>Shortly after I moved to Germany way back in mumble mumble, I showed a girl I went to school with a map of where I was living.

“What’s all the green stuff?” she asked.

“Dark’s forest, light’s countryside” I said.

“Oh” she said “Forests.”

Brief pause.

“I always thought Germany was like all INDUSTRIAL…”

We’re 10 minutes out of Mainz, capital of the Palatinate, 20 minutes from Wiesbaden, capital of Hessen, 23 minutes from the 2nd largest airport in Europe and 30 minutes from the HQ of the European Central Bank.

And we can see it all, too.

But we’re only 2 minutes walk from scenes like this – a leash (had to look that one up..) trying to maintain a safe distance from people out for a walk.

And there’s more.

Blue jay sat on the fence this morning, we used to have loads of squirrels, then a colony of owls in the birches, subsequently a marked reduction in the squirrel population which is slowly recovering, foxes in the copses in the motorway cloverleaves plus a whole lot of very slow moving flat furry things that live on the main roads.

Plus magpies, one of which stole my bike.

And too many bloody pigeons.

Tags: mainz, leash of dear, Klein-Winternheim, nature

04 Mar This entry was published on 4 March, 2008 at 08:21. It’s filed under Mainz, Nature and tagged Klein-Winternheim. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.