Places to Knit

The newest Secret Pal 10 contest is to report on strange knitting experiences and places to knit. I'm working on it.

Here I am knitting at the top of a slide in Bad Zwischenhan, a little resort town near Oldenburg. There's actually a beautiful blue sky, but that disappeared when I tried to correct backlighting. There isn't much to do in Bad Zwischenhan, but it's a great place to walk by the lake, bask in the sun, and knit.

I didn't go down the slide. It's not that warm yet.

My best strange knitting story isn't actually about knitting, and I regret that I don't have any pictures. All through college, I did needlework in class. I hate sitting still.

I had a wonderful old military history professor, Gunther Rothenberg. Professor Rothenberg was a World War II veteran (among other things), and an Old European in every sense. He'd stand up when women came into his office, and watch his language when he had female students. He was brilliant, and somewhat demanding. I once saw him throw a student out of class for reading the Exponent, the student newspaper, because he said that to imply it was more interesting than him was insulting. His last words, shouted down the hall, were "If I were you, Mister, I would DROP this class!"

He didn't mind my needlework - in fact, he specifically said "you can do whatever it is you do" when he was listing things that it was OK to do in class. (It was acceptable to sleep, or to read the New York Times...it was the choice of distraction that was insulting.) But, he specifically asked that I not knit. He said it made him nervous. Apparently he couldn't stop thinking of Madame Defarge. He wasn't a man I wanted to make nervous - there's a rumor that he once knocked out a campus Holocaust denier. So I didn't get to knit for my weird knitting story.

Bad Zwischenhan is full of old people. Some of them may even be World War II veterans, albeit for the other side. But none of them seemed to be made nervous by knitting. I took the sock out to show it a good time, and got nothing more than a few puzzled looks. So here's a more scenic picture of the sock overlooking the lake, and the slide.