A weekend in Germany

Gretchen and I drove to Germany for the weekend to visit our daughter Amanda in Esslingen, outside of Stuttgart, and also to visit some of our Young Life staff taking a theology class in Heidelberg. Here are some highlights:

• Driving between 140 - 150 km per hour on the Autobahn (150 is 90 miles per hour) and having cars - mostly Audis, BMWs and Mercedes - blow by me traveling at least 40 or 50 kph's faster than me. It doesn't seem possible to nod off driving when that sort of thing is happening. A car driving 200 kph is going 120 mph.
  
• Staying in Stuttgart in a beautiful 4th floor apartment with our friend Helmut and enjoying everything about city life.
• Punting on the Neckar river in a gondola around Tubingen with a group of German, Israeli, and Palestinian young people participating in a peace conference. Gretchen and I got to crash the party. The peace conference was the brainchild of our friend Dieter, and he had his hands full with this group. They had been meeting all day and as you could imagine, it had been extremely intense. I thought it was a great strategy - take two groups that don't like each other and put them on a gondola floating serenely down a river. We punted in peace.
  
• Worshiping in an ancient German church in Heidelberg on a special Bach - Mendelsohn Sunday with a group that included people who live in Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Czech Republic and California. Among the people in the group were Rob Johnston and Cathy Barsotti, who are teaching the theology class. Rob made me laugh yesterday when we got into a discussion of street names in neighborhoods -- in our neighborhood here we can go to the intersection of Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak, which is just around the corner from Herman Hesse. In the neighborhood his father lived in in California you could go to the corner of Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra, just up the road from Ginger Rogers.
• Walking across a fabulous bridge in Heidelberg and having Amanda read a little sign in German for us that noted the bridge had been blown up in March, 1945 for no reason and reassembled after the war by the citizens of Heidelberg.
• Visiting the spectacular church of our friend Ele Arnold in Stuttgart and seeing the cellar door of the church manse that is preserved there. The door has light pencil writing all over it, and as you exam it you see the writing is a list of dates and times throughout 1944 and 1945 - and it goes up and down the length of the door - there are hundreds of dates and times. Ele explained that the people who lived in the house at that time recorded every date they went into the cellar for an air raid and how long they stayed in the cellar. When you see things like that (and the bridge in Heidelberg) it is difficult to know how to react. I feel torn between "I'm sorry" and "you started it." Germany always challenges me this way.
• Hearing from Amanda about a German caller on a radio show saying that Germany should accept all immigrants from Turkey, Italy, and other countries because people are people and you should be open and loving toward any person, except, of course, if the person is a Hollander. Another German commented - half in jest - that the Dutch were funny people with a funny language. There are some real feelings between these two countries, many of which also have to do with World War II.
  

So, that's about it from a long weekend away. We're going to work on some more posts later and add some pictures of Germany to this and also post some pictures of life around here for you.