Starying Local in Dortmund

The Pynchon conference was being hosted in the IBZ on campus of Dortmund Technical University, so we stayed in an AirBnB just a few bus stops down the street from the university. Verein Strasse on the 447 bus. I surely could have walked it, just a few kilometers away.

Dortmund, at about 587k people, is the 9th largest city in Germany, housed the popular Borussia Dortmund (the only soccer team I knew in the Bundesliga besides Bayern Munich), and has a rich minority population. Tourists in our neighborhood were, eh, rare.

The AirBnB was the top flat in a building, a two bedroom, one bath apartment, with an en-closable living room, two twin beds in one room, and a modest kitchen.

View from the main bedroom

The building was on a one-way street that led down to busy street. Up that street was a doner-kabob place we ate at a few times, and on the corner itself was a laundromat, something we'd be needing before moving on from Dortmund.

Down the street from us was a neighborhood park, visible below as the trees spilling out into the street from the left:

When we first passed it on the first afternoon after we dropped our stuff off and started exploring, there were kids there playing with no adults. So we were comfortable with the idea of the kids heading there by themselves. Corrie sent them often, when they weren't going to Cologne  to see the cathedral.

Here's the park from the street, but while it looks like dusk (and it was), the time of year and latitude betrays the time itself:

9:37 pm

On the Friday evening, after the early end of the conference, making dinner and finishing laundry, I took the kids to the family-friendly concert at a jazz bar in downtown Dortmund. It was an easy trip using the light rail.

I'll mention it later, since it was Pynchon adjacent.

Once Corrie called Camille "camembert" as a term of endearment, and when I saw this advert painted on a building, I had to snap a picture.

Dortmund, in western Germnay, a hundred miles or so from the Netherlands, is lush and green, and on a long field trip from DTU to a coal mine, I got to see a cross section of town on a city bus. The trip took nearly forty-five minutes winding through town, and it was remarkable. The street was a bus street, so a commercial thoroughfare, and was spotted with apartment flats like where we stayed along the entire route.

The parks were lush, like above, and I found a nature trail behind the IBZ, which showed off the general beauty of the region. Corrie and the kids visited the Zoo, took a train to see the cathedral in Cologne, and generally did local-living items. It warmed up substantially by the time we left, the last two nights were spent with us sleeping with the windows wide open and using no sheets or blankets. Nobody really had AC, since they neevr really needed it in years past, and the infrastructure was nonexistent.

It was a vey pleasant place to spend a week.

Day Zero

The kids finished school on the 11th, and we left ion the 12th. It was like that. We woke, I showered (everyone else had showered the night before), and called the Uber. We said goodbye to Picasso and made our way to the LAX.

We flew to Toronto, five hours away and had dinner, but late and at a bar because of the three hour difference, and put eyes on USA beating the hell out of that first opponent. From there we flew to Amsterdam, and tried to navigate the airport to get to our first hotel, in the Dutch countryside that normal Yanks would see on a map and say, "Yeah, that's not quite Amsterdam's city center, but..."

Little would they know that Amstelveen, as the hamlet is known, is in the view of the local Dutch, like...the countryside. Getting there, once we left the free WiFi confines of the airport, much more challenging.

The weather turned chilly, the sky was ominous, and the locals viewed us with, if not scorn, then a general bewilderment. They didn't get tourists in this part of town, especially families of four with rolly bags designed for three weeks of travel.

The damp Dutch countryside

The bus we wanted arrived once the first few drops started dropping, after we walked around looking for the correct way---without a map---for a while, and finally made it to the Hotel Chariot.

After dinner, when Cass and I split the smoked eel appetizer, we got the kids down with the help of some melatonin, and finally, the first collection of travel, from one continent to the other, was done, and we went to bed.

We were to learn soon that Cass was going to be up for fish at all times, and of all kinds, for the duration of this trip.

Some Fun with Numbers and Histories

I had to go back and look up my other posts from Central America, South-East Asia, and Rome (Syracuse, actually) to be reminded about this section of these things---long travelogue post collections. So...here we go.

Where are we?

Germany

Area: 357k sq. km

Population: 83.5 million

Think about it like: Slightly smaller than Montana with the combined populations of California, Texas, and Pennsylvania

Belgium

Area: 30.7k sq. km

Population: 11.9 million

Think about it like: Slightly bigger than Maryland with the population of Ohio

Netherlands

Area: 41.9k sq. km

Population: 18 million

Think about it like: Larger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia with the population of nearly New York

Germany is not identified as one of the Low Countries, but it's influence over the region is rich. I don't really want to go into a deep dive on the histories, only to describe a few of the details I learned on this trip.

When Caesar took Gaul, he divvied the northern regions up into a separate partition called Gaulish Belgica. The region became known as the "Low Countries" because much of the northern lands remain under sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea through years of pumping out sea water and building elaborate dykes.

