The Aerie
Home safe, after 16 hours on 'Screaming Baby' airlines! More when I'm not totally exhausted...
We're on our last two hours. Everything is packed and ready to go.
Just enough time for one last cup of coffee from the automagic coffee machine (push the button: it grinds the beans and produces a cup of espresso; push the second button, hot frothed milk). Just enough time to cook some bacon, fry an egg or two, and eat my last breze saved from yesterday.
In a couple of hours one of our hosts' parents will arrive to kindly drive us to the airport. Then after all the liquids are removed from our bodies and our sphincters are all inspected we will be packed like cattle into the tiny seats and flown home. Our plane flies so fast that we will arrive only three hours after we leave - by the clock at least. That means that the plane will fly only slightly less fast than the planet spins.
Took the boys to 'Ultra Comix' yesterday for the last time while I ran over to Saturn to pick up a replacement for my lost cel-phone cord. Of course upon returning home I found my cell phone cord. D'oh! I also grabbed a couple of final tourist photos of a very whimsical fountain in the middle of town. Nothing shows the different attitudes towards sex and death between Europe and America more than a public fountain with a life-size depiction of Death having Sex in a public fountain. It's creepy.
So we'll make breakfast, clean up, climb in the van, and off we'll go.
Five weeks have sure passed fast!!
We're getting packed and ready to go today: cleaning our hosts' house and lining up our luggage and gathering together things that have become scattered after five weeks in a different place.
Theresa and I had a nice night out alone together in Neumarkt: we went to the Obern Gastskeller on the IM'ed recommendation of our hosts. The food was great, but of course the room was smoky in typical German fashion. I really should look up the per-capita cancer and autobahn death rates and compare them to the U.S. It would be funny if they were lower, but I suspect they're not.
We went for a stroll through town afterwards. Neumarkt on der Oberpfalz is a very attractive place. Then we came home and hit the sack early in order to get up early and start cleaning. Instead I slept late. I don't know what's going on, but I've been getting tons of sleep here - maybe it's months of sleep deprivation catching up with me.
In order to further delay chores, I took a nice shower and then strolled through the suburb of Polling where we are staying and over to the butcher and baker. There I bought my LAST pretzel! WAAAH! I haven't had pretzels this good since I was a child in Queens, and that's probably a memory enhanced by time. Pretzels here are called "Breze", which if you migrate the B to a P you can see the word "pretzel" starting to emerge. At the GC 2006 convention I even saw a stand which had them listed as "brezels".
And how good are they? Well, if you buy a pretzel in America - at a mall or the movie theater - you get a piece of salted bread that has been preserved for days.
When I bought my breze from a temporary stand at the GC convention center, I had to wait. Because the guy with the dough pretzels on a tray had just hurried up and dropped off a fresh set. When the woman handed me the breze, it was almost too hot to touch, and fresh from the oven. And that's from a rolling cart. The ones from the bakery are even better.
I am going to miss these pretzels, or breze.
So I'm doing laundry, and we have the bags mostly packed, and we're getting on towards cleaning the bathrooms. When we're done I'll drive the boys into Nuremburg for one last trip to Ultra Comix, as a reward for their hard work.
The weather is being inconstant again - on my stroll it was sunny, but now its drizzling again. I want to wash our hosts towels and sheets and hang them to dry, but we'll see if that's manageable given this odd weather.
Anyway, back to work before the wife gives me the evil eye!
Back now from Leipzig and Prague. I spent Sunday morning at the convention, then left the boys there and went back to the hotel to pack and get us out of the room. Then Theresa and Gennie and I toured Leipzig and had lunch to pass the time while we waited for the convention to end. We saw Bach's grave, and Goethe's statue, had lunch at a terrific little cafe while an old German man serenaded the square with soft guitar music (we tipped him well because everything he did was great. Except when he decided to sing Clapton's "You Look Wonderful Tonight," a song meant to be crooned softly, not bellowed across a square in a thick German accent).
We picked up the boys at the convention center when the convention ended, and that worked like a charm. There was a streetlight-tall sculpture of a rose right in front, so I told them to meet me at the rose when the place closed, and as I was walking up from one side they were walking up from the other. Fabulous.
Twenty four hours have passed and I am just about recovered from the trip. The journey til then was, as regular readers know, extremely stressful, and the journey back from Leipzig was no different.
Once again my eyeballs were turning yellow, (one thing you learn in travel is to always know where the next toilet is and I hadn't been able to find the one indicated on the map of Leipzig), so while the rest of the 186,000 convention attendees crowded up the counter at the McDonald's across the street, my family invaded the restrooms. Thus refreshed, we attempted to reach the freeway immediately adjacent to the McDonalds.
We followed a little red Ford hatchback that seemed to know where it was going, but this was a false hope. He wandered from pillar to post behind a bunch of strip malls, but eventually we stumbled upon the freeway.
We zoomed down the autobahn and caught the freeway that would take us south to Neumarkt, and when we saw the next McDonald's sign we exited to feed the boys, who had been too obsessed to eat while at the convention. I thought our idea of driving 30 kilometers to find another McDonald's was a clever one, but so did the other 200 convention attendees at the counter in front of us. Nonetheless we eventually got our food from the very nice lady behind the counter, and then I spent a few minutes setting up the laptop in the car to play a DVD for the kids. This ended up working really well.
We got on the freeway well-fed, watered or de-watered as the case may have been, the DVD playing the westering sun shining, ready for a three-hour trip home, and no national borders to attempt to cross. Everything was perfect.
It couldn't last.
Not more than ten kilometers down the road, traffic came to a terrifying stop. Well, it wasn't an accident or anything, it was just that it was stopped, and it looked to stay stopped for a long time. I started having flashbacks to Munich, when the stop-and-go traffic continued for forty or fifty miles, and my left leg almost fell off from riding the clutch.
The traffic went on for quite a while and I was considering getting a motel rather than drive this way for another 10 km, but finally we saw the Road Construction sign that indicated the cause to the problem. Two kilometers later and traffic narrowed to two lanes in either direction. Patiently we shuttllled down the narrow channel, anticipating the freedom at the other end, and soon enough it opened up! The pedal went to the floor, and the car surged forward!
Two kilometers later it stopped again. A few kilometers further, more road construction. Then it opened up. Then we hit more road construction.
The sun went down. Fog rolled in. It began to rain.
I found myself driving down a narrow channel between construction walls, with mere inches of clearance on either side of the van. I kept having to choose between going 30 mph in the right lane behind a semi, or going 45 in the left lane to try to PASS the semi, its lugnuts whirling like Ben Hur's spiked chariot axles only inches from the fender. The idea of motels waxed strongly.
And then... although I didn't know it... it was done. All at once the road construction stopped, the rain let up, and it even got a little lighter for a while. I don't know what had changed, but we were through and after fifteen minutes or so I dared hope we might get home the same evening.
We passed through areas thick with those wind-generation turbines, like some surreal spinning forest. I read today that Germany leads the world with a full 6% of domestic power produced thus, and more planned out at sea. Wow!
Zooming down the road in the autobahn, I tell you, it keeps you awake. The left lane is a constant struggle for position among increasingly fast drivers: pull in front of the wrong person at the wrong time and they'll park in your trunk. And unless you're really confident and knowledgeable of the road, you risk losing control while changing lanes.
When they're available, the middle lane can be a good compromise. Sometimes you end up passing slower cars on the left, merging into that competitive high-speed zone for a while; sometimes you end up pulling to the right to let faster drivers in the middle lane pass you. In some ways its more relaxed, but in others it's twice as complex: when the roads are wet, the middle lane is the worst because when you're not passing others are passing you, and one car out of control will take others with it.
But even the right lane is not safe. At one point I found myself in the rightmost of three lanes, driving 100 mph, and having faster cars overtake me... in the RIGHT lane. Sure I didn't have to go that fast, but the more you break with the traffic flow, the more you risk a multi-car accident as cars pass you. All of it has to be balanced together, and let me tell you, that keeps you awake.
So I remained alert as we tore south on the A9 at an average speed (after the road construction) of 95 mph, or 152 kilometers per hour. About halfway there we re-entered the part of the map that the navigation computer acknowledged existed, and soon we had a countdown till home (to say nothing of a little added info about the road ahead. When you're going 95 mph, it is helpful to see in advance that the road is going to bear right or left in a couple of miles.
Finally we exited to Neumarkt and rolled into the driveway, a full four hours after leaving Leipzig. The diesel manual transmission minivan only used about a quarter tank of gas.
Today has been very restful. We slept very late, aided by gray gloomy skies that rained constantly. The rain was welcome as it freed us from any belief that we ought to be out seeing Germany a bit on our last three days. No, it was nice to work on my trip photos (fully updated at right), and do some laundry in preparation for our trip home.
Tomorrow we will be having lunch with the Burgermeister, and maybe in the evening inviting some neighbors over again. Wednesday maybe we'll pack and visit Nuremburg if we feel ambitious, and then on Thursday, the long flight home.
I'll be sure we have our passports.
Posting from an Internet kiosk at GC. Five huge arenas each crowded with tens of thousands of people - most of them teenaged boys with shaggy brown hair wearing black T-shirts. As a result I haven't seen my eldest son since the place opened at 9:00. Or I've seen him continuously, depending on how you look at it.
I'm currently trying to find my younger son, as well. He is either obliviously playing one of the kazillion free video games in this place, or wandering weeping through the crowds crying 'Daddy, Daddy,' depending on whether or not I let myself worry too much. This place closes at 8:00 p.m., so I'll find both of the boys then by simply waiting at the trolley platform.
Sigh, are they all grown up and don't need me, or at 11 and 15 am I a terrible parent for having lost them in this place? Time will tell, but I'm sure it will turn out fine.
Just keep telling myself that...
(Edit, later) Found Him! *phew* I'm a good Dad again! The older boy can take care of himself, but I found the younger one!
