"Hobbies and other things I find fascinating" Personal Page by Weissdorn

I was looking for people to go sailing with. Back in the Old VT days, you could click on certain activities and find out what other people liked to do when they travelled. I used it to look for people who liked to go sailing. Now that doesn't work anymore, but it doesn't matter anyway, because VT isn't like Travel Chums or Lonely Planet, where people use the net to find nice strangers with common interests to take a holiday with.

At any rate I just stayed and posted interesting things about places I have been too.

A childhood dream come true...

...about 12 years old, I started learning German, and in school the teacher showed us films and slides about Germany, which I found absolutely fascinating. I could have watched them for hours! Back then I swore that one day I would live across the street from a castle in a gingerbread house (half-timbered house). Well I finally did it! But the childhood dream isn't really as romantic as the reality. The castle across the street, which belongs to a real-live Baron, doesn't have rooked towers, just plain coned ones. And I found out the hard way, that living in a half-timbered house is a logistical and financial nightmare. The floors are not level, the walls aren't perpendicular, furniture never seems to fit. You have to get used to having pipes outside of the walls and small windows. Incidently, standard windows and doors from do-it-yourself markets never fit these houses, so you have to have a good raport with carpenter. We lucked out on that one, too, because one lives right around the corner.

Barbarossa

....and Americans dream about knights in shining armour, princesses and kings. Most American learn the history of their country in 2 semesters - the 19th and the 20th centuries - that's it. I don't think that I could ever really be bored living in a country that has more than 20 centuries of history. Sometimes I wonder how they learn it all in school. Then I found out, that most only learn about the highlights. Although almost every American kid could tell you the name of every U.S. President, most Germans cannot tell you the names of more than 10 Holy Roman Emperors, let alone all of them. I guess it's just too much! I am still learning more about the history in bits and pieces, and currently I am learning more about the Staufer dynasty.
I don't particularly like the topic of WWII, because most people tend to divide the nations into the “good” and “bad”. Personally I think the entire period was a very bad time for the whole world, and humanity always loses in a war and never really wins. Besides history writers tend to portray the winners as the good and losers as the bad, until so much time has gone by, to the point where some start to find faults on all sides. So, rather than try to change peoples' minds about this subject, I would rather avoid it. This is why you won't find any former sites of Nazi crimes listed as “Must See” sites on any of my German pages. I think you can see them if you want to, or you think you should – but I dislike places where human anguish and suffering have become tourist attractions. Although these places attempt to remind future generations to never forget how inhumane people can be, I sometimes think they also have a adverse effect, and also remind people that one group will always be innocent martyrs for all generations to come and the others will remain the eternal villains.