We left Paris early on Monday, and we made it through customs in London by 9 am, with no problems luckily. We got on a train to central London to meet up with Sharman, who had taken the day off to show us around and hang out with us. We did LOTS of walking. We saw The Globe, Westminster Abbey, Tower Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral (where Princess Di and Charles got married), The Parliament Building, Big Ben, 10 Downing Street, The Tower of London and Buckingham Palace (and associated gardens). We took a short tour of the palace, where we saw lots of paintings and furniture and jewelry. Unfortunately, we didn’t read the brochure until after we had bought our tickets. We really wanted to see some actual rooms in the palace, but those don’t open until July, so we were out of luck there.
In the afternoon, we found a café and had some tea and scones. Sharman taught us how to put the jam and cream on the scones the British way, so we can cross that experience off the list. I was beat at this point so I chose to slam back a double espresso as well, which definitely perked my eyelids up a bit. At the café, we met a guy from Sao Paulo (Brazil), who struck up some conversation with us because he was wondering where to find some good English food. In my mind, I was thinking “Does that exist?” but Sharman politely pointed him in the right direction. He turned out to be really interesting. He had come all the way to London for a Paul McCartney concert and he turned out to be a trip himself. He invited us to stay with him in Brazil, if we ever head that way. I wonder if he realizes that we really might :p.
After the café, it was time to head over to the theater district. Nick bought Sharman a ticket to see the play as well, so we went to pick up her ticket. Ah, what to say about the show. I had read mixed reviews about it, but I didn’t care at all. I had to go see it. Visually, it was really impressive. The set was really creative and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The music was great as well, but I don’t think it was on quite the same level as Phantom. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, Phantom still gives me goosebumps. I don’t think the sequel has the same effect. There was one incredibly moving scene but that one doesn’t compare to every scene in Phantom. Anyway, if you’re a fan, you should still see it if you can. It’s worth it.
After the show, Sharman drove us around a bit so that we could see London at night. We ended up missing Abby Road, which was too bad. I was really hoping to get a picture walking across it for my Dad. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30, so we decided to just stay at the airport rather than get a hotel. Apparently, everyone and their mother had the same thought. The airport looked more like a homeless shelter when we walked in. The floor was just covered with bodies. We were exhausted. We tried to hole up in a dark area, which worked for a little while, but we were eventually woken up at 4 am when the information center next to us opened. We sleep-walked our way through security and customs and settled down at the gate. By 5:30 the airport looked like a Metropolis. Insanity. Our flight took off and got in on time. Another end to another amazing weekend.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Paris! Haw Haw Haw!
While waiting for the plane, my stomach started to do the, uh, Sammy dance. I ran to purchase the Imodium and by the time I was finished it was time to board- no time for a bathroom stop. I got on, I sat down, I stood up. I (ran) to the back of the plane and explained to the flight attendant that I really needed to use the bathroom. She seemed a little annoyed but didn’t put up a fight. I smiled and thanked her on my way back to my seat . I sat, buckled my seat-belt, thirty seconds went by, and I unbuckled my seat-belt, I stood up and (calmly) walked back to the back of the plane. I’m sure at this point, she (and everyone else I was passing) was thinking, “What is wrong with this girl, it’s a 50 minute flight.” I mumbled “I’m really sorry “ and proceeded to the bathroom. It was fairly embarrassing, but I enjoy sharing my bodily miseries for the humor value :p
The flight to Paris was short and (relatively) painless. We made our way through customs in a flash and unscathed by the border guards. We both imagined that French people would be stereotypically rude and awful, but it couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Everyone we met in France was incredibly welcoming and genuine. People were much friendlier about speaking English with us than most people in Germany and nobody looked down their nose at us like Miss UK did, that’s for sure.
We took a bus to our hotel which was AMAZING. Nick really deserves a standing ovation on that one. I of course had no idea where we were staying, so when we walked in and I saw their rates listed at 650 Euro a night (roughly $840) (+ 25Euro extra for a view of the Eiffel Tower) my mouth just about hit the floor. It turns out that Nick pricelined the hotel for just over $100 a night for the two nights. Priceline has been incredible to us more than once. If that doesn’t make you a believer, I don’t know what would. Because we had gotten barely any sleep the night before I really wanted to see if we could check in early so that I could sleep for a few hours (it was 9am at this point). The clerk was super friendly and great with us. He checked us in right away and gave us a room on the 15th floor, with a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower and of the Arc de Triumph. It was unreal. I was a happy (almost) birthday girl.
I dozed for a couple of hours and then got up and took a perfect hotel shower. You know the one. We originally planned to do a free walking tour of Paris, but opted to go to the Louvre instead. The trains in Paris were super easy to navigate and there was a train station conveniently attached to our hotel through a little mall, so getting places over the weekend was a cinch.
We decided to grab some food before walking through the museum because by that point I had made peace with my stomach and we were both pretty hungry. We had lunch at a typical French café and ended up sitting next to a couple from Philadelphia. We noticed that they had the Rick Steve’s guide book in hand, which is the same book that we have (and have loved) for Germany. That struck up some conversation and we talked about how surprising it was to us that the people were so friendly in France. They let us in on a little secret- you should never say “Hi” to a French person. To them, it’s like saying “Hey You”, so they tend to not be as friendly when greeted that way. This was advice that we followed all weekend and we never had a problem. Maybe we should have tested it out. Next time.
Back to the Louvre. Wow! You know, everyone always talks about how beautiful the museum is and I really thought, “How special can it be, it’s a bunch of paintings?” I’m not really into art. Not that I can’t appreciate something nice when I see it, but walking through art museums is a little dry for me, buuut I figured we had to visit the Louvre while we were in Paris. Man, there’s a reason why everyone always talks about it- it’s gorgeous, plain and simple. And HUGE! Apparently, it would take 9 months to walk through the entire museum and look at everything. I could have spent all day just looking at the outside of the building. It’s so ornate and regal looking. I was surprised because you can take pictures in the museum, without a flash, which was a rule that no one heeded nor enforced. The messed up thing about it is that when no one is allowed to bring cameras into the museum, those people who were flashing away will be pissed off about it.
The paintings in the museum were, of course, fantastic. For me, the best part of the museum was seeing the ceilings in the different rooms. How do people sculpt things on the ceilings? I feel like a little piece of humanity has died in that sense. No one cares about making things look nice just for the sake of it. I wish that I had a time machine, so that I could go back and meet the people who made those things. I’m sure it would make for some interesting conversations. Anyway, of course we saw the Mona Lisa, which was so tiny compared to everything around it. It looked so weird. More than the painting itself, I think the best part of that was the feeling of standing in front of something so famous and renowned. It was cool. We also saw the sculpture of Venus and Henry V’s crown jewels which were impressive, as one would expect a King’s jewels to be.
After the Louvre, we had planned to walk through a neighborhood called Montmarte. We thought getting our picture painted by a crazy Frenchman would be fitting, but just as we were exiting the subway, Sammy struck again. Deeply submerged in conversation with Nico, I somehow managed to slip and fall (very hard) while walking UP the stairs of the subway. Yes, that’s right. Up the stairs. I really don’t know how I manage to do these things. Unfortunately, my right knee smacking into the pavement with no help from my hands to stop me was enough to bring our walking to a halt for the day. After that, we holed up in a mall for an hour or so and got a drink. The mall wasn’t your typical cookie cutter structure like at home. It was built in the shape of a cathedral. All of the stores were in a circle around an open area in the middle and the ceiling was made of stained glass. If you’re a shopper, it would inspire you to max out your Visa.
On Saturday night, Nick’s parents got us tickets to go to the top of the Eifel Tower, so that we could be there at midnight for my birthday. After some consideration we decided to go up, despite the over-crowded elevator and the really high point at the top. We counted down at midnight and had some fun taking pictures at the top. Even though it’s such a cliché, Paris really is romantic and beautiful. The tower has a light show every hour on the hour until 1 am. It lights up like a big sparkler for a couple of minutes which gets lots of “oooohhhs and aaahhss.”
On Sunday, we hit up Notre Dame, a little bit of the Latin Quarter, and we made it to Montmarte. We tried to get to the Catacombs, which is the place where they buried the dead under the streets of Paris when they ran out of space in the cemeteries, but we didn’t realize the line closed at 4 while the catacombs themselves were open until 5. I was a little bummed. We both wanted to see some creepy bones, but maybe in another life
The restaurant that Nico found for dinner was incredible! “Le Train Bleu” was the place we went to for dinner, and I pray to the food Gods that I’ll be able to go there again someday. The restaurant itself was eccentric to say the least. It was in a train station and the sign for it was lit up in neon letters. It looked like a Johnny Rockets basically. When you stepped through the revolving doors, it was like falling through the rabbit hole. Everything in the room had gold trim, the ceilings were painted and sculpted just like those in the Louvre, and the staff was fully dressed in penguin attire, of course. We both ordered from the same set menu which included an appetizer, entrée, and choice of dessert or cheese. With each order you also got a half a bottle of wine with your meal. We started with some sort of sausage appetizer covered in a sauce made from deliciousness. Next, we got duck which I had ordered well done, while Nick opted for medium-rare. His was by far the better choice. Not that mine wasn’t incredible (because it was), but his was out of this world. With that, we got a side of whipped sweet potatoes, which were scrumptious. Neither of us really likes sweet potatoes. At Thanksgiving, I generally turn up my nose to them when my Dad makes them, but WOW- they were insanely good. For desert, I got some sort of Strawberry tart, while Nick went with the cheese plate. Turns out, I made the better decision there. He got three different pieces of cheese and one that smelled suspiciously of feet. I don’t think I’ve seen someone in so much pain before. Nick’s face turned bright red, as soon as he popped it into his mouth and I could tell he was struggling with all his might not to gag it up onto his plate. Hahaahaha.. That one will stay with me for awhile.
Also at dinner, Nick gave me another present from his parents –tickets to go see “Love Never Dies” (the sequel to “The Phantom of the Opera”) in London the next night. I was beside myself. I really love Phantom, so I was pretty ecstatic to find out we were going! After dinner we hopped on the Subway and took a quick detour to the Arc de Triumph, so that we could get a look at it at night. Talk about massive! I wanted to try to run into the middle, so that we could walk through it, but even at midnight, there was no way we were going to be able to run through 7 lanes of traffic. I wanted to get home, so that I could call my parents and show them the Eifel Tower all lit up, so we ran around the Arc, stopping once and a while to take some pictures. We must have looked so silly. Haha. We got back in time, so that I could call Mom and Dad and show them the skyline.
It was such a memorable trip. Nick really is the best <3.
The flight to Paris was short and (relatively) painless. We made our way through customs in a flash and unscathed by the border guards. We both imagined that French people would be stereotypically rude and awful, but it couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Everyone we met in France was incredibly welcoming and genuine. People were much friendlier about speaking English with us than most people in Germany and nobody looked down their nose at us like Miss UK did, that’s for sure.
We took a bus to our hotel which was AMAZING. Nick really deserves a standing ovation on that one. I of course had no idea where we were staying, so when we walked in and I saw their rates listed at 650 Euro a night (roughly $840) (+ 25Euro extra for a view of the Eiffel Tower) my mouth just about hit the floor. It turns out that Nick pricelined the hotel for just over $100 a night for the two nights. Priceline has been incredible to us more than once. If that doesn’t make you a believer, I don’t know what would. Because we had gotten barely any sleep the night before I really wanted to see if we could check in early so that I could sleep for a few hours (it was 9am at this point). The clerk was super friendly and great with us. He checked us in right away and gave us a room on the 15th floor, with a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower and of the Arc de Triumph. It was unreal. I was a happy (almost) birthday girl.
I dozed for a couple of hours and then got up and took a perfect hotel shower. You know the one. We originally planned to do a free walking tour of Paris, but opted to go to the Louvre instead. The trains in Paris were super easy to navigate and there was a train station conveniently attached to our hotel through a little mall, so getting places over the weekend was a cinch.
We decided to grab some food before walking through the museum because by that point I had made peace with my stomach and we were both pretty hungry. We had lunch at a typical French café and ended up sitting next to a couple from Philadelphia. We noticed that they had the Rick Steve’s guide book in hand, which is the same book that we have (and have loved) for Germany. That struck up some conversation and we talked about how surprising it was to us that the people were so friendly in France. They let us in on a little secret- you should never say “Hi” to a French person. To them, it’s like saying “Hey You”, so they tend to not be as friendly when greeted that way. This was advice that we followed all weekend and we never had a problem. Maybe we should have tested it out. Next time.
Back to the Louvre. Wow! You know, everyone always talks about how beautiful the museum is and I really thought, “How special can it be, it’s a bunch of paintings?” I’m not really into art. Not that I can’t appreciate something nice when I see it, but walking through art museums is a little dry for me, buuut I figured we had to visit the Louvre while we were in Paris. Man, there’s a reason why everyone always talks about it- it’s gorgeous, plain and simple. And HUGE! Apparently, it would take 9 months to walk through the entire museum and look at everything. I could have spent all day just looking at the outside of the building. It’s so ornate and regal looking. I was surprised because you can take pictures in the museum, without a flash, which was a rule that no one heeded nor enforced. The messed up thing about it is that when no one is allowed to bring cameras into the museum, those people who were flashing away will be pissed off about it.
The paintings in the museum were, of course, fantastic. For me, the best part of the museum was seeing the ceilings in the different rooms. How do people sculpt things on the ceilings? I feel like a little piece of humanity has died in that sense. No one cares about making things look nice just for the sake of it. I wish that I had a time machine, so that I could go back and meet the people who made those things. I’m sure it would make for some interesting conversations. Anyway, of course we saw the Mona Lisa, which was so tiny compared to everything around it. It looked so weird. More than the painting itself, I think the best part of that was the feeling of standing in front of something so famous and renowned. It was cool. We also saw the sculpture of Venus and Henry V’s crown jewels which were impressive, as one would expect a King’s jewels to be.
After the Louvre, we had planned to walk through a neighborhood called Montmarte. We thought getting our picture painted by a crazy Frenchman would be fitting, but just as we were exiting the subway, Sammy struck again. Deeply submerged in conversation with Nico, I somehow managed to slip and fall (very hard) while walking UP the stairs of the subway. Yes, that’s right. Up the stairs. I really don’t know how I manage to do these things. Unfortunately, my right knee smacking into the pavement with no help from my hands to stop me was enough to bring our walking to a halt for the day. After that, we holed up in a mall for an hour or so and got a drink. The mall wasn’t your typical cookie cutter structure like at home. It was built in the shape of a cathedral. All of the stores were in a circle around an open area in the middle and the ceiling was made of stained glass. If you’re a shopper, it would inspire you to max out your Visa.
On Saturday night, Nick’s parents got us tickets to go to the top of the Eifel Tower, so that we could be there at midnight for my birthday. After some consideration we decided to go up, despite the over-crowded elevator and the really high point at the top. We counted down at midnight and had some fun taking pictures at the top. Even though it’s such a cliché, Paris really is romantic and beautiful. The tower has a light show every hour on the hour until 1 am. It lights up like a big sparkler for a couple of minutes which gets lots of “oooohhhs and aaahhss.”
On Sunday, we hit up Notre Dame, a little bit of the Latin Quarter, and we made it to Montmarte. We tried to get to the Catacombs, which is the place where they buried the dead under the streets of Paris when they ran out of space in the cemeteries, but we didn’t realize the line closed at 4 while the catacombs themselves were open until 5. I was a little bummed. We both wanted to see some creepy bones, but maybe in another life
The restaurant that Nico found for dinner was incredible! “Le Train Bleu” was the place we went to for dinner, and I pray to the food Gods that I’ll be able to go there again someday. The restaurant itself was eccentric to say the least. It was in a train station and the sign for it was lit up in neon letters. It looked like a Johnny Rockets basically. When you stepped through the revolving doors, it was like falling through the rabbit hole. Everything in the room had gold trim, the ceilings were painted and sculpted just like those in the Louvre, and the staff was fully dressed in penguin attire, of course. We both ordered from the same set menu which included an appetizer, entrée, and choice of dessert or cheese. With each order you also got a half a bottle of wine with your meal. We started with some sort of sausage appetizer covered in a sauce made from deliciousness. Next, we got duck which I had ordered well done, while Nick opted for medium-rare. His was by far the better choice. Not that mine wasn’t incredible (because it was), but his was out of this world. With that, we got a side of whipped sweet potatoes, which were scrumptious. Neither of us really likes sweet potatoes. At Thanksgiving, I generally turn up my nose to them when my Dad makes them, but WOW- they were insanely good. For desert, I got some sort of Strawberry tart, while Nick went with the cheese plate. Turns out, I made the better decision there. He got three different pieces of cheese and one that smelled suspiciously of feet. I don’t think I’ve seen someone in so much pain before. Nick’s face turned bright red, as soon as he popped it into his mouth and I could tell he was struggling with all his might not to gag it up onto his plate. Hahaahaha.. That one will stay with me for awhile.
Also at dinner, Nick gave me another present from his parents –tickets to go see “Love Never Dies” (the sequel to “The Phantom of the Opera”) in London the next night. I was beside myself. I really love Phantom, so I was pretty ecstatic to find out we were going! After dinner we hopped on the Subway and took a quick detour to the Arc de Triumph, so that we could get a look at it at night. Talk about massive! I wanted to try to run into the middle, so that we could walk through it, but even at midnight, there was no way we were going to be able to run through 7 lanes of traffic. I wanted to get home, so that I could call my parents and show them the Eifel Tower all lit up, so we ran around the Arc, stopping once and a while to take some pictures. We must have looked so silly. Haha. We got back in time, so that I could call Mom and Dad and show them the skyline.
It was such a memorable trip. Nick really is the best <3.
Birthday plans!
I figured I would give Nick’s fingers a vacation and write the entry about my birthday weekend because Nick put a lot of effort into making it really special and I love him a little more for it, if that’s possible. We mentioned in an earlier post that we had bought insanely cheap tickets to different places via RyanAir. For the weekend of my birthday, we bought a round trip to London for 6 Euro each. I admit, London was not the place that I really wanted to spend my birthday in. There were far more romantic and cool places that I had in mind, but I couldn’t pass up the ridiculous offer.
I contacted our friend Sharman who we had met in Ecuador while we were living there. Marta (our Spanish teacher) introduced us to Sharman because Sharman was taking a 2 week vacation to Ecuador and was looking for some people who she could (understand) and hang out with. We took her to Salsa night, dancing and went out for dinner a few times. She’s a great person and told us if we ever came to London to get in touch and she would love to show us around. So, we did. I was under the impression that Shar would be picking us up from the airport and we would be staying with her for weekend. Meanwhile, Nick found a really great deal on a flight from London to Paris because he knew I had been dying to go there forever. He contacted Sharman and told her to keep sending me messages and keep me under the impression that we would be in London for the whole weekend.
Flash forward to the week before the trip. Of course, as luck would have it we both came down with colds on Wednesday before leaving on Friday. If you don’t already know, I really have to be one of the unluckiest people in the world (as far as random mishaps go). Sometimes, I feel like the guy from Mario Kart driving around with the storm cloud above my head. I spent most of Thursday and Friday sleeping (occasionally waking up to watch the World Cup :D) and pumping my stomach full of OJ and soup.
When Friday came, although my sore throat had subsided a bit, I still felt like there was a small army of germs marching its way through my sinuses; but, off we went. Our flight didn’t leave until 10:55pm and was only a little more than an hour long. Because of the time difference, we arrived in London at 11:30pm. The flight was smooth but I ended up having a problem with my ears and sinuses while we were landing. My ears were in an immense amount of pain, so I was happy to be on the ground not only on time, but early! Nick, of course, was thinking “Wait until she finds out we have another plane to catch!” However, that’s where the luck stopped for the time being. As we rounded the corner for customs, I knew we were in for a LONG night. There were about 150 people waiting in line in front of us, waiting to be pushed through the two windows that were open.
An hour and a half later, we had the pleasure of meeting the most unpleasant woman on Earth. I have never been looked at in such a suspicious manner before. Now, after standing in line for an hour and a half until 1 in the morning while sick, I had some trouble dealing with her BS. The first thing she said to us (no greeting) was “Put your passports together on the counter, so I only need to reach up once.” What?! You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean I know that border guards have a physically demanding job and all, but REALLY? She continued to bombard us with questions about our jobs, lives, intentions etc. Even after asking for and seeing our return ticket to Germany, she seemed to think that she was doing us a favor by letting us in. Thanks to Satan, we missed the bus we needed to take to the other airport (at this point, I was still thinking that Shar was picking us up there because it was closer to her house). We asked an information desk what our next best option was and they told us there was a bus that would take us into London (1 hour and 15 minutes) then we would have to wait another hour there and then get on a second bus to the airport (add one more hour and fifteen on).