Or NEVER LEAVE YOUR PASSPORT AT HOME
Somewhere out there on the Internet there is a web-spider. A web-spider is a program that automatically searches the Internet and collects the information that it finds. Somewhere on the Internet there is a web-spider that searches for naïve, gawping stupidity.
That web spider will find my post from yesterday, and it will feed. It will grow fat and torpid over the volume and quality of naïveté, and slither satisfied into its dark lair to digest its rich, satisfying meal.
Somewhere on the Internet there is a reader who might read yesterday's post, the part where I drove into the Czech Republic without my daughter's passport, and the soldier at the border said "Oh, you might have some trouble getting back into Germany. You might have to pay a fine."
And that reader, if they have any empathy at all, at that point will say to themselves "Oh dear."
The day started off well enough. We woke early, walked our luggage over to the Tesco - a big shopping mall in the middle of Prague - and stored it in our car which had spent the night safely and freely in the Tesco garage. Then we went upstairs to the mall to have breakfast in a cafe. After indulging in half an hour of shopping, we hopped in the car and attempted to escape Prague.
The first problem was that the navigator computer in our host's car refused to aknowledge the existence of Leipzig, our destination city. In fact it refused to acknowledge any city along our planned route of escape from the Czech Republic.
This presented a problem, because our map of Prague only went out so far, and it didn't reach to the beltway around the city. We couldn't tell which major road leading out of Prague would get us out of the city, and which would double back on itself and dump us downtown again. We pulled over and spent 15 minutes planning a route out of town, and then spent the next hour completely unable to escape.
Along the way an interesting and very kind thing happened. An old man waved at our car as we drove past, and made the open-close-open hand gesture to turn on our headlights. I had no idea that it was a requirement for driving, but of course as soon as he did that and I turned on my lights I noticed everyone else had them on too. Some old duffer was observant enough to notice some car in the traffic, quick enough to react, and cared enough to bother. I really appreciated that old fellow.
Finally I pulled into a filling station, where I filled the tank, quizzed the kind old lady behind the counter for an escape route, and bought a different map of Prague to help us get away. Thus armed, we managed to finally reach the beltway and escape the city - hooray!
We then spent another few hours crossing the northern Czech Republic. What absolutely gorgeous land. Rolling hills, broad valleys, low mountains stretching off into the distance. Fabulous. And the weather was great.
As we approached the border with Germany, an odd change came over the towns through which we passed. The Czech towns had always been poor by comparison, but they had been well-kept, lived in. Now they started to look unkempt, shabby. I noticed a couple of "Gentleman's clubs" on the roadside. Then a few more. Finally I pointed out to my wife that there were a LOT of them, and over there, a "sauna."
"I guess we know where the Germans go to party," I told her.
Then we passed a woman standing on the roadside in too-small clothing. There, another, in tight shorts up ahead.
"Lovely countryside," I muttered under my breath, "rolling hills, green pastures, hookers."
Then it got silly. The frequency of scantily-clad women on the roadside climbed past Las Vegas levels until the needle wavered just below "downtown Thailand." And then, just as suddenly as it began, it dropped off to nothing after we passed a small roadside cabin with plate-glass windows on two corners and two gals in their underwear lounging in the sunlight.
For a while things seemed normal again as we climbed up the hill. Then, at about 1:00 in the afternoon, we crested another saddle in the mountains and saw in the distance the border checkpoint at Altendorf. Apparently when German men cross the border for illicit activites, they like to have at least one range of mountains in between themselves and their wives. Given what I've seen of elderly German women, this is probably a wise precaution.
Now, the day before when we had checked into the Prague hotel, I had I thought been clever. Before leaving on our trip, I scanned all of our passports and stored the images in a secure, secret place on the Internet. When we checked in, the clerk asked for our passports and I explained that we did not have our daughter's. Then I gave her the link to the passport on the Internet, and when she brought up the image I had her print off two copies - one for the hotel, and one for me.
Thus armed with four passports and a color printout of a passport, we approached the Altendorf checkpoint. I remembered the words of the Czech border guard, and hoped the fine wouldn't be too expensive. [Insert sound of web-spider sucking hard on the naïeveté here.]
"Vas ist?" said the soldier, as I handed him the paper.
"My daughter left her passport in Neumarkt." I tried to explain.
I was not encouraged when another soldier approached, asked in German what was happening, and then broke into loud laughter when the solder said "His daughter's passport is in Neumarkt." It wasn't nasty laughter, or grim laughter - it was exactly the kind of surprised laughter you make when the thought running through your head is "And he thinks this piece of paper is going to help?" The soldiers instructed us to park to one side, and we waited, but I remained confident things would be okay. The Czech soldier had said we might have to pay a fine, that's all. [Suuuuucck-uuck-uucck-uck-uck]
After a nervous 20 minute wait in the car, a grim faced soldier approached. Speaking in rapid German he pointed in an odd direction, over his shoulder to the other side of the guard-house.
"Sprechen sie English, bitte?" I asked as politely as I could.
He shook his head. "Nein."
"Was ist dis?" I asked, pointing in the direction he was indicating.
"Beck," he ordered. "American Embassy. Prague."
My heart sank through my stomach into my feet. "Prague?" I asked weakly.
"Not official document," he said (his no-English was better than my no-German), "Go back. American Embassy."
With that he ordered us to U-turn, opened a gap in the outbound line of horny German men, and saw us back into the Czech Republic. Then he handed us our passports and one humble printout and waved us away.
With pure despair chilling my heart I drove back to the nearest service station and parked, absently waved off a cloud of hookers, and stared back up the road towards Prague.
For months the kids have been dying, absolutely dying to get to the Games Convention 2006 in Leipzig. My older son, who more than deserves to go and has been my staunch right hand through much of this trip, has been walking up to me at odd times, bouncing up on the balls of his feet, and chanting "LeipzigLeipzigLeipzig!" Last night in Prague my younger boy kept saying "Can we go back to the hotel and go to sleep now so we can go to Leipzig in the morning?"
Going to Prague and back to this checkpoint would by itself consume the remainder of the day - and I've heard nightmare stories about dealing with Embassies. It was already Friday, and if there were any bureaucratic delays - or if the Czech bureaucrats adhered to the dreadful work habits that I've read about - then we would be in Prague for the entire weekend, and possibly longer. Leipzig would be gone, and my children would be terribly disappointed. The whole Trip to Germany 2006 was two wheels over the canyon, and rocking forward on the frame. Consumed by gloom, I could not think of other solutions. Even my cell phone couldn't reach the Internet to look up the number of the American Embassy in Prague in order to talk to them, and my cell phone has otherwise had flawless Internet connectivity.
Fortunately my wife had her Lonely Planet Germany guide, which included the phone number of the American Embassy in Germany. While my cell phone had no Internet, the T-Mobile voice service still worked. I spoke to the Embassy receptionist for several minutes, but she did not sound encouraging. She didn't seem to consider that there was anything the American Embassy in Germany could do about Americans attempting to enter Germany from the Czech Republic, and seemed to think it only natural that we would have to talk to the American Embassy in Prague (which number she provided).
Then I remembered the image of my daughter's passport that was on the Internet, and suggested she look up the link. She became very confused at this point, and said, "Please hold."
And then my saint picked up the phone. Alison, from the American Emergency Services group recieved my call. Apparently when the Americans sound desperate enough, they are passed to this squad of crack specialists. I explained my situation to her, and after some difficulties (I couldn't properly remember the link location and everything would have fallen apart if the hotel printout didn't happen to have the link info on the bottom) she managed to pull up the image on her browser.
"Well," she mused, "It looks like a valid passport, but I can't tell if that's genuinely your daughter."
"No, but the guards can," I said, "She's right here with me."
"Well, go back and see if you can get a phone number from them where I can call, I'll talk to my colleagues here and see what they think, this is an odd situation, we've never had this before."
I drove back to the checkpoint, where we enountered a lot of difficulty making the guards understand that we wanted the American Embassy in Berlin to call them, and could we get a phone number. Then we finally got a phone number and it didn't work.
This is due to an odd thing I haven't mentioned before, but which has been notable on this journey: Europeans are mutating their numeral 1's into some strange new symbol that looks like an upside-down "V". Basically the "barb" at the top of the 1 has extended down almost to the bottom of the vertical bar. Well, when the solder wrote down the phone number of the base, he wrote 034-123/456-7890. Unfortunately, I read his / as an extra 1, and the esrtwhile Alison could not complete the call.
Meanwhile, we could not advance any further into the checkpoint than the guard shack, because every pace past that put us in Germany, and we didn't have permission to cross to Germany. Finally the guards gave us permission to walk into the administrative office some ten paces on German soil, in order to resolve our problem.
A pair of German men were ahead of us at the window, and although they didn't seem to be occupying the attention of the soldiers beyond, neither would they move away from the window to let me at the speaker. A couple of polite "Enschuldigung" were completely ignored. And the last thing I wanted to do right then was annoy the guards in the Administrative office by being pounded into a bloody pile in their atrium at the hands of the two broad-shouldered German workers.
Unfortunately, the patient Alison was on the phone with me the whole time, and she was ten minutes from leaving her office for the day. So I screwed my courage to the sticking-place (that, by the way, is the clumisiest idiom in the English language, unseating 'between a rock and a hard place' in recent polling of people with too much time on their hands) and shouldered my way between them.
The soldier behind the counter could not understand my question, so finally in desperation I told Alison to hold on, and slid my cell phone through the hole to the soldier. He picked it up, looked at it to figure out where to talk (my cell phone does ten million interesting things, but looks like a sliver bar of soap), and tenatively said, "Hallo?"
He talked to Allison for a while, then passed the phone back through to me. It was 14:29.
"I'm sending him a fax," she said, "I can't promise you any results," and disconnected.
My daughter and I waited in the Administrative office for ten minutes. People came and went. The German men left, happy, with a new stamped piece of paper. My phone rang.
