Book Report: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

If you've ever driven to the west coast from anywhere east of the Rockies, you know how much of the United States is a complete wasteland. There are thousands and thousands of square miles unfit for human habitation. In the Distance spends most of its time in that unforgiving place, following a Swedish immigrant named Hakan (pronounced Hawk-can) from boyhood to old age as he does little more than survive. The landscape is unrelentingly bleak, and it's an apt metaphor for Hakan's life. After getting separated from his brother, Linus, on the voyage to America in the mid 1800s, he ends up in San Francisco and makes it a goal to reunite with Linus in New York. He speaks no English, and so the early part of the book is nearly incomprehensible, as the events are seen through his eyes and interpreted incompletely based on how Hakan understands the situation. He's held captive by some sort of criminal gang based in a California gold-rush town, led by a violent, disgusting woman with rotting gums who makes Hakan her sexual slave.

After escaping her clutches, he spends most of his life avoiding other humans, especially after killing most of a band of marauding religious extremists called the Avenging Angels and becoming a wanted man. Hakan is a giant, and is for the most part a gentle soul who I rooted for, but he's in mortal danger for nearly the entire book. He's either on the verge of starvation, or freezing to death, or dying from an infection, or thirst, or at the hands of whatever bloodthirsty vigilantes who have stumbled across him. In between, years pass as he merely subsists in isolation. He comes into contact with a few good people, but they die off more quickly than your average Spinal Tap drummer, often in similarly gruesome fashion. It's a rough world, and Hakan inhabits one of the most unwelcoming areas of it, with unpleasant results.

Book Report: Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

We live about a mile from a really cool sci-fi and mystery bookstore, Uncle Hugo's & Uncle Edgar's, and until a couple of weeks ago, we'd never darkened their door. I found a really cool mass-market paperback copy of The Sirens of Titan (very similar to the one pictured above, but in even better condition) by Kurt Vonnegut for $4. The store is extremely cool, and it gave me an excuse to read one of Vonnegut's books that I'd never read before. I would like to know enough about sci-fi to purchase a book by someone who I was less familiar with, but that's a goal for a different day, I guess.

Most of the enjoyment that I got from reading the book came from some unexpected twists in the plot, so I'll try not to spoil any of the surprises that I enjoyed here. The Sirens of Titan was Vonnegut's second novel, after Player Piano, and came out a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five. It didn't seem like his satirical knife was quite as finely-honed as it was by the time Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle came out. The main themes (which I certainly enjoy) of the absurdity of both war and organized religion are firmly in place in The Sirens of Titan, but they seemed to have benefited from some additional reps by the time of his later works.

The main character of The Sirens of Titan is Malachi Constant, who begins the book as the richest man on earth. Fellow rich person Winston Niles Rumfoord is in some sort of cosmic loop where he and his dog materialize at different times in different places, and Rumfoord can see the future. There's a war fought by Martians who invade Earth, and a religion which emphasizes both God's disinterest in humans as well as the disproportionate influence which luck has over humans' outcomes. Constant is brought low, goes to Mars, then to Mercury, and then back briefly to Earth before heading to Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he's reunited with Rumfoord's wife, whom he raped on the initial voyage to Mars, and their son who was conceived at that time.

The Sirens of Titan is a good book, but it left me slightly cold. None of the characters seemed to be intended to be fully recognizable or relatable as human. That left the story to do the heavy lifting, and while it's very imaginative and swiftly plotted, I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters' outcomes.

Incomplete Book Report: October by China Mieville

I was really excited to read October, and I gave it the old college try, but I had to give up about 100 pages in. It's just not a compelling narrative in Mieville's hands. There are hundreds of principal characters, introduced briefly and often discarded immediately, but the book reads like research notes that need to be included to justify the effort expended to acquire them. There's probably a good book in here somewhere, but I don't have the patience to sort through it.

Book Report: Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla

I read an excerpt of Ants Among Elephants on Longform or something similar a few months ago, and my interest was piqued enough to request it from the library. The book follows the story of the previous two generations of Gidla's family, leaving off when she is in elementary school. It is, like several books I've read lately, extremely bleak, with the procession of disappointment and near-starvation only occasionally interrupted by brief rays of hope.

