Day 15 - Home Again

We got home from Germany last night. We had a great trip. We're sorry it's over. But damn, it's great to be home.

Bubble Tea stand

First thing I did in the United States was to drink a glass of iced tea, which was tough to find in Germany. Seems easy enough to put ice cubes in tea (not that ice was all that common) but it was never on any menus, which leaned toward coffee. Great coffee too.

There were Bubble Tea stands everywhere, selling what is now Kyra's favorite drink. It consists of a little tea (your choice of black, green or jasmine) mixed with milk and a shot of flavored syrup (your choice of a zillion flavors.) That all gets shaken up by a shaking machine. Then you add a scoop of little round flavored candy bubbles (in your choice of a zillion flavors.) Then the cup is sealed with a foil top in a sealing machine. Then you jab the foil with a really wide straw so you can drink the tea and suck up the bubbles. The bubble candies are squishy, and when you bite into them, they have a liquid center. The drink is really a very sophisticated sugar delivery system that has won over my daughter completely. But it's not really tea.

Things I already miss - fresh bread in the mornings. Easy, reliable mass transit. Cities worth walking through. Street life.  Discovering unexpected little courtyards filled with charming little shops or galleries. Excellent food available everywhere, even in subway stations and gas stations. Clean restrooms everywhere, even in subway stations and gas stations. In fact, I was so impressed with the self-sanitizing toilet seats at one gas station, where the seat rotates under a little spray of sanitizer after every flush, that I flushed again, and shot a little video.

Kyra's favorite part of Germany

Here's what impressed Kyra the most about Germany - eating ice cream and drinking Sprite every day.

Things that surprised me - there was less smoking than I'd expected in Germany. I mean, of course there was a lot of smoking, just not as much as I'd expected. There were plenty of cigarette ads and cigarette machines, but there was no smoking in restaurants or bars, or in train stations. There was no smoking at the Berlin airport. In Munich, you could smoke in the airport, but only if you first went into a glass cubical designed to isolate smokers.

Things that I expected that still surprised me - Europeans look so much better in clothes than Americans do. For the most part they dress better than we do, at least, those of us in Wisconsin. And they're thinner, so clothes look better. But they can even carry off red pants, and I mean both men and women. More than that, I think it's safe to say that they look outstanding in red pants, which I challenge any American to try to pull off, even the sexy people on the coasts. The younger women sometimes dressed overtly sexy, as if to make it clear that they were available to hop into bed at a moment's notice. But even the the middle aged moms looked sexier than the average American and I don't know why or how. Just the old "je ne sais quoi."

Remains of the Berlin Wall

Another surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise - their culture isn't driven by lawsuit avoidance. Our last afternoon in Berlin we spent in the park, swimming in a public pool. The place was packed, but there were no lifeguards anywhere. Parents just had to look after their kids. There was nobody to yell at the kids when they ran to get a headstart on doing cannonballs into the pool. And it turns out that nobody died. At the fair in Hamburg we saw kids on one ride that spun them around, while rising and dipping unexpectedly so that the kids' feet flew out from under them, sometimes when they were 15 feet in the air. And they weren't restrained in any way, except that they were holding on. If they had fallen, they could have fallen a good distance and really been hurt, so I assume they were very motivated to keep holding on. Paul and I watched for a while, and then agreed that you would never see that ride in America. And if you did, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't let our kid on it. On the playground, the equipment was higher. At the zoo, the animals were closer. It was clearly different, and made us aware of how comfortable we've gotten with our safety precautions, which was interesting.

Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe

If I could do the trip again, I would like to spend more time in Berlin. I had some friends who'd spent a year there, and that sounds about right. We were traveling with a nine-year-old, which means we couldn't spend a lot of time reading placards at historical museums. And the horrors of the Nazi regime, the war, the Holocaust, the Soviet occupation were a little too much for her at this point. We visited the stretch of what remains of the Berlin Wall, and the Holocaust Memorial - a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, both extremely moving. And we visited the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which is devoted to stories of survival, courage, escape and heroism. But even given its idealistic focus, it was a little overwhelming for someone who cares about the comfort and feelings of stuffed animals.

Checkpoint Charlie

When my parents traveled in Germany on their honeymoon in 1957, they said that nobody would even mention the war or Hitler. You could look around at that time and still see a lot of bombed-out areas. For Germans then, the war was still part of their daily lives, but it wasn't spoken of. Now there is a lot of information available and preserved for public consumption, memorials, art, museums. But it is overwhelming, and better taken in in small doses.

