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Part I: In Which Collin Returns to Germersheim

My train comes around the bend from Speyer and the first thing I see is the Studentenwohnheim building and that’s very, very weird.

The plan is to meet up with my friend Johanna, go to the American English conversation table, then leave again later that night. The plan stops at 10PM.

I spend the next two or three hours and a beer weighing my options. Plan #1 involves Ireland and Scotland; the bulk of Plan #2 is Italy. I’m having a tough time deciding between the two, primarily because I don’t want to do either one; I’m having trouble finding lodging in Italy, and the northern UK involves the extra expense of air travel. Fortunately, the ever-helpful Internet makes my decision for me.

A few weeks ago, I had a phone interview with IBM Ireland, and while researching travel options, I get an email from the same people: they’re interested in a second phone interview. Problem is, I won’t really have a phone number for the duration of the current Euro-adventure. I suggest we do the interview in person, they say OK; five minutes later, I have a €49 fare from Cologne to Edinburgh and a hostel in the same.

The plan is this: spend some time in Edinburgh, meeting up with Internet People while there, then make my way down to Dublin via Glasgow and possibly Belfast. This will put the interview about nine or ten days out, with time left over to go see some more of Ireland before heading back to central Europe.

I meet up with Johanna at 3PM, she makes me speak German for a few hours, then I get my revenge at the conversation table. Charlotte is surprised to see me (as planned). All is going according to plan.

Part II: In Which Collin Makes His Way to Scotland

The English conversation table finally breaks up around 11:20 PM and I head off to the train station, escorted by the lovely Johanna. The ticket machines are most willing to sell me a late-night trip northward, and we say our goodbyes next to the RegionalExpress 3862 to Karlsruhe. Change the locomotive to a propeller plane, swap small-town Germany for northern Morocco and we could make a run at a convincing Boghart and Bergman.

I guess the plot would have to be different, too.

I sleep all the way to Karlsruhe; upon my arrival, I am hungry. Given that the Europeans generally don’t go in for American-style 24-hour everything, I’m worried about being able to find food before my train leaves.

I have never been so relieved to see a McDonalds in my life. I elect to sample some of the more un-American items on their menu: the Big Tasty McChicken (which is indeed “big” and may well contain “chicken”, but “tasty” might be a bit much) and Farm Kartoffeln (Kartoffeln == potatoes) with sour cream dipping sauce.

At 1AM, there are no trains in the Karlsruhe Hauptbahnhof. Occasionally a freight line will blow through, and an ICE just crept by (yes, crept; we’re talking single-digit speeds), but otherwise the place is ganz leer, as they say. It’s very strange, seeing the Karlsruhe station completely trainless, given how busy it is during the day time. They’ve got a lot of the lights turned off or turned down, giving the place a distinct “imps are going to jump out and throw fireballs at you” feel.

There’s a surprising number of people here, most of them apparently waiting for the same train I am (the 1:34 ICE to Kiel).

It occurs to me at some point that this will be my second time in Cologne today.

GermanWings limits you to 13 kg of carry-on luggage, meaning that I’ve had to check my backpack for the first time. I tried convincing the woman to let me take 2 sub-13 kilo carry-ons, but she didn’t bite. This is the first time in a while I haven’t had my pack with me on the flight. I am nervous.

I am the only passenger in this entire wing of the Cologne/Bonn airport; I guess that’s what I get for arriving five hours early for my flight. I’m here so early, my plane isn’t even up on the big “what flights are leaving when” boards yet.

Killing time, catching up on blog entries (like this one). I’m trying to come up with a list of all the airports I’ve ever been in; here’s the first stab:

• America
• Nashville, TN
• Atlanta, GA
• Dulles, Washington DC
• Newark, NJ
• JFK, NYC
• O’Hare, Chicago
• Colorado Springs, CO
• Minneapolis/St Paul, MN
• Cincinatti, OH
• St. Louis, MO
• Europe
• Gatwick, London
• Heathrow, London
• Geneva, Switzerland
• Basel-Mulhouse, France
• Charles de Gaulle, Paris
• Frankfurt Rhein-Main, Germany
• Berlin Tegel, Germany
• Madrid, Spain
• Lisbon, Portugal
• Cologne/Bonn, Germany (today)
• Edinburgh, Scotland (today)

I think I’ve forgotten one or two. Also, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been in some of these, like Atlanta.

