Tourgasm with Pecos, part III: Głuchołazy (Bad Ziegenhals)

On May 30, 1928, my grandfather, Heinz Grüttner, was born in a small town of about 8,000 on the German-Czech border. His mother was an 18-year-old girl named Maria (nee Grundei) who, about nine months earlier, had started a relationship with a man named Franz Grüttner. Together, the three of them started a life together in the town, called Bad Ziegenhals.
Much like Germany itself, this small town had seen its ups and downs. At the time, it was the end of the “Golden Era” for the Weimar Republic, Germany’s post-WWI attempt to establish a free and liberal democracy. Civil conflict and inflation were rising. And this town was also in a trough.
Like the boom towns of Eureka, California, and Skagway, Alaska, Bad Ziegenhals was built up thanks to gold. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this green valley town near the foothills of the Giant and Jizera mountains became the hotspot for those trying to strike it rich. For a short period, the town ebbed in popularity and commerce. Gold was limited, though, and the attention paid to this town after other, neighboring towns were found to be closer to the action ceased.

During the 19th centuries and the advent of better roads and trains, the rich in Europe started to travel. Tourism at the time was devoted to spa resort towns where the healing powers of the naturally occurring hot springs acted as the snake oil of the time, curing all that ailed you.

Bad Ziegenhals’ locals picked up on this notion and exploited their own city’s hot springs to wealthy foreign travelers, once again building the city up to its gold rush popularity.

Money and visitors flowed in and it seemed this town could once again be put on maps. However, World War I and the ensuing recession halted those dreams and put this boom-and-bust town into an accustomed, disheartening gloom.

When Heinz was little and growing up in this town, he did the things normal kids did. He went to school, played outside, and occasionally griped about going to church. During the winters, when the snow on the nearby mountains looked too tempting to pass up, he skipped school with his brother and friends, waxed down his skis, and trudged up the desolate mountain, probably getting a good four or five runs in before dinner. During the summer of his childhood, he’d play soccer near the high wall that separated Germany from Czechoslovakia, periodically kicking the ball over the wall by accident and hoping that the Czech kids would toss it back. When he was older, he worked on a farm in the mountains, having to haul fresh milk and produce down into his town. He probably got into a fight, kissed a couple girls, and had a pretty normal life.
There was another side to Heinz’s life, though. His first memories of moving pictures most likely surrounded the ascent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933. This was big news not only in this fortified Prussian frontier town where German Army border guards were most likely a common sight, but around the world, where the furor for Der Führer was just starting to grow.

In the mid- to late-1930s, when Heinz was in his formative years, the growing strength of the German Army heartened many proud Germans in this town, as this meant security from foreign invaders. He probably felt that. No more worrying about the nearby Czech and Polish contingents.

There’s also no doubt that the antagonizing older children in the town bullied younger kids like Heinz if they weren’t “cool” and down with the increasingly militaristic and anti-Semitic doctrine the Hitler Youth organization was putting out. Whether he was wrapped up in the fanciful idea of the Aryan superman or whether he was drafted into it, my grandfather became aligned with the Hitler Youth doctrine around the same time the war started. He was probably taught weapons training, survival strategies, and basic assault routines. He was probably also roughed up by older boys who believed tormenting the younger kids would either harden them or weed them out.

Eventually, around the time the American and Russian cross hairs on Hitler’s regime were just starting to come into focus, he was promoted to the level of a real soldier and was tasked with experimenting with a new type of airplane called a glider. With a flight pin and a slap on the back, this young 16-year-old kid from a small town on the German-Czech border was now a glider pilot.

Practice he did. But whether he flew any actual missions before the end of the war, I don’t know. I do know that after the war ended and the Germans were expelled from their homes by the invading Russian Army, he gave up his soldier status and moved west, meeting my Oma several years later at the Fliegerhorst Kaserne in Hanau, Germany – only about one hour away from Wiesbaden.
Today, Bad Ziegenhals (which translates into Bath Goat Neck) is called Głuchołazy. Like Wrocław there are no German speakers left. There are only Poles. One of the first stops in the town was the cemetery. Although I don’t know for how many generations my family had been living there (was my great-great-great-great-great grandfather a gold miner?), I was hoping to find a headstone or some sort of marker with the name Grüttner or Grundei. But there were only Polish graves from the 1940s on.

