As I explained in Part 1, in June of 2007 I took an impromptu trip to Germany, to save AC from boredom in a small town called Saarloius. Last time, I was just getting ready to fly from Toronto to Frankfurt in Germany. Despite the last-minute Air Transat booking, I managed to score an aisle seat, so I wasn’t quite as cramped as the poor suckers in the middle (Air Transat really packs ‘em in). After a several hour delay, we managed to take off, and eventually land without incident. The next step was to get on a train…

AC’s train trip was more exciting than mine, because when she flew to Germany she had no idea how to get from the airport to Saarloius. Actually she didn’t even know she was going to Saarloius. She barely had time to pack before we taxi’d out to the airport and put her on a plane. When she landed, she texted me: “now what?“. Over text message, I gave her directions and told her what to buy. Every half hour or so I would get a text from her that said something like: “In Mannheim - what next?“. And, half-way through the trip I found out that her destination had suddenly changed, so I had to re-direct her. Planning her route by text message, half-way around the world, was pretty exciting - it felt like something out of an action movie. Of course, when she finally got to Saarloius, she just went to her hotel, instead of breaking into an embassy or something like that…

Since I had my itinerary all planned out, my train ride was far more prosaic. There were a few times where I would get out at my stop and discover that I was standing on what seemed like an abandoned platform in the middle of nowhere. But, inevitably another train would show up, right on time.

So, after something like 14 hours of travel, I finally made it to Saarloius, and met my Skype nemesis - the angry old man who ran the hotel front desk at night and spoke not a word of English. At first he seemed a bit icy - I’m not sure he realized I was AC’s husband, and not just some tourist she had found at a bar, and was clearly irritated when I hung out in the lobby trying to use the wireless internet. But, eventually we bonded when I worked up the nerve to ask him how to make outgoing calls. After some initial confusion, he grabbed my hand and pointed it at the phone, shouting “NULL” (which he pronounced “knool“). I realized that he meant I needed to dial 0 before making outgoing calls, but he wasn’t sure I got it, so he shouted “knool” at me a few more times, with increasing volume, until he decided he had said it loud enough that I understood. After this incident, he was as friendly as any other angry old German man (at least, I think he was friendly….).

Next up: sausage.

I have been meaning to write about this for the last 6 months. I finally got around to it.

As you may or may not know, in June I took a trip to Europe. An unplanned trip to Europe. For reasons I will avoid discussing over the internets, AC was spending the month in the south-west corner of Germany, in a town called Saarloius. A month in Germany might sound exciting, but Saarloius is very small and very German, and AC doesn’t speak German, so she was kind of bored. Naturally, I had to come to her rescue. In an airplane.

Does this sound like madness to you? Well, it kind of was. But we had been talking about taking a real vacation for a while, and here was our chance. Plus, I got to walk into a travel agent and answer the question “When would you like to leave for Germany?” with “How about tonight?“. Downside: flying “tonight” is expensive. Actually I didn’t get to fly “tonight”. I got to fly “in 3 days, when the next Air Transat plane leaves for Frankfurt”, because Air Transat charges half of what Air Canada does when you want to book a trip to Europe only 3 days in advance. In retrospect, I should have paid for the Air Canada flight…

I spent the next 3 days alternating between packing, organizing things for when I was gone, and blind panic. Oh, and trying to call AC’s hotel with skype. This was harder than it sounds, because I was calling at roughly 3AM in German time, and the overnight attendant at the hotel front desk was a grumpy old man who didn’t speak a word of English. Initially I tried to formulate sentences with Google Translator, like “room 9 please”, but I’m sure I butchered the pronunciation and the grumpy old man was completely disinterested in trying to decipher my broken dialog. Our conversations would go like this:

<rms> Hello! raum 9 bitte!
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (angry-sounding german words here)
<rms> …..um…..raum 9 bitte? (pronounced slightly differently, with less certainty…)
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (more angry words)
<rms> ….ok….I’ll call back…

I quickly abandoned my valiant attempts at cultural exchange and had a German friend call, who learned that (1) the grumpy old man was on his cell phone and I should just call back later, and (2) he would prefer if I just called the room directly and left him alone. I could never get that to work, so we eventually established a system where I would call and shout “Carpendale, bitte” (shouting because the skype connection was abysmal), and he would shout back “Carpendale, ja, ja” and connect me.

I started to realize that communication might be an issue on this trip. See, I’ve been to Europe a few times, but only to England and Ireland, where I speak the native tongue (well, sort of). But I quickly discovered that in Germany, most people only speak German! Troubling. So, I spent a while on iTunes, filling AC’s iPod up with “how to speak German” podcasts. I had a brilliant plan to listen to these on the plane, and do the accompanying worksheets. Seriously. I think I managed to listen to the first 2 or 3 before I realized that, like with the French, there was no way I was going to teach myself anything beyond “please” and “thanks”. The backs of the worksheets were good for doodling on, though.

Anyway, now that I had a plane ticket, German podcasts, and a growing realization of the madness of the whole plan, I was ready to go to Germany…