JOYS & SORROWS OF THE 3RD WEEK --- 14-18 AUGUST
JOYS --- One big excursion this week was to a park in Kaefertal where there are animals running more or less free. There are fences, but the enclosures are quite large, hundreds of yards across. There were deer, wild pigs, and bison, yes, American bison. Never thought I would have to travel all the way to Germany to see a real live buffalo. But only the pigs were willing to come up close to the fence, hoping for a handout of food from the passersby.

The other was to the palace in Schwetzingen. The palace was moderately impressive, smaller than Charlottenburg, less ornate than Sans Souci. But the big attraction was the gardens, at their height of beauty now in August. (The gardens of Sans Souci were covered with snow when I was there.) But most impressive was not the flora but the ornamentation. The grounds contained no less than three faux-pagan temples (there might have been four), someone's 18th century homeage to classical antiqity. The temples I saw were to Athena, Hermes, and Apollo. The temple to Apollo was the largest, standing atop a fake hill with a fake waterfall (real water, but actually a fountain), and beneath it a network of fake caves built into the hill. One could imagine initiates enduring the Mysteries in the caves during the night before emerging to climb the hill and greet the Sun-God at dawn. Whether or not this was what the 18th-century architect/artist who designed it had in mind, I have no idea.

And there was a pond with ducks and swans and a stream with --- I swear --- catfish in it. Is there such a thing as German catfish? They looked like catfish to me. Too bad they don't eat them here.

SORROWS --- The apartments here are looked after by superintendents called Hausmeister, and the one in my building is available for one entire hour every week. Anything you need, you have to get it during that hour. So I made sure to be home at 7:00 pm this Wednesday so I could get a key to the laundry room. The next day I tried to do laundry.

There are 144 apartments in my building, and in the laundry room there are two washers and two dryers. Both washers were in use when I first went, and were soon finished. But after waiting over an hour for my predecessors to remove their laundry from the respective machines, I unloaded one of them myself and put in mine. So far so good. But it turned out the dryer I used did not work, or I did not know how to work it (there were no written directions, just pictures). Three hours, and the laundry was still cold and wet. The dryer never got hot. So now I have wet laundry hanging up all over the apartment, on the radiator, over the tops of doors, etc. Better to find a public laundromat downtown, where hopefully the facilities will be adequate. But is there such a thing here?

But on the bright side, I finally got my telephone hooked up, and I think I've finally figured out the banking system. No one uses checks here; as I said earlier, they prefer direct withdrawals from your account. One-time payments can be made on-line, which requires not only a PIN number, but a separate code number for each transaction. They send you a list of 100 such numbers, which you must guard with your life. (They send more when you run out.) The Germans love to make things complicated. (Just look at how they write.)