We didn't see any remaining bomb damage where we visited. Instead, we saw a lot of the cheap, block Soviet housing in the former East Germany. And we saw a lot of new construction in that area too. In what was West Germany, we saw an interesting mix of beautiful old architecture, in the traditional Germanic style, side-by-side with beautiful new architecture that was very modern and creative. So it was sometimes quite clear which buildings survived the war and which didn't. Sometimes you would see old details on new buildings, as if pieces of an old building had been preserved even thought most of the building was gone.

I keep being surprised that jet lag isn't a bigger problem. I remember suffering from it on previous trips overseas, but not so much on this one. On the way there, we flew overnight, and that worked pretty well. We all slept about four or five hours, which isn't a great night's sleep, but seemed to be enough to get us through the next day. On the way home we flew during the day, so I was expecting the worst. We left Germany in the morning, and arrived in Wisconsin around dinner time. We were up for 21 straight hours, which I thought would be harder to do, but I guess being relaxed and well rested beforehand helps.

Now that we're home, we're unpacking, buying groceries, doing laundry and catching up on bills. But we took a walk this afternoon, something we hadn't been in the habit of doing before Germany. Our town was like a ghost town compared to the dense German cities we'd been visiting. The streets were so empty, so easy to cross. Hardly any cars. Hardly any bikes. Hardly any pedestrians. No trains of any kind. And the place felt so spacious - with sidewalks and streets that are so wide, and all kinds of excess space for setbacks, and shoulders, for yards and grass and parking.

It was good to get away, to visit new places and to see new things. It's good to be home again. And it's good to have the opportunity to see our normal life through new eyes.

Germany Day 11 – Kids' Day Out

A small, historical stop
on the road to Berlin

We reached Kyra's limit on day 10. We'd spent a couple of days of serious site-seeing in Hamburg, walking a lot, and enjoying boring things like the weather, the scenery, the architecture and the history. If she knew the phrase "death march," she would have used it. And we followed it up with a long car ride from Hamburg to Berlin, by way of a couple of small, but historically significant towns. This morning we'd thought to get started with a bus tour of Berlin, to get our bearings, and to stop at a few of the major destinations, such as Checkpoint Charlie and the Reichstag and The Brandenburg Gate, and cross them off our list. And she just couldn't take it anymore.

Kyra - having fun
at the trampoline

When she had turned nine, we'd decided that now was the time to start traveling with her. It felt like she'd reached an age when a window of opportunity was open, a window that is likely to close again when she's 16 or so, and too busy or too cool to spend several weeks at a time with us. She's old enough now to keep herself occupied and amused for decent stretches of time. We've traveled with her before this of course, to see her grandparents, or to visit friends with kids, or to go to Disneyland. But this is different – a trip with long plane and car rides, lots of site-seeing, and long stretches without other kids.

We've made some accommodations for her. For example, we brought along some DVDs of her favorite TV shows, so that in the morning she can sit around in her pajamas for a half hour watching some familiar TV before getting up and going. And we brought along the laptop with some really good video games, so that she can kill some time in the evening, if there's nothing else to do in a hotel room, or if the grownups are sitting around chatting in that boring way we sometimes do. We brought along a big stack of books, and always have one handy, in case we're stuck waiting for a train, or standing in line, or sitting on a boat looking at castles for a little too long. We brought along her favorite stuffed animals, and don't blink when she wants to bring one along to a restaurant, or on the subway. And we've considered her interests when we're making our plans, which are short on museum visits, for example, and long on stops for ice cream.

But we hit her limit today, and needed to reconsider our plans. Fortunately, our hotel is right across the street from the Berlin Zoo, and so we didn't have to think too hard about what to do. We spent the day at the zoo, and it was great.

The zoo itself was beautiful. Walking through it felt like walking through a park with lush vegetation and winding paths. Some of the animals were familiar, such as elephants and zebras, but sometimes even the familiar ones looked different. (I think their zebras may have more stripes.) And sometimes the animal selection was completely different, so that we saw some we'd never seen before, for example wild animals that closely resembled pet kittens. The habitats were smaller than at our local zoo, and the safety precautions different, so that the animals were much closer to us than we were used to, and we could see them much more clearly. We saw an elephant bathing himself in a pond, for example, squirting himself with water from his trunk, and we felt a few drops of water land on us. He was so close that had he wanted to, he could have easily drenched us. And we watched penguins swimming by so close that we could have reached down to touch them.

On the playground

But the best part of the afternoon was at the playground in the zoo. It was the most elaborate playground I'd ever seen, with trampolines, and other play equipment I'd never seen before on a playground. Kyra found some girls her own age, and even though none of them spoke English, and Kyra speaks nothing but, they figured out how to play together, and she played there for about two hours. When she was done playing, she was tired, flushed, and happy. We spent the evening playing in the hotel pool.

