Profound Moments from Visiting Countries for the First Time

 

The sky at 1am in Bodo, Norway.

On this trip I traveled to  or through eight countries. Three are my favorite destinations in the world: France, Germany and Italy. Two I just passed through: Turkey and Sweden. Three I visited for the first time: Denmark, Norway and the Vatican. In each of the countries I was in for the first time, I had an experience that only being in that place could give me. 

In Bodo, Norway, I was above the Arctic Circle.  At 1am, when the sun is due north in the northern hemisphere during Daylight Savings Time, I was walking around Bodo. I took the picture above of the cloudy sky with the sun shining in from due north.  I have known this to be true since I first understood Earth's orbit, but seeing it made me irrationally happy.  The sun really was visible due north!  

In Denmark my friend Cliff and I visited Panzer Museum East southwest of Copenhagen.  On the way to Denmark a few days before, we visited Deutsches PanzerMuseum north of Hannover.  That museum, like most military museum, celebrates the weapons of that country. The museum in Denmark does not. The collection of hundreds of tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, missiles, aircraft, cannon, medical equipment, engines, radar systems and other equipment is Soviet-made. 

The museum is designed to be a warning: If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe, these vehicles would have been attacking our country. In a chilling update of the collection, the vehicles that Putin's Russia is using to invade Ukraine are tagged in the display. Nowhere in the museum is any vehicle or equipment ever used by the Army of Denmark.

Also in Denmark, I learned about very different burial practices common in both Denmark and Germany.  Headstones and burial plots are rented for 25 or 50 years.  Then someone gets the space.  I wrote about that here.

The third country I visited was the Vatican.  Like Monaco, San Marino, Andorra, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it is a city state, a member of the United Nations with its own government, but the size of a city.  Over the past fifteen hundred years the Vatican has had vastly different levels of power. Its current status as an independent state was granted by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1931.  

Before visiting the Vatican, I read a lot about the Catholic Church in Germany. Before and during the trip I was The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler  by David I. Kertzer.  The book is based on Vatican archives opened in 2020 that detail long-hidden history of Pope XII with Hitler and Mussolini.  

I took a train to the Vatican and rode a bike to  St. Peters Square. I walked into the vast plaza and was overwhelmed with sadness.  'To keep this you let all the Jews die,' was what I thought as I walked looking up at the statues and the fountain. Everything about the place screamed temporal power. This was a place of riches and political influence.  

I left and went back to Rome, which was another revelation for me. No amount of reading or maps prepared me for how small the area was that encompassed the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, the Capital, markets, baths, temples, circuses, all in a relatively small space.  

Travel to a new place is its own reward.  

 

Ukrainian Family in a German Monastery

 

Sergey, Maria and I at a monastery guesthouse 

When Cliff and I returned to Darmstadt from Denmark we met a family of refugees from Ukraine who are staying in a guesthouse at the monastery.  Sergey and Maria and their seven children between six months and thirteen years old are living in a house at the edge of the property. 

While we drank coffee together on the patio, the seven kids popped in and out of the house.  The oldest girl brought the baby out to see mom, then the oldest boy scooped the baby up and disappeared into the house.  

Sergey is Ukrainian, from Kyiv. Maria is Russian, from Moscow. Sergey speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Maria speaks Russian, English, and Ukrainian. They marked their 15th wedding anniversary on March 31st with their whole family in a car driving toward the border to seek asylum in the west.  Maria and Sergey lived in Sevastopol in Crimea, so they have been in an area of Russian occupation since 2014.  

When the Russians invaded, the fighting was not near their home, but missiles fired from Russian ships blasted over their city.  Maria talked about trying to tell the kids it would be okay, but after a month, they decided to leave. After a long journey, they made it to Darmstadt and the Land of Kanaan monastery.

Several times over the past five years, I have stayed in the guesthouse where Sergey and Maria and their family are now staying.  It was built for several men, usually visiting volunteers. There are several small rooms, a kitchen and a common room and two bathrooms with showers.  It was always so quiet. It was funny and delightful to see kids zooming in and out, running and riding bikes.

I am very glad to see another family safe from the war Russia inflicted on Ukraine and the democratic world.

A Thousand-Year-Old Church in Denmark and What I Learned about Burial

 

Just after we crested a small hill on a drive in Denmark, this beautiful Church was 500 meters ahead. My friend Cliff and I stopped to take a picture of what turned out to be a thousand-year-old Church of a type very common in Denmark. It is called Sorbymargle Kirke.  

Just after we stopped, the caretaker, Carina Rasmussen, drove up and offered to let us see the inside of the Church.  The design, long and narrow, is replicated across the country in Church large and small.  

There were very old drawings on the wall.  

But the real revelation was the graveyard.  I had seen another Church the day before with an immaculate garden cemetery.  This one is lovely.

Do you see what's missing?  I didn't. But it was not until we visited another Church where I saw old headstones in what could have been a granite recycling bin that I got the story on what's missing--old headstones.  In America, graveyards are the biggest problem faced by people who design roads and bridges and housing projects. We bury people in durable caskets. People here are buried in biodegradable caskets. The plot is a 25 or 50 year rental. By then, the current occupant is part of the soil and someone else moves in.  

The headstones get recycled as stone.  

The graveyards stay small and clean. there are no cracked, faded, broken 300-year-old headstones.  

One of the wonderful things about travel is seeing culture in a way you never could except on the ground in the place you are visiting.  And in this case, getting the answer to a question I never knew to ask.

