Team America visits Germany

A strange thing happened this week. I started enjoying German food after swearing off the entire national diet last summer after eating 15 bratwursts in one week. I eat lunch everyday in the university cafeteria--by no means the best-prepared German food to be had--but somewhere between the plump, soft bites of my Kartoffelklöße (potato dumplings) and the Hirschgulasch (venison goulash) I decided this country and its food ain't so bad after all.

Even though this change of attitude means that I'll enjoy the rest of my time in Germany much more, it also means that I'll soon lose every last trace of my American identity as I integrate more and more fully into German society.  But before I begin to think currywurst is real food or join an anti-war protest, I will attempt to use my last minutes of American consciousness to describe some thoughts about being an American abroad. This post will at points delve into my general political outlook so look out.

To start things off, I'll begin with a metaphor: being an American abroad (an AA as I'll call it from now on) is a bit like being a hated celebrity, say like...Justin Bieber. Everybody thinks they know the true you, some people are devoted fans, but most think you're an untalented, upstart superficial idiot, and everybody knows everything about what you did last summer (egged your neighbor's house and invaded Iraq), and then judges you for it. Despite this being a perfect metaphor, there's only one thing wrong with it: you didn't personally invade Iraq last summer, your government did. Whereas Biebs personally did egg that house. I suppose it could have been his friends who were over at his house who did it and Biebs then had to take responsibility for it, in which case my initial claim to a perfect metaphor stands. The point being: as an AA you have a high public profile. Politically and culturally, your country has penetrated, pierced, bombed, oozed, streamed, and beamed its way into every corner of the world. You are a known commodity about which everyone has an opinion and they all want to share it with you (in English preferably). Unable to bask in the ignorance that comes with being from Burkina Faso, an American has to answer for its culture often by undergoing a probing to see to what degree you match all the stereotypes: was your high school like the one in all those teen movies? (no, no one drank at my high school), do you own guns? (no, but I wish I did), have you ever tortured anyone? (yes, but it prevented a terrorist attack).

Over the years, I've decided that how an AA deals with its oversized reputation--wether it embraces its American identity or not--is very telling. I'll admit, it is not always easy to make the right choice here. Some wilt under the pressure and become Benedict Arnolds when confronted with ad hominem counterfactual conspiracy theories about supposed CIA-supported coups in Nicaragua, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Haiti, and Cuba, unilateral oil wars in Iraq, and a blank-check to the apartheid-regime in Israel. It's easy in such situations to feel uncomfortable being conflated with the bloated and corrupt political elite of your country. But that is, for better or worse, the choice we face as AAs: either turn our coats and deny that we support neo-imperialism or admit that 'united we stand, divided we fall' and let our individualities be subsumed into the glorious and transcendent national consciousness.

For me, it was a long road to being able to say with Colbert, "I Am America" and authentically embody all the contradictions of America's dynamic and diverse culture in my one person. When I was younger, I had a disdainful, haughty relationship to American patriotism. I would cross two of my fingers as I placed my hand on my heart and mutter the lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance" during the pledge of allegiance every morning in elementary school. Yeah, I was that 4th-grader. Growing up in a particularly patriotic corner of America (Utah Valley--regularly ranked the most conservative county in America), I think my natural contrarianism and early interest for European history made me think that the flag-waving, God-bless-America, gas-guzzling variety of American patriotism was provincial and uncultured (how foolish I was then!). I yearned for the cosmopolitan city lifestyle: living in an apartment in a European or east-coast city, with public transportation right outside my door, and hearing foreign languages being spoken while riding to the new Baroque exhibit at the Musée d'art. In other words, I was a lot like the prodigal son who had outgrown his home in some dusty Judaean province and longed to re-fashion himself as a liberated left-leaning cosmopolitan patsy under the bright-lights of first-century Jerusalem.