At this point, I was practically begging Nick to call Sharman and see if she would be willing to pick us up at this airport, so that we could get some sleep and not have to arrive at the airport at 4:30 am. Nick responded by pulling a present (wrapped in printer paper hehe) out of his bag and said “Happy Birthday.” He told me I should open the present because everything was going wrong for us and I could use a pick me up. Dazed and confused, I told him that I could wait until my birthday and I didn’t want to open it. He insisted so finally I gave in –who doesn’t love presents, right? It was an English/French dictionary. He explained that he knew I had always wanted to go to Paris, so he wanted me to be there for my birthday. He then explained to me that we NEEDED to take the 3 hour bus in order to get to the airport and catch our flight out at 6. Well, Jeez. It was such a romantic, hectic evening. One thing the info office failed to mention was that the bus would be dropping us off in the middle of London IN THE COLD at 2 am. There was no bus station to wait in and we were not impressed.
There was a Romanian girl on our bus who was in the same boat as us. She needed to get to the other airport, so we walked with her from the corner where bus #1 dropped us into the cold, dark night to the bus stop where we would catch bus #2 and we decided we would try to find a café or something to wait in. When we found bus stop #2, there was a bus parked there ready to go the airport. It wasn’t the same but as the one we had on our tickets, but we decided to beg the driver to let us on. After some debate, the guy finally said OK and we were off. We got into the airport at 3:30 am but c'est la vie, we were off to Paris!
I contacted our friend Sharman who we had met in Ecuador while we were living there. Marta (our Spanish teacher) introduced us to Sharman because Sharman was taking a 2 week vacation to Ecuador and was looking for some people who she could (understand) and hang out with. We took her to Salsa night, dancing and went out for dinner a few times. She’s a great person and told us if we ever came to London to get in touch and she would love to show us around. So, we did. I was under the impression that Shar would be picking us up from the airport and we would be staying with her for weekend. Meanwhile, Nick found a really great deal on a flight from London to Paris because he knew I had been dying to go there forever. He contacted Sharman and told her to keep sending me messages and keep me under the impression that we would be in London for the whole weekend.
Flash forward to the week before the trip. Of course, as luck would have it we both came down with colds on Wednesday before leaving on Friday. If you don’t already know, I really have to be one of the unluckiest people in the world (as far as random mishaps go). Sometimes, I feel like the guy from Mario Kart driving around with the storm cloud above my head. I spent most of Thursday and Friday sleeping (occasionally waking up to watch the World Cup :D) and pumping my stomach full of OJ and soup.
When Friday came, although my sore throat had subsided a bit, I still felt like there was a small army of germs marching its way through my sinuses; but, off we went. Our flight didn’t leave until 10:55pm and was only a little more than an hour long. Because of the time difference, we arrived in London at 11:30pm. The flight was smooth but I ended up having a problem with my ears and sinuses while we were landing. My ears were in an immense amount of pain, so I was happy to be on the ground not only on time, but early! Nick, of course, was thinking “Wait until she finds out we have another plane to catch!” However, that’s where the luck stopped for the time being. As we rounded the corner for customs, I knew we were in for a LONG night. There were about 150 people waiting in line in front of us, waiting to be pushed through the two windows that were open.
An hour and a half later, we had the pleasure of meeting the most unpleasant woman on Earth. I have never been looked at in such a suspicious manner before. Now, after standing in line for an hour and a half until 1 in the morning while sick, I had some trouble dealing with her BS. The first thing she said to us (no greeting) was “Put your passports together on the counter, so I only need to reach up once.” What?! You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean I know that border guards have a physically demanding job and all, but REALLY? She continued to bombard us with questions about our jobs, lives, intentions etc. Even after asking for and seeing our return ticket to Germany, she seemed to think that she was doing us a favor by letting us in. Thanks to Satan, we missed the bus we needed to take to the other airport (at this point, I was still thinking that Shar was picking us up there because it was closer to her house). We asked an information desk what our next best option was and they told us there was a bus that would take us into London (1 hour and 15 minutes) then we would have to wait another hour there and then get on a second bus to the airport (add one more hour and fifteen on).
At this point, I was practically begging Nick to call Sharman and see if she would be willing to pick us up at this airport, so that we could get some sleep and not have to arrive at the airport at 4:30 am. Nick responded by pulling a present (wrapped in printer paper hehe) out of his bag and said “Happy Birthday.” He told me I should open the present because everything was going wrong for us and I could use a pick me up. Dazed and confused, I told him that I could wait until my birthday and I didn’t want to open it. He insisted so finally I gave in –who doesn’t love presents, right? It was an English/French dictionary. He explained that he knew I had always wanted to go to Paris, so he wanted me to be there for my birthday. He then explained to me that we NEEDED to take the 3 hour bus in order to get to the airport and catch our flight out at 6. Well, Jeez. It was such a romantic, hectic evening. One thing the info office failed to mention was that the bus would be dropping us off in the middle of London IN THE COLD at 2 am. There was no bus station to wait in and we were not impressed.
There was a Romanian girl on our bus who was in the same boat as us. She needed to get to the other airport, so we walked with her from the corner where bus #1 dropped us into the cold, dark night to the bus stop where we would catch bus #2 and we decided we would try to find a café or something to wait in. When we found bus stop #2, there was a bus parked there ready to go the airport. It wasn’t the same but as the one we had on our tickets, but we decided to beg the driver to let us on. After some debate, the guy finally said OK and we were off. We got into the airport at 3:30 am but c'est la vie, we were off to Paris!
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Munich II
Munich Part II
Unfortunately, a lot of time has passed since my last entry.......but I neglected to finish my thoughts on Munich, so this will be a (brief) summary of our last few hours in Bavaria.
When we were on the bus to Dachau (you take a train to the won of Dachau and then a bus to the camp), an American on the bus asked to borrow my Rick Steves book. When she brought it back, she told us about a celebration in the center of town. Starting at 3pm, there was free beer and a huge celebration in the main square due to Munich's soccer team's triumph in the German league. Apparently, they won the championship. This became more apparent when we got back into the city, the train filled to the brim with people wearing jerseys, hats, and scarves. I saw more grown men than I could count who had winter scarves tied to both arms on a hot, almost 80-degree day. So I had to show my Munichian pride as well......Sammy let me buy a scarf to don for the celebration. It's not every day you're at the May version of Oktoberfest in Munich (known as Munchen in German btw).
So down to the main square we went.....though it was too packed to get anywhere near the middle (from whence the free beer must have flowed). We saw plenty of the free beer cups stacked high in many a Munichians hands though.....and many a paid-for beer bottle as well. Remember how there's no open container law? It comes in particularly handy when your soccer team wins the national championship.
Anyway, we walked around as best we could (though the main square was jammed) and heard the music and listened to thousands of Germans join in a raucous chorus or two of Sweet Caroline. Who would have known that Neil Diamond was popular enough to be the anthem of a victory party here in Germany? Unfortunately, I never blogged when we were in South America......but let me take this opportunity to also marvel at the immense popularity of Bob Marley anywhere within a 5 hour drive of sand and salt water. We went to coastal towns in Ecuador where clearly no one spoke more than 5 words of English ("yes", "no", and "good price for you!"). But they all bopped their heads to Bob. Even in a town where there was one straw hut beach bar after another and people Salsa-ed and Bachata-ed until the wee hours of the morning....any place that didn't mix in a Bob Marley tune or two or five throughout the night was definitely the exception rather than the rule.
That's going to lead me on a quick tangent of the power of American culture. I don't know as though the average American realizes the influence of American culture and tastes worldwide. Yes, I know Neil Diamond is Canadian. So is Johnny Favourite Swing Orchestra. Ever heard of them? Ya know why? They didn't have a big US hit. Anyway.......American music and fast food chains and corporations are just everywhere. It's really amazing sometimes when I realize how far our tastes reach. We were in the jungle hearing FloRida's "Low" and in shopping malls in Quito, Ecuador (where, again, very few people speak English) where the music was all American/British adult contemporary pop. That probably doesn't surprise you until you think about it. Imagine that you're a marginally well-to-do mall shopper in a major city in the US and you were in the mall......and all of the music was in Russian. Imagine you worked in the Gap and you didn't really understand a word of what was being said in the songs playing in your store all day long. Sure, I know that once in a great while we have a pop song that gets popular that's got some spanish in it. But "dame la gasoliiiiina" every once in a while isn't the same as an entire afternoon of listening to Phil Collins when you don't speak English. Yes, I know he's not American either. But hopefully you're getting my point. In Quito, we had Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Domino's, Tony Roma's, Applebee's, McDonald's, Burger King, Baskin Robins, KFC, Taco Bell, TGI Friday's, and Payless Shoes (which wasn't where you really went if you wanted to Pay Less.....paying less meant going to one of the MANY Chinese stores called "Hong Kong Almacen" or something like that were you could buy a pair of dress shoes or "Nike" sneakers for $7-$15 (fifteen would be really, really nice). In Costa Rica, so many American companies had large office buildings in industrial parks where companies like Western Union headquarter most of their accounting. In one park, I think we saw Western Union, Proctor & Gamble, Oracle, Microsoft, HP.....and several that I've forgotten. Though Starbucks doesn't sell coffee in Costa Rica, we saw their office in San Jose where they negotiate with their suppliers. In Colombia, we finally got a Subway Sub for the first time after about 7 months. And those are relatively poor countries (as compared to the US). In Ecuador, lunch was $1.50 at a local restaurant -- consisting of a large bowl of soup, a plate of rice with vegetables and meat, and a glass of juice. Yet people were willing to splurge on a $4 or $5 value meal at McDonald's. I have yet to see the village without Coca-Cola -- including at the top of the crater of a volcano at 12,000 feet where there weren't even enough houses to call it a village. They still had a convenience store that stocked Coke. It's amazing to realize that whether we are loved or hated in the world, the things that we produce are still in such high demand -- even in places where people have neither the need nor the means to consume them. While in some ways, I don't think this is all as bad as some people more liberal than I would tell you. But it worries me as to what will happen to smaller cultures around the world. One of the things I miss the most about Ecuador is flying around bends on mountain side roads with the bus driver blasting upbeat local music in Spanish at 2am. I worry that someday, that, too, will be gone. I hope it won't.
But anyway -- back to Munich. We weaved around the crowd and made our way to our key destination for nourishment -- Hofbrauhaus -- the most famous (and largest) Beer Hall in Germany and the World. During Oktoberfest, this is apparently the place to be. It's where Germans and tourists alike down copius amounts of German beer and they serve the finest of local cuisine. All of the beer except for White Beer (a local specialty made from Wheat) is only served in a 1L glass -- so more or less, you gotta drink a lot of beer. The place is said to pour 10,000 of the 1L glasses a day. Once of the more interesting things about Bavaria is that you get an interesting mix of people who look more or less the same as any average American......as well as the folks who still dress in the traditional suspenders/coveralls/Birkenstocks/etc. The Hofbrauhaus did not disappoint........
So Sam and I ordered some grub and as we were waiting, there was a band just finishing up their gig playing traditional Bavarian music. At some point, a large, happy, very traditionally dressed man (picture it down to the fedora-y type hat with a feather) leaned down onto our table with his elbow on the surface and he hand extended out to Sam in an invitation to arm wrestle. He had Steve Buscemi's eyes and a "V for Vendetta" grin. Sam figured that this was all part of the show, so why not arm wrestle the dude. So she took his hand and proceed to pound him into the tablecloth like it was no big deal. He turned those big brown Steve Buscemi's to me in amazement and apparently decided that he needed greater leverage, so he slid himself onto my bench and extended his arm for a rematch -- staring at the tablecloth with his hand open and extended towards Sam, not saying a word. Naturally, Sam thought he let her win the first time, so they'd go for round two and about the time she almost had him down he's sling her hand back down like the large drunken Bavarian he was. However, yet again, Sam won with relative ease.....though waiting a bit this time to see if he'd fight back I think. He again turned to me in utter disbelief and uttered something to be in German that clearly meant, "Where did you find Olga, the strongest woman on Earth? Aren't you afraid for your life with this one?". Apparently, he hadn't had enough yet, so he put his arm down for round 3, at which point, Sam politely let him know that she was done. However, ole crazy eyes wasn't having any of that. He put his elbow down insistently and began squeezing the air as though to taunt Sam into a 3rd attempt. Sam looked at me and asked me to save her.....but what was I going to do? Push a (weird, but clearly friendly) drunken, traditionally-dressed, obviously regular patron of the establishment off the edge of our bench while we are in the largest Beer Hall in the world, surrounded by a number of other similarly clad charged up Bavarians? Clearly not. So we proceeded with round 3. And 4. And some ridiculous number more rounds. I had more or less figured that once our food came, this game would have to end. In the meantime, I was snapping as many pictures of this guy's game face as possible. At some point, a similarly large, traditionally dressed, white-bearded man came to our table looking at our new friend and he said something to us in German. I told him that I didn't speak German and he asked us in English if this guy was bothering us. We told him that he wasn't, but I think he could tell that it had gone on long enough. He made some polite small talk asking us where we were from. His English was quite impressive -- I guess I was surprised seeing as how he had to have been in at the least his late 60's. After a few moments, he said something to the crazed arm wrestler and took him buy the hand and gave him a gentle tug that let the guy know it was time to get up. At this point, I realized that this was probably his father and that rather than just being drunk, this guy was likely somewhat mentally challenged. I felt a little bad at having had some laughs at his expense -- but then, he was having as much fun as we were I think. And that brings me to my final thought about Bavarians.......they are MUCH friendlier than Berliners. In general, people were very, very nice to us in Bavaria. They immediately spoke English with us when they realized we didn't speak German and they seemed happy to do so. I certainly don't expect everyone to speak English -- we are, after all, in Germany. However, the people in Bavaria didn't seem as annoyed to converse with us in English as those in Berlin and they seemed happy to show us the local culture. In fact, when we couldn't find the Hofbrauhaus, Sam had asked a woman on the street. She didn't know it, but she worked in a hotel. She was clearly on her way home from work, but she insisted on turning around and walking us back to her hotel (seemingly almost half a mile) so she could bring us in and introduce us to the desk clerk who spoke some English and could tell us where to go. This is the Germany that you should see if you ever visit.
Oh -- and remember, no Leiberkasse.
Unfortunately, a lot of time has passed since my last entry.......but I neglected to finish my thoughts on Munich, so this will be a (brief) summary of our last few hours in Bavaria.
When we were on the bus to Dachau (you take a train to the won of Dachau and then a bus to the camp), an American on the bus asked to borrow my Rick Steves book. When she brought it back, she told us about a celebration in the center of town. Starting at 3pm, there was free beer and a huge celebration in the main square due to Munich's soccer team's triumph in the German league. Apparently, they won the championship. This became more apparent when we got back into the city, the train filled to the brim with people wearing jerseys, hats, and scarves. I saw more grown men than I could count who had winter scarves tied to both arms on a hot, almost 80-degree day. So I had to show my Munichian pride as well......Sammy let me buy a scarf to don for the celebration. It's not every day you're at the May version of Oktoberfest in Munich (known as Munchen in German btw).
So down to the main square we went.....though it was too packed to get anywhere near the middle (from whence the free beer must have flowed). We saw plenty of the free beer cups stacked high in many a Munichians hands though.....and many a paid-for beer bottle as well. Remember how there's no open container law? It comes in particularly handy when your soccer team wins the national championship.
Anyway, we walked around as best we could (though the main square was jammed) and heard the music and listened to thousands of Germans join in a raucous chorus or two of Sweet Caroline. Who would have known that Neil Diamond was popular enough to be the anthem of a victory party here in Germany? Unfortunately, I never blogged when we were in South America......but let me take this opportunity to also marvel at the immense popularity of Bob Marley anywhere within a 5 hour drive of sand and salt water. We went to coastal towns in Ecuador where clearly no one spoke more than 5 words of English ("yes", "no", and "good price for you!"). But they all bopped their heads to Bob. Even in a town where there was one straw hut beach bar after another and people Salsa-ed and Bachata-ed until the wee hours of the morning....any place that didn't mix in a Bob Marley tune or two or five throughout the night was definitely the exception rather than the rule.
That's going to lead me on a quick tangent of the power of American culture. I don't know as though the average American realizes the influence of American culture and tastes worldwide. Yes, I know Neil Diamond is Canadian. So is Johnny Favourite Swing Orchestra. Ever heard of them? Ya know why? They didn't have a big US hit. Anyway.......American music and fast food chains and corporations are just everywhere. It's really amazing sometimes when I realize how far our tastes reach. We were in the jungle hearing FloRida's "Low" and in shopping malls in Quito, Ecuador (where, again, very few people speak English) where the music was all American/British adult contemporary pop. That probably doesn't surprise you until you think about it. Imagine that you're a marginally well-to-do mall shopper in a major city in the US and you were in the mall......and all of the music was in Russian. Imagine you worked in the Gap and you didn't really understand a word of what was being said in the songs playing in your store all day long. Sure, I know that once in a great while we have a pop song that gets popular that's got some spanish in it. But "dame la gasoliiiiina" every once in a while isn't the same as an entire afternoon of listening to Phil Collins when you don't speak English. Yes, I know he's not American either. But hopefully you're getting my point. In Quito, we had Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Domino's, Tony Roma's, Applebee's, McDonald's, Burger King, Baskin Robins, KFC, Taco Bell, TGI Friday's, and Payless Shoes (which wasn't where you really went if you wanted to Pay Less.....paying less meant going to one of the MANY Chinese stores called "Hong Kong Almacen" or something like that were you could buy a pair of dress shoes or "Nike" sneakers for $7-$15 (fifteen would be really, really nice). In Costa Rica, so many American companies had large office buildings in industrial parks where companies like Western Union headquarter most of their accounting. In one park, I think we saw Western Union, Proctor & Gamble, Oracle, Microsoft, HP.....and several that I've forgotten. Though Starbucks doesn't sell coffee in Costa Rica, we saw their office in San Jose where they negotiate with their suppliers. In Colombia, we finally got a Subway Sub for the first time after about 7 months. And those are relatively poor countries (as compared to the US). In Ecuador, lunch was $1.50 at a local restaurant -- consisting of a large bowl of soup, a plate of rice with vegetables and meat, and a glass of juice. Yet people were willing to splurge on a $4 or $5 value meal at McDonald's. I have yet to see the village without Coca-Cola -- including at the top of the crater of a volcano at 12,000 feet where there weren't even enough houses to call it a village. They still had a convenience store that stocked Coke. It's amazing to realize that whether we are loved or hated in the world, the things that we produce are still in such high demand -- even in places where people have neither the need nor the means to consume them. While in some ways, I don't think this is all as bad as some people more liberal than I would tell you. But it worries me as to what will happen to smaller cultures around the world. One of the things I miss the most about Ecuador is flying around bends on mountain side roads with the bus driver blasting upbeat local music in Spanish at 2am. I worry that someday, that, too, will be gone. I hope it won't.
But anyway -- back to Munich. We weaved around the crowd and made our way to our key destination for nourishment -- Hofbrauhaus -- the most famous (and largest) Beer Hall in Germany and the World. During Oktoberfest, this is apparently the place to be. It's where Germans and tourists alike down copius amounts of German beer and they serve the finest of local cuisine. All of the beer except for White Beer (a local specialty made from Wheat) is only served in a 1L glass -- so more or less, you gotta drink a lot of beer. The place is said to pour 10,000 of the 1L glasses a day. Once of the more interesting things about Bavaria is that you get an interesting mix of people who look more or less the same as any average American......as well as the folks who still dress in the traditional suspenders/coveralls/Birkenstocks/etc. The Hofbrauhaus did not disappoint........
So Sam and I ordered some grub and as we were waiting, there was a band just finishing up their gig playing traditional Bavarian music. At some point, a large, happy, very traditionally dressed man (picture it down to the fedora-y type hat with a feather) leaned down onto our table with his elbow on the surface and he hand extended out to Sam in an invitation to arm wrestle. He had Steve Buscemi's eyes and a "V for Vendetta" grin. Sam figured that this was all part of the show, so why not arm wrestle the dude. So she took his hand and proceed to pound him into the tablecloth like it was no big deal. He turned those big brown Steve Buscemi's to me in amazement and apparently decided that he needed greater leverage, so he slid himself onto my bench and extended his arm for a rematch -- staring at the tablecloth with his hand open and extended towards Sam, not saying a word. Naturally, Sam thought he let her win the first time, so they'd go for round two and about the time she almost had him down he's sling her hand back down like the large drunken Bavarian he was. However, yet again, Sam won with relative ease.....though waiting a bit this time to see if he'd fight back I think. He again turned to me in utter disbelief and uttered something to be in German that clearly meant, "Where did you find Olga, the strongest woman on Earth? Aren't you afraid for your life with this one?". Apparently, he hadn't had enough yet, so he put his arm down for round 3, at which point, Sam politely let him know that she was done. However, ole crazy eyes wasn't having any of that. He put his elbow down insistently and began squeezing the air as though to taunt Sam into a 3rd attempt. Sam looked at me and asked me to save her.....but what was I going to do? Push a (weird, but clearly friendly) drunken, traditionally-dressed, obviously regular patron of the establishment off the edge of our bench while we are in the largest Beer Hall in the world, surrounded by a number of other similarly clad charged up Bavarians? Clearly not. So we proceeded with round 3. And 4. And some ridiculous number more rounds. I had more or less figured that once our food came, this game would have to end. In the meantime, I was snapping as many pictures of this guy's game face as possible. At some point, a similarly large, traditionally dressed, white-bearded man came to our table looking at our new friend and he said something to us in German. I told him that I didn't speak German and he asked us in English if this guy was bothering us. We told him that he wasn't, but I think he could tell that it had gone on long enough. He made some polite small talk asking us where we were from. His English was quite impressive -- I guess I was surprised seeing as how he had to have been in at the least his late 60's. After a few moments, he said something to the crazed arm wrestler and took him buy the hand and gave him a gentle tug that let the guy know it was time to get up. At this point, I realized that this was probably his father and that rather than just being drunk, this guy was likely somewhat mentally challenged. I felt a little bad at having had some laughs at his expense -- but then, he was having as much fun as we were I think. And that brings me to my final thought about Bavarians.......they are MUCH friendlier than Berliners. In general, people were very, very nice to us in Bavaria. They immediately spoke English with us when they realized we didn't speak German and they seemed happy to do so. I certainly don't expect everyone to speak English -- we are, after all, in Germany. However, the people in Bavaria didn't seem as annoyed to converse with us in English as those in Berlin and they seemed happy to show us the local culture. In fact, when we couldn't find the Hofbrauhaus, Sam had asked a woman on the street. She didn't know it, but she worked in a hotel. She was clearly on her way home from work, but she insisted on turning around and walking us back to her hotel (seemingly almost half a mile) so she could bring us in and introduce us to the desk clerk who spoke some English and could tell us where to go. This is the Germany that you should see if you ever visit.