Gidla's family are untouchable (or "outcaste") Christians in Andhra state of southeastern India, meaning they cannot live in the primary village and are socially and economically oppressed by the Brahmin, reddy, and other castes, as well as generally by Hindus and Muslims, who are held in higher esteem in Indian culture. Many untouchables were converted to Christianity by western missionaries because they were excluded from other religions. It was very enlightening to read an account of the caste system from an Indian national, and while the philosophy behind it doesn't make any more sense (but, hey, neither does racism), I understand the structure a lot better than I did.

There's no attempt to sugar-coat anything involving Gidla's family (or any other families connected to them, really) as the joyous poor, freed from the encumbrances of their material possessions, or anything like that. The closest thing I can compare it to is if an entire country was made up of the Joad family in Grapes of Wrath, except with way less food available. Even when Gidla's mother, Manjula, is able to hold down a university teaching job, she barely has enough money to keep her three children fed. Her husband is able to nearly bankrupt the family by the profligate habits of brewing two cups of tea per day and smoking cigarettes. And these are well-educated people! Who are presumably several rungs above the least fortunate! There are plenty of decisions made with which one could quibble, but when you're running on such a knife's edge your entire life, it's hard to see how things were going to work out well even if you do everything perfectly.

Patriarchy is a strong overarching theme of the book. The women often have just as strong employment prospects as the men, but they are expected to hand over their paychecks to their husbands. Gidla's uncle, Satyam, is probably the most sympathetic character in the book, and he leaves his wife and children alone without income for months and years at a time while he travels underground as a Communist revolutionary, returning only to impregnate his wife another time. I guess that's another way to say there really aren't any sympathetic characters in this book. Mother-in-laws conspire against daughter-in-laws, caste people lord their tiny amount of power over outcastes, etc., etc. They are all worthy of pathos, but it's difficult to like any of them.

Book Report: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is a really great book, and you should read it before the movie adaptation starring Natalie Portman comes out in February. I zoomed through the 195 pages in three sittings; it's not a breezy read, but it's tough to put down. Annihilation is deeply weird and profoundly unsettling in ways that I haven't experienced from a book in a long time, if ever. The closest comparison I can make to the experience of reading this book is watching the first hour or so of Seven, when the depth of John Doe's depraved and elliptical, but chillingly logical, punishments are slowly revealed, mixed with a healthy dose of Lost (I haven't seen Lost, but you know, you pick up plenty of the sense of it by just existing). Now imagine that John Doe is NATURE. /bong hit

An group of five unnamed women -- the biologist (our narrator), the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist, and the linguist -- are making the twelfth expedition into Area X, part of the Southern Reach that experienced an Event thirty years ago, and has been entirely isolated since then. The previous 11 expeditions went to complete shit in entirely different ways, and, spoiler alert, this one doesn't go so smoothly either. It's an amazing book, and I can't wait to read the second and third entries in the trilogy.

Combining Deep Thoughts

I ran the combine for about 9 hours on Saturday, which is enough time to catch up on some thinking. I hadn't combined corn before, which doesn't exactly reinforce my farm-kid bonafides, but that is what it is at this point. Running the combine is pretty mindless, but you also need to stay focused enough to react fairly quickly if something goes wrong. So, for something that involves sitting on your ass and driving around 2 miles per hour, it's sort of mentally exhausting after a full day. You can space out, but not too far, or else you'll end up driving through the field with the unload auger running and dumping all that nice, freshly-harvested corn back onto the stubble.

Grandpa has told me stories about picking corn by hand following behind a team of horses when he was in high school. Dad has told me stories about running the two-row picker, which mounted onto a tractor without a cab, before he and Grandpa bought their first combine in the mid-'70s. So, even though Dad's combine is as old as I am, I was still considerably more comfortable than previous Gillespie generations had been while doing this job.

