Author Archives: Clare Dunkle
56th Miesau Horse Races (Pferderennen)
This weekend, Joe and I took a drive out to Miesau to see the 56th running of the horse races there. We weren’t entirely sure where the event would be held, but it proved easy to find. It’s just off …
Today’s word sends us back to the days when the great German universities were the pride of the civilized world. (Even Prince Hamlet went to a German university, you know.) The word is der Luftikus. No, it isn’t some specialized …
Museumsdorf Bayerischer Wald, pt. III: Faith of Our Fathers
The English word, “plastic,” has its roots in the Greek word for “to mold” because plastic is formed, not carved like wood or beaten into shape like iron. But the German word for plastic, der Kunststoff, expresses a different concept. …
Museumsdorf Bayerischer Wald, pt II: Life before Plastic
I took this picture of my cat, Leela, in the middle of our heatwave. If she could speak, she’d be saying, “Don’t expect any dead mice on the patio today. I have hitzefrei.” When my girls were going to German …
Beating the Heat in Germany
It’s sunny and 85 degrees outside (30 degrees C), and even the ducks are listless and miserable. My Texan friends might laugh, but stop to think about this first: Germany has almost no air conditioning! Everywhere you go right now, …
The word, “Bavarian,” appears to date back to the AD 400s, to the days of the decaying Roman empire, when it was used to describe the people who lived east of the Swabians but west of historic Bohemia (now the …
Museumsdorf Bayerischer Wald: History in the Open Air
This wonderful open-air museum lies in the village of Tittling, twenty minutes north of Passau, in southeastern Germany. The large, grassy park contains a hundred and fifty buildings that, according to the website, date from 1580 to 1850–a nice bit …
If you’ve read the children’s classic, Heidi (and if you haven’t, then you should immediately do so), then you’ve already learned about die Alm. It’s such a unique term that it isn’t usually translated. Die Alm is any high mountain …