"I've sent the fax, you should hear something in a few minutes," Alison told me, and rang off for the day. It was 14:40.
We waited. Ten minutes later a soldier came down from upstairs and pushed two pieces of paper through the window. The soldiers inside unfolded them, and I saw my daughter's passport image in blurry fax-and-white. Discussion followed. Finally a soldier with some English approached the window. He looked at the pictures, looked at my daughter, walked away. I could tell that the fax was exactly the same image as the one I had folded in my hand, the printed-out image of my daughter's scanned passport.
Five minites later he returned. "Okay," he said. "We make a new passport."
I couldn't believe my ears, "You make a new passport?"
"Ja," he said, holding up a piece of green paper, "Temporary."
My heart began to prickle with pins and needles as hope slowly seeped back into it. A tall, burly soldier brought out a carbon-copy pad, and had my daughter and I sign it in several places. He tore bits off, handed some through the window, others to the administrative officers. He had me fill out my mailing address, then had me rewrite "Minneapolis, Minnesota" in full, because "Mpls, MN" meant nothing to him.
My wife had joined us in here somewhere, and she was there when he came back to the window.
"Photograph," he said, looking between us.
"Photograph?" I asked
"Ja, für passport," he said, pointing at the blank space on the form.
The hope that had recently started trickling into my heart withdrew with a sharp sucking sound. My daughter, wife and I patted our pockets helplessly for a moment. Then my wife (notice, whenever I'm completely unprepared, who the person is who has just what is needed?) said "Wait!" She scrabbled through her little black book to a vinyl pouch at the back where she keeps... school pictures of our children. She removed our daughter's latest picture and handed it to the soldier.
"Too big," he said.
"Cut it!" the three of us responded in unison.
"I cut?" he said, miming scissors.
"Ja!"
So the big burly solder sat at a desk and began to trim the edges off the tiny photograph. Meanwhile other solders wrote and another stamped. The fellow who knew English approached.
"The cost," he began.
'Okay,' I told myself, 'here it comes. I've got about 100 Euros on me, Theresa must have some. Maybe they take Visa?'
"Twenty-five Oy-rows."
Twenty five? Twenty FIVE? That's less than the ORIGINAL passport cost!
"Ich haber funfsec Oy-rows," I replied, after doublechecking "Fifty" in German with Theresa, "Ist OK?"
"Ja," said the English-speaking soldier.
In German, but clearly understandable, the burly solder looked up from his trimming and shouted, "Maybe you buy two!"
"Ja! Ja!" I agreed, a little hysterically. I was ready to buy EIGHT, and make a donation to the Old German Soldier's fund to boot.
Stamp, glue, sign, and the soldier handed us a green slip of paper with my daughter's delicately-trimmed picture stuck to it.
"Okay, you go through now!"
"Ein millionen danke!" I effused.
Scarely daring to hope, we left the administrative office where we had been for more than an hour. My older son was waiting across the parking lot, and I gave him a tenative thumbs-up to lessen the suspense. We got in the car, and simply cut into the now-half-mile-long line of waiting cars by inserting our front bumper in between two vehicles. We rolled up to the checkpoint, and I handed out four passports... and a green piece of paper with my daughter's picture glued to it.
The soldier who took it knew exactly who I was. I'd pestered them at the gatehouse ninety minutes past, and he'd had occasion to go by us in the anteroom of the administrative office on some errands of his own. So he looked a little startled and maybe annoyed to see us in line again, handing him some flimsy document we had somehow cobbled together. However at least it wasn't the gruff guard who had turned us back to Prague. The soldier looked at our documents...
...and sent us to wait in the same spot as we had the first time.
This wait, it was from hell. It was worse than everything before it, because for the first time we had gotten a taste of hope. Meanwhile, the gatehouse had its own priorities, and dealing with the backed-up mile of cars came first. They opened another gate and started working the line down. Twenty minutes later it was three cars long and they closed off the second gate.
There had been a lone red car ahead of us in the waiting area, and by the time the line was down to nothing the waiting area was full. The red car was dealt with first, and as far as I could tell they were turned back. The tension in the car was thick enough to cut with a knife, and we were hungry enough to eat the slices. We waited. Soldiers came out of the gatehouse, went past us without stopping. Soldiers did things we couldn't quite see inside the gatehouse.
Finally a young woman soldier came out, holding our passports. She walked up to our car. My mouth was dry. My heart was a raisin in the hope-blasting glare of a noonday sun.
Hardly stopping, she handed me the passports and said "Okay, you can go!"
Celebrating quietly, lest we annoy the guards and they change their minds, we pulled out and drove from the checkpoint. I kept waiting for someone to stop us, but no one did. We were in Germany.
I knew we had gotten off SO easy. Others in our position have had to go back to Prague, sacrificing their itineraries and dreams to wade through the icy waters of Czech bureaucracy. But because I had thought to scan our passports and put them in a secure place on the web, we had overcome my stupidity in not making sure all my kids brought their passports for our trip to Prague. I am indeed the smartest moron in the world.
And luckiest. Only the able assistance of Alison at the U.S. Embassy in Germany got us through. The exact same image that in our hands was a meaningless piece of paper was our ticket into Germany when it bore the imprimatur of the Embassy fax machine. If she had been less intelligent, less considerate, or less creative and innovative, I would be posting a very different blog tonight, from Prague.
"Damn," I said to my family, finally daring to believe we'd made it. "I keep expecting someone to tap me on my shoulder and say in German 'You most com beck to ze border!'" Everyone laughed the shaky laughs of released tension, and the kids went on a spree making up more and more elaborate scenarios for being recalled to the checkpoint.
As we regained our equilibrium we began to take stock of the world around us once again. I could almost begin enjoying the beautiful rolling countryside and quaint German villages through which we passed. Unfortunately traffic was starting to pile up. We thought it was because the road was becoming steep, and at one point we saw below us a long semi-trailer slowly negotiating a switchback in the road. So relieved were we to be in Germany at all, however, that we did not chafe at the slow progress towards our goal, even when we completed the switchback and came to a complete stop. I took advantage of the apparent complete stop in traffic to review the map of Germany.
Then it happened.
My door opened of its own accord.
A hand reached in and tapped me on the shoulder.
A voice barked something sharp in German in my ear.
Time slowed. My vision telescoped. Slowly I turned.
At the end of a long dark tunnel was an old man.
He wasn't in uniform.
Time lurched.
Resumed.
"Was?" I said, not only unable to understand his words, but unable to recall hearing them.
He pointed, gestured, spoke again in German.
Finally I got it.
The old man who had opened my car door was reminding me to turn on my headlights. I threw the switch and thanked him. He gave me a tight smile, satisfied, and walked back to his car, its door standing open, behind mine in the line of stopped traffic.
We wouldn't have made it here to our five-star hotel in Leipzig tonight without all those people: the old men in the Czech Republic and in Germany who kept us from getting pulled over for yet another ticket. The burly soldier trimming the school photograph. And of course Alison, who will find out that we made it through the checkpoint when the flowers arrive on her desk.
All of them made it possible to get here. The traffic from Altendorf to Dresden was dreadful, but we would have had to drive back to Prague otherwise, so we enjoyed it. We got here too late for the convention today, but we have all day tomorrow and Sunday and that ought to be sufficient.
We wouldn't have had any of that if a lot of people weren't willing to help me compensate for my own naiëveté about the importance of passports and the ramifications of not having them.
We have a new plan, now. We're going to take our daughter to a tattoo parlor and tattoo her passport onto her back.
And on my forehead we'll tattoo "Don't leave home without it." In reverse so I can read it in the mirror...
The trip to Prague was a bit of a botch, starting with the speeding ticket. In my defense, I was just driving with the traffic.
(Posted via cell phone)
Concerned about being able to get cash in Prague, we had stopped by the city center in Neumarkt, where I also accidentally bought a buttered pretzel. Unfortunately as we left the city center, we joined a line of cars on a two-lane residential road out of the city. Suddenly up ahead a police officer with a flashing paddle wand waved about eight cars to the side of the road. One by one he walked down the line, and the cars drove off. Was he going to tell us the road up ahead was closed.
No. The officer kindly switched to his "little bit" of English (most European's "little bit" of English is superior to a lot of Americans’ English), and told us we were driving 77 kph in a 50 kph zone. (45 mph in a 30 zone, essentially). I was in no position to argue since in the short distance I had driven I had not seen a speed limit sign, and was just driving with the traffic. Additionally what the officer told me was that normally he just notified the drivers of the charge, and then they had to go to the rathaus (town hall) in order to contest or pay the fine of 50 Euro ($65). Since I wasn't a resident, he offered me a deal, pay 35 Euros on the spot and be done with it. Fortunately I had exact change from the cash machine, and he sent us on our way $45 lighter. Sigh. I suppose I got off lightly, but I didn't enjoy it. I really didn't like it when his partner pointed at the sensor dome on our dashboard and said "What is that?" I was sure he suspected it was a fuzzbuster (whatever the European version of that is), and he looked skeptical when I assured him it was the GPS sensor and only detected satellites. Visions of a night spent in a Neumarkt prison were not enhanced by the idea being bailed out by the town mayor.
Nonetheless we were off, and not too late. We drove towards Prague, and I ignored the navigation computer, which was urging me to drive on a two-lane highway for about a hundred miles. No thanks: we raced up the autobahn towards Nuremburg and hung a right towards Prague. Zoom, the miles melted away.
Then we came to the end of the autobahn. The road swooped in a loop and terminated at a two-lane road crossing our path. The navigation computer urged us left: my usually infallible sense of direction urged us right. We went left.
Several miles of two-lane tractor-filled highway later, the autobahn resumed. Apparently the autobahn between Prague and Nuremburg is still recovering from years of Soviet rule, and is under construction in several places.
