My New Hero, Robert L. Watson

The above photo is taken from the North County Times.  This is where I saw the ad to see Bob Watson, WWII Vet, speak at the Escondido Library.  I took (dragged) Kyle with me, explaining the importance of witnessing a first hand account by someone who had actually experienced D-Day.  (Kind of the same speech I gave him about seeing Doris Martin, Holocaust survivor, which you can read about in my blog archives.)  It's one thing to read about it in a book, but how many chances are you ever going to have of an eye witness relating these world changing events?  Mr. Watson sprinkled his emotionally charged story with humor where he could.  He joined the Navy instead of the Army because the Navy seemed more elite and he thought he would get a lot of attention from the girls by wearing his sexy Navy uniform.  He was only 18 when he was sent to Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, after being drafted and spending only one month in boot camp.  All the sailors on his boat were 18 and 19 years old, had never seen combat, and were scared to death.  I was on the edge of my seat as he described how their boat started taking on water as it plowed through high waves and choppy seas, in dismal, foggy conditions.  They were supposed to rush out of the boat and storm the beach but they were struck by land mines planted in the water by the Germans. Bob found himself clinging to a rubber life boat, shaking and trembling in terror.  Once on the beach, he had to scramble over dead bodies to find a fox hole while dodging bullets flying around his head.  He had been wounded by shrapnel from the mines and was surprised when an army medic ran up to him and injected him with one of the many morphine needles dangling from his jacket.  Many in his battalion never made it to the beach, and he had to witness some of his buddies being shot down, right before his eyes.  A friend in a foxhole next to him, raised his head up to look around, only to have it blown off his body. Bob spent 28 hair raising days on Omaha Beach, received several promotions, and was eventually put in charge of herding German POW's down to the beach to be shipped to England.  He chokes up a little remembering the young men who lost their lives there and were never honored for their heroic deeds.  While his emotions are still close to the surface, even after all these years, he also has a quick sense of humor.  One audience member introduced an elderly gentleman who had also been there on D-Day and thought they might possibly know each other.  Bob said, excitedly, "I saw him!  He was wearing a helmet!"  Bob and his lovely wife of over 60 years have been back to France many times and he is always treated with great respect there.  On a recent visit, a group of young German soldiers spent an hour talking to him about his experiences on Omaha Beach.  They shook his hand and thanked him for saving their country! Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg also shook his hand on a recent visit and Mr. Spielberg took him aside and asked if he had done a good job with the movie (Saving Private Ryan).  Bob said he thought he'd done the best he could, but the soldiers in the movie looked like they were in their late 20's when in reality, nobody there was over 19 years old.  He said the bloody scenes depicted in the first part of the movie were 20 times worse in real life.  Kyle and I had the honor of speaking to Bob's son and daughter in law afterwards, who told us he had been so traumatized by his experience, he was unable to speak about it for 50 years.  I am so glad he is speaking about it now because these things should never be forgotten.  Someone who has lived through such horror deserves to have their story heard by everyone.  He also  speaks at high schools and  I'm told he is at the Midway every Saturday to answer any questions.  I felt honored to be in his presence and asked if I could shake his hand.  He took my hand in his and kissed it ever so gallantly, saying with a charming smile, "I'm sorry.  It's the old sailor in me!"  Thank you, Mr. Watson.  You are a true hero and we are honored to have met you.

Uncle Rudolf, Hannah's Cottage and a Duck Story

Ate picked up Uncle Rudolf at the train station and he spent the day with us.  Over the years I've had the pleasure of attending a few of his birthday parties.  He used to throw himself  huge parties with 100+ people, even renting out a room in a local hotel for a birthday buffet.  He is engaging, exuberant and always impeccably dressed. He is 93 years old now, still well groomed, but walks a little crooked and is thin and seems very fragile.  His kids made him give up his driver's license earlier this year which he is not happy about.  But he was still lively and optimistic when he wasn't dozing off in his chair.  We took him with us to

