101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [42]
LISA MARGONELLI is the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.
Chapter 64
An Island off Germany’s East Coast, January 16, 1362
Imagine the scene: you’re a German farmer in the mid-1300s, diligently tending your livestock in your field on the island of Strand. In the distance you can see the buildings of Rungholt, Strand’s main port, and beyond that the North Sea. You’re working hard but you’re happy—your wife’s pregnant again, and your youngest sons are just old enough to start helping out on the farm. You take a moment’s break to gaze out into the distance, giving thanks for all that is good, and that’s when you realize that something is not right. The clouds are dark and rushing toward you. The wind is screaming. Your rudimentary hoe is blown out of your hands just as the sky erupts into pelting, horizontal rain. You try to run to shelter, but you never make it. The storm is too strong. The sea rises up and enormous waves crash over the island. You, your family, and your entire community are killed.
No, it’s not the apocalypse. It’s the Grote Mandrenke, Low Saxon for “the Great Man-Drowning”—a massive cyclonic windstorm that hit the northern European coast on January 16, 1362. The mandrenke was so grote that it killed at least twenty-five thousand people, destroyed some sixty Danish parishes, sank the entire city of Rungholt, and smashed the German coast into islands. Not bad for a day’s work—and not a good day to have been there.
Chapter 65
Fucking, Austria
In 2004, the residents of the small Austrian town of Fucking took a vote on whether to change their village’s name. Our town can’t be mentioned on international television, argued the proponents of a switch. And besides, it wouldn’t be the first time a group of people abandoned what they considered an embarrassing moniker: the Canadian village of Gayside is now known as Baytona.
But the good people of Fucking decided that no, they did not want to change the name. They were proud of their home, this hamlet of just over one hundred people, founded in 1070 and named after a man named Focko. Besides, a good part of their annual GDP came from T-shirt sales.
There was one problem, however: the town’s road signs. Long considered tempting trophies by immature tourists, they have been stolen more times than the town’s budget could afford. So Fucking’s leaders came up with a plan. They commissioned new signs, bolted to steel posts that were embedded in a concrete block—a creation so sturdy that according to Fucking’s mayor, it would take all night to steal. And in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, they decided to address another local nuisance at the same time: speeding. So right below the town name they hung a different placard that says, BITTE, NICHT SO SCHNELL, accompanied by a picture of two cartoon children.
“Fucking,” the signs now announce. “Please, not so fast.”
Skip Fucking, but you might want to check out the Newfoundland town of Dildo. It’s home to the Dildo Museum interpretive center and everyone’s favorite summer event, the Historic Dildo Days.
One of Fucking’s former stealable signs
Wikipedia Commons
Chapter 66
The White Shark Café While Dressed As an Elephant Seal
I know you think it’s an unlikely situation: you, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, dressed as an elephant seal. But it’s not like it’s impossible. You’re at a costume party on a cruise boat from Hawaii, there’s free booze, you decide to reenact the “I’m the king of the world!” scene from Titanic, and then, boom. You fall overboard.
Please make sure this doesn’t happen. If there’s one spot you don’t want to go swimming in a seal outfit, it’s the four-hundred-mile-wide stretch of ocean halfway between Hawaii and Baja, California. Known to scientists as the “White Shark Café,” this is a popular congregation spot for great whites, who come to the café from all along the North American coast to spend some quality time—sometimes months—hanging out with other sharks. They swim in circles; they participate in mysterious