Every Abend is Feierabend

I make two euros and 18 cents per hour. I'm happy to be getting that much. In fact, I might go so far as to say that that's pretty good, given that I have absolutely no work permits or German residency papers. While I am currently content, I imagine that this is the last time that my per-hour breakdown is going to be so meager. Well, maybe this is just going to be the last time such a pay rate will be satisfactory. In any case, it's an interesting perspective to think that hour of my time amounts to exactly enough money to buy two packs of German Haribo assorted flavor gummy bears.

Now that my parents are gone and vacation is over, the process of settling in has begun. I'm still not quite sure what exactly that entails or how to complete it, but I'm almost positive that it starts with getting residency and work permits (number one on every To-Do list scattered throughout my room). American citizens, as well as those from several other countries, are permitted to stay in Germany without any visa or official documentation for three months, so technically I'm still legit. To become a resident, one must apply at City Hall and then simply wait to see if the request is accepted. I have two more months to complete said task, but I think the sooner the better.

The other aspects of becoming a settled German are going much better, namely finding somewhere to live and getting a job. As for living arrangements, they were all but organized for me before I arrived (another shout out to the Walter family for hooking me way up). I am living in downtown Würzburg in a three bedroom apartment with a kitchen, a bathroom, a hallway that connects all five rooms, light switches that aren't in the rooms they turn the lights on in, and no laundry facilities (as you can see in the photo, my room is currently doubling as a dryer). The apartment itself is very new, the location is fantastic and rent is cheaper than any equivalent that you'd find in the US (save a room in Montana or Minnesota). My two roommates are both students at Universität Würzburg, the well-known Stefan who studies physics and Viktoria Killian who is a law student finishing up the last of her exams before she enters the world of German Justice (which I can only imagine is extremely convoluted and littered with all kinds of enormous words). I'm still finishing getting all the last little pieces of my room put in place - a laundry basket for the pile of clothes leaking out from behind my door, a makeshift closet where I can actually hang things instead of draping them over the back of a chair, a rug to dampen the amazing echo produced by every sound wave that travels through my room, and a clock so I don't have to go into the kitchen to see what time it is. It's a work in progress, to say the very least.

Life at work is slightly more organized, but only slightly. I currently have a "paid" internship at St. Martin Schule in Kitzingen, a city about 20 kilometers outside of Würzburg. It's a school for mentally and physically disabled children from kindergarten through high school. I'm working virtually full time and it has taken two weeks for them to figure out where they want me, so I've been bouncing around, spending a lot of time wondering what it is I should be doing, occupying myself by playing a game where I trying to translate the nasty Franconian dialect spoken by the teachers. But after two slightly awkward weeks of figuring out my place at St. Martin, I now feel more adjusted and comfortable.

Working with disabled children is something so wildly different than any other job I've had. Communicating with the kids requires a graceful balance, a balance between patience and firmness, between questions and answers, between holding on and letting go, between using your words and using your hands. I joke a little when I say that I did little more than stand around; actually, I'm surprised at the amount of things that I've done in just two weeks. My first week I was filling in for another intern who wasn't able to come and I got the chance to work with the same group of children for several days in a row and see how you can strike this seemingly impossible balance.

One student in the class is Jonathan, an eight year old with severe Autism that has stripped his ability to speak. His condition is such that he requires a personal aide, a role that I was asked to fill. Jonathan experiences the world through his sensory nerves - touching that which has interesting texture, and listening to things that make exciting, often irritating, sounds. At first he was rather wary of me, given that I was a unfamiliar person and he didn't know what to expect. I gave him his space, helped him clean up when he made a mess, pushed him around in his stroller allowing him to drift his hands through the long, wavy blades of grass and sat by his side during meals to make sure that he had everything he needed. We built a trust and a system of communication that was completely independent of words. Jonathan doesn't recognize me through my voice or my appearance, but through the way I feel. He is absolutely fixed on my beard, for example. When we spend time together, he'll give it a rub every few minutes just to make sure that it's still in fact me that he's with. He's also discovered my hands and how they can be used to apply pressure to his body when he craves touch. I spend a lot of time giving him foot massages and scratching his back; that, coupled with touching my beard, seems to calm him down, even in his moments of more severe distress. I spend a lot of time wondering what it is that he's thinking; is his mind quiet, or is it racing? Are his thoughts simple or complex? The answers may never come, but I'm glad that I can at least contribute something positive to his life, a life that he didn't choose, and to a large degree, he cannot control.

The other students I work with, both in Jonathan's class and throughout all the other groups I help, all require separate communication strategies, the assembly thereof having been an exciting process for me. For those who can speak, we talk and oftentimes I am the one who feels hindered given that everything operates in German. We read together, do math, with the older students we play boardgames, build things in woodshop and discuss the latest German soccer matches (I just spend most of the time in these conversations offering various phrases of agreement with whatever point is brought up because I know next to nothing about the trade deal between Schweinsteiger and Müller.) The whole experience of working everyday with the kids has forced my German to improve very quickly, not only to decipher what it is the students are saying, but so that I can respond promptly and accurately. Another benefit is that I now know the words for all things that you would find in a woodshop, like a Bandsägemaschine or a Kreuzschlitzschraubenzieher. It will be interesting to see what my vocabulary looks like at the end of my internship at St. Martins. My time there is going to be challenging, but I have no doubts that it will be one of the most rewarding endeavors of my life.

