CHAPTER 16: WIESBADEN, GERMANY
Saturday, October 23

Your favorite homeless couple is now in Wiesbaden, Germany, just a little west of Frankfurt. Our adventures are coming along faster than we can write these chapters. In our last one, we told you about our Netherlands stay up through Monday the 18th. This chapter will cover the five days after that.

For our last day on the north side of Europe, we decided to go visit Brussels, Belgium. We took a train down, which turned out to be most interesting. We shared a car with a bunch of American college students. They were from a variety of schools and were doing a 3-city European tour for a course on "sexuality". (You mean they're offering courses on this now? Sheesh, when I was in college, all we had were non-credit, self-paced labs for sex ed. Just getting to first base was a challenge, much less getting a European tour out of it!). I'm pleased to report that American college kids are just as inane as they have always been (my generation included). Every third word was "like", and they have an odd way of phrasing declarative sentences so that they sound like questions. Some samples of their conversation:
- "Like, it has to do with, you know, history, 'cause it's, like, historical?"
- "Abortion is, like, a women's issue, because 80% of the people who have abortions are, like, women?"
- "I am SO THERE!!"

The Dutch landscape is billiard-table flat. You can calibrate a carpenter's level on it. The highest land between our bungalow and the sea was the railroad overpass, even though we were over three hours inland from the coast.

Fall is definitely here. It's getting quite cool now, with lows in the low 30's. The frost is on the pumpkin. Leaves are changing and falling. Many of the old farmhouses are covered in ivy that is now turning a brilliant crimson. We were kicking the leaves as we walked along the road to our Dutch bungalow. While on the train, we passed by a Dutch turf farm and saw a guy with a leaf blower, clearing the leaves off the 5-acre turf field.

Brussels was a wonderful city. While the Netherlands is very Germanic in language and habits, Brussels is very definitely French. The architecture is French, the people largely spoke French, and most people dressed with a French flair. Also, the waiters are slow as molasses, and the only thing slower than the waiter is deodorant sales. The city center is hilly and covered with narrow streets and wonderful old baroque buildings. We found quite a few old plazas surrounded by ornate churches and ancient merchant buildings. Gold leaf is (or was once) a thriving business, as we saw statues, clocks, shields, and other emblems heavily covered with it.

Stores in downtown Brussels are tightly grouped by type. If you want stamps or coins, you go to one particular street, and you'll find store after store selling nothing but stamps and coins. If you want antiques, there are a few particular blocks that you go to. We even went down one street where almost every shop sold Greek gyros. Outside that particular area, they're hard to find, but go to the right street and you can have your choice. Somehow we missed the diamond district. Danged if I know how we did, but thank God for small favors!

The Belgian waffle is quite a delicacy. There are small stands all over the city selling waffles. You can get them plain or covered in various kinds of sugar or chocolate or both. We each had one covered with some sort of toasted maple syrup, and it was to die for.

So we had a very enjoyable visit to Brussels. We got home early enough to finish packing, and the next morning we headed for Germany. Our route took us by the Dutch border city of Nijmegan and down the western side of Germany, a bit west of Dusseldorf, Cologne, and Bonn. At Koblenz, we cut east over the Rhine and then south into Wiesbaden. We found the hotel with only a little bit of trouble and have settled in for our stay. We're in the American Arms Hotel, which is an American military hotel and conference center near central Wiesbaden. We've got a nice room: large comfortable bed, plenty of hot water, a large laundromat, and the military TV channel AFRTS (we don't know yet if that's a blessing or a curse, but at least it's in American English). The only problem we've identified so far is that the phones are antiques and we can't connect to the Internet from here. We found a place on base to check email, but it had Model T computers and couldn't do everything we needed. Subsequently, I found a cyber cafe downtown with modern computers, but its keyboards are German and quite a bit different from the U.S. ones.

Wiesbaden is a nice city. Friendly people, well-kept buildings, and a beautiful car-free city center. We wandered all around the downtown area, poking our heads into shops, admiring the wonderful red brick cathedral, and getting a feel for this city. It's an interesting combination of old and new. It took some damage during World War II, but had been built up again and has a thriving economy based on industry, business, military, and tourism. We stopped in a small cafe and had a perfect crumb cake and cappuccino. We were hugely entertained by an old couple in a nearby booth. The man had started to read a newspaper and had fallen sound asleep, with his head almost on the table. The woman was equally asleep with her head bolt upright. Yep, there are exciting times to be had in German coffeehouses!

Yesterday we took a day-long trip on a tour boat down the Rhine River. It went from Wiesbaden to St. Goarshausen and back, a distance of 3 hours down and 5 hours back. What a wonderful trip! At first, the countryside was fairly flat, then suddenly the river took a right turn into a valley cut through the Taunus mountains. There were vineyards going straight up the mountainsides. We passed by Johannisburg (home of Johannisburg Reisling) and a number of small villages with their own particular varieties of wine. Each village was filled with ancient half-timbered or stone buildings and looked like it came straight off a model railroad set. Once we got into the mountain valleys, we were never out of sight of a castle. Often there were two or three in sight at any one time. Some of the castles are carefully maintained ruins. Some have been fixed up and are now hotels, while others are strictly private mansions. The trees are changing colors: reds, yellows, and golds. It was a perfect day: nice, sunny, and cool. Once we returned to Wiesbaden, we found a very good Mexican restaurant and had dinner.

Here in the hotel, the bartender is an Italian named (what else) Antonio. The other night, one of the hotel workers brought up the Ferrari Formula 1 team's disqualification from the Malaysian Grand Prix. You have never seen anybody get as passionate about any sport like Antonio got about Ferrari. Holy cow. Actually, he started talking very much like a Ferrari races: the volume went up, the speed went up, the arms started waving, and he kept going over the same ground over and over and over again. Hugely entertaining! The most dedicated NASCAR fan cannot even begin to approach the passion that an Italian has for Ferrari.

One thing we're starting to run into, now that we've been to a number of countries, is the hassle of changing money. We've got American dollars, British pounds, Dutch guilders, Belgian franks, and German marks. After several weeks in the UK, we got used to the exchange rate (about $1.65 to the pound) and could quickly do mental conversions back and forth. The Dutch currency was even easier, right at 2 guilders to the dollar. In Belgium, however, the rate was 35 franks to the dollar ... now how the hell do you convert that? Here in Germany, the rate is 1.8 marks to the dollar, which is a bit like the UK conversion rate only in reverse, so we're able to deal with it fairly well ("divide by two and add a bit").

Another challenge is turning out to be with the different languages. After three years in Japan, we were accustomed to saying things like "hai" and "domo" and "kudasai". We still do, only here those words don't do squat for you. In a Brussels restaurant, I got flustered and ran through four languages before I got the right one ("Hai ... er, si ... er, ja .... uh, da? ... Oh, yeah, OUI!") The waiter was not impressed. But then, he had never heard of deodorant, so we weren't impressed, either.

Previous Chapter | "Trip" Table of Contents | Next Chapter