But luckily, a little world-traveling in my European mecca along with a healthy dose of ressentiment and reactionism helped to set me straight. From the age of 19 to 29 (my current age) I spent almost five years in Europe. First as a mormon missionary in Norway, then as a master's student in England, a number of summers in Germany, and now on a one-year research fellowship in Germany. Eager to embrace what I assumed was a bastion of reason, moderation, and benevolent pluralism, I happily sat myself down at the feet of my European friends to hear what wisdom they had to share with me. But I quickly experienced something quite different. Instead of nodding my head vigorously as I heard Americans described as fat, violent, gun-toting religious ignoramuses, I discovered a previously unknown sympathy with my American compatriots. Something in the uninformed stereotyping of the other shattered my idea of a Europe free of regional blinders or pride. Pretty soon I stopped attending soccer-viewing parties and the local chapter of the anti-capitalist revolutionary student club. One heard from my lips less and less frequently denunciations of neo-liberal governmentality and I re-discovered the moral dimensions of American sports-culture. I soon become a practiced apologist for American neo-conservatism and my favorite rhetorical tool was the 'moral equivalency' argument. When confronted with some outlandish and improbable argument about the misuses of American power, all one had to do was point a finger to some problem in Europe, like say, their own history of colonialism and genocide, or their present-day booming weapons-industry. It's a great tool this moral equivalency argument. Instead of having to talk about specifics or admit any guilt in any particular instance, you can just silence the other by questioning their fitness for making a critique in the first place.

Now, to get real for a second, I think this time around in Europe, I am changing my approach a little bit. I am still quite vigorous in denouncing what I think are unfair characterizations of the blessed homeland, but I no longer feel quite as instinctively defensive about defending the less savory aspects of American history or political culture. I think Germany's own confrontation with its past and the lack of defensiveness has been an inspiration for me in this regard. It's hard to find another example of a country whose own recent history is constantly invoked as the measurement for pure evil. I know it was different in the 50s and 60s and that Germans still generally chafe under the world's obsession with Nazism, but overall, I think Germans have set a great example for how to graciously take criticism about their past and national culture and to perform meaningful self-criticism. It seems to me that in order to perform this self-criticism Germans have perhaps embraced an over-the-top rejection of patriotism and nationalism vainly trying to deny that national-identity is in our blood. But that makes sense--if 'German' for so long only meant genocide and fascism then you probably aren't going to happily embrace that identity or name even if it ignores that people sharing the same language, geographic space, and culture do have intertwined destinies however much that can be manipulated.

As for myself, I'm constantly trying to find a way to be open to self-critique of what are very real problems with American power and society while at the same time continuing to feel what I consider a perfectly reasonable pride in a country I consider great in so many ways. Not the least of which is Team America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOEIruwzf54

The Wurst Post

I'll be the first to admit that life in a small, provincial German town may not offer the forms of excitement that people my age are on the look-out for. There isn't an endless stream of beautiful, thick-framed glasses-wearing18-30 year olds to hang out with, no bowling alleys, and definitely no occupy protests condemning neo-liberal governmentality (there are farmers' markets though!). Since I basically know no one here, my option for entertainment most evenings is limited to either watching the latest Coen brothers film I've downloaded, reading in my internet-less room, or...worst of all...continuing to work. But, on the other hand, being exiled to an area that is as authentically German as can be with very little foreign influence has provided me an up-close look at what traditional German life is like which I otherwise might miss out on in a big city.

And at the top of the list of what makes up 'traditional' German life is German cuisine. In my mind, three types of food stand-out as being the most important to Germans: the wurst, cabbage, and beer. This post is dedicated to the wurst and cabbage with a little reflection on the German character at the end.

Wurst is probably the most emblematic food of Germany with a staggering 1500 regional variants from the classic Bratwurst, Blutwurst (blood sausage), the Frankfurter Bockwurst, Knackwurst, Weisswurst (white sausage), Leberwurst (Liverwurst), and so forth. Each wurst differs slightly depending on the seasoning and the type of meat used (venison and horse seem to be popular locally--I just had a venison wurst for lunch) The local wurst, the Thuringer Rotwurst is apparently quite famous.

