Bavaria

June 8 – 10, 2022

Dragging our bags through the Munich airport towards the rental cars, I remind myself that no two humans on Earth make a worse navigation team than my children’s parents. If you resurrected every first-week reject from The Amazing Race for an epic Battle of the Losers, my wife and I would place last. So while clucking about a gaggle of confused Avis patrons, trying to tease a line out of surprisingly un-German disorder, I think to look up and plug into GPS the address of our alpine chalet in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Cell data is slow, and Google maps starts to load just as there’s an opening at the counter.  Suggestions that wife and son take over the GPS pre-planning are briskly rejected, so I table the project and commence the sacred rental-car rituals — rituals which, as science confirms, are never shortened by completing the online paperwork beforehand.

We shuffle off to our A6 wagon, load up, and wend our way out of the garage, just as my wife decides it’s time to feed instructions to her hungry cellphone GPS.  Only she can get no cell data, and my jet lagged brain is left to enter the hotel address into my Google Maps, while ignoring angry horns and driving a non-intuitive German-speaking rental-wagon on the busy autobahn.  

Abandoning her cellphone, Joanna launches the car’s nav system, and grabs the first Garmisch address listed, which happens to be some random doctor’s office.  Thrilled with the German language, she quietly translates word-for-word its utterly disquieting directions, barked out in harsh German tone. If not for the calm translation, the commands could only be understood to mean “halt, pull over, and show us your papers.”  

All this has the predictable result of raising blood pressure and making it hard to hear the useful information offered in the soothing British voice of my Google Maps.  I beg — without success — to silence this duet of hard German gibberish and soft spousal translation. This Gestap-and-start to Dr. Mengele’s Garmisch office continues until my wife tells me — I scheisse you not — that I may now ignore the car’s nav completely.

We arrive mid-afternoon at our Gasthof. A walk along the cobblestoned Ludwigstrasse helps fend off the siren-song of irresponsible napping. In the narrow alleys of the old town, feral alpine eyes peer at us from behind misty beer glasses.

My wife points out the symbols over the entrances of some of the old buildings.  Centuries ago, when many lacked the ability to read (or, oddly, to recognize shapes that happened to form words), artisans and shopkeepers displayed unique symbols outside their shops to indicate their brand, like a pre-industrial trademark.

Our Gasthof restaurant has declared today a rest-day Ruhetag, which we come to learn can be any day of the week or any time of the day.  So we dine at an Italian café next door.  So we dine at the Italian café next door. The sidewalk table is perfect for relentless Volks-watching; less perfect for the microwaved hot pockets and tomato-paste pitas that later join our table. 

Cash is Kaiser, I learn when the bill arrives, and my backup credit card is tolerated only if I walk it to a dusty card-reader fixed behind the serving counter.  Feel free to leave home without your AmEx here or anywhere outside of Munich. 

Germany, it turns out, still harbors a surprising number of illiterates, which is how I’ve taken to referring to locals who fail to speak immediate, flawless English when it would benefit me. Take breakfast, morning one.  Joanna and I take seat at a window table in the main dining room, wondering if the included breakfast is delivered or fetched.  A perfect Zen-nothingness eventually leads us to surmise there to be a back nook where breakfast is obtained, and we wander that way.

We find a small spread of sliced cheese — both dairy and head — some fruit, and a massive void where coffee and carbs ought to be. Having lost the will to jump to the other side of my Skinner box, I quickly accept defeat and return to my table with a slice of cheese and a miniature carton of yogurt.

A large, frightening Fraukenstein follows me and begins to berate me in an unintelligible angry yammering.  Is the cheese merely ornamental, I wonder?  Reserved for elite clientele?  Does she somehow know I’m going to try to use a credit card?  Seeing my confusion, the illiterate deems me deaf, rather than merely dumb, and figures louder volume will help me understand.  The other nearby tables now eye me disapprovingly.  “I can’t sit here?,” I earnestly ask in the world’s most universal language.  “Vat ruhm nomba” she barks, accusing me, I can only assume, of freeloading this fine feast.  “Room ten,” I plead, and she motions me, like a dog caught on the couch, back to the corner nook where Joanna is hiding any bilingual assistance.  I scurry along behind her, and she rewards me with a basket of biscuits and coffee.  I’ll never get on that fucking couch again.

