Nights 23 & 24: Anklam and the island of Usedom

Sorry about the slowness on this. Finally being home has meant I've been having to deal with the upcoming semester technical business, which is a real energy sucker. It also doesn't help that it's been so BEAUTIFUL outside that I can't stand to sit in front of my computer for long. But here we go.

Anklam is a small town in northeastern Germany that's seen a lot of change in the last half century. It was bombed during the war thanks to its weapons industry and was then semi-rebuilt by the East German regime with lifeless gray buildings. Many of these buildings and others have since been abandoned and have fallen into a sorry state of disrepair. It's a sad town to drive around. However, most of my time was spent on the nearby island of Usedom on the Polish border, many parts of which have been rescued by tourism. The photo above is actually not in Anklam, but rather in one of the small villages on the island.


In Anklam I was warmly welcomed into a 73-yr-old woman's pretty pink guesthouse. Ingrid (her name) told me it was once red and has since faded. The house was built by her grandparents and she had spent a lot of time visiting them there as a child. It was almost lost to the family during the DDR time and she had to fight for three years in court to get it back after the reunification. That story was only the beginning to the myriad of amazing tales she had to tell about her life. I liked her immediately.

Ingrid met me at the nearly empty train station about mid-afternoon on the 19th and drove me the short distance to her home, where she let me choose which of the two fully-furnished guest rooms I wanted to sleep in and which of the private bathrooms I would like to use. Then she invited me upstairs to the apartment where she lived and where she had a beautiful spread of cake and different sorts of tea all ready on pretty matching china dishes. There we talked until dark. She asked me lots of questions about my project and life and I learned about the decades she spent as a tour guide all around the world and years driving around Europe in her little RV by herself or with a small group of her favorite old ladies. She showed me her scrapbooks and list of all the tours she'd conducted. It was pages and pages and pages long. For example, she'd led 26 tours through Morocco not counting the many times she'd been there by herself. She'd also studied geography and geology at the university and had a book about tectonic plates on her coffee table. This woman blew my mind.

We ate a light dinner later and went to bed early as we were both tired. She's currently working on repairing the house and gives presentations about her travels and about the history of her area, where she continues to lead many different tours. She offered to take me around the next day, so I asked to see her favorite places. After sleeping wonderfully and a great hotel buffet-style breakfast, we grabbed our umbrellas and drove east to the island of Usedom.

She first showed me some of her favorite coastal places on the southern side of the island, but the weather wasn't particularly keen on sharing the view. We drove within a couple kilometers of the Polish border, at which point my cell phone informed me of international tariff prices. The Polish fog was very beautiful...uhh. Hi, Poland!

I had never seen so many thatched roofs before. They're still used commonly in the area, even with more modern homes. There was also a great Swedish (and general Baltic) influence on a lot of the architecture. This was once again something I'd never seen before.

"There's no such thing as bad weather," she said, "only bad clothing!"

This is an old church that Ingrid wanted to take me in, but it was closed. It has no steeple, but still had bells in a large wooden contraption on the ground near the courtyard entrance. Never seen that before, either.

When the southern coast didn't yield much, we went to the northeastern coast which had been dressed up as a touristy strip of beaches and pretty hotels and villas. In one town, I saw not one, but TWO villas with my name on them! Here's one.


After having a little picnic of cheese sandwiches and delicious coffee in the backseat of Ingrid's Auto, we went for a long walk along the promenade connecting the different coastal towns. Much of the beach was still covered in dirty snow and ice, though it wasn't too cold. Many people were still out despite the icky weather.

Remains of an old bridge.

Our next stop was to a little church in the tiny village of Benz. None of the other churches we'd checked so far had been open, but our luck changed with this one.

It looked like your basic pretty, but plain stone church from the outside, but the inside immediately took the gold for the most beautiful church I'd ever seen. It was small and plain with white walls, big windows, and blankets folded in the plain wooden pews (no heating?), but the ceiling! It was like the heavens were charted out in perfectly symmetrical squares above everything. The first stars were painted in 1200-something. That's over 800 years ago!!!



I thought this simple means of decoration was more meaningful and beautiful than any mass of baroque gaudiness or elegantly carved gothic stone in churches I'd seen before. Apparently this kind of church decoration is typical of the northern countries. I want to see more!

After that little thing of beauty, we made our way to another small town that had an old castle. It's since been turned into a fancy restaurant and special events center, but kept much of its medieval atmosphere. There was a wedding reception going on at the time and all the people who worked there were dressed in medieval clothing. It was amusing to see. However, the Easter eggs on the little tree to the right were a pretty funny contrast to the medieval garb and gray stone. (By the way, colored eggs hung on trees and bushes are apparently THE way to decorate for Easter all over Germany.)