As this town served no significant purpose during the war, many old buildings still remain – derelict today only because of abandonment and poverty.
The church my Opa went to is still there, I’m told by his sister, Anneliesa, who now lives in Mülheim a.d. Ruhr, about two and a half hours north of here. As is the school and the building they grew up in. In fact, other than the damage caused by 50 years of communist neglect, things are probably the same. Anneliesa, who is younger by about four years, said she has a school friend who still (or again?) lives in the town. Although we attempted to call this friend to see if she tell us more about the lives of the little Grüttner kids, she wasn’t available. Perhaps next time.

Tourgasm with Pecos, part II: Wroclaw (Breslau)

There’s a strange magnetic force that exists in Poland. Any unsuspecting male who enters the country is almost immediately overcome by a feeling that can only be described as “chafing.” Some people completely ignore the force while others chalk it up to a hangover from cheap Polish vodka. But, being that that majority of my family can trace its roots back to Polish soil, I knew different. I had been to Poland before several times and had felt the undeniably hale power of The Force – the power to compel Polish males to take their shirts off in public.

It’s a little known fact that Polish men in Poland are only rarely seen with shirts on. And, unluckily for those men and women who’d prefer to see a nice, trim man shirtless, weight seems to be directly proportional to weakness against The Force.

Yes, in cars, on the street, in a house, or on farm equipment, Polish men love taking their shirts off. Especially fat men. We noticed this not too long after entering the country after leaving the German city of Dresden. It was then Kate threw up a little in her mouth.
Our destination that day was Wroclaw, a mid-sized city (650,000) in southern Poland that had been under the jurisdiction of the Germans (who actually wear shirts thank you very much) since 1262. This leg of the trip was about four hours and almost solely based on logistics, as there wasn’t much we really wanted to see here. It was simply halfway between Dresden and Krakow, two historic cities that were high on our “to-see-before-we-leave-Europe” list.

But what the city lacked in reputation, it made up for in charm. And little gnome-like statues, which were everywhere, yet weren't mentioned in anything we read.When we drove in, we’d noticed that the city was abuzz with commerce, especially the clothing stores (where the women were probably looking for shirts for their husbands who inexplicably keep “losing” them).

After checking into our hotel – which was an insane room, with two separate and cavernous bedrooms, three beds, and a complete living room set – we started the 10-minute walk down the quaint commercial street to the main town square.

Once over a small bridge and officially in the pedestrian-only old town, we stopped by a “You-are-here” map to get bearings and headed in. After stopping at what is perhaps the tallest church I’ve ever seen, we ambled closer to the square, which is the second largest in Poland, and started hearing street music. Accordions, guitars, brass instruments, you name it, somewhere in the square it was being played. Here's the bottom half of the tall church.Outdoor cafes and bars were overstuffed with locals drinking one of several varieties of very smooth Polish beer with names like ZWYCSZIESCZSY and DWZDYSACSDZ. It was about 6 p.m. and still very sunny and warm, but no one was eating. Almost everyone at every table (and there were A LOT of tables) was drinking beer.

In any normal situation, without seeing or smelling food, I probably could have kept walking around this cobble-stony square for hours. But the favorable exchange rate to Polish Zlotys and the idea of freshly made pierogis were weighing heavy on my brain, like a fat shirtless Pole.

After finding a couple seats, fumbling through a Polish menu to find the word pierogi, and gulping down some beer, we began to relax and think about how perfect this place seemed. With the ambient foreign chatter and the radiant later-afternoon light bouncing off the beautiful buildings in the square, I began to wonder about why this city had been overlooked by guidebooks.The town square itself was diverse, with architectural styles representing Prussian influences (tall, angular buildings with red slate roofs), gothic influences, and Austrian influences (large pastel buildings trimmed with white) no doubt enforced by Habsburg rule.