The funny thing is that Paul and I had needed a day off from our vacation too, only we don't tend to cry or whine, so if it hadn't been for Kyra, we probably wouldn't have taken one. But all the plans we'd had for today, wonderful things that we may only get to do once in our lives, and which we were gritting our teeth and approaching like an onerous duty, we're now eagerly anticipating doing tomorrow. At least, Paul and I are eagerly anticipating them. Kyra is willing, and she knows that if nothing else, she'll have along a book to read.

Days 8 & 9 in Germany – Sunny Hamburg

Kyra relaxing at a beach cafe

It's the middle of our trip, and we're drooping a bit. I skipped a day of blogging because I went to bed when we got home last night instead of writing about our day, and then I slept in this morning too. We are kind of drifting along in the middle of our trip, enjoying Britta's company, and enjoying the sunshine and beautiful weather, which is a happy change from the weeks of dreary cold rain they'd been having in Hamburg.

Britta took us to all of her favorite haunts, downtown, at the docks, in the Portuguese enclave, around a lake, and gave us a running travelogue as we went, one of the advantages to knowing geographers. We took a boat up the Elbe, to see the container port, which was pretty fascinating. We watched ships being loaded and unloaded by robotic cranes, and enormous ships being tugged out of the dock and sent on their way to the sea.

The Hamburg port

We spent a leisurely hour on the beach, lounging in deck chairs at a beach café – right on the Elbe, across from the docks. We rode the ferris wheel and drank BubbleTea at the carnival near her place. We spent some time in her apartment with our feet up, enjoying the view and cold drinks, and caught a cool water and light show in the park last night.

At the carnival

Today we went to the world's largest model train exhibit, and it was incredible. It's so large that they have divided the exhibit into countries. In Switzerland, there's a miniature Matterhorn, with a moving tram to take skiers up the mountain. In Austria there's an airport with model planes that actually taxi, land and take off. In the Hamburg area, you can see the building that houses the model train exhibit we were in, and when you peak in the tiny windows, you can see an even tinier model train exhibit. It's kind of like a diorama of model train infinity.

After a week in Germany, I am in better shape than I have been in years, despite the fact that we've been eating ice cream every day. (Kyra's idea.) It's been like a week on a medieval stone stairmaster. Everywhere we go we are walking up and down stairs. Yesterday we decided to climb to the top of the tower of Michaeliskirche (St. Michael's church) to look out over Hamburg, and Kyra objected. There was an elevator, and she wanted to take it. But first we had to climb three flights of stairs to get to it.

Kristin and Britta

Tomorrow we head to Berlin, the last stop on our trip. We won't be sorry to leave our hotel, which has the worst coffee I've ever tried – so bad that we actually went without caffeine this morning rather than drink it. It has a laundry room with a washer and dryer, which was nice, because we wanted to clean a few things before we packed. But when we went to check it out, we saw that it had only a washing machine, and that what they called a dryer was actually a wooden rack where you can hang your wet clothes. So we washed a few things out in the sink, and we're hoping for better luck in hotels when we get to Berlin.

Hamburg - The New York of Germany - Day 7

It was sad to say good-bye to Tina, a good friend I only see about once a decade or so. Sad to say good-bye to leisurely breakfasts over bread and cheese and really good coffee, and to talks late into the night. But it was time to press on to Hamburg.

Rest stop on the way to Hamburg

Our fantasies about driving 100 mph on the Autobahn were just that. The trip from Frankfurt to Hamburg is supposed to take about four hours, but it took eight, because the Autobahn was a parking lot most of the way. Germany is about the same size as Wisconsin, but with about 16 times more people, and they were all on the highway to Hamburg.

We're staying at the Suite Novotel, a new, modern hotel that strikes us as a Budgetel for international business travelers. Our room is very sleek, but very compact, with bamboo screens that slide across the middle of the room dividing the desk area from the bed area, and thus qualifying as a suite. The bathroom is in two parts, with a shower, bathtub and sink in one modular unit off the bed area, and a toilet and sink modular unit off the desk area, apparently so your guests to the desk area don't need to see your shaving and bathing things, while still being able to do their business, in all senses of the word.

The Hamburg port
and the Blockbrau Microbrewery

After checking in, we met up with Britta, a friend I met in grad school, when she came to Wisconsin for a Master's in Geography. Now she's a professor at the university in Bonn, but she keeps an apartment in Hamburg, very near the port, in the part of the city that must be the Greenwich Village of Hamburg, filled with color and street life and many, many people.

Finding parking near her place was tricky, and involved some nasty, aggressive people in a sporty car, completely uncharmed by Kyra and her stuffed dog Puffy, trying to bully us out of a parking space. And we were again reminded of New York.

