant that adjoins the inn. The dining room in the back of the restaurant reminded me of Social Studies (i.e. history) classes in Canadian school. Its decor was a mixture of time periods: a fan-shaped lamp hung from the ceiling, oil paintings of landscapes as well as of people dressed in 18th?-century attire apparently somewhere in Eastern Canada or the US hung on the walls above the wainscoting. Swing music played from unobtrusive loudspeakers. The tablecloths were mulberry-red and I worried about dropping any food on them. Flowers from the garden beds were sprinkled in vases on the tables: yellow dusty miller or white yarrow? I don't remember. A grandfather in a plaid shirt and baseball cap was dining with his grandson in one corner of the room, and at the end of the meal they played on the floor. The inn owner family's grandchild was roaming around all the tables and intermittently vanishing into the kitchen with a quietly cheeky air.

A man and woman were the other guests, sitting in the opposite corner. As they chatted with the current owners, we found out that they were the inn's previous owners. The pair had run the place for (I seem to recall) thirteen years. When we were woven into the discussion, they told us about the inn's past life. In the 1970s, I think, the inn had been named in honour of Lucerne in Switzerland, before being renamed after the park on the other side of Slocan Lake. The pair bought it and ran it for many years. They reminisced about the boom and bust cycles of working at an inn: long periods of inactivity, even with the year-round influx of mountain cyclists in summer and snowmobilers in winter. They evidently had few, or no, regrets about passing the torch.

Besides, the former inn owner mused about the social changes in New Denver, likely applicable to British Columbian towns in general: new people moving in, people speaking to each other on their smartphones instead of meeting each other in person, young people travelling off for jobs in remote areas, for weeks at a time, returning too tired to leave their houses and go out in the village. I guess that in a city like Berlin the social change is not dissimilar, although it might be easier to notice the change if one lives in a village.

As for the food, one of the brothers ordered a wild sockeye salmon burger with fries. But above all we shared sweet & sour chicken, spring rolls with dipping sauce, dumplings with soy sauce and green onion, beef ginger chicken, and sweet & sour pork. It was Hong Kong food as we'd never had it before, because it had elements of home cooking rather than the familiar conventions of restaurant fare made for a large crowd. Green onions from the garden and lemon slipped into the sweet-and-sour sauce, and I liked it. It felt like being invited over to a friend's house.

To drink I had chrysanthemum tea, which came in greenish-yellow buds. The inn owner daughter also recommended that we try a new ginger ale brand, brewed in Victoria, so we did; in Berlin I also like to compare the taste of German ginger ale (generally more pungent and dry) to the Canadian ginger ale brands we grew up with, and this Victoria brand was the first time that I had ginger ale that tastes like cooked ginger root rather than raw ginger root.

For the dessert, the grandmother — who was doing the cooking — brought us apple fritters as an extra: fried with fruit which her grandson had picked from a tree across the street, dusted with powdered sugar.

After that, pleased with everything, we went to our rooms.

***

September 14, 2024

Next morning, as I recorded in my notebook, I woke up before 6 a.m.

Walking downslope through the town, it was a relief to see rain and mist clinging to the mountains across the lake. Hopefully they were quenching more of the forest fires — although it was always hard to tell what was mist and what was smoke. The reddish mountain ash berries glowed in New Denver's streets, and (intentional) woodsmoke rose from a house's chimney. We saw one or two For Sale signs on the buildings. No bears in sight, but we did spot what I thought was a hawk.

Sign near the waterfront, New Denver
September 14, 2024
All rights reserved.

In the restaurant, the radio was playing 1980s hits like "Down Under" and "Eye of the Tiger," as we ordered coffee, Earl Grey tea, and chrysanthemum tea. The brothers had one of the omelettes with toast, as far as I recall, as well as Belgian waffles with blueberry jam and whipping cream, and French toast with maple syrup. Uncle Pu and/or I ordered porridge, too.

Uncle Pu was asked how he would like the porridge prepared. He was ready with an answer, since he has a patented way in which he prepares it for breakfast. He explained that he likes it served with brown sugar and milk on the side, and — when asked — specified that the milk should be 3.8%... Unfortunately for the restaurant, Canadian milk that is not skimmed seems to come in 3.25% or some other fat percentage, unlike German milk. But, when it was reported to him, Uncle Pu accepted this divergence willingly. I did feel bad that there was any doubt that we'd accept it... Either way, the porridge was tasty.

