A returning secondee wrote on his blog about the difference between flying out of British airports when you're going anywhere besides the US. I was not prepared for the number of people waiting to check in. In hindsight it makes sense. United's one flight out of Birmingham is the one to Newark. Flybe has multiple flights from Birmingham to cities in Europe and the British Isles. We parked by 5:15, and made it through security by 6:15. Looking at the massive line behind us when we checked our bags, I think arriving much later would have put us in trouble. As it was, we grabbed some food from Boots, and found some empty seats in the hallway to sit and eat while we waited to find out which gate we would board from.
Although I don't have an accompanying photo, my favorite part of the flight to Stuttgart was these words from the gate attendant: Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready to begin boarding. We would like to ask families traveling with young children to board first. It made up for finding out from the flight attendant that paying extra for reserved seats didn't mean anything. It actually didn't because we had our pick of seats on the plane since families got on first.
We stayed in a little village called Bad Boll, about a half hour south-east of Stuttgart. Evidently many village names in the area begin with "Bad." The connotation is when the town has some special trait related to health. Bad Boll has a health resort because the water in its spring contains a high concentration of special minerals.
Our host family for the trip, the Siegels, are another friendship of Kristine's that has stood the test of time and distance. Claudia spent time in West Lafayette as an exchange student when she and Kristine were in high school. The language differences made for an interesting trip. Claudia speaks excellent English. Winfried speaks passable English but often looks to Claudia for help translating. Kristine and I speak almost no German. Our kids speak no German, and their kids speak no English. Credit to both sets of kids for quickly finding activities that they could share without much common language: Making friendship bracelets
Working on puzzles
Playing tag (naturally, boy chases girls)
Going to the local playground
where Elise conquered the climbing wall (and as my editor, vetoed a picture of something between a jump and a fall during her first attempt)
And playing blockflote (okay, so that last one may have had more adult enjoyment from the Collins family, but it was awfully fun).
Over the course of our stay, the kids began experimenting with German and English. Childhood mimicry skills provided some not trivial amusement. I can't transcribe what our girls were doing with German, but here's what I heard from Sophia and Jonathan with English. Elise's "Ready, steady, go!" became Jonathan's "Ready, skeadygo." Or "They're not ahead of us." became "aheadubus." Charis transcribed this joke that Elise came up with about what could happen when English and German speakers try to communicate.
Another highlight from our first day was when Winfried offered us coffee. Claudia's question: Do you like your coffee strong? Because you know, Americans tend to drink their coffee much weaker than German. For a coffee lover like Kristine, it doesn't get much better than being asked if you can handle strong coffee. Which, for the record, was excellent. Snide remark about seeking decent coffee in an island nation obsessed with tea goes here.
Sunday morning we took the train from Eislingen, the nearest train station, to Ulm. Elise was excited to learn that this route includes the steepest grade in Germany. She thought it would be a mountain train like when we went up Snowdon. It was anticlimactic because she kept asking where the steep mountain was, only to find out that we were done climbing and now descending to Ulm. She forgave me when I took all the kids up to the second story on the train.
Clare and Charis found mini-seats that could also fold down and offer a hard surface.
We were in Ulm to visit the cathedral. Our walk from the train station to the cathedral took us past this memorial to Albert Einstein's birthplace.
The cathedral is an extremely impressive work of Gothic architecture. Naturally when sitting in the courtyard, one's mind turns toward the things that Gothic architecture was intended to facilitate: thoughts of the heavens, meditating on things of eternal significance.
The girls did take a break from chasing pigeons when this clock played at about 20 minutes past the hour. The tune was very hand bell-ish in its sound - perhaps in keeping with the bells above the clock. The bird on the pendulum is the symbol for the city of Ulm.
We did make it inside the cathedral. In general, the adults were excited to walk around, gaze, and take pictures.
The cathedral towers had stone carvings of various figures from German history. This photo of Luther is a shout out to my mother and sister.
The children collectively had less patience for hanging around inside. I got this shot of Clare shortly after we entered, which was also shortly before she became bored.
We were able to get this family photo inside the cathedral. Yes, that's a UConn husky on my sweatshirt. Thanks, Daniel.
The cathedral is the tallest of its kind in the world. 161 m. There are steps that let you climb 140 m. Claudia graciously kept Clare and Sophia in the courtyard while the rest of us went. It felt a bit like a neverending stairway. You ascend circular steps in a narrow tower. When passing people who are descending, you both exhale to make yourself as thin as possible while you squeeze past each other. Crowded staircase aside, this climb was another exploration of topics which don't need much language to communicate. The excitement that Elise, Charis and Jonathan shared at being up so high is one of them. We paused about a third of the way up to look down at the courtyard. The open spaces were quite well barricaded to prevent people from falling through them. Elise suggested the thought experiment of a mouse that wasn't clever enough to stay on the inside of the wall, and wound up falling off into the courtyard. It was a funny story when we were only 200 steps up the stairway and enjoying this view of the city farm safely behind bars.