Most of these buildings, though, had been restored. About two-thirds of the city was destroyed during the war in what’s now called the Battle of Breslau (the much more pronounceable German name for the city).
Before the war, the city was a mélange of German, Jewish, and Polish culture, language, and art. In the late 1930s, Breslau rallied behind Hitler, though, offering him honorary citizenship and carrying out heinous actions in his name against Poles and Jews living there. This included burning shops, destroying schools, and arresting innocent citizens for such things as using the Polish language in public. Today it’s called ethnic cleansing.

In 1945, the Soviet Red Army’s stopover on their way to Berlin restored some order, but only through absolute domination. The Soviets held innocent civilians hostage, mass raped female Germans, and killed simple laborers who were thought potentially capable of forming a militia. Just before the war ended, in the dead of winter, restrictions eased and allowed for the untimely release of ill-prepared imprisoned civilians. About 18,000 people, mostly children and babies, froze. The remaining Germans were expelled.
In their place were resettled Poles from central Poland and former areas of their country in the east that were annexed by the Soviet Union.

Today, no one speaks German. The last German school was closed in 1963 and all the German names used for over 800 years have changed.

One of those names is Dominsel (Cathedral Island), now called Ostrów Tumski in Polish, where we went after dinner. This five-minute walk from the town square is the oldest part of the city, where the original fortification against invading tribes was built, but it’s really kind of boring, dirty, and forgotten. Aside from a large cathedral, we didn’t find much there. So we headed back.
It’s then that I realized that, yes, the restored town square was gorgeous; the live music, flowing beer, and cheap pierogis were wonderful; and the ubiquitous fat shirtless men were funny in an “ew gross” kind of way, but it didn’t seem real. The “real” Poland consists of poor Catholic families living in boring, dirty, and forgotten places like the old Ostrów Tumski island. The hyped up and commercialized town square, while nice, is a façade of concentrated wealth. It was charming, to be sure, but it wasn’t real. And I’m glad I got that insight.
Back at our chasmal hotel cave, we rested peacefully for the night and woke up ready to continue our adventure.The next day’s journey would involve snaking through backwoods roads and squinting at foreign maps on our way to a boring, dirty, and forgotten Polish-Czech border town called Glucholazy. Up until 60 years ago it was a German town called Bad Ziegenhals. This is where my Opa grew up. And this was our next stop.

Tourgasm with Pecos, part I: Dresden

Sheer delight is not a phrase most people use when describing the feeling they get when they enter a hostel room. Hostel rooms are pretty much known throughout this planet (and that other potentially habitable earth-like planet they just found 5 billion light years away) as low-budget smell caves where 16 drunk college-aged Americans yelling “OH YEAH! SPRING BREAK! HOP ON BOARD THE DRUNK TRAIN! WOOOWOOOO!!” cram into a room to “sleep.”

On occasion, though, some hostel rooms are delightful. Clean. Functional. Free of college-aged nocturnal beasts (who are found commonly throughout the major metropolitan areas of Europe).

The hostel room we stayed at in Dresden was just that. And it was apparently a harbinger for other delightful hostel rooms. Here you can see why.

Without any prior notice, Kate and I entered our room to find a car with a bed in it. A real car. And a real mattress. The car was a Trabant, the most common vehicle in the former East Germany, known for being compact, fast, durable, and smoky (thanks to the poor performance of its poorly made two-stroke engine). And although we didn’t sleep in it because there were two beds in the loft above, the bed was comfortable, allowing Pecos and me to nap for a couple minutes early in the evening.

After coming down from the silliness high of HAVING A FLIPPING CAR IN THE ROOM, we realized we had just spent five hours starting this tour of Eastern Germany and Poland, so we might as well go out there and have fun.
Our hostel was in the Neustadt (new city), the less-touristy region north of the Elbe River known for NOT being the Altstadt (old city). It’s here where the locals go to shop, eat, drink, drink, and drink some more. There are 50 bars per square kilometer, almost ensuring something for everyone’s taste. Although it’s call the Neustadt, it’s still very old, with cobblestone streets and a varied array of architectural styles (mostly because the city was so heavily bombed in World War II).

