Picture Post: Road Trip Down Memory Lane, Pt. 1: Gevelsberg
About a month ago, I went on a road trip with my mother, to visit some places where we'd used to live, and then see the exhibition about the Varus battle at Kalkriese. First, we went to Gevelsberg, where we used to live until I was six, and where my grandmother lived until 1998; via the former Cistercian monastery known as 'Altenberger Dom', which is a popular destination not too far away.
That's the main church of that former monastery; because of its impressive size and isolated location, it's being used as a parish church by both the Catholic and Protestant parishes of the area, and quite peacefully so. Each has a notice board on one side of the entrance.
Most of the buildings around that used to be part of the monastery once are restaurants now, where the tourists go and recuperate from the stress of looking at the church, by means of really good local fudz.
Braille map of the area. We saw that in several places of interest on our trip, cast in bronze for people to touch. Sighted people loved looking at these, too.-
The church from the inside.
Statue of St. Engelbert. corchen, this is the bishop we once murdered virtually. The monastery was one his family seat before they moved up the mountain because a deep valley is not so easy to defend, and left the plae to the monks.
Kitchen courtyard of the monastery, with St. Mark's chapel in the background, and my mother in the middle ground -- beige jacket, brown backpack.
Cemetery in Schwelm, the town next to Gevelsberg, just over a hill. My mother went to look for the graves of some distant relatives, but couldn't find them any more. 'A bit down and left from the entrance, under a big tree and facing a path going downhill' was not a good enough description in a place full of old trees and paths going downhill. It was a lovely place, though, and a nice walk.-
A tinyphant in the place near our hotel where we had dinner that night.
Green hills, a bit cloudy: this is the default landscape for me. This is how country normally looks, familiar from my childhood. Not any hillier, not any flatter.
My mother taking a picture of a school where she once used to work. At that place, we were accosted by a defensive janitor; in the next one, there was nobody, and at my former kindergarten near that, there was a teacher who remembered me. I said 'vom Bruch' (we still go under my grandmother's name there), and she said 'Martina, right?' I was there only for a bit more than a year, in about 1971. I must have been epic trouble, for her to remember me.-
Gevelsbergers really believe in global warming and hence assume that palm trees will now thrive in their gardens. This example, opposite my mother's second former school-where-she-used-to-work, was by far not the only one I noticed. Even Susanne, the professional master gardener living in the house next to my grandmother's former home (I used to play with her when I was a kid) had palm trees in her lovely yard which was fit for any gardening magazine. However, as she is a pro, hers were potted and could be taken inside. These were planted in the ground, poor things.-
An alley of hollowed-out trees near the old manor house in a valley just off the main road from Gevelsberg to Hagen. It sits unhappily under a motorway bridge AND power lines, and the former stables have been turned, half-heartedly, into condos. But the trees are still there.
We used to live there, in the second floor. There were no solar panels yet, of course. The people who live there now are still the sons of the family that used to rent the flat to us. In Gevelsberg, there is lots of permanence.
No special place, just a traditional default house of the area: black-and-white timber frame, green shutters, shingle covered weather sides. This is what 'a house' looked like for me when I was a kid.
View over Gevelsberg from the green hills above.
My mother, and her car, parked to take a picture of that view.
Another view from above.
The factory that used to belong to my grandmother's second husband and his brother. The brother's son still runs it. It makes small cast-steel precision parts for engineering purposes, in a very old-fashioned way, casting steel in wet sand in which wooden models had been pressed, and then milling it to within tenth of millimeters of specification.
More black, white and green houses along the road where that factory is.
This is where the bishop from a few pictures back was actually murdered; Gevelsberg grew out from the nunnery that was established there.
Former distillery being converted to a culture centre. You know how it goes.
Typical shop on the high street of Gevelsberg; it has recently been converted to a semi-pedestrian zone.
The house that used to belong to my grandmother.
Our cast-iron gate.
The house still has the coat of paint my grandmother had done in 1978. The people who bought it from her when she moved to Wiesbaden to be near my mother in 1998, the former tenants on the ground floor, have gone quite batty and do nothing about the house, Susanne next door told us -- she was just leaving with a few crates of plants to take to some cemetery or something, but had the time to fill us in on everything in the last 11 years, and show us what she'd done with the yard which I had known as tiled an uninteresting as a kid when I came over the wall from my grandmother's garden to play with Susanne.
