Loraine Can Now Die Happy

We came, we saw, we met Tim Civeja.

For the last time on this trip, greetings from Saarbrucken, where I am no longer the most important guy in Loraine's life.  But you know what?  I'm okay with that, especially after she was able to meet her Saarbrucken football idol, the aforementioned Tim Civeja--

Actually, she did more than just meet him.  He spent 20 minutes talking to her (in flawless English because, you know, he's German and that's what they do), remembering an Instagram post she put up about him (because she tagged him in it), and even running back into the dressing room to grab some stuff he could sign for her--

We have a fair amount of experience dealing with celebrities, so we know how most of them act.  But not Tim.  Several times, we gave him an "out", a chance for him to leave, and several times he politely turned it down, because he said he was interested in speaking with Loraine.  When he finally DID leave, he invited her to continue the conversation on Instagram.  Most people with a little fame to their name don't do that, but Tim Civeja did.

And that's why, in the five hours since this happened, Loraine has not been able to stop smiling

8-)

Since the team didn't practice (and Loraine couldn't meet the new most important man in her life) until afternoon, we had the morning to atone for burning a bunch of gas Monday driving to three different countries to buy chocolate.  We did that by walking everywhere, including the part of Saarbrucken that holds the city's old castle.  The castle itself is big and elevated, but behind it were a flight of stairs that never seemed to end--

So we walked up the stairs, in the process probably burning off the calories from all the chocolate we've been buying, and were rewarded with views like this--

The whole neighborhood was kind of like Ridge Street in Marquette, elevated above everything and providing views that are second to none.  It was a cool place; once we were done, we took the stairs back down.

You can trust me on this--the stairs were a LOT easier to go down than they were to go up.

(That reminds me--someone left a comment on a Facebook post about one of these blogs asking if we eat all the chocolate we buy before we come home.  No, Renee, we don't.  If we ate all that chocolate we buy while we're here, we'd be doing nothing but climbing those stairs in an attempt not to gain 5,000 pounds in a week.  We bring them home and eat them gradually, so that we can at least have a fighting chance not to have a weight gain in the 3 or 4 figure range).

But, with that in mind, here's today's wall of chocolate--

While we were up at the top of Saarbrucken, I took this picture--

That is just one small section of the Willi Graf Ufer, a riverwalk that runs along the Saar, and has provided the backdrop for several of the pictures I've posted the past few days.  It's a gorgeous trail that has everything from playgrounds to ping-pong tables running along it.  It's named after Willi Graf, who was a member of the White Rose resistance movement during World War II.  If you've been reading these trip thingees since we began writing them, you know of our admiration for people like the Scholl siblings, or Chrisoph Probst, or Willi Graf, who was raised in Saarbrucken.

And since he's buried here, we decided another place we should walk was to pay his grave a visit.

German cemeteries aren't like American cemeteries; they are, in fact, somewhere dark and gothic--

But one of the things they do is to make it easy to find the final resting place of anyone important who's buried there, and the old cemetery in Saarbrucken is no exception--

In fact, all you need to do is turn the corner, and there you'll find his final resting place--

Complete with a monument to his short but vital life, brutally cut short by a vicious regime--

Loraine felt bad that we didn't bring anything, but then she remembered the words of Tony the Tour Guide when we visited Sophie Scholl's grave in Munich without any flowers--"the important thing is that you're here".

And we were indeed there.  Which made it kind of interesting and just a little freaky that soon afterwards, we came across this--

If you don't know anything about the White Rose group, I highly suggest you go down that rabbit hole when you have a few minutes.  You'll find a lot out there about it, because Germany, better than most countries, realizes what happens when authoritarians or authoritarian governments try to silence dissent or tries to make "the other"--someone who looks different or loves different or worships different--into an object of hate.

They do it because it's happened here , and they want to make sure it doesn't happen again.

That's about it for today.  I've been writing this for almost an hour, and the smile still hasn't left Loraine's face.  I, however, think that's one of the coolest things ever, because if anyone deserves to have a smile linger like that, it's her.

And just because I can, here's another shot of Loraine and the most important guy in her life--

Tomorrow, we attend one more practice of the team, I hope that Loraine doesn't decide to stay here permanently, and we hit the road to Frankfurt to begin our long journey home.  

So until then...

(jimkoskimqt@gmail.com)