Right now there is some sort of festival going on in Gotha and of the 7 stands selling food, 6 of them are selling different types of wurst.

 Traditional German event music consists of old German men playing their favorite American 70s rock with racist Americana as their backdrop.

If you wanted to go out on a limb and ask what the Wurst tells us about the German character, one could possibly say something about how the wurst developed as a product of efficient butchery techniques. Efficiency is something very important to Germans. The wurst is made (or once was) when the butcher took all the scraps from the animal (intestines, fat, organs, blood), mixed them all up and then preserved them by salting and putting them in the intestine casing (the exterior skin of sausages). So it was the way to eat any kind of meat that wasn't fresh which explains its popularity and usefulness. But this attempt to connect wurst to the German psyche is feeble at best. Wurst is just as popular in the rest of continental Europe.

In any case, Germans do eat a lot of meat. No doubt about it. But when Germans aren't eating some form of wurst, they are most likely eating some type of kohl (cabbage). Kohl is another linguistically manifold culinary concept. There are an incredible number of different types of vegetables bearing the name of kohl in German. Rosenkohl (brussel sprouts), Blumenkohl (cauliflower), and Grühnkohl (kale). Then there is Kohlrabi, Rotkohl, and of course the most important form of German cabbage, sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage slicings and is of course an important condiment put on the Bratwurst.

The other day, I found myself in a lunch conversation with my German colleagues about all the different types of Kohl and the different regional ways of eating or preparing it. I ended up thinking about how the anthropologist Frank Boas highlighted the fact that inuit and saamis have an incredibly developed vocabulary for snow. Being in such close proximity to this natural phenomenon, they have many more words to describe its various forms than people from more southern climes. I had this same sense for the German appreciation of wurst and cabbage and food culture in general. In my opinion, continental europeans' relationship to food is fundamentally different from that of Americans. Even though we have very 'American food' like hamburgers, milkshakes, and so forth, there isn't a strong sense of deeply traditional regional cuisine in the same way as Europe. In the US, our diet is a mish-mash of a hundred different national cuisines and you can pretty much eat however you want wherever you are (despite bbq and grits being especially important to the south). With Europeans, you really stick to traditional cuisine. Sometimes I am really taken aback by how closely my Hungarian friends stick to just eating their national foods.

But this closeness to certain types of food makes sense when you realize how tied Europeans are to their local regions where their ancestors have been settled for hundreds of years. It is very different than Americans who are on average much more likely to move from state to state throughout their lives. Europeans derive so much more of their identity from their local regions than I feel is the case in the US. Each region's cuisine and culinary habits differs a great deal (maybe not to an outsider) from the next region. What type of wurst is popular, what type of chutney or sauce you use, and so forth.

And the average German is very knowledgeable about food in a way that Americans aren't, i.e. it isn't pretentious. I just had a conversation with an Italian friend about how for my generation in the Anglo-world, caring about food, being able to cook, knowing about incredibly obscure vegetables--in other words being a foody--is a very trendy and hip skill to have. As a mark of culture, this I feel would be kind of lost on Europeans. Knowing about food and cooking at home from scratch is just second-nature and how life has always been for Italians, the French or Germans. My italian friend said she is still shocked at the thought of eating food from cans. So I think our generation's pride about cooking with fresh food and gourmet food in general (perhaps as evidenced by our desire to photograph it) is more about the novelty of such a lifestyle and distinguishing ourselves from a reigning food culture of canned or fast-foods inherited from our parents.