While most attention gets paid to ethanol, nearly as much corn is fed to livestock in the U.S. as is used to produce alcohol. My parents raise sheep, and their goal has been to raise all the feed, roughage and bedding material for the sheep (a combination of corn, alfalfa, oats (for both feed and straw), and grass) on their farm, and sell the excess as they're able, depending on how the year goes. Last year, there was a big alfalfa hay crop, so Dad sold what he couldn't use from that. This year, oats and corn were the bigger producers. So, their 160 acres takes in seed corn, diesel fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, and some other miscellaneous inputs, it produces enough cash to support my parents, and the meat from 600 sheep or so is the primary product that goes into the larger world.

I'm still working out how I feel about that, and what I would prefer to see done with the land if it were up to me. It's decent land in an area where it would be used for agriculture regardless of who owned it. I really enjoy that it's not just a slab of earth with half corn and half soybeans every year, but anything that you do beyond that requires orders of magnitude of additional effort, planning and thought. Would it be better if they just sold the corn, oats, and hay, and left the livestock raising to someone else? Would it make more sense to change the makeup of the sheep flock to be more for wool production than meat production, so that less grain is required? Should some of the ground (more than their gigantic garden) be turned into vegetable production? Should it all just be turned into a hemp farm, maaaannn? I have no idea, but I'll continue to ponder. Eventually, it'll be up to me, so I need to get a semblance of an idea of a plan.

Book Report: Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

It sucks to be poor at any age, but Nomadland puts a very fine point on how much it sucks to be poor and elderly. So poor, in fact, that stationary housing is not even a consideration. The book centers around older Americans (not all past retirement age, but close) who have began living in RVs, trailers, vans, and cars in order to reduce their cost of living. None of the people we meet have enough savings to retire, and most don't have enough to buy a $4,000 vehicle without taking out a loan. Most travel around following whatever jobs are available to people their age: Amazon warehouse picker, sugar beet harvester, and national park campground attendant are the most common. Those jobs in particular seem to have developed a recruitment strategy (and a compensation scheme to match) around older folks who pretty much need whatever job is offered to them.

Bruder is an exceptionally empathetic tour guide to the RV parks (and stealth campgrounds) of primarily the Southwest, and she has a gift for getting female workampers (as they're called by Amazon, at least) to open up to her about the winding paths that their lives have taken. There's a lot of optimism present in their stories, but much of that struck me as delusion that's necessary for them to get through the brutal options that each day presents them with: drive 45 minutes each way to work so you can shower in a dumpy RV park, or crash in the Walmart parking lot to save gas? Eat, or fill the gas tank? Nomadland echoes the best of Steinbeck and Eirenreich. I'm privileged and lucky to have stable, well-paying employment, and I've never been so motivated as I am now to pay down my mortgage quickly and put every penny I can save into my 401(k). I hope that ends up being enough to avoid being a story like those told in this book.

Book Report: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

You may have heard of this one, and you've probably already read multiple thinkpieces about the newfound relevance of The Handmaid's Tale (book and/or TV show) in the age of Trump. So I won't re-tread over that same ground. I'd like to write a few words about how Atwood has crafted this stark dystopia by enacting only governmental changes.

There's been no ecological disaster or nuclear holocaust, and there was no gradual political transition from the '80s current day in which the book was written to the misogynist hellscape in which it was set. The physical world is the same as it ever was, but the Gileadan (sp?) takeover, economically and horrifically described in flashback, was incredibly effective in brutalizing half of the population. One day you're a young mother trying to do the best for your young family, and a short period later you're being chased through the woods with your daughter as bullet zip past and your husband is probably killed elsewhere. Atwood does an excellent job of sowing doubt in Offred's character's mind about every man's motivations, even her ostensibly decent husband, who is shown to be somewhat controlling given the opportunity. It's harrowing throughout, but not any more so than the first couple of episodes of the show, which are nonstop brutal.

Book Report: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I've been making a conscious effort over the past couple of years to read books by authors who are not white males. It's been very worthwhile for me to read perspectives about life that come from people who don't look like me. And while that approach hasn't been foolproof, it's for the most part protected me from reading whiny, masturbatory crap like The Fortress of Solitude.

