...and a good time was had by all.

In May, I stopped offering walks with my local walking group. Too taxing all the time and I'd done it for 9 years (not so many in the pandemic years admittedly). Time to let other people offer walks.

However, so many people in the group were sad that I had stopped offering the monthly short walks and they contacted me, so I decided to start the short walks with these people as of June or so - and to offer the walks through the local English library so that people new to the area could also get to see something of the local area.

Anyway, today I led a walk through the Neanderthal Valley to the picturesque village of Gruiten - all along the Düssel, a tributary of the Rhine. We were surrounded by trees all the way.

This is a picture of the valley (not taken by me but taken off the Internet).

And this is Gruiten

The village cafe was choc-a-bloc (or chockablock if you prefer) so we tried another place nearby. We sat there for a while, but the single man working there was overwhelmed by work and said it would take him at least 15 minutes to get to us, so we caught an earlier bus and ended up back in the town we started off from.

This is the village cafe - with the cakes on display:

We went to a cafe right next to the station (apart from the five who had got off the train earlier - where they lived). 

Fourteen people had shown up and around 9 of us made it to the cafe: a family of three from Bangladesh, an Indian woman, a Latvian woman, a woman whose nationality I didn't get (possibly German), me (a Welsh-German mongrel) and the rest were Germans from my walking group.

Whether we were walking, on the bus or train, or in the cafe, a good mood prevailed. German native speakers spoke German and English, non-native German speakers spoke English and German, new words were learnt in both languages (including important words such as "die Einkehr" [stopping for refreshments along the way or at the end of the way] and phrases such as "et kütt wie et kütt" [es kommt wie es kommt or que sera sera]) and different aspects of German life were explained (such as the concept of mixed saunas [i.e. men and women together] all naked).

Everyone got on well with the other - a veritable United Nations. If a bunch of disparate people, from different backgrounds and nations, of different ages (including one child of around 11), with different native languages, who have never met each other before, can get on, why can't that be the case with everyone? It was so easy.

Altogether, it kept me busy for 6 hours and I got great pleasure in seeing everyone getting on with each other. We walked, we talked, we ate cake and drank coffee...and a good time was had by all. A perfect afternoon.

And next month, there's going to be another walk and another constellation of walkers that will mix with each other and get to know new people, new words and new places.

And this is supposed to be an improvement? Part 1

The powers that be in this town don't seem to have thinking skills. Or maybe they're being bribed to take certain decisions. I don't know.

What I do know is that the decisions of the last five years or so don't make sense.

Take for example the site of the Tourist Information Office. For as long as I've known it, there has been a TIO right in front of the main station here. You come out of the station, look to the right and there is the TIO.

Not any more, though. Oh, no. That would be making life too easy for all the tourists and the trade fair visitors (and we have hundreds of thousands of them in a year - from all over the world).

No, no. Now, if you arrive here as a tourist and want some advice on this town, you have to walk about 2 km into the Altstadt (usually one of the main places that tourists want to visit). You practically have to walk all the way over to the Rhine. 

I think that if you can find your way there, then you don't need a TIO. If you need a TIO, you won't be able to find your way there that easily. I've seen how people struggle with the little maps on their smartphones.

And this is supposed to be an improvement?

How much?! Part 1

I'm not very good at remember the precise price of whatever I buy in a supermarket. All I do know is that apples generally cost EUR 2.99 per kilo and that, for years, my usual four pots of "stichfeste"* plain yoghurt used to cost a mere 69 cents.

Then came the cost of living crisis and the price was hiked up to 89 cents. The last time I looked, the price had risen once again to EUR 1.09. How much?! Forty cents more in a matter of weeks? That's a 57% increase from 69 cents. I dread to think how much they will cost by Christmas. I get through two pots a day.

*stichfest means that yoghurt is semi-solid rather than being 'sloppy'. I dislike 'sloppy' yoghurt. What I very much enjoy are desserts that, when you take a spoonful out of them, you can see the 'dent' you've made in them. 

I fled from paradise

Earlier this year, I returned to my beloved Cala Mondrago on the isle of Mallorca for what was going to be a nearly three-week holiday. It was my first flight since Easter 2019 and the first time back there since the summer of 2018.

As I said, the holiday there was supposed to last for nearly three weeks, but I fled five nights earlier than expected.

