Abenteuer in der Urwelt

(Adventures in pre-history)

Sometimes people just kinda save your life, y'know?

I don't mean this in the literal sense of someone jumping into the waterhole in which you're drowning, diving deep to free your ankles from the reeds, dragging you to shore and resuscitating you. I mean they save you just by being a) themselves and b) around you at a time when you need it.

I think it happens to all of us at one point or another, and it's certainly happened to me a number of times. Let me give you one example, which occurred six years ago in Moscow, where I lived and worked during my first year as an ESL teacher.

When I arrived in the city, I was allocated a flat which I shared with a complete stranger (and any other 'ESL person' reading this will know exactly how much of a lottery that is!). As it turned out, he was not a fellow English teacher, but a German teacher from the 'Globus' arm of the International House school there. I know "globus" sounds like a mildly embarrassing medical condition, but actually it's the name of their school of international languages.

This guy's name was (and still is) Reinhard, and I was extremely lucky to have drawn him as a flamate – as I appreciated even more after meeting the other male English teachers in Moscow. Quite a few of them* were just awful, having come to Russia either to drink themselves silly, to sleep their way through as much of the local female population as their complete lack of charm would allow, to preach some capitalist creed to the 'ex-commies', or to start fights with Russian guys in bars ... or for other, equally abhorrent reasons. 

Meanwhile, my year in Moscow was the first time I'd lived abroad ... and what a place to start! There were times when it all seemed too much, and I quite seriously thought I was going mad. But it was always sanity-enhancing to get home at night, and find that it really was home. The flat became the 'sanctuary', a place to relax and laugh, cook and eat, drink and talk about lu&e**, and generally to feel sane. So yeah ... have to acknowledge quite a sizeable debt to Mr Reinhard, especially considering what's happened since, with ESL becoming my career and whatnot. He was one of those 'life-saving' people )))

Something else I want to mention here, and it's this: without wishing to cause any offence to people I've known for a long time, I have to say that quite a lot of what happened before Moscow seems kinda vague these days ... as though it were part of some pre-history known only from a partial fossil record.

I mean, of course that's not true of every part of my life. Obviously I remember personal relationships, close friendships, family relations (including those with cats), and lots of stuff about making music and travelling and so forth. But the day-to-day realities of life then – how I spent my working days, what I did on weekends, what things I had in my house, what bills I had to pay, how it felt to be 'me' as I walked down the street on a typical day – a lot of that stuff might as well have taken place in the pre-Cambrian era. So in a way, my little 'Moscow period' was where pre-history ended and history without a prefix began.

You may wonder why I considered it worthwhile mentioning all of this. Well, there's basically one reason. Last night I arrived in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, and waiting for me on the station was my old flatmate Reinhard, who I hadn't seen since he left Moscow six years ago. It was quite a moment, and I wanted to try and give you a sense of it. That's all )))

Reinhard is in fact a Stuttgart native ... or pretty close to being one. He took me for a drive just outside the city today, and showed me "the mountain where I come from" – meaning the one on which he was born (I think) and which he often played on while suffering the condition of extreme smallness known as 'early childhood'. This, I thought, was a reasonably impressive thing to be able to point out to someone through a car window as you speed along a German motorway.

Not much further down the road we passed a small but unmistakable extinct volcano, classically cone-shaped, which Reinhard told me was "where my parents grew up". Once again, not unimpressive.

Almost as much fun as this was a guided tour through some of Stuttgart's better bars the previous evening (though I'm reasonably sure that none of Reinhard's family members were born or grew up in any of the places he took me to). We got a round of applause as we entered the first of them ... which is certainly as good an introduction to a 'bar crawl' as any I've ever had )))

(Actually, an objective observer would probably have attributed this applause to the fact that a band had finished their set just a second before we went inside ... but why allow an objective observer to spoil the moment, when you open the door of a bar and a crowd of people immediately start clapping and cheering? That would just be silly!)

Back to the pretty Baden-Württemberg countryside that I was talking about before: there were essentially two things which drew us out there today. The first was that I love nature documentaries, especially those produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, of which Sir David Attenborough was the pioneer. (I was happy to discover that Reinhard is also a fan, which was great because it meant he was also keen on the excursion.) The second is that, back when I suffered from extreme smallness, I was completely obsessed with dinosaurs.