As we got back on the autobahn, it occurred to me to ask, "Does everyone have their passports?" Yes, yes, yes yes... no. Our daughter, who is That Age, has objected to wearing the wallet-under-the-shirt that we all sport in order to both prevent pickpockets, and also make it clear to everyone who sees us that we are tourists. We, her parents, had neglected to double-check that we had all the passports, so really it is our fault. Nonetheless here we were about an hour out from home, and she has no passport.
When we traveled to France we encountered no border checkpoint at all, but I suspected the Czech Republic would be different, and I was right. A few miles later we approached what looked like a toll station but was the border checkpoint. A polite guard collected our four passports and one excuse, and returned.
"Well, you can enter, but you may have problem coming back."
"What kind of problem?" I asked, visions of gulags and gruel floating through my brain.
"The Germans may fine you."
"What kind of fine?"
He waggled a hand uncertainly, "Maybe thirty, forty Euro." He pronounced Euro sideways, the way most do: Oy-row.
I winced, "I guess I can afford forty Euro."
"Maybe you get lucky," he urged with an optimism I did not share.
Back on the road I was uncertain - is the Czech autobahn unlimited, like the German version, or limited, like the French. While Theresa queried the web on my cell phone, I found a car headed in our direction at about our rate of speed and started to shadow it about a thousand feet back. This seemed to work well, and I continued to shadow my friend.
Apparently he didn't like this, although I didn't have any indication of his displeasure - such as speeding up or slowing down or just waving a finger out the window - until he passed a semi and then cut sharply to an exit in a move right out of a cop movie. There was no way for me to follow him, and about 1000 feet later the autobahn once again evaporated into a two-lane highway.
At this point the navigator said to continue forward for about 3 kilometers. We'd followed it before, against my better judgement, and come out alright, so I figured to trust it again. Bad idea. Two km down the road the blue "go this way" line came to an end. Confused, I continued past the end of the blue line, and it jumped out in front of us again for about 4 km. What was it doing? Four kilometers later I figured it out.
The navigator was too stupid to simply say "go back," because the car it was navigating needed a place to turn around. So it was telling me to go forward to the next intersection, and at that point turn around, and go back. Unfortunately we were in the Czech equivalent of The Sticks, and intersections were several miles apart. By the time I figured this programming problem out, we were eight kilometers off course in the small Czech town of Prkzyskyzksyzky.
Having come this far, we were only about a kilometer from some gigantic building that had been looming over the parched farmland of the broad valley we had been crossing, so I was danged if I was going to turn around without getting a look at it. We drove up the hill and found it was, no surprise, a gigantic church of some sort, decorated in an unusual umber-and-white design. I climbed out to grab a couple snapshots, leaving the family in the car, and on the far side of the church saw a shop down the hill labeled "Kulturny". Thinking maybe it was a "cultural office" I scrambled down the steps and found myself in an astonishing little curio-shop. All sorts of 1950's era Czech paraphernalia surrounded me: gumball machines, decorative trays, posters, antique farm equipment, and on the counter, a genuine old-fashioned cash-register with the little scalloped-topped tags that popped up to display the price. The register was still in use.
A young woman behind the counter had only "a little English," but was willing to help me get back to the road to Prague. I didn't know at that point whether it was better to go back on our route, or head off in another direction and pick up the autobahn later. The girl was willing to help, as was the older woman in the back room. And her husband. And the other guy. And the really old guy with bad hearing and a loud voice. Soon I found myself in the middle of My Big Fat Czech Wedding, as three generations of shopkeepers debated the novel question of "How Does One Get to Prague From Here?"
Apparently nobody from Pkryzyrysykszy has ever gone to Prague because the debate took considerable time, and involved referencing two fold-out maps, a brochure, and two bound atlases of the Czech area. The shopkeepers debated boisterously, while I milled about, wishing to photograph everything in the store but not wishing to offend the folks who after all were pitching in to help.
Finally the young shopkeeper announced their decision, inked carefully in magic marker on glossy brochure map. Translated from Czech it amounted to "Go back the way you came, 8 kilometers."
Sigh.
We meandered back up the road, through the broad fields that smelled powerfully of manure-based fertilizer, and onto the counterpart of the exit where my Virgil had abandonded me an hour before. A few more kilometers of two-lane highway, and we were back on the E50, the Czech autobahn.
No further incidents occurred until we reached Prague, and my wife broke out the directions that the hotel provided. I transcribe them below for your enlightenment and edification:
"As to arrive the Blue River Palace the highway distance Arrives to you in Praga following, and exiting from the freeway (obliged sage in how much finishes in the city) following the indications of carried out obligatory will be found immediately in the street distance of Praga 5, to continue for approximately 1 km., will find to your right a street graft for the SMICHOV quarter (will notice Ford concessionaire on the vs. skillful) to which immettera you on the Way Pizenska, to continue always straight, observing with diligenza the street indications, and you will arrive in the center of the City new, to the vs. skillful you will find Movempick Hotel, continuations the distance with indication CENTRUM, to your left IBIS hotel, this point you are in ANDEL quarter, observing Hotel IBIS therefore to the vs. sx (semaforo) to turn feeding the tree-lined avenue to the vs. skillful, maintaining the corsia of sx, to the semaforo to turn to sx, after the attraversamento of 2 crossings to the vs sx you will find STAROPRAMENNA, you are arrives you to the BLUE RIVER PALACE, good stay"
Riiiiiight. Uh, could you go over that again from the first sentence?
Upon reviewing this Czech version of 'Ulysses,' I realized that we were in trouble. Amazingly we actually stumbled across the Ford dealership, and somehow grafted ourselves into the city center, aided by the Navigation system which was talking to us again, but trying to fuck with our minds (most notably it would try to guide us to within half a block of the "city center" before swinging out 7 kilometers, looping back around, and delivering us to the destination from the opposite direction, I kid you not). Anyway we reached the "center" of Prague, and doubled back to where we thought the hotel was, stopping to ask directions of a kind lady with "a little English" at a magazine stand which had no maps. Her directions took us back across the bridge, and then we made a right turn in the middle of the city.
Now, a right turn, made in the heart of a city, ought one would suspect, bring one around a block over, yes? No. By some lucky chance, we'd found the road that ran up away from the river, along the bluff overlooking the city. Before we were offered a second right turn, we were more than three kilometers outside of Prague. But we took that right turn and wandered back down the bluff and back into the city.
In all of this I must add I was aided by my Gift. Now I have a lot of gifts in my life, from my wife to my kids to my adoptive and birth-families, my health, my brains, and of course my dashing good looks. But the one Gift I have that is almost supernatural is my sense of direction. I can get lost and I do, about once a decade - but it takes a really thick fog, an unfamiliar city, and a complete lack of any knowledge of the city. But Prague, its narrow, winding, one-way streets and tricky secret roads that don't turn for over a mile, those only frustrated me. I always knew where I was trying to get, I simply couldn't get the roads to take me there.
Anyway we managed to make our way back to the city center based on my sense of direction, and even found the dread corner where, if I took another right turn, it would be another half-hour till we got back again. I turned left. Now the street we were lookign for was "Staropramenna," and pretty soon we started seeing "Staroprama" written on various things: awnings, mostly. We stopped a second time, at a computer store, where the clever lads went to "mapy.cz" and pulled up an Internet map that showed Staroprammenna only two blocks away. Rejoice!
By this time I had to pee so bad that my spit was yellow, so I was eager to reach our hotel. It was a simple matter of driving two streets over, turning left on Nadzena, passing Jadizky, passing Nakalaka Belaraka, and going left on Lidikyaka to reach Staropramennna.
Which proved absolutely impossible.
Every street was one way in another direction. We found Nadzena and Jadizky and Nakalaka Balaraka, and all of them sported two lines of cars parked facing our direction no matter how we tried to approach. By now every cobblestone was vibrating directly up to my kidneys and I was making illegal turns and cutting across traffic in a manner that would have aged our hosts ten years apiece if they'd known about it.
And of course we only knew when we were on Staropramenna after were already on it, when someone looked out the window and saw a street sign on the side of a building. We were looking for #7 and were at #23, but that was close enough for me, particularly since the opposite side of the intersection was one-way, facing me. I turned left, found a parkign spot 1.4" wider than the van, and parked. We staggered a block and a half and lo an behold, there was the BLUE RIVER PALACE. It looked a lot like A YELLOW BUILDING, but at this point everything was looking yellow to me. We arranged our room with a very, very helpful desk clerk, and soon I was able to apply my mind to any other topic than the need to find a toilet.
It was now time to park the van. The clerk advised me to park in the garage underneath the Tesco. This had the advantage of being free, with the disadvantage that the garage is inaccessible between midnight and seven a.m. This being no disadvantage at all, I was pleased to park there, assuming I could reach it. Finding it was no problem: a map and my sense of direction told me it was just over yonder, no more than three blocks away. I greased up the cars on either side of my parking spot and, the van emptied now of luggage, set off to the Tedesco lot three blocks away.
I put three kilometers on the car getting there. I didn't get lost on any road running along the bluff, nor did I make the mistake of entering the tunnel that plunges under the city and emerges somewhere in the northern suburbs. No, I simply drove a block over, turned left because street dead-ended, went a couple more blocks til I could turn left again, drove towards where the Tedesco ought to be, and found I couldn't go that direction because this street ended in a pedestrian plaza. Around I went again, one street further, headed towards Tedesco... and was in the wrong lane and was forced to make another left. Around again, each time around involving traversing an increasingly-familiar maze of one-way streets, dead ends, and in one place driving up a set of stairs next to a streetcar, I kid you not.
Finally I got back on the right street, stayed one lane over from where I'd been, turned a corner, and there I was already IN the lane committed to entering the Tedesco garage - had I not been going there, I would have been going there anyway. I parked the van, secured its remaining contents from curious eyes as best I could, and returned to the hotel where my family lay exhausted from the drive.