My laptop clock says it’s 8:03 AM CEST before other passengers show up. The place is still not what you’d call “full”.

Coming to you from the other side of passport control: I seriously need to get my passport photo updated. I’m tired of immigration officials spending far longer than is comfortable looking at my papers.

Part III: In Which Collin Arrives in Scotland

A country full of freckled redheads. This must be heaven.

Edinburgh is a very pretty place, much prettier than expected.

To kill time before I can check into my hostel, I go grocery shopping, grab a little picnic for lunch. The menu: little rucola + onion bhaji sandwiches, plus a banana and the most delicious potato chips ever. I was somewhat skeptical when the bag claimed a flavour of “roasted chicken with lemon and thyme”, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t managed to squeeze Thanksgiving dinner in there. Dining: al fresco, in the park below the Edinburgh castle.

I’m finally checked in to the hostel, after this ordeal: arrive in city center; hike to the hostel’s address; get told by a little guy from the Dominican Republic that I have to go somewhere else to check in, in a tone of voice that says I’m the stupidest person on God’s Green Earth for not knowing this; hike to the check-in place; get told that I’m too early; adjourn for lunch; come back to check-in place; exchange money for lodging; hike back to the hostel; find out they gave me the wrong bed assignment; wait while poor English speaker #1 argues with poor English speaker #2 about whose fault this is; finally get a bed assignment; drop stuff. All this, and the room smells like ass.

Intermezzo: go out wandering, make dinner, watch a World Cup game or two.

It seems that there are three couples in this room, and I’m not in one. I couldn’t begin to match the faces I see during the day with the beds that get used at night.

So, a bit of excitement today.

I get down to the train station early to buy that rumoured youth discount card.
I manage to purchase one (they’re significantly less slick than their German and Swiss counterparts), ending up with a ticket back to Paris in the bargain — meaning I need to buy another ticket during our 2.5-hour layover in Gare du Nord. (My parents are ticketted straight through.)

After making our way to Gare du Nord from Gard Saint Lazare, heavy packs and all through the Metro system ([1]), I queue up to buy my ticket. Thirty minutes later, I have a train ticket that leaves at the same time as my parents’ train, but arrives in Cologne an hour earlier. We all marvel at this, chalking it up to some magic inefficiency somewhere in the French rail system. We all go off our separate ways for lunch.

We regroup 15 minutes or so before the train is scheduled to leave. My parents’ seat reservations are in one car while mine are in another, so we split up to find our respective seats. At some point while searching for car 28 in a train where the numbers only go to 12, as I’m reading over my ticket for the dozen-th to see if maybe I’ve misread the car number, I realise why my train arrives an hour earlier: 3:50PM (the time now) is not 2:50PM, aka, when my train left. One mad dash in slippery conditions later, I’ve informed my level-headed father that he’s going to have to get to Cologne, feed the family and find the hotel — without the directions, since I don’t have enough time to get them out of my bag before his train leaves.

Dad says, OK.

I hop off, and their train goes in one direction while I go in the other, back to the ticket window. 45 minutes of standing in line later, I’m perched hawklike on the platform, waiting for my new train to Cologne; I am determined not to miss this one.

I arrive in Cologne 250 minutes later than planned. The guy at the information desk insists on speaking to me in English. He mangles the directions. After several S-Bahn lines and a good bit of walking, I find the place. My parents have checked into the hotel; this is good.

I knock on the door for what seems like forever before they come up behind me. They’ve been out at dinner, enjoying watching Germany’s victory in that day’s World Cup match. They’ve got beer in hand and have only returned to grab their daypacks so they can return to the market and stuff their packs full of booze and chocolate to take back to America. I grab my own rucksack, stockpile my own beer, then we all return to the hotel to swap stories about finding the place.

