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.
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| 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.
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| 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."
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
