You Don't Speak German!

I was playing with the Google Translator app on the tablet at some point between Berlin and Hamburg when I made an alarming discovery.

When traveling in a country where we are unfamiliar with the language, which would be most of them, we had tried to ensure that we could at least manage a botched version of the basics: hello, yes, no, thank you, two beers please, can I use your toilet, and the ever-necessary I'm sorry, I don't speak German/Portugese/Spanish/Italian.

It is on this final point we were having difficulty, although we had no idea. For weeks now, when someone addressed us in German we would shake our heads and say, apologetically but with moderate confidence, some of the few German words we had mastered:

"Sorry, nein sprechensie Deutsch." "Sorry, I don't speak German". We had heard and understood this somewhere in our travels and now used it many times a day.

But nearly every time, there would be a pause, and then the Germans would cock their heads and say, "Bitte?" rather quizzically. Which means, "excuse me?"

We would repeat ourselves, assuming poor pronounciation, at which point they would either give up entirely or recommence in English.

What I discovered with the translator was that in fact to say, "I don't speak German," you say, "Keine spreche Deutsch."

It turns out that for weeks we had been saying, "YOU don't speak German!" with bad grammar, to boot. Which explains all the "bitte" nonsense.

Sorry, Germany. Anyway, on with the story.

After our flurry of touristing in Berlin, on reaching Hamburg, we were ready for a change. So our first evening in town, exploring the waterfront (street beers in hand, of course) accidentally turned into racous night out.

We managed to make it cost-effective by buying beers from kiosks. Hamburg's notorious red light district, just north of the river in St. Pauli, is entertaining enough to just wander. Tragically I lost my dollar store sunglasses, although why I wore them in the first place is still unknown. We left the hostel after dark. I blame the tequila-beer. Always blame the tequila-beer.

Half drunk and peckish, we stumbled into the Portugese quarter (surprise!) and delighted, feasted on shrimp and olives and bread. Good lord do I miss Portugese food.

Jan, who we'd visited in Frankfurt, was in Hamburg for work, so we met up and had a fantastic breakfast at a café near our hostel. Afterwards we got transit passes for the day - in Hamburg, an all day pass is also valid for the ferries, so we spent most of our final afternoon taking various ferry lines across the river and into the interior of the port.

We weren't quite ready to leave Germany, so we decided to spend the weekend camping in Bremen, near the Dutch border.




A massive park stretches five kilometres north from the centre of town, full of paths and canals and forest. Our campsite was on the north end of the park, so we rented bikes and enjoyed our commutes, rather than busing back and forth.

Bremen's medieval centre is preserved, largely because during the second world war, there was a port just north on which the air raids were focused. The two churches at the centre are twelve and eight hundred years old, respectively. Under the larger of the two, there is a display of bodies that were mummified by the extremely dry conditions in the church's crypt. Cool, albeit slightly creepy.

We ate 'goodbye Germany' currywurst in the main station on Sunday morning (yes, morning.) and then we were off to new adventures in a new and even more confusing language: time to break out the Dutch!

S.

Berlin (Go Go Trabi)

We rolled into Berlin at the beginning of a sweltering holiday weekend, so to save some cash, we stayed in a suite at a cheap hotel on the south side of Schöneberg. No problem staying away from the action of Mitte and the Tiergarten, though - Berlin's transit is efficient and prompt.

In our five full days in the city, we saw a couple touristy sites or museums each day. I am not the type to pack my days with lists of 'must-dos,' especially as the city was in the thralls of a heatwave.

Berlin is massive - so even taking the subway system from place to place, we ended up walking for hours through the centre, with its massive buildings and its scars from decades of turbulence, left as a reminder.

The longest remaining portion of the famous Berlin Wall now forms the East Side Gallery - a stretch along the river that is covered in murals and graffiti. In other parts of the city, notably heading west from Checkpoint Charlie, the line of the wall is denoted by a double row of bricks that slices through streets and through neighbourhoods. In East Germany, the wall was backed by a wide kill-zone and then by a smaller interior wall, all guarded by watchtowers and spotlights. So there were, at the collapse of East Germany, large portions of the city centre that were veritable wastelands - entirely undeveloped. For us this was most shocking in Potsdammer Platz. Empty at the breach of the wall, it's now a commercial hub full of modern glass buildings.

Here are the highlights of the touristy stuff, for me:

We did a tour of a ruined Nazi flaktower, dug out of the rubble by the Berlin Underworld society. Definitely recommended. The building itself is massive, hidden under a pile of its own rubble that is now a park. The tour explores the safe sections of the building, and is an interesting foray into the city's war-time mentality.