Oh -- and remember, no Leiberkasse.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Munich - Part I
There were two distinctly different things I wanted to do in Munich, and one wasn't going to be possible on a Sunday. You can tour the BMW factory during the week, but not on weekends. So . . .
At the other end of the spectrum, we decided that we wanted to see Dachau Concentration Camp. Dachau is just outside of Munich -- accessible by the city train. It was the first Nazi Concentration Camp, opened in 1933. It was primarily a work camp -- it's focus was not the extermination of the jews but the forced slave labor of jews, political opponents, preists, and dissenters from conquered lands. Still, more than 30,000 people died and were incinerated in the crematorium at Dachau, and while paltry in comparison to the estimated 1.5 million who were murdered at Auschwitz, it is still horrible enough to make you feel sick.
I think the part that affected me most was the open area where roll call happened. I have seen this enough time in Hollywood movies to have a notion -- despite an inability to fully comprehend it -- of what it was like. To look at this wide open space and imagine the malnourished, the beaten, the broken, the slowly dying.....it was just powerful in a way I can't seem to capture right now. When the roll call number was not correct, prisoners sometimes had to stand motionless for hours while they looked for escapees or dead bodies. I could begin to try to describe the atrocities committed at Dachau as we learned from our tour of the place, but I know that I won't do justice to the history with my limited knowledge. You should look it up and read about it and remember it.
So touring Dachau was profoundly sad, but compelling and necessary. You have to give the Germans credit -- I don't think any other nation on Earth has documented and taken ownership of the atrocities it has committed the way that this country has. It is free to visit Dachau and with the plethora of documentation there, it is completely unnecessary to get any sort of tour. This is undoubtedly the way it should be as it has been made clear that the survivors wanted to be sure that no one would ever forget what happened there. I know that those people who will read this will likely never see Dachau or Auschwitz for themselves, but I can't help but implore you to make something so sad and scary and eerily close in history something that we continue to carry with us for generations as a reminder of our potential for evil.
Before going to Dachau, Sammy and I had already planned that Auschwitz would be one of the few things we wouldn't accept missing while we were in Europe. We both just think it's important to us to see it for ourselves. No amount of reading about it or seeing it in a movie compares to feeling what it's like to walk in the steps of history. I don't want to say that I'm excited about seeing Auscwitz, because that would be a mischaracterization. I think the best way to describe the feeling in words is to say that I am looking forward to contributing my eyes and mind to the cause of those who vow never to forget the atrocities committed in the name of the Nazi regime. I don't know why I am so powerfully affected by what happened in Nazi Germany - nor why I am so drawn to it. I am filled with a sense of overwhelming sadness when I honestly confront what happened to other human beings in these camps. Putting my mind in that place and trying to understand what it felt like to suffer, fear, and prepare to die in these camps is chilling yet also compelling. It fills me with a sense of responsibility to learn more and educate others so that no one can try to deny what happened or allow it to happen under our collective watch again. As we toured Dachau today, Sam asked me, "How long will it be before people stop caring about this?". I pondered the answer. The realist in me knows that at some point, what happened in Nazi Germany will be such a part of ancient history that it will be like learning of witches burned at the stake and the Spanish Inquisition -- things that we are taught were terrible but that seem so ancient and distant as to leave us unaffected if not disinterested. It deeply saddens me to know that this will become a fleeting moment in history -- but understanding it is so pivotal to our continued coexistence on this planet. After standing on ground depicted so horrifically in so many Hollywood movies -- and knowing that this was the place where those terrible things really happened -- I think a part of my soul will forever be engraved with it's memory. It's hard to ignore that power.
At the other end of the spectrum, we decided that we wanted to see Dachau Concentration Camp. Dachau is just outside of Munich -- accessible by the city train. It was the first Nazi Concentration Camp, opened in 1933. It was primarily a work camp -- it's focus was not the extermination of the jews but the forced slave labor of jews, political opponents, preists, and dissenters from conquered lands. Still, more than 30,000 people died and were incinerated in the crematorium at Dachau, and while paltry in comparison to the estimated 1.5 million who were murdered at Auschwitz, it is still horrible enough to make you feel sick.
I think the part that affected me most was the open area where roll call happened. I have seen this enough time in Hollywood movies to have a notion -- despite an inability to fully comprehend it -- of what it was like. To look at this wide open space and imagine the malnourished, the beaten, the broken, the slowly dying.....it was just powerful in a way I can't seem to capture right now. When the roll call number was not correct, prisoners sometimes had to stand motionless for hours while they looked for escapees or dead bodies. I could begin to try to describe the atrocities committed at Dachau as we learned from our tour of the place, but I know that I won't do justice to the history with my limited knowledge. You should look it up and read about it and remember it.
So touring Dachau was profoundly sad, but compelling and necessary. You have to give the Germans credit -- I don't think any other nation on Earth has documented and taken ownership of the atrocities it has committed the way that this country has. It is free to visit Dachau and with the plethora of documentation there, it is completely unnecessary to get any sort of tour. This is undoubtedly the way it should be as it has been made clear that the survivors wanted to be sure that no one would ever forget what happened there. I know that those people who will read this will likely never see Dachau or Auschwitz for themselves, but I can't help but implore you to make something so sad and scary and eerily close in history something that we continue to carry with us for generations as a reminder of our potential for evil.
Before going to Dachau, Sammy and I had already planned that Auschwitz would be one of the few things we wouldn't accept missing while we were in Europe. We both just think it's important to us to see it for ourselves. No amount of reading about it or seeing it in a movie compares to feeling what it's like to walk in the steps of history. I don't want to say that I'm excited about seeing Auscwitz, because that would be a mischaracterization. I think the best way to describe the feeling in words is to say that I am looking forward to contributing my eyes and mind to the cause of those who vow never to forget the atrocities committed in the name of the Nazi regime. I don't know why I am so powerfully affected by what happened in Nazi Germany - nor why I am so drawn to it. I am filled with a sense of overwhelming sadness when I honestly confront what happened to other human beings in these camps. Putting my mind in that place and trying to understand what it felt like to suffer, fear, and prepare to die in these camps is chilling yet also compelling. It fills me with a sense of responsibility to learn more and educate others so that no one can try to deny what happened or allow it to happen under our collective watch again. As we toured Dachau today, Sam asked me, "How long will it be before people stop caring about this?". I pondered the answer. The realist in me knows that at some point, what happened in Nazi Germany will be such a part of ancient history that it will be like learning of witches burned at the stake and the Spanish Inquisition -- things that we are taught were terrible but that seem so ancient and distant as to leave us unaffected if not disinterested. It deeply saddens me to know that this will become a fleeting moment in history -- but understanding it is so pivotal to our continued coexistence on this planet. After standing on ground depicted so horrifically in so many Hollywood movies -- and knowing that this was the place where those terrible things really happened -- I think a part of my soul will forever be engraved with it's memory. It's hard to ignore that power.
Saturday night, post-castles
We had half-thought to catch a night-train to Munich on Saturday night, but after researching prices of accomodations a bit, we opted to stay another night in Fussen. The train to Munich is only 2 hours, so as long as we were good about getting up early again, we could catch a 7am train that would put us in Munich by 9am. There wasn't much else to do in Fussen, so we thought we could spend Sunday in Munich during the day and catch a late train back to Berlin.
I wasn't really interested in paying quite as much as we had the night before in the guesthouse -- and nor did I want to hike the entire kilometer out to it and back to the train station at 6am. So we went to the Internet cafe and got online to look for some hostels. I found one with a website that said it was only 300m from the train station and the rates looked decent. That sounded like a much better option than walking more than half a mile in the morning. So off we went to find the Happy Sleep Hostel.
Yeah, that's right. The joint was called The Happy Sleep Hostel. We went to the door and as Sam tried to fiddle with the nob (it was closed and locked), a small, young Japanese woman opened the door. She looked a little frazzled and I wasn't sure that she was even working. But she spoke English and said that they had a room and it would be 23 Euro each -- significantly less expensive than the 35 each we had paid the night before. We were thrilled. We had to go get our bags from a locker at the train station and then we came back to the hostel. The woman came back down to let us in. She opened the door and Sam stepped by her and I was behind Sam. When you entered, there wasn't anywhere to go really except up the stairs, so I told Sam to start up. We both got a few steps up the stairs and then the woman told us that we could change into slippers any time we wanted -- and she pointed to the slipper shelves directly to the left of the staircase. Damn it -- that's twice now that we've screwed up with shoes. I immediately offered to change right away, but she got on the stairs behind us and said that later was fine. She sat us down to do the registration thing and pay and she showed us to our room -- Schloss Neuschwanstein. While we were registering, her son came out to run around -- a cute, energetic little kid (maybe 3 or 4 years old?). Anyway -- the room was clean and nice and even had a skylight. The bathrooms were separate from the rooms, as is often the case in hostels. This place probably had the cleanest bathrooms in hostel history and the tiniest one-toilet (no sink) bathroom ever seen. Also of note is the bed situation here in Germany. No where is there a bed bigger than a twin. Every place we've been to (even a Ramada) has just had two single beds pushed together. I guess it's for versatility -- but interesting nonetheless.
So we settled in to the Happy Sleep Hostel, got some dinner, and had a happy sleep for cheap.
I wasn't really interested in paying quite as much as we had the night before in the guesthouse -- and nor did I want to hike the entire kilometer out to it and back to the train station at 6am. So we went to the Internet cafe and got online to look for some hostels. I found one with a website that said it was only 300m from the train station and the rates looked decent. That sounded like a much better option than walking more than half a mile in the morning. So off we went to find the Happy Sleep Hostel.
Yeah, that's right. The joint was called The Happy Sleep Hostel. We went to the door and as Sam tried to fiddle with the nob (it was closed and locked), a small, young Japanese woman opened the door. She looked a little frazzled and I wasn't sure that she was even working. But she spoke English and said that they had a room and it would be 23 Euro each -- significantly less expensive than the 35 each we had paid the night before. We were thrilled. We had to go get our bags from a locker at the train station and then we came back to the hostel. The woman came back down to let us in. She opened the door and Sam stepped by her and I was behind Sam. When you entered, there wasn't anywhere to go really except up the stairs, so I told Sam to start up. We both got a few steps up the stairs and then the woman told us that we could change into slippers any time we wanted -- and she pointed to the slipper shelves directly to the left of the staircase. Damn it -- that's twice now that we've screwed up with shoes. I immediately offered to change right away, but she got on the stairs behind us and said that later was fine. She sat us down to do the registration thing and pay and she showed us to our room -- Schloss Neuschwanstein. While we were registering, her son came out to run around -- a cute, energetic little kid (maybe 3 or 4 years old?). Anyway -- the room was clean and nice and even had a skylight. The bathrooms were separate from the rooms, as is often the case in hostels. This place probably had the cleanest bathrooms in hostel history and the tiniest one-toilet (no sink) bathroom ever seen. Also of note is the bed situation here in Germany. No where is there a bed bigger than a twin. Every place we've been to (even a Ramada) has just had two single beds pushed together. I guess it's for versatility -- but interesting nonetheless.
So we settled in to the Happy Sleep Hostel, got some dinner, and had a happy sleep for cheap.
Saturday, May 8th, 2010 -- Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Castles
When the alarm went off on Saturday morning, we awoke with a purpose. We had read stories about the ridiculously long lines for the two castles that we had come to this small Bavarian town to see. Word has gotten around -- we certainly aren't the only two tourists who come to see these castles. At this point, I should give some background.
So "Mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria became king at the age of 18 sometime in the mid-1800's. More or less, he is known as Mad King Ludwig because everyone thought he was nuts -- and they were probably correct. He grew up with an obsession with Richard Wagner and his operas and their fairy-tale like storylines. His father, who preceeded him on the throne, had a small summer home/hunting castle here in the foothills of the German Alps (about 2 miles from Fussen). Ludwig grew up spending time in this castle, Hohenschwangau, and the walls were covered with paintings of fairy-tale stories. Between the paintings and the operas, he planned from an early age to build his own fairytale castle within view of his father's. When he became King, he started to do so. Neuschwanstein was his dream -- built in a medeivel style to resemble the stuff of fairytale dreams. This makes the result a little contrived -- it looks like something a lot older than it really is, but it isn't. But it does look just like a fairy tale -- mostly because this is purportedly the castle that inspired Walt Disney's own fantasyland Castle in Disneyland/DisneyWorld (the big Cinderella-y-castle in the Magic Kingdom). And it's not hard to imagine that. It is in one of the most picturesque settings imaginable and it looks like the stuff of knights in shining armour slaying dragons.
One thing I definitely learned this weekend is the drawing power of Disney. I mean, I've been to DisneyWorld. I know that it seems that half the world goes to Orlando at some point in their lives. If you've been on the line for the log ride on a hot day, as Sam and I have, you don't need me to tell you about the ability of Disney to draw people and sell tickets. However, allow me to try to add to our joint understanding. The castle inhabited by Ludwig's father is pretty small as castles go. Neither would take up more than a small corner of Prague castle. And Ludwig's fairy tale, Neuschwanstein, wasn't ever finished. Only about a third of the rooms are finished. The tours of each castle only last about 30 minutes. Yet some days they get 10,000 visitors. The old lady at the guest house told us that 1.5 million people visit every year -- making it the most visited castle in Europe. Considering the plethora of FINISHED castles that exist in Europe, the fact that this castle is the top draw is absolutely a testament to the way that Walt Disney has woven fairy tale dreams into the fabric of our being.
All that said, this place was not without merit. After all, it's no accident that this place inspired good ole Walt to give us those dreams. Both castles look like they come from a Walt Disney dream -- the intricate paintings, the ornate furnishings, the grandeur and fanfare all conspiring to force you to feel like a little kid in a dream world. Unfortunately, photographs aren't allowed in the castle (to make you buy theirs) -- but I'm sure if you google it, you'll find some depictions online. It's worth a peek. And as you'll see from our pictures, the countryside that these castles overlooks can only be described as majestic. Despite the fact that we would have liked to have been able to wander and linger a bit longer than the rushed tours allow, we were still thrilled to be there. More than anything else, I know I felt like I was finally seeing something I had seen in pictures and books for a long, long time -- and only imagined I'd someday see. The fact that this piece of my imaginings came true was enough to make me smile and wonder what other dreams might. In that sense, it lived up to Disney's promise -- when you wish upon a star, dreams come true . . . .
So "Mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria became king at the age of 18 sometime in the mid-1800's. More or less, he is known as Mad King Ludwig because everyone thought he was nuts -- and they were probably correct. He grew up with an obsession with Richard Wagner and his operas and their fairy-tale like storylines. His father, who preceeded him on the throne, had a small summer home/hunting castle here in the foothills of the German Alps (about 2 miles from Fussen). Ludwig grew up spending time in this castle, Hohenschwangau, and the walls were covered with paintings of fairy-tale stories. Between the paintings and the operas, he planned from an early age to build his own fairytale castle within view of his father's. When he became King, he started to do so. Neuschwanstein was his dream -- built in a medeivel style to resemble the stuff of fairytale dreams. This makes the result a little contrived -- it looks like something a lot older than it really is, but it isn't. But it does look just like a fairy tale -- mostly because this is purportedly the castle that inspired Walt Disney's own fantasyland Castle in Disneyland/DisneyWorld (the big Cinderella-y-castle in the Magic Kingdom). And it's not hard to imagine that. It is in one of the most picturesque settings imaginable and it looks like the stuff of knights in shining armour slaying dragons.
One thing I definitely learned this weekend is the drawing power of Disney. I mean, I've been to DisneyWorld. I know that it seems that half the world goes to Orlando at some point in their lives. If you've been on the line for the log ride on a hot day, as Sam and I have, you don't need me to tell you about the ability of Disney to draw people and sell tickets. However, allow me to try to add to our joint understanding. The castle inhabited by Ludwig's father is pretty small as castles go. Neither would take up more than a small corner of Prague castle. And Ludwig's fairy tale, Neuschwanstein, wasn't ever finished. Only about a third of the rooms are finished. The tours of each castle only last about 30 minutes. Yet some days they get 10,000 visitors. The old lady at the guest house told us that 1.5 million people visit every year -- making it the most visited castle in Europe. Considering the plethora of FINISHED castles that exist in Europe, the fact that this castle is the top draw is absolutely a testament to the way that Walt Disney has woven fairy tale dreams into the fabric of our being.
All that said, this place was not without merit. After all, it's no accident that this place inspired good ole Walt to give us those dreams. Both castles look like they come from a Walt Disney dream -- the intricate paintings, the ornate furnishings, the grandeur and fanfare all conspiring to force you to feel like a little kid in a dream world. Unfortunately, photographs aren't allowed in the castle (to make you buy theirs) -- but I'm sure if you google it, you'll find some depictions online. It's worth a peek. And as you'll see from our pictures, the countryside that these castles overlooks can only be described as majestic. Despite the fact that we would have liked to have been able to wander and linger a bit longer than the rushed tours allow, we were still thrilled to be there. More than anything else, I know I felt like I was finally seeing something I had seen in pictures and books for a long, long time -- and only imagined I'd someday see. The fact that this piece of my imaginings came true was enough to make me smile and wonder what other dreams might. In that sense, it lived up to Disney's promise -- when you wish upon a star, dreams come true . . . .
Dinner in Fussen
So after we settled in to our new room, we decided that we wanted to get some grub. We were, after all, in Bavaria. We planned on a pretty early night and a relatively early morning. The early night wasn't much of a problem as nearly nothing in town was open other than a Woolworth's on the main drag and a handful of restaurants.
So we went walking into town in search of some good Bavarian nourishment. The woman at the guesthouse had told us of a restaurant with good Bavarian food that was cheap, so we figured we'd try it out. We also wanted to briefly use the Internet, so we started at an Internet cafe we had read about in Rick Steeve's Germany book. Let me mention that the Rick Steeve's book in general is surprisingly quite good. I had read some less-than-stellar reviews, but I think his book offers great value. He outlines a lot of do-it-yourself tours that are quite interesting and informative and he provides a good mix of what most tourists would want while including things to try if you want a more authentic experience.
Anyway -- the Internet cafe was a little strange. The Wifi was 2.50 Euro for an hour. To use one of their computers, it was 2 Euro for 2 hours. Strange and probably unnecessary. But whatever.....so goes life.
After the Internet cafe, we walked around and windowshopped in the closed stores for a while and then made our way to a place called Römerkeller (Roman Cellar -- oddly enough a Bavarian restuarant). We were the only 2 non-Germans in the place -- which is always a good sign. We got menus and started to peruse them, looking to sample the local specialties.
I knew that I wanted some sausage and some sauerkraut -- it's been 3 weeks since we arrived in Germany and I haven't had any sauerkraut. But I also hunted the menu for anything else local that looked appealing. Let's note here that the menus are normally in German, so my knowledge of food words is steadily increasing. I've learned that "cheese" is "käse". So when I saw "portion of leiberkasse mit pommes frittes und ei" on the Bavarian specialties list in a "lighter meal" section, I thought that would make a great appetizer. A portion of local cheese with french fries and an egg. Sammy said that must have been what she saw someone else eating and she'd take the egg. It sounded like a good start.
