Hundertwasser

Many have an idea of the Germans as people so precise and obsessed with perfection that have no space in their brain for new and original projects.
These many should go to Magdeburg and would have a very different opinion.
I personally do not like Gaudi, I find it a little kitschy, but I was surprised and pleasantly surprised...
The real catchy is that you wouldn’t certainly expect anything of this kind in Germany.
This is a Paradise for children and adults that dream to be children again.
All those stairs and small gardens and hidden windows and colored columns.
It is something like the "One thousand and one nights".
It is like jumping in a fairy tale and be a part of it...

The white fence

Finally we have the sun today.
It was missing since long, so long nobody remembers a June like this, cold and rainy.
They say it is because the climate changes and pollution and so on.
I know why: because the Broghammers decided to live here.
Wherever they go, they bring rain and cold.
Mostly it is Mrs. Broghammer´s fault.
She is always cold and always complaining and that is exactly what happens.
Something like a Nemesis, today to you, tomorrow to somebody else and usually to the Broghammers...
Anyway, today was the right day to go on with the fence.
It proceeded also last week, in spite of the rain, in the few moments of sun,the Broghammers were ready with brushes and paint.
It looks great, at least that is what everybody around says.
Painting is also a way of socializing.
People who have little to do (which looks like to be the majority around) stop and chat.
Every day the Broghammers know a little piece more about the people who lived here before.
Every day a little piece of local history unfolds and many small details find an explanation.
For example the PKK written with a mosaic of tiles on the cellar’s floor is the name of the Polish who lived here in the early DDR times.
He kept the garden and the fence in a spotless way.
He loved to play the Harmonium in the garden and there were chairs and benches ready for whoever wanted to stop by and sing.
They also drank and laughed and enjoyed life.
Later he went away and the garden lost its glamour.
The fence began deteriorating, the color went away, the gate died a slow and painful death.
The Broghammers are welcome because the garden can begin to live again, the fence is a shining, glossy white and may be they hope somebody will begin to play and sing again.
That is something which won’t happen, but the neighbor’s are already happy to be able to find somebody to chat with.

The Broghammers´Sundays

What do the Broghammers do on Sundays?
The alarm rings at 5.
Because they have to catch the train that goes to Magdeburg and leaves at 6.33
It takes 30 minutes to arrive by foot to the Station and around 10 to make a ticket.
It should take much less, especially at that hour when you do not even have to queue.
But Mr. Broghammer has to be sure to get the best offer and that takes what it takes.
The tickets machine is like his home computer and just putting starting from and arriving to would be WHAT an Italian would do.
Being a German he HAS to make things a little bit more complicated.
What is the use of a German sophisticated machine if you do not use it at its maximum potential?
That is also the natural consequence of being in a country where it is a must to complicate matters.
In Italy the machine calculates the Kilometers and multiply them for the price of the unitary Kilometer.
What you get (plus of course some extras to feed the Railroad’s managers, the politicians who hire them and so on...) is the ticket price.
Here the ticket price depends more on how many people will be on the train, so that at 5 and on Weekends you get one price and on working days a totally different one.
Then you have the variable of the type of train, the seat, the whatsoever and FINALLY you get the price.
That price is further discounted if you are a "railroad fan" which you prove subscribing with 50 Euros per year.
Well, going back to the Broghammers, in order to be able to be on that train they have to leave home at ten to six, so that leaves fifty minutes for breakfast and getting ready.
Mr. Broghammer has the duty to prepare "frustück", while Mrs. Broghammer has to care for her hair ( in order to look "respectable" and rightly shabby, what they call "shabby chic" which is the maximum she can achieve with it).
The Sundays "Frustück" is particularly rich.
Instead of two slices of toasted bread (black bread which is healthier) they have three.
With Margarine and marmalade.
Since the day will be particularly busy, there won’t be time for a "complete lunch" and so that slice more will keep the stomach busy (and it will further be cheated with a few additional "sneaks").
This is an unhealty practice for your stomach, but a particularly healty one for your wallet.
And that is a must in a day in which the Broghammers in spite of saving on the tickets, already endanger their budget with a three and a half hours trip on the German Railroad...
But Berlin is well worth a Weekend ticket...

Wernigerode

The Broghammers love to wander around. It is their favorite sport.
Not too heavy, not too light.
They walk a lot and look and see and enjoy.
At least it has one of their favorite features: it is cheap and brings a lot for the money you spend.
Besides there is always the opportunity to find eventual bargains.
Enjoy and save...

