In Focus

Germany Chick

Probably the most important part of being a Chick is being balanced; not to consume yourself with the market. I know it can get addicting. Sometimes I find myself just plunking down on the couch and watching CNBC for hours. It's my own personal Survivor series... everyday. This past week I flew to Germany with my family and started to go through "Stock Market" withdrawals. To hook up my laptop to the Internet was going to cost me a buck a minute and my CNBC market coverage was on at the wrong hour. I started to shake. Not even the German beer was going to get me through the depression. It was when my daughter asked me if I could please leave the hotel room and take her swimming that I realized that I had crossed the line from being a Chick to being a Wall Street Suit. I had forgotten how to balance. I had forgotten that my investments are only a small part of the whole big Chick picture and that my family should be the biggest slice of the life pie. Someone should have slapped me. You don't go to Germany to watch the S&P 500. Thank goodness I figured this out when I still had time left to sightsee.

Do you want to hear about the rest of the trip? You see, you too need a little breather in the middle of a Chick's Eye View week. We've been bringing you Chicks' Dozens, company numbers and investment topics for the past eight months, so I thought I'd throw in a little bit of the Chickiness we forgot about. The bigger slice.

We are in Cologne, Germany as part of the World Championships of Hockey. My husband is playing for Team USA. Every year in the spring, the tournament is held in a different country. Last year we went to St. Petersburg, Russia. The hockey arena here in Cologne is brand spankin' new and holds 18,500 people. We beat the Finnish team 4-1 and I swear they had 18,000 fans to our 26 cheering Americans. I did get reprimanded for putting my feet on the seat in front of me. Woops. Chalk it up to being a rude American. To see how Team USA is doing in the tournament, check out the International Ice World Championship Web site.

The city of Cologne sits on the Rhine River. Their most famous landmark is the Cologne Cathedral. They started building the church in 313. Uh-huh... 313. Then in 1248, the larger version began and continued until 1560 when the money ran out. It sounds like a long time, but you should see the building! It's huge. One square foot must have taken 10 years. The detail in the columns, the arches and the floors are unexplainable. It would be like trying to do a mosaic puzzle over a football field when your pieces are smaller than a centimeter each. The church holds 40,000 people. If you looked at every pane of the stained glass windows, you'd be there for a week. There are two towers that mirror each other and are said to be the trademark of Cologne. The Twin Towers. Each tower is 160 meters high. It's a fifteen-minute trek up the stairs. Seriously, the whole cathedral looks better than something out of a Disney movie. Even Walt couldn't have dreamt up such a site.

Then on March 2, 1945 we bombed Germany. Fourteen bombs reduced the city of Cologne to rubble. This is the freakiest part about walking around the town, knowing that 60 years ago, there was nothing here. Before the war, 800,000 people lived in Cologne. After the war, 40,000 people remained. Today there are about a million. American troops were instructed not to bomb the church in their raids, but you can see portions of shrapnel in the walls of the church. Again, totally freaky for the girl from Minnesota who doesn't know much about history, nor ever really felt it.

Inside the church is the Shrine of Three Kings. It was this part that scared my three year old daughter. We lit a candle up on the altar for her grandmother and walked over to the shrine area. There is a wooden box containing the relics of the three kings and off to the side are bodies enclosed in glass tombs. (Men sure were short in those days.) Avery was not at all impressed with the dead people, no matter how beautiful the gold box with jewels was.

Then as part of being a total Germany Chick, I brought my kids for more sightseeing. We took a bus about an hour south to a place called Nurburgring. It totally cracked me up... almost literally. Nurburgring is a Grand Prix racetrack for anyone to use. For fourteen US dollars you can take your car or motorcycle on the track and go as fast as you want. Like as fast as your car can go, or as fast as your stomach can take. Husbands and wives come, with motorcycles on a trailer behind their car, unload them, race each other all morning, go up to the chalet for lunch, and then, race again. You should see the cars! There are BMWs, Porshes, and Lamborghinis. Not one to miss an experience, I hired a driver to whiz us around the 15-mile track. Mind you, nobody has to have any sort of credentials to drive the track... and you don't even have to take a breathalyzer. The people are absolutely crazy! The driver put us in his little BMW, strapped us in (like that would really save us), and off we went. When the speedometer hit 210 kilometers per hour, I started asking questions. How long had he been driving? Did he have a problem with alcohol? Did he really have to tell us how many cars crash every day? Do you really have to pass all of these other cars? WATCH OUT FOR THAT MOTORCYCLE!! Crazy crazy crazy! I saw an $80,000 Porsche with the back end completely smashed in. Get this, every weekend Germans gather at the racetrack, bring their barbecue grills, some beverages, and watch the crashes on the course. Tailgating has a whole new meaning. Yes, people die.

Did I say crazy??

Since I'm at my 1,000-word limit, I won't go into the shopping here. The racetrack was probably safer, since my credit card is doing some serious damage. Cologne has some hip and artsy shops. And... the best part... a shoe store on every corner! I'm going to bring the kids out right now and call it a math study day. We're going to convert German Marks to US dollars!