Later, Napoleon recognized the differences between the Dutch people in his Belgica region and split them up, the impetus for what we have today as the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium. Some of the basis for the split was religious: the northern Dutch were Protestant, while the southern Dutch were Catholic.

Belgium today is the amalgam of weirdo French (Walloons) and conservative, Catholic Dutch. It's an uneasy alliance, that is routinely ready to split the country, with the Flemish part desiring to possibly return to the Netherlands, while the French looking side-eyed at the Wallonia region.

An oversimplification, but here we are...

Pynchon and the Low Countries

After venturing to Rome in 2019, and after the early days of the pandemic hit Italy pretty hard, the 2021 IPW was a Zoom get together like so many other get-togethers at the time. By 2022, the energy for an in-person gathering was back, and this time it would be closer to home for us---up in Vancouver. It's also on the Pacific coast of North America, and my cousin lives there, but it started---and ended---before the summer break actually happened for Los Angeles proper. That put the kibosh on the trip.

In 2024, the International Pynchon Week was in Belgrade. While taking a trip to Serbia would be exciting, taking a trip to Belgrade with a 4 year old proved too much for us to wrap our heads around.

When we saw that in 2026, this year's IPW was to be in western Germany, we decided to pull the trigger and make the journey. Camille is two years older, at 6, and Cass is big and tall and an adventurous eater, and the language barrier is less than in Serbia.

In Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, English is both much closer to their own languages that it is to the Slavic languages in the Balkans, and taught from an early stage in their schooling. English adjacency and Camille being able to maybe remember things made this the trip for us.

When my half-thought-out project was rejected, I realized I could make the journey and not be stressed.

We ventured through the outskirts of Amsterdam to Dortmund, and then off to Brussels and Antwerp, finishing off with a return to the heart of Amsterdam. It was a whirlwind, and hot, and stressful at times (as anything this complicated can be), and as it recedes into the memories like a dream, the full effect may be borne out with the kids for, er, ever, maybe? 

Regaining Sleep Patterns

We arrived to our Long Beach apartment yesterday in the early afternoon, after two days of flying west, first from Amsterdam, into the sunlight for eight hours to Toronto (trying to get the kids dinner at 9 pm local time but 3 am body time was fun), and then the next morning, from Toronto through the sunlight all the way back to SoCal.

That was flight was funny, as it's jts under five hours, but we get three of them back with the time changes, so it was like we left at 11 and arrived at 1.

Anyway, I'll be dumping stuff up here for the next few days. Before going to bed last night I shaved off my beard and had Corrie start the chopping of my hair. I needed a new summer feel.

I felt like sharing the least Western Europe picture I had from the trip, the north fork side of the Grand Canyon from the flight home.

Happy Birthday Cass!

We made it to double-digits!

We made it to double-digits? Oh. My. Goodness.

Ten!

I love you, buddy, and we've done some cool stuff over the last decade. I even wrote about some of them:

• The Beginning
  
•  First Mexico Run
• Birthday in Rome
  
• Talking about the Pandemic
  
• A nice repository of posts when Cass turned 7
  
• "Home Alone" at the LB Performing Arts Center
  

Minnesota Changed its Flag

I still have (but haven't posted to) a Flag and Logo blog, mainly because I was fascinated/obsessed with, eh, flags and logos.

I once planned out a five-part comic miniseries about the politics of a specific land, breaking up the land into four provinces, each had their own flag, and I had designed all four flags. You may not have known it, but I was able to do it without the Good Flag, Bad Flag book, and I would argue they were each pretty good. 

Anyway, the other day I came across the following flag, labeled as Minnesota's state flag:

What? I've never seen that flag before, but I definitely like it. I thought...I thought the flag of Minnesota was...different.

So, one issue that the GF/BF text discusses is the proliferation of banal sameness in the state flag game, a whole slew of impossible to read official seals on navy-blue fields. I made a graphic below using small versions just to fit them all in and show off the boring similarity:

The bottom row are the seals on different color fields, as well as the seal on the bison with the red frame. Also, in the sea of blue-and-state-seals, you get the obverse of a flag (do you know which one?) as well as Minnesota's old state flag. Can you even tell? Can anybody? Some of the flags have the names of the states themselves on them---twice in the case of South Dakota---which breaks one of the GF/BF rules.

Back in 2024, the new flag for Minnesota was adopted and put into place. There are initiatives to change the flags of Illinois and Massachusetts on the docket, and possibly one other. But...Minnesota.

This flag is pretty damn cool. It's unique, simple, clear and easy to read visually from distance, can be drawn by a kid from memory, uses no words, has two colors that are related to the area (rivers/lakes/sky), the single star (for the 'North'), the star reflecting the star in the rotunda in their state capitol building, and which many Minnesotans think looks like four M's glued together. Another key thing in good flag design is how it appears hanging vertically: does it visually hold up? Is it still easy to read?

Yes to all of them. 

Anyway, I'm a nerd. But Minnesota has a cool new flag.