Wernigerode is a real jewel, a gem few know and it is a real pity.
Because it is such a nice place to visit in an early Spring day.
At least if you like old towns.
They (the Germans) have a lot of original buildings also in the West, but the beauty of the East is that they are still as they were, roads and environment included.
In the DDR they just abandoned the old and built new ugly towns somewhere else.
That is why entering something like Wernigerode you feel like jumping in the past.
What brings you to the present is the huge mass of tourists sitting in the beautiful Cafes, eating ice creams (Italian) and enjoying the sun.

We walked and walked. We went to the Castle and coming back we finished in a "Gross" and beautiful Park.
After the Winter we had, it looked like Nature had died, the sun had gone away and the cold was our friend forever.
But suddenly Spring exploded and everything is so green that I guess a painter would have problems to copy it.
There were a lot of young people playing, small children running and mothers chatting.
The sky was blue and there was a very sweet smell in the air: the smell of flowers.

We finally sat in a fancy Cafe, had a coffee with the Schwarzwald cake, a huge slice, and we were, if not happy, at least very pleased.
If you plan to go to Germany this is a place to be.

Mind the German language

That is exactly what Mrs. Broghammer does every Thursday evening.
May be a few minutes also on Thursday afternoon, just before the lesson, in order to accomplish her duties as a pupil.

Every Thursday a few words more and many new ideas well confused, but, as the teacher says, the important is to speak...
Mrs Broghammer was elected as special trainer and interpreter of her nachbar (neighbor) Lilly.
Lilly is from Beijing, 45 but looks much younger.
She doesn’t speak German and a very little English.
She says her biggest problem is that here in Germany people speak German, also on TV.
I would say that is good, you can learn a lot.
Do you understand?
Mrs. Broghammer is at a point in German language where she doesn’t understand what they say, but she can understand what they are talking about.
Which in principle is all what you need to watch TV.
Sometimes it is even better not to understand the words...

Lilly says she is very envious, she would at least like to understand the commercials.
In order to do so, she shouldn’t be Chinese.
Being European makes everything much more simple (or simpler?).
When they begin, you already know where they will finish, that is how you can understand.
But if you are Chinese you do not understand where they begin and consequently where they will finish.

She is here in Germany to study the behavior of the "Chinese cabbage".
I always thought that if you wanted to study the Chinese vegetables you should have done so in China.
But it looks that the Chinese Cabbage prefers the German landscape.
May be it wants to copy his similars and get some color (the Chinese cabbage is white), or the latest "fashion trends".
Whatever, she is here to study and spends eight hours a day, six days a week for I do not know how many months, and all that for a small plant...

Lilly is very unhappy because soon her scholarship will be finished.
May be she will have to leave her cabbage and go back to Beijing to study the behavior of the German cabbage in China...

The Broghammers spend the weekend in Rügen

Mrs. Broghammer says Greetings aus Rügen.

That is as far as she can go with her German and as far as she can go with a train.
It takes an average of six hours to be in Binz from Quedlinburg.
Most people would consider that wasted times, on the contrary Mrs. Broghammer can transform such a long trip in a very useful time.
She was able to knit two fronts and half a sleeve of a very nice pink cardigan that she finished in Quedlinburg and she is going to wear tonight at the German course, being that the only "social" occasion of her week at home.
Going back to Rügen, the one who has never been there doesn’t know what he lost.
Especially if he is in the category to which the Broghammers belong, I mean the group of people who like nature and beautiful landscape, including the landscape created by men some years ago, the beautiful Jugenstil villas in front of a beautiful white sandy beach.
It is all that white of the houses and the green of the trees and the beach and the sand.
It is a paradise for birds and for humans.
If you go in March you have good chances to have a nice, mild weather and the certainty to have very good pricing in the hotels.
May be that is the main reason why the Broghammers choose that weekend, a full apartment, in front of the sea, for Euro 40 per night.
They saved and they even enjoyed it very much.
In the morning you wake up at the sound of the sea gulls singing, you walk for hours in a deserted beach and you enjoy the sound of the waves...
I still wonder why so few people know about it, may be the ones who do, do not want to share it...

German course

I thought that Italians were particularly good in making chaos out of normality, I believed so till I went to a German course in Germany.
Well, as my husbands likes to point it out "in East Germany".
I do not know the west, I am inclined to think sometimes that Germany is one only state, but I prefer not to say anything about it.
Let’s pretend there are still two Germanys...
Coming back to the language course.
I finally decided it was time to learn this wonderful language and, after many do it yourself trials I decided it was time to invest some money to do it once and for all.
Of course the money invested was not toooo much, following Mrs Broghammer´s style...why spend if you can save?
Every Thursday I spend one and a half hour with other five people of five different nationalities and one teacher, the only one of course German (east German)in the local School and we talk German, or better, we are supposed to talk German.
I wouldn’t say it is boring, I do not see much the results, but, as the teacher says the results will come...
I thought my German was non existent, till I met the Chinese who knows even less than me and I was elected immediately teacher, since I can communicate with her better than the teacher...
The big problem is that we are five different people with five different levels and five different mother tongue.
We have two books, the level one and the level two, but we do not follow any book, we jump from one page to the 120th, then back to number first, and so on.
We jump from present to past tense, from verbs to adjectives and so on.
This looks to me a very peculiar course and I see it as a little bit chaotic, but if enjoying is learning, well, we won’t miss to learn German...

