On the road to Otto Bock. [written Monday, January 9]

We’re traveling to the Otto Bock manufacturing plant today. It’s a train and a bus ride away from Berlin to get to Duderstadt. We’re currently on the bus driving through the German countryside, flanked on either side by stick-straight trees—birches, oaks, firs—that seem to shoot for the sky despite the steep climb of the hills. The hills, the hills, coated with layers of red decaying foliage, ferns hugging the base of the trees and the moss-covered boulders as they peer out here and there like ancient ruins, echoing the solemnity of the grey sky and the quiet countryside. True beauty, true Europe, quiet and smaller somehow. Despite the great expanse of land, the gingerbread houses with their wooden trims and there tiled sloping rooves simply dot the land, as unobtrusively as their matchbox cars that scuttle around like little bugs, hurrying out of site. It’s so green here, green and grey, sad and beautiful. I like the gloom; it’s somehow calming, somehow peaceful, and yet somehow subdued, like the hush that falls over the sea after a storm, purposefully masking the memories of its violent and tumultuous past. End. We’re almost there.