Despite the long day, I’ve no appetite. On the other hand, this is Germany, and if my time abroad has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t pass up beer in Germany. Thank you, beer.

[1] - When I first came to Paris, I spent a long time searching for the fabled Magenta line between Gare du Nord and Gare Saint Lazare. I finally found it on this trip; turns out it’s a lot easier to locate coming from Gare Saint Lazare than from Gare du Nord.

Growing up, a travel agency in my father’s hometown ran adds talking up a little town in southern Baveria called Garmisch. Appropriately, one of my tasks when laying out this trip was to figure out how to fit this place into the itenerary. Ergo, we’ll be spending tonight in Innsbruck, which is a straight shot through the mountains from Munich — taking you through Garmish and its sister city, Partenkirchen.

Turns out that there’s not much to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It’s got some nice mountain scenery, sure, but so does every chunk of land on the German-Austrian border. What makes it worthwhile, though, is when you get back on the train and head to Austria. The view as the train winds through the lower Alps is gorgeous. The whole place is one big postcard, exactly what you expect southern Bavaria to look like.

Things are a little less sunny upon arrival in Innsbruck. After a bit of mapwork, I figure out the approximate area where our hotel is and we start walking. We finally find the general vicinity, at which point I go exploring to try and find out exactly where we’ll be sleeping. This ends up taking quite a while.

It seems Expedia had confused a road named Kirchstrasse (where the hotel actually is) with one named Kirchgasse (where we were). These things are nowhere near each other — as in, 30 minutes-by-train nowhere near each other. I only find this out after asking several people directions, none of whom know where this place is. One of the recognises one part of the address, though: it’s apparently just a fancy name for an exit ramp off the Autobahn.

We head back to the train station and find the tourist information counter. The woman there recognises the name of the place, immediately cancels our reseverations there and books us at a different, much closer hotel.

Dinner is local cuisine at a restraurant where I have to play interpreter. Maybe I should have taken some of the interpreting classes back in Germersheim…

Today’s agenda is a side trip to Aachen (Germany) and Liege (Belgium); they’re both in the same direction, so I’m planning to hit them both in one trip.

Aachen is one of those places I remember reading about in Mr. Lindley’s 10th grade AP European History class. It was the capital of the German part of the Holy Roman Empire, so was kinda a big deal in its day.

Liege is an excuse to stock up on Belgian beer and waffels.

Here’s a fun little anecdote about the three places involved in today’s story: Cologne, Aachen and Liege are all pretty close together, meaning they’re all pretty close to the same four borders, meaning they’ve changed hands a fair amount over the years. As a result, they all have different names, depending on whether you’re talking about them in German, French or Dutch. I can imagine the girl at the ticket counter was a bit confused when I used the French name Liege in the middle of a German sentence. So you know:

• Cologne (English, French) == Köln (German) == Koeln (Dutch)

• Aachen (English, German) == Aix-en-Chapelle (French) == Aken (Dutch)

• Liege (English, French) == Lüttich (German) == Luik (Dutch)

…and knowing is half the battle.

So, Aachen: there’s not that much to see there (that I was aware of) outside of the main cathedral. The cathedral itself is gorgeous, as is the golden box in its center that contains Charlemagne’s ashes (that’s Karl der Groesse for you Germans).

Liege is pretty but kinda rainy, though it has a nice river. After walking around for a bit I picked one of the lookout points marked on the map and started walking. On the way, waffels were procured. I finally found my way to the general area of where I wanted to go, but after the huge staircase I climbed to get there, I wasn’t in the mood to play particulars.

I ended up at a basilica next to something that looked like an observatory tower. The church was locked, and after walking around it a few times, I went to try my luck at the thing next door. I should mention at this point that I’m the only person there. I haven’t seen anyone out on the streets in this part of town, and there’s nobody visible at the basilica or tower-thingy. What is visible at the tower-thingy are some signs that I don’t fully understand but seem to mention government property, so I’m going to take this recon job careful-like.

