For Whom the Bell Tolls, Non-Stop

(Pictures are coming in next post, tomorrow)

Kim Feldt’s Carleton ties are dynastic. Her mother went to Carleton. Her father went to Carleton and is now a trustee. Her grandmother graduated during the Depression and, still alive, is a frequent contributor to the alumni magazine The Voice. I’m pretty sure her family has been in Northfield since back when the college was known as Carleton-Feldt, before the undocumented Great Schism of 1888 and the ensuing defeat of Jesse James.

Anyway, had Kim not taken us in for a couple nights, she says she would have felt like she had let her family down (would have had feelings un-Feldt, if you will).

Upon graduation in 1987, she lived like Annalise and I after we left Carleton—just a few blocks off Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. A few years time found herself in Africa climbing up Mt. Kilimanjaro. She came down with a future husband who lived in Germany. She moved there, learned the language, became a psychologist, had a daughter and moved to Kaufbeuren—a very livable place.

There are, for example, more bars per capita here than in Berlin, and the really good local beers in the stores are about seventy-five cents max. There is a grocery store below her house, and a few blocks down a café with free wireless. There’s all these statues, and tourist information on King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the lunatic royale who built one of the most famous castles and German tourist destinations: Neuschwantszensenteanineanenen (I can’t look this up right now, let’s say: N).

These castles are a forty-minute car ride away to the middle of the Alps, and Kim chiseled out valuable time from her Tuesday afternoon to take us and her daughter to see them. This was awesome since these castles were about one of six places I really wanted to see on this trip, along with things like the Louvre, the Vatican, the red lights of Amsterdam and a man who can eat his own face (I’ve seen three out of four, and can’t wait to get to the Vatican next week!).

We hiked around the woods there, and the views of the Alps are more majestic then anything I’ve ever seen. We then went to the castle Hohensehenensensentesteinenesteinagau (H), since N was closed. The exterior, like N, is gorgeous and fairy taley. The interior—eh. That’s what I’ve heard about both castles, so the fact that we got to walk around the premises but couldn’t go in the other one is ok with me.

Both nights and mornings Kim fed us (dinners and breakfasts, respectively). She also bought us beers and packed us lunches for the train ride to Zurich. Again, we are astounded by the incredible generosity of a stranger.

There’s this church outside Kim’s house, and every six hours, on the six’s and twelve’s, some madman in the belltower goes beserk, banging and banging against the clap until someone goes up there and forcibly removes him. I counted the bangs until I actually got to 68, and I never learned to count higher than that at six in the morning. In a couple minutes the clanging was over, and I went back to sleep, and slept through Kim talking next door, curing one of her patients.

It’s weird to think I’m having such a merry little time in a country that would have had me worked to death less than seventy years ago. Take that, Nazis!

Next thought, Zurich.