Dinner

We walked down to the water for dinner at a wonderful microbrewery in a charming old building, with great food and beer and a great view of the port. I took Britta's dare, and ordered Labskaus, a traditional dish of fried eggs, hash, a little dead fish and a pickle. Apparently these are all things that are easily preserved on a long sea voyage, and this is a favorite comfort food in the area. It was surprisingly good, or else I was very hungry.

Tunnel under the Elbe

After dinner we took a walk along the water, and then took many, many steps down what looked like an enormous underground tower, to a tunnel that runs under the Elbe to the shipyards out on an island.  The tunnel was long, probably several football fields, and beautiful – fully lined with decorative tile for its entire length. It was built in the early 1900s for the thousands of shipyard workers who needed to cross the river to get to work. The underground tower is actually a car elevator, which still operates, and it also has pedestrian elevators, and the many, many steps for people like us, who can't seem to avoid treating Germany as a giant stairmaster.

Even late at night the tunnel was packed with pedestrians and bicyclists. On we got to other side, we looked back to Hamburg, and watched fireworks over the city. Very nice.

Germany Day 6 - In the Dark

What it was like in
Dialog in the Dark Museum

I've never had an experience like this. We went to a place called Dialog in the Dark, a museum in Frankfurt that helps sighted people understand the world of a blind person. When you go through the museum, you're part of a group. Our group consisted of the three of us, my friend Tina and her 11-year-old son Kurosch, another party of three we'd never met before, and our guide Andy, who is blind. When you go through the museum, it's pitch black. You can't see anything, at all, for two hours.

We were given canes for the visit, the kind that blind people use to help them know what is ahead of them. We were led into the dark, where we were greeted by Andy, the guide whom we never saw, and then we started to get our bearings. There was a theme to the visit, which changes periodically through the year, so that returning visitors can have a different experience. This time it was a game to guess what country we were in. The answer was Canada. 

Sometimes as we were led through the exhibit, we were told to keep a hand against the wall to guide us to the next place, around corners, sometimes bumping into other people. Other times we were told to walk across the center of the room with nothing to guide us except the sound of Andy's voice. 

Nothing was ever unsafe, and we were never made to feel unsafe either. Our guide helped us and we were instructed to help one another, which we did, and which simulated the reality that blind people often have to depend on others for assistance. We were warned of steps up or down, or ramps, or where to stop and when to start, or when the surface we were walking on would change, from concrete, to gravel, to a wooden bridge. Still, unless you've experienced it, you can't imagine the claustrophobic feeling of the darkness closing in, and the urge to be done and to step out of the darkness, which doesn't happen until the end of the visit two hours later.

Kyra was as fascinated by the experience as everyone else, although the rapid pace of her chattering suggests that she was a little freaked out too. Paul and I were much more silent, trying to keep track of our daughter, and to manage her experience, as we were navigating our own. Silence wasn't helpful, though, as the guide tried to keep track of the eight of us visitors as we passed from room to room, and as the other people around us tried to keep themselves oriented by the sounds of voices. And we wanted to know where she was, and that she was with at least one of us, even though we couldn't see her or each other.

Tina and Kurosch

At some point Kyra dropped her stick, something easy to do but hard to deal with. I dropped my own later, without even noticing at first, in the café at the end, while buying a Coke. It took the whole group to help us find them. We were trying to help Kyra find hers, and to slow down the guide who had gotten a little ahead, but couldn't hear us well over the loud city sounds. We didn't know Kyra had gotten down on the ground to look, until she bumped her head and started to cry. So we had to find her, and find her booboo, and find her stick, and keep up with the group, and not fall off the curb into the street. No serious harm. It was all over in about two minutes. But it was a little overwhelming in the dark.

We were given many different experiences – reaching out to touch things to see if we could identify them, e.g. water sliding down a wall, a beaver pelt, a dugout canoe, the exterior of a brick house with windows. Other times we walked into rooms with unexpected sounds. Once it was a forest with animal sounds - some scary like howling wolves, or a growling bear, others safe like chirping birds, and others that we didn't recognize, and weren't sure about. Once it was a noisy, congested city street corner with honking and revving engines and people talking or shouting, and a persistent clicking sound that turned out to be at a crosswalk. It's great that the clicking sounds are there to help a blind person with a traffic signal, but it would be helpful to know that's what the clicking was for, and what the different sounds represented – does the fast click mean a red light or a green one?

We boarded a rocking boat, and felt as if we were sailing. We gathered in a room where a table full of percussion instruments was stored, various shakers, and drums with drumsticks, which were distributed to us all, with everybody getting and playing one, creating a mild chaos even as the instruments were still being disbursed, then re-collected and stored. We sat in a room where the floor amplified sound vibrations. We sat, we stood, we leaned, we walked, we slid. And we ended in a café where we listened to the list of the many menu options, waited at the counter, in the dark, to be served, paid with unfamiliar coins we couldn't see, waited for our change, and then sat at a table with the others to enjoy the snacks and drinks that we needed to keep track of.