Unfortunately this afternoon was our only time in Prague, so I was unrelenting in getting us out the door. On our drive around Prague we had taken in a couple of tourist sites, most notably the Dancing House which was built by the same dreadful architect who cursed us with the Weismann Art Museum in Minneapolis, but I wanted to at least touch on some more of this famous city.
We stopped first for a late lunch/early dinner at a Czech restaurant, this being my decision after the family could not decide between TGI Fridays and Mexican (I know I say "I kid you not," but a lot of this stuff strikes me as so absurd I don' t know if it will be believed. TGI Fridays is BIG in Prague, people.) But we didn't drive all the way to Prague to eat Fridays, so there we were in front of a menu listing such delicacies as Jeleni steak po myslivecku and Vepi rizecky Zlaty andel. We confirmed with the very kind waitress that we could spend Euros ("Oy rows") here, and I attempted to interpret the menu. For example, Vepr. Rizecky Futuristic Brent was listed as containing smazena, vepl kyta,and syr, but listed no Brent all, futuristic or not! I was about to call our waitress over and insist that she bring Brent out in order that we authenticate his credentials as our dinner, when somebody noticed that the second page of the menu was an Engish translation of the first.
So I had the Jeleni steak po myslivecku, which turned out to be a delicious venison steak in cream and cranberry sauce. My daughter's Anglicky biftek s vejcem"or "Golden Angel chicken" turned out to have very little angel in it, but was otherwise delicious, and the rest of the family were pleased with their selections as well. Leo ordered something which turned out to be beef in wine gravy with mushrooms - pretty much what he gets everywhere. My wife had a curry chicken, and my youngest son had a huge platter of something batter-fried. A delightful meal, and even with gratuity and the exorbitant exchange rate, very cheap.
Now reconstituted, we grabbed a little bit of Czech currency from a cash machine and made our way a block over to the Metro. I was forced - forced I tell you! - to break on of the bills by purchasing a small bag of chocolate covered almonds, and a helpful old lady told me which kind of Metro ticket to buy, and we were soon on a train to the heart of Prague.
We had a wonderful if somewhat footsore and weary time exploring Prague, wandering up to Wenceslas Square and tracking down a couple of tourist-oriented performaces that ended up (at about $100 for the family) being too expensive for our tastes. After an evening of seeing and photographing much of central Prague, we made our way back to the Metro and home.
Emerging from the Metro I had the oddest sensation relating to my sense of direction that I've had in quite some time. Getting off the train, I did not pay attention to which way we turned, and we ended up leaving by a different staircase than we had entered. Upon reaching the top of the stair, I found myself in an unfamiliar location. At this point, I felt something pull my head around and point it off in to the growing darkness of the evening, across a plaza. I took a few tenative steps in that direction, and way, way across the plaza, through the trees... there was our restaurant from dinner. And once I saw it, I knew that our hotel was no more than a block farther on, in the same direction. That was just weird.
So now it's very late and time to be getting to bed. I had to give short shrift to the details of touring Prague itself, but I wanted to at least record something. Because while I have many gifts, I also have my share of challenges. I'm partially colorblind; I have only the most rudimentary sense of smell... and I have a memory like old cheesecloth. So it's important that I write this stuff down, because I guarantee in a couple of years my wife will be slapping me on the arm and saying "What do you mean 'You'd love to visit Prague someday?' We've been there!" and I won't recall a bit of it.
But now I can read about it!
After returning home from Paris we've had a couple of much-needed restful days. On Sunday the rain cleared up in the afternoon, leaving us with another rainbow. This one stretched full across the sky - so wide that I couldn't even capture it with in one frame of the camera.
Drawn outdoors, we began to explore the various toys that our hosts had left for us in their garage. In addition to a collection of bikes, some borrowed from neighbors for the occasion of our visit, our hosts had left us a set of unicycles and a Vespa scooter.
My youngest boy took to a bicycle immediately, while my oldest wanted to try his hand -- or butt -- at the unicycle. Despite the assurances of our quite acrobatic hosts that unicycling would be easy and fun, the charm of falling off someone else's expensive piece of equipment wore off rather quickly, hastened by the intimidating lumpy solidity of the cobbled driveway. And no teenager wants to undertake a recreation that requires leaning heavily upon one's parents for support the entire time.
I was secretly relieved. Meaning no disrespect to our hosts who I like and admire, but, well, there's always been something about unicyclists and jugglers that has confused me. I mean, think about it. First of all, why do they always go together: the jugglers and the unicyclists are always the same people, along with the stilt-walkers. They always have this earnest friendliness, and of course as entertainers they want to please. But... well... what's the point?
I mean, look, here's unicycling: a difficult skill to achieve, and once you can do it, what does it get you? You get to ride half of a tiny bicycle. Most people can WALK faster than a unicycle travels. Maybe if it's one of those really tall ones you can ride HIGH, but what are you going to do up there, clean the gutters? Otherwise, well, you're just pedaling this wheel around.
Related to this of course is stilt-walking, which removes the charm of the little tiny wheel and pedals, and replaces it with a signficant risk of severe knee injury. People who don't believe in evolution like to pretend we're fully-evolved creatures made in the image of "God." Well, let me tell you, God has a bad back and his knees must be for shit by now, because we're still evolving in those areas. Look at any mammal, and you can see that the knee and the heel, those are meant to be part of the LEGS. The heel isn't designed for banging on the ground, it's a JOINT, it's meant for suspension and speed.
The knee is supposed to be part of that supporting leg structure - each knee and elbow is evolved to support 1/4 of the body's weight as part of a flexible suspension system. Human knees have to support twice as much weight as other mammals' knees, and that weight is piled up-and-down right on top of the joint. And let's not even TALK about the spine, which is supposed to be horizontal but which we stack up like a set of dinner plates.
So the human body is not done evolving yet, and one of the things that's having the most trouble is the human knee. With that in mind, consider how very, very unwise it is to extend the length of the calf from the 18 to 24 inches on most people to several yards in length. The knee, which is having enough trouble just walking for 80 years without grinding itself into painful little chips of bone, is now asked to swing and support a lower leg much, much longer and weightier than it's ever had to handle before. Trip on a curb normally and you might suffer some knee pain: trip on a curb in stilts and you are pretty much asking to feel your tendons snapping like guitar strings at a Megadeth concert.
And once you've considered the risks, what are the rewards? You can walk on stilts... where? You demonstrate instead to all viewers that you are willing to invest significant effort in a dubious endeavor. Like unicycling, the only thing stilt-walking is good for is... stilt-walking. These are completely eponymous skills - all you can do with them is DO them. A bicyclist can race. A bicyclist can travel. A bicyclist can run errands. A stilt-walker can stilt-walk, and that's it. A unicyclist can run errands or travel, but would be better off on foot.
Likewise juggling. A juggler can... juggle. Can they juggle for any purpose other than to juggle? No. You can't drive nails while juggling or by juggling, you can't juggle in order to, say, carry more items with you than you otherwise could carry in a sack or a basket.
So, you have these difficult skills: juggling, stilt-walking, unicycling, and what are they? They're something you do on broad, grassy lawns in order that you can say to those who see you, "Look! I can juggle/stilt/unicycle!" And at that point the only response is "Splendid! And?" To which there is no answer. The entertainment value of each is limited to a few moments of polite interest, possibly a tiny bit of envy for this unique and interesting ability and then the audience drifts away.
Of course, many folks try doubling up these skills - many stiltwalkers and unicyclists can also juggle at the same time. And I suppose a dedicated individual could walk on stilts while juggling unicycles. Or vice-versa. But aside from that overlap, the Venn-diagrams of Stiltwalking/Unicycling/Juggling do not overlap with any other circles in the world, save "Circus employment", which is not a large circle.
So when the unicycling did not draw in The Boy, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Again, not meant in any way to put down our juggling, stiltwalking and unicycling hosts: I remain convinced that this holy trinity is part of a religion, and as such is simply another religion of which I am not a part. But for those who find something in this Trinity which speaks to them - good on yah! And if my kids wanted to join this religion, well, I'd certainly accept them and applaud politely while they juggled flaming unicycles on stilts. I would just be very challenged understanding the whys or wherefores of what they do. But then, that was my parents' lot with me, so it would only be fair.
Fortunately I apparently won't have to suffer Tevye's struggles of watching my children marry into the foreign religion of unicycling, because as mentioned it failed to hold their interest. Of much greater appeal was Saint Vespa, patroness of the Motor Scooter. This was a device which had immediate and powerful appeal. After trying out the bikes and falling off the unicycles a few times, inevitably their eyes returned again and again to this winged chariot. They touched the smooth black surface of the helmet, and it was good.
As a complete and absolute nerd I of course had never driven so much as a Vespa - the one time I was a passenger on a motorcycle I almost caused a wreck trying to remain perpendicular to the ground while the motorcycle banked on an entrance ramp. Nerds don't understand the whole "lean into the turn" thing, at least not without someone describing it in terms of centripedal force and centers-of-balance, and I had had no such instruction.
However as "Dad" it's my job to instill confidence and to open up new worlds to my kids - if I wanted to raise narrow little nerds like myself we wouldn't be in Germany in the first place, would we? We'd have all stayed home in Minnesota and spent the summer sitting in front of various screens and returned to work and school in September just as pale, out-of-shape, and unenlightened as we were at the beginning of the summer. So if we were going to be in Germany and there was a Vespa at hand, then it was my role to encourage my kids to Embrace the Different.
Our host had briefly explained the Vespa to me before he left, but probably assumed that anyone could master so simple a device in fairly short order. However, this is ina country that has THREE separate garbage collections: one for paper, one for biological waste, one for junk, and where everyone has a compost pile and glass an cans are recycled in the grocery store. As a result it took about half an hour of fiddling and pressing of buttons and switches before the motor finally coughed to life. The proper order was, with the Vespa up on its larger of two kickstands, put the key in the ignition and turn it to about 2:00 o'clock. With the right foot on the ground, twist the right-hand throttle slightly, while pressing the red right-hand thumb-switch. Have the choke open on the left side, and somehow contort your left leg to kick the starter peg down and forward. When successful the motor will start - any misstep results in an undiginified flopping-to-the ground on the part of the operator.
