May 24^th.

Landed in Germany. Again an easy flight and a gentle landing. Nuernberg: a cool, cloudy afternoon. We leave the plane, and with it the last piece of the Mediterranean world behind us. The houses feel so square in Germany and the street do look clean. Well, I am in a small town of 20.000 mostly middle inhabitants, no ugly high risers with sad little dirt playgrounds. Even our tallest high riser of 8 floors has a green area and playgrounds.

Herzogenaurach, the city of Puma and Adidas. 20 minutes by car to the University City of Erlangen or Nuernberg. A thriving place to be.

An interesting history though: once the seat of Earls (Herzog) at the little river of the Aurach, then a trading place for fabrics, later for shoes. Expanded after World War II with the migrations from Silesia and areas that Germany had to give back to Poland. Until today, the city has been absorbing refugees. In my childhood we had projects to meet people from Romania and Poland, who left the then communist regimes there as persons of German heritage. They came to our Puma and Adidas and Schaeffler town and here they were the folks from East Europe. I do recall collecting clothes for them and doing interviews and visits with them. Today the refugees come from Somalia and Syria. They stay in a school and then in private apartments. Herzogenaurach is proud to support the refuges with volunteers. The town is also proud of its partnerships with Kaya/Burkina Faso, where very lively cultural exchanges are organized and even a school in Kaya was built as a summer project by a team of students from Kaya and Herzogenaurach. My brother and sister were there and family contact remain to the present day. In my youth this was not so easy.

My parents and we three children came here in 1974. They have stayed since. Slowly, we became the strangers that integrated. My parents have many contacts and a few friends. I grew up here in my high school time in a town that did not have a cinema yet and the bus to the next town took an hour. There was no bus connection after 9pm. So I was very active here. I left when I was 18. Today I do walk through the streets and look at the folks that are my age and think I should know them. But I don’t. I enjoy strolling through the beautiful nature with a school friend and with a former teacher – age difference shrink with years. My parents have a garden full of flowers. I am here to spend time with my parents who struggle with health and depression. I cannot change anything but hopefully add some benign moments into the struggle to keep the head above water…