We ended with a dialog with our guide and each other, to talk about our experience in the museum and Andy's experience with blindness. He answered questions openly, about becoming blind at age 10, and about how he pictures the new things he encounters in the world, such as smart phones, how he uses sight-oriented tools like his computer, and how he visualizes space. And then we left our guide, and gathered in a dim room to let our eyes adjust, and to really see the companions we'd just been with for two hours, who all looked much shorter than they had seemed in the dark.

And then we spent the rest of the day shopping, and hanging out in Frankfurt, on a bright, sunny day. 

Germany Day 5 - Tripping Over Castles

This was another castle-themed day, although it was more about quantity than quality. We'd seen a comedy routine by British comedian Eddie Izzard a few weeks ago. He was joking around about how castles are so common in Europe that people are practically tripping over them. Ha ha. No really.

The view from Tina's kitchen

So, we're staying with my friend Tina in the town of Biebertal, kind of best described as the middle of nowhere in Germany – about 45 minutes outside of Frankfurt, where she and her husband both work. I met Tina in high school, when she stayed with my family as an exchange student. This morning we woke up and looked out her kitchen window at a view of two peaks with castles on top, both about a thousand years old. That's her everyday view – just the old neighborhood castles.

Later we drove to the small town on Rudesheim on the Rhine, boarded a boat, and took a leisurely trip down the river. Well, us and about eight billion school kids on a field trip, all looking as if they were on a forced march. But for us, it was a peak experience – blue skies, soft breeze, perfect temperatures, and castle after castle after castle. Around every bend in the river is another massive, magnificent old castle.

A castle on the Rhine

I don't know history well, so I can only imagine the medieval kings, sitting on their turrets, thumbing their noses at the neighboring king, who can't be more than five miles away. Really – do you need THAT many castles?

In any case, we had been warned that Kyra might be bored by the long boat ride. And, in fact, after the first half dozen castles, there is a sameness to them. It was kind of like medieval tract housing for castles. We didn't care, particularly, about their names, or their exact significance in history. But what picturesque tract housing! We gave Kyra the camera, and she had a blast. She must have taken hundreds of pictures, probably most of the ones on the blog today. And when she did, finally, get bored, there was a slide on the boat where children could play.

Another castle

We took the boat one way, ending at the rocks where the Lorelie lures unwary sailors. (We evaded the danger. Maybe we had a female boat  captain.) We disembarked at a little village, got some ice cream, then found a train to take back to where we'd left our car. (Boy do we love how easy it is to use the German transportation system, where you don't even need to plan ahead - just get off the boat at some small town, and know that you can just take the next train through.)

Kyra and Puffy on the Rhine

We ended the day with dinner in a castle. Turns out they've put a restaurant into one of the castles you can see from Tina's kitchen. I guess they needed to do something with all that vacant real estate. Met a guy in the restaurant from Wisconsin – because why wouldn't a restaurant in a medieval castle at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in Germany be filled with people from Wisconsin?

Another great day.

Germany Day 4 - Driving to Frankfurt

Hey - my street!

I've taken a train through Germany before, but I'm not really a train person. I think I learned more about the country by driving through it and seeing it the way I'm used to seeing the world. And what we're finding is that Germany looks a lot like Wisconsin, except when it doesn't. It's kind of like if you see your sister wearing somebody else's clothes.

Lit sign powered by
a solar panel and a windmill

We spent most of the day driving from Munich to Frankfurt, which took a lot longer than predicted because of all the road construction. (Yep – that seems familiar.) The Autobahn was mostly as described – three lanes of beautiful road, with the trucks and slower cars on the right, normal people like us, doing 80, in the middle, and well engineered cars moving like bullets on the left. Occasionally a truck would pull into the middle to pass a slower truck, so then normal people like us would pull into the left to go around the truck, and then a bullet would suddenly appear in the rear view mirror, scaring the crap out of us, until we pulled back into the middle. Sometimes the bullet car would veer in front of us to let an even faster bullet shoot by.

So even though it is all very smooth driving, and orderly, with everyone following traffic laws perfectly (OK – that's not all that familiar) it was still a little more stressful than usual when combined with the unfamiliar road and unfamiliar car. But not enough to make us regret the drive.

The landscape was mostly hilly like Wisconsin, and mostly rural or wooded. At some point, though, we realized that even when we weren't driving through woods, it often felt like we were, because the roads were lined pretty heavily with trees and vegetation. We assume this  was planted intentionally, whether for aesthetic reasons, or for sound-blocking, we aren't sure. For those most part, the highway doesn't pass through cities, just near them, and the view was usually blocked by the trees, with infrequent exits, giving the isolated feel of driving through northern Wisconsin. Seems like zoning controls are stronger in Germany than we're used to, given the lack of commercial development near the exits, which tends to spring up pretty rapidly in the U.S.