However, once started the Vespa was a fine little machine to drive. It propelled itself forward at a reasonable pace, and held itself upright without help of the operator. I buzzed off down the narrow German street, hoping only to encounter no traffic at all as I rounded the suburban block. Things went well until I rounded the final turn and the sunlight shone directly in my eyes as I tried to negotiate cars parked on both sides of the narrow street. Fortunately I was able to avoid a collision, and rode triumphantly up to my admiring family. Dad: courageous hero of the Vespa.
Shortly I gave rides to each of my children, and then with my heart in my throat confidently offered my eldest son the keys and said "Give it a try." The boy's 15 years old, he could go for a driving permit any time, and I could see no reason that he should have to wait to return to America to imperil other drivers and pedestrians. Heck, an accident here in Germany might not even make it on to his driving record, who knows.
I could tell he was thrilled. I walked him through the operation of the Vespa, which aside from the starting process is astonishingly simple: the hardest part is remembering to turn off the turn signal, and since he was going to be circling the block even that wasn't critical. I left my confusion about what we were supposed to do with the choke out of the discussion and with a pat on the back sent him off on his first ride.
Of course a car came, but he negotiated passage without accident, if not without accidentally slipping off the brake and hitting the throttle. Nonetheless, no harm done, and a minute later he zoomed exuberantly up the road towards his family, even managing to stop without incident. His sister took a turn at it and only nearly ran in to a concrete barrier one time - and it was only four inches high, so she probably would have been fine anyway. Finally we badgered their mother into taking a ride - our youngest we judged too young yet, and he didn't seem to mind that assessment.
All in all we spent a pleasant hour annoying the neighbors by imperiling their cars with the buzz and stink of the Vespa. And now, rather than the dubious ability to ride half a bicycle at a time, my family is instead able to start and pilot a Vespa with some small confidence. At the very least, they can carry a passenger on a Vespa! The kids had a fine time, and you know that after this trip is long over, they'll remember riding the Vespa more than they'll remember visiting the Louvre, even though we could have driven a Vespa in the U.S. at any time. But the important part was we all had fun!
Well we're back from Paris, and I've got another day of pictures posted over there to the right.
The return drive was very tiring due to rain. The autobahn is a great tool in good weather, and a nightmare when it rains. Thank goodness we didn't try to drive it after dark, we'd still be there. The height of the fun was when I tried to pay for gas using a credit card, and in broken Germlish he told me that not only wasn't my card working, but he was not going to let me have it back. After a $10 phone call to the card emergency number, I found that I was using a card I should have destroyed after my spouse got scammed by bank spam last spring. So it was my own fault in the end, but that didn't make me any happier.
But we got home in one piece and spent yesterday mostly resting, recovering, and doing laundry. Since we had been gone for the week there was no food in the house, so at one point in the afternoon I loaded the boy up in the van and we drove around looking for open grocery stores. As we'd been told, the only thing open were gas-station convenience stores, so we got some hilarious foot-long-hot-dogs in glass jars of brine for dinner.
Today we have spent so far arranging for our next and final excursion before we depart: a mere day spent in Prague, followed by two nights in Leipzig for the GC Game Convention. When my son first told me about this, it sounded like a nice little diversion to attend. He plays a game called "Guild Wars" and he believed at the time it was "a Guild Wars convention." It turns out its the second largest annual computer game convention in the world.
As a result, all the hotels in town were booked, and getting reservations took several hours of phone calls this morning. However a call to "www.hotels.de" was not only handled with courtesy and expedience, but quickly turned up a five-star hotel with a room available for five people, apparently not far from the convention center. So Props to the Hotels.com people, because now we have someplace to stay in Leipzig, and apparently someplace pretty nice at that.
This afternoon we are supposed to already be at the final day of the Neumarkt festival, the local equivalent of the Minnesota State Fair. Unfortunately its been raining off and on, so we're only getting going now, at 2:30 in the afternoon. But that's okay, plenty of time to enjoy the fair again before the fireworks tonight at dark.
We have free tickets and a commemorative stein from the fair, personally hand delivered to our door by the Oberburgermeister (or mayor) of Neumarkt and his wife. THAT'S how courteous the German people are. The fact that we're staying in his son's house has NOTHING to do with it... While he was visiting we made an appointment to drop by his office in the Town Hall (German: "rathaus") tomorrow at 11:00. I think he was just being polite, but how often do you get to visit a Burgermeister, much less an OBERburgermeister?
Anyway the reservations for Prague and Leipzig are now in place, which will take us through Sunday. Our plane leaves the following Thursday, so we're approaching the end of our five-week visit to Germany in about ten days, with no further major excursions planned.
Now it's time to head off for the festival again. I am determined to get one of those giant pretzels and a stein of beer..
More Paris pics soon!
This blogging stuff just takes too darned long! I've got the last four days of photos uploaded to my server, but I don't have time to rotate, crop, and comment all of them right now, to say nothing of blogging about the last four days in any detail.
However, I do have a blog entry I wrote while disconnected from the Internet during the period when my spouse drove us across France. So without further adieu, I will add that, and I'll see if I can't get one day of photos added to the gallery before we leave for breakfast on the way to Versailles...
Wow, my spouse is driving.
We're in France, passing through Metz on our way to Paris for a five-day excursion to our honeymoon city. It will be interesting to see if I can detect the differences after eighteen years. Probably not: the city has been around for two millenia and likely shrugs off a fraction of a century.
My spouse has been too intimidated by the autobahn to want to drive a stick-shift minivan on it, and I can't blame her. With no speed limit one spends as much time looking in the rearview mirror as forwards, lest a BMW park in one's trunk while you're passing a semi. So for the past 1800 kilometers I've been the one behind the wheel.
But France has "normal" driving, including strictly-enforced speed limits, so as soon as we crossed the border she steeled herself to driving a stick again and got behind the wheel. So far so good.
You really see a lot of differences when driving in Germany and France from driving in the U.S. I'd say the biggest difference - when not on the freeway - is the prevalence of bicycles. In the U.S. there seem to be two types of people bicycling: delusional sportspeople and crunchy-granola greens.
The first dress in matching spandex uniforms and bike helmets, and hunching seriously over their racing-bike handlebars. They clog the River Road while ignoring the bike path not a yard to their right, because They're Serious Bikers. A subset of this group are the Mountain Bikers, whose handlebars are straight rather than curved. These bikers eschew fenders as some kind of sissy acoutrement that might shave crucial seconds off their times, and so their fancy duds become stained by stripes of muddy water starting at their asses and streaking up their backs.
The second group are the crunchy-granola types, skinny boomer ex-hippies on recumbent bikes saving the Earth one pedal at a time.
I guess the third group are bicycle commuters, but this seems to be a fairly small portion of the biking community, and mostly consists of students who have better sense than to try to own a car while attending college.
Out of all of the bikers that I see, the commuter seems like the smallest fraction. Well, except for pairs of Jehovah's Witnesses with their helmets, white shirts and black ties. But ordinary people out running errands on their bikes seem like an infinitesmally small portion of the biking community, to say nothing of the transit community in America.
In Germany, commuter or errand bikers are almost the entire community. They ride everywhere, often in perilious proximity to automotive traffic, and almost never while wearing a helmet. As with smoking and food-service hygiene, bicycle safety is lodged firmly where America was in the 1960's. Everyone smokes everywhere, flies and wasps crawl on the pastries behind the counter, and nobody wears a bike helmet. But everybody bikes. Everywhere. Bikes are entirely commonplace, and entirely normal. Nobody looks twice at a bike hauled aboard a train by a middle-aged man, or a grandma biking up to a shop to load her basket with groceries. You don't get the sense that anyone is out to stroke their egos or save the Earth, they're just going to the store in the most expedient
fashion, and frequently that's biking.
It helps that there are plenty of bike paths, but in addition to that bicycles are so commonplace that making way for them on the streets is simply what one does when driving. Nobody seems to care if they have to slow down for a short while until it's safe to pass a bike, or their motorized cousins, the Vespas.
Like bike safety, the grocery stores are also lodged in the Sixties. The nearest one to the home where we are staying is an Aldi, part of a chain that competes with Edika and the incongruous "Norma," named after Marilyn Monroe and featuring her face on their bags. Both Norma and Aldi are oddly-stocked collections of, well, stuff. While they are ostensibly "grocery stores," they feature a little of everything. Around the perimeter of
the local Aldi are refridgerated cases with a little meat, a little cheese, ice creams, etc. Milk is frequently not refridgerated, nor are eggs, but are stacked like most other merchandise in haphazard pallets that make up the outside aisles of the store. The eggs come in cartons of ten, not twelve, and the milk comes in these ubiquitous cardboard liter containers that are also used for juices. Both open with a little plastic spout on a flat top, rather than American cardboard milk cartons with their origami spouts.
The side walls of the grocery stores are refridgerators, the outer aisles are piles of goods, sometimes stacked on shelves, as often as not just jumbles of boxes. The middle aisles of the grocery store are a wonder of diversity. Ever been out shopping and discovered that you needed a canvas granny-bra? They're in the center aisle, as are shoes, ratchet sets, and two-hundred-Euro portable DVD players. In fact, almost any random thing seems to qualify
for placement in the center piles of these grocery stores.
Except vegetables. As far as we can tell, Bavarians by and large eschew vegetables, and derive sustenance solely from milk, cheese, sausages, and a bewildering variety of fruit juices. One gets the notion that the produce sections are mandated by law, stocked in a surly fashion, and eyed suspiciously for rogue Frenchmen blowing their cover in a desperate search for something, anything, to sautee. In this they are rewarded only with mushrooms, which Germans celebrate with the exuberant name "Champignions," doubtless also adopted as
a lure for malnourished French infiltrators.
