Dispatch from the Ore Mountains

Over the first two weeks of September, we are being visited by Denise's parents, Guy and Anita and her aunt and uncle, Rosie and Butch. We have had a great time checking out the area around our place in Jena, but now it is time to hit the road for our tour of the former Eastern Bloc.



Day One of the Akob-Profili visit adventure extravaganza, and I am currently sitting in the small town of Seiffen in the easternmost part of Germany, right on the Czech border in an area called the Erzgebirge, or directly translated, the Ore Mountains. People mined metals (iron, copper, cobalt, silver, tin) here starting about 700 years ago continued until the mines all closed some 150 years ago. Given Denise's chosen profession, working with microbes that help clean up uranium wastes, this part of the world is particularly interesting. In a nearby town on the Czech side, Joachimsthal, the pitchblende (uranium ore) was mined in which Marie Curie discovered the element radium, which eventually won her the Nobel Prize. This place, which was turned into a spa where people could experience the wonderful "healing power" of radioactive materials, used to be the only known source of Uranium in the world and was turned into a large, forced-labor mine during the Soviet era to produce the Uranium for the USSR's nuclear weapons arsenal.



This is not the real reason we are here though. We are here because this is the world's capital for wooden Christmas toys (nutcrackers, smokers, pyramids, candle arches, etc.). There are more stores here filled with neat wooden stuff than you can shake a stick at. The old mining towns, after the ore went dry in the 1800's, made this their primary industry.



During the GDR (East Germany) times, this was the primary export of not only this area, but the GDR in general. Now you can find this stuff all over the world and particularly in the German Christmas Markets. It is very interesting seeing all this stuff made and knowing that it is all within a few hours of our place in Germany. More tomorrow, and then we head to Prague.