Wednesday:
We woke up to pouring rain, which made it a perfect day for visiting the Zeppelin museum; it's crazy how many accidents/disasters the airships had during the course of their existence, and how weird it is that usually technology always progresses but the passenger-toting Zeppelins came to an abrupt end. The most famous one, the Hindenburg, flew from 1928 to 1937, when the flight of the LZ Graf 127 ended in a blazing flame and killed 35 passengers over the Atlantic. The museum had tons of photos and a life-size replica of the inside of the blimp, which was big enough to have hallways and beds and cafes with big windows to the clouds.
After the museum, we walked around a little in the drizzle and ended up at a bakery with self-serve lunch items and snacks. I ate a mediocre chicken bbq sandwich on a multigrain baguette and had a delicious chocolate muffin baked with a hint of mint. We walked around for about an hour after lunch and then started driving to our AirBnB destination in the Black Forest-- Doug had booked us a nice big house in a place called Lenzkirch. He gave me the sunny upstairs bedroom with a cute little table and he slept on the cooler ground floor. Just as we were leaving the house for dinner, a really old couple appeared out of our back yard; they both were in their upper 80s and neither one of them seemed particularly "all there"-- the old man introduced them in German as neighbors who lived down the street, but when Doug asked if they were on a designated walking path they were like oh no this is all private land, and then the man immediately started talking in both German and very accented English about the Second World War... His wife changed the subject, or maybe it was Doug asking about a good restaurant recommendation, but suddenly he was talking about the war again. The whole thing seemed so much like they were characters you'd meet in a quest. Before they walked away, I asked again if there was a good place to eat, and the man said there's a nice Italian place down by the water. I think that's where we ended up--we split lasagna and Hawaiian Pizza at Il Carpaccio and then went back to the AirBnB where I blogged on the living room couch while Doug researched hikes. I really do love writing with someone, or many people, in the room--as long as I know they won't interrupt me.
Thursday:
Thursday morning, Doug got some treats from the bakery and then by 11 or so we were hiking the Feldbergsteig path in the Southern Black Forest Nature Park. The nearly 8-mile-long hike was designed sort of like a pilgrimage path, with restaurants and huts along the way to refuel. We ate our lunch on a wooden bench as schoolchildren ran around kicking balls and arguing about who was the better soccer player. It was a beautiful hike with long stretches of solitude, lilac flowers buzzing with bees and the scent of wood chips, but I was having a rough week mentally and was feeling totally disengaged.
We saved our little chocolate-filled cookies for later in the hike, where we sat in the grass by a little mountain lake and snacked and took photos with Doug's camera. For dinner we drove to Titisee, a touristy little town where Doug ate his first schnitzel at the Bergs Restaurant by the lake. We thought we could demolish both a Black Forest Cake and a big ice cream becher, but after the cake we could hardly eat the icecream--I took some obligatory bites of whipped cream and dipped my spoon to the bottom to get some cold scoops of vanilla. That night we watched a couple episodes of Friends from College, a show I got really into the first season of but then not so much the second one; it's always weird when you can sense the awkwardness of the actors after a break in filming, and how the writers try to change personality traits of the characters before it gets too late.
Friday:
On Friday we paddled around the lake in Titisee on a cute little orange and yellow boat and talked about my favorite subject, relationships! The scenery reminded me very much of the cold kayak paddling Doug and I did in Maine back in October, except this time there was full sun and we were hot enough to dip our hands in the totally refreshing lake water. After our hour-long paddle around the lake, we drove to Triberg, a town with the highest waterfall in Germany and the world's largest cuckoo clock--both very touristy things that in my mind were sort of beside the point. The waterfall had paved ramps all the way up and was littered with people, and the biggest cuckoo clock was totally cute but the normal sized cuckoo clocks were way more impressive; we walked into one shop and chatted with the owner Christian, who told us he was a third-generation cuckoo clock maker. While the rest of the town was full of manufactured clocks, this store had crumbles of stone on the second floor from where Christian chipped away at little forest animals and village people he pinned on wooden carousels. I'd visit that town again for that store alone, to see Christian's somewhat tired but still boyish smile watch the little birds he made pop out of their doors.
After debating whether Doug or I should buy a cuckoo clock from this man, particularly one with the deeply resonant church bell sounds, we decided to duck into a very touristy lodge-style restaurant and grab another slice of Black Forest Cake, which was perfectly moist and cool and way better than the one at Titisee. We visited the big cuckoo clock house after that and met Katrina, an older French lady who had been camping around the Black Forest with her bicycle all week. She was telling us how people always ask her if she's scared as a single female, and how her response is that actually 99 percent of people are good, and she meets the best ones when she's out traveling--people offer her food and warm places to stay.