It's hard to see why the French would need to infiltrate Germany: both nations have gorgeous countryside. France, at least this northern area we're traversing, is a ittle more flat and given over to broader croplands. Bavaria is more lush and hilly, with narrow valleys crammed with smaller croplands. France sees fit to decorate its roadsides with geometric shapes in tie-dye colors: all along the road we pass spheres, pyramids, cubes, and totem-pole-like cylinders interspersed with flat colored triangular, square and circular panels. The Germans would brook no such effete nonsense.
Or maybe they would. So far the German reputation for brusque no-nonsensism has only manifested itself in one category of native: the old German woman. The Germans seem perfectly friendly right up until they become old women: then, as I told my kids, their hair turns silver and they mistake it for a crown. I've already mentioned the server who nearly whacked my daughter for trying to order breakfast weisswurst at dinner. On our way back from that trip, another old lady simply shouldered me aside in order to argue with the pink-haired cashier at the gas station; another shoved my son asid yesterday as he stooped to pick up some parade candy flung at his feet. The old German woman snatched it up for her own grandchild.
I'm not sure if the Germans would tolerate public art on their autobahn or not. Certainly it would be challenging to program an installation for an audience zooming by at any speed between 50 and 150 miles per hour. Traffic moving at a constant pace is no problem: while riding the underground between Mariansplatz and the Haufbahnhof in Munich, there is a series of video panels placed on the tunnel wall. As the train passes these spring to
life in sequence to display advertisements. How this is superior to placing a single panel inside the car is not certain, but the flashing video display does grab the attention.
Another thing that grabs the attention while travelling are these giant power-producing windmills looming over he countryside. The closer you get to these things, the bigger they seem until you're right under them: each blade is like a block of surban street spinning through the air, and the generator is as big as a house, all up on a ten-story
steel pole. They seem more commonplace here than in the U.S., or maybe the roads just pass closer to them. Energy production in all forms is more diverse and more casual than it is in the U.S. Gas stations stock not only diesel, but PREMIUM diesel. This stick-shift minivan we're driving burns diesel, and it seems considerably less expensive that the unleaded-automatic version of the same vehicle we drove back in the States. I've seen
houses equipped with solar power panels, which at least in the States indicates a considerable outlay of capital for an uncertain return. With all these sources of energy, I get the impression that the oil companies don't have the same tight grip over the public that they do back in America, where any form of energy aside from petroleum
is deliberately slandered into ridiculousness by companies earning more money every year than any company has ever earned in history.
Urban planning is also considerably different here, not the least reason because the towns and villages are not new settlements in the last 150 years, but are modern incarnations of hamlets that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. Or, sometimes, they are new settlements on what has traditionally been farmland. I think the little development where we are staying is one such: it has a newness about it and a planned orderliness to
its streets that is at odds with much of the surrounding area. To be sure the town of Pölling itself doubtless hals from the days when the Romans exacted tribute from the local farmers: our little portion of it seems like the recent addition. Pölling is a satellite of Neumarkt, which in turn is a suburb of Nürnberg, but I get the sense that the three are merely arranged so by the advent of the automobile: one hundred and fifty years ago Pölling was a suburb of Neumarkt, and Nuremberg was a good two-day jaunt away.
The streets are laid out much differently than in sprawling American suburbs. Cobblestone, even on new streets, is as common as asphalt. Sidewalks are narrow and the curb is a single low cobblestone rim, making it easy to park on the sidewalk which the locals do seemingly at random. Driveways and, notably, parking lots are done in mosaic cobblestone arrays, the parking slots picked out in rows of red bricks among a grid of dark granite.
Most towns have an "old section" at their center, some of which are preserved for historical purposes, but most of which are active business sections with cars and all, despite being only as wide as two horses passing. Surrounding this is a 'modern' business ring of three-story business buildings, and radiating out from this are spokes of neighborhoods, broken up by various terrain features. Where the sprawl of rapidly-developed American suburbia seems to result in long swathes of identical strip-malls and cheaply-built townhouses,
European neighborhoods seem to use more concrete, more tile roofing, and greater variety. In our little suburb for example the streets wind and curve, and every three or four developed properties are separated by undeveloped lots. Is this a deliberate aesthetic decision, or some happenstance of economic reality? Don't know. But it looks different out the window than an American suburb.
The windows are themselves rather different than in America. Most of thhe modern windows I've seen are of this complicated multi-opening variety that takes a while to figure out. The windows - and even the doors! - in our hosts' home open thusly: handle down means the window is closed; handle sideways makes the window or door open on a side hinge, as one would expect a door to do. But twist the handle upwards and the window or door tips
perilously forwards, until it stops against some kind of catch at about 10-15 degrees open. This resulted in no shortage of confusion the first few days, let me tell you. I'd walk over to open a door, only to have it start falling on me. I nearly got religion the first time that happened and the door slammed to a stop before crushing me like a bug.
A lot of bugs get in by those windows and doors. One big difference between Germany and America that I've noticed is a much more cavalier attitude towards bugs and rodents. When we first swapped homes with our hosts, they demonstrated their mode of living, which involved leaving the entire back of the house open to the good weather. While charming, the house was full of flies and even a mouse that we eventually trapped. Our hosts paid no attention to the flies, although they didn't like the mouse.
When they left and the weather turned cold and rainy we kept the doors and windows mostly shut, greatly reducing the fly problem. Other places show the same lack of concern for insects: when we went to the local bakery the other day the display case was full of flies, and even a wasp, buzzing around inside. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating because, well, because I find it kind of icky. Maybe its a way in which Americans have become prissy and uptight, but after watching a couple of flies dancing on a sweet roll I am very disinclined to want to eat it.
One way in which we have learned that France is very different from Germany is in the price of travel. Diesel fuel is about 10% more expensive, but even worse, the toll roads are ridiculous. We haven't even reached Paris yet and we've dropped over 20 Euros into these stupid little booths. Toll roads are astonishingly stupid things, in my estimation: in exchange for the convenience of going rather faster than on other roads, they make you
stop every few miles. Like now, outside of Jouarre, with Kelly Clarkson whining nasally on the radio. It's a lot like Chicago, but much more pricy.
But, come on, it's the 21st century for cryin' out loud. If you're going to run a toll road, set up some kind of automatic scanner and read people's license plates, then mai them a bill or something. Not only would traffic not need to slow down, but it would be our hosts who eventually got the bill :-).
Anyway my battery is almost out and we're about half an hour from Paris so I'll wrap up this stream-of-consciousness on the differences between Europe and America. Soon I will have to resume my piloting duties, and I've heard people frown on drivers who ae attempting to blog on a laptop at the same time...
Au revoir! Look for a Parisian photo gallery, coming soon!
Woo hoo! There is a weak wireless signal available at the new hotel. Hopefully it will remain available this evening and I can post some pics. Right now we're getting ready to head off to the Picasso museum. More later.
This entry brought to you by: Insomnia. Insomnia, for times when exhaustion just isn't enough!
A very brief cell-phone update to pass the time and assure everyone of our continued existence. Can't post any pics yet: there are two DOZEN wireless access points in range of my laptop, and every one that isn't encrypted is a fee-access municipal wifi point. I'd PAY to use the danged things, but their instructions are both in French, and utterly non-intuitive. So maybe no pics till the weekend unless I get lucky or French web designers get smarter.
Having fun in Paris, although the city seems dirttier and the Metro much more confusing than 18 yeats ago. Went to a big Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science on the Villette today, and holy smokes is that a big museum. At some point after the Star Wars exhibit and the other exhibits started to blur together (was Darth Vader responsible for continental drift?) I simply got museumed-out.
We left the museum and encountered the Geode (a giant mirrored ball that will raise the hackles of anyone who has read Vernor Vinge), and the giant public park that is the Villette.
We made our way across Paris to Montmartre and visited the Sacre Coure, which was more crowded and less impressive than I recalled. This may have been due to the fact that the only thing I could think the entire time I was in there was 'where's the bathroom?' (The answer 'far down the hill and half an hour in the future' was unfortunately not revealed to me in a flash of divine knowledge.) The predatory portrait-artists are still there, or their children, waiting to shame tourists into parting with 20 Euros for a bad charicature.
Dinner was some odd manifestation of my spouse's desire for an authentic Parisian experience smashing headlong into starvation. First we bought some pop and apples at a grocery we found growing out of a crack in a wall, then we bought-out the entire stock of fly-blown French 'hot dogs,' two dubious pale sausages welded into a split baguette with gelid cheese, aged half a day in a window, and microwaved to turgid softness. Hunger served as a condiment, and we ate crammed into a windowledge in a corner, drawing curious stares from the mostly Algerian neighborhood residents as they shouted into their cell-phones. I stared right back, having watched enough of their dashiki-clad neighbors gnaw roast corn on the metro to know that these French gourmands weren't above eating food bought out of a bucket on a rail platform themselves.
We then staggered down to Gare du Nord, a train station where we hoped to buy a discount rail pass. We were led a merry chase and by the time we found the right place and learned the cost would be 10 Euros more for having to buy photos to put ON the rail passes, we were baked. We headed back to the hostel and watched a movie on my laptop.
Tomorrow we're due to visit the Louvre, after that we shall see.
Well I don't feel any sleepier, but at least now I'm hungry too, so I'll sign off and observe the battle between hunger, exhaustion, insomnia and boredom to see who wins. I'm rooting for exhaustion. Gooooo Lethe!
Neumarkt held an annual parade today, and we were lucky to be in town for it. Tomorrow we leave for Paris. So we made a point of stopping by to see it. It was lots of fun, but regrettably plagued by the same inconstant weather that has been hanging over this area for a while. Nonetheless everyone seemed to have a good time.