Then Uncle Pu roamed around the town with us again. We stopped at the Catholic church of St. Anthony's (1929): there, he said, he had met the priest and rung the bell a few times when he was a child. Afterwards we passed the Knox Presbyterian Hall, built 1897, now a non-denominational community hall.

Old fire station, New Denver.
No longer in use; as of 2024 I think it was partly or wholly owned
by a tree maintenance company.
September 13, 2024
License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Returning to the inn, Uncle Pu engaged one of the owner's family in talk about geothermal energy, and I cryptically noted that there was mention of "exploitative rentals of gold mining equipment by stock listed companies (TSX)." Which I guess refers to the veins of various precious and semi-precious metals that still lurk in the British Columbia hills, luring modern-day heirs to the gold fevers that once populated the Yukon, Cariboo and Sacramento. Meanwhile, the housekeeper (wearing an apron) was on her rounds and knocking on doors.

As we headed outdoors again, we had (in my case, for the first time) a quintessential North American experience, namely a visit to an outdoor outfitter's shop. I was so awed that I kept a long mental list of items:

canoe paddle covers, pots, pans, water bottles, water purification kits, water purification tabs, forks, spoons, bear spray, bear klaxon, whistles, lifevest for dogs?, swimwear, tops, hiking trousers, puffer jackets, paddles, knives, axes, maps, books about bear attacks and mushrooms, fuel canisters, sunscreen, flares

Sale signs were prolific, given the end of the holiday season, and I guess we probably felt doubly welcome. Uncle Pu chatted with the shop's owner, who stood behind her son at the cash register. (The store is a franchise, which has outlets with other owners in, for example, Victoria.)

I think he was at the time embarked on his months-long quest to find Gore-Tex hiking trousers with a certain number of layers of fabric, so that was one topic. (In Berlin's sports stores, he had failed to find his Holy Grail: one salesperson explained that they only carry the cheaper apparel in-store, and that online shopping is the likelier option.) But he also winkled out the information that the outfitter would be running kayak rentals the following year. In the end he bought, for example, two waterproof bags that can be used in kayaks to prevent one's valuables from becoming soaked or sunken.

Then, at the owner's recommendation, we drove to a boat rental in the nearby town of Slocan, thirty kilometres away. I continued to worry that we were on a lemming mission and that I'd see my uncle and all of my brothers be lost to Davy Jones's locker if they did go kayaking. (Whether this fear was rational, or irrational — and if the latter, if it was inspired by my father's sudden death — I guess I'll leave to any future therapist to decide.)

In consequence, I felt little sense of grievance when Uncle Pu surmised that the area's kayak store owners were engaged in a conspiracy to keep tourists off the water and away from the far shores of the National Park, to avoid risking people's lives through the wildfires there. I also still had no intention whatsoever of climbing into a boat myself, although I feared that this would seem like girlish timidity and let down the feminist cause.

Instead I was sunken in foreboding gloom. That said, the foreboding gloom was needless. Slocan's kayak rental was closed — the owner clearly cheerfully convinced that the season was over anyway and that a spontaneous vacation was in order.

Red and black trees after forest fires; mist and possibly smoke,
in Slocan. September 14, 2024.
All rights reserved.

By way of compensation, we went on a road trip to the ghost town of Sandon and the former steamship vacation destination of Kaslo.

Flowers, a Spanish Essay and Sewing

We're expecting 33°C weather tomorrow. So while lush May and early June flowers remain — like elderflower, jasmine, and bellflowers — especially in the shaded hedges, and the linden trees are still diffusing a lovely fragrance from their pale leaf-petals, I expect everything green and bright will become withered and straw-like sooner or later. It is a particularly bad year for rain, but I still can't water the trees in the neighbourhood because the street water pump is still out of service; the RBB news network has even run an article about the widespread problem of non-operational pumps. (This malfunctioning is also a spanner in the works of Berlin's emergency planning, because the Notbrunnen are meant to be a back-up resource for civilians.)

While frantically cycling between universities — again, it's sadly a necessity every Thursday due to my schedule this summer — I noticed that the diesel(?) price at a gas station has finally dipped to 181 cents per litre. Thanks, probably, to the Memorandum of Understanding that was just signed between Iran and the United States.

I've been struggling with overstimulation at university: due to the Franco presentation, then an in-class essay, regular homework, and bouts of migraines/tension headaches that make it impossible to do homework.