We were both pretty hungry by that point and tried to go to a nice fish restaurant, but it was closed. Therefore we decided to go home, relax, and make our own dinner. I asked Ingrid my German-ness questions over a nice meal of pasta and zucchini, which led to yet another fascinating conversation. I won't write down her whole life story here, just the basics. She was born in 1936 and grew up during the hard war aftermath with her hard-working but emotionally distant mother. Her father was a soldier and disappeared in service near the end of the war. After years of school, university, and work, she secretly left East Germany in the middle of the night just two months before it was cut off from the rest of the world. It was then that she started working as a tour guide out of a company in West Germany and found herself learning many languages and exploring many European and African countries. In the late '80s, she took a post in the USA where she took German tour groups on trips from one coast to the other over several weeks. She'd been there for two years when the political situation in Berlin and DDR got shaky to the point of talks of reunification, at which point she booked it back to Germany. During her years in the US and even beforehand, she'd been so angry with the division and political situation that she thought she might end up staying in the US or Canada for the rest of her days. Long story short, she was finally able to move back into her old family home in Anklam, though the town had changed so much since the war that she had no more emotional attachment to it. Because she'd seen so much of the world, she said that she felt Europe was her emotional homeland. She said if someone had told her she would end up living in her grandparents' home at any point during the few decades before she was actually back, she never ever would have believed them. It was that hopeless.

There was something else she'd said while we were discussing the war that really struck me, being that once her generation dies out, no one else will understand how such a terrible thing came to pass. Once those that had experienced it were gone, she said such a war could happen all over again, and that it would go on and on with the comings and goings of the generations.

[Moment of silence.]

The next morning I looked through more of her photos before going off on another mini-tour before my train. Here's a photo of Ingrid with her van back in the day.

...And one of her old ladies eating breakfast in the van while traveling to exotic places.

Amazing, right? And now for a change of pace, here's some amazing life I discovered in her yard!

Our mini-tour that morning started off with Ingrid driving me around a nearby village that had been forced to evacuate by the DDR regime. Many of the homes haven't been touched since they were abandoned. Beautiful, sad empty places.


Then we drove to another small village that had been refurbished and was now a happening cultural center for out of the way concerts and rich visitors. There were also ruins of an old church and convent that were almost 1000 years old. And there was rain and wind.

Many of the main roads on the island were lined with these beautiful trees that Ingrid said form a lovely shaded tunnel in the summer.

Back in Anklam, we went to a very nice restaurant for lunch where we had fresh fish and chocolate ice cream. I took this picture near the restaurant. It's an image that I saw over and over again in this town and in many others in East Germany.

The old town gate that was once part of the city wall in Anklam. Most of the towns that we drove through had one similar to this.

After lunch, Ingrid brought me to the train station where several of the glass panels covering the train information had been smashed. She wished me all the best and asked to be kept informed of what I did with my life. She also invited me back at any time and told me I could bring friends. If I have time, I really hope to go visit her again when the warmer weather comes to the coast.

I had a couple options of how to get back to Hamburg, but they both took about 4.5 hours. I could either go all the way back to Berlin again and then west or I could travel north to the coastal city of Stralsund where I would have an hour layover before getting a direct train to Hamburg. Wanting to see more of this part of the country, I opted for the train to Stralsund. The scenery going north was lovely.

I also saw this crazy group of birds running across a field. Does anyone know what they are?

A veritable garden of wind power! All the turbines are painted in pretty greens on the bottom, too.

It was turning into a glorious day once I got to Stralsund. Not wanting to pay 4 euro for one hour of luggage locker use, I strapped on my (Liz Chase's) backpack and went exploring. Ingrid had sent me with a city map and told me which route I should take to see the best of the city in one hour, which was helpful. Stralsund also had its share of abandoned buildings, though many of them had been dressed up to look a little better. This yellow one was completely unlivable, for example.

Like in many other cities, Stralsund also had its share of Stolpersteine. (I don't know why Blogger is insisting on uploading this sideways, but there it is.)

There were many scenes like this in Stralsund and other East German cities in which you find one beautiful abandoned building next to one that had been fixed up. The contrast is often pretty powerful.


One of Stralsund's main attractions beside being the gateway to the beautiful island of Rügen is a newfangled Oceanarium, which looks quite out of place amidst the older buildings.

Before turning back to the train station, I got myself a tasty fish sandwich from one of these floating cafes. Mmmm. Then I had to scurry back to catch my train.

I caught it with a couple minutes to spare and a couple hours later found myself effortlessly winding my way through the maze of Hamburgian public transportation back home.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting about this adventure in the last week, but haven't been able to write it down in an organized manner yet. Hopefully I'll be able to do that soon. For now I'll just say that I am so, so fortunate and grateful to have been able to have had this opportunity and that it might have been one of the most enriching months I've yet experienced.

Now I'll post this and enjoy the thunder and lightning and pouring rain outside my open window. Hello, spring.