So, unaware of all this, Kate and I went out into the city at night ostensibly to eat Döner kebabs and walk around. We found lots of young, urban, hip, perhaps a little punky people drinking on the street, watching the crowds go by, smoking, dancing, and eating at outdoor cafes. It was a Wednesday night, but it felt like a Saturday.
But, as we’re already old bags whose idea of a wild night is to have a glass of wine when we sit on our sofa watching Lost, we merely ate our kebabs and called it a night.

The next morning, we ventured down the shop-lined main street (Hauptstrasse), which was in the middle of hosting a pretty tame but good natured Fruehlings Fest (spring fest). This meant there were tons of small booths selling local wares, baked goods, sausage, and commercial commodities such as yummy processed fish sandwiches. Yay for processed fish! Then, on past a shiny statue of August the somebody we went, crossing over the Elbe River on the Augustbrücke and into the famed Altstadt.

Dresden’s Altstadt is famous. Maybe not to you and me, but once upon a time (between 1660 and the 1820s) it was one of the most touristed destinations in Europe thanks to its having a lasting spot on the “hot list” for European travelers’ itineraries then. Rich tourists then, particularly young British upperclassmen, usually took year-long educational rites of passage where they’d travel the continent learning about culture, aristocracy, fashion, and on very special occasions, schnapps.

To those of us who lived most of our lives after the two world wars, Dresden is known as one of the most horribly and controversially bombed cities during the war.

Here’s a pic I found of the main church in Dresden (the Frauenkirche) after the war.

And here it is today (with me in front, of course).

Here are some other ruins.

And here are some reconstructed buildings.

As you can see, the city has been restored to prewar (i.e., mostly Baroque) splendor and is beautiful. Kate and I compared it both to Prague (incontestably gorgeous) and Vienna (our favorite city) while there. Unfortunately for Dresden, the entire city smelled like pickles. Seriously. Pickles.

Other than the famous Frauenkirche, we walked around two other important and impressive sights. The first was the royal castle, once home to August the somebody (Strong, I think…King of Poland). Due to repeated additions, the castle has integrated elements of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classicist styles and was semi-fun.

The second was the Zwinger Palace, across the road from the castle, which has been converted to a center for the royal art collections and a place to hold festivals. It even had a moat and a golden-crown-topped gate! (This is the first image, btw).

Moat aside and HUGE CROWN aside, we both thought it was incredibly impressive, with a sandy walking area in the center and carved paths of well maintained green grass on the outside. From ground level, the paths looked snaky and weird. But from above, the paths formed intricate and beautiful designs.

Well, by that time, Pecos was hot, I was going blind from forgetting my sunglasses in the car, and Kate was eager to get on the road to start our three-hour border-crossing transit to our next destination, the completely unpronounceable Wrocław, Poland.

For about 500 years it was German territory and they called it Breslau. After WWII, though, the Slav beneficiaries – who were never too keen on simple words – were unaware that the simpler the name of a city is for foreigners to say, the more likely it is to get tourists (Paris, London, etc. vs. Tlaquepaque, Shijiazhuang). So, they changed it to Wrocław (complete with the funny looking L). This is pronounced VROT-swof and that city will be part II.

Life without Schlumpy

The train of life trudges on here. After our raucous bout with a stinky homeless varmint named Schlumpy, things have been pretty tame ‘round these parts.

After work on Friday, Kate and I cooked up some tasty Spanish food (paellas, empanadas, flan, etc.) and invited some friends over to play games. Our goal was to get our unaware guests tanked on vino and cervesa and then whup their asses in board games. Unfortunately, although I thought the idea we had concocted was pretty sound, our playing abilities that night started out dismally, with both Kate and I poorly representing our strategic thinking skills in the first game of the night, the Settlers of Cataan.

The flan and coffee after the loss must have reenergized our abilities somehow, because Kate and I had the best showing in the history of the game of Trivial Pursuit later on, with us collecting all the pie pieces and landing in the center before anyone else had even rolled the dice. Yes, it’s true. We are gods. GODS of Trivia! Thou Shalt Fear Our Random Knowledge!!! The Capital of North Dakota is BISMARK! The Actress Known for Her Ability to Master Almost Any Accent is Merryl Streep!

