Scoutmaster trip to Eurpoe 2007

Friday, September 7, 2007

This morning, I took the train to the Oslo Airport to catch a flight to Gothenburg, Sweden. My flight was in a turboprop aircraft flown by a company called Wideroes. They are a small Swedish airline associated with SAS. The flight only took about an hour. After landing at the airport in Gothenburg, I took a bus to the central train station to catch another train to Helsingborg where Niclas, my former foreign exchange student lives with his wife, Susanne and their three children, Ella, nine, Eric, almost eight, and Ida, four. Niclas’ parents, Sture and Gunbritt also live in Helsingborg. The train ride from Gothenburg to Helsingborg took two and half hours, and I arrived in Helsingborg, around 3:30 p.m.. Susanne and Ida came to meet me and give me a ride back to their home for the weekend.

Niclas pointed out that I probably should have booked a flight to Copenhagen, but since I am flying out of Gothenburg at the end of my visit here, I did not really think about Copenhagen. The last time I visited Niclas was for his wedding eleven years ago, and at the time I drove a rented car from Germany through Denmark, and took a ferry from Helsingor, Denmark (Hamlet’s Castle) to Helsingborg, Sweden. Now there is a new bridge-tunnel from Denmark to Sweden.

Niclas was our foreign exchange student in 1985; he attended Woodson High School as a 11th grader, and he was an excellent student. Two years ago, Niclas and his family visited me in America, and we had a great time seeing the sights. We got to see the new baby Panda at the National Zoo, the Air and Space Museum at Dulles, the Insect Petting Zoo at the Smithsonian, and lot’s of other places.

Niclas and his family own a large, modern home just few miles from the center of town. I’d say that they are a typical suburban family, “typical” in the sense of an American suburban model. Ella is taking horseback riding lessons; both Ella and Ida swim, and Eric plays football (soccer). Niclas works for a large packaging company, Tetra Pak, and Susanne is a doctor just about finished with her Ear, Nose and Throat specialty training. Both Niclas and Susanne commute an hour or so each way to work. Ella and Eric walk to school five minutes from their house, and Ida is dropped off at preschool each day. Niclas and Susanne are also fortunate to have grandpa and grandma, Sture and Gunbritt, close by. When either has to travel for work, or attend events, the grandparents watch the children. Now tell me, doesn’t this sound like a typical suburban American family? But, let me assure you, they are real Swedes.

Niclas and Susanne’s home is lovely, and has some special touches. A few years ago, they remodeled and nearly doubled the size of the house. During the process, they installed a tile stove in their dining room. Tile stoves have been used for heating houses (and castles) for centuries. Their stove is a white glazed tile cylinder about two feet in diameter and about seven feet tall in one corner of the room. The stove burns wood, and the tiles hold the heat a long time.

In their kitchen, which is very modern, and has all the electrical appliances like a double door refrigerator-freezer, dishwasher, and electric range and oven. Any American would feel very comfortable in their kitchen. The special touch is a cast-iron cook stove under the exhaust hood that surrounds the cooking areas. The cook stove is also heated with wood, and Niclas says it can boil water as fast as the highest setting on his electric range. The house also boasts a large back yard and a white picket fence in the front, and like most houses in Sweden, the walls are constructed with brick and the roof is tiled.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

We spent the day seeing the sights of Lund, a college town near Helsingborg. Both Niclas and Susanne did their undergraduate work at the University in Lund. We visited the cathedral and a Swedish folk culture museum. The cathedral has a 900-year history. Inside a 400-year-old astronomical clock has carved religious figures that we got to see operate at noon. A giant tried to tear the building down by shaking one of the supporting columns according to legend. The giant’s name was Finn, and the story is that he shook some stones loose, but a shaft of light came through the window and turned him to stone as he clutched one of the columns. A stone sculpture of Finn with his arms and legs wrapped around a stone column can be seen in the basement of the cathedral.

The Swedish folk culture museum has a park-like setting with many buildings that house a variety of displays. Some of the displays show Swedish farm life over the past few hundred years, and others show how Swedish fishing has progressed. There are several areas on the grounds with toys for children to play with. Eric mastered wooden stilts, and both children enjoyed a wooden go-cart that Susanne and Niclas pushed around. The serious exhibits about Viking and middle age cultures were well done. The most fun came in one building where we tried on costumes and dressed like Trolls.

Ella had horseback riding lessons to attend. We picked her up at the stables on the way home. Then in the evening we went to Sture and Gunbritt’s house for a fine dinner and conversation. Sture and I have several things in common. Both of us were in the military. Sture flew helicopters for the Swedish Army, and his family served as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Israel back in the 1970’s. Like me, Sture also had heart bypass surgery a few years ago.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Today was really special as Niclas, Susanne, Eric, Ida and I took a small ferry to an island called Ven where Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, had his estate and observatories. The day was sunny and clear. We could see the coast of Denmark and the new bridge, and we could even see Hamlet’s castle in Helsingor. On the island, we rented bicycles to cycled around, and we visited the Tycho Brahe museum, housed in a former church. We had an invigorating ride cycling around the island. Niclas’ bike had a small trailer with a seat for Ida, and room for the pack with our lunch food. We had a picnic lunch on a rocky shore, and Niclas and the children changed into bathing suits to actually go into the very cold ocean for just a few minutes. It really was too cold to swim, but Swedish people can tolerate the cold better than other nationalities, I guess.

