BFT23 - We Go to Germany

 

In early March 2020, when the world burned down, Lauren was in Germany.

She’d won a full scholarship to study abroad for the academic year, one of only a handful offered by this particular national-level program, and ended up in Walsrode, a small town in the northwestern part of Germany roughly equidistant from Bremen, Hanover, and Hamburg. Her first host family didn’t work out, but eventually she settled in with a new host family that she really liked and she was looking forward to the rest of her time there.

And then the pandemic hit, and suddenly she was back in Wisconsin.

If you check GoogleMaps it says that the trip from Prague to Walsrode should take between six and seven hours by car, depending on what route you take and what traffic conditions you might find. A good chunk of this is on the Autobahn which has long stretches where the speed limit is “Whatever, dude, just don’t come crying to us if it doesn’t work out well for you” except in German so it is somehow more intimidating, and this meant that in theory it might take even less than that if nothing untoward happened. Midwesterners will gladly drive that distance for no real reason at all, so we decided to take some of the time we had planned to be in Prague and visit Lauren’s host family.

This, of course, required us to rent a car. We’d already had experience doing this in Italy so we figured this would be fine – especially since Kim handled all of the arrangements for it, which meant that it would actually be done well. As is standard in large European cities in our experience, the car rental place was located at the central train station in Prague, not that far from Wenceslas Square. So early one morning Kim and I boarded the tram to go to the trains to get the car.

I don’t know who designs European central rail stations, but my guess is that they are all big fans of M.C. Escher because these things are positively surreal in their ability to fold space and time in new and exciting ways that don’t actually lead to your rental car agency. GPS will not help you. The signs will not help you. The people working in the café that opens in three minutes will not help you, at least not for another three minutes. You are on your own in a world without geometry.

We walked around the station for a while, then we went outside and walked around there for a while and eventually we went down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel underneath the busy road in front of the station, and then back up and around to what turned out to be the rental car parking lot (so at least we knew where that was when we needed it later) where we were told to go back into the station. There was an elevator just sort of poking up out of the ground right by the parking lot entrance that would get us within hailing distance of the rental agency. Eventually we found the agency in a long subterranean hallway in a disused lavatory behind a locked door with a sign that said “Beware of the Leopard” in Czech. The car rental people were friendly enough once we got there, though, and after a suitable amount of bureaucracy involving pretty much every form of ID we had brought to Europe, they handed us the keys to the car. We retraced our steps to the rental car parking lot we’d visited earlier – back through the hallway, past the leopard, up the elevator, and so on – and eventually we got to little shed where we presented our papers and were told where to find the car. It was a Skoda of some kind, significantly larger than the Fiat Speck we’d had in Italy – it would be on the smaller end of midsized in the US – so we were able to put all of our bags in the trunk rather than on our laps.

Already, we were ahead.

We bobbed and weaved our way through the streets of Prague and back to the apartment, where Oliver and Lauren were waiting outside for us. They had elected not to get up early just to watch us sign papers, for which we did not blame them. Once we got the car Kim texted ahead to ask if Lauren could get her a coffee from the shop across the street, which she did and that is how we eventually found out that Costa coffee cups are pretty much useless as beverage containers though they do make it easy to spray coffee over a wide area. But we found each other, got everything and everyone packed in, and then pointed the car to the northwest, out of Prague and toward Germany.

The roads in central Europe are a lot bigger than they are in Italy, and the drive was lovely but uneventful as we made our way out of Czechia. We stopped for gas and snacks at one point – road trips are pretty universal that way – and soon found ourselves in Germany and on the Autobahn.

The Autobahn has variable speed limits, which are posted on digital signs overhead. Sometimes there is a number, which tells you how many kph you can do – it’s usually between 120 and 140 or roughly 75 to 90 mph. Sometimes less if there is congestion. Sometimes more. And sometimes there isn’t a number at all, which is when you’re on your own. Kim did most of the driving as this was something she had been looking forward to doing, though after a long day I ended up driving the last couple of hours.

We zipped along, admiring the scenery, stopping for food and gas now and then. And then somewhere around Magdeberg we hit traffic.

From this we learned two things. First, when traffic comes to a standstill on a highway in Germany everyone moves to the shoulders in order to clear a center lane for any emergency vehicles that need to pass through. And second, GPS can always find a way to get you through as long as you’re willing to drive on ever smaller roads through ever smaller towns. And since a) we were tourists and seeing more than just the highway sounded like a good idea, and b) we wanted to get to our destination by a reasonable hour, we figured we’d try it.

There were some interesting turns and some congested little towns – we weren’t the only ones who had this idea, after all, and I have distinct memories of one little town that a) required us to slalom our way through a fair number of residential areas and b) had a single traffic light on the road out of town that backed everything up for a thoroughly absurd amount of time – but eventually we found ourselves on the road into Walsrode, and a few minutes later we’d found Lauren’s family.

Gerd and Sonja were kind enough to take Lauren in after the first host family didn’t work out. They have a son, Neil, who is about Lauren’s age – which is how she got to know them, as they were in school together – and a daughter, Jella, who was actually an exchange student herself while Lauren was there so we all got to meet her this trip. I can see why Lauren felt so comfortable with them. They were incredibly kind and welcoming, and we enjoyed our time with them immensely. We look forward to seeing them again – either here or in Germany or, perhaps, both.

