Tschüss, Lübeck!

Today (Sunday) was our last day in Lübeck. We had a full day, starting with cleaning our flat and morosely piling our luggage by the door. Late in the morning, we treated ourselves to a classical piano concert at the Balsamico Bistro across the courtyard from our flat, to hear some Liszt and Beethoven by Daniel Fritzen, who is so darn cute you can't believe what he can do to a piano. Excellent! I would have snapped a photo but I didn't want to disturb him. 

After the concert, Peter and his partner, Marin, drove us up to the coast for one last walk along the Baltic. Along the way, Peter pointed out some points of interest, like the former East/West German border just east of Lübeck, in the area near Schlutup. They left this East German watchtower up, as a reminder, but no one really wants to remember those dark days. Still, I'm fascinated by the whole Cold War thing, and Peter obliged me with lots of interesting information. 

We passed a beautiful lake called the Dassower See, which reminded us of our own Big Sandy Lake. Peter told us that the city of Lübeck owns the entry to the Dassower See from the Trave River which, back in the day, precluded the East Germans from building a border there. So to get around the problem -- so to speak -- they built a wall around the entire lake. If you had a nice view of the lake, in other words, you got to kiss it goodbye for the duration of the Cold War, and look at a wall instead. I can't even fathom how depressing that must have been. It took a few years to finally take the wall down after Reunification, and it’s hard today to imagine anyone thinking that walling off a lake would be a great way to win hearts and minds. 

On our drive, Peter told us about what it was like to enter East Germany shortly after Reunification. He said he'd been anxious to see it, as he imagined it must be beautiful there. East Germany was as remote to him as a foreign country, despite being just a couple of kilometers away. The reality was that the nature was beautiful and preserved, but the villages and cities were not: West Germans would call the former East Germany “Dunkel Deutschland” (dark Germany) because all the houses and buildings were the same color of gray, and in dire need of repair. 

When we arrived at the beach area, Peter and Marin treated us to an excellent soup for lunch at this sweet cafe, where lots of Lübeckians stop before or after their Sunday walks on the beach . . .



. . . after which we walked past these fabulous multicolored sheep . . .

. . . and arrived at this little road, parallel to the sea, which Peter told us used to be fortified and constantly patrolled, to keep people from getting to the beach. 

My incredulous response to this bit of information was, “Were they trying to make everyone as miserable as possible??” Peter's answer was that they had to go to great lengths to keep their brightest and best from escaping. It's hard to imagine that anyone would think that system was a good one, but as Peter pointed out, many of the people who lived in the East put all their energy and faith into this system, hoping it would work. They were devastated when it failed so spectacularly. 


Fortunately, we were able to walk unimpeded to the beach, where the Baltic was so high that we had to stick to the high ground, as there was no beach to walk on. There's not much of a tide in the Baltic; the water level changes depending on the speed and direction of the wind. Peter said he's never seen the water as high as it was today, that normally the beach is wide in this wild part of the Baltic that was off-limits to Westerners -- and Easterners -- for so many years. 

Along the way, we looked for bernstein (amber) and flint with holes in it (the name of which I forgot to write down). Marin scored a piece of flint with a hole in it! I found a couple of pieces of what might be bernstein but probably is not. (They say that there's a form of phosphorus that many people mistake for amber, that will burn you if you stick it in your pocket. So I kept a close watch on the stones I'd picked up, just in case I'd mistakenly picked up the hot stuff.) 




The place was stunning and beautiful and I hated to leave it. But we had to go, and stopped back in at the Cafe Strandgut for some gooseberry kuchen and milchkaffee -- which cheered me up immensely -- before we headed back to Lübeck. On the way back, we took the little car ferry to Travemünde (a 1-minute ride at most), and Peter & Marin showed us where the fishing boats come in there, which we had never seen before. They are preparing to do away with this area to make way for some luxury apartments: people love the character of this place so much, they all want to live here. Unfortunately, there will be no more character left by the time they move into their deluxe apartments. We're so glad we got to see this, before it's gone forever. 

After a quick once-over of our flat and loading of luggage into the car, we were off to the bahnhof. We will stop back in Lübeck to pick up our luggage in 10 days (universe willing), so we didn't have to say goodbye to it just yet.

Tonite we are in an airport hotel -- the Leonardo -- near the Hamburg airport. Tomorrow we depart for Sicily, and I will be blogging from there.