The 600-word, Spanish-language in-class essay was especially stressful as I didn't quite know how to prepare for it. Nevertheless, at first it went beautifully. I was well-rested before writing it, the argumentative structures were neat, and I recollected many pertinent details from our semester materials, etc. (Of course I did make mistakes, but still.) ... Then the professor alerted us: we had 5 minutes left. Sadly, it was impossible to transfer the rest of of my draft essay text to the final version paper in that time.

My main consolations (besides a fairly decent class attendance record, and the successful tackling of much of my prescribed readings and homework) have been 1. the fairly warm atmosphere amongst my classmates and professors, and 2. little discoveries along the route to campus — like random police officers standing on deserted sidewalks and foxes trotting into the underbrush.

*

Another factor in the overstimulation has been performing in my choir's two summer concerts. That said, I enjoyed the first one hugely, and Mama, T. and J. came to watch it. It was just that practicing the songs at home before the concert, to avoid singing off rhythm and out of tune, is stressful.

(It was only when they and I walked home together after the event that J. divulged the details of his highly adventurous afternoon. He and Ge. capsized their canoe in one of Berlin's southwestern lakes, soaked their shoes and clothes and wallets in evil-smelling water, and ruined a smartphone and a digital camera (which now have to be replaced). But they were wearing life jackets, and they were in such a shallow area that they were able to wade through the mucky urban lake bottom to terra firma. Meanwhile Gi., staying perfectly dry and on top of the water surface in his kayak, helped steer the canoe to the shore.

As a temporary measure, J. is enjoying the use of my old smartphone — the phone that I was phasing out because its battery has been bulging, a little alarmingly, for months.)

Ge. had already wisely decided to stay at home instead of attending the concert, since he would work an early shift the next day. So he recovered at leisure from the canoeing shenanigans.

The second concert has not happened yet. It will be on Sunday: part of the Fête de la Musique.

***

On Wednesday, I had a brief phone interview for a one-day job that I am very excited about: conducting voter polling during the next Berlin city government election, on behalf of one of Germany's two big public television channels. They have promised to contact me again, with a positive or negative response, in July or August.

I'm also keeping an eye out for other jobs to help fill the summer holidays. (No news from the political think tank, mentioned in the last blog post, yet.)

I am growing increasingly cranky about worrying about my spending.

My latest flight of anxiety: Even buying darning wool for my socks at €1.20 per package now seems extravagant. So I thought to ask the local zero-waste shop if I could have the packing yarn that is used to sew shut some of the bags of food. Happily the staff said yes, were delighted by the idea because they've just been throwing away the yarn, and have already given me the first string. But, to be honest, I felt a little embarrassed...

The round of socks that I mended over the past months is beginning to dissolve into holes now, which is deflating my morale. But I have mended a pair of pajama pants as well, and that made me feel very accomplished.

Dim Pages of History, and Hunting for Work

Today was well below 30°C but humid and warmer than I'd like again. Exhausted from the past week and the Franco dictatorship presentation preparation — I was practically reading articles and taking notes night and day for a while, and on the day of the presentation I had to cycle from the Freie Universität to the Humboldt Universität and back again (I only had 30 minutes to do each trip if I wanted to arrive to class on time; but it takes at least 45 minutes for me, if not 50, so I was chronically late) — I only got up around 11 a.m.

Then my siblings returned from their travels to Ireland, sleep-deprived but happy, and we feasted on porter cake, Oxford cake, and vanilla fudge that they had brought back. We postponed the viewing of their travel photos to a later date. In the evening, Uncle Pu popped by for a visit.

My only outing was shopping: at the zero waste store, for eggs, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and tomato passata.

***

Friday was easier, university-wise.

In the afternoon the Greek History professor gave his usual video class. He was, lamentably!, confident that we had all read the prescribed texts and therefore did not need to be told year by year what happened during the Greek Civil War. But after the Franco research, and last week's immersion in the Pontic genocide after World War I and the fall of Constantinople in my other Greek classes, I was all warfare'd out. Before the class I'd opened up the website that hosts our course materials, twice, and tested myself by looking at the links he had posted; it was rather as if I'd had the stomach flu and were checking if I could stand the thought of eating certain foods again. But both times I felt an instant aversion. So I definitely have not read the prescribed texts, did need to be told year by year what happened during the Greek Civil War, and will have to review that material in future.

***

This week I also did my personal household accounting for May. It was of course easy, given my somewhat limited set of expenses and a very limited set of incomes. My largest cost centres are the rent, food, and health insurance.

Then I sent off an application for a job at a political think thank that would require 10 hours of work per week.

