Filker-rodents!

aryana_filker and I saw these adorable critters at Dierenpark Emmen in the Netherlands thought they looked rather like filkers. I’d initially said “like filkers saying goodbye,” but, really, also like filkers saying hello, or filkers saying “have I hugged you yet this afternoon?”

( really cute photo )

thoughts...

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.