A Tandem Tour of the Heimatland

As far as traveling goes, there’s nothing better than getting off the beaten path and seeing a place through the eyes of a local. While in Freiburg, Jack offered to take us on a bicycle tour of Durbach, the small wine village where he used to live and for whom he still plays soccer. Although we were a little apprehensive about the cycling given recent events, it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. The village lies at the heart of German identity, and even now, most Germans live and die in the same village in which their families lived and died for generations. This unbroken chain of habitation has left these little towns steeped in tradition and coated with a rich patina of history. But despite their laid-back charm, they can be a bit impenetrable without the entrée of a local.

Although Jack only lived in Durbach for a year, he so threw himself into the life of the village – working at the local winery, living with a local family, playing for the local soccer team, even dating a local girl – that he quickly achieved honorary local status. Wherever we went, people seemed to know Jack and wanted to stop and chew over the latest bit of town gossip. Every door seemed open to us, and we could hardly exit without first sitting down to a homemade meal or taking home a bottled of local wine.

We had lunch his host family, a nice old Hausfrau and her crotchety old mother, who fed us homemade Spätzle (a fluffy macaroni-and-cheese-style dish) and showed us pictures of Jack’s time with them. We “broke bread,” as the Germans call their light evening meal, with Jack’s girlfriend’s parents and had a rousing conversation about society and politics. And in between, we cycled through the rolling vineyards and blossoming cherry orchards, toured a winery, hiked up a mountain, and took a peak at the Schwarzwald, Germany’s famous, if dwindling, “Black Forest.” All in all, a brilliant day, and the most authentically German experience I can imagine – and with none other than a fellow Arkansan as my guide.

Making wine

As part of our tour of Durbach, Jack took us on a visit to the Schwörer winery, where he first worked after moving to Germany. Although he hadn’t worked there in almost a year, everyone remembered him fondly, and the vintner was generous enough to give us a private tour and a free wine tasting. (Although I’m not sure how fond Jack’s memories were; it looks like pretty backbreaking work.)

First off, the vintner showed us the wine cellar, where they store the wine in new aluminum barrels as well as the traditional wooden wine casks, some of which are a hundred years old. On his first day on the job, Jack had clean these wooden casks, which involved crawling through a little hole no bigger than a cat door and scrubbing the inside by hand -- with nothing but a flashlight to see by. I cannot believe he went back for a second day of this.

We also saw the bottling room where a couple of brawny guys were busy feeding the bottling machine, an insatiable Rube-Goldberg-like contraption that fills a thousand bottles an hour. Jack also used to have this job and explained that during a typical bottling day, he had to work non-stop for 10-15 hours – he even had to eat his lunch at the machine. Here’s a short (15 second) video of how it works: (Unfortunately, I didn't record the moment when the machine went all wonky and started spitting half-filled wine bottles everywhere.)



Finally we tasted some of the wines that Jack’s hard labor helped produce: Kabinett, Rotling, Spätburgunder, Rosé. This was particularly educational for me since my earlier wine vocabulary consisted little more than “Cabernet” and “Pinot Noir.” Anyhow, they all turned out to be wonderfully light, dry, fragrant wines, which would pair nicely with most summer dishes, especially grilled ones. Unfortunately, Schwörer doesn’t export, and as we were on bicycles, I could hardly take a case with me. As it was I had to drink my fill in the winery, which I must confess made the rest of the bike tour a little, um … interesting.



P.S. I apologize for the dryness of this post (no pun intended). I can only plead cultural assimilation, as the Germans are obsessed with documentaries about "how stuff gets made." I swear, Kevin and I have seen dozens of these documentaries in the past few months, and they are always on the most boring topics imaginable: making sausage, making maple syrup, making a stool, making shoelaces, etc. Usually though, if you watch them long enough, you can work up a fair amount of enthusiasm for even the most mundane details. However recently, an episode about tree mold had us completely stumped.

What happened to Jack's face

I’ll bet your reaction just now was similar to mine when Jack met me at the Freiburg train station, looking like he’d just been attacked by a cheese grater. What happened to his face?

“Well, this is what’s bound to happen, at some time or another, when you ride a bike in Freiburg,” he said, trying his best to crack a smile despite the pain. “It’s all my fault, actually,” he explained. “I was tailing a car too closely and didn’t notice when he stopped.” His bike was totaled, and he hit the pavement face-first. Actually, he’s lucky it wasn’t worse. He was not wearing a helmet. Still, you can imagine my concern, not only for Jack’s face, but also because this was my introduction to the city’s famous cycling culture – and just a day before we were schedule to tour the region by bike.

Freiburg is one of the most cycle-friendly cities in all of Europe. According to the tourist literature, there are actually more bicycles in the city than there are citizens. Wherever you go, you encounter cyclists of every stripe: dreadlocked co-eds and businessmen in suits, white-haired pensioners and parents with young children. I even saw one man riding despite a sprained ankle. He carried his crutches in one hand while he steered with the other!

I’ve always been a fan of city cycling and wished that it were more prevalent in America. I mean, what’s not to like about it? It’s cheap, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s an enjoyable form of exercise, and it reduces the volume of city traffic. Unfortunately in America’s car-centric culture, it’s not always practical. One summer, when I was living in Boston, I tried cycling to work everyday, but I felt so under threat from the “crazy Boston drivers,” who don’t signal, don’t share the road, and often fail to see cyclists, that I was forced to give it up after only a month.