In general I feel uncomfortable about figuring out which jobs to apply for and how to configure my CV. Firstly, I haven't entirely figured out which way I want my career to go, secondly I have many interests, thirdly I wish I'd had at least one other full-time job of 2 years or more to fill out my job history (my volunteer work timeline feels more impressive than my paid work timeline), fourthly my 40 years of living are breathing down my neck, and lastly I'm sitting on many fences when it comes to junior vs. senior qualifications. The pragmatic thing to do would be to finally self-study math, statistics, computer architecture and computer programming, and put my last full-time job to good use. But another central problem, aside from qualifications, is that I detest tooting my own horn, and (to paraphrase Burns) have never been given the gift to see myself as others see me.

Telegrams of Student Life in Early Summer

It's the time of year where it makes less sense to sit indoors with one's nose in a university notebook or one's face in front of a computer screen all day, but the homework load is keeping me busy.

Roses and elderflowers perfume the air when I cycle to campus, and the beauty bushes with their whitish flowers and dabs of orange always remind me of the garden that Opapa planted in Canada.

I've been exchanging emails about the tutoring volunteer work that I've wanted to do with refugee children here in Berlin. So far it's still unclear whether it will happen, because the children are understandably reluctant to fill their schedules with more academic drill.

In any case, once the pressure from university releases a little, I'm planning to volunteer at the food-sorting place again.

The same goes for amateur-journalistic enterprises — given the class presentations that I need to prepare for, e.g. 10 minutes about Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain, I don't have as much time for projects as I'd like.

Today I played the piano again, but it wasn't very exciting: I was trying out sight-reading primers for children who are taking lessons. Admittedly the scores were zeitgeisty, and I'm quite sure they're left over from my Aunt Nora's piano teacher years in Washington state and in Canada.

I earned money last week by helping people vote in the student elections. This year's were quieter than last year's. For example, there were far fewer parties and candidates. I think this is partly explained by the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and a détente between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups and the university administration. Fortunately the voter turnout was higher this year — at least in the polling station I was at.

And this evening I cooked a lentil soup with leek, onion, carrot, potato, parsnip, parsley, and Vienna sausages, with one garlic clove, for dinner. Maybe next time I'll use a recipe so that the proportions of vegetables are better, but the family liked it anyway.

Summer Research and the Life Story of Tante Lieschen

Morbidly, perhaps, I've taken to doing family history research journeys during university holidays, taking the Holocaust and Nazi era as my focus.

*

Last summer holidays I started by looking at my great-great-grandmother's sister. My father's paternal family wasn't religiously Jewish any more in the 1930s, due to converting to the Protestant faith before the 20th century. Largely they had assimilated — a practice which I gather became controversial amongst 20th century Zionist-leaning thinkers like Gershom Scholem. But, as my grandfather's Ahnenpass reflected, in the 1930s he was considered part-Jewish, and some of his living relatives were considered even more Jewish and thus were in great danger. (In the early 2000s, as he was tidying up and we also went through his sister's papers to see what to keep, I remember that we found both of their Ahnenpässe.)

My grandfather wrote in his memoirs, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, that his 'Tante Lieschen' had died due to the Holocaust. So last summer I was interested in learning more about her life story. It felt especially urgent because of world events: if the Holocaust is only remembered when it is used as a cudgel to justify killing civilians in the Middle East today, or suppressing pro-Palestinian activism in Germany, I am certain that it does the victims of the Holocaust a disservice. Regardless of what my Jewish ancestors and relatives would have thought and felt about the political situation — it is, of course, impossible to know that, although I can say with certainty that in the early 2000s my grandfather sympathized with my father's opinions that Israel's Likud governments went too far — I felt it was important to shed post-World War political interpretations and go back to what we do know about the real people who were affected by the Holocaust.

As others have already researched my family's history in great depth, I found an online biography of Tante Lieschen: her real first name was Elisabeth. She was born into a family of medical researchers at the Charité in Berlin. One of them wrote about transgender identity at a time where I gather it was not often discussed, let alone accepted. After taking care of her sick mother for years, Tante Lieschen ended up (if I remember correctly) in a care home in Potsdam or southwestern Berlin, in her seventies. I don't know if she herself was in the crosshairs of the Nazis early on. But her brother, a politician in Potsdam, incurred the Nazis' ire when he wanted their flag taken off a public building. Eventually a relative of ours found out that she was about to be arrested and transported to a concentration camp. He passed on this information to Tante Lieschen, who took her own life.

