Detroit Free Press Fails World Cup

Coverage continues to be dismal. The papers disregard for the biggest world sporting event is reflective of attitudes in Michigan overall. This state hasn’t been able to evolve and maintains its dinosaur stance even with glaring problems of unemployment, massive business closedowns, bankruptcy of the car companies, major public school problems, and loss of population.
Oh wait! These problems result FROM years of a stick-your-head-in-the-ground attitude. They don’t need to change anything. Everything is just fine, right?
There is a large immigrant population, probably a lot of football fans among them. At the bar last week there was a table full of Mexicans cheering on their team. Potential subscribers to the Free Press if they chose to provide some decent coverage.
This rant goes back a lot of years. When I came back from Europe in the 1970′s I was eager to follow Detroit’s new team, The Detroit Wheels. these were the heady days of bringing in Franz Beckenbauer and Pele to attract interest in world football (ugh, soccer). I went to games at the Silverdome. Then I tried to keep up with my team via news media. Absolutely no coverage – not in the newspapers, not on television. I had absolutely no way to find out how they were doing. Nobody bothered to even list the scores anywhere. The promoters failed to get media to buy in if only to post the scores somewhere.
My interest waned. It had to.
So here we go again. You can’t fight globalization. Oh you can and you end up like Michigan – an industrial wasteland whose remaining college graduates increasingly leave the state for opportunity.

Real Bagel – Not Synthetic

I finally found it! A bagel shop in western Metro Detroit with real bagels! Detroit Bagel on Middlebelt at Seven Mile has the genuine chewy, hard yet rubbery crust. Reminds me of the 1970′s when I went to a bagel place on Seven Mile at Evergreen. It was a converted storefront establishment. The commercial districts around Detroit were already in decline.
I remember a conveyor belt along which the bagels travelled from some mysterious backroom place. Saturday mornings I’d drive over to get bagels for the family. We could still afford to buy lox back then, and it was just lox, not smoked salmon, or wild caught salmon, or marinated salmon. Just lox. (Lox isn’t even an acceptable word in the Worpress dictionary!) A couple of months ago I was talking to young adults in Kalamazoo who didn’t know what lox was. And they weren’t even Christian Reformed people who grew up in an insulated environment.
Those cake like things that sell for bagels at the franchise chain places have ruined bagels. They put the good Jewish shops out of business. Is it better to have poorer quality bagels with widespread availability, or made an effort to keep good quality places in business?
And what’s with all the stupid flavored cream cheeses? It’s not cream cheese any more. Do people even know that cream cheese is not sweet?
This whole industrialization of food makes all foods tastes more alike in many respects and loses their unique qualities. We almost can’t handle fresh food any more; the taste is too strong. It’s like with good artisan cheese – I don’t eat as much because the flavor is more pungent. If you eat those softer mass-produced products you have to eat more to have taste satisfaction.

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about Detroit Metro – but it is a real downer to the start of a trip for which we have such great anticipation.
So why am I putting myself through this torture of airports and cramped airplanes, countless waits, running for shuttles, travel with an elderly mother, crammed into uncomfortable and inhumanely tight seats risking blood clots, airborne diseases and other unanticipated horrors? I am taking my mother back home, to see a place of such influence on her life, where she spent her youth.
Mother is Edith Klemm, née Brumpreiksch. Home is a place she last saw 57 years ago. She was fleeing the country with her sister, escaping in front of rapidly advancing enemy Russian troops. Home is the cities of Heydekrug and Grabuppen in Memelland, East Prussia.
None of us could ever have even dreamed that it was even remotely possible to visit Memelland. I would have paid closer attention when the family talked about the place, but it was so remote and not like a real place I could actually visit, say like Hamburg or Berlin. We could visit our relatives in the east so I knew a bit about that area. And we accepted as fact that our relatives in the east side were stuck, never to be able to travel out of their country west, to visit places they dreamed of. Now, in such a short time everything changed, history overturned and the last fifty years erased, an entire ideology made obsolete overnight. No more tense border crossings, guard dogs, searches for decadent western printed matter, costly visa applications, absurd registration formalities upon entry and exit. No more paranoid regimes. We don’t have to exchange western money for each day we stay in the workers paradise. It all sounds so ridiculous so many

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remotely edible. Finally, in the maze we did find something suitable, and I rushed forward to wake up a staff person. The rush was short-lived - they were out of it! At the other fast foods places the staff was so slovenly dressed in grimy uniforms I was too disgusted to even bring myself to try to get clarification of the meager offerings. We finally settled on a beverage. And there we sat a the tiny table for two, among the hoards shuffling past, dragging untied shoelaces of oversized athletic shoes, pants hanging dangerously low, not a good haircut in sight. I had a flashback to a George Romero film where zombies trudge through the mall. In all my traveling over the years I’ve rarely had a good food experience at any U.S. airport. No point talking about train or bus stations (once briefly during my student days) Wait, Union Station in Washington D.C. did have some nice restaurants in their newly remodeled version, so maybe there is hope. It is most appalling when coming back from Europe; even street vendors have better offerings than U.S. airports. Victoria Train Station in London has amazing restaurants with great food! So what’s the deal? Some would say that the food isn’t any better in the U.S. even when you get out of the airport. Hmmm. That could be; I pack a cooler when I go on road trips and most my food stops are at grocery stores. But then I have the dogs waiting in the vehicle and am not suitably for more than a Flying J truck stop. Turns out it was fortunate we didn’t eat especially when we become aware of the restroom situation in the airport terminal. The bathroom is so filthy as to be unusable. First time I ever actually wanted to get on the plane in order to use the restroom. Mom and I are both eager to board our flight just to escape this purgatory. Enough ranting

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Before the outward-bound journey was over, we’d see four airports and pass through two additional countries to get to our destination. Seeing these airports in close succession makes the differences all the more striking. At least time would work in our favor, leaving in the afternoon and arriving in Lithuania late in the evening so we could go to bed before having to set out in a foreign land.
Living in Michigan it made sense to fly out of Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Chicago’s O’Hare would be about the same distance, but a lot more traffic getting there and the connections were no better. Metro is under construction once again, so maneuvering through the airport proved a greater challenge than usual. The airport was being totally overhauled with construction sites blocking much of the airport. We spared our relatives having to come see us off; none of them wanted to come on the trip. Neither my sister nor any of my nieces are interested in travel to Europe, and especially not Germany or our relatives.
Trying to eat at the airport proved a major challenge. A vegetarian, I pretty much have lost interest eating in most places, but these airport options set new lows to even find any edible food. We arrived with plenty of time and hoped to fill the time taking it easy and eating something nice. We will be totally immobile for an entire day so didn’t need to make ourselves feel any more bloated.
I recall that Detroit got an award for having the fattest population. I now know why. Just looking at the fast food menus posted above counters where sullen staff stood as immobile as mounds of lard draped in cheap polyester, it was enough to clog our arteries and raise blood sugar levels. Long lines of people stood zombie like for the high corn syrup and cholesterol offerings. We searched among the construction chaos for anything