With nearly eight thousand words behind me, I wanted to run through a few items that didn't fit anywhere, and give my overall impression of Bavaria and surrounding nations.
Carnival
Despite New Orleans' plight after Katrina, there is no monopoly on frenzied party prior to Lent.
In a country as Christian as Germany, confetti still peppered space between stones in Munich's altstadt.
As for Wunsiedel, when the carnival season rages, we saw our share of teens dressed for the occasion (they can drink beer at 16, so it's all fare game). Wunsiedel sat in Franconia, a culturally distinct and deeply religious region swallowed up by Bavaria, so when midnight hits and Tuesday rolls into Ash Wednesday, the celebration ceases.
Yet there were no surging drunken mobs or OU Halloween-grade incidents with the police. It was almost placid, minus the parade float with a giant boot kicking the rear end of a Bavarian state minister-president Edmund Stoiber in effigy (this was in the Tuesday morning paper; we only saw the remains of the carnival parades on public squares and altstadts).
Die Hunde waren wunderbar
German dogs are by far the best behaved on the planet. Commands given in that tongue are harsh, and every time one drifted from its owner, a swift verbal reminder brought the dog back on course.
They trotted into bars and restaurants with their owners and rarely walked on leashes.
Sometimes a muzzle will intrude beneath the table, though with a word, it will withdraw just as quickly as the owner warns their pet.
Actually, among the few tethered dogs I saw, one leash stuck further than all others – it was folded up and the shepherd mix carried it in his/her mouth as it followed its owner through Munich's altstadt.
Whenever I get a dog, it will learn commands in German.
How could the once and future hound ignore a curt “Achtung!” after nosing through the garbage for chicken bones?
The German keyboard blues
The programs are all the same, and figuring out how to check English-language web pages from German versions of the search engines was simple.
But the typing took a few minutes to grow familiar.
I typed the key where “y” normally sits and found it missing. The keyboard took a quick primer at Dietmar's house or the Internet cafes where I swept away massive volumes of irrelevant work e-mails.
The @ symbol so vital to e-mail appeared only with a string of simultaneously-tapped keys.
And since the German language includes a few extra alphabet options, they too make their mark - a,o and u with umlauts all have their own keys, as does the long “s” that to Americans looks like a distorted capital B. Control+Alt+E will get you the symbol for the Euro.
I never typed comfortably as to where my falling fingers landed.
Walk on
The big conclusion I've drawn is while my linguistic skills needed improvement, my sensibilities are much more European than I ever imagined.
I like walking everywhere, past churches conceived by kings and bishops who died centuries before Columbus' fleet dropped anchor in the Caribbean. And we walked a lot – I'd estimate we covered 5-7 miles a day, possibly more in Munich. My legs were constantly sore and my feet blistered by the second day in Munich. However, there was a lot of sausage to burn off.
Drivers respect pedestrians, and I would not be alone in biking down congested streets. Many larger Munich boulevard reserve a portion of sidewalk for their bike commuters, and no one cares where you hail from so long as you meet or exceed the pack speed – or stay our of their way.
Germans don't like bullshit and phonies. If that means they come off as cold on the introduction, so be it. At least they're real, and not seething beneath a friendly veneer. Most of the people we encountered couldn't have been friendlier – I could have, by relearning more of their language. At most stops, the Germans did not scoff at the effort; it isn't as if I was in France. They appreciated that I tried to navigate their language, even if my raft was filled with holes.
The social end is similar to the States, yet drastically more comfortable. Strolling into the corner tavern for a few to wind down the night is past-time familiar to many here, but in Germany, it's a rich tradition, with patrons occupying the same tables for bull sessions or card games over decades. There were no frat boy types gulping down shots on their short, rough path to middle age.
The Thalgau Josephs had their fun, but it was not harassment; there was no punishment for failing their German language litmus test but a little mockery. I wouldn't mind brushing up on mein Deutsch and taking another shot; I don't think they'd mind.
After waking up to clanging in the belfries, I want to stop on the town square to chat with neighbors and friends.
That speaks to why I live in an older (chuckle away) area of Columbus, where I can accomplish most business on foot, and almost always run into a familiar face in the grocery or tavern.
So what does all this adds up to? Better odds of an annual trip to the Germanic countries.
(For now, an ending – with the wanderlust for a second round)
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