As a person who spent a lot of years feeling sorry for himself because he wasn't treated nicely by a lot of his peers in middle and high school, I can relate to Lethem's stand-in in this autobiographical novel, Dylan Ebdus, who spends a really large portion of this 500+ page book complaining about being beat by black kids as a white kid growing up in Brooklyn. However, it's become abundantly clear to me as I've grown into adulthood that most people were (or think they were) bullied when they were kids. And, like a poker bad-beat story or a tough fantasy sports loss, it's pretty boring to hear about another fairly-privileged person talk about how rough they had it as a child. When it's set against the crushing poverty that surrounds Ebdus, though, it's really tough to corral enough sympathy to stick with the story.

The first half of the book takes Ebdus from his early-'70s toddler-hood through high school, raised solo by a taciturn father who condescends to make money painting pulp novel covers while working on his interminable passion project: a hand-painted avant-garde animated film. Ebdus' mother skipped town when he was 5 or 6 to join a commune and occasionally sends cryptic shellfish-punned postcards to her son, but is never seen nor heard from again.

Dylan spends most of his time alternately worshiping and disregarding his neighbor and sometimes best friend Mingus Rude, mixed-race son of Marvin Gaye stand-in Barrett Rude, Jr. Mingus is so much cooler than Dylan it's unclear why they ever spend any time together, but let's just roll with it. When Mingus is avoiding Dylan, he hangs out with even less cool white kid Arthur Lomb. Dylan and Mingus even trade handjobs once in a while, I guess so that no one accused the book of being homophobic? Oh, and there's a ring that grants the wearer superpowers, but why would you want to make that more than a tangential plot point?

The second part of the book opens with Ebdus as an insufferably self-absorbed 30-something freelance music journalist (picture John Cusack's character in High Fidelity after the credits roll, but with more coke) pitching a movie about a black convict band to a Hollywood studio exec. If you were hoping Lethem would spare us the details of how we got there, you will be sorely disappointed. Did he also feel alienated at his fancy Vermont college before getting kicked out after a semester for dealing coke? You better believe it. Do he and his black girlfriend make each other miserable? Oh yes. Does he go to the trouble of making any of the non-white characters fully human or with any redeeming qualities? Nope. Does he leave his superpower ring on the shelf for more than a decade before using it for one final, tossed-off hurrah? Grrrrrrr, yes. I hate-read the last 200 pages of this book, and I'm so glad that I don't have to spend any more time in the presence of any of these characters.

Book Report: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

The Left Hand of Darkness has been recommended to me by multiple people over the years, so when I came home with a copy after the book exchange at the most recent Boneshaker Books volunteer party, I didn't have any excuse to not read it. And after all that buildup: it's fine. I know that any Le Guin fan who stumbles upon this will want to fight me, but I'm pretty lukewarm about the book. And after reading The Dispossessed a couple of years ago and having a similar experience, I'm comfortable saying that she's just not for me.

The book is set on the planet of Gethen, an icy world which is visited by Genly, an emissary from the earth-like Terra on behalf of the Ekumen. Genly is trying to convince Gethen to join the Ekumen, something of a United Federation of Planets. Genly and the residents of Gethen are all recognizably human, but Gethenians are androgynous and only have sex during the few days a month when they're in kemmer, when they can take on male or female characteristics in order to procreate. Any Gethenian can be a father, and any Gethenian can be a mother. They consider Genly, who is male, a pervert because he is capable of having sex throughout the month.

The book is a political drama for the first half or two-thirds, sort of like a novella-length version of the Star Wars prequels, except with considerably better-quality writing. Then, for the last part, it's a man (ok, well, one of the participants is androgynous)-vs.-nature adventure story on the frozen glacier between the countries of Karhide and Orgoreyn.

