I’m back, and in one piece, despite Washington / Dulles International Airport’s attempts upon my sanity and well-being. (Please note when choosing flight plans: this is, hands down, the most poorly designed and mismanaged airport in the history of EVER. Really, thousands of travelers coming in, with connecting flights, and they can only come up with four people on staff at customs? Yet they send five people, hands jammed firmly in pockets, to escort one guy in a wheelchair? Come on.) I just got in last night, and found myself a bit swamped at work today, well, as swamped as a person at my job can actually be (I have stuff! to do! whoa). And missing Europe, of course, and spending time with Elijah.
We went to several places in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. I arrived in Frankfurt on the 20th, and soon after, we set off to Marburg and Limburg, Germany (according to E, German towns ending in -burg are the best); then we met up with his parents and drove down to Austria, staying a night in Salzburg, and two nights in this wonderful Alpine town named Halstatt. Afterwards we drove up to the Netherlands, to Nijmegen (where his parents are staying), and to Amsterdam for a day. Then we went back to Germany, to stay with his grandmother in Höhr-Grenzhausen, just outside of Koblenz (which is an hour away from Frankfurt). Yes, a whirlwind trip in just ten days! I’ll be sorting through my photos and posting my journal entries over the next few days. Meanwhile, here are some fun factoids:
- German rooftops can either be one of two particular shades, dark brown or burnt orange. Everything else is forbidden, nay, verboten.
- Germans love the word “verboten.”
- According to E., there is this ideal that Germans and Austrians strive for, called gemütlich – the quaint, cute and comfortable. In Germany and Austria, almost every successive town we saw seemed to try and one up the others in achieving the gemütlich, to almost absurd levels. Absurdly cute, that is.
- Even the exposed skulls in Halstatt are very gemütlich.
- The Germans have the cleanest rest stop bathrooms ever. There’s this neat system called Sanifair, in which you have to pay 50 cents to use the bathroom, but you get a ticket that can be used to purchase 50 cents worth of merchandise in the station. Sanifair, indeed. Also, the toilets actually clean themselves! I was pretty startled the first time I used a restroom, when I looked down and saw that the toilet seat had started to rotate. Crazy stuff, but the germ freak in me approves.
- The Dutch are really, really tall. Also, the Dutch language is pretty silly (sorry Nederlanders! But I did so laugh every time I saw “UIT” marking the exit ramps on the Autobahn, or any word with more than two double vowels. I’m easily amused.)
- Dutch houses are really tall, deep and skinny, because once upon a time, people paid property taxes based on the width of their houses. As consequence, most Dutch staircases are pretty treacherous, and I still have no idea how the elderly, blind, handicapped, etc. manage to function in the Netherlands.
- And finally, my personal favorite factoid: “das ist verboten” to wash your car on Sundays in Germany. Seriously. We took E’s oma’s car all around Europe, and the decent thing to do was to wash the bug guts off of it (the Autobahn has slain more insects than Raid and DDT combined). When E tried to take it to an automatic car wash, he was informed of this country-wide policy by the man behind the counter.
Following exchanges in German, of course:
Man: There’s no car washing on Sundays! It’s a Christian day.
E: But…but it’s a machine!
Man: Even machines must observe Christian rules.
E, heading back to the car, shaking his head: Germany’s crazy, you can’t wash your car on Sundays.
E’s oma: Germany’s not crazy! America’s crazy! You can’t buy stocks in Korea because you’re American!
E (and me, once he’d translated): :???:
Photos and more stories to come soon! I’ll probably change the date stamp to match up with the actual travel, if I’m feeling industrious, so if you’re curious, keep checking the recent entries.
* Here are the entries thus far:
Day 1: Marburg and Limburg, Germany
Day 2: Salzburg, Austria
Day 3 & 4: Hallstatt, Austria
Day 5 & 6: Nijmegen and the Nature Park
Day 7: Amsterdam
Day 8: Tulip Gardens and Nijmegen Again
6 Comments
I can’t wait to hear about your travels, sounds good so far!
Hopefully that last comment is “E” otherwise you met some odd new friends on your trip
I don’t think I met that last individual…I assume it’s some new and exciting form of spam? Since it doesn’t reference discount cialis or anything, I’ll leave it
It’s absolutely no spam. In fact, it’s a trackback from the weblog of the Nassauische Neue Presse, the local newspaper of the Limburg-Weilburg “county”. I found karenology’s weblog via technorati. We’re allways collecting finds from the net connected to our region. Karenology’s remarks about german traits and quirks are quite funny (and in some aspects quite fitting). So, I thought they could be interesting for our readers.
Wow. In that case, I’m quite honored! Thanks for the trackback (and sorry for my lack of German comprehension ;) )
Wow, how freakin’ cool are you?!
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] Deutschland ist “absurdely cute”. Das meint zumindest “karenology”. Sie ist ihres Zeichens 23-jährige Amerikanerin und gerade von einem Europa-Trip zurück, der sie unter anderem in die schöne Domstadt an der Lahn geführt hat. Dabei sind ihr einige erstaunliche kulturwissenschaftliche Erkenntisse über unsere schöne (?) Heimat herausgekommen, die sie flugs in ihrem Weblog verarbeitet hat. [...]
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