From our Show Me Your Letterbox series.
A short time ago, the fitness studio had a summer vacation time offer. Like the early January New Year's post Christmas binge flyer. Or the Spring Time brochure, the get into bikini shape for the ladies and get your Summer Abs for the men flyer.
If the past few years are anything to go by, there will be another flyer in early Fall telling us to get in shape for winter sports.
The fitness studio must be doing okay, we've seen their obnoxious flyers for many years.
To us, the unwanted flyers in the mailbox hold no promise of physical fitness, better health, or a longer life.
They signify merely in a personal manner the immense changes in this rural region over the past few decades.
People around here had a straightforward fitness program for the past few thousand years or so. It was called work.
The construction workers, roofers, and other craftsmen still make up a good part of the workforce, but the farmers are virtually extinct, and heavy machinery does the work in the forest. Most of the small factory jobs around here are gone, and everybody is chanting the praises of tourism -- as ritualized and at times desperate as chants for rain during a prolonged drought back in the U.S.
Although Germany has not lost as much of its industrial base as many other Western countries, that industry has changed and is concentrated in fewer places.
Today, the descendants of farmers and manual laborers flex their muscles on the treadmills and other fine examples of German engineering in the thriving fitness studio a few towns.
After the exercise routine, they only need to drive a quarter mile or so to get to the upmarket garden center for a huge selection of plants and accessories.
There will be seasonal flyer by the garden center in a week or so.
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