On Saturday, Kate had a Girl’s Night at a friends’ place where they tried Oprah’s new martini recipe and talked about shopping while I partook in a Man’s Night consisting of drinking massive amounts of beer, vociferously critiquing the local women, and eating pizza.

Sunday had us at Linda and Jay’s for a relaxing evening of Asian stir-fry and a complicated French board game called “Metro.”

Right now we’re excited about our upcoming trip to Poland. Here’s a picture of Pecos to tide you over until we’re back.

Homeward Bound - Schlumpy Style

After a relatively peaceful night broken only by intermittant Pecos barks whenever a whiff of Schlumpy wafted in the room, I woke Schlumpy up to take him to the pound. Although I didn't notice it at the time, my ride to the pound was much quicker than normal due to the lack of cars on the road.

Only later, when Schlumpy and I actually arrived at the pound to find it closed, did we both realize it was a German holiday and that everything is closed today. I was disappointed because I wanted him to be reunited with his owner, like today, and the pound seemed like the vehicle that would facilitate the reunion. I was also a bit disappointed because I had already cleaned up three pee puddles in the hallway and I could think of better ways to spend my day.

Motivated by a selfish desire to get rid of the stinky beast, we made up a "Found Dog" poster and went back to the town where we found him after Justin got out of work. After driving around and asking pedestrians if they knew him (no one did) we got out of the car to search on foot.

We started our search where we found Schlumpy last night, a children's school right next to some private garden plots. Although at first Schlumpy led on in his usual unaware mode, within minutes he seemed to know exactly where he was and where he wanted to go. He pulled Justin along at an almost-run for about 10 minutes through some random fields that appeared to go no where, only stopping because there was a closed gate leading to some small fishing ponds that he was apparently eager to go to.

Consoled only by the fact that the dog's nose still seemed to work, we assumed this meant something. So we opened the gate, went in, and asked the first people we saw if they knew Schlumpy. Miraciously, they did! After a phone call to the owner, and a walk in which Schlumpy showed us where he likes to go fishing, his owner arrived.

His owner (an old German man) was very excited to see Schlumpy, and Schlumpy was very excited to see him. According to Justin, the owner had tears in his eyes at the reunion.

Supposedly, Schlumpy had been with his owner in their garden plot yesterday when he took off. When we found Schlumpy, he was apparently headed - albeit in a lost, wandering manner - to the fishing pond, eager to play. Whether Schlumpy was lost or running away, we don't know. All we know is that it was a happy ending for all.

An Unexpected Guest

When Justin and I went to Ikea today, we expected to come home with a few new picture frames, not a new (to us) dog. Reality did not match our expectations.

After our trip to Ikea, we took Pecos on a romp in a grassy field in a nearby town. As we were driving away, I noticed a dachshund in the road. He was oblivious to the cars around him and he was clearly alone. Feeling guilty, I turned the car around to go check on the dog. As we passed again, he wandered in the road two more times. Justin and I then stopped to rescue him. After devising a collar/leash out of Pecos' leash and asking a few locals if they knew the dog, we decided the only course of action was to take him to the pound in Wiesbaden.

During the hour drive to the pound (damn traffic), Justin and I got to examine our guests many wonderful traits. He is old, fat, lumpy, stinky, scabby, and dirty. He also has disgusting long rear-dewclaws, large black balls, and a few open soars. Beyond all this he is agreeable.

Much to Justin's dismay, the pound was closed when we arrived, and the dog came home with us. We have named him Slumpy (or Schlumpy if you speak Yiddish or are me). He has had a bath, eaten some food, had some water, and gone to sleep. He seems to be unaware that this is not his daily routine, or perhaps we are the ones who are unaware. Hopefully his state of obliviousness will keep his spirits high when he goes to the pound tomorrow morning, or at least until his owner claims him.

Pecos is in disbelief.

Oh, and on a completely different note, Justin wants to let everyone know that cuckoo birds actually do exist. We heard a real one today for the first time during our romp through the fields.

As requested....

Due to the overwhelming popularity of my upside-down, half-naked ape impression (and the request for a picture of Kate doing the same), here's a series of pictures showing my better half striking the simian pose.

And me getting out of the way at the right moment.

SO proud!

Big girl!