The ivy also looks picturesque, but is not a good sign, as it's actually vines with insistent little sticky feet that will damage the masonry. Anybody has a million Euro or two to spare so I an buy it back and do something about it? No? Thought so.- **sigh**
That's the main church of that former monastery; because of its impressive size and isolated location, it's being used as a parish church by both the Catholic and Protestant parishes of the area, and quite peacefully so. Each has a notice board on one side of the entrance.
Most of the buildings around that used to be part of the monastery once are restaurants now, where the tourists go and recuperate from the stress of looking at the church, by means of really good local fudz.
Braille map of the area. We saw that in several places of interest on our trip, cast in bronze for people to touch. Sighted people loved looking at these, too.-
The church from the inside.
Statue of St. Engelbert. corchen, this is the bishop we once murdered virtually. The monastery was one his family seat before they moved up the mountain because a deep valley is not so easy to defend, and left the plae to the monks.
Kitchen courtyard of the monastery, with St. Mark's chapel in the background, and my mother in the middle ground -- beige jacket, brown backpack.
Cemetery in Schwelm, the town next to Gevelsberg, just over a hill. My mother went to look for the graves of some distant relatives, but couldn't find them any more. 'A bit down and left from the entrance, under a big tree and facing a path going downhill' was not a good enough description in a place full of old trees and paths going downhill. It was a lovely place, though, and a nice walk.-
A tinyphant in the place near our hotel where we had dinner that night.
Green hills, a bit cloudy: this is the default landscape for me. This is how country normally looks, familiar from my childhood. Not any hillier, not any flatter.
My mother taking a picture of a school where she once used to work. At that place, we were accosted by a defensive janitor; in the next one, there was nobody, and at my former kindergarten near that, there was a teacher who remembered me. I said 'vom Bruch' (we still go under my grandmother's name there), and she said 'Martina, right?' I was there only for a bit more than a year, in about 1971. I must have been epic trouble, for her to remember me.-
Gevelsbergers really believe in global warming and hence assume that palm trees will now thrive in their gardens. This example, opposite my mother's second former school-where-she-used-to-work, was by far not the only one I noticed. Even Susanne, the professional master gardener living in the house next to my grandmother's former home (I used to play with her when I was a kid) had palm trees in her lovely yard which was fit for any gardening magazine. However, as she is a pro, hers were potted and could be taken inside. These were planted in the ground, poor things.-
An alley of hollowed-out trees near the old manor house in a valley just off the main road from Gevelsberg to Hagen. It sits unhappily under a motorway bridge AND power lines, and the former stables have been turned, half-heartedly, into condos. But the trees are still there.
We used to live there, in the second floor. There were no solar panels yet, of course. The people who live there now are still the sons of the family that used to rent the flat to us. In Gevelsberg, there is lots of permanence.
No special place, just a traditional default house of the area: black-and-white timber frame, green shutters, shingle covered weather sides. This is what 'a house' looked like for me when I was a kid.
View over Gevelsberg from the green hills above.
My mother, and her car, parked to take a picture of that view.
Another view from above.
The factory that used to belong to my grandmother's second husband and his brother. The brother's son still runs it. It makes small cast-steel precision parts for engineering purposes, in a very old-fashioned way, casting steel in wet sand in which wooden models had been pressed, and then milling it to within tenth of millimeters of specification.
More black, white and green houses along the road where that factory is.
This is where the bishop from a few pictures back was actually murdered; Gevelsberg grew out from the nunnery that was established there.
Former distillery being converted to a culture centre. You know how it goes.
Typical shop on the high street of Gevelsberg; it has recently been converted to a semi-pedestrian zone.
The house that used to belong to my grandmother.
Our cast-iron gate.
The house still has the coat of paint my grandmother had done in 1978. The people who bought it from her when she moved to Wiesbaden to be near my mother in 1998, the former tenants on the ground floor, have gone quite batty and do nothing about the house, Susanne next door told us -- she was just leaving with a few crates of plants to take to some cemetery or something, but had the time to fill us in on everything in the last 11 years, and show us what she'd done with the yard which I had known as tiled an uninteresting as a kid when I came over the wall from my grandmother's garden to play with Susanne.
The ivy also looks picturesque, but is not a good sign, as it's actually vines with insistent little sticky feet that will damage the masonry. Anybody has a million Euro or two to spare so I an buy it back and do something about it? No? Thought so.- **sigh**