Ex Patria

Night train to Copenhavn

Alan and I (and, by logical extension, breastfeeding Jacob) are traveling to Sweden at the end of this month.  He has been invited to visit with his friends Jacob and Louisa, his best buddies back in Romania.  They are spending the summer in Sweden with their parents, in a little town called Örum in Skane.   Three kids who cannot wait to roam the Swedish countryside and go on adventures with imaginary pirates and hidden treasures.  It does sound almost like someting out of an Lindgren story. 

Today I found out that the best way to get there is to take the night train to Copenhagen and then a regional train that crosses the Öresund bridge.  That is way cool.

Still flying

When we arrived in Germany on July 1st, I saw something that amazed me to the point of disbelief: the whole country was awash in German flags.

For someone who is not German this might not be easy to understand.  Germans on the whole have a little hangup with patriotism and any symbols that go along with it.  Traditionally (i.e. ever after WWII), we associate an ostentatious showing of the flag or a display of pride in Germany with the radical right.  It was just not done by your average German person.  Flags would fly on high holidays but mostly on official buildings, and sometimes a few would hang from houses when a German sports team do something wonderful on an international platform.

But now, see this!  Flags everywhere, hanging from houses, and more than anything else, flags on German cars.  Lots of them.  And smiling people.  The whole country vibrated with something that I can only call friendly pride in oneself.  Not arrogant, not condescending, just happy.

So I thought this was because the German team got further than anyone ever thought it could go.  And I watched the game on Tuesday evening, and I was excited, and I was sad when the team lost.  And I thought to myself, knowing my countrymen and women, that the flags would be pulled in now that the German team was out, and that people would go about their business as usual.

I still didn't understand just how much of a transformation for Germany this world cup had been.