We kept going up to the room above the bells in the tower. This room had the winch system and basket that was used to haul rocks from the ground while building the cathedral. The large round structure in the middle had plastic windows cut into it that let you look down the tower. Lots of kids were scrambling to get up onto the structure, look through the window, and exclaim about how high they were. The excitement didn't need much translation. The blonde head dangling to the left is Charis.
I thought the bell tower level was the top of the steps. I was wrong. Elise found another staircase that said "Way up." That took us even further up the steeple. Excitement at the height was starting to wear off for adults and kids. Except for Charis. She cheerfully reminded us about the careless mouse. The originator of the thought experiment was not amused.
I thought this level was the top of the steps. I was wrong again. There was yet another tower. At this point most of us were ready to head down. Charis pipes up that she wants to go up the last tower. This is the same kid who convinced her older sister to go down the vertical slide at the Bowood adventure playground. I'm beginning to think she's got a daredevil streak hidden under that gentle demeanor. Naturally the rest of us weren't going to be shamed by the youngest person in the party. Up the steps we went.
We were past excitement into endurance with that climb. The tower was narrower than anything lower in the cathedral. It was also the most crowded with people going both up and down. Passing in the stairway was a gentle game of chicken. Whomever stopped first picked their spot - the inside or the outside wall, and then the other party had to keep moving. On the way up, the people coming down stopped on the inside and we squeezed past on the outside wall. On the way down we stopped on the outside to let the folks climbing up squeeze past. Until we got close to the bottom and there was a decent (5 or 6) sized party who stopped against the wall. We had to squeeze past on the inside. Meaning my size 14 shoes had to find the stone on steps that were tapered very narrowly. In theory they were supposed to do this without also finding any feet of the people standing still. In practice? Well, I tried to step gently.
One side effect of the narrow stairways was the echoing voices. At one point, a fellow coming up heard me speaking to Elise in English. When I said "Danke" to him for letting us past, he replied "You're welcome."
768 steps to ascend the 141 m of the stairway. 768 steps to descend back to the courtyard. The girls were exhausted, right? Nope. They were ready to chase pigeons again. We had to tear them away to walk back to the train station.
During some down time that evening, my blog editor proofread the post about our trip to Staten Island.
The highlight of Monday (and probably of the whole trip for the girls) was removal of a hornet's nest from inside the wall of Claudia and Winfried's flat. The hornets have been in the wall for a while. Since they are a protected species, the American response of spraying poison isn't allowed. Several months of being told by various local authorities to not worry, do nothing, and give the hornets time to go away, finally hit a threshold when the hornets began chewing through the wood of the wall. It turned out that Wala, a local manufacturer of homeopathic remedies and beauty products, is low on hornets this year. They happily sent a crew to relocate the nest from the house for free because they wanted the poison from the stingers of the worker bees. Their first step was to connect a vacuum to one side of the carrier box for the hornets, and then run another tube from the box up to the nest. They taped an extension rod to the end of the tube so they could control how they pointed it at the hornets.
The spectators started the event on the couch several feet away from the window. It didn't take them long to move closer to the action.
Mission accomplished - most of the hornets are successfully inside inside the box and ready to move to their new home.
Relocation included taking the hornet larva as well. One of the larva graciously hatched while this fellow showed us the hornets' nest. Resulting in lots of excited comments about cute baby hornets. Go figure.
In the afternoon we drove to the adjacent village to go for a hike. The plan was to make it to the Deutsches Haus.
She was more cheerful further up the hill when she got to look at an interesting plant with Sophia.
At this point most of the kids were pretty tired. We decided that reaching this wooden bench at a fork in the road was a good stopping point to have snacks and turn around. I think we made it between 1 and 2 km up the hill.
The recalcitrant 3 yr old walked for a little way right when we turned around.
She hitched a ride for most of the way. Which meant we were able to stay together a bit better as a group.
I forgave her recalcitrance when we encountered this dead beetle and she exclaimed "Daddy, it doesn't have batteries!"
Then, on seeing this slug, she said that "It's moving because it has batteries."
We spent Tuesday exploring more of the Bad Boll village. One highlight was visiting the local butcher. The varieties of meat, and in particular the varieties of sausage, that we had with Claudia and Winfried was impressive. Seeing the even greater variety available from the butcher was downright mind-boggling. We got to take this picture because he was as excited about having Americans visit his shop as we were to visit.
More than a few tears were shed amongst both sets of children when we said goodbye at the airport. We told them we were happy for the friendship that formed enough during our four days in Germany for the goodbye to be sad, even if we weren't happy that they were crying.
It was raining heavily in Stuttgart when we boarded the plane. Then the plane climbed through the clouds and treated us to a lovely sunset for our 90 minute flight back to Birmingham.
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