See, within a few kilometres of 'Mount Reinhard', there's a quarry at a place called Holzmaden. This place is central to a geographical region called the Swabian Jura, which is quite a remarkable area ... partly because it used to be under the ocean, and partly for its geological make-up. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact details, but it seems that layers of shale formed in the Jura over hundreds of millions of years. And as you know if you've handled shale, it deposits in a different way to other kinds of rock. It forms distinct layers which, with the right tools, can be pulled apart quite cleanly.

The other thing about shale is that it tends to expel oxygen from the spaces it wants to occupy. Oxygen causes bones to decay, but if a creature dies and is then covered in shale, sometimes its bones don't get enough oxygen for this process to occur ... and so they are preserved.

In the 18th Century, a German paleontologist started digging up the layers of shale in this area, and he found some truly astounding things. The Swabian Jura subsequently became the origin of many significant dinosaur finds; without the contribution of this area, your brain probably wouldn't contain quite a few of the 'familiar' images of dinosaurs that we all carry around with us. For example, a pretty hefty percentage of all the icthyosaur*** and plesiosaur**** specimens in the world have been found here. So we got our picture of the prehistoric seas largely from the Swabian Jura.

(Fellow dinosaur nerds may be interested to know that the first archaeopteryx skeleton was also found near here in the 1860s. This creature – a major 'missing link' between the existence of reptiles and the later development of birds – helped fuel Darwin's insistence that all species were created by a process of natural selection. It also seems to have made his wacky theory more palatable to others, so it really was a hugely significant find. Archaeopteryx was actually the thing I wanted most to see, but unfortunately it's on display in a different town to the one we went to. Oh well ... next time.)

Anyway, about 200 years after that mad frenzy of discovery subsided, I was born. Then, six or seven years later, I became aware of dinosaurs, and collected as much paraphernalia related to them as my parents would buy me.

Lastly, a further 25-ish years down the track, David Attenborough and his awesomely talented crew made a brilliant documentary series called The Life of Birds, which is still one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen on a TV screen. In this series he talked about archaeopteryx, and also brought to my attention something that other people would confirm later: if you want to see these amazing fossil finds with your own eyes, one of the best places to start is the Swabian Jura, and in particular Holzmaden.

And so, with Reinhard in agreement, there we were.

I must confess I'm usually not that much of a museum person, though I do make exceptions. (I can never pass up the 'oddball' ones, like the Museum of Parasites in Tokyo, or the occasional vast-and-undeniably-fabulous collection like the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.) And though we were only there for about an hour and a half, The Holzmaden Museum of Prehistory definitely makes it onto my list of favourites. The paleontologists' workshops were really great, and in three of the four main display rooms, at least 50% of all the things I saw just blew my mind.

Too many highlights to mention here, but the ammonites were great (Reinhard told me he often used to find them on 'his' mountain), and I loved the details in the skulls and tailbones of the icthyosaurs.

However, in some ways perhaps the best exhibit was an an enormous display of lily fossils, frozen in their ancient form and covering an entire wall. Whereas all the other things we saw here were extraordinary for scientific reasons, this one was difficult not to regard as a work of art, with nature itself holding the brushes.

I would absolutely love to have this thing on my living room wall (though admittedly, I'd need a bigger living room than any I'm ever likely to have!). It would give my eyes an excuse to wander for indefinite periods across the canvas, with my thoughts following. This kind of languid visual and mental 'wandering' is one of the most enjoyable reactions I've ever had to visual art, and it reminds me of Kandinsky's answer to the question "How do you create your paintings?" He answered "I take a line for a walk." 

A lot of my favourite art takes me for that kind of walk ... and here, in Holzmaden, were a bunch of flowers in a swamp doing exactly the same thing. Amazing )))

Ooh, and one more thing: after you've checked out all the exhibits, you can pay a fee and the curators give you some tools and let you loose in the quarry outside the museum, where some of the fossils on display were found. Unfortunately I had a plane to catch and so wasn't able to search for my own archaeopteryx specimen ... but what a cool idea!