Well, for those of you playing along from home, you've probably already noticed the distinct difference in spelling between "käse" and "kasse". That extra "s" and the absence of the two dots above the "a" aren't from a falty keyboard or other operator error. The error was all mine. When two pink things resembling large hamsteaks came with the french fries, I was a little surprised, but not too concerned. Clearly I had made some mistake. I cut a bite off of the hamsteak. The consistency was weird. It kind of tasted light and airy like tofu with the taste of fried bologna. Then it hit me. I remembered the more important half of that word. Say it out lout to yourself. The "ie" sounds like a long, "ee". Leiber. Now say the "er" like it's pronounced "air". Lee-bair. Sounds a little like what I remembered it to be.......liver. I pulled out my German phrasebook and found my fear to be accurate -- this was a pork-liver meatloaf that I had ordered. Honestly, it didn't taste that bad. But I couldn't shake the stigma of eating liver long enough to eat more than a second bite. I felt a bit like an idiot when I had cleaned the entire sausage -kraut-mashed potatoes platter, and all of the french fries, and exactly two bites of the two huge liver meatloaf slices. But whatcha gonna do? Ooops. Lesson learned -- don't start thinking that you're hot stuff and start ordering without double-checking with the dictionary. That moment kind of brought me back to two Canadian guys we had met in the Ecuadorian rainforest. They were kayakers from somewhere in the wild north of Canada that had come to Ecuador for a great kayaking adventure in the rainforest. They didn't speak a bit of Spanish -- and they weren't in a place where ANYONE really spoke much English (other than other expat rafters and kayakers). They told us that dinner each night was a complete surprise -- they never knew exactly what they were ordering. Except they seemed to happily accept that and chow away. I couldn't do it with the liver.
Thanks to the fact that German restaurants will clear your plates and leave you with your drinks until you have turned to dust unless you stop the waiter or waitress again, we had plenty of time to digest and forget about the liver before I got the woman's attention again so we could order an apple strudel -- and an excellent decision it was.
After dinner, we strolled back down the walking trail to our guesthouse. It was pretty and romantic. By the time we got back to the room, we passed out within minutes. We were still exhausted.
So we went walking into town in search of some good Bavarian nourishment. The woman at the guesthouse had told us of a restaurant with good Bavarian food that was cheap, so we figured we'd try it out. We also wanted to briefly use the Internet, so we started at an Internet cafe we had read about in Rick Steeve's Germany book. Let me mention that the Rick Steeve's book in general is surprisingly quite good. I had read some less-than-stellar reviews, but I think his book offers great value. He outlines a lot of do-it-yourself tours that are quite interesting and informative and he provides a good mix of what most tourists would want while including things to try if you want a more authentic experience.
Anyway -- the Internet cafe was a little strange. The Wifi was 2.50 Euro for an hour. To use one of their computers, it was 2 Euro for 2 hours. Strange and probably unnecessary. But whatever.....so goes life.
After the Internet cafe, we walked around and windowshopped in the closed stores for a while and then made our way to a place called Römerkeller (Roman Cellar -- oddly enough a Bavarian restuarant). We were the only 2 non-Germans in the place -- which is always a good sign. We got menus and started to peruse them, looking to sample the local specialties.
I knew that I wanted some sausage and some sauerkraut -- it's been 3 weeks since we arrived in Germany and I haven't had any sauerkraut. But I also hunted the menu for anything else local that looked appealing. Let's note here that the menus are normally in German, so my knowledge of food words is steadily increasing. I've learned that "cheese" is "käse". So when I saw "portion of leiberkasse mit pommes frittes und ei" on the Bavarian specialties list in a "lighter meal" section, I thought that would make a great appetizer. A portion of local cheese with french fries and an egg. Sammy said that must have been what she saw someone else eating and she'd take the egg. It sounded like a good start.
Well, for those of you playing along from home, you've probably already noticed the distinct difference in spelling between "käse" and "kasse". That extra "s" and the absence of the two dots above the "a" aren't from a falty keyboard or other operator error. The error was all mine. When two pink things resembling large hamsteaks came with the french fries, I was a little surprised, but not too concerned. Clearly I had made some mistake. I cut a bite off of the hamsteak. The consistency was weird. It kind of tasted light and airy like tofu with the taste of fried bologna. Then it hit me. I remembered the more important half of that word. Say it out lout to yourself. The "ie" sounds like a long, "ee". Leiber. Now say the "er" like it's pronounced "air". Lee-bair. Sounds a little like what I remembered it to be.......liver. I pulled out my German phrasebook and found my fear to be accurate -- this was a pork-liver meatloaf that I had ordered. Honestly, it didn't taste that bad. But I couldn't shake the stigma of eating liver long enough to eat more than a second bite. I felt a bit like an idiot when I had cleaned the entire sausage -kraut-mashed potatoes platter, and all of the french fries, and exactly two bites of the two huge liver meatloaf slices. But whatcha gonna do? Ooops. Lesson learned -- don't start thinking that you're hot stuff and start ordering without double-checking with the dictionary. That moment kind of brought me back to two Canadian guys we had met in the Ecuadorian rainforest. They were kayakers from somewhere in the wild north of Canada that had come to Ecuador for a great kayaking adventure in the rainforest. They didn't speak a bit of Spanish -- and they weren't in a place where ANYONE really spoke much English (other than other expat rafters and kayakers). They told us that dinner each night was a complete surprise -- they never knew exactly what they were ordering. Except they seemed to happily accept that and chow away. I couldn't do it with the liver.
Thanks to the fact that German restaurants will clear your plates and leave you with your drinks until you have turned to dust unless you stop the waiter or waitress again, we had plenty of time to digest and forget about the liver before I got the woman's attention again so we could order an apple strudel -- and an excellent decision it was.
After dinner, we strolled back down the walking trail to our guesthouse. It was pretty and romantic. By the time we got back to the room, we passed out within minutes. We were still exhausted.
Getting to Fűssen
So now that you've likely read my unplanned Mexican Restaurant post, I'll get back to the meat and potatoes of the weekend (in more ways than one). On Friday, we took the train to Fűssen. Another previously unmentioned motivation behind taking the Friday morning train was that it would give us an opportunity to see the German countryside. We both want to see as much of the country as possible, and this train trip would take us right through the heart of it and down to the bottom of Bavaria -- what is said to be the most beautiful region of Germany.
Unfortunately, we had a bit of a fiasco reserving our seats for the train. We came accross one of the least helpful people we've met yet when we went to the train station to reserve our seats. I'm not sure what it was about her -- perhaps it was her reluctance to speak English with us despite the fact that she said she spoke "a little" English...maybe it was the loud sighs after each utterance we made that seemed like it might begin a question. But most likely, it was the way her face contorted into 19 distinctly different shapes and the way she hoisted her left eyebrow like the Jolly Roger by the time we finished formulating said question. After we had already decided which train we wanted to reserve seats on, Sammy had the thought to ask if we could try to reserve seats that were both facing the direction that the train was going -- it's kind of a little nauseating to face the wrong direction. By the time Sam got out the entire "C" sound in the word, "can", our friendly Deutschbahn ticket lady was already belting out a hardy, "no". So, as surely as the sky is blue, Sammy and I were facing the wrong direction in the morning.
As we were facing the wrong direction and I didn't want to wait until I felt sick, I decided that maybe I'd take some Drammamine or maybe I wouldn't. Ok, so I didn't really decide. I offered it to Sam, and she took one. I started to take it and then I put it back in the bottle and then I changed my mind again and said better to be good to go than in the train bathroom for an hour waiitng for the Drammamine to kick in.
I don't know if it was the Drammamine or the fact that we'd worked a lot of hours this week, but Sam and I didn't end up seeing much of the German countryside afterall. We were knocked out like Kimbo Slice for most of the first 6-7 hours. I don't know what it was -- we just couldn't stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. For the last two hours, we had to switch to a different (regional) train. By then we were in at least slightly better shape...but only slightly. We also had to switch from one car to another on the regional train at some point. Fűssen, the town we were going to, only has a population of about 14,000 people -- so I guess they don't need as many cars on Friday afternoons. So they chopped a couple of cars off the tail end and we had to move closer to the opposite end of the train. I'm glad that a guy got back on the train to tell those of us who didn't speak German that we had to get off the train and move. I'm especially glad because by the time we strapped on our bags and stepped onto the second train, it felt like it started moving within a minute or so of us switching.
Anyway -- for all of the buildup of Bavaria, I was a little disappointed until the last hour of the train ride. There were some cute small towns here and there -- and a lot of beautiful, very bright yellow flowers. But there weren't nearly as many hills/mountains as I expected. In that last hour, the mountains started appearing. At some point, a German guy moved from the front of the train to sit behind us. I knew he had seen me taking pictures with my camera and that he had likely seen us drifting in and out of consciousness, so I was slightly suspicious, but not all that concerned -- I have yet to see or hear of any crime other than the annual May Day riots (which are much more common around the world than I knew -- is the American Media hiding these workers-rights riots from us on purpose? Bah -- that's another blog entry).
So anyway, this guy smelled like he had just dragged himself out of the bottom of a beer bottle. That wasn't really surprising, through, either. Never in my life have I seen so much beer drinking. Frat parties have nothing on Germany. Maybe I should take that back -- people aren't doing keg stands and shotgunning cans. But everywhere you go, someone is drinking a beer. People inside and outside of restaurants, folks sitting on the stoop of convenience stores, Kids walking down the street, people on trains -- heck, even the convenience store WORKERS while they're working sometimes. There either is no open container law or it isn't enforced -- because people walk down the street at all times of day with a beer.
As it turns out, the guy was friendly. Eventually, he leaned towards the back of our heads in between the seats and he said, "Excuse me" very slowly and purposefully in German. At that moment, I wasn't sure if it was a beer-enduced stupor that slowed down his speech, but it turned out that he was speaking slowly because he figured that we probably didn't speak much German. He tried to explain something to me in German, and from the one or two words that I know (combined with gestures), I was able to figure out that he was trying to say that there would be something scenic on the other side of the train from where I was sitting.
I thanked him and I moved to the other side of the train. When I moved, he tried to explain further, and I told him that I didn't speak German. He seemed a little frustrated (I think because he was speaking slowly in the hopes that I knew some German and would understand better). He threw down with the 3 or 4 English words that he knew, and I picked up the fact that he said about 500 meters past a station there would be something scenic. I wasn't sure exactly what the name of the station was from what he said, but I figured I would recognize it when I saw it spelled out from what I more or less heard him say. It turns out he isn't very good at gestimating meters as it was probably closer to about 3,000 meters past that station, but a clearing did open up with a beautiful lake framed by majesticky snow-capped mountains. I took some pictures and he gave me the thumbs up. After the rest of the weekend, I'm not sure that this particular tip was exactly a view to write home about, but I appreciated the fact that he tried to share the beauty of his countryside with a tourist despite the language barrier. While I think we come from a pretty friendly area at home, I couldn't see many drunk, scruffy-faced, baseball-capped guys (like this one) at home who would see a foreigner and go out of their way to point out something beautiful for a photo-op. I appreciated it and made sure to thank him a few times.
So we got to Fűssen on Friday afternoon and almost immediately found the single most brilliant and helpful and brilliantly helpful idea that I've ever seen a small town implement. About 2 blocks from the train station, there was a hotel info-booth. I've seen semi-similar things in airports in the US. Maybe you've seen the stations in big-city airports where you can pick up a phone and call the airport-area Holiday Inn or Ramada or whatnot to see if they have availability and a shuttle. This was a similar idea, but different . . . .
Inside the booth, there was a colorful map of the town. There was also a touch-screen computer. You could put the touch-screen into a number of different languages -- so we went with English :-). You could then choose to search for Hotels, Inns, B&B's, Guesthouses, etc -- or to look at everything. Again, we went with everything. It then lists each place with available rooms for the night and their price ranges. When you touched the individual hotel, you could see the different types of rooms and prices. You could then touch a spot on the screen to find out where the hotel was -- and immediately a corresponding light on the colorful, large town map lit up so you could see how far it was from the info-booth. Absolutely brilliant. If you have a car, you can look for a bigger range....if you're on foot, like us, you can stick to things within walking distance. The screen also listed the phone number for each place. And next to the touch-screen . . . was a free phone that you could use to call each place to double-check on availability and rates. This was a fantastic idea. An absolutely fan-TASTIC idea for the hotels involved. The vast majority of tourists who might otherwise walk around and find a cheaper option are likely to just roll in to this booth and be dumfounded at the ease of use and pay more than they needed to for a room. That was us :-).
In our defense, we did call around until we found the place that was the cheapest within a walkable distance. It was a little more than half a mile away -- so it took us a bit to get there. When we arrived, we were greeted by quite possibly the 2nd most agressively friendly German lady who ever lived. I only say the 2nd most because we definitely encountered the MOST agressively friendly German woman ever on the subway on Thursday night. We were waiting for a train that wasn't running (maybe work on the tracks?), so she started to explain to us (in German) that we needed to go take a bus. When I told her that I didn't speak German, she switched mid-sentence to English and stepped closer and opened her eyes wider and barked louder -- I had previously throught (erroneously) that she had been at maximum intensity when she began in German. This lady clearly had no sense of personal space. And I think I need to explain that a bit more. As I mentioned in a previous entry, Sam and I miss Latin American culture. In Latin American culture, personal space is nonexistant. Everyone hugs and kisses on the cheek, even when they meet for the first time. People touch you on the arm when they talk to you, and you cram into busses like overpacked sardines. But here in Germany, most people keep to their own business -- and when there is public business at hand, they are pretty agressive about it. No one is shy to muscle through line and hop in front of you if you're momentarily looking the other way. That kind of style doesn't lend itself well to face-to-face interaction. When training for my job in the juvenile justice system, I learned about the importance of stance. When most people are standing and talking, they are at a slightly sideways angle -- their shoulders are at, say, 45 degree angles. When people stand with their shoulders squared off, it's usually confrontational -- so if conflict is escalating, people get angrier -- or in situations where people aren't confident, they will back down to a person with squared shoulders and try to stand sideways in order to break the feeling. Anyway -- she came straight at us square-shouldered. She was loud, boisterious, and big. Her eyes were bugged out. But she miled from ear to ear and she was friendly. As we subcounciously broke the squared-offness of the situation, she repositioned to stay parallel and square - the whole time wide-eyed, smiling, and yelling as if we were accross the station (though only about 12 inches separated us from the spray of her saliva). Anyway.....she was nice and she was trying to explain that we should take a bus, but we instead decided to just take a different train.
Anyway........on to the second-most agressively friendly German woman. She was probably in her late 60's, white-haired, with the kind of peering eyes you expect from a wise, old woman who feels like she can see through you, but she likes what she sees. She had a definitively German accent, but spoke English very clearly and quite well. She welcomed us into the "house" (this was a guesthouse). The place was kind of like a very large house with a lot of bedrooms. She lived there as well and clearly enjoyed hosting visitors. When she referred to the house, she referred to it as "the house" and when she spoke of the guests she gets, she always said, "I", rather than we, leading us to assume that she was widowed or never married. She was happy to tell us a bit about the history of the town and the surrounding area and to ask us about where we were from and what our plans were. She showed us where breakfast would be served (included in the price) and took us to our rooms and explained an easier way to get into town. She also showed us a cool feature of the windows -- metal shades that came down the window/door to the balcony area via a cable that you had to lower -- slowly (they were HEAVY). I'm a fan of a cavernous sleeping environment, so that was an added perk. You could also see the purpose of our trip -- Neushwanstein castle -- from the lawn of the place. She gave us our key and wished us a good night -- no mention of money, but she didn't seem too worried.
Unfortunately, we had a bit of a fiasco reserving our seats for the train. We came accross one of the least helpful people we've met yet when we went to the train station to reserve our seats. I'm not sure what it was about her -- perhaps it was her reluctance to speak English with us despite the fact that she said she spoke "a little" English...maybe it was the loud sighs after each utterance we made that seemed like it might begin a question. But most likely, it was the way her face contorted into 19 distinctly different shapes and the way she hoisted her left eyebrow like the Jolly Roger by the time we finished formulating said question. After we had already decided which train we wanted to reserve seats on, Sammy had the thought to ask if we could try to reserve seats that were both facing the direction that the train was going -- it's kind of a little nauseating to face the wrong direction. By the time Sam got out the entire "C" sound in the word, "can", our friendly Deutschbahn ticket lady was already belting out a hardy, "no". So, as surely as the sky is blue, Sammy and I were facing the wrong direction in the morning.
As we were facing the wrong direction and I didn't want to wait until I felt sick, I decided that maybe I'd take some Drammamine or maybe I wouldn't. Ok, so I didn't really decide. I offered it to Sam, and she took one. I started to take it and then I put it back in the bottle and then I changed my mind again and said better to be good to go than in the train bathroom for an hour waiitng for the Drammamine to kick in.
I don't know if it was the Drammamine or the fact that we'd worked a lot of hours this week, but Sam and I didn't end up seeing much of the German countryside afterall. We were knocked out like Kimbo Slice for most of the first 6-7 hours. I don't know what it was -- we just couldn't stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. For the last two hours, we had to switch to a different (regional) train. By then we were in at least slightly better shape...but only slightly. We also had to switch from one car to another on the regional train at some point. Fűssen, the town we were going to, only has a population of about 14,000 people -- so I guess they don't need as many cars on Friday afternoons. So they chopped a couple of cars off the tail end and we had to move closer to the opposite end of the train. I'm glad that a guy got back on the train to tell those of us who didn't speak German that we had to get off the train and move. I'm especially glad because by the time we strapped on our bags and stepped onto the second train, it felt like it started moving within a minute or so of us switching.
Anyway -- for all of the buildup of Bavaria, I was a little disappointed until the last hour of the train ride. There were some cute small towns here and there -- and a lot of beautiful, very bright yellow flowers. But there weren't nearly as many hills/mountains as I expected. In that last hour, the mountains started appearing. At some point, a German guy moved from the front of the train to sit behind us. I knew he had seen me taking pictures with my camera and that he had likely seen us drifting in and out of consciousness, so I was slightly suspicious, but not all that concerned -- I have yet to see or hear of any crime other than the annual May Day riots (which are much more common around the world than I knew -- is the American Media hiding these workers-rights riots from us on purpose? Bah -- that's another blog entry).
So anyway, this guy smelled like he had just dragged himself out of the bottom of a beer bottle. That wasn't really surprising, through, either. Never in my life have I seen so much beer drinking. Frat parties have nothing on Germany. Maybe I should take that back -- people aren't doing keg stands and shotgunning cans. But everywhere you go, someone is drinking a beer. People inside and outside of restaurants, folks sitting on the stoop of convenience stores, Kids walking down the street, people on trains -- heck, even the convenience store WORKERS while they're working sometimes. There either is no open container law or it isn't enforced -- because people walk down the street at all times of day with a beer.
As it turns out, the guy was friendly. Eventually, he leaned towards the back of our heads in between the seats and he said, "Excuse me" very slowly and purposefully in German. At that moment, I wasn't sure if it was a beer-enduced stupor that slowed down his speech, but it turned out that he was speaking slowly because he figured that we probably didn't speak much German. He tried to explain something to me in German, and from the one or two words that I know (combined with gestures), I was able to figure out that he was trying to say that there would be something scenic on the other side of the train from where I was sitting.
I thanked him and I moved to the other side of the train. When I moved, he tried to explain further, and I told him that I didn't speak German. He seemed a little frustrated (I think because he was speaking slowly in the hopes that I knew some German and would understand better). He threw down with the 3 or 4 English words that he knew, and I picked up the fact that he said about 500 meters past a station there would be something scenic. I wasn't sure exactly what the name of the station was from what he said, but I figured I would recognize it when I saw it spelled out from what I more or less heard him say. It turns out he isn't very good at gestimating meters as it was probably closer to about 3,000 meters past that station, but a clearing did open up with a beautiful lake framed by majesticky snow-capped mountains. I took some pictures and he gave me the thumbs up. After the rest of the weekend, I'm not sure that this particular tip was exactly a view to write home about, but I appreciated the fact that he tried to share the beauty of his countryside with a tourist despite the language barrier. While I think we come from a pretty friendly area at home, I couldn't see many drunk, scruffy-faced, baseball-capped guys (like this one) at home who would see a foreigner and go out of their way to point out something beautiful for a photo-op. I appreciated it and made sure to thank him a few times.
So we got to Fűssen on Friday afternoon and almost immediately found the single most brilliant and helpful and brilliantly helpful idea that I've ever seen a small town implement. About 2 blocks from the train station, there was a hotel info-booth. I've seen semi-similar things in airports in the US. Maybe you've seen the stations in big-city airports where you can pick up a phone and call the airport-area Holiday Inn or Ramada or whatnot to see if they have availability and a shuttle. This was a similar idea, but different . . . .
Inside the booth, there was a colorful map of the town. There was also a touch-screen computer. You could put the touch-screen into a number of different languages -- so we went with English :-). You could then choose to search for Hotels, Inns, B&B's, Guesthouses, etc -- or to look at everything. Again, we went with everything. It then lists each place with available rooms for the night and their price ranges. When you touched the individual hotel, you could see the different types of rooms and prices. You could then touch a spot on the screen to find out where the hotel was -- and immediately a corresponding light on the colorful, large town map lit up so you could see how far it was from the info-booth. Absolutely brilliant. If you have a car, you can look for a bigger range....if you're on foot, like us, you can stick to things within walking distance. The screen also listed the phone number for each place. And next to the touch-screen . . . was a free phone that you could use to call each place to double-check on availability and rates. This was a fantastic idea. An absolutely fan-TASTIC idea for the hotels involved. The vast majority of tourists who might otherwise walk around and find a cheaper option are likely to just roll in to this booth and be dumfounded at the ease of use and pay more than they needed to for a room. That was us :-).
