The adventures of Flat Stanley

My eight-year-old cousin Trevor wrote to me recently from Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania, to ask for my help with a school project.

Dear Michael,
We are working on a Flat Stanley project. Stanley is a character in our book, Flat Stanley. He was flattened when a big bulletin board fell on him while he was in bed sleeping. In the book, his parents sent him in the mail to California. Please take Stanley on an adventure and take lots of pictures and don’t forget to send him back! Have fun!
Trevor

Jeff Brown wrote this book in 1964, but Dale Hubert, a Canadian schoolteacher, turned it into a cultural phenomenon in 1995 when he had the idea of getting kids to draw their own Flat Stanleys and mail them to others. The Flat Stanley project has the aim of getting kids excited about reading and writing, as well as of making them curious about the world. It’s really caught on: thousands of school classes across North America are doing this.

So, for Trevor and for Mrs. Krape and Miss Guth’s second-grade class at Pleasant Gap Elementary School, this would be an opportunity to learn a few things about Munich. I enlisted three of my co-workers — Rita Forbes, Spotlight‘s audio editor, who is from Missouri; Richard Mote from Spotlight‘s youth magazine, Spot on, who is from Australia; and Petra Daniell, also from Spot on, who is from an exotic place called Gräfelfing.

The rest is for Trevor — but come along anyway. You might be interested to see what we did! I tried to focus on the things that are most different from what you’d see in rural Pennsylvania.

Dear Trevor,

I now present the adventures of Flat Stanley in Munich, Germany. Germany is a country that is far away — even an airplane takes seven hours to fly here from Pittsburgh. Some things are the same as they are in Pennsylvania, and some things are different.

When somebody visits you, the first thing you do is offer him something to eat or drink. So we went to an outdoor restaurant that’s in the middle of a park. The soft pretzels here are really big — almost a foot across! Pretzels are a tradition here. A lot of people in Munich eat them every day.

When you’re in a big city, it’s important to know what you’re supposed to do. So you have to look at signs. The picture on this sign means that this is a place where only people are allowed to walk. Cars cannot drive here. We’re fine because we’re walking.

Munich is a very big city. More than a million people live here, in one place. So it’s not easy to know where you’re going. You have to look at a map to see where everything is. This is a map of where all the trains, buses and trolleys go in Munich. Every stop is marked.

We have to buy a ticket to ride the trolley. You choose the ticket you want and then put money in the machine. The money here is different. Instead of dollars, people use euros. The money is very colorful.

And now the trolley is here. We have to get on! But look at the brightly colored houses. Lots of families live in each house. Each family has its own space, called an apartment.

This is a park where the Olympics were held. At the Olympics, people from all the countries in the world come to one place to play sports. Even countries that don’t like each other come and play sports together. That way, maybe they’ll learn to like each other.

The Olympics are in a different city each time. The last time they were here was in 1972, a few months before your dad was born. People are hoping that Munich will have the Olympics again in 2018. You’ll be a teenager then!

The roofs you see are supposed to look like the webs of tent caterpillars, but they’re strong enough that people can walk on them.

When you’re in a faraway place, you have to be careful. It looks like the lion’s got Stanley! Just like the bald eagle is the symbol of America, the lion is the symbol of Bavaria, the state Munich is in. You see lions everywhere (but not real ones).

You could get stepped on, though!

Finally, Flat Stanley visited a school class in Gräfelfing. (Pronounce the “ä” like a long “a”.) They know you like soccer. That’s the big sport here, so we’re on the school’s soccer field.