Fotoeins Fotografie

Notes for an abridged spell

By HL fotoeins on 22 Apr 2024

1st-quarter of 2024

A few things have happened since I last saw and spoke with you.

As the calendar transitioned from 2023 to 2024, I understood I would relive in part the trauma of living through and “surviving” my parents’ deaths. I knew the replay in mind, body, and spirit was entirely, critically, and consciously inevitable: one, two.

After some dawdling on my part (lasting months), my sister and I finally put up for sale the family house in Chinatown/East Vancouver. We listed the house in early-January with open-house viewing mid-month. According to our realtor, about a dozen groups of people passed through for a look. We received an offer, and after minor negotiations, we accepted in February the offer on par with assessment.

Over two separate busy sessions, we had the house emptied (“ruthlessly”) of all its items, leaving behind only appliances, light-fixtures, and very old drapes. On April 3rd, I handed all of the house-keys to the buyer’s realtor, ending in that simple gesture almost 50 years of our family’s presence within a simple but very functional 2-storey house. By the end of April 4th (“double 4, double death”), BC Hydro had cut all power to the house.

The emotional impact wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined, despite my inclination to self-destruction. But typing this now in a basement apartment I’ve rented for a month in New Westminster, it feels a lot like I’m finally closing the doors to many things to the rapidly fading past. Am I going to look back? Perhaps. It seems unkind not to, but there is a growing sense there’s more “out there,” if I decide I’m brave enough to move forward, one foot in front of the other. But I don’t intend on going back.

(And yet, that’s what I said when I left for Toronto in 1994, never imagining my return in 2013. Funny how my eventual refusal to abandon the parents worked out after all …)

It is an enormous mixture of satisfaction and the bittersweet: a little sad it’s gone and out of our hands, but I’m also eager now to get out of this place.

Thanks for being out there …

I’ve reduced all of my worldly belongings to be contained within a 32-litre backpack, a messenger bag, and a large suitcase. Starting in early-May, I’m spending 3 months in Germany and Austria. I had kinda forgotten about the European Soccer Championships occurring throughout Germany from mid-June to mid-July: for me, that means I’m spending that entire time in Vienna. The other 2 months, I’m “skirting” around my Berlin, and as it turns out, I’ll pass through almost all four corners of Germany. I did forget about the Paris Summer Olympics: I’m going nowhere near that.

Here are some of the places I’ve decided to go:

I’m going to Saarbrücken to visit the former Völklingen Ironworks, but I’m also going to head 30-minutes east by train to the town of Blieskastel. That’s the birth town of one David Oppenheimer, who with his siblings made their way to North America and who in 1888 became the fledgling city of Vancouver’s 2nd mayor.

I’m going to Schengen, Luxembourg: a humble place by all visual accounts, to where it all “began”, this “newly” modern 20th- and 21st-century idea and ongoing experiment of a “united Europe.” The Moselle river in town is where the borders of Luxembourg, France, and Germany converge.

I’m going to Heligoland, a flat outcrop of rock jutting up in the middle of the North Sea, because simply it’s there; a place with strategic and military value, the rock ruled once by Denmark and governed later by the British Empire.

I’m going to Greifswald and Rügen, the places where Caspar David Friedrich grew up and became familiar, setting to memory some of the motifs he made famous in his paintings as part of the short-lived 19th-century arts and cultural movement called German Romanticism. (Yes, I know I’ll also have to go back to Dresden … and Leipzig …)

I’m going to an alpine forest hamlet called Wamberg, just outside of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Early-summer means sunrise happens earlier and weather is often clearer, and that also means there are parts of the surrounding Werdenfelser Land I’d like to see that don’t necessarily mean I have to go up top (again) to Zugspitze mountain.

I’m going to Basel, Switzerland because I’m chasing (mathematical) traces of the Bernoulli and Euler families, and I’m going to pay my respects to Otto Frank. Flowing somewhere over the Rhine river is where the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland meet.

Köln (Cologne) where Napoleonic troops trudged through on their way to conquering eastern lands is the “closest” I get to the French capital (Gott sei dank). But, “Viva Colonia”: it’s where some of my best friends live. I saw one of them last June for their birthday, but I haven’t seen the other in many years. His wife has very serious health issues, and they’ve kept going as bravely and strong as possible. They bounce regularly between Turkey and Germany, and the trick has always been to time my visit when they’re not getting their sun on in Antalya. But this time, I think it’s going to work, and I’ll see them in the big-K. And yes, I also considered the other and fairly obvious possibility: that I’d finally make it to Turkey. I’d love to see and experience Istanbul through their eyes.

If everything works out, I should be able to visit and photograph another 10 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Germany, raising the completion rate to over 80 percent.

… when it’s just me in here

What happens next? I’ll come back very reluctantly to Vancouver in August, and then I want time in Calgary in September to see my aunt Jean (Mum’s older sister), while Alberta weather remains favourable and because I haven’t seen my aunt in person in decades. As far as 98-year old Auntie is concerned, my sister and I are the only remaining living reminders of her “baby sister.”

Beyond September, who knows. I hear the siren’s call of southern summer in the lush greenery of Aotearoa, and feel a strong pull to a warm dry northern winter in the deserts of southern Arizona. When northern spring begins again, I gotta get back to Berlin; the gap will be almost 4 years: far too long in between. My next phase of exploration “requires” at least 4 to 6 weeks at “home” in the German capital.

“Mal sehen … / we’ll see …”

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T20 extra: I do love the cricket

Absolutely chuffed Smriti Mandhana and the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) women claimed their 1st championship title in the recent 2024 WPL season 🇮🇳🏏

Absolutely gutted the RCB men have only 1 win out of 8 matches thus far in the 2024 IPL season 🇮🇳🏏

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With an iPhone15, the 1st two images are from 2 and 21 April 2024, respectively; and the last three images are screenshots from Organic Maps on iOS. This post with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-sll.