Horse-drawn carriges feature a lot more strongly in these parades than in the ones I've seen in America. And people dress better - whole marching bands in traditional costume. Even people in the crowd wear traditional clothes.
Last night the family visited the fair being held as part of the festival weekend. It was a like a slightly smaller version of the Minnesota Midway, with lots of teens and families wandering among the rides. The "Wild Mouse" was even named the "Wilde Maus"! One thing my wife pointed out was that many of the foods served from the booths were the same foods people could buy day to day: pretzels, cheese, candy, etc. The beer gardens were immense, and everyone drank from big glass steins. Normally these steins would be expensive tourist items, but I could have had one just by buying a beer and walking off with the glass - or by picking up one of the many left on tables. I refrained from kleptomania however.
We ran into Claudia at the fair: she's a local girl who has befriended our daughter and has stopped by regularly to visit. Unfortunately when we get back from Paris, Claudia will be on vacation, so we won't see her again after today. But it's nice that our daughter has made a friend locally.
Claudia even brought over her sisters to shake my hand and solemnly wish me a "Happy Birthday." It's apparently treated much more seriously here than in the States. Or maybe, given my advanced age and all, they were simply worried that I might expire at any moment.
We're packing up for Paris, so I'd better wrap this up. Oh, and the weather there? Forecast of rain, all week long...
It'll be just like our honeymoon!
Okay.
Well, given a couple of days' rest and some time to work on it, I've managed to get all my photos to date up and in galleries online. Looking to the right --> you will see that I have thoughtfully arranged them for your viewing pleasure in a special section! That's me, Mister Thoughtful.
I still need to do a bit of editing, there are a lot of duplicates and too many shots of misty mountains, but just getting them in place was a lot of work and I'll leave that for later.
Otherwise its been a couple of quiet days here. Yesterday my big accomplishment was to mow the lawn. It has been cool and very rainy here and apparently those are ideal conditions for German grass, because the house was barely visible from the road. And don't even ask about the mushrooms and snails. We knew that one of our hosts' parents was due to come by and mow the lawn, but I didn't know if they would actually have a chance to because it was raining so much
So I hauled the mower out of the garage, and figured out how to start it (press the button, THEN squeeze the deadman switch on the handle). Soon I was mowing away. Very quiet mower. It featured a built-in clippings bag, so I frequently had to empty it into the compost. Still, once I got the hang of it the chore was rather fun. I was 95% done when sure enough our hostess' father arrived, in vest and buttondown shirt, to mow. He seemed a little put out that I had done most of it, but was happy enough to accept instead the task of paying the 5-Euro parking ticket I had gotten last weekend. I didn't realize that "3 Std" meant "3 hours".
Anyway we had a nice chat, and he showed us how to use the parking tag in the car. An odd little invention: when you park in a time-limited zone, you adjust the tag to the current time: when the officer checks your car, they can tell how long it has been there. He stayed for about half an hour and as he left the rain began again: he would have gotten about 20% of the yard finished.
Since my birthday the prior day had been spent in first gear, wrangling a minivan through hours and hours of stop-and-go traffic on the autobahn, the family decided to take me out for a donut. We went to "Der Beck," which is to Germany what Caribou is to Minnesota. We had a very nice time having our snack, and afterwards drove randomly around Neumarkt, stumbling serendiptiously upon the one store that sells peanut butter. In Germany, you don't have peanut butter, you have Nutella. Peanut butter here is as hard to find as Vegemite in the U.S.
The evening was spent quietly at home. It was a nice break. I worked on my photographs, which continued until today. But now, I'm finished, and we're all going to go for a walk. Tomorrow is another quiet day, and then on Monday we leave for Paris...
Posring a brief update via cell from the town of Garmisch. Or from Partenkirchen, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that this has been a fantastic day. We visited Mad King Ludwig's castle and had a fabulous time. Then since the tour took much longer than expected, I phoned a hotel out of my wife's 'Lonely Planet' guide and reserved a room blind.
When we got here, it turned out to be a terrific little 4th-floor suite with fanciful rooms for the kids and a kitchenette. We walked around town and found a fancy pizza place for dinner. In the park across the street a Bavarian orchestra in lederhosen performed.
And everywhere the MOUNTAINS, staggering and overwhelming, wreathed in mist or glowing in the sunset or silhouetted against purple gloaming. I don't know how anyone gets anything done with mountains like these all around. I strolled around a corner and stopped dead, staring at a mountain in the sunset.
Tomorrow we ride the zugspritz!
Greetings from Munich, where we're in our second day. Today's pictures are from our first day, yesterday the 7th: haven't gotten around to the more limited selection of photos today.
Yesterday was terrific. The weather was fine and the only hiccough was trying to find the hostel where we are staying: we missed the exit immediately upon reachng Munich and would have had to drive all the way around the city if we stayed on the beltway (the "Ring" as it's called here). Instead we cut across the center of the city, where our hosts' GPS unit betrayed us, misleading us to Elisinestrasse instead of Elisabethstrasse. Fortunately Mapblast on my cell phone came to our rescue, reliably taking us across central Munich to our destination just northwest of the city.
The rest of the day was just fine, however.
We wandered over to Josephsplatz before stumbling across the subway system, in the form of an elevator standing incongruously in the corner of a park. I descendened cautiously, telling my son "If I'm not back in ten minutes, send the reinforcements." Instead lo an behold beneath our feet was the subway system. Soon we had changed trains at the central station and arrived at the Odeonplatz, beside the Residenz (both really famous Munich-type places which I had never heard of before yesterday because I have no culture).
We toured the Residenz, then strolled to the Frauenkirche, where we tortured our children with Yet Another Old Church. This one had special meaning for my wife, because in her favorite book series, "Betsy, Tacy and Tib" (don't ask), the protagonist, Betsy, spends six weeks in Munich before World War I, and visits the Frauenkirche. Fortunately for the kids, the Wars were not kind to the Frauenkirche. Much of its otherwise fascinating interior had been reconstructed out of simple whitewashed concrete, so the tour was brief. We were all interested to see the two-story tall grandfather clock behind the altar. It was the Grandfather of all grandfather clocks!
Wandering on we visited the Marianzplatz, the center of old Munich and home to the famous Glockenschpiel, then mad eour way to the Viktualmarkt just as it was closing down. We bought the last five sandwiches at a "Nordsee" chain store, then discovered an open booth selling bratwurst and schnitzel. Soon we were merrily sampling each others plates, going back for more, the whole family laughing and havnig a great time. Somewhere in the middle of this meal I felt as happy as I have ever been.
We began our journey home only to be interrupted by a fantastic sunset across the Marianzplatz, which demanded photographic attention. I'm afraid the end of this series of shots is a little repetitive as I didn't have the battery power on my laptop to do a thorough job of sorting through these final photos.
Finally we staggered in, footsore and weary, to pass out in our hostel, but not before I processed and commented most of the photos in my camera.
Today, in contrast, was pleasant but almost totally hapless. We managed with some trouble to reach Dachau by about 11 a.m., and the weather was blazing hot. Oddly, Dachau was not a very comfortable place (imagine that!), and the blazing shade-less grounds soon sapped our energy, as did the very nature of the place itself. By the time we left around 2:30 we were completely drained from the heat and glare.
Our next destination was the Englishergarten, the largest and oldest public park in Europe. Train and train and train and we disembarked on a different planet. While we were tubing it, the weather had been replaced with something imported from a Portland autumn. Grey clouds spat chilly rain on a fitful wind as we trudged towards the Englischergarten, and when we arrived: downpour. We sat beneath a thick, leaning tree supported by two great metal posts (a tree which in America would have been cut down at the first sign of non-verticality for fear of insurance lawsuits) and shivered in 60-degree winds, dreaming fondly now of blazing Dachau just 90 minutes prior. Finally our patience ran out, and we slogged through the sleet back to the train station, our view of the largest park in Europe restricted to the single grassy field before our tree.
Back at Marianzplatz our dinner was somewhat less hapless, but plagued by European smokers and the obligatory screaming infant in a high chair diagonally across from our table. Still the food (I had the Schweinschunkenmeaten, or deep-fried leg of pig) was good and the place was warm. Our waitress was ALL GERMAN. I'm sure she spoke English, but damn if she was going to bother with us. When my daughter tried to order breakfast sausage (weissbraten) at dinner I thought the woman was going to reach over and slap her with the order pad.
We shopped a little after dinner but it was still chilly and sprinkly, so we finally headed home. However my wife wanted to make one last stop: the Alte Pinakothek museum, another Betsy-Tacy destination. It was two stops prior to ours on the train home, and she assured us it was open until 10 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so tromp-tromp-tromp we made our way there, arriving at exactly 8:00 p.m... when the museum closed. Poor girl, she'd mixed up the European "20:00 o'clock" with "10:00 o'clock". I've made the same mistake in the past.
Finally we noticed that the Pension Geiger - where the author Maud Hart Lovelace and her protagonist Betsy stayed in Munich, was only two blocks from the Pinakothek - so we had to stop by. Theresa would have been satisfied to merely take a photograph at the door, but no, I had to push it. So up we went, past the yoga center, to the second floor "reception desk" (which would be the third floor in America) that turned out not to be an open desk as I had supposed but the owner's' apartment. There I bothered the little old couple who ran the place, but we couldn't make each other understood - I wanted to find out if they knew anything about this author from 100 years ago who stayed there: they, quite reasonably, thought I wanted a room. The linguistic gap could not be abridged, but we did leave with a lovely business card. Hopefully we didn't confuse the owners too badly.
A visit to Dachau cut short by heat, a visit to the Gartens by cold and rain, dinner troubled by smoke, a museum closed by time, and a guest-house tangled in language, we wrapped up our hapless day by walking the last three blocks home in a driving cold rain. And you know what?
I'm still happy.