Moving from objects to people, one of the things I like about Germany is striking up conversations with older Germans about their past lives. It's a good way to practice German in a non-threatening environment since old people are very egotistical and like to talk about themselves. But that's ok because older Germans have the right to blabber on about their life experiences since recent German history is much more tumultuous and interesting than American history (excluding our grandparents generation of course). For example, just the other day I was at a conference in Marburg and I ended up having dinner with the extremely charismatic organizer, Winfrid Schröder. He started talking about his childhood and specifically about the conservative post-WWII culture that reigned in Germany. He mentioned how his father was a very silent figure who was wounded on the eastern front and how his uncle was a womanizer who then joined the SS--but not just any old humdrum SS unit. He was a member of Hitler's special bodyguard SS division, the 1st SS Panzer division or "Leibstandarte". He was killed sometime during the battle of Berlin. For someone like me, a former WWII buff, this type of personal history always blows my mind. An uncle who was in the SS!!! Not that I think that is cool or anything.

And just yesterday I struck up a conversation with an old lady in the train who was on her way to her home town in eastern Germany to celebrate the 65 anniversary of her confirmation (a German tradition apparently). We started to chat about where she had lived in Germany and she began to tell me about her family's escape from East Germany in 1952. Her family were actually all from West Germany and had only immigrated to East Germany to find work during the 1920s. When the war ended, his father secretly secured a job at a West German company and they facilitated his family's escape through West Berlin. She talked for a while about how they simply had no future in East Germany. If any of them wanted to go to college or a blue-collar job, then they would have to join the party. And this was something they despised having just lived through Nazi times. Towing the line and constant surveillance coupled with economic stagnation didn't sit well with them.

While I am personally a pro-war activist, having a sense of Germany's past of political totalitarianism and state surveillance is important to understanding their approach to contemporary politics. Germany, more than any other state, abhors the idea of a centralized collection of private data under the name of security. They went berserk during the NSA scandal. While I personally see this obsession with privacy as slightly neurotic, it is important to understand this obsession in its historical context. The memory of Hitler and especially of the East German secret services (Stasi) famous surveillance programs has made them wary of any compromise of privacy rights.

On the other hand, and perhaps paradoxically, Germany stands as the example par excellence of a controlled, orderly, and secure society which is achieved through an often inflexible, burdensome, and bewildering (for foreigners) bureaucracy. Germans are often thought of as hyper-rational in their obsession with record-keeping and following protocol. They are careful only to cross the street when the man is green, they exhibited a macabre meticulousness in carrying out and recording the Holocaust, and the Stasi recorded everything about an individual's life down to what they ate in the morning and the kind of trash they produced. This mindset considers it very important that all situations have to be thought out, recorded, and a rule made for how to proceed which then must be strictly followed. Germans today have a saying which sums up this attitude about how this type of micro-management: "Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser" ('trust is good, but control is better').

The rules for entering and leaving the research center at which I work might serve as a small example of this mentality. When I arrived in Gotha, I was given a lengthy orientation of all the things I had to do to properly use the research center building. One of the most peculiar aspects of the protocol for the building is this:

It is a board with slots for all of the fellows and employees using the building. The names are arranged in order of the most senior fellow at the top to the least senior (yours truly) at the bottom. Every time we enter the building we are supposed to move our name-tag over to the 'present' slot to indicate that we are in the building and to move it back to the 'absent' slot when we leave. This way everyone will know if there is anyone else in the building so the last person can know to turn on the alarm. As one German friend said with deep primal satisfaction when he saw it, "sehr praktisch" ("very useful"). As for us foreigners, we kind of roll our eyes. The building really isn't that big and it's pretty easy to know who is still left in the building. But even if it seems like micro-management, it does make entering and exiting more efficient. As a footnote, I also enjoyed one of the instructions in the manual we were given about using the building (yes, we got a 10 page manual for how to use the building). The line in question stated without any irony "If you are the first to enter the building and are assaulted by intruders who force you to enter the alarm deactivation code, be sure to enter the following code which alerts the authorities instead of the usual code..." I kind of laughed at the thought of being assaulted and then calmly thinking through the appropriate protocol delineated for us to use in such a case.