Hannah's vacation house in Denmark.  Christine had told me it was the most beautiful beach house ever and I had to agree.  It is a rose covered cottage with a thatch roof perched right above a beach on the Baltic Sea.  She has a beautiful front lawn with  numerous flowers and shrubs and a little wooden gate in the hedges which leads to the beach.  Inside, the house was cozy with big picture windows looking out onto the sea which was constantly moving from left to right, making me  a little dizzy.  The table in her living room was laden with homemade chocolate cake, fresh rolls with Danish butter and a strawberry torte from a local bakery.  I sat facing the window and couldn't take my eyes off the ocean, this huge body of water in constant motion, left to right, left to right.  I was hypnotized.  And dizzy.  We were served coffee and tea and all the above scrumptious pastries, and then a bottle of champagne was opened and we sat and talked all afternoon.  Hannah told me she had met me a long time ago when I was visiting Ate and Annette in Heidelburg.  We were checking into a hotel and there was Hannah and her husband and their big German Shepherd dog in the lobby.  As soon as she told the story I remembered because I was so astounded at the time that the hotel would allow such a big dog, but that's just how it is in Germany.  I remember Ate being surprised to see her there and them hugging and then introducing me, and they were very nice, and now here I was all these years later sitting in her house.  A Dutch door led out onto a courtyard with a picnic table where Hannah entertains when the weather's nice.  This is where the story of the ducks comes in.  It's cute, a little tragic, but has a happy ending - sort of.  A duck had its babies on top of her straw roof.  She didn’t know they were there until one came sliding down  the roof during a birthday celebration and fell right by and almost into a glass of champagne.  Then the baby ducklings wandered out to swim in the sea and were promptly gobbled up by seagulls.  The neighbors were able to save one injured duckling and kept it for years as a pet.  What do you think?  Does that warm your heart?  Or are you still gasping at that nasty seagull part?  Me too.

Hamburg, Schleswig, Restaurants, and I See Dead People

Tour of Hamburg
 Christine is Ate's middle daughter.  She is about my age and lives right next door with her daughter, Carla.  She is a school teacher and has always been an excellent tour guide for us.  She drove us to Hamburg one day for a boat tour on the Elbe River.  The narrator made jokes along the way and said that if you drink water from the Elbe, you won’t age because you will die.The boat came so close to a huge cargo ship, we had the illusion we were sailing underneath it.  We also floated by the warehouses where traders negotiated with vendors on boats.  Somehow they were able to hand carpets and other goods from the boats up to the shop keepers. For dinner we went to a unique restaurant which had a computer screen for each diner.  You would order your food from the screen and it would come sliding down a roller coaster and end up at your table. It was so amusing to watch wine and beer and hot and cold dishes rocking and rolling down the tracks.  We kept ordering food just to watch it make its journey to us.

In Schleswig we visited a castle which is now a museum and holds an exhibit of corpses from the year 100.  That's right, I said 100!!  So hard to wrap your head around that.  They were discovered in a nearby moor which did a good job of preserving them.  Think I'll go roll in some mud.  There was a young girl and a couple of men, and possible explanations for their deaths - murder, sacrifice, punishment.  There is a depiction of the young girl which shows how she may have looked in life.  I found this same picture in Wikipedia and it appears below.  I think she looks like me.

A short walk across the castle grounds brings you to Globus, the oldest planetarium in the world.  It was built for the Danish king in the 1600s, then Russia stole it, then another replica was built and has been there ever since.  It's in a special tower room built just for it and you have to wait a little because they only let 10 people in at a time. The outside of the globe depicts the world as they knew it back then.  It is surprisingly accurate.  Then you step up inside of the globe and everyone sits on a bench, kind of squished together, and it is a little warm in there too.  The door closes and the ceiling lights up with all the constellations.  It is intended to represent, in a 10 minute period,  how the constellations move around in the night sky in 24 hours.
 After that, we met Ate and her good friend Hannah at  a restaurant which represented the Viking era.  We ate at a long table with a bench seat covered by fluffy sheepskins.  Hannah is originally from Denmark, has a cute Danish accent when she speaks German and I adore her.  Her hair is always pulled back in a pony tail, giving her a youthful appearance and she is always smiling and happy.  She invited us to her vacation house in Denmark and told us an amusing story about ducks on her roof, but I will save that story for another time.

