Lounging in Paradise

My friends, I have seen Paradise! It's a long grueling climb upwards, but once you finally plop down at the top and wipe the sweat off your forehead, the view is simply incredible.

And that's just the secret little place we found in Baden-Baden yesterday.

The real purpose of the day trip was to see an exhibition of a group of artists known as "The Blue Rider" who stirred up the art scene around 1910 with their depictions of natural settings in vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes. However, I was also eager to visit the town from which my German ancestors came (and fulfill many family members' requests to make such a visit).

After some time at the museum and a quick bite to eat, I explored the town a bit with Jonathon, a friend who recently moved up into my class and hails from Guernsey, a little island in the English Channel. Because he teaches Latin and ancient Greek, his inherent interest in ancient cultures brought us to the centuries-old ruins of the city's Roman baths. ("Baden" means "baths"in German, and even today many tourists visit solely for the unique and refreshing cleansing experience.) Johnathon was even able to helpfully clarify the verbose explanations on the audioguides that we received with our museum tickets, and as a result, I actually learned quite a bit about the technical and social sides of how the baths worked so long ago - even today, the ancient Romans never fail to impress with their forward thinking.

After much wandering through all these portals of history and culture, we took a mental break in a Biergarten, complete with waiters in full lederhosen! Jean-François (Quebec) and Laia (Spain), two other friendly faces from our class, happened to come looking for a refreshing drink not long after we had sat down, and naturally we took the opportunity to talk about our town adventures in our rudimentary German. We even snatched a town map off another table, with which Jean-François pointed out a path called "der Paradies" and encouraged us to see where it led.


In doing so, Jonathon and I found ourselves maneuvering up steep narrow streets surrounded by these grand white Bauhaus-style homes and lots of greenery. The higher we climbed, the more we could begin to discern a series of fountains dividing another set of steps to climb. With so many steps and the occasional leveling off for some landscaping, the throbbing heat made it easy to question what lay at the top of this pseudo-Elysium.

And even though the initial sight of a boring gravel plane with a little playground and a few dingy benches wasn't exactly what I had envisioned for the summit, a sense of fulfillment still rushed in with the mountain-framed view and the invigorating warmth of the sun on our faces.Without the obligation of a meeting time and a train ride back, I quite possibly could have lolled in that Paradise sun forever.