Checkpoint Charlie, the famous gateway between the two Berlins, takes just a moment to see, but the associated museum, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, would take days to thoroughly explore. It's a scattered, but fantastic collection of information and exhibitions on the Cold War and on the wall itself. Especially interesting were the stories of escapees (and the tragedy of the would-be escapees). The ingenuity and variety of escape methods is astonishing: people shoved themselves into car compartments, tunneled; one man lowered his son over the wall with a pulley.

The DDR museum is smaller, and displays the strange quirks of life in East Germany. Also excellent, and cheap.

And on the subject of East German life: Trabi Safari will give you a guided tour of East Berlin while you drive your very own Trabant, or Trabi: the East German shitbox. Ahem. Car. East German car.

A Trabi in its natural state - broken.

The cars form a convoy and rattle around the streets spewing fumes bad enough to make me lightheaded after an hour and a half of Trabi fun. The tour itself was decent and really demonstrated the physical divide of the city during the war years. But the highlight was obviously driving the Trabis. We both got to drive, and both managed to get it into fourth gear, which is super fast for a Trabi. And ours didn't break down - our tour leader's car did. Ten minutes into the tour. Apparently this is pretty normal.

Lastly, the zoo. The Berlin Zoo is the oldest zoo in Europe. It's tiny compared to the Toronto zoo, far more compact, but still with lots to see. We spent a great half-day wandering around, enjoying the nature after four days of war history.

Recently, we spent a day with a woman who spent ten years living in Berlin, moving away only a few years ago. She told us that, having lived in the city through its second decade of reunification, the city has transformed itself again - but not for the better. The first decade was full of creativity and excitement and the energy of a city forging a new identity - rising from the ashes, if you will permit me the cliché.

But the past few years have seen Berlin commercializing itself. The unique quirks of a city struggling to unite the experience of both east and west are being smoothed into a western, cosmopolitan city. The public spaces that she loved, left empty by the wall, are now filling with condos and office buildings. The rent is high, because the city is now a desirable place to be, but the jobs are not following suit.

So for us, visiting for the first time, the city was incredibly interesting. It has a history and a resilient character that we found captivating. But here is the question: now that commercialism has harnessed the creative energy, can Berlin retain its unique flair, or is it set to become another European city with an exploited soul and a faded hipster vibe?

S.

Frites and Kölsh: Brussels and Cologne

 On the last Thursday in May, my parents left us at the hotel in Brussels. When we re-planned our trip following the Schengen revelation, we decided that at this point, we would strike out immediately for Cologne, opting to spend the time in Germany rather than Belgium. But in the three months we've now been travelling, we've learned that here and there it is essential for our mental and physical health to take breaks, to linger and to relax from the constant pull of European sightseeing. (Hard life, right? Don't hate me. I saved hard for this!)

So now in Brussels, both recovering from nasty colds and reeling from three weeks of motion through the alps and through Normandy, we decided to stay another night, and then another and another. After five days, we found that we'd fallen in love with the lively, charming city we'd planned to practically skip.

The only truly touristy thing we did was to explore an old-fashioned lambic brewery at the Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze, where we were pleasantly surprised by the sour, but delicious gueuze beer. The brewery itself still uses largely original equipment, and still relies on naturally occurring yeasts to ferment and flavour the beer in a unique way. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

Past this, we wandered the twisting, patio-lined streets, admiring the gorgeous buildings from afar. We drank alarmingly strong (and shockingly delicious) beers in brew pubs. We were in town on the weekend of the free jazz marathon - so all of these lovely streets stayed alive long into the nights. And we slept with earplugs, because Brussels knows how to party.

Finally, when we were stuffed to bursting with waffles and frites and moules and frites and beer and chocolates (and frites. I love Belgian frites with mayo SO much), we grabbed a Eurolines bus into the Rhineland.

Here's the thing about Belgium and Germany: you can drink on the streets, in the parks and in any public space. Technically you aren't supposed to drink on public transit, but no one really cares. Kiosks (variety stores) all have bottle openers next to the cash so that you can pull back on your quart right away. And they sell shot-sized bottles of Jagermeister. Although you see the occasional smashed bottle or drunken stumble, this freedom certainly doesn't breed drunken rioting.

We were discussing tactics on hiding our cans for some covert street drinking during the jazz festival in Brussels - a kiosk owner laughed at our conversation and shared this little detail. No need to sneak.

The result? Breakfast beers! Park beers! Beers while wandering the streets! It was all very exciting for us oppressed (and extra-classy) Canadians.

Once we got to Cologne, we met up with Stefan, my friend from school, and his new friends Laura and Jasmine. We spent about eight hours drinking kolsch, the local brew, in the park by the Rhine, catching up and plotting bathroom visits (tricky when the park has no public toilet!).

