Die Katze Auf Dem Heissen Blechdach

Our Thanksgiving trip to Germany begins in less than a week, and Joshua and I are getting increasingly excited, as are my parents and my middle brother.

Josh and I are already getting our things ready, and right now we are trying to decide what books to take with us to read on the airplane.

My middle brother will fly from Denver to Minneapolis, and join us at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport for the remainder of the journey. All five of us will fly nonstop from MSP to Amsterdam on Northwest, and from there on to Hamburg via Lufthansa. On the main leg of the trip, Josh and my brother and I will sit together, and my parents will sit together a few rows away from us.

We have added some new items to our Hamburg itinerary. We will visit the Hamburg Bunker Museum, a World War II bomb shelter now open as a museum. We will also view the exteriors of the two giant Hamburg flak towers erected during World War II. One flak tower has been turned into an apartment building, and the other is in disuse. Neither, of course, is open to the public for interior viewings.

We will also visit the Johannes Brahms Museum. Brahms was a native of Hamburg, and North German Protestant rectitude is one important component to be heard in all of his music, as is the color of the dark but dramatic Baltic sky.

We are trying to decide whether we would enjoy attending a performance of "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" in German, performed by one of the two large state-supported theaters in Hamburg. Josh and I think it might be interesting to see "Die Katze Auf Dem Heissen Blechdach", and my mother is moderately intrigued by the idea, but my Dad and my brother are not keen on the idea at all. Personally, I would like to hear Big Daddy (who remains "Big Daddy" in the German translation) offer his "odor of mendacity" speech in German, but no one else in the family seems to be quite as enthused as I am about this particular point.