At 2am, after a 90 minute flight, a 90 minute train ride (of which the connecting train left 45 minutes late – so much for German efficiency!) and a 45 minute car ride I arrived in Doberlug-Kirchhain. A small town, or a large village, it is where Andrea calls home and where I was to spend 6 days and get to finally meet her family.
Unsure what to expect, the next day I quickly got to know the local area: there is a main high street with cobbled streets and nice buildings particularly around the main square which has a solitary café providing outdoor seating. There are few shops or buildings of note, but those that are in Kirchhain (Doberlug is the other side of the train tracks 2 km away) give a good representation of life in rural Eastern Germany: a few bakeries providing the bread fix that Germans need for breakfast and dinner, a few butchers providing the meat fix, a small games room for gambling and drinking as well as around 4 or 5 pubs of which only 1 is actually welcoming (with a nice beer garden too), a couple of cafés selling doner kebabs (a german institution thanks to the Turkish immigrants), a bank, a town hall, a bicycle shop (most people cycle around the town as it is small), a financial services shop (actually a self-employed guy who opens up his house and puts up lots of signs and a small information booth outside), a barber and a dress-maker amongst other things.
In addition, there are 3 supermarkets which also have bakeries and butcheries thus making life tough for the local independents, and 3 discount stores: one for clothes, one for household goods and one that sells all sorts (basically anything under 5 euros). Surrounding the town are fields, fields and more fields. Dotted between the fields are other small villages, but only a couple of towns bigger than Doberlug-Kirchhain of any note within 20 km, and wind turbines. In fact there are a lot of wind turbines and even a fair number of houses with roofs covered in solar panels.
Most people own their own fairly large house, which they would have built once upon a time, though a three bedroom detached house with large garden goes for about 50,000 euros here which is a sign of the lack of demand to live in the area. Once children leave the local schools they rarely return leaving most of the population in the latter end of their lives but for those that are here it is a nice, quiet, convenient life.
The Kirchhain church traces its beginnings back over 400 years whilst in Doberlug there is a castle and historic town centre with several functional shops and a few others such as a jeweler. The town clearly has history and there is culture too in some respects – a nearby village, Lindena had its annual summer festival when we were there. Unfortunately it rained most of the night. In fact both Doberlug and Kirchhain have a restaurant specializing in ice creams. I had not realized the germans liked their fancy ice creams so much!
My first few days were spent in the local area checking out the back streets and countryside (particularly the lakes nearby from disused coal pits that were flooded) and finding one of the pubs with a nice beer garden. We also prepared for the "polter abend" which took place on the Saturday night with family and friends. It is a traditional german pre-wedding party whereby guests bring old crockery to smash when they arrive. Other than that it was really just a good old BBQ and the weather managed to hold up.
On one day Andrea and I drove to a fairly famous area only an hour away called the Spreewald, named after the river Spree which runs through here (it also runs through Berlin 100km away). What makes the area a tourist hotspot is the hundreds of rivers and the villages built alongside them which are very pretty. Although fairly touristy (most of the houses actually along the rivers are for rent as holiday homes since it is not that convenient if you don't have road access, which some do not) it is pretty and kayaking around was fun, despite the intermittent rain. We even had to operate a lock ourselves, and pull our kayaks along some rollers here and there whilst trying to navigate around the rivers and avoid sluices (the signage was awful).
Another day, along with her parents, we went to visit one of the largest pieces of mining machinery in the world, called an F60, which is basically a massive horizontal crane with wheels under both ends so it could roll along on top of the coal pit, scooping up the earth on top of the coal, transporting it to the other end of the pit and dumping it. The length of the crane is longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall and it was a very interesting couple of hours walking through the machine and learning how it works and the history of coal mining in the area. The machine has been disused since 1992 after reunification led to a change of energy policy and a lack of demand for the type of coal that was in the pit. A bit of a shame for the machine which had only been built a couple of years earlier!
Other highlights of time in the countryside was a wonderful run through the back streets when there was blue sky, visits to local bakeries (as well as the ice cream shops), walking the dog, eating some german food (including plinzer, which are basically pancakes with sugar and butter on top, but are eaten as a main meal) and trying to speak some German!
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