A Change of Pace - and Country

Well, it is hard to blog when you are doing nothing - well pretty much nothing.  Thursday is market day here in Rhinau so we headed over to the Place du Marche to check out what was there.  I knew there was "the chicken lady", a woman with a food truck which has chickens roasting on skewers.  Yum!  We could smell it as we crossed the street!  So that, along with buying produce and a Tarte Munster for our lunch was our big excitement yesterday.  Other than that and, of course, eating the chicken for dinner, we sat and read.  Oh, yes and Doug went for a bike ride. 

 

 

Today (Friday) we drove up into the Black Forest (Schwarzwald).  As I mentioned Rhinau is on the banks of the Rhine river and there is a broad plain that stretches west from the Vosges mountains east to the hills of the Black Forest which, if I am not mistaken are basically the foothills of the Alps.  Much of that area is rich farmland.  One very impressive thing about this part of Germany is its dedication to solar power.  Most of the houses have solar panels on their houses and barns; some are even in the fields.  The population of Freiberg, a major city just south of here, generates 98% of its energy individually.  Perhaps Mr. Trump could learn about that.  The industry employs more people than any coal mine would!

Our destination was the Black Forest Open-Air Museum in Gutach.  I had visited it about 25 years ago but it has changed significantly.  Before, there was only signage in German and now it is in three languages.  That made it a lot more interesting.  Basically, you get to explore different kinds of Black Forest houses from various centuries.  One dates from 1599 and was moved to the location piece by piece.  There is one original house on the site when the museum started.  The people living in it remained there until one year after the museum was opened.  Over 5 generations of the same family lived there until the last moved out in 1995.  Aside from being informative about the history and culture of this region, the museum is also a good place for school visits with a number of hands-on workshops that kids could participate in.  Also, in addition to the houses, you could visit the bake house (baking was done only once a month), a distillery, the mill (mostly rye was ground here), a blacksmith shop, a storage house for wine and grains plus a "retirement house" where farmers when they were about 60 could retire and hope the daughter-in-law in the family would help them out and take care of them.  The sign poignantly said that generally that was not a long commitment as people didn't live that long.  What was very clear is how hard the farm life would have been - and probably is now, even with the assistance of machinery!  The following photos are from our visit to the museum.

 

Train station at the Museum

We left the museum, had lunch at a nearby Imbiss (snack place) where all three of us were disappointed in the food and headed for the charming town of Gengenbach, not far from Offenburg.  I first went to this place about three years ago when I was traveling in this region with some friends (also neighbours).  I fell in love with its cobblestoned streets, its "Engelgasse" (Angel Alley) and interesting shops.  It is also the first place where I saw "Stolperstein" - the little brass plaques that have replaced a cobblestone in front of many houses here and in a lot of Germany to signify that someone (usually a Jew) was taken from the residence.  It also details the birth and fate of the person.  While I had seen a number of these plaques on another visit here, today we only found one.  Numbing just the same.

One of the gates leading into the town

Engelgasse (Angel Alley)

One of the "Stolperstein"

To reiterate what Stolpersteine are, I copied the following info from Wikipedia:

A stolperstein, literally "stumbling stone", metaphorically a "stumbling block" or a stone to "stumble upon", plural stolpersteine) is a cobblestone-size (10 by 10 centimetres (3.9 in × 3.9 in)) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. The stolperstein art project was initiated by the German artist, Günter Demnig in 1992, and is still ongoing. It aims at commemorating individual persons at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror, euthanasia, eugenics, was deported to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of 31 January 2017^[update], over 56,000 stolpersteine have been laid in 22 European countries, making the stolperstein project the world's largest decentralized memorial.  The majority of stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for  Sinti and Romania people (then also called gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, members of the Christian opposition (both Protestants and Catholics), Freemasons, the Communist Party, and the European anti-Nazi Resistance, military deserters, and the physically or mentally disabled.

When we got back to Rhinau, there were two camels, a dromedary, goats and an emu (or maybe it was an ostrich) in the field near where we recycle our wine, beer and panache bottles.  No, we weren't hallucinating; the circus is in town.  How exciting!