Cool lady and Hannover

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Yup, I'm updating you with the most current stuff. I can't imagine I'll have another update, since the only other thing would be getting through all the darned airports, which I'm sure I'll rant about to everyone who is dumb enough to listen to me 😉
Nadja-- you should know by now that NOTHING Russian beats ANYTHING German. You guy have, like, Rachmaninoff, we have Beethoven. You have Tolstoy, we have Franz Kafka and Goethe (okay, I confess, I purposely left out Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn) (I hope that darn name is spelled right). We have Albrecht Dürer, you have.... do you guys have artists? 😉 You get the point. We wont even go into philosophy, because that's almost unfair to Russia. It's like a bodybuilder beating up a kindergartner! 😊 You know I love you.

So last Thursday, Uschi and I took a bike ride out to the castle here in Duisberg... it was finally not raining, so we could do that.... where we met the coolest old lady. Hence the first part of my title. Yea, I've abandoned all pretenses of grammatical correctness. Anyhoo, she's 91 years old. I immediately wanted to pry from her memory everything about Germany, but resisted. That woulda been impolite. Luckily she shared a bit anyway. Apparently she used to live in a castle near Dresden that was destroyed in 1944. She actually got tears in her eyes when she was talking about it. So sad 😞 Then apparently her family fled to Österreich (Austria). Apparently throughout her life she's collected handmade dolls, and now owns 450 of them. Whoa. She also had this rock with water in it... you could see the water slosh around... it was pretty sweet. From what I remember it was really old too; I think she said a million, but my memory is falling apart in my old age, so I could be wrong. She then asked us what beliefs we have... apparently because quite a many folk here have the idea that Americans aren't very religious. I guess that's fair, since they see mostly prominent politicians and a bunch of Hollywooders... But I couldn't help but think "If only she could see Virginia..." She invited us to her house to see all her dolls, which was pretty sweet. I still want to pick her brain about the 1920s-40s.

Then the next day I went to Hannover. It's a very pretty city, but not as much to see as Berlin, natürlich. It was great to see my friend Mareike, whom I met at my highschool. She was an exchange student. So once we were out of the Hauptbahnhof, we wandered around and visited the ruins of a church (whose name yet again escapes me) which was awesome. It also held a bell-monument to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We then saw the Staatsoper, but of course no operas are playing at the moment 😞. By the opera house is a monument to remember the Holocaust. Almost every German city I've been in has had such monuments... the Germans never want to forget their dead, it seems. I find it really touching. Remember the past to not repeat it, seems to be the concensus. So practically every city it seems has a Holocaust memorial and another for Germans who've died in wars and such.

After that we visited the New Rathaus and went to the top to see almost all of Hannover. It was awesome. The Leine is so pretty. I really liked the New Rathaus. The inside was also gorgeous, and had really interesting models of Hannover at different periods of time. I think there was one for way back when, then one for something like 1920, then one in 1945, and then a modern day one. Hannover was completely destroyed by Allied bombing. Seeing the model cannot possibly show the whole picture, but even the model sort of made your heart sink.
The next day (Mari's Bday!) we wandered around the Altstadt, where we saw the Old Rathaus, the Kreuzkirche, and the Marktkirche. The Marktkirche was sooo pretty, and had the most unique organ I think I've ever seen. I took a picture of the pipes and stuff; I hope it develops well.

We then had to go home because her sister was leaving for Uruguay for a year, so we hung out in the airport for practically 3 hours. Good thing Mari is as entertaining as she is 😉. On Sunday, we basically just hung around because everything is closed on Sunday. We played Rummikub (so fun!) and went out to eat with her parents, who were incredibly nice, at this awesome pizza place. Real German right? 😉 But it was so good! Yummy. And then I had to leave, pretty much, after a few more games of Rummikub.

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