There are frequent little turn-offs for people to park, not exactly equivalent to our rest areas, because most don't have restrooms or vending machines, just places to get off the Autobahn and park, before pulling back on again. And they were all packed, mostly with semis. Paul remembered reading that, while the passenger train system in Germany is much more developed and used than in the U.S., the opposite is true with freight trains, and so most freight is transported by trucks in Germany, and there are a LOT of trucks.

We think this means
you should try to be friends
with people not like you

There are also periodic turn offs that are kind of like the oases on the Illinois toll-way, with a gas station, restrooms (put your 70 cents in the slot and push through the turnstyle to get in) and restaurants or vending. We bought dinner from the counter at a gas station, and while it was much more sophisticated than anything I've bought at a gas station in America, the best I can say about it is that it was adequate and filling.

Low-flying
exclamation points?

In the rural areas, some of the fields looked different than we were used to, and I'd always thought a hilly green field was a hilly green field. But sometimes the plowing patterns were different, and sometimes the plants were different. I'm no farmer, so I was surprised to notice that. We saw some fields with row after row of high, wire fences, with long vines attached – maybe some kind of bean? And other fields with plants on low fences – maybe grapes? We didn't see many wind turbines, which have become so common in Wisconsin, but sometimes we would see enormous fields of solar panels.

When we first started our drive, we were a little overwhelmed by all the road signs we couldn't understand. Until you start to figure out which shapes are for what, it's kind of confusing. Stop signs are the same, which is comforting. And I don't just mean the shape. The ones we've seen actually say "Stop" on them, instead of the German equivalent.

Yield to
aliens?

Yield signs are the same too. But then there are lots of signs that look like upside-down yield signs, with symbols in them. We saw one with an airplane, and wondered if a person driving a car actually has to be prompted to yield to an airplane. Eventually we figured out they warned of low-flying planes when we passed near small airports. Another replaced the airplane with an exclamation point, which made us wonder if we had to beware of low-flying exclamations. Eventually we figured out that it was the German way of saying, "Hey – Pay attention to this," which was usually something in German.

So - what do you think
the speed limit is here?

Some we figured out pretty quickly, although not immediately, like highway number signs and speed limits, things it would have been nice to know right away. Others we never did figure out, and so we simply had to disregard them, and hope they weren't important. Of course, you have to figure that someone thought it was important enough to make the big metal sign, and to send a crew out to post it next to the road for everyone to see. Oh well.

The Germany Trip Continues - with Castles!

Castle Neuschwanstein

Today was the day for Castle Neuschwanstein. When I programmed the GPS, it gave me the choice of Fast Route, Short Route, or Optimal Route. How could I resist? I chose Optimal Route. Turns out that's synonymous with Slower than Slow Route, although people who look at the bright side might call it the Scenic Route. It took at least 30 minutes longer than it should have, but the drive took us through lots of quaint villages, and narrow windy roads, and was a pretty good accident.

The Optimal Route

Except, that we were in a hurry. The seasoned traveler, who knows enough to read the Rick Steves chapter on Castle Neuschwanstein earlier than the night before, would have known to go online to make advance reservations before the deadline. We began reading the chapter shortly after the deadline, and learned that we could expect that after a long drive, we would stand in a long line, and still run the risk of not getting in. And it was too late to do anything about it.

We got there, finally, after two hours, and it was just as he described. We stood in line for an hour and were fortunate to get tickets to enter the castle at 4:25pm. One group of about 20 people is allowed in every five minutes. The last group is allowed to enter the castle at 5:00pm, which means that many, many people, still standing in the one-hour line behind us, would not get in. We had arrived at 11:30am.

Kyra and Paul on the
Mountain Hike

It was a gorgeous summer day, and we had plenty of time. So we grabbed some lunch – finally something German – bratwurst. (Kyra had pizza.) Then we climbed the winding, wooded trail near a beautiful alpine lake, up a mountain to the other castle Hohenschwangau. (Because one isn't enough for some kings.)  It's less well known, being just "the summer castle," but it was also beautiful.  Then we shopped for postcards and tacky souvenirs (a castle-shaped cookie cutter, a castle snow globe, and a castle refrigerator magnet) before it was time to wander down that mountain and up the next one to Neuschwanstein.