In our defense, we did call around until we found the place that was the cheapest within a walkable distance. It was a little more than half a mile away -- so it took us a bit to get there. When we arrived, we were greeted by quite possibly the 2nd most agressively friendly German lady who ever lived. I only say the 2nd most because we definitely encountered the MOST agressively friendly German woman ever on the subway on Thursday night. We were waiting for a train that wasn't running (maybe work on the tracks?), so she started to explain to us (in German) that we needed to go take a bus. When I told her that I didn't speak German, she switched mid-sentence to English and stepped closer and opened her eyes wider and barked louder -- I had previously throught (erroneously) that she had been at maximum intensity when she began in German. This lady clearly had no sense of personal space. And I think I need to explain that a bit more. As I mentioned in a previous entry, Sam and I miss Latin American culture. In Latin American culture, personal space is nonexistant. Everyone hugs and kisses on the cheek, even when they meet for the first time. People touch you on the arm when they talk to you, and you cram into busses like overpacked sardines. But here in Germany, most people keep to their own business -- and when there is public business at hand, they are pretty agressive about it. No one is shy to muscle through line and hop in front of you if you're momentarily looking the other way. That kind of style doesn't lend itself well to face-to-face interaction. When training for my job in the juvenile justice system, I learned about the importance of stance. When most people are standing and talking, they are at a slightly sideways angle -- their shoulders are at, say, 45 degree angles. When people stand with their shoulders squared off, it's usually confrontational -- so if conflict is escalating, people get angrier -- or in situations where people aren't confident, they will back down to a person with squared shoulders and try to stand sideways in order to break the feeling. Anyway -- she came straight at us square-shouldered. She was loud, boisterious, and big. Her eyes were bugged out. But she miled from ear to ear and she was friendly. As we subcounciously broke the squared-offness of the situation, she repositioned to stay parallel and square - the whole time wide-eyed, smiling, and yelling as if we were accross the station (though only about 12 inches separated us from the spray of her saliva). Anyway.....she was nice and she was trying to explain that we should take a bus, but we instead decided to just take a different train.
Anyway........on to the second-most agressively friendly German woman. She was probably in her late 60's, white-haired, with the kind of peering eyes you expect from a wise, old woman who feels like she can see through you, but she likes what she sees. She had a definitively German accent, but spoke English very clearly and quite well. She welcomed us into the "house" (this was a guesthouse). The place was kind of like a very large house with a lot of bedrooms. She lived there as well and clearly enjoyed hosting visitors. When she referred to the house, she referred to it as "the house" and when she spoke of the guests she gets, she always said, "I", rather than we, leading us to assume that she was widowed or never married. She was happy to tell us a bit about the history of the town and the surrounding area and to ask us about where we were from and what our plans were. She showed us where breakfast would be served (included in the price) and took us to our rooms and explained an easier way to get into town. She also showed us a cool feature of the windows -- metal shades that came down the window/door to the balcony area via a cable that you had to lower -- slowly (they were HEAVY). I'm a fan of a cavernous sleeping environment, so that was an added perk. You could also see the purpose of our trip -- Neushwanstein castle -- from the lawn of the place. She gave us our key and wished us a good night -- no mention of money, but she didn't seem too worried.
Thursday, May 6th, 2910
What a weekend! I'm only on sentence number 2, but I'm going to go ahead and try to make a committment to myself to split this weekend into at least 2 separate blog entries to make it slightly more readable.
I'll start at the beginning of the weekend -- Friday morning. Sammy and I decided to get a decent night's sleep in our own bed Thursday night and catch a train early Friday morning to Fűssen. Our original plan was to take an overnight train on Thursday in order to get to Fussen on Friday morning and maximize our weekend time. But we got out of the house a little late and made a mistake on the way to the train station and we were under the impression that it might cost us a good bit more to reserve a sleeping car, so we more or less decided that Friday morning made more sense.
So on Thursday night, when we didn't make the overnight train, Sammy said she was in the mood for Mexican. Those are words I haven't heard in 4 years of knowing Sammy, so I busted out the GPS and found a Mexican joint without hesitation. Alice (our GPS) came up with the closest places, out of which I picked out a place called, "Viva Mexico!" -- it seemed like a more Mexican name than some other places. The thing with an entry-level GPS is that it doesn't differentiate between a 5-star restaurant and a greasy taco stand.....and it was raining and COLD. But I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. As long as Marcus wasn't working there, it couldn't be that bad . . .
So we ended up on a pretty dark street on which nothing looked open. Then I saw it -- the Viva Mexico name painted on an old wooden shingle. From afar, I sensed a faint light in the window -- and when we approached, the door was open. Nice -- at least it wasn't the greasy taco stand I had envisioned. When we stepped inside, there were two people cleaning and no one was eating. The lights were dim. The two people were an older (maybe mid-40s?) dark-skinned woman and a young guy. She immediately said, "Hola!" when we walked in -- much to my surprise. Ok, yes, it was a Mexican joint. But I'm Puerto Rican and I didn't speak much Spanish until recently -- so it isn't altogether impossible that these were two Mexican-Germans who only spoke German. I asked the woman in Spanish if she spoke Spanish and she told me, "Un poco". "English?" I asked sheepishly. Then she replied in Spanish, "This is a Mexican restaurant, of course we speak Spanish!". I laughed and asked if they were open, to which she replied that they were. I asked if we could sit anywhere and she said of course. This was more or less the longest conversation I've had with anyone who wasn't Sammy or my family in a couple of weeks. It felt good. We sat down and the young guy served us and we were able to ask questions and order and make conversation -- and it was nice. During dinner, Sammy and I both mentioned how much we miss Latin American culture. We're having a good time here in Europe and we've seen some downright magical things already -- and there is still a lot more to come. But I think that we jointly came to the conclusion that beyond the places we'll see and things we'll do in other parts of the world, it will continue to be hard not to miss the friendliness, openness, and acceptance of Latin America. We miss the people, the music, the Spanish, and the ability to itneract in another language.
As I said, this is not in any way to minimize the sheer awesomeness of our weekend. It is just to say that we were lucky that we started out in Latin America. I think it gave us a deep appreciation for people and human interaction and connection. I think we enjoyed being two of the few (or often only) Americans around. The more we see Americans as we travel, the more we understand why people don't like Americans. But that's a separate, third blog entry. For now, let me just say that our Mexican meals were decent and the service was great. I think it was just dimly lit and the music was a little soft because we were there on May 6th -- I'm sure the place partied itself out for Cinco de Mayo and was a little more low key the night we went. The prices weren't great and the food wasn't fantastic, but it was a nice slice of our home away from home. Obviously America will always be our first home, but Latin America is a close second. Whenever I hear people speaking Spanish here, I want to join in . . . . nos extraña, Ecuador!
I'll start at the beginning of the weekend -- Friday morning. Sammy and I decided to get a decent night's sleep in our own bed Thursday night and catch a train early Friday morning to Fűssen. Our original plan was to take an overnight train on Thursday in order to get to Fussen on Friday morning and maximize our weekend time. But we got out of the house a little late and made a mistake on the way to the train station and we were under the impression that it might cost us a good bit more to reserve a sleeping car, so we more or less decided that Friday morning made more sense.
So on Thursday night, when we didn't make the overnight train, Sammy said she was in the mood for Mexican. Those are words I haven't heard in 4 years of knowing Sammy, so I busted out the GPS and found a Mexican joint without hesitation. Alice (our GPS) came up with the closest places, out of which I picked out a place called, "Viva Mexico!" -- it seemed like a more Mexican name than some other places. The thing with an entry-level GPS is that it doesn't differentiate between a 5-star restaurant and a greasy taco stand.....and it was raining and COLD. But I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. As long as Marcus wasn't working there, it couldn't be that bad . . .
So we ended up on a pretty dark street on which nothing looked open. Then I saw it -- the Viva Mexico name painted on an old wooden shingle. From afar, I sensed a faint light in the window -- and when we approached, the door was open. Nice -- at least it wasn't the greasy taco stand I had envisioned. When we stepped inside, there were two people cleaning and no one was eating. The lights were dim. The two people were an older (maybe mid-40s?) dark-skinned woman and a young guy. She immediately said, "Hola!" when we walked in -- much to my surprise. Ok, yes, it was a Mexican joint. But I'm Puerto Rican and I didn't speak much Spanish until recently -- so it isn't altogether impossible that these were two Mexican-Germans who only spoke German. I asked the woman in Spanish if she spoke Spanish and she told me, "Un poco". "English?" I asked sheepishly. Then she replied in Spanish, "This is a Mexican restaurant, of course we speak Spanish!". I laughed and asked if they were open, to which she replied that they were. I asked if we could sit anywhere and she said of course. This was more or less the longest conversation I've had with anyone who wasn't Sammy or my family in a couple of weeks. It felt good. We sat down and the young guy served us and we were able to ask questions and order and make conversation -- and it was nice. During dinner, Sammy and I both mentioned how much we miss Latin American culture. We're having a good time here in Europe and we've seen some downright magical things already -- and there is still a lot more to come. But I think that we jointly came to the conclusion that beyond the places we'll see and things we'll do in other parts of the world, it will continue to be hard not to miss the friendliness, openness, and acceptance of Latin America. We miss the people, the music, the Spanish, and the ability to itneract in another language.
As I said, this is not in any way to minimize the sheer awesomeness of our weekend. It is just to say that we were lucky that we started out in Latin America. I think it gave us a deep appreciation for people and human interaction and connection. I think we enjoyed being two of the few (or often only) Americans around. The more we see Americans as we travel, the more we understand why people don't like Americans. But that's a separate, third blog entry. For now, let me just say that our Mexican meals were decent and the service was great. I think it was just dimly lit and the music was a little soft because we were there on May 6th -- I'm sure the place partied itself out for Cinco de Mayo and was a little more low key the night we went. The prices weren't great and the food wasn't fantastic, but it was a nice slice of our home away from home. Obviously America will always be our first home, but Latin America is a close second. Whenever I hear people speaking Spanish here, I want to join in . . . . nos extraña, Ecuador!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
A thought
I'm happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed a bottle of 2.99 Euro wine over the weekend. Although Alex (the guy whose apartment we're renting) doesn't have a corkscrew, that didn't stop me from trying (and failing) to remove it with a serrated knife. The wine tasted just as fine with the cork bobbing around in the bottle. I can now enjoy our dinners on our little balcony with a glass of white deliciousness more often, now that I know it won't be pricey. I don't know if this is a testament to how good the wine is here or how poor my taste in wine is. You be the judge.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The Unforseen Joy of Distant Family Members
This blog entry is going to cover a number of things that are almost completely out of order. We have neglected typing about a few very important things, but right now I'm going to type what's freshest and work my way backwards.
Before I get to the present moment, let me say that Prague might be the most beautiful city the world has ever seen. It has beauty beyond anything I can adequately capture in text. Two dimensional images will fall flat. It is utterly amazing.
An attempt to capture a piece of it is here.....see more on facebook
That was our day Saturday -- we were surrounded by unimaginable beauty. Sunday made sure to change things up a bit for us just to remind us that we aren't actually living in a fairy tale.
We woke up in our hostel Sunday morning.......a little later than planned (after a few too many "snooze" buttons). We had wanted to make sure that we had enough time to enjoy our drive through the Western Czech Republic and that we gave ourselves some time to stop and enjoy the German countryside on our way to Frankfurt. Or so we thought. As it turned out when we arrived, Marcus's place was not at all in Frankfurt -- it was in a very small town called Budingen. It wasn't even really in Budingen. It was really in a small development outside of a small town where there used to be a military base -- but now there is nothing. His small development had no commercial property -- only houses and apartments and corn fields surrounding. Unfortunately, we wouldn't be walking down the block for lunch anymore.
That reminds me that I should add a bit of background info. We started out in Berlin, where we had an apartment for 10 days. We sublet someone's place while they were on vacation. After that 10 days, we were looking at a few options. We had looked at an apartment that we really liked and we had an email offer for another (each for 3-4 weeks), but upon arriving in Germany we found out that I have a cousin who lives in Frankfurt. My father is the youngest of 8 boys, so I have a number of cousins who I've never met. Marcus is one of those cousins. He had stopped by Grandma's the day that we were leaving for Germany (a few hours after we had) and wanted my contact info. An email later, he told us about how he would love to help us out and give us a free place to stay (with him) in Frankfurt so we could free up our money to travel on the weekends. He was very warm and welcoming when he told us that he spoke a number of languages and he thought he could be a great resource for us here and he said that he could take us around and show us some castles, etc.
I was a little hesitant at his offer. While it sounded nice (a free place to stay with someone who has been in Germany for years and knows a lot about it), I know that living with Sam and I could be a pain in the ass. We teach for 10 hours per day from Monday through Thursday now and we need to be in separate rooms with relative quiet. Additionally, there is some general weirdness in some of my extended family. They are all good people inside, but sometimes they can be strange. No one in my immediately family really knows Marcus. Ideally, I would have wanted to meet up with Marcus this past weekend to feel things out a bit. However, he had been in the US for a while and due to the Volcanic Ash that grounded everyone flying into or out of Europe for most of week, he wasn't able to get a flight back to Germany until this past weekend (Saturday night - April 24th). So he was set to arrive in Frankfurt on Sunday morning. Sam and I had to be out of our place by Saturday morning, so we decided to rent a car in Berlin on Friday and drive it to Prague and then to Frankfurt on Sunday. We had to return it by 4pm on Sunday in Frankfurt. I talked to Marcus on the phone to ask where the best place to return the car would be - whether at the airport or somewhere closer to him -- he said the airport was fine as it was only 30 or 35 minutes from his house and he could pick us up. I told him I'd try to call him from the road on our way from Prague.
When we finally got out of bed and got ready Sunday morning, we went downstairs in the hostel and handed in our key and "Czeched out" so to speak. We walked outside and ran into this English dude who was still drunk and hadn't slept (I get the feeling that as beautiful as Prague is by day, it gets pretty ugly at night....lol). As we were saying good morning and goodbye to him, Sam got my attention and pointed to our car (parked across the street). There on the front driver's tire was a lovely little yellow boot. Apparently we couldn't park where we were. We had left the car there from 12:45pm Saturday until a little past 9am on Sunday -- and it wasn't until about 10 minutes before we walked outside (we were told by the drunk Englishman and the street cleaner) that the police came by and booted it. So there was a number we had to call and no one knew exactly how much it would cost.....only that it should be around 500 Czech Crowns (about $25). We went into the hostel and called and the front desk dude talked to the cop to explain where we were. I will give them a little credit -- I half expected to wait hours on end, but they arrived pretty quickly. The cop came up with plenty of cop attitude and unnecessary sunglasses and explained to me (in English) that the maximum fine was 2,000 Crowns ($100), but that he was going to charge us 1,000 Crowns ($50). How sweet of him. The Englishman has been in Prague since October, so he spoke some Czech and he tried to reason with the guy. I told him that I didn't think we had 1,000 Crowns left on us. However, he didn't seem to budge much. He watched us count out every last coin we had -- 960 Crowns -- and then he snatched it out of our hands pissed off and he walked away angry. But we didn't have time to mess around......we had to get the car back to Frankfurt and meet with Marcus.
Fast forward about an hour........I realized that I never wrote down Marcus's number. So.....I couldn't call him from the road. Shoot.
And then we had a little trouble following our GPS when we got into Frankfurt. I hadn't planned to rent cars, so I didn't bring the car charger for my GPS. I figured that we would occasionally use it when walking around cities. Thanks to my parents, I bought the European maps pack for my Garmin Nuvi GPS. I mention this only because maybe that will help someone else. It was an incredible investment. I bought it on Amazon -- it cost $150 plus shipping to get it from Garmin, or $120 with free shipping from Amazon. Sometimes it is as low as $114. Buy it on a MicroSD card if you buy it. If you want to know why, ask me and I will explain.
Anyway......we made a mistake or two on the way into Frankfurt that added to our slow start to bring us PAINFULLY close to the return time of 4:00pm. We pulled into the garage finally at 3:53pm. And then we realized that we forgot to gas it back up......so we're going to get killed on that as they overcharge you an arm and a leg for that in the US......and gas is expensive here to begin with. So we weren't too happy, but what can ya do?
Our next step was to call Marcus. Let me back up once again and give some background. My cousin Marcus had called my dad the same day that we had left for Germany. He wanted my contact info because he definitely wanted to meet me and hang out. He had told my dad that Berlin was about 4.5 hours away from Frankfurt, but he would be happy to drive up to come see us and take us to a few places in Germany. I initially sent him an email hoping that maybe he had some contacts in Southern Germany who might have apartments. We really wanted to live in or around Munich, but we couldn't find any sites that weren't in German. All I really knew about Marcus was that he had been in the military and had stayed in Germany afterward.
When I emailed Marcus, I outlined the fact that Sam and I teach English on the Internet and we're going to be in Germany for a while to experience something different. I told him that we were staying in an apartment that we had sublet and that we were looking at other sublets in Berlin, but that we really wanted to be somewhere in Southern Germany. I hoped that he could help us at least make some phone calls in German and that I could meet him and connect with a cousin I never knew. He wrote back very enthusiastically, explaining that he retired from the military and he collects enough to live comfortably, so he doesn't work or anything. He told me that he speaks a number of languages and that his girlfriend was Russian but she doesn't speak any English. Then he offered for us to stay with him. He said that he would love to save us some money so we could use our money to travel and not have to worry about paying for a place to stay. This was a huge offer. I was very hesitant because I really didn't know him at all, but Sam and I decided that it made more sense to take up a family member on a free place to stay. We thought it would be a good resource to have someone who knew Germany well and it well. I sent Marcus a long email. I think my direct words were something along the lines of, "If this sounds like too much, it is no problem at all. We didn't plan on staying with you when we came to Germany, so if this doesn't work for you, that's absolutely fine. I just need to know so we can make a decision about where to live." Again, Marcus wrote back assuring me that everything was cool and that if it didn't work out at his house, he had several friends with hotels who would give us a special "Marcus rate" - nothing close to a regular hotel rate.
Marcus and I spoke on the phone finally on Friday of last week (April 23rd). He confirmed that he would be in Frankfurt on Sunday morning and that we were more than welcome to come to his apartment on Sunday. I told him that we had rented a car and that we would be driving to Prague and then to Frankfurt on Sunday. I also told him that we would try to call him from the road around noon and that we had to have the car back by 4pm.
Now we fast forward once again to Sunday afternoon at around 4:15pm. We had cleaned out the car and lugged all of our crapola into the airport terminal and sat down and paid our $11 to use the Internet after a pretty crappy day -- between the $50 fine in Prague and the expense of gas when we filled up and forgetting to fill up at the end, we felt like the trip had cost us more than we intended. But so goes life...it wasn't the end of the world.
So Marcus answered the phone and he almost immediately sounded annoyed. He said that he had expected us to call hours before. He kind of left things flat for a second, so I asked him if he was going to come get us at the airport or if we should take a taxi. I told him that I would need his address for a taxi. He said that he had emailed me his address (I checked....he hadn't). He said to go outside and try to get a taxi because it would be at least 30 or 35 minutes for him to get to the airport (which was absolutely no problem for us.....but I figured that he is doing us a favor, so heck with it...we could pony up for the taxi). I asked him how much it would be. He said it would probably be about 50 Euro ($67 or $68 or so). He told me to go get a taxi and then put him on the phone with the driver. I explained to Marcus, as I had previously on Friday, that we don't have a cell phone -- only Skype. I told him that I wouldn't get Internet access outside and that the taxi driver wasn't going to put on my headset. I said it was fine, we would figure it out after he gave us the address. He said that if they try to say 100 Euro to just call him again and he'd come and get us. I was more than a little annoyed.....if I knew we'd be taking a taxi, I would have definitely tried to find a rental location as close as possible to his place. Additionally, the line about "if they try to say 100 Euro" was very suspect. So I gave a taxi driver the address and asked how much. He told me that it would be 40-50 Kilometers and that the taxi would cost 13 Euro for every 10 Kilometers. I did the math in my head and figured that to be between 52-65 Euro and I figured that was close enough. He plugged the address into his GPS as we took off and he almost immediately said, "56 Kilometers". Ok.....I had been hoping for the 40km end, but what can you do? I quickly did the math in my head and I figured on around 72 Euro. I wasn't at all happy.....but again, ce la vie.