That night we drove to the (basically medieval) town Schiltach in the eastern Black Forest, our favorite town yet with the best schnitzel: fried skin that fell right off the tender pork, served with spätzle, dumpling-like German egg noodles. MmMmMm. After our delicious food at Gasthof Sonne, we took tons of photos with Doug's camera on narrow cobblestone paths and then popped into a gelato shop where I got a scoop of stracciatella: it's one of those icecream flavors that always sounds better to me than all the others but sometimes I think it doesn't have much taste at all? There was an art event happening by the canal in the town center--people were sipping wine and beer and watching artists paint the inside of a translucent blow-up ball. The whole place really felt like a storybook town: somewhere you could imagine knights and witches and beer-bellied man stumbling out of short stone archways.
Saturday:
We left our AirBnB at 11 am on Saturday and drove about 15 minutes to the 6.5 mile Rotenbachschlucht hike. It ended up being our least favorite hike: very woodsy and Tennessee-like with bugs and not many views. We found stretches of peace and a mushroom or two, but we were both relieved to get back to the car, where we drove the Autobahn back to Munich and Doug had an adrenaline spike hitting 180 km/hour (that's 111 mph...)--an ultimate reward for driving us the whole time, navigating strange German signs (does "frei" mean you're free to go or the street is "free of" bikes and cars?!) and parallel parking! We stopped in a couple of random and mostly unimpressive towns, at least compared to Shiltach, before finally arriving at our Dachau hotel that evening, where we ate dinner at some touristy brewery that gave us big plates of yummy food: more spätzle and schnitzel.
Sunday:
We spent most of the day Sunday walking around the Dachau concentration camp, which was in operation from 1933 to 1945 (the longest of all of them); it's strange to say that out of all the museums we've visited this trip that one was my favorite, but it was the one that resonated the most. It was one of the few museums I've been to in life that I'll never forget: seeing all the photographs of starving men in stripes, reading tragic phrases like "swaying skeletons" from first-hand accounts, wrapping my brain around the purpose of a camp-appointed doctor who was forbidden to actually treat the sick and dying. Learning about military lab rats: humans who were submerged in below-freezing water to test which limbs hypothermia kills first, who died during high-altitude experiments that put them in extreme low-pressure chambers. Reading about sadism at its core, people infected by power, who tortured fellow men for magnificent thrills. Studying the "Eine Laus--Dein Tod!" (One lice: your death!) poster and imagining the demented act of using your artistic talent to manipulate and scare your fellow inmates and misinform the outside world. Imagining writing a postcard from Dachau to your family that said everything was just fine and they shouldn't worry. And, of course, walking through the gas chambers: standing there in the cool concrete room with Doug, the only two people in there for a good thirty seconds or so, looking at the ventilation holes at the top of the room and imagining the fear of the people who walked in. Moving around the sloped burial rooms and wondering how long it took to scrub blood and bodies from the floor; studying a photograph of a heap of the prisoners' clothes and thinking it looked nearly the same as the one full of bodies--being unable to distinguish what was skin and what was fabric from the way the humans lay slack in a pile.
It feels weird to sharply transition from Sunday's somber visit to the hedonism of Monday (shopping and eating) but there we were: on our final day in Munich we went back to the town center, popped into some shops (including one where I bought a bright red floral backpack), ate delicious cinnamon rolls, and then drove to our last hotel of the trip by the airport. We stopped at the grocery store and got an impressive and delightful spread of snacks (meats, cheeses, bread, quark, blueberries, strawberries, crackers, peanut butter) for dinner, which we ate in the hotel room while finishing Season 2 of Friends from College, which really was not as good as Season 1, but eating while watching always makes everything so much better.
I spent some time that night packing and organizing my suitcase, stuffing every last bit into it, only to get to the airport Tuesday morning and have to unload about five kilos into a carry-on bag. My big suitcase now has a cracked/broken wheel, frayed edges, a broken zipper...but it still carries things I need, especially the two breezy outfits I wore over and over again in Munich as I contemplated whether or not I could actually be a two-outfit girl. I don't think so, but Doug and I always talk a lot about different realities/versions of our lives, and it really is fun to imagine a kind of "stationary nomad" life (where you rotate "home bases" throughout the year and use those as jumping off points to other locations). This whole adventure so far has reminded me that effectively doing that requires not just money but a more practiced level of being able to let things go: expectations, anxieties, belongings. Figuring out not only what needs to be packed and what can be left, but how...
Comments