Castle Hohenschwangau

This is the first family trip we've taken like this, where we're not just visiting friends and family, but actually doggedly site-seeing, day after day. My family did a lot of traveling when I was a kid, so this kind of thing is familiar to me, but this is the first time that I was on the parent side of the whining. I've been looking forward to seeing this castle since we started planning this trip, and I've been wanting to see it for most of my life, since hearing my parents talk about seeing it on their honeymoon. But from the point-of-view of a 9-year-old, it's a two-hour car ride, followed by a one-hour wait in line, followed by a long, steep, boring walk, followed by a lot of standing around, followed by the pay-off of a guided tour through an old building, followed by another boring walk, another wait, and another guided tour. And then another boring walk back to the car, and a long drive home.

Our Ride up the Mountain

In retrospect, the fact that the whining episode was fairly short and isolated is actually kind of surprising.  Most of the time Kyra is proving to be a very capable traveler. And fortunately for her, the insides of the castles were pretty amazing, extravagant beyond anything we've ever seen. (In fact, it was largely because of the obscene extravagance and expense of building the Castle Neuschwanstein that King Ludwig II was declared insane, and deposed.) Plus we got to take a horse and carriage ride up one of the mountains, there was some pizza, some ice cream, and seconds on soda. Plus, a castle isn't like any other old, dusty building, simply because it's a castle. We ate some German food for dinner – pork and dumplings and sauerkraut. (Kyra had pizza.) And we all called it a great day.

Germany Day 2 - Quirky Combinations

Traffic signals for bikes too

Another great day, and one for odd combinations - pastries at McDonald's, surfers in an English garden, teacups at a beer hall and drag queens at the glockenspiel. It started with us wanting an early start, and sleeping until noon We slept right through breakfast this morning, in part because I couldn't figure out where I'd packed our alarm, and our hotel doesn't supply a clock, and in part because of jet lag. So much for my optimistic report yesterday that we'd mostly avoided that. We had lunch at a sunny café near our hotel, one where we had to climb steps to get from little room to little room, like an airy, glass-enclosed treehouse, until we got to our table perched near the very top.

Paul's last German class was about 35 years ago, so he understands only about one word in five these days, which is not enough to decipher a menu. The one word we recognized easily was "quiche," which is apparently the same in every language. It's not that we're not adventurous, more that we were starved, and that once we recognized the word, quiche sounded imperative to all of us. So our second German meal was French. It was served with a yummy yogurt herb sauce, and some sprouts in a balsamic reduction, and huge cups of strong coffee and rich cream. Mmm. Excuse me while I have a moment.

The McDonald's pastry counter

We'd planned to do a one-hour bus tour of Munich's highlights this morning, and instead did it this afternoon, which worked out well, given that it rained all day. In fact the rain is drumming against our hotel window now. Any other year we might have been disappointed, but it's been months since we've had rain at home, and we're enjoying the novelty. We saw some historically important and architecturally beautiful buildings, from the top of a double decker bus, and drove through the lovely English garden, where people were surfing on the river. Seriously.

Hungry again after the bus tour, we stopped at a McDonald's, because how can you not go to McDonald's, when you're an American in another country? Especially an American with a kid? And it was worth it, because this McDonald's had a gourmet coffee bar with an amazing assortment of desserts. We got ourselves some triple chocolate mousse pastries to tide us over until dinner.

The McDonald's also provided Kyra's first experience of having to pay to use the restroom. So naturally I had to teach her a rhyme that I must have learned as a kid, I'm guessing from my dad:

Here I sit, all brokenhearted;
Came to sh*t, but only farted.

Kyra found it hilarious (and repeated it often) but it also makes her a little sad.

The infamous Hofbrauhaus

Even though we weren't ready for dinner or beer, we had to see the Hofbrauhaus, the famous Munich beer hall where my mother got drunk, back when she was 19 and on her honeymoon. We went to the gift shop and bought her an official commemorative Hofbrauhaus teacup, which is probably more to her taste these days than the liter-sized steins (the only size they have here, which goes some way toward explaining my mother's only known bender on record.) To be fair, she claims (without any effort at being convincing) that she wasn't drunk -  she just felt like singing Jingle Bells that night, even though it was only May, and it wasn't her fault that nobody else felt like singing.

Glockenspiel in Munich's Town Hall

Our last stop was Marienplatz, home of the famous glockenspiel with dancing and jousting figurines, which only plays three times per day, and which was scheduled to play at 5:00pm. We arrived early, and enjoyed the end of a drag review going on in the bandstand on the plaza, the last of the gay pride street fair going on this weekend. The review stopped promptly at the stroke of five in deference to the glockenspiel, and started up again at 5:10. The audience was an interesting mixture of drag review and glockenspiel fans, and Kyra fit right in with her rainbow-striped umbrella.

Korean food in Bavaria

We made our meandering way back to the hotel after that. It's a nice enough hotel, but the pictures on the hotel's website show palatial rooms, and we're not really sure where they got them. Our room, a two-room suite, is small enough that the door to our bedroom only opens halfway before bumping the bed. You need to close it again to get to the door to the bathroom, and that entrance is also partly blocked by the bed.

