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cheap wine in Wolfsburg Monday, September 9 2024
location: cabin 105, Swiss Ruby river boat, Mittelland Canal just west of Wolfsburg, Germany
This morning Gretchen and I again had breakast with the mousey Swedish woman and her mother. We ended up talking mostly about American politics, specifically Donald Trump, JD Vance, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris. We also discussed, briefly, how America's lack of a parliamentary system makes voting for third parties a futile act. In a country like Sweden, though, various small parties form coalitions, so one can vote for the party that most closely matches your politics. This is why the Green Party can be a force for good in Europe while being, essentially, a front for Republicans in the United States.
Meanwhile our boat had tied off at a dock across from a gloomy-looking factory building with four incredibly-tall smokestacks, looking a little like an uglier version of the power plant on the album cover of Pink Floyd's Animals. Because the building had a huge Volkswagen logo on it, initially I assumed we'd arrived at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg. Indeed, we had arrived at Wolfsburg, and that building belonged to its factory. But that factory is a huge sprawling complex (the biggest factory in the world, someone said), and that building was just its power plant. The complex dates back to Nazi Germany, and it wasn't hard to picture Jews from a concentration camp being forced to work there, which is one of several lowlights of Volkswagen's history.
After breakfast, Gretchen and I got off the boat and walked into Wolfsburg to get a sense of the city that Volkswagen built. (I should mention that I've been familiar with Wolfsburg for a long time, remembering the Wolfsburg wolf-with-castle logo on the steering wheel on the Punchbuggy Green.) Compared to all the lovely architecture (both new and old) we'd seen so far, Wolfsburg (which lies just within the borders of the old West Germany) was a deeply ugly place, featuring architecture from possibly the worst period in Western history (something like the mid-70s), as if all the buildings house muffler shops. Periodically there would be an attempt to add visual interest, but the results tended to be dissonant, amplifying the ugliness. As we marveled at the depressing spectacle in front of us, Kelly suddenly appeared out of nowhere. She said she'd been having a minor fight with Brian about people looking into their cabin from the dock. Evidently some kids had walked by and seen Brian's naked torso and stopped to point and laugh at him. But he insisted on having the curtains open because otherwise the cabin was too gloomy. The three of us walked through town and out to a woodland, where we followed a paved pathway until we worried perhaps we'd gone too far for the time slot available. In the woodland were a large number of large gastropods, both slugs and snails, some of which I moved out of the pathway to keep them from being run over by cyclists. The snails had shells the size of golf balls and the slugs were as big as my thumb, if not bigger.
As we walked back through town, Brian sent a message saying the water wasn't working on the boat and suggested Kelly get bottled water so they'd at least have something to drink. This was how we came to go into an Aldi. All I cared about getting there was wine so we could do the decanting thing that Simon and Cathy were doing. The prices were astoundingly cheap, with many wines costing only two or three euros. As for water, Gretchen and I guessed that the water would be fixed soon enough (we both hate the idea of buying water in a disposable plastic bottle). Kelly, though, has a temperament more geared towards peferring safe over sorry.
At lunch, our six-person crew sat at the frontmost port-side booth. The water still hadn't been fixed, and as a way of making us feel better about it, beer and wine were free. This caused much more drinking than usual, especially for a lunchtime (a time I myself haven't been drinking at all), indicating that even fairly wealthy people (the kind who can afford riverboat cruises) are much more likely to drink alcohol if it is free. I myself had two enormous pale German beers. They were some kind of lager and not really my thing, but they were fucking free! Foodwise, I've been really enjoying what the kitchen has been producing (much more so than on the Portugal cruise). Today at lunch they served a "stew" that amounted to a ball of rice with bokchoi and shitake mushrooms, and it was excellent, particularly with a few tiny pieces of ghost pepper.
This afternoon I didn't join the excursion to tour the massive Volkswagen plant. Instead I made myself some kratom tea and did a little light tinkering with my Networked Spelling Bee code, which I've been trying to make so that it handles disconnections from the internet more gracefully. (This came up because I've been trying to play Spelling Bee even when I don't have WiFi, and sometimes this has resulted in play on one device overwriting advances in play I've made on another.) I was out in the lounge working a little on this when an "ice cream party" commenced. (I would've used the term "ice cream party.") I wasn't particularly interested in the ice cream (which was vegan of course) but I was interested in coffee (which is offered at such times). I was joined by Kelly and Brian and, briefly, Gretchen. But then Dave, that guy Gretchen doesn't much like, joined us as well. He and I talked about solar technology, which is never much fun when the person I am talking to is a know-it-all who doesn't actually know all that much. But as I was talking about the solar setup at the cabin, I could show Brian and Dave my remote control system with all its fancy graphs and methods of turning circuits on and off. In so doing, I realized that the lack of a good way to page back through the graphs time-period-by-time-period was a real limitation to showing off its features.
At dinner, I decanted a bottle of red wine into an old empty bottle from among the wines that are stock and sold onboard. But when I got to dinner with this bottle, one of the waiter guys said it was unnecessary to bring wine, since the policy of offering free alcohol was continuing (even though the problem with the boat's water supply had been fixed). Over dinner, somehow the subject of Mad Magazine came up, with me mentioning the times I stayed in an off-grid farmhouse in rural Quebec and was delighted to find a big stack of old Mad Magazines in the closet. The Brits among us were familiar with Mad, but there were other similar and even crazier magazines in Britain, especially one called Viz that Simon and Brian started riffing references from. Viz apparently had none of the kid-friendly limitations of Mad, so there was, for example, a character with "unfeasibly large" testicles.
After dinner, we all went up to the lounge to participate in a raffle to benefit the members of the crew, which seemed like a good enough charity considering how terribly cruise employees tend to be payed. Cathy had bought a bunch of tickets for knick-knacks from the boat's gift shop (none of which had an appeal to me, though Gretchen was vaguely interested in a cork wallet). But somehow Cathy didn't win anything, while other people participating managed to win a couple things. Still, it was kind of fun to participate, especially since everyone was unusually intoxicated after drinking all the free alcohol that had been offered.
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The Volkswagen factory power plant, viewed from our cabin.
Click to enlarge.
A large landsnail on a wooded path on the south side of Wolfsburg. Unfortunately, he's sucked his eye stalks into his head.
Click to enlarge.
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