There were a few niggles that annoyed me: the food wasn't as good as before; the staff wasn't as accommodating as before; and the air-conditioning system in the kitchen made an extremely annoying noise that I could hear in the little extra house that the owners had built about 100 metres away from the main building. ("Casa Blanca", as it's called, has 9 twin rooms for people who return a lot and who want extra peace and quiet. Me included.) I could even hear that noise in my room with the door and windows shut and with wax earplugs firmly embedded in my ears.

However, what made me flee from a place that really does look like paradise to me was this incident...

It was the last Sunday evening, around 6 p.m. I had gone to the beach for a swim. I normally swim from one bay to the other and back. That takes me around 30 minutes.

I got into the sea, adjusted my snorkel, goggles and hat (I have a pink swimming hat that I hope is visible to others in the sea - just in case a boat comes into the swimming area - safety first!) and then I started swimming.

At first, I didn't notice anything untoward. Yes, there was a lot less biodiversity since my last visit four years before, but that had been obvious as of my first swim back there two weeks before.

It was when I started to round the corner to swim to the next bay that the 'trauma' started. The wind was up a bit and it must have churned the water and caused whatever was lying on the sea bed to rise up. 

I suddenly found myself swimming in what seemed to me to be a washing machine with lots of bits of plastic in it. It was horrendous. Metre after metre of churned-up water with hundreds of small bits of clear plastic - and a few shreds of white plastic, too, just for good measure. Everywhere I looked, there was plastic. The more I swam, the more I saw. There was no end to the plastic waste. I thanked my lucky stars that I had a snorkel in my mouth and that I didn't have to take breaths with my mouth.

Finally, I got to the other beach and got out. This time, though, instead of swimming back, I decided to walk back along the concrete pathway that clings to the rocks leading from one bay to the other. From the top, I could only see the few bits of white plastic. All the hundreds of pieces of clear plastic were not visible at all. Other beachgoers probably believed that all was well in the water. Well, it wasn't. I could barely see any fish as I swam, just plastic.

I remember that when I first started to holiday in Cala Mondrago, large plastic bags and bits of packaging would sometimes end up in the sea, blown there by the wind. And I would leave the sea with both hands carrying the bits I could see close to the shore. I well remember the horrified looks of some holidaymakers when they saw me exiting the sea with plastic bags etc. in my hands.

The very next morning after this incident, I took a taxi to the airport, bought a ticket within 10 minutes, dropped off my old and battered suitcase within 2 minutes and went through security in 3 minutes, then waited 5 hours for my flight. It was cheaper to buy a new ticket than to stay another five nights.

When I returned to Germany, I did some research. The Mediterranean is the most polluted sea in the world. It stands to reason: there's only a small narrow outlet between Morocco and Spain. Everything pretty much stays in the Med. 

Did you know, for example, that, on average, around 730 tons of plastic enters the Med every day? This is the estimate of UNEP (the United Nations Environmental Program). 

See here for more details: https://www.unep.org/unepmap/resources/factsheets/pollution

Here are two more facts from the same source:

• Plastics account for between 95 to 100% of total floating litter, and more than 50% of seabed litter.
   
• Single-use plastics represent more than 60% of the total recorded marine litter on beaches

If you want to have some idea of what I swam through, here's an image from an Australian website:

I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to return to this place (you can see the two beaches clearly here - I swam from the one on the right to the one on the left):

It has taken weeks to get over this 'trauma'. It really was that upsetting. You enter what you think are beautiful clear waters, and then you swim through rubbish, as shown in the previous photo. It really was traumatic.

Green is the colour of hope

A couple of months ago, a large patch of wasteland that I pass when I go to a small post office was cleared of all vegetation, bar a few large mature trees.

I was devastated. Everything gone. Nothing but bare earth remained. I stopped a passer-by and he had no clue as to what was going to happen there. "There used to be a building here about 10 years ago," he said. And I felt sad at the thought that this formerly large patch of green might be built on again.

A fair few weeks later, when I had to go to the post office again, I was amazed. The ground was covered with green again and not much later after that, the plants were as high as they had been before. The power of nature.

I recently read that, if left alone, a cleared patch of the Amazon jungle could return to its former condition in just 20 years. You might think that 20 years is a long time, but geologically speaking, it's a blink of an eye.

 That bit of barren earth near the post office proves this. Nature will prevail. Given time and if left in peace.