Since then, I often fantasized that if I were Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World, I would shut down all inner-city motor vehicle traffic, except for public transportation, and give the roads over to the cyclists, who, in my experience, are a remarkably polite and law-abiding bunch. But, alas, I’m not. In America the car is king, and all other vehicles have to jockey for their right to be on the road. So I was really curious to see what life was like in Freiburg, where cyclists rule and automobiles are relegated to the outskirts of town.

But it turns out that it is not as safe or peaceful as I had imagined. In fact, as a pedestrian in Freiburg, I felt under threat from the cyclists! For one thing, German cyclists are allowed to ride on the sidewalks, which seems pretty unreasonable since they’ve already been given the roads. You can’t imagine how incredibly nerve-racking it is when they weave in an out of the crowd at full speed, passing you within inches – without any warning. I’m sure they think that they don’t pose a danger, but they can’t know when you might take it into your head to turn off in a new direction.

Futhermore, German cyclists are not the conscientious citizens that American cyclists are. They don’t wear helmets, they don’t obey traffic signs, and they don’t feel the need to ride in the direction of traffic.

So I’ve begun to wonder if it’s not American cyclists’ minority standing that makes them such a virtuous bunch. In order to survive the hazards of city cycling, American cyclists have to be hyper-aware of the behavior of everyone around them. If they’re not, they’ll be run off the road by some woman in a tinted SUV, who’s talking on her cell phone while trying to sip her Starbucks. Maybe it’s just the tyranny of being in the majority that makes European cyclists such careless custodians of the road.

On the other hand, it could be that most people are just bad drivers – no matter what their mode of transportation. Perhaps the American cyclists are a self-selected group of naturally prudent people, who would make excellent drivers, too. But in Freiburg, almost everyone rides a bike, and so, at any given moment, the majority of people on the road are likely to be idiots behind the wheel.

Whatever the reason, you can be sure that the next day, when Jack, Kevin and I rented bikes to tour the Durbach vineyards, I observed the rules of the road with vigilance. I wasn’t able to find a helmet, but I never went too fast or followed anyone too closely, else I wind up with a mug like poor Jack. That is, at least not in while we were riding in Freiburg. Once we got to the country, you had better believe I sped down the steep roads like I owned them, as if I were the Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World.

Arkansans Abroad: Freiburg Edition

During my Easter break from classes, Kevin and I decided to get some traveling under our belts, and so we set out for Freiburg, the warmest, sunniest, southwestern-most city in Germany. Its climate is perfect for producing light, sweet wines, and it’s a popular launching point for trips into the nearby Schwarzwald (Black Forest). But Freiburg had no real attraction for us, save one: It’s the home of my brother’s high school best friend, Jack.

This may seem a tenuous connection at first, but we’re Southerners – Arkansans at that – and all Arkansans away from home can claim one another as friends, even if they don’t actually know each other that well. And as it turns out, we’re even related: My great uncle married his aunt, etc. Although that may seem even more tenuous connection than the first, there’s something to be said for being able to talk to someone who know where you’re from and knows where you’re coming from, and there are scant few of those in Germany. Although maybe more than could be expected.

It had been a few years since I’d seen Jack, but I remembered his being one of the more ambitious of my brother’s buddies, and in his life after college it’s clear that he has lost none of that “get up and go.” After graduating two years ago from Centenary College in Louisiana, he decided to move to Europe and see if he couldn’t play soccer for a European league. Now, Jack is a great soccer player – I believe he might even have been ranked first in the state when we were in high school – but he was under no illusions that he was a big fish in a small pond. Arkansas is hardly prime soccer territory – and Europe is clearly the Mecca of the soccer world. “I knew I wasn’t a Pélé or a Mirabella,” Jack told me, “but I wanted to see if I was any good.”

Well, it turns out the Jack was pretty good and got picked up by a small semi-pro soccer club in the village of Durbach (pop. 4,000), about 40 minutes north of Freiburg. This, in and of itself, is an amazing accomplishment. Germans are crazy about their Fußball and have no shortage of their own highly skilled boys to chose from. Even their small, semi-pro leagues are highly competitive. Furthermore, Jack didn’t speak a word of German, and in this corner of Germany there are few Germans who speak English. “In order to understand the terms of my contract, I had to have a member of the team translate it into Spanish,” he said. “It was the only language I had in common with anyone.”

But what impresses me even more than his signing with a German team, is how he’s made a whole life for himself in a foreign country in less than two years. His first year here, he boarded with a family in Durbach and worked in a local winery (more on both of these later). Between the two, he became completely fluent in German, with only the slightest hint of a Southern accent. Now, he’s got his own apartment (and a German girlfriend) in Freiburg, where he’s studying for a master’s degree in exercise science at the prestigious Albert-Ludwig University. He also works at a wine research institute and occasionally schleps tables and plays guitar at a local Irish pub. And of course, he’s still playing soccer for Durbach.

I’ve lived in Germany for four months now and have come to feel myself quite at home. But I can never imagine creating a life for myself the way Jack has, even if I were to live here a dozen years. So more than anything else in Freiburg, Jack was the main attraction, and in touring around with him for several days, I saw more of “the real Germany” than I’ve seen all year. Funny that it was with an Arkansan as my guide.
[Jack with the lovely and talented Anja, who is studying to be a journalist for public television. Needless to say, we hit it right off.]