I could go into considerably more detail with the plot description; there's a lot here. Both the setting and the culture are richly imagined, and I feel somewhat guilty that it left me cold (not unlike Gethen, amirite?) when I've met so many people who have had a much more meaningful interaction with Le Guin's work. However, I didn't connect with any of the characters here, and I really couldn't care less about the internal political machinations surrounding Genly's proposal, which took up a significant portion of the book. If there were significant metaphors here for life on earth, I completely overlooked them. Once Genly takes to the ice, fleeing for his life with an initially reluctant companion, it was more exciting than politics, but I wasn't emotionally invested enough in the characters to really get sucked into the adventure.

Book Report: Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

I've been trying to read more, and I think that it would help me to retain what I read a little more and have some record of what I read if I make a blog entry about each title, no matter how brief or insipid. So, I'm going to give it a shot.

Black Moses is set primarily in an orphanage in the People's Republic of the Congo in the 1970s. Moses was left there by his mother in his infancy, and he's picked on by the older kids. The orphanage undergoes a transition from indoctrinating their wards with Catholicism to indoctrinating their wards with Communism as the political winds shift over a period of years. Moses has an opportunity to run away with his former bullies in early adolescence, and does so. He ends up working as an errand boy in a brothel in Pointe-Noire, working his way up to a more prominent position, and then abruptly having a breakdown after the political winds shift again and the brothel is bulldozed.

The storyline is interesting and engaging, but I had a hard time understanding the individual characters, among which Moses is the only constant presence. Moses especially is an enigma, lurching from weakling to rising ghetto boss to pathetic drunk over the course of a few pages. Maybe that's intentional, contributing to the general sense of unease that surrounds the book's plot? I'll give Mabanckou the benefit of the doubt.

On the Shores of the Øresund and Elbe: A Copenhagen/Hamburg Vacation

Part One: Copenhagen

(Author's note: I took a bunch of Boomerang videos on the trip, and I had to embed them in the blog as videos. They won't auto-start, so click them to view; they're all about 4 seconds long, so they shouldn't take too long to load.) 

A few months ago, a flight alert popped up for $420 round trip flights on Delta from Minneapolis to Copenhagen, Denmark. Since neither of us had ever been there, and it offered easy access to visit my brother, Tom, and his family in Hamburg, Germany, on the same trip, it was a no-brainer.

Tom described Denmark as the "land of made-up vowels," and other than the title of this entry, it will not be alphabetically correct. I hope that this doesn't detract too much from your reading experience.

Sunday, October 8

We flew out of MSP in the direction of Amsterdam at 7:45 p.m. All went well, and we even slept for a few hours on the overnight flight.

Monday, October 9

We arrived at Copenhagen airport in early afternoon, and took the train to Copenhagen Central Station and a bus to our lodging, the Little Guesthouse, in the Vesterbro neighborhood about a mile west of central Copenhagen. It was a great place to stay; we had a second-floor bedroom in a three-story house, and shared a bathroom and kitchen with the other guestroom.

We dropped off our bags, and based on a recommendation from half of the husband and wife innkeeper team, Jens, we walked to dinner at the WestMarket, a collection of street food-type booths in a common space. We had some ramen and a beer, and then had another pint at Fermentoren on our way back to the hotel.

Fermentoren had Big Lebowski stencil quotes covering the walls in their men's room:

We were pretty wiped out by that point (spoiler alert: this will be a recurring theme), so we crashed.

Tuesday, October 10

Our first stop was Christiansborg Palace, which had a free elevator to a tower which offered a panoramic view of the city.

From there, we walked to Nyhavn, which is an old merchants' neighborhood with brightly colored row houses.

We paid through the nose for lunch, so we tried to make up for it by taking advantage of free admission on Tuesdays at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a classical art museum, where we viewed their collection of Roman sculpture, which included this bust of Jimmy Carter, I'm pretty sure.

We hit up the Netto supermarket down the street for dinner fixings and called it a night.

Wednesday, October 11

We took a day trip to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, located in Humlebaek, a picturesque northern suburb of Copenhagen right along the Oresund, which separates Denmark from Sweden. The train took 30-40 minutes from Central Station.

Molly was most excited about the Marina Abramovich exhibition, which did not disappoint. We both got the opportunity to uncomfortably walk between two completely nude models, which was a first for me. In all seriousness, though, it was great.