I would say that for most Germans today, the national values of micro-management, hyper-efficiency, and social order on the one hand and a fierce defense of private data on the other don't seem contradictory--and for the most part they're not. Efficiency and order aren't intertwined with a totalitarian system as they once were, but are rather held up as the reason for German success in economic and industrial matters (thanks to German engineering it is one of the world's largest exporters), on-time and expansive public transportation, and an overall highly-functional hybrid welfare state.

Well, I'm pretty tired of this mediocre post. Until next time!

Waiting for Gotha

Well, I've arrived in Gotha, (or as the locals call it, the "G-thang") which will be my home for the next three months. Let me describe Gotha the place a bit before I get into the weightier matters of how my first couple weeks here have been. Gotha is located in the central German state of Thuringia (Thüringen) about 10 miles west of the state capital, Erfurt. See if you can locate Thuringia and Gotha on the maps below:

One of the first things you notice about Gotha upon arrival is the aging population. Walking around town, you get the impression that the average age is about 82.6. This impression is deepened as you discover that almost every street downtown has a Hörgeräte (hearing aid) store. One of the main reasons for this elderly population is the rapid depopulation of Gotha following German reunification and the younger generation seeking a way out of economically depressed East Germany. The German wikipedia page notes that "due to rapid depopulation, Gotha has very affordable housing costs." This is true. I pay 250 euros ($320) for a very nice room. This has made me feel a lot better about not seeing another human being for the next three months.

But Gotha wasn't always the smallest German sausage around. It actually has quite the illustrious history. Back in 1640, one of the hottest up-and-coming German princes was Duke Ernest the Pious (see below) who decided to make Gotha the capital of his new duchy, Saxe-Gotha after a territorial partition of a bigger kingdom with his brothers. Ol' Ernest immediately went about trying to make Gotha a prestigious cultural center. He introduced compulsory education up until age 12, built one of the first and grandest baroque castles in Germany (see Schloss Friedenstein below where my archive is located), and set about collecting massive amounts of books for his private library. For the elite back then, owning a really good library was like owning a basketball team or something. That's why today Gotha is an important research center for historians (along with Wolfenbüttel--I dare you to try and pronounce that).

The fun didn't stop with Ernest either. Gotha was particularly good at one of the most important activities of early modern dynasties: hob-knobbing with other royals and marrying your sons and daughters off to them. At one point or another, the ruling houses of England, Belgium, Portugal, and Bulgaria were all spawned in one of the rooms in this castle in tiny little Gotha. Not a bad resume (except for Bulgaria I guess). Even into the 19th-century Gotha still was calling all the shots in German politics. The modern SPD was formed in Gotha in 1875 and modern day German insurance began in Gotha. This is memorialized by the fact that Gotha has Germany's only Versicherungsmuseum (Insurance Museum). It's a fascinating museum which I've now visited four times. I am lying about that. Here are a few pictures of the place as seen from the perspective of my camera:

 This is my street, Jüdenstrasse (Jew Street). It's a pretty rockin' street with a Müller's convenience store and a fresh fruit and vegetable shop.

Now, a little bit about my life here. I was at first kind of shocked by how small this place was. In Berkeley I could pick and choose only the best from all the people who wanted to spend time with me. After the first few days in Gotha my best friend here seemed to be the cash register lady at the local electronics store which I had to repeatedly visit because of internet issues. But now I've changed my mind. I think that in small places like Gotha you end up developing intensive, albeit it short, friendships with the few people there are to hang out with. This may be cynical, but since there are literally no other distractions, you end up spending all your time with just a few people. This is something that I've actually experienced a number of times in Germany since I've almost always spent my summers in tiny towns with a few people. And luckily this time it is kind of similar in that I am housed at a research institute along with a number of other fellowship holders. They have become very dear friends of mine. I can't describe in adequate depth all of their very interesting stories and backgrounds and our fascinating conversations, but I'll say a little.