The taxi driver was extremely friendly and he taught us a bit about the history of Germany and the Czech Republic on the way to Marcus's house. It was a pretty cool conversation actually. He had been married to a Czech woman, so he told us about some places to see in the Czech Republic and both the Czech and German words for those places. He told us a bit about the Roman Empire and some castles and so on. We finally got to Marcus's and I asked him how much. He pointed to his meter, which read "91.15". I told him it wasn't possible. He tried to explain that this was what the meter said and he couldn't do any differently. I laid the math out for him (thanks to Mom for making me a good Math student) and explained that even if I gave him a lot of leeway, it couldn't have come out to more than 80 Euro, and it definitely should have been around 72. He sat there quiet and asked what we wanted to do. I wasn't really sure how to answer the question. Finally I went through my pockets....I didn't have a 2 Euro coin, so I had to give him 75. I told him that we wouldn't pay any more than that. He said OK and took it and helped us get our bags out of the back. Strange that he didn't insist.....which leads me to believe that we got ripped off. But we're there. We're outside Marcus's place (where is he while we're arguing with the cab driver btw?). But things are about to get better. We'll get inside and put down all of our bags and chillax. Finally this rough day was about to lighten and brighten up.
As the taxi driver drove away, Marcus came from around the back of the building. At first, I wasn't sure if it was him or not. Everyone had told me that he was tall and over 300 pounds. I also expected him to be somewhat dark-skinned. This guy coming around the corner was pretty large and dark, but he was moving very slowly and just sort of smirking -- not even a full smile or hello. I said hi first and his smile finally began to reveal a couple of teeth and he said "hi" kind of matter-of-factly. We exchanged a sort of awkward greeting as one might expect from family that just met (after 30 years in my case....37 in his).
We walked into his building and up a small flight of stairs, where he opened the door and his girlfriend was waiting inside. I was carrying a backpack on my front and back, so I just kind of walked in and Sam followed me. Marcus said, "usually we take our shoes off in the house" in a way that seemed half matter of fact and half like he thought we were rude for not taking them off. I'm usually super-conscious about the fact that some people take their shoes off, but I had so many things that I hadn't thought about it. I apologized and we took our shoes off.
He told us to put our stuff down in the hallway and he said the first thing to do is check the Internet. I figured we could sit down for a second first and catch up a bit. But OK -- we did need to make sure it was all good in the hood so to speak. He said, "so what do you need....do you need to plug in or something? Because I don't have Internet access here, but I think the people upstairs do or something."
WHAT???!?!?!??????????????????????????????!????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
NO INTERNET???????????!?!?!??????????????????????????????????????????
You have GOT to be kidding me.
I have to admit, my first thought was that he was joking. But the confused look on my face led to a look on his face that made it clear that this was no joke. I might have asked him if he was, in fact, serious. He certainly was. He said he didn't know what we had or needed - he figured that we could just plug into a phone jack or whatever and go.
Let me also take this opportunity to mention that Marcus had been in New York since January -- so it's not like he's been living under a rock where the modern world does not exist. He was in and around the city for the past few months.
I absolutely couldn't believe that this day had just gone from bad to worse. I told him that the Internet was the only thing we needed and that we absolutely needed to plug into a router. I told him that this was what I had mentioned in the email and why I had mentioned it. I also told him that we were going to need to figure something out because we had to work on Monday. My head raced trying to figure out what to do. I knew that I would have to email our company to tell them that we probably needed to cancel our sessions for Monday. I also knew that we might need to find a new place to stay. Both required Internet access....and if I had that, I wouldn't be in the predicament to need either. We went into the living room and sat down and I was completely dumbfounded. I don't think there is a better word. I felt like I was traveling through a Twilight zone. Between the taxi driver who seemed to have trouble understanding how the tariff couldn't have possibly been 91 Euro (and still paying $75 Euro -- over $100) and Marcus telling me that the only thing we really needed in a place to stay wasn't there....I was baffled and befuddled and beginning to wonder if I was the craziest person in the world.
So we sat down in his living room -- on the most amazing couch I have ever seen, mind you -- and wondered what the next step was. I had Sam grab her laptop in the off chance that a neighbor had wireless that was not password-protected. Of course, as fate would have it, all of the networks in reach were passworded. So Marcus said, "So what do we do now?" He also muttled something about how he didn't know what we would need because when his father comes, he just plugs in his computer and he has access. He also murmured something about how he was going to buy a laptop this week and try to get Internet in the apartment anyway. He had also previously mentioned that he was going to buy a car this week and some other things. As I'm sure it is similar to the states, I knew that even if he did want to get Internet access, it would likely only happen after a few days.
Maybe this is also an opportune time to mention that Marcus had mentioned in an email that he would only be in Germany for a few weeks and then he had to go back to New York for something. On Friday, when we talked on the phone, he said he would be around for 10-14 days. On the couch, he said he would be there for a week and he asked how long we were planning to stay.
Of course, without Internet access, we weren't planning to stay for long. I told him that Internet was absolutely essential. I asked him if he did indeed have friends with hotels that we could try. He made two phone calls. The first was to someone who had a hotel that had gone bankrupt and was empty.....but he thought maybe we could still go use the Internet during the day (as though that probably didn't get shut off long before they closed the hotel). They didn't have that place anymore. The second was to a guy he plays poker with. His family has a hotel apparently. The best they could do was 56 Euro a night I think. Mind you, we had turned down two places in Berlin that were 600 Euro and 420 Euro per MONTH with everything included. Those were two furnished apartments with utilities and Internet access that we could have had for a whole Month. When you figure that out by the day, it comes out to about 20 Euro per night (maybe a little less since May has 31 days). Staying in a hotel for 56 Euro per night for a week wasn't doing me any favors. Add to this the fact that in a hotel, Sam and I would be teaching in the bedroom and bathroom I guess? So I'd be sitting on the toilet or something? Not so preferable.
Marcus again asked what we wanted to do......as though I would have a solution to a huge problem that he had created. We could have had a place lined up in Berlin and we could have saved ourselves a hundred bucks from the airport to his place as well as the gas to drive all the way to Frankfurt......so we're already out a good bit of money that we didn't need to be....and I didn't have a solution. In the back of my mind, I knew that we could probably find something in Berlin....but a 1-way train ticket from Frankfurt to Berlin is either 97 Euro for a slow train a couple of times a day or 113 Euro for most trains. That's about $145 each. So now we're out $290 + $100 for the taxi and I'll be generous and only throw in $50 in gas from Prague to Frankfurt.....in reality, it was probably quite a bit more. So far, we're down $440 on this favor.
Sam asked if there was an Internet cafe where we could get online and at least email our bosses and look for something else. Props to Sam...I think my brain was too fried by the transition to this netherworld in which we were to think that straight. Marcus said absolutely and that he would take us right down. So we tossed on our shoes and went. Before we went out the door, he held out his arms and dropped two 2 Euro coins in my hand and in Sam's hand for the Internet access. I told him that it was unnecessary -- but at the same time, I accepted.
Marcus drove us to a casino. He said that he thought they had Internet access.......which, odd as it sounds, I have noticed to be true. I've seen signs outside of a few casinos that say, "Internet". So we went in and they had computers with coin slots like an arcade machine. So we each popped in our 2 Euro and away we went.
Sam and I popped off 20 or 30 or 40 emails desperately begging for a place to stay in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Amsterdam, Florence, and any other corner of Western Europe that seemed possible. I concentrated my efforts on Berlin because I know that the rent there is more affordable than in most other cites in Europe. However, at that moment, I would have stayed in a cow pasture in the Ukraine if it had Internet access.
So we fired off emails, including one to our company explaining that we had a personal emergency and needed to cancel our sessions for Monday. It really bothered me to do this because they have recently offered me some sessions that have a lot more students and an opportunity to make a lot more money. However, they are a regularly scheduled lecture series that can not be canceled. These sessions haven't started yet, but I don't want anyone thinking that I am unreliable. The last thing I wanted to do was cancel our classes less than 24 hours in advance, but so be it. We had to do what we had to do. Unfortunately, no one from our company would be online until after midnight and we certainly wouldn't have access then, so I was going to have to hope that I'd wake up to an "it's OK message" when we returned to the Internet cafe in the morning. After almost 2 hours of looking and emailing, I could tell that Marcus was getting antsy (and losing all of his money in a slot machine). I told him that we were ready to go. He called his girlfriend so we could get ready and go to dinner.
I should also mention that on the phone last week, Marcus told me that he was going to propose to his girlfriend at dinner. As it turned out, he had done it earlier in the day before we arrived. Strange situation, but whatever.
I should also mention that his wife to be has a daughter who came out and quickly said hi to us when we arrived and then went back to her room and didn't make a sound. She was cute and shy and didn't speak any English, so she didn't hang out with us for long.
So we went back to the house to pick up his girlfriend. On the way, he said that his girlfriend told him that it was too late to eat (I never understood all of that, "eating late at night makes you fat" garbage). But she was going to come and just drink at dinner. Ok. Whatever.
So she got in the car with us and away we went...without her daughter. Her daughter was 9 and I thought it was a bit odd to leave her at home while we went to dinner...but it was so far from the weirdest pieces of this puzzle that it didn't phase me as much as it should have.
So we went to dinner at a cool little German place in a very stereotypical-looking spot. The building looked like what you picture in a little German town. I don't know how to describe that right now, but it looked pretty.
We asked Marcus for some help with the menu, and he helped a little.....but it also seemed like I knew a few things in German that he didn't. That surprised me a bit. Then when he was ordering, I noticed that he added a couple of Spanish words and a couple of English words that didn't belong. I thought that to be a strange, but not the end of the world.
During dinner, conversation was a little odd. Marcus's girlfriend doesn't speak English, but she understands a fair bit I guess. Sam tried to involve her by commenting on how much she liked this girl's nails -- they were pretty intricately done. She clearly understood the smile and warm expression that Sam gave her and the fact that Sam had pointed to her nails. But she looked down and seemed to hide them and she didn't say anything. I thought it was kind of strange that she didn't even say, "Thanks" in German, but she seemed kind of shy, so whatever.
Conversation was a little weird. At times, Marcus translated some things back and forth, and at times he didn't. At times, he answered questions that I asked and at times he didn't. At times he said more than 3 words, but most times he didn't. It was a strange kind of lack of conversation - not just at dinner, but all day. To give one example, earlier in the afternoon, I had asked him what his job was in the military. He responded with, "to Kill people".
More interesting than that was his response to one of Sammy's questions. She asked him, "So how long did it take you to pick up on the language?". Marcus replied, "I picked up on it the first day". She kind of laughed and he was dead serious. Except here's the thing.....he doesn't really speak the language. Sam wanted Balsamic Vinegar on her salad. I tried to explain that to the waiter because I knew the word for Vinegar (Essig). Marcus chimed in over me to say "Oil and Vinegar" in a German-sounding accent -- as though the word was the same. I think I tried to repeat the correct word, but he spoke over me to insist on "Vinegar". I think the waiter understood enough English to get what he meant....but the fact of the matter was that he was full of it. He didn't even really speak German after (supposedly) living here for 8 years.
As dinner wrapped up, the waiter brought the bill. I glanced at it to add up what we owed. Marcus grabbed it and said, "it's OK" and he pulled money from his pocket and paid. I told him that we could pay for our own and I dropped 30 Euro on the table (about $40). He kind of shrugged and commented that he, "just wanted to save us some money". Then he proceeded to leave the money alone for a while and then slowly pull out his wallet, carefully fold the money, and put it in. I mention this part not because I care about the money -- we can, after all, pay for our own food -- but more because of the way it went down. It was strange how slowly and deliberately he kind of picked it up and folded it and put it away. I'm not sure what the deal was. But whatever. We may have spent as much on dinner anywhere.
So we finished dinner and went back to his place. In their apartment, they had a spare room with a futon-type thing that folded down. I think we had already twice addressed the fact that the futon was fine with us, but for some unknown reason, Marcus made his girlfriend go wake up her daughter (at around midnight) to move her into the spare room so we could sleep in the little girl's Hannah Montana bed. Neither of us understand even a little bit why he insisted on waking up this little girl and moving her. So they moved the little girl and we put our stuff in her room. Sam and I went to bed shortly thereafter and whispered about how he probably had a hidden camera in that room and about how we wanted to get the heck out of there as soon as possible.
The next morning, we woke up and the place was empty. I knew that Marcus had to take his girlfriend to work and the little one to school, but he should have been back well before we had woken up. This wasn't a super big deal. A bigger deal was the fact that the day before, Sam had a problem with her hair straightener. When I had spoken to Marcus while he was still in New York, he asked if we needed anything from the US. After initially saying no, I quickly corrected myself to say that we needed a power converter. Our power converters are too short to fit into the outlets here. We have two outlet adapters that we can plug our laptops into because the laptops automatically change the electricity. However, Sam's expensive hair straightener ($130) does not convert the electricity. She learned that the hard way when she blew one in Australia a few years ago. So I asked Marcus if he could pick one up for us. He told me that he had plenty of them because he picks one up almost every time he goes back and forth. So on Sunday night, Sam went to the bathroom to get ready before we went out to dinner. She came into the living room from the bathroom and she asked Marcus if he had a power converter because she wanted to straighten her hair. He said, "yes". And that was it. Just "yes". She was standing there and he was still laying on the couch. So she said, "OK -- is it just in the bathroom somewhere?". He turned and said, "So you mean I have to get up?" He rolled around and got stumbled off the couch and he got the adapter and plugged it into the wall for her. A while later, Sam told me that her straightener didn't work and she didn't know why -- she ended up having to use Marcus's girlfriend's straightener. Fast forward to Monday morning. I saw the adapter in the bathroom. I picked it up because it just looked like a straight up wall adapter -- not a power converter. It CLEARLY says on the side that it "does not convert electrical power". In English. Black & white. There goes another $130 plus the cost of the converter here -- I'm imagining slightly more expensive than at home since there is probably a smaller supply.
So we started to get ready and Marcus came back. He asked what we wanted to do (I felt like I had heard this more than I ever care to hear it again by this point). I told him that we needed to get back to the Internet place to get on the computer. We showered up and finished getting ready and he took us. We got on the computer, and by a stroke of divine intervention, we had exactly one email out of the tons of emails that said, "yes, you can move in today". All of Sam's emails said "no". I received one other "yes" response from a place that said that we could move in on Tuesday -- but it was only for 3 days. The one guy who said that we could move in right away, Alex, didn't say much else. He attached a few pictures and said he would be free after 4pm. At that point, I didn't even remember which listing was his, so I went back to find it again. The listing was about as minimal as could be. I normally would have assumed that a listing with such little information was a scam -- but we had been desperate. The listing just had a short list of what the apartment had and a couple of pictures that weren't very bright (yet the listing touted how the apartment was "bright" and "sunny"). Basically, all Alex said was that we could move in that same day and that he was free to talk after 4pm. He gave his number. He had a Germany phone number and last name......two promising sign. We've had contact with people in China and Nigeria and various other countries who supposedly have an apartment for rent in Florence or Rome or blah blah blah.
We were still looking through and writing some more messages because we still couldn't be sure about this place. Marcus had to go pick up the little one from school at 1pm, so he offered to leave us there (we were at a new casino, btw) while he went to get her. While he was gone, Sam and I finally had a chance to talk where we felt far enough from prying ears. We had previously (the night before) discussed staying Monday night and trying to have somewhere else to go Tuesday morning.
However, I was sufficiently creeped out and unhappy at this point. I knew that we had one potential offer and another place that looked legitimate for 3 or 4 days from Tuesday. Sam was clearly upset and frustrated and I couldn't see telling work that we would miss another day. My initial thought was to wait until 4pm to call this dude from Marcus's place and see if it was on the up and up and then possibly catch a train after that to Berlin. But between the look on Sammy's face as she continued to stare at the screen in desperation and my own desire to get out of dodge, I manned up and made a decision. I told Sam that I thought we should tell Marcus we had the place when he came back and we should ask for a ride to the train station. I thought that perhaps we would sit in the Frankfurt train station until 4pm to call Alex and then go from there. If things weren't good, we could still catch a train to Berlin and stay in a hostel for a night. It sure beat another night in the Hannah Montana bed with a guy whose job was "to kill people".
So my next stop was the train website. I looked up the schedule and found that we could leave Frankfurt a couple of times each hour more or less. The cost was the kicker -- 113 Euro each. That's 226 Euro together for a 1-way ticket to Berlin from the main Frankfurt station. Considering Marcus's reluctance to pick us up at the airport and the fact that we were in some small podunk town outside of Frankfurt, I wasn't confident he would bring us there. From his podunk town, I think it only came to like 232. More or less, about $300. On top of what we wasted on gas to get to Frankfurt, the extra money we paid to return the car in a different city than where we picked it up (about $40), the $100 from the airport to his house, the $130 for the straightener, the $10.83 I had to pay to use the Internet in the airport to call Marcus, the $13 it cost us to use the Internet to look for apartments, the $200 or so that we lost from not working on Monday, and the priceless frustration, this wasn't really making either of us too happy. Each time I started thinking about how much money was just being thrown away for no reason whatsoever, I wanted to cry. This was turning out to be a very, very expensive mistake. This is actually the first time that I've really put the numbers on paper and thought about them. It's one thing if we chose to spend that money on something. It was another to feel like we threw it in the garbage.
Anyway -- I remembered that I had read that there was some sort of German Rail pass. I researched it and found this to be true. For a 2-person 3-day pass, it only cost 258 Euro altogether. It was a small amount more than the 1-way to Berlin and we would get three days of unlimited rail travel. In other words, we could get our ticket to Berlin plus a round trip to use on any other days within a month. This seemed like a wise decision. The catch: you can only order them online to be shipped to your home address outside of Germany. These passes are only available to non-Germans, so they only mail them outside of the country. The website also says that they sell them in select train stations in Germany -- but it doesn't mention anywhere which train stations those are. Nice.
A quick Internet/Lonely Planet search revealed that you can buy this pass in the Frankfurt Airport. Since that is only about 30-35 minutes from Marcus's house, I decided that the least he could do was drive us there. When he came back, I told him that I was sorry that we had to run so fast, but we had found a place in Berlin that was much more economical (500 Euro for a month with everything (TV, electricity, Internet, the whole 9 yards) included -- a much better idea than spending 60 Euro a day for the next 3 or 4 days. I told him that we needed to get to the Frankfurt Airport so we could get a train back to Berlin. I explained that we were going to buy a special pass that we needed to buy at the airport, so we needed a ride to the airport. He told me that we could get our passes at any train station and that he would take us to a place called Hanau. I explained to Marcus that we were looking to buy a special 3-day pass that wasn't available everywhere. He told me that pass was only available for the weekends -- I knew he was talking about the 3-day family pass available for German families which covers up to 5 people. We were looking at something for foreigners. I explained this to Marcus and he told me that we could definitely buy the pass in Hanau and that even if not, the airport was only one stop away and wouldn't cost more than a few Euros to get to. I was getting a little annoyed, but I also didn't want to blow another $100 to get to the airport, so I bit my tongue and said that would be fine. I told him that we could have lunch with him and then we would need to go. He mentioned twice that he thought we should probably get going if we were going to travel all the way to Berlin. The second time was enough for me, so I just agreed.
So we went back and packed everything up and off we went to Hanau. We drove. And drove. And drove. It seemed to take almost exactly as long to get to this Hanau place as it did to the airport. I've since looked it up on Google Maps. It was 56km from the airport to his place -- and 35 from his place to Hanau. A difference of 21km is about 12 miles. Considering the fact that the highway has no speed limit, that's a pretty negligible difference -- it's not like it takes 12 minutes to go that much farther. So we got to Hanau and he didn't help us get in with our bags or ask about the train passes - he just opened up the trunk and said peace out. That was fine with me.
We went in and asked about the train pass. Of course, as I already knew, it is only available at select train stations. It cost us 14 Euro more ($18 and change) to get to where they sell the passes. FanTASTIC. Get me out of here.
From there, things got a little better for a little while. We got our train to the main station, where we also got our passes (apparently from a very friendly ticket agent -- Sam smiled more than I had seen in days while they were talking. I was guarding all of our worldly possessions). We could take any train for the rest of the night, giving us many options. We sat down in the McCafe in the train station -- the first time either of us have eaten McDonald's food in a long, long time. Kind of strange that we don't eat it in the US and we got it here. Also kind of strange seeing as how we have only seen 3 McDonalds since we've been here -- props to Germany on that one.
Anyway -- I got back online in the train station and called Alex a few minutes after 4pm. He sounded German -- that was a plus. We didn't talk too much - I told him that we would take a train around 5:15pm that would put us in Berlin around 9:30pm. He asked which station we would go to and he said that he could borrow a car and pick us up when we got in. This made me hesitant -- a guy who likely expects us to have all of our cash, at least 2 computers, and all of our other things (including American passports) -- wanted to pick us up in a car. Who knows where he would drive us? I politely declined and said that we could get a train to his neighborhood and walk it. He told me that it was raining in Berlin. I told him I'd email him our train number and that I would call him when we arrived.
So I was about 50/50 at this point as to what was going on. All I can say for sure is that I was praying with every last ounce of energy I had that this wasn't going to be a scam and that we weren't going to get jumped by 6 guys, beaten up, and robbed. All I could do was hope.