The tower-thingy turns out to be a memorial site to the various nations that have fought to defend Liege over the past six centuries or so. There are monuments to the Greeks, the British, the French, etc, etc. It’s a huge site involving multiple levels, and it’s a bit creepy being the only human in the joint. Still and all, I’d recommend it if you happen to be in town.

After coming down from the ridge, lots more walking and a bit more rain later, I head back to the station and my ICE back to Cologne (PS: the ICEs beat Thalys-line trains hands down). Tonight’s an early-to-bed, early-to-rise affair: I have to be up at God-awful-early-o’clock to catch an express line to the airport in Frankfurt um die Eltern abzuholen.

I did very — almost satisfyingly — little today.

The day’s activities can be best summed up as: woke up late, lazed about in Utrecht for a while, caught an ICE to Cologne, walked around Cologne a bit. It was a recharging-the-batteries-kinda day; travel (the way I do it, at least, which involves a lot of walking) has to be the most exhausting way to take a vacation.

The walking-around in Cologne was limited by the ever-present, northern-Europe-in-June drizzle. It was surprising to see so many people out shopping, despite the crap weather. The Germans, they are a hearty people.

Tomorrow: more walking in Aachen and Liege.

On my way back from a shopping expedition to Frankfurt today, I had a revelation. For the longest time, I thought that the announcement in the train was Es besteht Uebergang zur S-Bahn sowieso uebrigen Regionalverkehr (”You can change over to the S-Bahn and other regional transit systems”). I was very confused, trying to fit this usage of sowieso in with the dictionary’s translations of “anyway” and “in any event”.

Today I realised my mistake; the announcement is actually Es besteht Uebergang zur S-Bahn sowie zum uebrigen Regionalverkehr. And thus all became right with the world.

That is all. Carry on.

No time to sleep in and let my feet recover from last night’s new-shoes abuse: there’s a plane to catch.

The morning’s only adventure was a quick sidetrip to Picadilly Square on my way to Heathrow; I had seen a tie shop there and was hoping to pick something up for CRL before leaving the island. The place was of coursed closed and so I was forced to spend that tie money on an espresso around the corner.

Perhaps “adventure” isn’t the right word.

The trip back to Germany was the best kind: uneventful. The Tube was running smoothly, there were no problems at Heathrow, Frankfurt or anywhere in between. All train connections on the way from Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof to Germersheim Gleis 3 were made without incident.

Time to start planning the next trip — I have a flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta on 29 March and it’s not like I’m going to spend that 16 days in southern Rheinland-Pfalz.

My cousin and her husband, being young, rich and without tiny humans to concern themselves with, tend to take a lot of snap-decision trips to far-off locales. They’re currently on the last days of one such mini-vacation: a week in sunny (read: cold, wet, generally miserable) Germany. They’re in Frankfurt at the moment, so I headed up last night to meet them for dinner.

Once the words, “I’ll be coming on the 17:57 from Mannheim” crossed my lips, it became inevitable that I would, under no circumstances, make it to Frankfurt even close to 6PM. There was a decent bit of snow on the ground (12-14cm), and given that it was rush hour, it was no surprise that all the trains were running behind schedule.

From the very start of the trip, things went awry: my train to Speyer was a few minutes late, meaning that I was just in time to watch my connection to Mannheim pull away. I caught the next train to Mannheim, 30 minutes later, meaning that I had missed my InterCity Express from Mannheim to Frankfurt.

I finally arrived at the central Frankfurt station around 7:05PM. I walked around a bit before finding Christy and Mark, then we headed off to a restaurant they had picked out on the other side of the Main, the main (pardon the pun) river that flows through Frankfurt.

The place was a nice Apfelwein tavern, serving exclusively the local Hessian apple wine. I got to play translator and interpreter for the others, since they don’t speak any German — reading a menu to someone never gets any less strange the more times I do it. Over the meal, we swapped stories of our respective continental travels and they provided me news from the relatives back in the States.

After a leisurely dinner, they dropped me back off at the train station and I headed back to Germersheim. Of course, now that I didn’t have any time obligations to meet, all the trains ran on schedule.