Above are the two ladies I've been closest to in my first few weeks at Gotha. On the left is Francesca from Naples and on the right is Nashwa from Cairo. Francesco is a philologist focusing on popular medieval arabic texts of which Gotha has a lot. I love her to death. She is the mother of two young boys and she and her husband are both academics. She has a job in Turin and her husband has one in Naples. This means that every week she has to fly across the entire country to her job for three days. She and I have similar viewpoints about a lot of things like the greater spiritualistic, non-capitalist meaning of education, pesto, and Carla Bruni.

As for Nashwa, she has a similar story...in some ways. She is the mother of twins and has just finished her PhD in Stuttgart. I think she comes from an elite Egyptian family of scientists because she lives in New Cairo (a posh suburb of Cairo) and on her last day in Gotha she bought half of Kaufland (the local supermarket). She has a big personality. I've got to tell a funny story about her while I'm on the topic. So, one day last week Nashwa wanted to set me up with one of her friends. She showed me pictures of her on Facebook and I said I would think about it. About ten minutes later she said to me, "Tim, there is something I must tell you first though. She has been divorced four times. But only two times were her fault." We all just started laughing uproariously for ten minutes straight. Thanks for the effort Nashwa! 

And here is the big group all together for a going-away dinner for Nashwa and Tomass (another great Italian). There's Duane in the back there, an American historian of early modern noise, there's Asaph (on the right), another Near East scholar from Israel, and Sietske from the Netherlands up front studying early modern alchemy. 

Life is actually kind of ideal here if you are a researcher. My apartment is about a five minute walk from the archive where I can get a lot of the materials I need for my topic. In addition, there is a research institute with computers, copiers, scanners, a kitchen, and other academics. Within five minutes from the city center you can find forest trails which I've been running on. If you just look past the fact that no one lives here it isn't that bad!

As a tangent, one of the German staff members (actually a scholar of the enlightenment) here has taken an interest in me because he writes a lot about religion and secret societies and recently did a long blog-post on mormonism and the mormon missionaries in Gotha.http://positivists.org/blog/archives/category/social/religions/mormonism  He kind of rubbed me the wrong way early on when the first thing out of his mouth after hearing I was from Utah was "I dont understand how you can be a historian and a mormon". Because of this and other conversations, I've been thinking a lot about how present I want my background to be in my current life in Germany. I came to Germany this year thinking that this year I'm just going to be "Tim, the PhD student from Berkeley" and not "Tim the mormon." This actually always seems to be my goal no matter where I am in geographically or in my belief, but it never seems to work out that way. I always make the mistake (intentionally maybe?) of saying I grew up in Utah and then I have little control over what happens next. It's an open question for me how I should approach this. I don't like the fact this becomes such a dominating aspect of my identity but I can't seem to help the fact that my odd background is very exotic and interesting for people. When they get a whiff of it it seems like that is all they want to talk about and and I can't say that I don't enjoy the attention it brings me. But at the same time I'm acutely aware of the fatigue I feel living between two worlds and never feeling completely in the one or other. 

Moving on, after one week in Gotha I got to spend the weekend with my friend Anna and her beautiful husband Max (below) at Anna's family's vacation home in the Thüringer Wald which I think is one of Germany's national parks. It's pretty dank regardless.

The house was so beautiful. As you'll see from these photos, it was kind of like a little elven fairy-tale home in some stunning mountain landscape. The home was originally built by Anna's grandpa during the second world war and was confiscated by the DDR to be used as a rental vacation home for DDR citizens. They finally got it back in 1993 and have been fixing it up since.

 Frogs are everywhere in this home. I'm including this because my mom decorates our home in the same way. But this has a legitimate reason attached to it since Anna's grandpa's last name (I think) was "Frosch" (frog).

 And the house had a sauna! This one's for you Joey. I am too lazy to rotate this picture but you get the idea.

