August is a exciting time of year around here.  Roughly fifteen of the local villages and one tiny town compete for the votes of both tourists and locals for who came up with the best straw figure this year.  Sadly, some villages have never won (and generally you can see why).  But others have deep pockets and clever artists and engineers and tend to come up with spectacular creations.  Yesterday, Spouse and I finally got it in gear and took a brief bike tour of the nearest two competitors.

 

Bendfeld, whose past entries have included a giant but cute fire-breathing dragon whose dream it was to become a fireman and a whale you could sit inside and listen to Jonah’s tale retold in terms of marine pollution engendering God’s wrath against humanity (damn those plastic straws!), went for an overly political statement this year.  The Gorch Fock sinking into a sea of euro signs, in reference to the retrofit comedy of errors whose cost to the German defense ministry has skyrocketed from 10 million to more than 135 million and involving the ship being briefly seized by a shipyard driven into bankruptcy by the navy’s failure to pay it (or some such similar thing that my limited German couldn’t quite follow along in detail to on the evening news).

 

 

The sailors preparing to abseil down to a life raft was a poignant touch, although they’re a bit bare-chested for a crew that includes a fair proportion of the not legally shirtless gender.

 

 

Krummbek, prone to sculptures you can walk into, produced a submarine…

 

 

…complete with propeller and lookout tower which…

 

 

… you could get to from an inside equipped with beds for not terribly tall people and tubes for launching torpedoes and…

 

… a galley amply stocked with bread.

 

 

Kindly, the observation tower came stocked with binoculars for better observation of the local wildlife…