Easter in Pinnow

Pinnow turned out to be a really small village with just a few dozen houses. It's not a very lively village. Around half of the houses are owned by Berliners as weekend houses. Brandenburg, the equivalent of a state in Germany, has the same problem as Iowa in that all of the young people are moving away because there aren't enough jobs. The problem in Brandenburg though stems more from the problems of re-unification than a movement away from agriculture.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was a mass migration from East Germany to the West. Because of this the price of real estate plummeted in the short term and many people from the West bought land in the East. Wolfgang and Linda bought their house at this time although it hadn't been lived in for a long time before they bought it. They worked a couple of years on the weekends to renovate it into a livable house.

It's a cozy house with fachwerk construction and a very steeply sloping roof. The landscape was in fact similar to Minnesota with lots of lakes and gently rolling hills. Because of the rolling hills it's called a feminine landscape in German. One day we took a walk through the forest and was struck once again by the degree of human manipulation of nature.

All of the trees in the forest were planted in a grid. It was planted like a field of corn. There was no place that hadn't been planned and just allowed to be wild. It was no different than a big garden and I didn't have the feeling I was walking through the forest but just a tree farm. In Colorado sometimes when you go off the trail you have the feeling that maybe no one has stood where you're standing for five hundred years, maybe never. Such a feeling of discovery is impossible to have here.