Every day on my way to campus, I walk by a camera shop/photo place. One of the ads in the window, a 2-meter by 1-meter sign, is for Bewerbungsfotos (literally, “job application photos”). I’ve encountered this word before, in the context of having passport-size photos made, but had never really understood what they were (apart from the fact that they’re expensive). The other day, I asked someone about this, and here’s what I found out:

When you send in a job application in Germany, you have to include a head shot. Now, this isn’t just for modeling or acting jobs; professors, surgeons, bakers, everyone has to include a picture. You see, in Germany, it’s legal not to hire someone based solely on what they look like. In fact, it’s perfectly OK not to hire someone based on ethnicity, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, height, weight or any one of a thousand other factors that would get you sued immediately in America.

Moreover, this kind of discrimination isn’t just theoretical — it’s the norm. At the university here, for instance, they’re currently searching for a new professor to replace the outgoing English department chair. One of the members of the search committee didn’t find a particular candidate visually appealing, so that person was immediately dropped from the applicant pool; no-one objected to that kind of rationale, no-one thought it was unusual in any way.

Another quirk of the hiring system here: let’s say you have two candidates applying for the same professorship; they both have PhDs from the same university, but one applicant has published dozens of journal articles and several books, while the other hasn’t written a single thing since he got the degree. In Germany, these two candidates would be given equal consideration. The only qualifications that matter are what you have certificates for; your publication and research history is irrelevant.

Even if you do get hired, you’re not out of the woods. For the first year, you can be fired for absolutely any “reason” at all. You might come in to work one morning, the boss might not like the shoes you have on, and you suddenly find yourself looking for work again before 10AM. They don’t even have to lie about why they’re firing you; your pink slip could well read, “We wouldn’t have hired you if we had known you’re a fag”, and that would be well within the law.

Let’s assume you manage to keep your job, there’s still the issue of the German pay scale. In this country, your salary isn’t determined by how valuable you are to the company — age is the only factor. The older you get, the more they pay you, regardless of productivity or qualifications. As with hiring, it doesn’t matter what your publication or research history is, only that you’re a certain age.

There’s a reason I haven’t sent a single job application to a German firm.

• For a long time, whenever I’ve been in train stations, I’ve had the feeling that something was a bit off. On Monday, it finally hit me what was missing: elevators, wheel-chair ramps, those buttons people in wheel-chairs can hit to open doors.

  Relative to the US, Germany must be a pretty hellacious place to live if you’re in a wheel-chair. Take the train system: only larger stations have elevators, and even once you get to the platform, it’s not like the trains have ramps. My apartment building has an elevator and a ramp, but the ramp’s not wide enough to get a wheel-chair up, and even if you manage to get to the door, they’re so heavy you could never get them open. The school has elevators, but in order to reach them, you’re going to have to get up some stairs.

• The Germans love dill. They put it in, on and around everything they can get their hands on. If you can find a salad dressing in the grocery store that doesn’t have dill in it, let me know; sometimes the dill is just assumed to be in there, so they don’t bother listing it on the ingredients label. Tricky.

• Yogurt is, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, believed to be the be-all, end-all miracle cure of cures. You can even get yogurt with “extra-special bacteria”, which is supposedly better for you.

  The Bulgarians, it should be noted, eat 20 kilos of the stuff annually.

• You can buy pig brains at the grocery store. They’re pre-shrinkwrapped for your convenience. They’re right next to the cow throats.

• Germans use the strangest crutches I’ve ever seen. Rather than nestle them in your armpit, these are basically canes — you have to use your hands at all times. There’s no option to simply have the crutches hold you up while freeing your hands.

  I’ve never seen anyone using another style of crutch.

• People around here (i.e., “Europe”) learn to ride a bike right as soon as they can walk, and by the time they’re my age, they can all handle a bike pretty well (they have excellent senses of balance, for example). There’s just one problem: since most of the country is so flat, they generally don’t know how to shift gears. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve seen get off and walk their bike up an incline, rather than simply downshift.