We got on our train at 5:15pm and hoped for the best. Apparently you can pay a few extra bucks to reserve specific seats, but I didn't catch that before we get on. Without reserving seats, you have to do the truffle shuffle through open seats until the train starts to empty out. This was far from our biggest concern at this point. Once we got a few stops out of Frankfurt, the train emptied considerably and we got two decent seats that had a table in front and two seats facing us. All 4 were empty. so we sat down and relaxed. A stop or two later, two guys got on and sat across from us -- and old man in a 3 piece suit and a young man who appeared to be in his mid-30's. I was writing part of this blog entry and I noticed that they were pointing to the back of my computer and talking. I have a lot of stickers on the back, so I figured they were just looking at them. At some point, the old guy asked me something in German. I told him that I didn't speak German -- and the young dude immediately asked me the same question in English, so I responded kind of slowly (teaching English online has me in a mode where I automatically talk to non-native speakers slowly). As it turns out, that wasn't too necessary. The two men were both German -- they were grandfather and grandson -- but the grandson had been born in Minneapolis and lived most of his life outside of Germany and his grandfather had spent a few years in Maryland at some point. More interesting than that -- the old man told us that he was born in a small town, but he moved to Berlin 72 years ago. That would have been 1938 -- a very interesting time to have been living in Berlin indeed. He proceeded to talk our ears off about history for the rest of our time on the train -- and it was very, very interesting. He told us about rebuilding after the war and the way that people pulled together despite the horrible situation and he pointed out Volkswagen headquarters as we passed it and the town that wouldn't be if not for it. He taught us about the canal system and the history of Germany and the different dialects spoken in the South and North. I only wish that I had felt more comfortable to ask him about his childhood and the height of the Nazi empire -- and the 30+ years that he lived in a divided Berlin and what it has been like since it was reunified. He did make sure to mention that he lived in the American sector -- not the communist part. Anyway -- this was a definite improvement over where things had been in the morning and a slight improvement in conversation from, "to kill people".
We got to Berlin at precisely 9:26pm -- the exact time the schedule said (the German train system is pretty tight). We called Alex and I told him that we could take a train to a station near his apartment. He explained to me how to take the train there, but I definitely haven't perfected the art of understanding German names when spoken by Germans. I didn't completely understand and I had to ask for help in the station.
From here, the short version of the long story is that we didn't go the right way. Instead of taking 20 minutes, it took us about 2 hours to get to the right station. At that point, Alex was nowhere to be found and there were no phones or Internet access. It was raining. The only real option ended up being to have Sam sit near the exit of the train station (with all of our worldly possessions) while I ran down the block (with my backpack still on at this point) trying to find a phone. As I ran around, the plastic bag that had been hanging from my backpack with our travel books in it broke, dropping our books on the ground and soaking them. Eventually, I had to return to Sam to drop off my backpack and make another run for it through the rain. I finally found an Internet cafe a block and a half away and I called Alex. He was very nice on the phone and he said that he would be there to pick us up at the Internet cafe in 10 minutes. I sprinted back to get Sam -- the train station was a little shady at this hour of night and I was concerned, but there was no other option really. When I got there, Sam was visibly shaken. Some strange (probably drunk) German man had come up to her and pointed at her bags and screamed at her in German. Someone came walking down the stairs and he screamed at them and then stumbled away. It was enough to give her a scare.
We saddled up the bags and walked down to the Internet cafe -- just getting wetter as we walked. A couple of minutes later, Alex pulled up in a really small car. We packed our bags in and I prayed that we weren't getting beaten up/robbed/killed. We needed him to drive us to an ATM because for some reason we weren't able to take out money when we tried somewhere else. Sam went in to take out the money and I talked to Alex in the car. I asked him about why the apartment was vacant and where he was living. He explained that he had worked in the hotel industry for a few years but he didn't like it. He decided to go back to school. His apartment was paid for with his schooling, but he stayed with his girlfriend and her daughter from a previous relationship. Her daughter was only with the father once a month, so at most they had used the apartment once a month for the past 6 months. One of his friends told him he should try putting it up on Craigslist and he did. If only I had known all of this before and I had some time to negotiate. I definitely could have gotten him down at least to 400 Euro. Anyway, as I got to talking with him, I started to feel a bit more at ease. He was very friendly and very sincere. He seemed about as harmless as you could possibly imagine.
Sam got the money and got back in and we drove to the place. Alex pulled in, and it immediately started pouring harder than it had all night. Wonderful yet again. So we grabbed the bags and ran as best we could -- getting absolutely soaked on the way in. Then we started walking up. And up. And up. And up. I've since counted -- 76 stairs, no elevator to the apartment.
However, once we walked in, our luck completely changed. The apartment is absolutely beautiful. It's got nice wood floors, VERY comfortable leather furniture, and a large bedroom and decent kitchen. There is also a nice patio-type area. It's like an enclosed balcony with large windows on both sides. Since we're on the top floor, we get a LOT of sunlight during the day. And the biggest part -- the Internet is perfect. Alex spent a while with us here showing us everything we needed to know and making sure that our computers connected to the Internet without any problems. He was the friend that we desperately needed at that moment -- a really great guy.
After we went over everything, we paid him. Sam mentioned that it was April 26th -- so she asked if that meant we were out May 26th or something. Alex said, "or 28th, or 29th -- it doesn't really matter much to me". I think he was just thrilled to have a bunch of extra money in his pocket. He said to let him know if we needed anything -- an extra pillow, information about tourist attractions, anything at all. We appreciated it.
Anyway -- we said our goodbyes and Sam got a shower and I took a nice, long, HOT, bath. We were finally able to relax. We talked to our families at length to explain the adventure of the past few days, and we went to bed VERY late.
We were both mentally drained and physically exhausted. But man -- it was nice to be home :-).
Before I get to the present moment, let me say that Prague might be the most beautiful city the world has ever seen. It has beauty beyond anything I can adequately capture in text. Two dimensional images will fall flat. It is utterly amazing.
An attempt to capture a piece of it is here.....see more on facebook
That was our day Saturday -- we were surrounded by unimaginable beauty. Sunday made sure to change things up a bit for us just to remind us that we aren't actually living in a fairy tale.
We woke up in our hostel Sunday morning.......a little later than planned (after a few too many "snooze" buttons). We had wanted to make sure that we had enough time to enjoy our drive through the Western Czech Republic and that we gave ourselves some time to stop and enjoy the German countryside on our way to Frankfurt. Or so we thought. As it turned out when we arrived, Marcus's place was not at all in Frankfurt -- it was in a very small town called Budingen. It wasn't even really in Budingen. It was really in a small development outside of a small town where there used to be a military base -- but now there is nothing. His small development had no commercial property -- only houses and apartments and corn fields surrounding. Unfortunately, we wouldn't be walking down the block for lunch anymore.
That reminds me that I should add a bit of background info. We started out in Berlin, where we had an apartment for 10 days. We sublet someone's place while they were on vacation. After that 10 days, we were looking at a few options. We had looked at an apartment that we really liked and we had an email offer for another (each for 3-4 weeks), but upon arriving in Germany we found out that I have a cousin who lives in Frankfurt. My father is the youngest of 8 boys, so I have a number of cousins who I've never met. Marcus is one of those cousins. He had stopped by Grandma's the day that we were leaving for Germany (a few hours after we had) and wanted my contact info. An email later, he told us about how he would love to help us out and give us a free place to stay (with him) in Frankfurt so we could free up our money to travel on the weekends. He was very warm and welcoming when he told us that he spoke a number of languages and he thought he could be a great resource for us here and he said that he could take us around and show us some castles, etc.
I was a little hesitant at his offer. While it sounded nice (a free place to stay with someone who has been in Germany for years and knows a lot about it), I know that living with Sam and I could be a pain in the ass. We teach for 10 hours per day from Monday through Thursday now and we need to be in separate rooms with relative quiet. Additionally, there is some general weirdness in some of my extended family. They are all good people inside, but sometimes they can be strange. No one in my immediately family really knows Marcus. Ideally, I would have wanted to meet up with Marcus this past weekend to feel things out a bit. However, he had been in the US for a while and due to the Volcanic Ash that grounded everyone flying into or out of Europe for most of week, he wasn't able to get a flight back to Germany until this past weekend (Saturday night - April 24th). So he was set to arrive in Frankfurt on Sunday morning. Sam and I had to be out of our place by Saturday morning, so we decided to rent a car in Berlin on Friday and drive it to Prague and then to Frankfurt on Sunday. We had to return it by 4pm on Sunday in Frankfurt. I talked to Marcus on the phone to ask where the best place to return the car would be - whether at the airport or somewhere closer to him -- he said the airport was fine as it was only 30 or 35 minutes from his house and he could pick us up. I told him I'd try to call him from the road on our way from Prague.
When we finally got out of bed and got ready Sunday morning, we went downstairs in the hostel and handed in our key and "Czeched out" so to speak. We walked outside and ran into this English dude who was still drunk and hadn't slept (I get the feeling that as beautiful as Prague is by day, it gets pretty ugly at night....lol). As we were saying good morning and goodbye to him, Sam got my attention and pointed to our car (parked across the street). There on the front driver's tire was a lovely little yellow boot. Apparently we couldn't park where we were. We had left the car there from 12:45pm Saturday until a little past 9am on Sunday -- and it wasn't until about 10 minutes before we walked outside (we were told by the drunk Englishman and the street cleaner) that the police came by and booted it. So there was a number we had to call and no one knew exactly how much it would cost.....only that it should be around 500 Czech Crowns (about $25). We went into the hostel and called and the front desk dude talked to the cop to explain where we were. I will give them a little credit -- I half expected to wait hours on end, but they arrived pretty quickly. The cop came up with plenty of cop attitude and unnecessary sunglasses and explained to me (in English) that the maximum fine was 2,000 Crowns ($100), but that he was going to charge us 1,000 Crowns ($50). How sweet of him. The Englishman has been in Prague since October, so he spoke some Czech and he tried to reason with the guy. I told him that I didn't think we had 1,000 Crowns left on us. However, he didn't seem to budge much. He watched us count out every last coin we had -- 960 Crowns -- and then he snatched it out of our hands pissed off and he walked away angry. But we didn't have time to mess around......we had to get the car back to Frankfurt and meet with Marcus.
Fast forward about an hour........I realized that I never wrote down Marcus's number. So.....I couldn't call him from the road. Shoot.
And then we had a little trouble following our GPS when we got into Frankfurt. I hadn't planned to rent cars, so I didn't bring the car charger for my GPS. I figured that we would occasionally use it when walking around cities. Thanks to my parents, I bought the European maps pack for my Garmin Nuvi GPS. I mention this only because maybe that will help someone else. It was an incredible investment. I bought it on Amazon -- it cost $150 plus shipping to get it from Garmin, or $120 with free shipping from Amazon. Sometimes it is as low as $114. Buy it on a MicroSD card if you buy it. If you want to know why, ask me and I will explain.
Anyway......we made a mistake or two on the way into Frankfurt that added to our slow start to bring us PAINFULLY close to the return time of 4:00pm. We pulled into the garage finally at 3:53pm. And then we realized that we forgot to gas it back up......so we're going to get killed on that as they overcharge you an arm and a leg for that in the US......and gas is expensive here to begin with. So we weren't too happy, but what can ya do?
Our next step was to call Marcus. Let me back up once again and give some background. My cousin Marcus had called my dad the same day that we had left for Germany. He wanted my contact info because he definitely wanted to meet me and hang out. He had told my dad that Berlin was about 4.5 hours away from Frankfurt, but he would be happy to drive up to come see us and take us to a few places in Germany. I initially sent him an email hoping that maybe he had some contacts in Southern Germany who might have apartments. We really wanted to live in or around Munich, but we couldn't find any sites that weren't in German. All I really knew about Marcus was that he had been in the military and had stayed in Germany afterward.
When I emailed Marcus, I outlined the fact that Sam and I teach English on the Internet and we're going to be in Germany for a while to experience something different. I told him that we were staying in an apartment that we had sublet and that we were looking at other sublets in Berlin, but that we really wanted to be somewhere in Southern Germany. I hoped that he could help us at least make some phone calls in German and that I could meet him and connect with a cousin I never knew. He wrote back very enthusiastically, explaining that he retired from the military and he collects enough to live comfortably, so he doesn't work or anything. He told me that he speaks a number of languages and that his girlfriend was Russian but she doesn't speak any English. Then he offered for us to stay with him. He said that he would love to save us some money so we could use our money to travel and not have to worry about paying for a place to stay. This was a huge offer. I was very hesitant because I really didn't know him at all, but Sam and I decided that it made more sense to take up a family member on a free place to stay. We thought it would be a good resource to have someone who knew Germany well and it well. I sent Marcus a long email. I think my direct words were something along the lines of, "If this sounds like too much, it is no problem at all. We didn't plan on staying with you when we came to Germany, so if this doesn't work for you, that's absolutely fine. I just need to know so we can make a decision about where to live." Again, Marcus wrote back assuring me that everything was cool and that if it didn't work out at his house, he had several friends with hotels who would give us a special "Marcus rate" - nothing close to a regular hotel rate.
Marcus and I spoke on the phone finally on Friday of last week (April 23rd). He confirmed that he would be in Frankfurt on Sunday morning and that we were more than welcome to come to his apartment on Sunday. I told him that we had rented a car and that we would be driving to Prague and then to Frankfurt on Sunday. I also told him that we would try to call him from the road around noon and that we had to have the car back by 4pm.
Now we fast forward once again to Sunday afternoon at around 4:15pm. We had cleaned out the car and lugged all of our crapola into the airport terminal and sat down and paid our $11 to use the Internet after a pretty crappy day -- between the $50 fine in Prague and the expense of gas when we filled up and forgetting to fill up at the end, we felt like the trip had cost us more than we intended. But so goes life...it wasn't the end of the world.
So Marcus answered the phone and he almost immediately sounded annoyed. He said that he had expected us to call hours before. He kind of left things flat for a second, so I asked him if he was going to come get us at the airport or if we should take a taxi. I told him that I would need his address for a taxi. He said that he had emailed me his address (I checked....he hadn't). He said to go outside and try to get a taxi because it would be at least 30 or 35 minutes for him to get to the airport (which was absolutely no problem for us.....but I figured that he is doing us a favor, so heck with it...we could pony up for the taxi). I asked him how much it would be. He said it would probably be about 50 Euro ($67 or $68 or so). He told me to go get a taxi and then put him on the phone with the driver. I explained to Marcus, as I had previously on Friday, that we don't have a cell phone -- only Skype. I told him that I wouldn't get Internet access outside and that the taxi driver wasn't going to put on my headset. I said it was fine, we would figure it out after he gave us the address. He said that if they try to say 100 Euro to just call him again and he'd come and get us. I was more than a little annoyed.....if I knew we'd be taking a taxi, I would have definitely tried to find a rental location as close as possible to his place. Additionally, the line about "if they try to say 100 Euro" was very suspect. So I gave a taxi driver the address and asked how much. He told me that it would be 40-50 Kilometers and that the taxi would cost 13 Euro for every 10 Kilometers. I did the math in my head and figured that to be between 52-65 Euro and I figured that was close enough. He plugged the address into his GPS as we took off and he almost immediately said, "56 Kilometers". Ok.....I had been hoping for the 40km end, but what can you do? I quickly did the math in my head and I figured on around 72 Euro. I wasn't at all happy.....but again, ce la vie.
The taxi driver was extremely friendly and he taught us a bit about the history of Germany and the Czech Republic on the way to Marcus's house. It was a pretty cool conversation actually. He had been married to a Czech woman, so he told us about some places to see in the Czech Republic and both the Czech and German words for those places. He told us a bit about the Roman Empire and some castles and so on. We finally got to Marcus's and I asked him how much. He pointed to his meter, which read "91.15". I told him it wasn't possible. He tried to explain that this was what the meter said and he couldn't do any differently. I laid the math out for him (thanks to Mom for making me a good Math student) and explained that even if I gave him a lot of leeway, it couldn't have come out to more than 80 Euro, and it definitely should have been around 72. He sat there quiet and asked what we wanted to do. I wasn't really sure how to answer the question. Finally I went through my pockets....I didn't have a 2 Euro coin, so I had to give him 75. I told him that we wouldn't pay any more than that. He said OK and took it and helped us get our bags out of the back. Strange that he didn't insist.....which leads me to believe that we got ripped off. But we're there. We're outside Marcus's place (where is he while we're arguing with the cab driver btw?). But things are about to get better. We'll get inside and put down all of our bags and chillax. Finally this rough day was about to lighten and brighten up.
As the taxi driver drove away, Marcus came from around the back of the building. At first, I wasn't sure if it was him or not. Everyone had told me that he was tall and over 300 pounds. I also expected him to be somewhat dark-skinned. This guy coming around the corner was pretty large and dark, but he was moving very slowly and just sort of smirking -- not even a full smile or hello. I said hi first and his smile finally began to reveal a couple of teeth and he said "hi" kind of matter-of-factly. We exchanged a sort of awkward greeting as one might expect from family that just met (after 30 years in my case....37 in his).
We walked into his building and up a small flight of stairs, where he opened the door and his girlfriend was waiting inside. I was carrying a backpack on my front and back, so I just kind of walked in and Sam followed me. Marcus said, "usually we take our shoes off in the house" in a way that seemed half matter of fact and half like he thought we were rude for not taking them off. I'm usually super-conscious about the fact that some people take their shoes off, but I had so many things that I hadn't thought about it. I apologized and we took our shoes off.
He told us to put our stuff down in the hallway and he said the first thing to do is check the Internet. I figured we could sit down for a second first and catch up a bit. But OK -- we did need to make sure it was all good in the hood so to speak. He said, "so what do you need....do you need to plug in or something? Because I don't have Internet access here, but I think the people upstairs do or something."
WHAT???!?!?!??????????????????????????????!????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
NO INTERNET???????????!?!?!??????????????????????????????????????????
You have GOT to be kidding me.
I have to admit, my first thought was that he was joking. But the confused look on my face led to a look on his face that made it clear that this was no joke. I might have asked him if he was, in fact, serious. He certainly was. He said he didn't know what we had or needed - he figured that we could just plug into a phone jack or whatever and go.
Let me also take this opportunity to mention that Marcus had been in New York since January -- so it's not like he's been living under a rock where the modern world does not exist. He was in and around the city for the past few months.
I absolutely couldn't believe that this day had just gone from bad to worse. I told him that the Internet was the only thing we needed and that we absolutely needed to plug into a router. I told him that this was what I had mentioned in the email and why I had mentioned it. I also told him that we were going to need to figure something out because we had to work on Monday. My head raced trying to figure out what to do. I knew that I would have to email our company to tell them that we probably needed to cancel our sessions for Monday. I also knew that we might need to find a new place to stay. Both required Internet access....and if I had that, I wouldn't be in the predicament to need either. We went into the living room and sat down and I was completely dumbfounded. I don't think there is a better word. I felt like I was traveling through a Twilight zone. Between the taxi driver who seemed to have trouble understanding how the tariff couldn't have possibly been 91 Euro (and still paying $75 Euro -- over $100) and Marcus telling me that the only thing we really needed in a place to stay wasn't there....I was baffled and befuddled and beginning to wonder if I was the craziest person in the world.
So we sat down in his living room -- on the most amazing couch I have ever seen, mind you -- and wondered what the next step was. I had Sam grab her laptop in the off chance that a neighbor had wireless that was not password-protected. Of course, as fate would have it, all of the networks in reach were passworded. So Marcus said, "So what do we do now?" He also muttled something about how he didn't know what we would need because when his father comes, he just plugs in his computer and he has access. He also murmured something about how he was going to buy a laptop this week and try to get Internet in the apartment anyway. He had also previously mentioned that he was going to buy a car this week and some other things. As I'm sure it is similar to the states, I knew that even if he did want to get Internet access, it would likely only happen after a few days.
Maybe this is also an opportune time to mention that Marcus had mentioned in an email that he would only be in Germany for a few weeks and then he had to go back to New York for something. On Friday, when we talked on the phone, he said he would be around for 10-14 days. On the couch, he said he would be there for a week and he asked how long we were planning to stay.
Of course, without Internet access, we weren't planning to stay for long. I told him that Internet was absolutely essential. I asked him if he did indeed have friends with hotels that we could try. He made two phone calls. The first was to someone who had a hotel that had gone bankrupt and was empty.....but he thought maybe we could still go use the Internet during the day (as though that probably didn't get shut off long before they closed the hotel). They didn't have that place anymore. The second was to a guy he plays poker with. His family has a hotel apparently. The best they could do was 56 Euro a night I think. Mind you, we had turned down two places in Berlin that were 600 Euro and 420 Euro per MONTH with everything included. Those were two furnished apartments with utilities and Internet access that we could have had for a whole Month. When you figure that out by the day, it comes out to about 20 Euro per night (maybe a little less since May has 31 days). Staying in a hotel for 56 Euro per night for a week wasn't doing me any favors. Add to this the fact that in a hotel, Sam and I would be teaching in the bedroom and bathroom I guess? So I'd be sitting on the toilet or something? Not so preferable.