Kyle Learns German

Ate  ordered an English-German dictionary for Kyle from the local book store and had a clerk deliver it to her front door. (!)  It is a very special dictionary with color pictures under the translations.  As she had done with me many years ago, she spoke only in German to Kyle to speed up the learning process.  Sometimes she would revert to English, as in, "Kyle, want you to have some bread?" but as the days went on, Kyle was able to understand more and started answering back in German.
One afternoon, while the rest of us were drinking a glass of sherry in the living room, Kyle watched the movie, "The Naked Gun" on German TV. We could hear him laughing in the next room and, yes, Leslie Nielsen is just as funny in German. Since we know the movie, it was a good way for him to learn some vocabulary.   We had a big dinner party one night with family and friends.  The conversation was lively and I watched Kyle’s eyes darting from one person to the next, trying to take it all in and understand what was being said.  My German sister, Annette, was there that evening and talked to Kyle about Estonia.  She knows some Russian and was telling us that the Russian alphabet is easy to learn.  Okay.  Of course she is an ear, nose and throat surgeon and therefore highly intelligent.  Also she's my age.  I feel insignificant somehow.  She has visited Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, sings in a choir and is an accomplished horseback rider.  She owns three horses which we got to visit later on. 
The dining room and kitchen in Ate's house have views of the ocean and Denmark beyond.  The living room has portraits of relatives from the 1700's.  One portrait in particular has always intrigued me.  The woman has a mischevious smile, as if she's about to reveal a secret.  She looks intriguing, someone I wish I knew.  In Ate's kitchen, Kyle learned how to make homemade strawberry jam.  She stood by giving him instructions and let him do it all himself.  We got to take some jars home with us and are still enjoying Kyle's homemade German jam. 

Cultural Differences

There are a few cultural differences between southern California and northern Germany, besides the weather. My German family doesn't watch much TV and, as a result, they talk a whole lot more with each other. What a concept! When a sudden rain storm drove us inside from sunning on lounge chairs, we sat in the cozy living room watching the rain through the picture window and talking about, I don't know, everything. At night after dinner, we sat in this same room with a bottle of champagne and talked.

Ate is a very interesting person and experienced World War II. She told us she was 4 years old when Hitler came into power. Everyone was celebrating in the street but when she went home, her mom and dad were depressed and she felt like she had walked into a funeral parlor. Her parents were anti Hitler and told her she must never repeat anything that was said in their house. Friends of theirs who were artists, dentists, concert pianists, disappeared, their homes ransacked. They were never seen again, all because they were Jewish. She brought out maps and showed us how Europe looked before, during and after the war. She said there were a lot of Americans who did good things for Germany after the war, like spending their own money to help rebuild churches that were bombed. A certain Mr. Hoover had provided meals to schools throughout Germany and she remembers how much she and her fellow students appreciated the bowl of soup that was provided every day for lunch by Mr. Hoover. It was called Hooverspeise and there was a different soup every day. She particularly liked the bean soup. Their teacher was rail thin - food was very scarce in Germany at that time - and one day she passed out in class from hunger. The students decided among themselves from then on that they would each give up one ladle of soup so their teacher could have something to eat too. They weren't supposed to do this; it was only meant for the children, but they loved their teacher and wanted to help her. I looked this information up later when I returned home and found out it was our former President Herbert Hoover who had done this. Here is what it says in Wikipedia: "On Hoover's initiative, a school meals program in the American and British occupation zones of Germany was begun on April 14, 1947. The program served 3,500,000 children aged six through 18. A total of 40,000 tons of American food was provided during the Hooverspeisung (Hoover meals)." One afternoon we drove 4 miles to the German/Denmark border. We parked the car by the Baltic Sea and walked across a small wooden bridge into Denmark. It was a very quiet, peaceful place. Two men in a boat floated under the bridge, ducks paddled lazily. A plaque at the end of the bridge commemorates this area of the border which was heavily patrolled by the Danish police during the war. As I looked out over the sun dappled water, I tried to imagine soldiers with rifles marching on the bridge and all the tension and violence that took place in this peaceful setting. What a difference 60 years makes. Every morning I jogged down through a little forest to a beautiful path along the beach and ran along the water, gazing at the Baltic Sea and Denmark.
On the way back, I would stop at the bakery and get fresh rolls for breakfast. When the weather was nice, we ate outside in the garden house which has glass walls overlooking the roses. There was bread, homemade jam, cheeses, meats, and soft boiled eggs in little ceramic egg cups with tiny knit hats to keep them warm. We were never hungry in Germany. Everything was served on linen tablecloths with linen napkins that I never used because I didn't want to get them all greasy and dirty, and the coffee and tea were in silver pots on top of warmers and we ate with the finest silverware and china plates and cups.  We were treated like royalty.  But actually, this is how they eat at every meal.  I'm ashamed to say I use plastic plates and paper napkins at my house.  Another cultural difference.  

