Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai

In the wonderfully beautiful month of May, as all the buds were leaping out [my translation of Heinrich Heine] I went for a holiday in Germany. My original plan was a road trip in a German car through Germany to visit friends there when the temperature is much cooler than in Morocco. The road trip part of the plan was only partly successful because of repeated problems with the car rental company; I prefer not to elaborate on that here. There was a heat wave on the Northern Atlantic so it was also over 30°C in Germany that week, though still 10°C cooler than in Meknès.

On the other hand, I did get to visit a total of 11 friends in 7 different places. They were friends I had made from different periods of my life, from my Masters in public rural administration in Paris in 1999, working together at ILRI in 2014, to trekking through China, studying Chinese agriculture or singing together in Beijing during the past five years.

My first stop was the old city of Aachen from which I crossed the border into the Netherlands to the equally historical city of Maastricht. During the next three days at the historical centre of the European Union project, my mobile phone and I were baffled by my crossing borders incessantly and having to change language between Dutch, French and German to speak with the locals. English was the easy default language to fall back to if I could not understand them or make myself understood.

And then I started my German road trip. From Aachen, I drove to Berlin, Postdam, then back Southwest to Ingelheim on the Rhine and finally South to the Swabian Alb region and Stuttgart. All this over seven days. My highlights from this trip were:

• Catching up with old friends, some of whom I had not seen in more than 14 years;
• Driving on the German Autobahn at more than 160 km/h with an odd sensation of both levitation and a constant state of intense awareness to slower cars in front and even faster cars zooming in from behind;
• Eating seasonal white asparagus cooked in various forms;
• The sunny outdoors trekking and biking;
• The typical architecture of these old Northern European cities in the sunset.

Also memorable was the Music Night festival in the small Swabian village of Kirchheim under Teck. The contrast between thumping rock bands, clapping and headbanging audience, cobblestoned streets and half-timbered houses was striking. Among the many rock acts on show, I particularly enjoyed the country music sounds of Johnny Trouble and his band, the easy tunes and harmonies by looping one-man-band artist Ricky Vicente, the mindboggling energy and eclectic repertoire of Orangefuel, and the electrifying unstoppable rock’n roll by The BangBags.

Dichterliebe, Robert Schumann
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Christoph Eschenbach