Trip to Bielefeld

On Friday I was invited to give a presentation at a festival in Bielefeld. It was 4 1/2 hours away by train. I was up all night the night before getting my presentation ready (because my computer crashed and I lost my earlier presentation) and I was supposed to be sent a code to get my tickets at the train station, but it had not come. I called the secretary in Bielefeld Friday morning and finally got her on the phone and got my ticket number at 8:40 am. I ran to the train station and had some trouble printing the ticket, I had never printed my own train tickets from a code before, I pushed the "English" button for help but that section was all in German anyway. Finally I got the tickets printed out minutes before my train arrived at 9:15 am. The rest of the trip was (oddly enough for me) without incident. I didn't get thrown off for having the wrong tickets and I didn't end up in the wrong stops. I guess I am learning how to really use the German train system. There are sheets printed in yellow at the stations that have all the stops for each train and the times they arrive there. Timing when to get off really helps when I am in a new area, otherwise it is hard to know which stop to get off at in time to get off before the train moves on. After my presentation was done I collapsed for a long nap at the hotel. On Saturday I walked around Bielefeld a bit, but the city was not that remarkable. It is in the industrial area of Germany. I hopped the train back to Hannover. There are some famous gardens I would have liked to see in Hannover but they were a long way out of town and I didn't want to spend any extra money until payday this week so I continued on to Hamburg. In Hamburg I went for a walk and stumbled first upon an anti-American parade and then upon St. Nicolai church. The parade was protesting "Yankee imperialism" in central and south America. It was flanked by police cars and had a line of people waving flags and a car with loudspeakers chanting slogans. I followed it for a ways to see if anything happened. I was comfortable with the "Yankee" protests. Being from the south, we have been fighting and protesting "Yankee" imperialism for over a century--since the Civil War. Despite the police presence the protest was uneventful and I went on and happened upon a church (a cathedral by American standards) that was bombed in WWII and was left as ruins rather than being rebuilt. The main spire is still standing and some of the corner walls but the center is gone with a memorial below ground. It is a real contrast to the office buildings around it. Some of the columns and the rose window in the spire are blasted out and the stone has a dark burnt look to it. I walked on to the famous Reeperbahn, the "touristic red-light" section of Hamburg. Here there are risque shops right next to McDonalds and KFCs, the contrast is amusing. It reminded me a bit of Amsterdam, only without all the drugs for sale in the shop windows. I walked back by the famous Rathaus (courthouse) and then on back to Ploen. On Sunday I took the kids "deer hunting." We snuck through some woods and found deer tracks, trails and scrapes (where they rub there antlers near the base of small trees), but no deer. And then this (Monday) morning a sighting that deserves mention. I saw two mink-like animals apparently hunting around an overpass around 5 am.