We shook off our hangovers the next day (I definitely did not envy Stef having to work in the morning) and went out to explore more of this fun, welcoming city. We climbed up the 509 steps of the enormous Dom, Cologne's cathedral, which houses the world's largest in-use bell. Size is, in fact, awfully important when it comes to bells... it rang while we were in the stone passages directly beside it.

So let me tell you this: do not drink the night before you plan to climb church spires.

From the top, the view is unlike that of most of the other European cities we'd seen, Cologne has big, wide streets and modern architecture rather than a tight, congested medieval core. As we were soon to learn, old buildings in Germany are rarer than elsewhere - as in Cologne, many cities were entirely rebuilt after being severely bombed during the war.

Cologne from the top of the cathedral

From Cologne, we grabbed a train to Frankfurt-am-Main to meet Dan's friends, Jan and Daniel for dinner. We only spent a night, in the red light district near the train station - more hilarious than dangerous. Dinner was delicious, in the student area just few U-bahn stops away.

And thankfully, as the e-coli scare ramped up and we were avoiding salads, we were back in the land of my beloved currywurst.

S.

The Road Trip: Alps

We left our linguistic comfort zone behind as we crossed into Italy, heading immediately north along the border and then east, passing just over Milan. In the alpine foothills, we stopped to stock up on two super-greasy pizzas and three magnums of red wine (you cannot be too prepared), and then off we went towards the northern border and the dizzy, snowy heights of the Alps.

That night we drank the first magnum at our campsite perched on a cliff over top of a valley town in Northern Italy with a magnificent view of the nearby peaks. Amid the thick, muffled forest, it's certainly easy to imagine how strange noises could spawn fairy tales and how rumours could attain a legendary quality. Even now, many of the mountain passes close for the entire winter. Although tunnels make the alpine villages much more accessible than in years past, the weight of isolation is easy to feel.

The next morning we packed up and set off into the alps. We had aimed for the famous Stelvio pass in the northern reaches of Lombardia, but after a morning of creative route-making through past the stone houses of a tiny alpine town (what happens when the navigator is also the designated nutella sandwich maker) we found that even in mid-May, the pass was closed.

So we picked our way back west through a different pass, had a delicious pizza lunch at a family-run restaurant at 2000 m altitude, and crossed into Switzerland. We gazed, awestruck, at the Swiss section of the alps - the highest and most picturesquely snowy we'd seen, and then promptly crossed the border into Austria.

We stopped for the night in the Austrian town of Kufstein, a mere four km from the German border and the base for some excellent and accessible hiking. Kufstein is adorably kitchy, complete with a smallish white castle on a hilltop in the middle of town and a medieval section with lederhosen for sale and similarly themed murals on the street walls.

We rose early the next morning and took a chairlift high up between a set of peaks that sits nestled in the Kaiser range - specifically Wilderkaiser and Zahmerkaiser, climbed up a peak in the middle and then walked for hours along the valley that links them. During a dizzying descent full of tiny rock stairs, rebar handholds,  and steep cliffs we watched as a chamonix, the alpine mountain goat, charged down the mountain side, darting nimbly among the trees and rocks and deadly drops.

Leaving Kufstein, we spent four days wandering southern Germany. Although we decided it would be too complicated to see Munich with a car to deal with, we spent a sombre morning learning about Nazi atrocities at the Dachau concentration camp memorial, and then after an afternoon of driving, admired the fabulous exterior of King Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein castle. We camped near Stuttgart and spent a day in the car museums - Dan made it to both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, I only managed the first. Which was very informative and well-organized and even interesting, although by the end I was car'd out.

Our final two German days we spent in the Schwarzwald - the Black Forest, named for its black pines. We hiked around a mountaintop and down into the dense forest, and explored the student town of Freiburg, where the medieval centre is in tact (rare in German towns following the bombings in the war) and where I fell deeply in love with currywurst.

Currywurst! Writing in Amsterdam, I'm hesitant to even think about it because the thought makes me hungry. Currywurst is simple - a wurst, or German sausage, sliced up, smothered in bbq sauce and then sprinkled with curry powder. So simple and so delicious.

We drove from the Schwarzwald back into the Alps and back into Switzerland. Rather, through Switzerland. We drove past Interlaken and out to Jungfrau, but in the fog of a rainy day were unable to see past what I would approximate as 2000 m. We had a similar problem with Mont Blanc, once we crossed the French border. Although we could see the fingers of glaciers poking through the mist, that was all.

We were still two nights from Paris, but for our poor little Fiat, we were done the hard part. After a week of alpine adventures, the brakes were now almost done in and smelled awful on descents, but the champ of a car managed to get us safely back to France.

S.