When we got there Gerd, Sonja, and Neil welcomed us into their home and we sat together at the table, sharing food and stories and getting to know each other. Eventually we moved over to the living room, where Jella joined us later

After a while we went back to the table for dinner and we stayed there until well after midnight, with conversations flowing back and forth across different groups. We shared a great many stories and some local liqueurs, which only made the stories brighter. It was a wonderfully comfortable evening, as if we’d known each other forever. At one point I remember pausing as the different conversations went on around me and noticing that I could barely hear myself think above the noise of it all, and if that isn’t the definition of a lovely evening I don't know what would be.

They also brought up from the basement a box full of things that Lauren had left behind back in 2020 when she’d been given just a few hours to get packed and onto the train to the airport, which was really thoughtful of them. We packed it up and took it back to Prague with us and then distributed it among our suitcases for the trip home, so now they have their basement back and Lauren has some of her old stuff. Win all around.

Gerd had to work the next day, so we said our goodbyes to him that night. And the next day we went out with Sonja, Neil, and Jella to see the town.

I enjoyed having a chance to explore Walsrode after only hearing about it for so long. It’s a strange thing to send your child off across the world without you, to live in a new country for a while. You ask how things are but unless there is an absolute catastrophe the answer is always “fine,” and you hope that’s true even though you know there’s not much you can do from that distance if it’s not. But now I’ve been there, and it really is a very nice place. So I feel retroactively reassured that way.

It's not a big town but when you walk through the streets it seems neat and well kept, though you can tell that people actually live there. We walked through the neighborhoods for a while until we got to the school that Lauren attended.

Sonja got us inside so we could walk around a bit – they were doing some renovations, so the place was open even in the summer. It was interesting to see how different it was in some ways from American schools and how much wasn’t that different at all.

Although sometimes the cross-cultural gap is a bit wider than people think.

We even found the statue that what would have been Lauren’s class donated after they graduated.

It’s got a pretty little downtown with a bunch of shops that we explored here and there, including one place that sold us the world’s best Fanta soda – a lemon and elderflower blend that really needs to catch on in this country and likely won’t until Americans decide they will accept paprika potato chips too.

We stopped into the big Lutheran church in town as well. It’s really astonishing how easy it is to tell a Lutheran church from a Catholic cathedral even without considering the size. It just has a completely different feel to it.

From there we wandered over to a nearby convent. The Walsrode Abbey was originally founded by Benedictine Nuns in 986 CE – yes, that’s a three-digit year – and it has had a long and fascinating history. It was plundered during the Thirty Years War, occupied by Napoleon, and has a refectory endowed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the guy who was in charge of Germany during World War I. It’s run by Lutherans now, as one would expect in northern Germany, and it’s really a lovely and peaceful place. You can wander around the grounds for a bit, and go inside some of the buildings. And they have an apple tree by the exit that has really tasty tart apples.

We also found this, which was a nice little break.

Eventually it got on toward lunchtime and there was no other place to go but Lauren’s favorite old haunt from when she was there, a doner kebab shop called Torino – they’ve moved to a new building since Lauren was there, but it’s the same people serving the same food. We ordered doner, of course, and took it back to the house. It was really good.

And then it was time to go. We said our goodbyes, at least for now, and then piled back into the Skoda and headed off back to Prague. It was a pretty drive with no traffic this time and we ended up chasing rainbows all the way back to Czechia.

Things got complicated once we arrived, though. We got back about an hour too late to return the car so we had to park it somewhere in Prague until the next morning, and if you know anything at all about trying to park a car in a large European city you know that this was going to be a great deal easier said than done. There are all sorts of regulations covering this, many of which involve what color paint is on the ground in the place where you think you’re going to leave your car. In Prague you want white paint, because you’re allowed to park there. Blue paint is for residents only. Yellow paint means you can park there for fifteen minutes, which was not terribly useful for our situation. There are other colors and they probably mean everything from “tow away zone” to “we will find you and squeeze lemons into all your bread flour.”

We thought we’d gotten lucky right off the bat with a spot just across the way from our apartment but it turned out to have blue paint that had been hard to see in the dark. We dropped off Oliver and Lauren so they could make their way back to the apartment and continued our search. Kim and I then found a fifteen-minute spot even closer to our apartment and just took the rest of our bags inside so at least that part was done. When we got back to the car we asked a server at a place across the street where we could park overnight and she said there was one street nearby where you could park for free as long as you got out by 8am, which was perfect since we needed to return the car by then anyway. What’s the street called? “Kovel Street,” we thought she said. This turned out not to be true, and we spent the next 45 minutes alternately looking for that street – a process that at various points included downloading an app for a spot we eventually decided against, nearly getting trapped in a tiny little piazza full of cars with only one way in or out, and Kim doing a masterful parallel parking job on a spot that turned out to be reserved for other people – or trying to find a parking garage. One garage we drove into, got our ticket, and found no actual spots where we could park. We were grateful that we actually could get back out. Another place we called and managed to get a reservation even though the guy actively discouraged it, and we were on our way there when we found a street full of white paint that we could actually park in. We tried to pay for it and only managed to pay for 4 minutes of parking due to a misreading of the dates (American style vs European style), but then a passerby told us that we’d actually found Kovel Street (or whatever it was called) and could park there for free.

So it was a bit of an end to the day, but that did nothing to take the shine off a lovely visit to Germany with some wonderful people.

We did get the car back in time the next morning, after all that.