Tycho Brahe was an interesting character, and an important figure in the history of astronomy. He was a Danish nobleman, by birth, and during his lifetime, Denmark ruled Sweden. He named his estate on Ven, Uraniborg. We visited his underground observatories where he and his assistants measured the positions of planets and other heavenly objects with the most accurate sextants of their time. The data he gathered actually were the basis for other astronomers to determine the correct model of the solar system. Tycho Brahe never believed that the Sun was the center of the solar system; he still clung to the old Aristotelian view of the heavens with the Earth in the center. A German, Johann Kepler, who was one of Brahe’s assistants, used the data to correctly describe the elliptical orbit of the planets mathematically. Tycho Brahe also made observations of a supernova and comets; however, although he made the most accurate observations and measurements, he often reached the wrong conclusion about what the data meant.

In the late afternoon, when we got home, Susanne took Ella and Ida for their swim lessons and practice while Niclas and Eric did some yard and house work. Ella actually swims competitively. Sture and Gunbritt came over for dinner. All in all, it has been a wonderful visit for me, and a delight to see how the children have grown. Like all Swedes, the children are learning English in school, and the next time I see them, they will probably be fluent.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Got up around 5:30 a.m. and I had breakfast with Niclas and Susanne. The children were not up when Niclas and I left the house. Niclas dropped me off at the Helsingborg train station in time to catch the 6:57 a.m., train to Gothenburg’s central station where I caught the bus back to the airport. I had plenty of time before my plane left. Using my frequent flyer miles again, I boarded a KLM flight to Berlin, with an intermediate stop in Amsterdam.

I arrived at Tegel Airport in Berlin around 4:30 p.m. and got directions to the Circus Hostel. I took a bus from the airport to the U-bahn station, and got to the hostel around 6:00 p.m. The thing about travel is that there is a lot of transportation involved in getting from place to place. At the hostel, I checked into a mixed dorm room with two women and four men. A couple from England, near Manchester, two Irish fellows, a fellow from France, and a young woman from San Francisco shared the dorm with me. The group was amazingly well educated. The two Irish fellows had recently completed advanced degrees in Law and Geology respectively, the English fellow had just completed medical school, and the woman from San Francisco was completing a doctorate in Biochemistry. All of my dorm mates were touring Europe before returning home to start their careers. The Europeans in the dorm knew as much about American politics and institutions as the two Americans, the woman from San Francisco and me. We talked for hours, and I have to admit that this kind of interaction is one of the reasons I enjoy staying at hostels.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

The last time I was in Berlin, 1999, the city was under construction. People used to say that the city’s bird was the construction crane. In fact, a lot of the things that I would have liked to visit were closed for renovation, and I decided that I would return to the city after at least five years. Berlin is not longer a city of construction cranes visible in every direction, and many new places are open to visitors. Another reason for my coming back to Berlin is my interest in Jewish history, and Berlin and Germany, were important centers for Judaism during the middle ages and into the 20th century. The towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were centers of Jewish learning and scholarship attracting people from all over Europe to study with famous scholars.

Berlin has the largest and best Holocaust memorial in the world, after Yad Vashem in Israel. It did not exist when I was last in Berlin; in fact, discussions and planning for the memorial took seventeen years. In addition to the Holocaust Memorial, other landmark sites like the New Synagogue and the Jewish Museum intrigue me. A dilemma, for me, remains the unanswered question of why does anti-Semitism exists. I can understand religious intolerance, but anti-Semitism, is not that simply explained. The first records of Europeans systematically killing Jews are in texts that date back to 1096, when, during the first crusade, Jews were slaughtered en-route to the Holy Lands. Persecuting Jews in Europe was both pervasive and continuous in the centuries that followed, culminating in the Holocaust. Even today, we read of anti-Semitism in many European countries.

It’s probably well understood that a major reason for places like the Holocaust memorial is so humanity will not forget what happened, and humanity will never let it happen again. However, while humanity has probably not forgotten, it has certainly not been able to prevent Holocaust-like genocide from recurring again and again. So the lesson is not learned, and the inhumanity continues.

From a Jewish perspective, there’s another reason for Holocaust memorials. In the Jewish tradition, it is important to remember ancestors. Customarily, this is a family responsibility, but during the Holocaust, families and entire communities were exterminated. So who is left to remember? Jews view this responsibility as a collective one, and the major mission of the Holocaust memorials is to archive the names and stories of the people who were murdered, that is, to remember the individual people.

In the past twenty years, Jews have returned to Germany in large numbers. The Jewish population is more than a hundred thousand people, and there are about ten thousand Jews living in Berlin. Many are Russian immigrants. So I think their influence is being felt again, and the new museums, memorials, and research are probably as a result of their presence as much as anything.

Philip Sternberg
Scoutmaster, Troop 1131