Overview

A Trip to Germany 

This began out of a combination of interests. I hadn't done the German language much since high school and college but I always liked it a lot - it was the first living language I studied, right after Latin, which it is similar to grammatically (lots of cases and genders, etc). So I started looking at old German movies on line, and then got interested in recent German history, and then in German history and culture in general. I've been re-studying German on my smart phone, and I am at the point where I can appreciate the irony in the Youtubes of old Nazi newsreels produced toward the end of the war. With the proliferation of scanned books and newspapers on line, you can get absorbing peeks into common people's quotidian concerns -- newspapers published while cities were being bombed and burned contain ads for deodorant and pills for quitting smoking. There are pathetic lost-dog ads and child's-sled-for-sale ads in the back of the Danzig daily newspapers, published just days before the city was bombed, overrun, crushed, and burned by the Russians, and the inhabitants killed or forced to flee for their lives. 

Mrs. Slade and I have been to Berlin twice and to Dresden once. We enjoyed restaurants, museums, walks, bike rides, botanical gardens, and the countryside along the Elbe in Saxony. But I want to mingle with locals and listen to them, and go to movies, plays, bookstores, pubs, and soccer games. I want to do "language immersion." So we decided this time I'll go alone. 

PLAN: A 15-day trip in early May. Fly to Munich and then immediately take the train to nearby Augsburg for a few days with a day trip to Nördlingen (a walled town in a meteor crater), then back to Munich, then to Leipzig with day trip to Halle, and then to Berlin, with a day trip to Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, and the site of the Battle or the Seelow Heights, where the Red Army plowed over the last of the Wehrmacht on its final push into Berlin in early 1945 (at which time I was already born).

The omniscient and infallible Internet dictated that the optimal time to buy international air tickets was exactly 151 day before departure, so that's exactly what I did. Our son advised me that the way to buy plane tickets is to keep an eye on prices for a while, and then jump in when it seems good and then -- most important of all -- STOP CHECKING. I followed his advice.

I also decided to use airbnb.com for lodgings, thinking that it would give me more opportunity to interact (in German) with real authentic Germans. But that doesn't really work, because it seems that most of the airbnb hosts are either absent or Turkish. But I still went with airbnb because you can find a central location, where the hotels are usually most expensive.