 On Saturday we went out on a hike through the forest to collect mushrooms (Steinpilzen) and raspberries, my favorite thing ever. They were both in great abundance. But even more exciting than the raspberries and mushrooms, was just how green and beautiful this forest was. I think the fact that it was raining all day made it even more atmospheric.

Anna and I were the industrious raspberry harvesters. Max wandered off right when the going got tough. Anna was very insistent that we had to pick only the berries "above pee-level" because apparently foxes go around at night peeing on the raspberry bushes. I still don't quite get why they choose the raspberry bushes but I followed the instructions.

I think I'm going to sign-off here. I know I never got round to summing up the road-trip or talking about Boston and New York, but maybe that'll have to be another time. I think in the coming post I'll talk a bit about what I'm doing in the archives in some more depth. Also on the horizon will be trips to England, Russia, and the Rhine valley...so stay-tuned!

Consider the Lobster

Like I've been saying all along, this road trip was never about us. At the forefront of our minds this entire trip has been what influence each one of our decisions--which national park to see, who to visit, what music to listen to, and what rest stop to nap at--would have on our readers. So, with the knowledge of how carefully we've thought about what you are about to see, I present this very long post of our journey from Chicago to Maine via Minneapolis, Michigan, and Erie P.A.

Let's begin at the very beginning. Chicago. Chai-Town. Showerville. Chicago is now one of my favorite cities. I absolutely loved it. I've decided that it's pretty arbitrary whether or not you end up liking this or that city--arbitrary in the sense that often it comes down to who you are with and what you decide to do as opposed to the fixed features of the city like the people, its look, and layout. I used to dislike London because it seemed too crowded, and every time I went I spent too much time in the tube, and all I did was visit dusty old museums which should have been destroyed in the war. But now I love London and all it took was a long weekend visit last summer with the right friends and going to the right places. I think this is what happened with Chicago this time. It was summer, two of my brothers were in town in addition to Joey and his friends, and we did a lot of fun things like the zoo, a White Sox game, biking, and Millenium Park.

 We spent forever watching this polar bear. Of all the animals at the zoo, he was by far the most interesting and happiest. The Gorillas all seemed depressed and the lions just paced back and forth roaring. But this guy had a gigantic pool which he swam back and forth in playing with his toys. Every minute or so he would make a pass at the glass where all the people were watching to take a look at us.

 Leo is Joey's friend from way, way, way back before Joey met better friends. They met when they were ten at a summer camp. Leo lives in Chicago in the up-scale Humboldt Park neighborhood where he runs his own failing art business called Shiner. It's a really cool product which Leo invented himself. You can see it (and buy it) here. Love you Leo!

The "Bean" at Millenium Park. I think Peter was talking about how he was going to link his interests in the Balkans with global environmental history at this point. Like the bean, it seemed like a stretch.

 Like I said, two of my brothers also happened to be in Chicago at the same time and we hung out. The encounter between Nathan and Joey's cousin Michael was pretty hilarious. Joey's been telling me about Michael forever. All of Joey's pithy and crude maxims about life apparently stem from Michael ("don't argue with retards" is one of them). He's a loud, fast-talking, opinionated, but warm guy who left day-trading because it was destroying his soul. At the same time, my brother Nathan is exactly the same way--apart from being a Manhattan playwright. Joey and I just sat silently as Michael and Nathan loudly shouted at each other their various opinions about movies, literature, and the best omelet to be had in New York (the red omelet apparently). It was like watching two waves meet and spike and double in height.

Moving on, one of the most interesting parts about Chicago to me was the Ukrainian and Polish neighborhoods. They were right next to Leo's apartment. It seemed like Ukrainian and Polish were really the main languages still spoken in these enclaves. This seemed really unique to me--that there were still pockets of insulated immigrant communities in America speaking their own language. And then I realized I was just being Eurocentric and that plenty of Asian, Hispanic, and other insulated, ethnic neighborhoods exist all over the country. In any case, the Ukrainian village was especially interesting because of the current crisis. Ukrainian flags were everywhere, and signs saying "Pray for Ukraine" and "United We Stand with Ukraine" hung in all the store windows.