Flensburg Here We Come

Our Scandinavian tour was coming to a close but not without one last nail biting adventure. Here was the plan: We leave Stockholm on the early morning train, change trains in Copenhagen and again in Odense, Denmark, then arrive in Flensburg, Germany in the early evening. Is it really too much to ask for things to go as planned??? Yes. All went well until Copenhagen, when the conductor announced that we would have to get off at the airport instead of the central train station because of some construction problems. We were told to take a subway to our destination. Say what?? There was no instruction about how to get to the subway or which one to take. Everyone had to get off the train and we were caught in a wave of confused tourists wondering where to go. I overheard a German man arguing with a subway conductor that he had been rerouted and shouldn't have to pay for a subway ticket. Since we were in the same boat, I stood by saying, "Yeah, same here." The conductor had no knowledge of our dilemma until he got a call on his walkie talkie that confirmed what we were trying to tell him. The German man was traveling with his wife and small kids and was very upset because he was going to miss his connecting train to Hamburg. (see, I'm not the only one! Sometimes.) Turns out we needed to take two different subways to get to our destination. We all piled onto the now overcrowded subway and I latched onto a big Danish dude who seemed very jovial. He said not to worry, he would get off with us and show us how to get to our train. He was big and tall and kind of like a Pied Piper to us confused tourists who followed him around the subway station. He rode with us to the central station and pointed us to the train tracks. Aw, the kindness of strangers... We found our track and as I stood there wondering if the train that had just arrived was ours, a nice woman came up and asked if we were going to Odense. When I said yes she said, "This is your train!" I asked how she knew because I couldn't see the train number and she said, "I ride this train every day." I thanked her and we got on board. Our ticket had a car and seat number assignment. We walked from car to car, looking for the right number. It was a very long train. In exasperation, I found a woman in a uniform, showed her our tickets and asked where our car was. She looked at my ticket and said, "Oh, you're on the wrong train." Just then the train started moving and everyone looked my way as I grabbed her arm and shrieked, "WHAT???" She looked a little frightened of me and said, "Well it still goes to Odense but this is not the train on your reservation. Go ahead and sit anywhere." She seemed a little nervous as she pulled her arm out of my grasp and backed away from me. I relaxed a little and we plunked down in the nearest available seats. Never a dull moment, right? We arrived in Odense a little earlier than planned and I was able to find a direct train that got us to Flensburg at 6 instead of 8. So you see - it all worked out for the better. I called my German "mom" and she was happy to pick us up earlier. It had been 7 years since I had seen her but the passage of time is not so noticeable when you are connected to someone. We greeted each other as if it had only been yesterday. Of course she didn't recognize Kyle, as he had been a little 9 year old boy the last time and was now a tall 16 year old with a stubble of beard. We piled into her little red sports car and drove to her lovely home. The stressful part of our trip was now officially over. From now on we would be well taken care of. We enjoyed a sunshiney afternoon in her park-like yard with her German Shephard, Quinya, and Dachshund, Bernstein. The pug in the picture is Gunther. He was just visiting. Bernstein sat at my feet licking my wounds. Ate (my German Mom) said dog saliva helps wounds heal quicker. Who knew? She said he likes me or he wouldn't be trying to heal me. Nevertheless, it was disturbing.

