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.