Marcus again asked what we wanted to do......as though I would have a solution to a huge problem that he had created. We could have had a place lined up in Berlin and we could have saved ourselves a hundred bucks from the airport to his place as well as the gas to drive all the way to Frankfurt......so we're already out a good bit of money that we didn't need to be....and I didn't have a solution. In the back of my mind, I knew that we could probably find something in Berlin....but a 1-way train ticket from Frankfurt to Berlin is either 97 Euro for a slow train a couple of times a day or 113 Euro for most trains. That's about $145 each. So now we're out $290 + $100 for the taxi and I'll be generous and only throw in $50 in gas from Prague to Frankfurt.....in reality, it was probably quite a bit more. So far, we're down $440 on this favor.
Sam asked if there was an Internet cafe where we could get online and at least email our bosses and look for something else. Props to Sam...I think my brain was too fried by the transition to this netherworld in which we were to think that straight. Marcus said absolutely and that he would take us right down. So we tossed on our shoes and went. Before we went out the door, he held out his arms and dropped two 2 Euro coins in my hand and in Sam's hand for the Internet access. I told him that it was unnecessary -- but at the same time, I accepted.
Marcus drove us to a casino. He said that he thought they had Internet access.......which, odd as it sounds, I have noticed to be true. I've seen signs outside of a few casinos that say, "Internet". So we went in and they had computers with coin slots like an arcade machine. So we each popped in our 2 Euro and away we went.
Sam and I popped off 20 or 30 or 40 emails desperately begging for a place to stay in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Amsterdam, Florence, and any other corner of Western Europe that seemed possible. I concentrated my efforts on Berlin because I know that the rent there is more affordable than in most other cites in Europe. However, at that moment, I would have stayed in a cow pasture in the Ukraine if it had Internet access.
So we fired off emails, including one to our company explaining that we had a personal emergency and needed to cancel our sessions for Monday. It really bothered me to do this because they have recently offered me some sessions that have a lot more students and an opportunity to make a lot more money. However, they are a regularly scheduled lecture series that can not be canceled. These sessions haven't started yet, but I don't want anyone thinking that I am unreliable. The last thing I wanted to do was cancel our classes less than 24 hours in advance, but so be it. We had to do what we had to do. Unfortunately, no one from our company would be online until after midnight and we certainly wouldn't have access then, so I was going to have to hope that I'd wake up to an "it's OK message" when we returned to the Internet cafe in the morning. After almost 2 hours of looking and emailing, I could tell that Marcus was getting antsy (and losing all of his money in a slot machine). I told him that we were ready to go. He called his girlfriend so we could get ready and go to dinner.
I should also mention that on the phone last week, Marcus told me that he was going to propose to his girlfriend at dinner. As it turned out, he had done it earlier in the day before we arrived. Strange situation, but whatever.
I should also mention that his wife to be has a daughter who came out and quickly said hi to us when we arrived and then went back to her room and didn't make a sound. She was cute and shy and didn't speak any English, so she didn't hang out with us for long.
So we went back to the house to pick up his girlfriend. On the way, he said that his girlfriend told him that it was too late to eat (I never understood all of that, "eating late at night makes you fat" garbage). But she was going to come and just drink at dinner. Ok. Whatever.
So she got in the car with us and away we went...without her daughter. Her daughter was 9 and I thought it was a bit odd to leave her at home while we went to dinner...but it was so far from the weirdest pieces of this puzzle that it didn't phase me as much as it should have.
So we went to dinner at a cool little German place in a very stereotypical-looking spot. The building looked like what you picture in a little German town. I don't know how to describe that right now, but it looked pretty.
We asked Marcus for some help with the menu, and he helped a little.....but it also seemed like I knew a few things in German that he didn't. That surprised me a bit. Then when he was ordering, I noticed that he added a couple of Spanish words and a couple of English words that didn't belong. I thought that to be a strange, but not the end of the world.
During dinner, conversation was a little odd. Marcus's girlfriend doesn't speak English, but she understands a fair bit I guess. Sam tried to involve her by commenting on how much she liked this girl's nails -- they were pretty intricately done. She clearly understood the smile and warm expression that Sam gave her and the fact that Sam had pointed to her nails. But she looked down and seemed to hide them and she didn't say anything. I thought it was kind of strange that she didn't even say, "Thanks" in German, but she seemed kind of shy, so whatever.
Conversation was a little weird. At times, Marcus translated some things back and forth, and at times he didn't. At times, he answered questions that I asked and at times he didn't. At times he said more than 3 words, but most times he didn't. It was a strange kind of lack of conversation - not just at dinner, but all day. To give one example, earlier in the afternoon, I had asked him what his job was in the military. He responded with, "to Kill people".
More interesting than that was his response to one of Sammy's questions. She asked him, "So how long did it take you to pick up on the language?". Marcus replied, "I picked up on it the first day". She kind of laughed and he was dead serious. Except here's the thing.....he doesn't really speak the language. Sam wanted Balsamic Vinegar on her salad. I tried to explain that to the waiter because I knew the word for Vinegar (Essig). Marcus chimed in over me to say "Oil and Vinegar" in a German-sounding accent -- as though the word was the same. I think I tried to repeat the correct word, but he spoke over me to insist on "Vinegar". I think the waiter understood enough English to get what he meant....but the fact of the matter was that he was full of it. He didn't even really speak German after (supposedly) living here for 8 years.
As dinner wrapped up, the waiter brought the bill. I glanced at it to add up what we owed. Marcus grabbed it and said, "it's OK" and he pulled money from his pocket and paid. I told him that we could pay for our own and I dropped 30 Euro on the table (about $40). He kind of shrugged and commented that he, "just wanted to save us some money". Then he proceeded to leave the money alone for a while and then slowly pull out his wallet, carefully fold the money, and put it in. I mention this part not because I care about the money -- we can, after all, pay for our own food -- but more because of the way it went down. It was strange how slowly and deliberately he kind of picked it up and folded it and put it away. I'm not sure what the deal was. But whatever. We may have spent as much on dinner anywhere.
So we finished dinner and went back to his place. In their apartment, they had a spare room with a futon-type thing that folded down. I think we had already twice addressed the fact that the futon was fine with us, but for some unknown reason, Marcus made his girlfriend go wake up her daughter (at around midnight) to move her into the spare room so we could sleep in the little girl's Hannah Montana bed. Neither of us understand even a little bit why he insisted on waking up this little girl and moving her. So they moved the little girl and we put our stuff in her room. Sam and I went to bed shortly thereafter and whispered about how he probably had a hidden camera in that room and about how we wanted to get the heck out of there as soon as possible.
The next morning, we woke up and the place was empty. I knew that Marcus had to take his girlfriend to work and the little one to school, but he should have been back well before we had woken up. This wasn't a super big deal. A bigger deal was the fact that the day before, Sam had a problem with her hair straightener. When I had spoken to Marcus while he was still in New York, he asked if we needed anything from the US. After initially saying no, I quickly corrected myself to say that we needed a power converter. Our power converters are too short to fit into the outlets here. We have two outlet adapters that we can plug our laptops into because the laptops automatically change the electricity. However, Sam's expensive hair straightener ($130) does not convert the electricity. She learned that the hard way when she blew one in Australia a few years ago. So I asked Marcus if he could pick one up for us. He told me that he had plenty of them because he picks one up almost every time he goes back and forth. So on Sunday night, Sam went to the bathroom to get ready before we went out to dinner. She came into the living room from the bathroom and she asked Marcus if he had a power converter because she wanted to straighten her hair. He said, "yes". And that was it. Just "yes". She was standing there and he was still laying on the couch. So she said, "OK -- is it just in the bathroom somewhere?". He turned and said, "So you mean I have to get up?" He rolled around and got stumbled off the couch and he got the adapter and plugged it into the wall for her. A while later, Sam told me that her straightener didn't work and she didn't know why -- she ended up having to use Marcus's girlfriend's straightener. Fast forward to Monday morning. I saw the adapter in the bathroom. I picked it up because it just looked like a straight up wall adapter -- not a power converter. It CLEARLY says on the side that it "does not convert electrical power". In English. Black & white. There goes another $130 plus the cost of the converter here -- I'm imagining slightly more expensive than at home since there is probably a smaller supply.
So we started to get ready and Marcus came back. He asked what we wanted to do (I felt like I had heard this more than I ever care to hear it again by this point). I told him that we needed to get back to the Internet place to get on the computer. We showered up and finished getting ready and he took us. We got on the computer, and by a stroke of divine intervention, we had exactly one email out of the tons of emails that said, "yes, you can move in today". All of Sam's emails said "no". I received one other "yes" response from a place that said that we could move in on Tuesday -- but it was only for 3 days. The one guy who said that we could move in right away, Alex, didn't say much else. He attached a few pictures and said he would be free after 4pm. At that point, I didn't even remember which listing was his, so I went back to find it again. The listing was about as minimal as could be. I normally would have assumed that a listing with such little information was a scam -- but we had been desperate. The listing just had a short list of what the apartment had and a couple of pictures that weren't very bright (yet the listing touted how the apartment was "bright" and "sunny"). Basically, all Alex said was that we could move in that same day and that he was free to talk after 4pm. He gave his number. He had a Germany phone number and last name......two promising sign. We've had contact with people in China and Nigeria and various other countries who supposedly have an apartment for rent in Florence or Rome or blah blah blah.
We were still looking through and writing some more messages because we still couldn't be sure about this place. Marcus had to go pick up the little one from school at 1pm, so he offered to leave us there (we were at a new casino, btw) while he went to get her. While he was gone, Sam and I finally had a chance to talk where we felt far enough from prying ears. We had previously (the night before) discussed staying Monday night and trying to have somewhere else to go Tuesday morning.
However, I was sufficiently creeped out and unhappy at this point. I knew that we had one potential offer and another place that looked legitimate for 3 or 4 days from Tuesday. Sam was clearly upset and frustrated and I couldn't see telling work that we would miss another day. My initial thought was to wait until 4pm to call this dude from Marcus's place and see if it was on the up and up and then possibly catch a train after that to Berlin. But between the look on Sammy's face as she continued to stare at the screen in desperation and my own desire to get out of dodge, I manned up and made a decision. I told Sam that I thought we should tell Marcus we had the place when he came back and we should ask for a ride to the train station. I thought that perhaps we would sit in the Frankfurt train station until 4pm to call Alex and then go from there. If things weren't good, we could still catch a train to Berlin and stay in a hostel for a night. It sure beat another night in the Hannah Montana bed with a guy whose job was "to kill people".
So my next stop was the train website. I looked up the schedule and found that we could leave Frankfurt a couple of times each hour more or less. The cost was the kicker -- 113 Euro each. That's 226 Euro together for a 1-way ticket to Berlin from the main Frankfurt station. Considering Marcus's reluctance to pick us up at the airport and the fact that we were in some small podunk town outside of Frankfurt, I wasn't confident he would bring us there. From his podunk town, I think it only came to like 232. More or less, about $300. On top of what we wasted on gas to get to Frankfurt, the extra money we paid to return the car in a different city than where we picked it up (about $40), the $100 from the airport to his house, the $130 for the straightener, the $10.83 I had to pay to use the Internet in the airport to call Marcus, the $13 it cost us to use the Internet to look for apartments, the $200 or so that we lost from not working on Monday, and the priceless frustration, this wasn't really making either of us too happy. Each time I started thinking about how much money was just being thrown away for no reason whatsoever, I wanted to cry. This was turning out to be a very, very expensive mistake. This is actually the first time that I've really put the numbers on paper and thought about them. It's one thing if we chose to spend that money on something. It was another to feel like we threw it in the garbage.
Anyway -- I remembered that I had read that there was some sort of German Rail pass. I researched it and found this to be true. For a 2-person 3-day pass, it only cost 258 Euro altogether. It was a small amount more than the 1-way to Berlin and we would get three days of unlimited rail travel. In other words, we could get our ticket to Berlin plus a round trip to use on any other days within a month. This seemed like a wise decision. The catch: you can only order them online to be shipped to your home address outside of Germany. These passes are only available to non-Germans, so they only mail them outside of the country. The website also says that they sell them in select train stations in Germany -- but it doesn't mention anywhere which train stations those are. Nice.
A quick Internet/Lonely Planet search revealed that you can buy this pass in the Frankfurt Airport. Since that is only about 30-35 minutes from Marcus's house, I decided that the least he could do was drive us there. When he came back, I told him that I was sorry that we had to run so fast, but we had found a place in Berlin that was much more economical (500 Euro for a month with everything (TV, electricity, Internet, the whole 9 yards) included -- a much better idea than spending 60 Euro a day for the next 3 or 4 days. I told him that we needed to get to the Frankfurt Airport so we could get a train back to Berlin. I explained that we were going to buy a special pass that we needed to buy at the airport, so we needed a ride to the airport. He told me that we could get our passes at any train station and that he would take us to a place called Hanau. I explained to Marcus that we were looking to buy a special 3-day pass that wasn't available everywhere. He told me that pass was only available for the weekends -- I knew he was talking about the 3-day family pass available for German families which covers up to 5 people. We were looking at something for foreigners. I explained this to Marcus and he told me that we could definitely buy the pass in Hanau and that even if not, the airport was only one stop away and wouldn't cost more than a few Euros to get to. I was getting a little annoyed, but I also didn't want to blow another $100 to get to the airport, so I bit my tongue and said that would be fine. I told him that we could have lunch with him and then we would need to go. He mentioned twice that he thought we should probably get going if we were going to travel all the way to Berlin. The second time was enough for me, so I just agreed.
So we went back and packed everything up and off we went to Hanau. We drove. And drove. And drove. It seemed to take almost exactly as long to get to this Hanau place as it did to the airport. I've since looked it up on Google Maps. It was 56km from the airport to his place -- and 35 from his place to Hanau. A difference of 21km is about 12 miles. Considering the fact that the highway has no speed limit, that's a pretty negligible difference -- it's not like it takes 12 minutes to go that much farther. So we got to Hanau and he didn't help us get in with our bags or ask about the train passes - he just opened up the trunk and said peace out. That was fine with me.
We went in and asked about the train pass. Of course, as I already knew, it is only available at select train stations. It cost us 14 Euro more ($18 and change) to get to where they sell the passes. FanTASTIC. Get me out of here.
From there, things got a little better for a little while. We got our train to the main station, where we also got our passes (apparently from a very friendly ticket agent -- Sam smiled more than I had seen in days while they were talking. I was guarding all of our worldly possessions). We could take any train for the rest of the night, giving us many options. We sat down in the McCafe in the train station -- the first time either of us have eaten McDonald's food in a long, long time. Kind of strange that we don't eat it in the US and we got it here. Also kind of strange seeing as how we have only seen 3 McDonalds since we've been here -- props to Germany on that one.
Anyway -- I got back online in the train station and called Alex a few minutes after 4pm. He sounded German -- that was a plus. We didn't talk too much - I told him that we would take a train around 5:15pm that would put us in Berlin around 9:30pm. He asked which station we would go to and he said that he could borrow a car and pick us up when we got in. This made me hesitant -- a guy who likely expects us to have all of our cash, at least 2 computers, and all of our other things (including American passports) -- wanted to pick us up in a car. Who knows where he would drive us? I politely declined and said that we could get a train to his neighborhood and walk it. He told me that it was raining in Berlin. I told him I'd email him our train number and that I would call him when we arrived.
So I was about 50/50 at this point as to what was going on. All I can say for sure is that I was praying with every last ounce of energy I had that this wasn't going to be a scam and that we weren't going to get jumped by 6 guys, beaten up, and robbed. All I could do was hope.
We got on our train at 5:15pm and hoped for the best. Apparently you can pay a few extra bucks to reserve specific seats, but I didn't catch that before we get on. Without reserving seats, you have to do the truffle shuffle through open seats until the train starts to empty out. This was far from our biggest concern at this point. Once we got a few stops out of Frankfurt, the train emptied considerably and we got two decent seats that had a table in front and two seats facing us. All 4 were empty. so we sat down and relaxed. A stop or two later, two guys got on and sat across from us -- and old man in a 3 piece suit and a young man who appeared to be in his mid-30's. I was writing part of this blog entry and I noticed that they were pointing to the back of my computer and talking. I have a lot of stickers on the back, so I figured they were just looking at them. At some point, the old guy asked me something in German. I told him that I didn't speak German -- and the young dude immediately asked me the same question in English, so I responded kind of slowly (teaching English online has me in a mode where I automatically talk to non-native speakers slowly). As it turns out, that wasn't too necessary. The two men were both German -- they were grandfather and grandson -- but the grandson had been born in Minneapolis and lived most of his life outside of Germany and his grandfather had spent a few years in Maryland at some point. More interesting than that -- the old man told us that he was born in a small town, but he moved to Berlin 72 years ago. That would have been 1938 -- a very interesting time to have been living in Berlin indeed. He proceeded to talk our ears off about history for the rest of our time on the train -- and it was very, very interesting. He told us about rebuilding after the war and the way that people pulled together despite the horrible situation and he pointed out Volkswagen headquarters as we passed it and the town that wouldn't be if not for it. He taught us about the canal system and the history of Germany and the different dialects spoken in the South and North. I only wish that I had felt more comfortable to ask him about his childhood and the height of the Nazi empire -- and the 30+ years that he lived in a divided Berlin and what it has been like since it was reunified. He did make sure to mention that he lived in the American sector -- not the communist part. Anyway -- this was a definite improvement over where things had been in the morning and a slight improvement in conversation from, "to kill people".
We got to Berlin at precisely 9:26pm -- the exact time the schedule said (the German train system is pretty tight). We called Alex and I told him that we could take a train to a station near his apartment. He explained to me how to take the train there, but I definitely haven't perfected the art of understanding German names when spoken by Germans. I didn't completely understand and I had to ask for help in the station.
From here, the short version of the long story is that we didn't go the right way. Instead of taking 20 minutes, it took us about 2 hours to get to the right station. At that point, Alex was nowhere to be found and there were no phones or Internet access. It was raining. The only real option ended up being to have Sam sit near the exit of the train station (with all of our worldly possessions) while I ran down the block (with my backpack still on at this point) trying to find a phone. As I ran around, the plastic bag that had been hanging from my backpack with our travel books in it broke, dropping our books on the ground and soaking them. Eventually, I had to return to Sam to drop off my backpack and make another run for it through the rain. I finally found an Internet cafe a block and a half away and I called Alex. He was very nice on the phone and he said that he would be there to pick us up at the Internet cafe in 10 minutes. I sprinted back to get Sam -- the train station was a little shady at this hour of night and I was concerned, but there was no other option really. When I got there, Sam was visibly shaken. Some strange (probably drunk) German man had come up to her and pointed at her bags and screamed at her in German. Someone came walking down the stairs and he screamed at them and then stumbled away. It was enough to give her a scare.
We saddled up the bags and walked down to the Internet cafe -- just getting wetter as we walked. A couple of minutes later, Alex pulled up in a really small car. We packed our bags in and I prayed that we weren't getting beaten up/robbed/killed. We needed him to drive us to an ATM because for some reason we weren't able to take out money when we tried somewhere else. Sam went in to take out the money and I talked to Alex in the car. I asked him about why the apartment was vacant and where he was living. He explained that he had worked in the hotel industry for a few years but he didn't like it. He decided to go back to school. His apartment was paid for with his schooling, but he stayed with his girlfriend and her daughter from a previous relationship. Her daughter was only with the father once a month, so at most they had used the apartment once a month for the past 6 months. One of his friends told him he should try putting it up on Craigslist and he did. If only I had known all of this before and I had some time to negotiate. I definitely could have gotten him down at least to 400 Euro. Anyway, as I got to talking with him, I started to feel a bit more at ease. He was very friendly and very sincere. He seemed about as harmless as you could possibly imagine.
Sam got the money and got back in and we drove to the place. Alex pulled in, and it immediately started pouring harder than it had all night. Wonderful yet again. So we grabbed the bags and ran as best we could -- getting absolutely soaked on the way in. Then we started walking up. And up. And up. And up. I've since counted -- 76 stairs, no elevator to the apartment.
However, once we walked in, our luck completely changed. The apartment is absolutely beautiful. It's got nice wood floors, VERY comfortable leather furniture, and a large bedroom and decent kitchen. There is also a nice patio-type area. It's like an enclosed balcony with large windows on both sides. Since we're on the top floor, we get a LOT of sunlight during the day. And the biggest part -- the Internet is perfect. Alex spent a while with us here showing us everything we needed to know and making sure that our computers connected to the Internet without any problems. He was the friend that we desperately needed at that moment -- a really great guy.
After we went over everything, we paid him. Sam mentioned that it was April 26th -- so she asked if that meant we were out May 26th or something. Alex said, "or 28th, or 29th -- it doesn't really matter much to me". I think he was just thrilled to have a bunch of extra money in his pocket. He said to let him know if we needed anything -- an extra pillow, information about tourist attractions, anything at all. We appreciated it.
Anyway -- we said our goodbyes and Sam got a shower and I took a nice, long, HOT, bath. We were finally able to relax. We talked to our families at length to explain the adventure of the past few days, and we went to bed VERY late.
We were both mentally drained and physically exhausted. But man -- it was nice to be home :-).
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