Please note the lovely sunshine. Sadly this was one of only a handfull of days we would see the sun for the next two weeks.

Stockholm on the 4th of July

Our ship sailed into Stockholm on the 4th of July. Happy Birthday USA. It's weird to be in a foreign country on Independence Day. No BBQ's or fireworks here. Kyle said goodbye to his new Estonian friends from the disco. He spent a good portion of the early morning hours learning the fine art of cross cultural and language communication. The Estonians (a cute girl, her family, and some guys his age) spoke broken English but Kyle listened intently as they described life under Russian rule (they hated it) and Estonian defiance. In particular, thousands of Estonians gathered for a song festival between 1986 and 1991 where they defiantly sang revolutionary songs. This non violent demonstration ultimately led to the country's independence. There is even a movie, The Singing Revolution, which was made about this event. It was a lovely, sunny day and we walked along a beautiful park along the ocean, dragging our luggage behind us. All the locals were enjoying the sunshine, picnicking, playing lawn games, skate boarding. Our hotel was right by this park. We checked in and asked the concierge what we should do during our stay here. He suggested Skansen, an outdoor folk museum. Because the weather was so nice, I wanted to wear Capri pants and cute shoes instead of the same jeans and running shoes I had been slogging around in. My blisters were pretty much healed so I put on my cute, strappy leather sandals. Big mistake, but more on that later. We took a ferry boat over to Skansen which is lovely and full of history and interesting things to see.

All the houses, churches and buildings are as they were hundreds of years ago. There was also an area for the local animals in their natural habitat. We saw reindeer, a wolverine, eagle owls and a gray seal. Red squirrels ran rampant and seemed almost tame, coming right up to us as if they expected handouts. I was mildly surprised when one stared at me with soulful eyes and in a high, squeaky voice said, "Bread please". (OK not really. Just checking to see if you were paying attention. They speak Swedish there, remember?) We walked all over the place and my feet were starting to smart. Damn. We sought out a nice Italian restaurant in the old town area and by this time I was limping again. I glanced down and was appalled to see blood seeping through the leather straps and running down my big toe. Well, that's attractive. The straps had sliced into my toe. No wonder my feet hurt. I was forced to break out the band aids again and forget about wearing cute shoes for a while. Again. The next day we found another park in the center of town with fountains and statues. Numerous cafes surrounded an area with water where children laughed and played. It seemed all of Stockholm was there to enjoy a lunchtime break. We took a boat cruise which went through a couple of locks and under bridges. The locks were so interesting - stone walls closed in front and in back of our boat and the water level rose to empty us from the Baltic into Malmo Lake and on the way back to the Baltic, the lock's water level dropped to spill us back out onto the sea. A recorded narrator explained the sights along the way. I was sad to see and hear about the asylum where the lepers and insane were sent in the 17 and 1800s. There was also a spot memorialized with a giant wooden keg where Absolut vodka had its distillery. After the cruise, we took the subway to Sodermalm, an area Kyle had read about in one of Stieg Larsson's books. We found a music store called Hellstone which was old and funky and fun. The owner said he had opened the store fifty years ago when he was 5 (teehee). Kyle plucked on a guitar for a while and got a t shirt that says Go to Hell Stone. Kyle loved Stockholm. He thought the people were friendly, enjoyed its beauty with its many islands and waterways, and is contemplating going to school here sometime in the future. We climbed an impossibly steep stairway in the side of a hill which led to a restaurant high above the city with sweeping views. It was sadly too expensive for our budget, but we got some good photos and enjoyed our last Swedish meal at an outdoor restaurant in the center of town. Back at our hotel, we were amused by an interesting show on TV. It was sort of sci fi, something about human looking robots (with perfect bodies) used as servants who were trying to take control. The thing is, the show was in Danish with Swedish subtitles. Because Kyle had learned a few words here and there, we were able to get the gist of what was going on. It was so intriguing and had some humorous parts too. We were bummed we would never find out what happens to those good looking robots. Goodbye Stockholm. Sure was fun. This also was the end of our Scandinavia tour. Next stop - Germany.