Goose the Blog 2.0

I just got back yesterday from a short trip to Germany. I was there for four nights, although I only had one morning at a business meeting. So I got to travel around and see a little bit of the southwest part of Germany (the Black Forest, Rhine and Neckar River Valleys). Travelling in new places stresses me out and I don't enjoy myself very much - I am too concerned with not knowing what to do or how to do something. I'm afraid of looking stupid, and not speaking the language makes it even harder for me (almost everyone spoke English, anyway, which just makes me feel worse because I have been too lazy to learn their language). I keep hoping that as I travel abroad more, I will get used to feeling out-of-place. It hasn't happened yet, though.

Still, I feel like I had an OK time, despite all my usually internalized stress. I saw Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Tübingen and Strasbourg. I even stopped briefly in the small town of Eschelbronn - Christian B. emigrated from there to a farm near Lititz, Pennsylvania around 1722, and started the B. clan in the United States. He was fleeing the religious wars that kept occurring in his home land, and came to a Colony with guaranteed religious freedom. Not coincidently, I think, the area he settled in looks surprisingly like the rolling hills and fields of the land he left. Tübingen is very picturesque and old (more authentic than Heidelberg or Strasbourg, according to my German coworker Karsten), and yet it is not a touristy town. It is a univeristy town.

I rented a cool car - a BMW 520 with GPS navigation. It was less than €20/day more than the standard full-size car (the minimum my company requires we rent, for safety reasons). The navigator was a great help in getting around, and left me free to concentrate on driving on the autobahn. I never went faster than 170 kph (~105 mph) but in the car I was driving, this felt like 45 mph in my Jeep. German drivers are very courteous (especially the slow ones) and seem to have a sort of compact about not getting in another's way too much. Also, trucks almost always stay in the right lane and are typically limited to 80 kph, which means you pass them at double their speed! Blink, and they are just a tiny toy in the rearview mirror. About the navigator: it spoke with a calm female voice, but the increasingly rapid suggestions to "Please make a u-turn" or "Take the next right" once you had reached (and ignored) your destination seemed to edge into restrained panic. Maybe it was just me.

Some interesting things about Germany:

• The toilets are bad. They look a lot like American toilets, but have some strange "features" like a horizontal shelf for holding your poop out of the water and splashing urine. I can't figure out what the design criteria were. The German sinks I found sensibly used a single spigot, unlike many of the sinks in England which had separate hot and cold spigots.


• Terminal 1 at Frankfurt Airport seems to have been designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. The combination of floor to ceiling white tiles and harsh lighting makes it seem as if they might just hose the whole thing down with antiseptic spray at night. And there was a very strange video played on the Luftansa plane just before landing, the purpose of which was to familiarize the passengers with disembarking, customs, and baggage procedures, and how to get to your next flight. It was shot in jerky, sped up, over-exposed footage with directional signs lit up in too bright letters. It actually hurt my eyes to watch, and I'm part of the MTV generation.


• Thanks to the EU, driving from Germany to France is like going from Pennslyvania to New Jersey - "France, 1000m." With Poland entering the EU on May 1, there is a lot of concern that the border with Eastern Europe will be too porous to illegal immigrants and smugglers, which means they will have access to the rest of the EU as well.


• The Germans kept saying "Cheers!" to me when I left their shop or restaurant. "I bet they picked up that habit from the English," I thought. Wrong - they were saying "Tschüß!" which sounds a lot like "cheers" but means "bye." Anyway, saying "Cheers" back doesn't make me look stupid (though technically it still makes me stupid).