Untitled Page 96

4.1.60
Dear Folks,

Since I'm in Deutschland I may as well write the date the way the Germans
would. Let's see, last time I wrote was just before New Years Eve. I think.
That seems like weeks ago, so much has been crammed into the last 4 days.

New Years Eve was a fine time. We had a little party here on the Burg at
9 pm. - hot wine, sweet rolls, balloons, dancing, singing German folk songs,
etc. Then just before midnight Dr. Boerner (the resident director, a native
of Germany, recently married to one of the girls from Group II, a year before us)
told us of the German traditions in celebrating Christmas and New Years.
We lit the candles on the Christmas tree and sang Auld Lang Syne! Then a
few minutes before midnight we went outside for a fireworks show. Our little
show up here high on a hill was duplicated in each of the towns in the
Remstal (Rems valley) below simultaneously, the night exploding every
few seconds with a new flash of color. After midnight passed in this colorful
fashion we walked together (about 10-15 of us) down the hill to Beutelsbach, and
went directly to the "Rose" a local (one of 9 in a town of 3100) bier haus - restaurant.
The place was crowded (with several other Stanford students also in the
crowd) with people singing, cheering, talking, drinking. Free Glühwein (hot
red wine, literally "glow wine") was served to everyone and many also bought
bottles of Sauterne and white wines. I sat with one of the Stanford girls
at a table filled otherwise by young Germans (18-20 years old), who were drinking
for the most part pretty heavily (they can, however, consume much more without
showing it, having built a tolerance since birth), joking loudly with each other,
etc. - generally fairly rowdy (though not really so for such a setting).
We sat for about 2 hours talking mainly with a quiet young fellow next
to us, who seemed more sober than some of the rest (He later remarked that
he had during the evening consumed more than 2 liters - over 2 quarts of wine!) He
was quite interested, and helped us with our halting German. His family
makes fine boxes (a word which we finally understood by having him look it
up in my German-English dictionary) of some kind. Most of the fellows were
not students still, but apprentices, but not apprentices at trades. Here the
young men serve apprenticeships for the semi-professional jobs; for example
one boy I knew is (at 18) an apprentice in architecture - we talked a little
about such people as Frank Lloyd Wright and Diego Rivera, and he seemed
to be fairly familiar with the names and some of their ideas. So he is more
the a draftsman, certainly. This is obviously quite different from the