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Arrival: 16th of May

Let me just start out by saying that the drive here was very safe and we made it in the city of Oldenburg with plenty of light and found a perfectly central little hotel to stay in. The Internet, as per the usual in the hotels I have thus far experienced in Europe, is pretty hit or miss in the room and just fine down in the lobby. My mother is very pleased with all of the accommodations and our stay thus far.

OK. That all being said I would like to add that the drive we took yesterday can and will go down as top five most stressful driving trips I have ever been a part of. We have a rental car and drove entirely on the autobahn. That was fine. I made sure we had directions the night before on a map off my phone, my Mom got some good tips about what to look out for on the road, and we got the car insured under my name very easily.

No big deal. The real sticky situations arose around our conversations which I won’t go into now due to the personal nature of the dialogue, but they revolved around family dynamics and that tends to be a heated debate between me and my Mom. We were able to expand on some philosophical points around children, how and what conversations to have with them, what choices couples have to come to terms with as a part of long term committed relationships, and the like. All well and good even though at times it did get tense.

So already I’m chalking this trip up as a great success because this is the sort of thing that as an adult I think is a rarity. To have such complex dialogues around touchy and sometimes taboo subjects and be able to find a way to express oneself clearly and articulate them in such a way as to share ones opinion, but not judge the individual giving it is really tricky to juggle all at once. This is all while driving very diligently on this super highway, on a trip where I’m wanting to get a better understanding of where I come from, in the country where I come from. Now that I take all that into consideration it doesn’t sound all that bad. In fact it sounds pretty great.

I guess the only real problems yesterday were getting stuck in traffic for about two to three hours and missing a turn and ending up in Hamburg. I mean we were close enough to the North Sea to be able to see the shipyard loading cranes. This was about an hour out of the way we were supposed to go. What was supposed to be a fairly simple four hour drive turned into an almost nine hour drive. The drive ended at Antares Hotel on Staulinie Strasse. Even with all of the stress and anxiety I’m really glad that we took the time to make it out here to a town some of our ancestors were from according to an essay my Great Uncle wrote while researching our ancestry. We got situated in the hotel got Chinese at a local place around the corner, and crashed.

17th of May

Today we went for a little wander around the downtown footpath streets and found an information center, the shopping centers, the bar streets, and a church that has been redone so many times the town doesn’t even know how it got there to begin with. It’s called the St. Lambertikirche in Oldenburg. And it is a massive piece of architecture to stumble upon while walking down these windy little corridors.

When I stepped into the white space inside this neo-gothic brickwork exterior I kept expecting to see a different aesthetic around the next corner. I was wondering where it was going to start being an old church with all of the elaborate and ornate pieces from saints and bible passages. None of it. The entire interior in painted very simply white with accents of a dull gold and light blue. In the entryway there are the sarcophagi of two of the most prominent noblemen of the town of old; Count Anton Günther (this guy)

and the Protestant Prince Bishop of Lübeck Friedrich Augustus, both laid empty.

It was the latters successor who rebuilt the interior of the church in the neo-classical style. Instead of the long gothic nave it is now a wel-lit rotunda which is much smaller than the outer dimensions suggest. Even with the seemingly out of place and somewhat tacky floating cross in the center of this space it is still a beautiful little historically misplaced place of worship. It just seems like it’s almost a part of the half brutalist half classical style of the third reich, even though the history clearly states otherwise, but you get an eerie sense that that sense of style was not unwelcome here. I’m just glad to say that my ancestors would have been here when it still looked like this.