There was also a permanent exhibition by Yayoi Kusama of mirrors and lights, which was super trippy.

The museum's setting was almost as awesome as the art within:

Molly even found a place to get her senior picture taken: 

On the trip back, we stopped at the Klampenborg station to check out Dyrehaven, a nature preserve featuring huge herds of deer.

We found a large group just steps from the entrance, including an immense buck and an albino doe.

A quick aside: I traveled to rural Mexico this summer for work, and it was a real bummer of a trip for multiple reasons which I won't bore you with here if I haven't already. A slightly redeeming quality that I was able to purchase Havana Club Rum, which isn't available in the U.S., and I got to feel like Cool Exotic Traveler Guy Who Can Acquire Obscure Items. You can imagine my elation, then, when every 7-Eleven in Denmark carried it, and every train station was covered in ads for it:

At least their mezcal selection was for shit.

Also, it's good to be a 12-year-old boy when traveling:

After the train ride back to the city, we stopped for dinner at War Pigs, a beer and BBQ joint which is a collaboration between Munster, Indiana's own Three Floyds and the Mikkeller Bar of Copenhagen. It was wonderful, and they had plenty of sauces.

Thursday, October 12

Since I'm an early riser, I headed out for solo walks from the hotel most mornings. The guesthouse was just east of the Ny Carlsberg Brewery (Ny is Danish for New, but this brewery is over 100 years old). Based on what Jens told us, Carlsberg has moved their brewing to Eastern Europe, so this facility is just for tours and offices now. The area around and within the brewery appears to be in the process of being converted into condos. /shrug emoji

This is the Elephant Gate, which has some, um, interesting iconography:

We took a stroll to the Norrebro neighborhood, with our first stop at Assistens Cemetery, the final resting place of Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, among others.

We walked pasted Rosenborg Castle on the way back.

And then we stumbled upon the rarest of creatures, a reasonably priced place to have a beer in Copenhagen! I present to you, The Log Lady, where you can drink a bottle of $5 Danish beer in the presence of extremely laid-back hipsters and look at centerfolds posted on the bathroom wall:

 After a discouraging bus ride (it seems like Copenhagen buses don't necessarily follow a set route for a given route number, which isn't a fantastic feature), we grabbed Thai takeout on the way back to the hotel.

Friday, October 13

We rented a couple of beat-up Dutch-style three-speeds from the hotel and explored Copenhagen by bike. First stop was Freetown Christiania, a part-hippie, part-punk settlement south of central Copenhagen where your square rules don't apply, maaannnn.

We cruised past the Little Mermaid statue and picked up a slice of pizza for lunch in Osterbro (one had peas on it!), followed by a visit to the Botanical Garden at the University of Copenhagen.

We followed that up with dinner at Paperoen, a former paper warehouse on the harbor which had been converted into another large room filled with street-food stalls. We enjoyed some fish and chips and checked out an outdoor crowdsourced Yoko Ono art exhibit at the adjacent Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center.

Saturday, October 14

With a half-day left in Copenhagen before our departure for Germany, we took a canal boat tour, which was lovely and informative. 

We stumbled upon a cafe for lunch, and walked around a little more before arriving at Central Station again to catch our train out of town.

The train was pretty crazy in that, midway through the five-hour journey, it drove onto a ferry and floated from Denmark to Germany for 45 minutes. We had to get off the train during its time on the ferry, and the interior of the boat was like an airport food court, with a full-sized duty-free store and everything. We did, however, get to spend some time on the top deck. Overall, the experience was well worth the price of admission. 

Tom picked us up at the Hamburg Central Station and treated us to the finest beers available:

Mr. Clou, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Clou:

Part Two: Hamburg

Sunday, October 15

Tom, his wife Sonja, and their two kids, Fiona and Anton, had been living in an apartment near the center of Hamburg, but they just bought a house and moved (only days before our visit) to a tiny village just outside of Ahrensburg, which is just outside the Hamburg city limits. 