My great-great-grandmother, meanwhile, was whisked away to Sweden until it was safe to return to Germany. I felt weird about the situation while reading the biography, and since I've done my research there's been anecdotal evidence to support my doubts. Recently one of my relatives was talking about Tante Lieschen and my great-great-grandmother in a different context. It sounds like the family paid millions of Mark to the Nazis to buy my great-great-grandmother's freedom, but that there wasn't money left over for Tante Lieschen. Perhaps 'Sophie's Choice' is not the right term here, but it is a horrible situation to decide which of two sisters lives and which dies.

To round out the story, at any rate, I found out to my surprise that Elisabeth is buried in Kreuzberg, in a cemetery on the Mehringdamm that I've visited before. It surprised me even more because I thought that the Nazi government buried Jewish Germans in separate cemeteries on the outskirts of the city, or that Tante Lieschen was buried elsewhere in Germany; but it turns out that her remains were transferred to that graveyard years after World War II ended. Visiting the cemetery, I found her resting place: tucked in a black-fenced plot, alongside her siblings and parents, as sunshine and evergreen branches and ivy framed the rather formal monuments. It felt even more personal because my grandfather's cousin, whom I have met, is buried opposite.

Tante Lieschen's story also, however, made me realize the complexity of trying to de-politicize the Holocaust: her brother Ernst's children emigrated to Israel, and one descendant died fighting in a mid-to-late 20th-century war. I can't in good conscience give an interpretation of what her life means for the present day, because it may clash with the interpretations of her closer relatives.

Step-Stones for the Summer Semester

University is inching closer and closer: the summer semester formally resumes on Monday. In preparation, I've signed up for my classes online. So far I've received no response to my application for helping with the student parliament elections. But I've been reviewing elementary Greek grammar exercises, hoping to build a stronger foundation for the next semester. In that sense, my preparations are complete, although a few castles-in-the-air that I had last semester — e.g. reading Spanish literature, reviewing Greek history, finishing the essay about a Spanish playwright in comparison with Molière, and/or reading Isaac Babel about Odessa — would have been a good idea to round out the curriculum...

In the meantime, this evening I went to a volunteer get-together for an organization that supplies refugee housing centres with locals willing to lead sports, sewing or art activities, help with homework, and organize outings.

The get-together was near Tempelhofer Feld. I was a little antsy riding my bicycle toward this area because my stereotype of Neukölln is that nobody obeys the laws of traffic and everyone (being in a great hurry) has a lead foot on the gas/bicycle pedal. The streets, often being older, are also often narrower. Needless to say, all my stereotypes were confirmed. Due to my blundering I also managed to take two wrong turns before realizing and correcting my mistakes. Anyway, at the event we gathered at will at different tables of five to six people, sipping lemonades, water, beer, and wine that the organizers had made available. Then we cooked Mediterranean-style dips, salads, a vegetable and rice stir-fry, garlic flatbread, rice with lentils, and muffins together, which took about three hours. At the end we sat down and ate.

It was, predictably, a friendly and diverse group of volunteers and organizers: others mentioned that they were, for instance, from Argentina, Hungary, Italy, India, Paraguay, Syria, and Ukraine. One or two children and a dog (it was as large as a collie, and I thought moderately but not bumptiously sociable) roamed around amongst us young adults/adults. There were a few glitches in food safety that both horrified and amused me, but while I've already told my family the details I don't think I'll go into them here.

In 2-4 weeks my police certificate of good conduct should (hopefully) have been printed and sent back by the authorities, proving that I'm safe company. Then I'll be tutoring, accompanying refugees to bureaucratic appointments, or both. Likely on Mondays, when it looks like I won't have any classes this semester, and/or on Saturdays. I've been soul-searching about my past volunteering and have come to the conclusion that it's more helpful for organizers if I really treat volunteering like a job, carefully arriving on time etc. (instead of being late, as I've been many a time for clothes-sorting or food sorting...).

A volunteer coordinator gave me advice about being a volunteer, when I asked her:

1. Do communicate to the coordinator, letting them know of problems. It's better than worrying about being a bother or assuming that things are supposed to be dysfunctional ... and letting problems escalate. But being independent is good at the same time.

2. Don't expect adult refugees to be full of energy and enthusiasm for new activities; they're often exhausted and struggling to adjust to living a life that they never expected.

3. If you start dreading going to volunteering appointments or start being unhappy in general, recognize your limits and stop what you're doing.

It seems like good advice, so I've noted it for later.