So that was my day out in the Swabian Jura, thinking a lot about pre-history – both my own subjective kind, and the actual kind.

Thanks again, Reinhard. See you in another five or six years, in a completely different city, where we'll do a completely different thing. Don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to it already :-)

(* Just want to stress that this doesn't apply to every male teacher I met Russia's capital. Only to, y'know, a significant percentage of them.)

** 'Life, The Universe and Everything' – the title of a novel by Douglas Adams, of whom both Reinhard and myself are big fans.

*** Enormous swimmy-about things that looked kinda like ancient sharks. The "20-foot fish" above is one of them.

**** Those swimming dinosaurs that resemble popular artists' depictions of the Loch Ness Monster.

first and final moments #3

Im Fernzug* nach Göttingen, circa 9pm (GMT +2)

The pilot plunges us into a thick soup of cloud that seems to stretch forever. For several rather wonderful minutes we are lost in a turbulent sea of white**, until suddenly – wham! – an impossibly vivid sunset crashes into view. The black undersides of the rain clouds are streaked through with überdramatic crimson, in a scene that would have black metal CD sleeve designers wetting their laced-up leather pants in delight.

This cycle repeats itself a couple of times (disappearing into cloud, re-emerging into the black metal sunset) until finally we are clear, and descending rapidly onto the biggest airport I've ever seen. In fact, it's not just bigger than other airports – it's a whole different kind of beast. In the same way that a whale isn't just a big fish, so the 'Fraport' in Frankfurt isn't just a big airport. It's a colossal City of Planes, with an infrastructure so complex that it makes me think they must employ Einstein's, Heisenberg's and Planck's direct lineal descendants to handle air traffic control duties.

We land and immediately join a long line of traffic, rolling along behind an Air China jet as though the two were cars on a motorway. We pause periodically at intersections, where sleek Lufthansa giants heading away from the terminal appear to have right of way. At one point, I see two of these giants heading diagonally towards each other, one turning at the last moment in obeyance of lane markings that I can't see from where I'm sitting. Not one to be overawed by machinery, but honestly, I've never seen anything quite like this. There are planes everywhere!

We disembark, and after a brief wait in the 'non-EU' line, I'm out in the street smoking, thinking, and preparing to enter the Deutsche Bahn rail network for the first time in nearly a decade.

Ok, skip forward. Everything I wrote above actually happened about two-and-a-half hours ago. On the flight over here I wrote lots of stuff about KZ, about the things I'll miss (and won't miss), and about my attempts to get acquainted with some of the country's further reaches during my third year there. Then I decided to delete all of that, and to put up a 'photo log' at some time in the not-too-distant future.

Instead, let me tell you what's happening now.

I'm on a train to Göttingen, about two hours north of Frankfurt. My flight was a little late, and it took me a while to sort out some 'arrival issues', so I just hope the hotel will be saving my room for me, despite the late check-in.

(Once, while on holiday in Sweden, my ex- Natalie and I lost our accommodation booking because our plane landed two hours late, and the owner gave our room to someone else. The result was a night spent walking the streets of Stockholm with our enormous bags ... nice city, but not a pleasant way to be introduced to it! Since then, arriving late to hotels and hostels has always made me a bit nervous.)

"So, Mr. Nerd ... any first impressions upon returning to Germany?"

Well, yeeeah. Lots of 'em, in fact. Let me share a few, as is my habit.

Firstly, Europe is not 'Europe'. I mean, as I learned somewhat to my horror this evening, the cost of a 90-minute train trip in Germany is roughly equivalent to a decent week's wage in Ukraine. You can easily see where the money is (and isn't) on this continent.

Secondly: if people here need a light for their cigarette, they say (in German, obviously) "Excuse me. May I have a light, please?" Then they explain apologetically how they came to be without their own lighter, and finish with a cheerful "Many thanks". This is a wild contrast to some more eastern-lying countries I could name, where you often get no more than a two-handed 'lighting my cigarette whilst sheltering the flame from the wind' gesture, followed by a grunt of thanks (and the grunt is optional).

