GLUTTONY
I spent my first night in Heinrich and Elke’s house, slept well, and joined them for breakfast at 8:30 a.m.. And then I caught the bus to Celle at 9:10. It is so easy to get around in Germany. I made another video of the Saturday market, this time not swinging around. And then I walked through the streets making panorama shots of fachwerk houses.
The problem with panorama photographs, while they are immersive and give you the feeling of being right on the street with a view that encircles you, is that sometimes, not always, a moving person or a car, particularly if they are close, will be cut in half because of the way the camera stitches together a panoramic shot.
And since the streets were full of Saturday shoppers, this happened fairly often. But I took a lot of panoramas and enough will be all right.
The second drawback, and it is because of the tiny camera in the iPhone 15 and not a fault of the Vision Pro, is that the when you blow a photograph way up in order to become immersed within it, it will start to pixelate. The way around this is to have a higher resolution camera making the panoramas and videos and is probably what Apple is working on for the iPhone 16 along with the ability to make spatial still photographs.
I was happily taking photographs when I passed Schweine Schulze restaurant, Pig Schulze, where years ago I had a psychological collapse. For seven years I had been a vegetarian. Todd and Susie were both vegetarians. When I taught classes that included discussions of poverty and hunger it was clear that meat eating is immoral. You can feed many more people with vegetables than you can by first using the fields to grow fodder for cattle which you then eat. Cattle farming is inefficient farming. So I became a vegetarian.
But, while Susie can’t stand the taste of meat and is a vegetarian because she doesn’t like to eat dead animals, my love of meat didn’t disappear. It was seeing my brother in law, Volker, eat an Eisbein, leg of a pig, that broke my spirit and all my resolutions and turned me back into a meat eating sinner again. It was at Schweine Schulze that I joined him in eating an Eisbein. I tried to get back on the vegetarian track, but I was a broken man, I couldn’t. I have been a meateater ever since. I know, I am complicit in the destruction of the Amazon forests to make more land for growing beef, I am complicit in the extreme water shortage in the Western United States where water goes to feed cattle, not people.
And today when I walked by Schweine Schulze, knowing that I had promised Elke that I would be back for lunch, something pressed me through the door. I was the only person there. I ordered an Eisbein in memory of my brother in law Volker and as recognition that I was a sinner with no way out. I didn’t eat much of it, but I couldn’t resist.
The red meat encased in fat was delicious along with the roasted potatoes and sauerkraut. It was heavenly. But I tore myself away, asking them to pack the remainder carefully, and got on the bus and came back to a wonderful meal that Elke had made. Heinrich loves Spargel, German white asparagus, and Elke was making him the first Spargel of the season, boiled until it was tender and covered with melted butter. We also had boiled potatoes and a large piece of veal cutlet with peanut/banana ice cream covered with blueberries and slathered in Eierlikör for desert.
After two delicious lunches it was all I could do to drag myself upstairs and to take a nap.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 