I had to find a restaurant with borsch of course.

Our next stop after Chicago was to Minnesota to pick up Joey's friend who we'll call "The Good Book". The Good Book needed a break from the hustle and bustle of the twin cities and her 80-hour a week job selling antique books. So we swung by, nabbed her, and headed up to Duluth. A lot of these photos our out of order but there's a picture of Lake Superior down there along with the Mackinaw Bridge. The U.P. was a strange but beautiful place. The culture seemed a bit like Alaska's: sparsely populated, remote, and (therefore?) full of guns, separatists, and strange accents. They call themselves "Yoopers".

Above: Duluth. My brother told us that Duluth is known as the "San Francisco of the North". It's definitely really far north.

Next stop: Old Mission! After the Minnesota backtrack, the work part of our road-trip was over and we could start our vacation. So we went to my family's summer vacation spot in Old Mission near Traverse City. The pictures you'll see below depict the following: the chapel where my parents were married in 1971 and where I was married in 2014, some black raspberries we picked, and the trip to our friend Logan's cherry orchard where we got to see how cherries are harvested. Watch the video! It will blow your mind.

From Old Mission we headed down to Erie P.A. to stay with my sister Cathy and her family for a night before arriving in Maine. Sophia, Cathy's 4-year old on the Good Book's lap, is known wide and far for her charismatic one-girl acts. She didn't disappoint during our visit. When we arrived, she went straight up to Joey and demanded "Who are you?!" "I"m Joey, Tim's friend" he replied. Sophia immediately retorted, "You look funny" and walked away. True, but not something you usually say directly to someone with a funny face.

Ok, here we go. We've arrived at the Maine part of this blog. My readers may remember that in my first post I exuberantly stated "I'm dying to see Maine and eat lobster until I puke". Well, apparently I wasn't just overstating my excitement to eat Maine shellfish. I was quite literally looking into the future. The first night in Maine we went to a restaurant across the bay and ate a mountain of clams. Hidden in that mountain was one evil clam which had been predestined for me. After a pleasant evening of learned discussion, poetry reading, and puzzles, we all retired for a well-earned night of restful sleep. At about 1:30AM the house awoke to the sound of my retching. I had at first hoped that my puking would blend in with the sound of the waves washing against the rocks outside, but that hope was dashed pretty quickly. I'll try to refrain from going into detail but let's just say it was so loud that even the Good Book who wouldn't even be awoken by a Tsunami had her sleep disturbed.

To my credit, I got back up, wiped that puke off my face, and ate lobster and oysters (not without some trepidation) two days later. I had come to Maine with a purpose and wasn't going to give up that easily.

Lobster time. As we approached Maine, we read David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" essay out loud. If you haven't read this essay, read it now. He discusses the debate over whether lobsters (and animals more generally) feel pain and whether it is ethical to boil them alive. It's mostly interesting to me for the questions he raises about what it even means to feel pain or compare animal and human consciousness and our uneasiness in considering the ethics of live lobster boiling. Needless to say, we had a long debate about this in the car afterwards but eventually agreed we would all eat lobster anyways and just not think about it.

I can't gush enough about Maine or Joey's family's hospitality. We stayed in Joey's mom's beautiful home right on the coast halfway up the state, ate seafood every night, and saw Portland and the rest of Maine by day. Joey's mom runs a cute, little general store stocked with only the tastiest products she finds at the food fairs she travels to all year. She basically let us plunder the store for breakfast and lunch.

This post has got to end now because it is too long and boring and I am about to jump on a flight here in New York to Frankfurt. I know this is kind of an anti-climactic ending to the road-trip blog so I'll write an epilogue including some reflections about what this trip means to history when I get to Germany. So long!