Habemus shower

Yes, after three weeks and Euro 1075 we have a new shower.
It is something so ugly that I think, with all my efforts, I wouldn´t have been able to make a worse one.
Yesterday evening I was on the verge of divorcing my husband.
I was swearing against Germany and all the Germans and their way to work.
In Italy it would have taken one week and Euro 300 for having a nice looking, nice working normal shower.
Which in principle should be a place where you go to wash yourself and stay a few minutes.
It doesn´t really matter if a few drops of water can eventually reach the walls or the floor.
It doesn´t matter to an Italian or to anybody from anywhere from the world.
But IT MATTERS to a German.
Not one only drop should NEVER reach anywhere outside where it should be.
In order to do so, you (the Germans) have to build an artificial wall around it and glue any possible tiny hole.
It took exactly 7 hours to do so and the rest of my life to get used to it.
I got a big lesson yesterday.
First you should never dream.
Dreams are there to be deluded and the dreamer too.
Second, you should always hire somebody you can talk to and more than anything somebody you can understand.
Never presume.
Especially when you are in Germany.
Germans are different and not always predictable.
We had the biggest lesson not so long ago and we should never undervaluate.
You are likely to be the same in BAD and in GOOD...

The Broghammers go to the "Grundbuchamt"

After one full morning and a few kilometers walk around Quedlinburg, Mr. Broghammer could walk home embracing a thick bundle of documents regarding our new home.
Now we know in details how many millimeters is our court wide and, more than anything, we know what to tell our neighbors.
They will come to put brand new and very visible sticks on the border of our property and close to them there will be big signs "No Trespassing" obviously in German, which I still do not know.
No German soul that doesn’t belong to Schmale Strasse 13 will be allowed to put a foot on the up mentioned land, not even dogs, especially not dogs.
And Mr. Broghammer will take care of that...
No more broken bottles or empty firecrackers cartoons, no cigarette, nothing.
That for the sake of the German Broghammer´s land.

It can be quite difficult to understand to a novice, but I will try to write when and where all this began.
Mr. Broghammer, when living in Italy, had the chance to point out how much different Germany was from Italy.
No disposal of bottles and rest of cigarettes on the road, no trespassing of borders from neighbors, everything looked so spiky and span in his country.
When the Broghammers decided to move to Germany "You will see the difference".
The fact was that Mrs Broghammer didn´t see that much difference in Schmale Strasse.
On the contrary, coming soon after the beginning of the year, Schmale Strasse 13 and the garden looked very unkempt and very dirty.
Broken bottles, every kind of garbage on the road, and...the neighbors car in our court!

I didn’t complain too much, I even enjoyed having the visit of some friendly dogs in our land, but for Mr. Broghammer that is really too much.
Finishing to teach lessons to the Italians, he has to begin with his own home land.

The Broghammers are in Germany

Well, finally here we are.
And all in one piece.
A part a few broken dishes and glasses, some scratch on my favorite furniture, some unavoidable distress, we are well established in Quedlinburg.
This is a hell of a beautiful town.
Sorry for the people who never heard about it.
It is a place at least to visit.
The magic is in the night, from my bedroom window on the last floor Schmale Strasse looks like a road in those Grimm’s fairytales.
With all those timber houses and the dim light of few old style, yellow lighted street lamps, the little stones road, the silence and the sky full of stars, I live again in my childhood when I read the Grimms´ tales and imagined a place just like this.
I guess it is from then that I dream to live in a old house and mine is indeed one.
On the door is written it was built in 1592 and I have no doubt of it.
You would think that such an old house would have an unwelcome air, but it is exactly the opposite.
The real moment is the night, when you still can hear the wind blowing and the noise of the people walking in the road.
Schmale means narrow and it is a narrow road, but that is what makes it nice.
There is so much to clean and polish.
I will soon have to make new wax, and that is one of the job I like best.
That smell of turpentine, seeing the pieces of wax melting, spreading it all over, windows, floors, furniture, even brass and silver.
I love the smell and the shining of everything.
In the small things you get sometimes (very often) your satisfaction and your happiness.
The thought you did a good job and your house looks exactly the way you like.
I was born in Italy, but I feel like my childhood was here, among these roads and looking out of these windows.
I love to think that somewhere there is a prince or a princess or some wild animal or a witch.
Behind these huge and heavy doors you could hide anything...