Practice, Practice

In just a few weeks we're scheduled for a bike tour from Görlitz to Frankfurt an der Oder.  About 170K in 6 days, so very doable. In fact, not really challenging since it's mostly flat.  But the winter was bad and I had a couple of little setbacks and so I've been trying to get into shape.  We've been biking more lately, and yesterday we biked some more.  Good for us/me!

The morning paper inspired us - a museum with both permanent and alternating exhibitions and interestingly in a psychiatric hospital.  Ohhh,  do we want to go there? Of course we do!

It has been windy and even stormy here in north Germany.  In fact, there were five reported tornadoes yesterday.  Good grief global warming.  And it is still windy, but the weather prediction was for sun and warm.  We checked out the wind and decided that going there by train and biking home was the thing to do.  We were right, of course.

On the way, we biked through a cemetery. Sounds a bit on the gruesome side, but they are really quite lovely in many ways, these cemeterys.  In this one, there was a statue constellation on the theme of grief that was quite moving.

On to the hospital. Wow. If I had to be hospitalized for my head, this would not be a bad place to be, I think, though I hope I never have to know that.  The grounds are green and spacious. And on such a day as today, I would hope inspiringly uplifting.

All of the hospitals in Bremen have regular art exhibits in their public spaces. OK, but one doesn't often go to hospitals to look at art.  And here at Bremen Ost, the psychiatric center, it's a bit different.  There's history and not all of it good, but worth recording and worth remembering and recognizing.

The current exhibit has to do with borders.

The art was quite interesting. Of course, I thought first of the Berlin Wall, but there were so many walls, and borders, that the artists considered.  Among them, the border between Mexico and the United States.

The permanent exhibit upstairs was about the hospital and its history.  Of course the history of the treatment of people with mental illness is fraught.

It also brought to fore memories of my nursing training at FSU, a semester at the state hospital in Chattahoochee.  What a nightmare for so many patients, for families, for staff, for nursing students.  "Housing" for the mentally ill was a horror.

So, the restraints, the beds with straps, the straight jackets were not pleasant reminders of my "education" or how folks with mental health disease were treated not so very long ago.  Frankly, I had to leave.

Breathe out. Breathe in.

We took a break.

And then started home. The wind was our friend!  My little bike computer had us going between 18 and  22 kph the whole way and getting home was a breeze.

Our north German landscape might seem a bit boring to some of you, so flat.  But these fields of grain, the pastures, the vistas have become what calms and soothes.  I love biking these ways.