Danish Ferry Crewman Who Worked in Thule Greenland and Served with Elite British Regiment

 

On Wednesday, I waited on the dock in Elsinor, Denmark, to board a ferry to Sweden.  A member of the crew walked up and asked if I was just waiting or boarding the ferry that was leaving in two minutes.  I said I was waiting for the next one to meet up with my friend who was a foot passenger.  I told him I was going to Sweden just to ride my bike. 

We started talking about travel. Then about the military. He was in the Danish Army in the 90s and served with the elite British Army cavalry reconnaissance unit known as the Life Guards.  He had seen my armor tattoo and showed me the Life Guards tattoo on his shoulder.

Then he said he worked for a year on the American Air Base in Thule, Greenland. He still had the THULE identification tag on his key ring.  He was there between 2008 and 2009, about the time I left for Iraq. We made a couple of jokes about differences in climate between the two bases.  I told him I have an uncle who was assigned to Thule in 1972, around the same time I first enlisted. Martin said with a huge smile, "I wasn't even a dirty thought back then!"   

Martin said his job on the ferry didn't pay much, but he really liked his co-workers and the work. I told him that was my goal in work, to be with great co-workers and do a job I liked.  We talked about how different travel is now compared to before the 9-11 attacks. But for both of us travel is worth whatever hassles come with it.  We both prefer trains, ships and cars to flying.  

After we talked, Martin continued went to work loading the ferry. I was delighted to find it was the ferry "Hamlet" within sight of Elsinor Castle.  

Laundromats Have Tourists Again!

 

Amy, Lee, Jane and John

American tourists are back in laundromats in Europe

Five years ago, I started making trips across Europe and Israel with just a backpack. Carrying just a few pieces of clothing has many advantages, but it also meant weekly trips to laundromats.  I like doing laundry, but the laundromats turned out to be much more fun than I expected. 

Other tourists from all over the world use laundromats in big cities so I met some very interesting people while resupplying myself with clean clothes.  But COVID changed laundromats just as it changed so many other things.  This current trip I am on is my fifth trip to Europe since July of last year.  

Until last week, I did not see any tourists in laundromats from France to Poland. At the beginning of this trip, I washed clothes in Rome in an empty laundromat.  But last Thursday, I went to a laundromat near the Pantheon and met three sisters traveling together in France. Actually, there are four sisters, one was off doing something else.  

Amy, Lee and Jane are currently living in Chicago, DC and Detroit.  We talked for a while about where they had already been--the Louvre, Versailles, and many other Paris destinations. The next day they were going on a tour of the Normandy coast.  They have another week in Paris then back to America.  

A few minutes before the laundry was dry, Jane's husband John joined us.  He saw my armor tattoo. He had an uncle who was a tank commander in World War II.  

Next week I am staying in a monastic guest house which has its own washer-dryer so I won't need a laundromat.  

In the same laundromat in which I met Amy, Lee and Jane, I met a couple from Australia and a bike racer from California. That was in 2017. The story is here.   

My favorite laundromat story was from 2019 in Jerusalem. That is here. 

Matthew Adamson on Academic Career Paths and the Interplay of Maps and Reality

 

At a conference on the history of science and diplomacy in Paris, Matthew Adamson talked about the history of uranium exploration and mining in the nuclear age. He had a mercator map of the world with all known uranium deposits as part his presentation.  

At a break, we had a chance to talk about the interplay between resource maps and the people who use them.  As the maps become more detailed and more reliable, they exert influence on those who use them.  When I worked for a global chemical company, the map of actual and potential raw material became a big part of business growth meetings.  Each potential source of uranium can be a source of peaceful power or weapons.  Adamson's map has business, regulatory and threat dimensions. 

At lunch we talked about he came to be Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College's campus in Budapest, Hungary, as well as External Researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest advising on the history and institutional context of use of radioisotopes.

Adamson studied French and French literature at James Madison University, graduating in 1996, then began a PhD program at Indiana University in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He completed the program in 2005. But in 2001 he had moved to France as part of his doctoral studies and met his future wife, who was from Budapest.  

She got a job in Budapest in 2005. Matthew followed and found a post at an McDaniel College Budapest and has been there ever since.  

I hope to see Matthew at a future conference, or possibly if my future travels take me through Budapest. 

The conference was organized by the Science History Institute at La Maison de la Chimie.

Deutsche Panzer Museum--World War II Tanks

Panzer I, the little tank with no cannon and two machine guns that was the majority of the tanks used in the invasion of Poland and France.

On Saturday, June 18, after we left the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, I saw a sign for the Deutsche PanzerMuseum. We stopped and tour the large facility for a couple of hours.  The museum has tanks from World War I to the recent years.  The tanks on display are painted and restored and in very good condition. There are so many tanks on display I decided to break them up into categories. This post is World War II main battle tanks.  

The museum did not have a Panzer II, but they had a turret. The Panzer II has the same chassis used later on the Marder self-propelled gun. 

The Panzer II has a 20mm cannon and a machine gun in the turret.

The Panzer 38(t) was developed in 1935. It has a 37mm gun, like the Panzer  II. It was a very reliable tank used early in the war.

Panzer III with a 50mm main gun.

Panzer IV, with a 75mm gun, the main tank of the Wehrmacht on every front from the beginning of the war to the end.

Panzer V, "Panther" with a long-barrel 75mm gun.

Used from 1942 to the end of the war on all fronts.

The Panzer VI "Tiger" tank is the most famous German tank of World War II. It was used in service from 1942 to the end of the war. It was armed with an 88mm gun and had heavy armor. It had reliability problems early. Production ended in 1944 in favor of the Tiger II "King Tiger".

 

The Tiger II "King Tiger" was a larger more heavily armored version of the Tiger I produced only in the last year year of the war in limited numbers.