Strangers in a Marginally Strange Land

Sometimes long distance travel can feel a lot like an extreme yoga class. You sweat and suffer and strain through the most uncomfortable positions, but afterwards you lie down, take a few deep breaths, and whisper to yourself, “Holy crow, I didn’t know my body could even do that!” And then you go around feeling like a bodhisattva for the rest of the day.

It can been a challenge to put yourself at ease when your surroundings are all so unfamiliar and everything is done just a little bit differently. The natural tendency is to regard the strange and new with suspicion. On the first or second day we were here, I pointed out to my daughter, Millie, that the toilet paper was hanging backwards. “It’s not backwards,” she said, “it’s just different. It still works fine.” I cannot imagine a more sensible and urbane reaction to this minor deviation. That’s when I knew she was going to be an outstanding and world-class traveler. Of course, she’s still a six-year old, so things don’t always flow so seamlessly, but her ability to adapt continues to be exemplary.

Having two children along for the ride is just one of the things that makes this trip so entirely dissimilar to the ten-month backpack tour I took through Europe 15 years ago. Already four weeks on the continent and I have yet to step inside a church—though I’ve walked and driven past dozens—or a botanical garden. On this trip we are more interested in discovering the best playground (more on that later) and the best loaf of bread. I’ve visited only one train station this month, and that was just to keep little Max entertained by viewing mass transit for a couple of hours, which worked out perfectly by the way.

This time around, all the travel is done in a car, which means learning a whole new system—only just slightly different—of roadways, traffic lights and speed limit signs. The roads are certainly narrower here, something I was admittedly pretty nervous about when I stepped into our first rental car, a VW cargo van we picked up at the Frankfurt airport. Guiding this cruise ship out of the parking garage and negotiating our way into city traffic at rush hour was a bit of a challenge, but once we hit the highway (die Autobahn) it was just a matter of figuring out what the speed limit was, if any, and not taking any wrong exits.

By the time we traded this bus in for a little compact stick-shift Opel a week later, I was careening through cities and alleys with absolute confidence. That’s about the time I got my first speeding ticket. Nobody likes to get caught speeding, and I was pretty irked, but it’s an entirely different experience here, in ways I’ve actually come to appreciate.

Instead of getting pulled over by a highway patrolman on an ego trip, Germany issues speeding tickets with hidden cameras and speed radars. As you zip into a small town, where the speed limit suddenly drops from 100 km/h to 50 km/h, you might notice the flash (Blitz) of a little camera, which simultaneously measures your speed and photographs your license plate. A week or so later you get a speeding ticket in the mail, with a bill, the price based on how many km/h above the limit you were doing. The humiliation of sucking up to a cop and trying to talk your way out of a ticket—something I’ve never been any good at, my boobs are much too small—is completely eliminated, as are injustices like racial profiling and other forms of harassment and intimidation.

If it’s intimidation you’re looking for, you need only go shopping. Customer service is provided in Germany according to a whole different system of standards than what we’re used to in smiley San Luis Obispo. But, to be honest, the sales clerks do seem a lot friendlier here than they were 15 years ago. In any case, grocery shopping is something I’m doing a lot more of on this trip; par for the course when you’re traveling as a family of four. And it’s an excellent opportunity to observe the natives in their natural habitat, prime people watching.

The grocery stores we’ve been frequenting here are somewhat enormous, nearly as intimating, in fact, as your average Walmart. But like the roads, the aisles of the grocery store always seem just a pinch too narrow for the shopping carts. It’s a bit crowded, but then it’s easier to spy on what other people are purchasing—often an absurd quantity of beer and chocolate—and to overhear the older couples as they bicker about what to buy, or about anything for that matter.

There definitely are a lot of older people in Germany. It’s a statistical fact, and it’s a serious issue of concern in regard to their social welfare system. And it’s obvious that more people here dye their hair than don’t. Any color seems acceptable, with black remaining very popular and relatively inconspicuous, but pink, purple and blue being quite fashionable as well, whether it’s the elderly brightening their thinning grey or kids coloring their unconventionally cropped locks. I even spotted an ironic young girl who had dyed her thick, dark hair with streaks of light grey. But you really know you’re in an aging society when—I kid you not—you hear the “Golden Girls” theme song playing over the loudspeakers in the grocery store.

Some people find it overly unsettling and unnerving, all the unfamiliar places and things that come with international travel. And sometimes it can be more than a little disorienting, but for me it’s about making the unfamiliar familiar. The process of encountering foreign things and learning new ways keeps the mind loose and limber, like yoga for the brain. And now that we’ve had a month to get acclimated, if not fully assimilated, we can proceed with our adventure without committing too many awful faux pas when we arrive on the cobblestone doorsteps of our first work-exchange hosts. We’ll know how to open and close their airtight windows, how to flush their water-saving toilets, and how to sort the heterogenous garbage; and we will do our very best to avoid any serious breach of etiquette concerning their elaborate recycling procedures which rival eastern mysticism in their mysterious complexity.

Until next time, dear reader, “Thank you for being a friend!”

Read on: For more enchanting stories about our adventures in Germany, check out the following articles:

• The best of Thuringia
• Urban Germany: Well-oiled engine of the EU
• Turning leaves in the Fatherland
• Philosophizing in Weimar