I'm not saying that I prefer one to the other – in fact, the economy of Russian discourse is one of the things I admire about it. Russian-speakers can say so much with one or two words, it sometimes makes English with all of its clumsy auxiliaries ("Did you xxxx yesterday?", "Have you been xxxxing lately?") and elaborate politeness strategies ("Would you kindly pass the xxxx?") seem a little absurd. I'm just saying that it's a striking difference, when you come here from a place with a very different 'culture of communication'.

(One thing I want to add, though: "Darf ich Feuer haben?", which translates literally as "May I have fire?", is one of my favourite phrases in any language :-)

This cheerful politeness also extends to any encounter which involves asking for help and information. Germans aren't known worldwide for being effusive, but they're extremely keen to help travellers – perhaps, one could speculate, because they're such a nation of travellers themselves, and so can empathise with the experience of being in a railway station in a foreign country with little or no idea of where to go or what to do next. But whetever the reason, they help you gladly with anything you need to know, and either they're all excellent actors or their cheerful willingness to do all this helping is really genuine. If it's the second one, it's brilliant and I love them for it.

Also, there's the food. This country is full of edibles that don't look like they want to hurt me. Everywhere I look, I see the word "organisch" ... and the place brims with freshly squeezed juices, salads with leaves (a feature noticeably lacking from the former-Soviet diet), succulent pineapples, freshly-baked bread, and other thoroughly wholesome-looking stuff. It seems nothing less than a minor miracle, after having arrived from the Central Asian Culinary Badlands.

Most miraculous of all, though, are the sausages. In Ukraine I was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances should I buy a sausage on the street. This advice was usually offered in the form of a question like "Where do you think all the tramps and stray dogs go?". And when you looked at the sausages there, it took little imagination to convince yourself that the warnings were genuine. So, as a fan of a good sausage, imagine my delight to be in a land where they look not only safe and edible, but actually tasty. My stomach is very happy that we came to this country )))

Lastly, the concern for hygeine here really leaps out at you when you first arrive. A German public toilet experience goes something like this: you go into a pleasant-smelling room and do what you need to, and when you're done, flushing occurs automatically. You then proceed to the sink, where you wave your hand in front of an electronic sensor to receive a generous amount of soap in your palm. A second electronic sensor also awaits your attention, releasing a generous amount of water in response to your hand-wave. You may then choose from a variety of hand-drying methods, all of which are similarly 'remote activated'. And lastly, the doors are usually turnstile gates that respond to forward pressure from any part of the body – a little push from the knee will get you through. So you walk out of the public toilet without having touched a single surface. I just can't tell you how much I love this. Really, I can't.

However, having enthused so much about the wonders of being a traveller in Deutschland after just a few hours back in the country, I have to say that things have changed for me a little since I was last here. I've already had moments when I've felt that there was 'something missing'. I mean, Germany is great, the people are super-nice, and the language is the most wonderful collection of sounds ever assembled outside of an orchestra pit***. And being here gives me lots of reasons to smile, whether at the stunning landscape or in response to the smiles I get from locals. But ... and here's the big "but" ... it somehow feels a little lacklustre compared to the intensity of life in the East, and I'm already missing that. Not sure if I could ever go back to this Western life. I just don't think it's really 'me' anymore.

Btw, what you've just read is one reason why I like working (at least now that I'm in a profession which I actually like). If I don't work, there's nothing to stop me from musing endlessly on questions like this ... and if I did that every day, I'd be as mad as a lemon before long.

(What, you don't think lemons are mad? You clearly haven't observed them very carefully. They're all insane! Just try and stare one down for ten minutes or so, and see how you feel after that.)

Ok, time to stop writing. It's been a ridiculously long day, starting at 5am and considerably lengthened by flying westwards through five time zones. Anything I've said in the last few hours can probably be written off as the delirious ramblings of a lemon ... I mean, of a madman.

Bye!


* Can someone please tell me if it should be Am Fernzug"? I can't make up my mind. Thanks )))

** I love turbulence; it's easily the most enjoyable part of flying. Rough descents are especially good )))

***. I realise that not everyone agrees with me on this, but frankly you'll never convince me that German isn't a gorgeous language. So unless you're going to tell me that Russian is more elegant and more tender – the only counter-argument I'm prepared to hear – please just nod politely and let's move on.