I was expecting something akin to a standard U.S. inner-ring suburb, with strip malls and car-centric design, but this place was pretty gosh-darn idyllic. There were sidewalks and cycle-tracks everywhere, and lovely older brick homes. Tom is now a car owner again after a 15-odd year break, but their diesel Toyota Corolla wagon is extremely practical, with a third row of seats that avoided a reappearance of Truncle Joel when hauling four adults and two kids in car seats. 

I accompanied Tom and Fiona to the village bakery first thing in the morning to get some bread for breakfast. One thing Molly and I were struck by on the trip is how weak our bread game is. 

We spent a good part of the day at a playground about a mile from their house, which was on the grounds of the elementary school that Tom and Sonja's kids will eventually attend. There was an extremely awesome zipline:

There was also a spider-web-type jungle gym, a long slide, a climbing wall, some other climbing equipment, and a couple of outdoor ping-pong tables. It was a playground built with a lot less fear of being sued than most I've seen in the U.S. 

We checked out some horses in a pasture on the walk back to the house. 

While the kids took a nap, Tom and I biked to Ahrensburg to check out the Ahrensburg Castle, and old manor house with a double moat surrounding it. It was a nice ride, but we didn't feel the need to pay the entry fee to check out the interior.

In the evening, Sonja's parents biked over from their home just inside the Hamburg city limits and we had a barbecue. 

Monday, October 16

This was our city tourism day. Our group of six drove to the parking garage under the brand-new Elbphilharmonie. 

For you Twin Cities readers, the building was similar to the Guthrie Theater, in that it offers a huge performing-arts venue, but also a free escalator to a viewing platform for the general public. 

From there, we stopped for lunch along the HafenCity harbor at a perfectly pleasant restaurant, and then Tom and family went to a playground before heading back home. Here's Fiona with her apfelschorle, and Molly with her spritz:

Molly and I continued to the St. Pauli Elbtunnel, which passes underground from one side of the Elbe River to the other. It has car elevators in it so that it can be used for vehicular traffic, but mostly it's a pedestrian and bike tunnel. 

From there, we strolled to the St. Nikolai Memorial, which has to be in the running for most metal church in the world. It was mostly destroyed in the Gomorrah firebombing by Allied planes during WWII, but was not re-built as a memorial to the dead. It's a very powerful reminder of the awfulness of war. 

Our next stop was Hamburg's City Hall, the Rathaus, which we strolled past on our way to have a drink at ALEX on the shores of the smaller Alster lake. It's a strong testament to Hamburg's affordability that drinks at the absolutely most touristy place in town, on a picture-perfect day, were extremely reasonable: I had a Ehrdinger weissbier pint and Molly had an Aperol spritz, and the bill came to around 10 euros (~$12). Pictured: Molly in her happy place.

Our main goal for Hamburg tourism was to experience a Bavarian-style meal with ridiculous quantities of pork products, huge pints of beer, and tacky taxidermy covering the walls with an oompah band playing in the background. We were able to cover most, if not all, of those bases at Hofbrau Wirsthaus. 

Since we arrived at about 5 p.m. on a Monday, the number of fellow revelers was somewhat limited, but we still had a great time. 

We had a couple of entrees and a couple of gigantic beers, and the bill was 37 euros (~$45). A good time was had by all, and there was even some sort of Super Mario level in the park next door: 

We hoofed it over to the Central Station, where we ran into a protest for Kurdish Independence outside before catching a train to a description of my condition: Bad, Old, and Slow:

Tom picked us up at the train station in Ahrensburg, and we experienced a German supermarket on the way back to the house. 

Tuesday, October 17

We spent our last day in Germany hanging out around the house, raking leaves and helping with swingset construction. 

We flew back to Copenhagen in the early evening, and crashed at a hotel near the airport before catching our flight out of town Wednesday morning. 

A hearty thank you to Tom and Sonja for putting up with houseguests while their house was still full of unpacked boxes, and for being such excellent hosts. We love you both, and your children are a pleasure to spend time with. 

I'll leave you with a few random items that didn't seem to fit into the narrative, but I would feel bad if I didn't include: