Wednesday and Thursday, September 21st & 22d

Since I saw Mark Twain's autographed photo in the touristy inn advertised as a "Historisches Studentlokal," (ha ha) where I ate yesterday among Hoosiers and Iowans, I downloaded the part of "A Tramp Abroad" where he talks about student life in Heidelberg (Click here). It's not like that nowadays. 

I passed a sign that said "In this house lived the scientist Robert Bunsen." But in my opinion, just because you invented some new kind of burner doesn't mean you're a scientist.

I stumbled on the birthplace and museum of Friedrich Ebert, the lefty Labor organizer who became the first president of the Weimar Republic in the early 20's. Sort of an FDR of post-war Germany. The say if he hadn't died of appendicitis, maybe there wouldn't have been any Nazi party. The place was all photos, letters, and wall explanations of German politics after WWI, very comprehensive and well-done, and in German only. I spent over two hours in there, and made 25 more German vocabulary cards on my phone (e.g., Umstürzler = subversive.  Rufmord = character assassination)

Then I came across the footpath up to the castle, so I walked up. It's was a very good evening view of the old tile-roofed town with its churches, and the River Neckar winding away toward the Rhine.

Sign in the window of a Heidelberg bar: 

"We have no wifi. Talk to each other. Pretend it's 1995."

Thursday I took the train back up to Frankfurt, passing through Darmstadt where the murdered last tsarina Alexandra of Russia (Queen Victoria's granddaughter) was born. Incidentally, Darmstadt means "Gut City." What were they thinking?!

In Frankfurt I changed for Erfurt, out of Hesse and eastward into Thuringia. Horses, sheep, brown and white cows. Free wifi on the train, so I whatsapped a lot with Missus Slade.

Erfurt is pretty big but it wasn't bombed much so it has very many really old apartment and office buildings with attractive 19-century architectural touches. And maybe it wasn't fiddled with much because it was in the Communist DDR so it was sort of in economic suspended animation. 

I had some trouble getting into the apartment. Tobias's flatmate Christian had emailed me that they were at work, but I was to ring Frau Schroder's flat, and she would give me the key. I rang her when I got there. She is an odd little woman with a peculiar manner, and I really couldn't understand anything she said.

She went out to her mailbox but there was no key in it. So I called Christian on my Mobal euro-phone, and he said the previous airbnb tenants must have put the key in HIS mailbox instead of Frau Schroder's. And he couldn't leave work until 4:30 (it was only 2:00 at the time). So I was ready to get kind of pissed, but then Frau Schroder came out of her flat with a long pair of tongs, which I managed to insert into Tobias's mailbox slot and, after quite a lot of fiddling, snag the keys. Ta-daah!

"Theatrum Mundi," a mechanical puppet and doll manufactory on a narrow old street in Erfurt. A little gnome-like man was inside there fiddling with many tools and doll parts. The sign says "Insert a coin."

The old part of town is a pedestrianized labyrinth of very pretty, almost medieval-looking buildings and churches. This afternoon it was full of people walking and shopping and eating, and THEY WERE ALL GERMANS! I didn't hear any other language, except one Australian guy in a restaurant. There was also a busker in one of the platzes singing like Bob Dillon, who was probably an Anglophone, and a skinny guy in another platz playing the didgeridoo, but he was probably a German. So anyway, anybody who wants to discover a charming part of Germany that is very German but off the tourist paths, this is it.

"Thüringer Sauerbraten mit Apfelrotkohl & gebratenen Kloßscheiben" - Thuringian sauerbraten with apple-red-cabbage and roasted dumpling discs. It was pretty good - very much like a London Sunday pub roast, with dumplings instead of Yorkshire pudding. The street outside is the medieval "Via Regia" which ran east-west across the Holy Roman Empire. Erfurt was a main stop on the highway, since it was a center of woad production. Can't live without woad!

Incidentally, wine, beer, and spirits are astoundingly cheap here. A bottle of nice Barolo docg is only $10. It makes you realize how much tax we pay in the U.S. just to get tuned.

Monday & Tuesday, September 19th & 20th.

After The Big One, Heidelberg was firmly in the American occupation zone and for 60 years it was overrun with thousands of Our Troops and their families. Nevertheless, the city traffic lights are now fitted out with the old DDR Communist "Ampelmann" pedestrian signal. He's just so dang cute!

I had watched the movie "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg," 1927, with Ramon Navarro and Norma Shearer (free to view on Youtube - Click here to enjoy it.

So I knew exactly what to expect: Heidelberg students with dueling scars, full of love and joy, sporting silly little student caps and constantly singing jolly German drinking songs.

Well, not so much.

I walked up into the old city of Heidelberg. I expected quaint little shops with quaint little troll-like men in them, making Christmas decorations and fashioning cuckoo clocks and mechanical dolls. I had read that since Heidelberg hadn't been bombed, it has preserved its picturesque old-world character - a journey back in time! 

Not on the Hauptstraße it's not. It's the touristiest place I've ever been in Germany. EVER! The main street of the "old town" is solid Gap, Gucci, NewYorker, Old Navy, Kaufhof, souvenirs and schlock jewelery, full of American tour groups with the guide holding up a stick. I love tourists, especially American ones. They're so endearingly clueless and confident. And they can't get enough of "Ausfahrt."

I was determined to have a dining experience at the inn where Mark Twain ate when he lived here for three months in 1878. His picture is on the wall there along with hundreds of others. I walked all the way to the end of the old-town Hauptstraße, past Michiganders and Hoosiers photographing the already-completely-photographed Heidelberg castle with their cell phones and tablets (wtf are they thinking? It's all on Google Images fer chrissake!), and at last I found it, "Zum roten Ochsen," The Red Ox (click it), unchanged since the 18th century. I was seeing what Mark Twain saw!

It' doesn't seem to be a student hangout anymore. Since (unlike the organized groups from Ohio) I didn't have a reservation, they seated me next to the lavatories, with a nice, shy Japanese youth who was admirably determined to experience the local culture despite a seemingly total, complete ignorance of the German or the English languages. He did it, and took cell phone pictures to prove it. He pointed to what I had, and said he wanted that. 

I ordered what seemed to me to be the most iconic German dish: Zwei Bauernbratwürste mit Weinsauerkraut und Kartoffelpüree - farm sausage & sauerkraut with mashed potatoes. It came with a mustard pot. Also, their famous goulash soup. Washed down with a Heidelberger pilsner. It was really delicious. Not vegetarian or vegan or gluten-free, but what the hell.

The price you have to pay for having this kind of genuine old-time German food isn't just for the food (which was reasonable). It's for having to eat somewhere where NO Germans would EVER eat (Germans eat international food - Italian and French cuisine and sushi and Turkish döner), and for having to listen to people across the room saying loudly how my daughter-in-law in Colorado was SO pleased with the Pack 'n Play I sent them. All I heard there was American English and a little bit of Japanese. Toward the end I thought I heard some snatches of actual German, but I think it was from an employee.

On Tuesday I went back to the old town and found the actual university, slightly removed from all the honky-tonkery. There were hundreds of bicycles and hundreds of youthful students milling around everywhere, but the funny little student caps seem to have gone out of style. Wie Schade!

I mingled with the students in the library - I let them think I must be a learned, doddering old professor, with the quirky habit of taking pictures in the library with a cell phone.

In the library. Presumably the computers and the gum ball machine have been added since the days of "The Student Prince."

Tomorrow, more Heidelberg.

Saturday and Sunday, September 17th & 18th

As you come out of the Cologne train station, the Kölner Dom smacks you in the eye. It's 700 years old, with towers that look like melted and dripped black wax.

It was damaged during the Big One, but was left standing, Bomber pilots used the towers for navigation.

This place is on the tourist route. Lots of people from all over were enjoying it.

When Chinese people take pictures, 
they don't say "Say 'cheese.'"
They say "1,2,3" -"Eeeeeeh, Arrrrrrrr, SAN!"

Sunday morning I went to high mass at the Kölner Dom. They try to keep the tourists out during mass, so there are a couple of old men in long red dresses at the roped-off way in. You can't go in unless you look Catholic, which I do I guess.

Archbishop Cardinal Woelki walked in wearing a squarish black hat and brandishing his crosier, followed by hangers-on and acolytes, and several guys swinging censers that poured out incense smoke like mad. I never saw so much incense in church. I really like the smell, and it chases Satan away.

Then came a couple dozen little boys in chasubles, at least half of them blondie-heads, and then some big boys - this was the boy choir. Then some random old men in red hats a some nuns.

The organ and choir sounded pretty nice in that big tall ancient space. The mass was in German of course, but when the choir sang the various chants, it was in the old languages. When they started to sing the Credo, I recognized the melody from when I was in the 5th grade choir at Gesu School in Detroit. I still remembered almost all the words, and the congregation sang along to parts of it, so there I was singing out loud, in Latin, in church, for the first time in sixty-two years (but in a lower pitch than I did back then). I really liked it. 

♫"Et resurrexit tertia di-eee, secundum scriptuuuraaas..."♫

Monday morning I said goodbye to host Eddie. He is studying French horn with the guy who plays it in the Westdeutscher Rundfunk orchestra. He is completely bilingual (German father & American mother). I took the train up the Rhine to Heidelberg. 

The Lorelei. 

TOE STORY

This involves some personal dealings I have had with the German medical system. It points up some interesting differences between our medical establishment and theirs, but it's kind of disgusting in places, so if you're squeamish you might want to skip it.

I mentioned earlier that just before I started this trip, I had toe trouble. The bottom of the big toenail on my left foot was red and painful, and Missus Slade urged me to go to an urgent care facility in Maryland, where a doctor diagnosed it as an infection, and prescribed antibiotic pills, which I began taking. He said it would be better in a few days.

Well, after I arrived in Germany it started getting worse, making it hard to sleep and hurting pretty badly when I walked, and it turned much more red around the bottom of the nail, and the nail was turning white, and then sort of green. I'll spare you the photo.

It got to the point that Missus Slade importuned me through our Whatsapp dialogues once again to seek medical council. which I did on Friday. I arrived from Aachen at my Cologne airbnb and was greeted by host Edward's girlfriend/roommate, Duoli. She and Edward are students, or maybe teachers, at the University of Music and Dance here. He plays French horn, and she is a composer. She is from Shanghai, so we chatted in Chinese. (Later I heard Edward playing snatches from Mozart's 1st horn concerto in the other room. Cool people).

Duoli gave me directions to the hospital next to the university where she and Eddie loiter, and I walked up there, but all the doctors were at "an important meeting" and none of them could see me! The reception people summoned a taxi for me and sent me up to St. Vinzenz's Hospital up north a few miles.

After a couple of long waits I was summoned to a treatment room where a young man took a look and sonogramed the toe area. He said it was full of pus. He was obviously a trainee. for he called in his trainer, Dr. Schubert, a nice looking early-thirtyish woman who was very friendly and professional. She looked it over and we talked about various options. They could treat it and take the nail off, or just treat the inflammation so it would last the next three weeks. She called in the big cheese to have a look, an older guy, and he asked me questions and then told the young doctors to go f'rit. 

Dr. Schubert explained to the young guy where to cut. It was a long and complicated explanation. She numbed the toe with just one long injection on each side. (My American podiatrist once took three tries to accomplish that). Then they made a cut under the skin at the bottom of the nail (the nail itself has come completely unhinged at its roots and is going to come off eventually) and began expressing the matter. It gushed out in an extraordinarily copious manner - more and then yet more. They made a little hole at the other side too, to connect underneath  the skin. Schubert said maybe I should look away, but I said no I wish I could make a Youtube of this, which seemed to amuse and appall her slightly. None of this hurt at all, after the initial numbing pin prick.

Then Schubert explained to the young guy how to make a "Lasche" out of a rubber glove. She had him put on his regular  "Gummihandschuhe."  (In German, gloves are called "hand shoes." Isn't that great?!) Then she had him unpack a special surgical hand-shoe from its sterile packet and, using sterile scissors, cut a very narrow strip from the side of one of one of the glove's fingers and then, using only tweezers, slip this cut sliver of rubber into one side of the toe and out the other, to keep the drainage open. Then he used the tweezers to tie the two ends into a little knot on top of my toe.

Dr. Schubert said I must come back tomorrow afternoon to see the wound doctor so they can decide what I should do next. They gave me Ibuprofin (because it's going to hurt when the dope wears off, she said) and some Pantoprozole, a proton pump inhibitor (I don't know why that). There was no prescription or drugstore nonsense. They just handed me the pills. And she told me to keep the foot elevated. They bandaged it up very prettily like a little mummy with lots of gauze extending down around the foot. Fortunately I could still get my shoe on.

Then the two of them sat at the computer and decided how much to charge me, scanning through long long lists of procedures. She said she would try to make it "günstig" (favorable). I told them no matter how much they charge, I bet it's cheaper than in the U.S. and they both smiled and said "we know."

So, guess how much, for consultation with three doctors, a sonogram, an hour's surgery, and meds? THIRTY-NINE FUCKING EUROS AND 85 CENTS!! $45.  I went to the hospital Kasse and paid the bill, tossing the petty cash out of my wallet like a drunk at last call.. I felt like Trump or something.

Three weeks ago my dentist in the U.S. took a look at a little bump on the roof of my mouth and said don't worry about it, and charged me $160! Since I like Germany anyway, it really would make sense for me to come here for all my medical treatments. Except that I have Medicare and Blue Cross so everything is free for me anyway. But who, in OUR system, is getting all this money? Something is very very wrong.

Here's one really good part of this whole medical adventure:  It was all in Deutsch! Not a word of English was spoken through the whole experience! That's what I came here for.

I took a cab back to the train station with a jolly old Turkish taxi driver. Since I was an American, he wanted to know if I knew Fethullah Gülen. He also explained to me in Turkish German and Turkish Arabic why it was impossible for anybody to actually be an atheist. 

It's the next day now, and I can now walk with no pain for the first time on this whole adventure.

What they're thinking - Two Vignettes

VIGNETTE ONE: On a train I sat across from a dark young Moroccan dude and a young skinny blond German dude who were talking. The German was asking how to say various things in Arabic, and the Moroccan was explaining meanings and dialect differences. 

After a while I couldn't help nosing in and I asked what the German guy did. He said he works at a call center. So I asked if he had to deal with a lot of calls from Arabs or what, and he said no, it's all in German. So I asked why he was interested in Arabic, and he said, "Because I'm a Muslim." He said he likes Americans ok, but the US government is just terrible. "With them it's just war all the time. War war war."

VIGNETTE TWO - On newsstands now.

"USA, Yesterday and Today.  The Rise and Fall of a Great Nation."

They're kissing us goodbye. "Nice knowin' ya!"

Thursday, September 15

I have wanted to see the cathedral at Aachen / Aix-la-Chapelle where Charlemagne is buried ever since Mrs. Eckholm in the 6th grade gave me an A on my paper "The Life of Charlemagne," which I wrote in the school library copying stuff out of The Book of Knowledge. "The accomplishments of Charlemagne are the Holy Roman Empire, conquest of the Lombards, Saxon rebellion, etc.".

Here's another reason I wanted to come: Through family research, Missus Slade's late father determined that they are directly descended from Charlemagne. So it's personal. (Actually, the sad fact is that my own family research has determined that I, also, am a descendant, which makes our marriage an incestuous sham and our children freakish bastards. But let's talk about something else.)

To get to Aachen I had to go through Cologne, but the train from Frankfurt was late and I missed my connection. I thought Germans were supposed to be so efficient! Angela's been in office for ten years, and the trains STILL aren't on time? Didn't Mussolini fix that in about TWO years?

My accommodation was near the railroad station. My airbnb host, Magnus, is a friendly open-faced blond youth who studies at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule here, a high-powered technical and research university that can eventually put you on the board of a major German corporation. Magnus's parents in Nürnberg must have money already, since they've fixed him up with this nice two bedroom apartment, all to himself. It's very comfy - carpets and everything.

Magnus gave me maps and advice on where to eat with the students, away from the clueless old tourists. I walked down to the weird little cathedral and sat in Charlemagne's ancient 1,200-year-old "octagon," looking at the golden box that holds his remains. It's a weirdly laid out church, and not big. Parts of it are fancy gold sort-of Byzantine designs and colored marble, and the new part (only about 700 years old) has tall narrow stained glass windows like at Sainte Chapelle in Paris. 

I lit a candle for Missus Slade's father, my dear father-in-law, at the closest candle stand to the bones of his illustrious ancestor.

The gold & silver Karlschrein
containing Charlemagne's remains

The church and treasury are full of relics. Besides the golden casket near the altar that holds St. Mary's cloak, Christ's swaddling clothes, St. John the Baptist's beheading cloth, and Our Lord's tighty whiteys (or, in more ecclesiastical terms, a "loin cloth"), the cathedral treasury also has many gold and silver reliquaries with bones and other stuff in them, like Jesus' belt, Mary's belt, the whip Our Lord was lashed with, etc.

It made me wonder how all that stuff was collected. Maybe some extremely prescient person moved among the bible-time people saying "Excuse me, can I have that when you're done with it?" and " I'll give you 5 denarii for that whip," and stuff like that.

One of Charlemagne's bones, containing
some of Missus Slade's DNA. Presumably.

I walked up near the university to eat (I had Curry-Hähnchengeschnetzeltes mit Reis, with a draft Warsteiner). In a university area, I'm the oldest person in sight. It's endearing and heartening to watch these nice young wide-eyed people walking around talking and laughing and eating and enjoying their hormones. They're not tired, and their legs don't ache and their feet don't hurt. They're oblivious. They have no idea. It's kind of cute.

Just 'cause you're medieval don't mean you can't have some fun!

On the way back, next to the medieval town hall, there was a great big ferris wheel labeled "La grande Roué Parisienne" - direct from Dortmund! I recognized the music it was playing as "Carolina Moon Keep Shining."

Wow a whole meter of popcorn.
I wish WE had the metric system!

Tuesday and Wednesday, September 13 and 14

We took off from cold rainy Keflavik early Tuesday morning and flew for three-hours-plus over the boggy farmlands of northern Europe, and then into hot sunny Frankfurt airport, which is the biggest airport I ever saw, by far. Unbelievably huge.

I took the shuttle to the light rail and then into the old town, called my Airbnb host Sebastian on my Mobal Euro-pay-as-you-go phone, and found the lodging at its address, Behind The Pretty View 13. That's the address. I assume the street is called Behind The Pretty View because it is lined with the back of the buildings that are on The Pretty View Street, which runs along the River Main on the east part of downtown. I attach a picture of  the street sign in case you don't believe me.

It's probably an old building that The Greatest Generation bombed out during The Big One, but it's been gutted and re-done in a bizarre way. It's all clean and spiffy but the toilet room and shower room are on the ground floor and a kitchen, fitness room, and 2 bedrooms are upstairs. The main entrance is in a busy loud courtyard full of little vans and construction vehicles. But it's RIGHT DOWNTOWN so who cares. I think Sebastian works from here on his computer in a little office/bedroom downstairs.

I hadn't hardly slept on either flight but I wanted to stay up till local bed time, and I was a little buzzed, so I decided to check out a barber shop I had read about -- Torreto's. Extremely cool. Read about it here and here.

Tuesday is a walk-in day there so I walked up from Behind The Pretty View to where they have an electric barberpole turning in front of their shop. 

The barber chairs are big old American ones, and there are oily old wooden shelves and drawers lining the back, and light fixtures with old tied-together tennis shoes thrown over them, and the walls are lined with hundreds of barber-related pictures and sayings. One of my favorites had a picture of a beard with the caption "I have a beard and I am good with the sex."

The main rule there is, No Girls Allowed, and you're not allowed to use the word "Friseur," the normal German word for barber, or you have to pay a €5 fine. You have to say "Barber."

There were four barbers working, all of them with great big beards. And there were six guys waiting for hair and beard cuts, and all but one of them had beards. I walked in and Alex greeted me and asked if I wanted a haircut and a beard trim, and I said yes both, so he said alles gut and pointed to one of the rump-sprung mis-matched upholstered chairs, next to the pile of German automotive magazines spilling out of an old suitcase on a dresser, but first he told me to run up to the bar on the balcony overlooking the place, and get me a beer, which I did (for free, a Mythos, from Greece). 

All the dudes were sitting around smoking and drinking beer and whiskey and talking incomprehensible (to me) Hessian German. It was the most dudical place I've been in since the navy. It wasn't gay at all, either, if that's what you're thinking. Slade's son says that these are Greek-German hipsters, and he may be right, but Slade says that just because you're a hipster, that doesn't mean you're not a nice person.

All of the barbers were taking about 5 or 6 times as long (no exaggeration) for each haircut as American barbers do, little snips and clips here and there, using every barber tool and trick you can imagine. And in between customers each barber would apologize to the customer whose turn it was, and sit down on a rump-sprung upholstered chair and have a cigarette and a drink.

When it was finally my turn, skinny little Alexis, aka "Slim," who had a big red beard, took me in his chair and asked "Ich mach's? (Should *I* do it)?" Meaning should I just let him cut it the way he wanted. I said yes, I wanted to rely on is technical expertise (Ich ziehe vor, mich auf deinem Fachkenntnis zu verlassen - That's how I talk, because I get my German from newspapers). But then as an afterthought, I told him to try to make me look like "a mature, successful German businessman" (ein reifer, erfolgreicher deutscher Geschäftsmann). Which he thought mildly amusing, and he shared it with Alex. 

I told them I had read that one of them was Greek, and he said ALL of them were Greeks, so we chatted a lot in Greek, and I was kind of surprised (and also kind of sort of disappointed considering the time I've spent on German) to find that I can carry on a conversation in Greek a LOT easier than I can in German.

Well, it turns out that he thought my hair should be pretty short on the sides and pretty long on the top, which is kind of the opposite of what I've always done since about 10th grade. And I think he was right, which is nice to finally know when you're 73 years old I guess.

When he was done, after many, many, many adjustments and touch-ups, and shaving of the neck and ear margins and edges and trimming the beard and mustache, and gelling the hair with proprietary lubricants and spraying the neck with one of those old-fashioned spray bottles with a squeeze bulb attached to a long hose, he put two tiny drops on his finger from a tiny old bottle with its label coming loose and rubbed it on his fingertips, and then he rubbed it all through my beard. I asked him what it was and he said it was "Italian beard oil, very expensive." ANOTHER consumer product I didn't know I needed till I was an old man!!

It cost €41 plus tip - awful expensive but considering it was a very enjoyable lifetime experience, plus I really like the outcome, I don't give a shit. That's what travel adventures are all about. Also, it will make me look different for the rest of my life.

Wednesday, my feet had gotten sore from walking (and the toe infection is still there), so I walked into touristic Frankfurt and to the historical museum (which sucks in numerous ways), and then rested back at the lodging to update the blog, drinking Binding Römer Pils ("das Frankfurter original!" - not too bad) that I bought at the Konstablerwache underground tube station shopping center. Frankfurt's touristic platz is total Disneyland kitsch but you can get fantastic cappuccino slurpies there!

Chinese tourists taking pictures among
phony restored "medieval" facades