Prepared for drizzle, we suit up and hike the Partnach Gorge. The man-made tunnel carved beside the roaring river is spectacular — fully worth getting drenched by mist and tourists. 

At the far end of the gorge tunnel, there’s a maximum-security turnstile to prevent hordes of desperate lowlifes from ducking the 6 euro fee.    

Mating ticket with reader allows a strong push to move the turnstile only temporarily.  So my 40-pound daughter’s efforts are rewarded with only a half-turn that leaves her in stuck in the jaws of this venus flytrap.  My wife quickly unsheathes her ticket and steps up to save Emilie with a full turn that frees the girl, but traps the mother in her place.  With unthinking courage and an intent to brainlessly repeat the process, I rush to sacrifice myself, when my son casually suggests that Emilie simply pass her ticket through the bars to let my wife out.  Ok, yeah, I was just going to suggest that, I lie. 

The man-eater now defeated, we climb a steep trail to an alpine ridge that loops back to our starting point.  

On the hike, I contemplate why natural selection has engineered children to walk directly in front of their parents, slow down, and try to trip them.  Sure, maybe if the kids are self-sufficient, and the aim is to secure a dead parent’s scarce resources.  But the practice is common well before they can survive on their own.  I eventually institute an 1 euro fine for acts of Oedipal ambulatory violence, to be assessed against the child’s travel allowance, which rule proves deterrent enough not to require enforcement.

My wife lived in Germany for two years—a huge asset on this trip. Not only can she deal with illiterates, but she also cheerily teaches the children (and their presumptive Y-chromosome donor) lessons about the language and culture.  Uncomfortable with that imbalance of authority, I supplement my wife’s thoughtful instruction with parental teaching of my own.  See that sign, “Weiss Betreten Verboten,” that means “not even white people are allowed in there,” I say to my 9-year old in a voice I wrongly think to be quieter than my wife can hear. “Only ausfahrt, not einfahrt, requires polite apology,” not even my 14-year old boy finds humorous.

As helpful as my wife’s German knowledge is, the distance from her cultural immersion — now approaching 25 years — sometimes shows itself.  When I suggest we order our coffee and pastries to take with us to the park, she chucklingly explains that small coffee shops like this one don’t offer a “to go” option.  On cue, the barista behind a stack of plastic lids asks in English if we’d like it for here or to go.  My vindication high is cut short by merciless kinder-ridicule, when I try to drink out of my straw, which turns out to be the solid, round handle of a spoon. 

For weeks in preparing for the trip, my wife tells the family that Germans eat only one big meal — lunch — followed by 4pm coffee and sweet snack known as Kaffeetrinken and maybe a light dinner later on. My children hear “sweet snack at 4pm,” and each day on this trip is now built around it.  We see no signs that this dining pattern remains a local practice, but we’ll damn well do our part to revive it.

On day one, my wife primes each child with its own 3:30 pm diabeties-sized chocolate bar.  I declare these must disqualify them from the official 4 pm sweet snack — a stance undermined by simultaneous whining and a spousal glance that says I am, at best, on my own. 

So I draw a hard Maginot Line: only a small treat at 4pm. Banking on short memories and tired parental indifference, my daughter proceeds to order the largest chocolate-dipped item in the pastry case, eat about a quarter of it, and squirrel away the remainder for a new German ritual: the “10 pm sweet snack.”

At our second Gasthof breakfast, my wife interrupts my vigilant watch for any sign of the terrifying Fraukenstein and directs the kinder and me to a series of wall-mounted black and white photos of past patrons with what appear to be nicknames written under them.  Pointing out several that end in an L, she notes that if you stick an L on the end of a German word, it makes a diminutive, like ito/ita in Spanish. We sponge that up in our growing Bavarian knowledge. “Take the N out” is family code (or at least one of its members tried to make it so) for a healthy bodily function, with etymologic derivation from our daily meal of schnitzel. “Take the N and L out” is now if the situation is more serious.

While that family code is consistent, “what” means different things in my family.  Only sometimes does it mean “pardon me, but I did not hear that.”  Very often it means “kindly pause while I process those things I plainly heard.”  Or with a rising “uh” that chases, but never quite catches, the t: “Parent, you annoy my teen sensibilities and should consider your question retracted.”  The bastardl.