But it has a Korean restaurant, a good one (with staff that can speak Korean, German and English, which is pretty impressive) and so our third German meal was Korean – Kyra's first experience with Korean food. We kept her away from the kimchee, because we're not idiots. But she tried everything else and loved it all, even the stuff you wouldn't expect. And I quote: "Can I have some more tofu, please?"

Now we're planning tomorrow, an earlier start, and a day trip to see Mad King Ludwig's famous castles.

Day 1 in Germany - Discovering Munich

Day 1 – Discovering Munich

Theatinerkirche in Munich

This morning we woke up near the United Kingdom, ate breakfast over France, and landed in Munich around noon. We flew on a Lufthanza airbus, a pretty new, pretty nice plane that had a lower level with bathrooms, which kind of impressed us – none of us had ever gone downstairs on a plane before.  It was an easy flight, and we slept for a lot of it, sure, squashed into an uncomfortable sitting position with a child draped half over us, but still we slept, so jet leg wasn't too terrible.  We made our connection in Chicago easily, all except Paul's suitcase, which for some reason hadn't been checked through to Munich, and was still sitting in Chicago, waiting for him to pick it up.  We hope it will get here tomorrow.

View from St. Peters

The fun thing (probably frustrating is a more accurate term, but it's vacation, so it's kind of fun too) about going to a different country is that everything is different, and it takes a while to figure it out.  For example, until we missed our exit ramp from the highway between the airport and our hotel, we didn't realize that our rental car comes equipped with a GPS that doesn't tell you when to exit.  And until we held up traffic on a busy street trying to parallel park the rental car, we didn't realize that we couldn't figure out how to put the car in reverse.  Turns out you have to lift a thing on the gear shift and squeeze while you shift.  The manual was no help, not only because it was all in German, but also because it was about a different kind of car.

Window shop[ing for ladybug-shaped chocolates

We finally got to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon, and were pretty hungry, so we set out to have a look around.  Of course first we had to find a place to get some money, and it turns out ATMs aren't as thick on the ground in Germany as they are back home.  We didn't get a receipt, so we don't honestly know how much that cash cost us.  Then we had to find a restaurant that was open, because in Germany, lots of restaurants aren't open in the middle of the afternoon.

Paul and Kyra in Marienplatz

But it's good to have an excuse to get out on the streets of Munich to explore, and looking for an ATM and a bite to eat did the trick.  What we found was Mexican food – our first German dining experience.  And it was great.  We ordered our bottled water without gas.  We could have gotten it with, but it hardly seemed necessary with Mexican food.

We weren't sure how much Kyra was up for, given her first go at jet lag, and we were a little nervous about going to the tourist center, given that our hotel clerk warned us about a demonstration going on there that had closed the public transit stops in that area for the whole weekend.  I'd pictured mobs of angry people, hostile political diatribe, maybe violence.  After all, we're from Wisconsin.  Turns out there was some important meaning lost in translation, and that the demonstration turned out to be a street fair with an LGBT theme.  We got a tiramisu-flavored ice cream cone (excellent) and a free balloon.

When you're in another country, even something as trivial as buying a subway ticket can be a major headache (or adventure, whatever) when you have to do it at a machine, and the marketing guru who came up with the snappy names for types of tickets didn't take into account that someone who had been in the city for approximately 90 minutes wouldn't have any idea what any of it meant.  We probably wasted about 20 euros and about 20 minutes, only to discover that nobody ever collected or checked the tickets.

Kristin and Kyra at the top of St. Peter's

We discovered some of the usual tourist stuff, and it was great.  We went into a church that was 400 years old, with an unbelievably ornate baroque interior, while mass was in progress, which added a hushed reverence to the tourist experience.  We climbed the tower of St. Peter's, another old, old church, built in 1060, that had 303 steps, which is more than Holy Hill, and more than the old courthouse tower in West Bend.  And the view of the city, in all directions, was exceptional.  And then we climbed back down again.  And then jet lag caught up with us.

Kyra on the Playground

On the way back to the hotel, at 7:30pm, which was only 12:30pm West Bend time (and that's how you can really tell when someone still has jet lag, when they still care more about the time back home than the time where they are) we came upon a small park, with a playground that wouldn't meet any American safety standards, but was fun, and a basketball court with a sand floor (nobody was playing) and several ping pong tables, and some cool concrete Hippo sculptures for kids to climb on, and a couple of German girls who looked Korean.  Kyra's stated goal for the first day of the trip was to go to a playground and play with a German kid, so we stopped and she did.  And now we're back at the hotel, ready for another day.