thoughts...

[beige_alert]

Before my trip to Germany I did do some looking around with Google Earth. At the time the Ruhrgebeit, for example, looked like a very few city names I knew in a cluster of utterly foreign places. I went back to Google Earth today with Joyce, showing her places I’d been, and it was absolutely the weirdest feeling to look at the map and think, yup, there’s Bochum, there’s Dortmund, there’s good ‘ol Castrop-Rauxel that we drove past repeatedly. We move over to the Bielefeld area and I’m saying, oh yes, Lemgo was nice.

Speaking of Lemgo and Schloß Brake (which itself is tricky for the silly American to say, since it looks rather like an English word), Joyce did think “Schloßstraße” quite the word, with just a bit more “s” and “ß” than she’s used to in any one word. And I did trip over my tongue trying to say it for her.

By the time I returned to Herne just before going back home it was starting to look like a familiar ’home.‘ “There’s the local cooling tower!”

Funny that places so far away could start to seem almost familiar so quickly.

Comments

[lisande.livejournal.com]

:) Yes, I know that feeling! Best example for me is Emden - well, it's not that far away, but I'm there only twice a year or so and yet it's completely familiar, especially the area around the station, the place where Kris lives and of course the way to Victobur church...

[madfilkentist]

"Schloßstraße." That is a tricky one. A "Zungenbrecher," as they say.