I get off work everyday at 3:30pm and come back to Würzburg with one of the teachers who lives about a kilometer away from me, a carpool that saves me a boatload on train tickets (a one way fare costs about three hours of work). This leads me into perhaps my favorite part of life in Deutschland: Feierabend. The German language is amazing in that it has a word for almost everything, including, in this case, the part of the day right when you get off work. It literally translates to "Festival Evening," a translation that took me aback when I first heard it. I was at the grocery store picking up some delicious German bread (something so miraculous that deserves its own post all together) and the cashier bade me farewell by commanding me to enjoy my festival evening. Confused, but excited there was a festival on a Tuesday, I asked Viktoria what the woman had meant. Vicky explained that that is what Germans call the evening after a day of work and that, alas, there was no secret Tuesday festival awaiting me in downtown Würzburg. Nevertheless, I find it to be a wonderful word, one that reminds me that work is a means to live, and that life isn't a means to work. And the best thing about my Feierabends is that I have nothing to do. No homework, no studying for the MCAT, no second job to get ready for (yet...). If I feel like reading, cooking, watching a movie, exercising (well, that's more of a personal obligation than a choice), wandering down to the Main River to people watch, I can. These are just some of the endless possibilities of Feierabend. I am going to enjoy very much for the next two years of my life to leave work and take nothing home - my time is my time. Sunday is no longer a frantic scramble to make up for Saturday when I should have been preparing for Monday. I can literally take it one day at a time and there is nothing wrong with going to bed at 9:15pm if I feel like it. I better enjoy it now because I'm pretty sure that there aren't any Feierabends in medical school, or in life as a physician for that matter.

That's a rather thorough summary of my life up to this point. The only other activity that I can think of that I do with frequency is run, something that has done a lot to get me in good shape and also familiarize myself with my new city. We are training for a half marathon in November, and as part of the regiment, Stefan and I took part in a local 1oK race last weekend and did well [42:06 (19th place) and 42:12 (20th place) respectively]. We have plans to do a three more in the upcoming weeks with the lofty goal being to finish in under 40 minutes. Another training run was a 25 kilometer (15.75ish miles) hill run that paralyzed the both of use for two days and gave us due respect for anybody that runs marathons. Good thing I'm only committed to a half...

Touring to Farewell

It looks like it's time to play a little catch up on the documentation of my life in Europe, but in my defense, we've been all over the place in the last couple of weeks. Excuses aside, here is a recap that I can only hope does justice to the wonderful weeks I've had.

My parents flew in to Munich on the 30th of August and after picking them and their luggage up (half of which was stuff I forgot) we continued heading south toward Austria. We were embarking on our week long tour of some of the major cities of Eastern Europe - Salzburg, Budapest, Vienna and Prague to be exact. It would be impossible to recount all the details of the trip without writing a novel, so I'll give a few highlights from each city.

Salzburg

At the end of our tour we looked back at the cities that we had seen and Salzburg wasn't particularly anybody's favorite. We chalked it up to the fact that we had pretty miserable weather. But in thinking about it more wholly, the city doesn't really stick out in my mind as boasting anything particularly unique other than it's vibrant classical music scene. Their intense love for the classics is most notably tied to Mozart, as the well known 18th century composer was born in Salzburg. Other than the big yellow house downtown which reads in large gold letters "Mozart's Birth House," their pride for Wolfgang manifests itself in little chocolate balls with Mozart's bust printed on the foil. Maybe I missed something, but I don't see the connection. Almost every store, in addition to their main item of sale, sold Mozart Balls - pastries and Mozart Balls, Rolex watches and Mozart Balls, tickets to a classical music show and a complimentary sample taste of Mozart's Chocolate Balls! The number of chocolate balls in that city was almost offensive, but I can't deny that they were pretty good.

We stayed in a hotel in the newer part of the city, the nicest Ramada I've ever set foot in (I can only compare to the Ramada we stayed in two days later in Budapest which felt like a hotel from a 1994 episode of Law & Order SVU). In addition to having an amazing breakfast selection (an important criteria for judging how good a hotel is), the Ramada had a beautiful spa/fitness area which they called their Wellnessoase or Wellness Oasis. When fully open it had a massage room, mani/pedi room, foot soaking baths and two saunas. The three of us young men on the trip (Brant, Stefan and myself) used the saunas to relax after a long day of touring the city in the cold, nasty rain. Change in the locker room, towels on the hook and into the steam bed. The only other person in the room was the 50ish year old woman we had let into the Oasis about 20 minutes earlier because she couldn't find her card. After a few minutes of silence, she took one of the hoses in the room and cooled herself off with some cool water, an apparently customary behavior in a steam bed. But instead of turning off when she's done, she pointed it at Brant and gave him a drilling spray. He was a little taken aback, but we just laughed it off. The ice had been broken and we started talking. She was an Austrian woman visiting Salzburg for a festival that ended the day before. Her German was so strongly accented I didn't catch much of the conversation she was having with Stefan, not to mention the 80 degrees Celcius didn't allow me to concentrate on much of anything anyway. The conversation died and I couldn't last much longer in the sauna, so I exited, followed less than a minute later by Stefan. Brant, however, remained, inciting laughs and the creation of unlikely hypotheticals from Stefan and myself. We decided to go back to our room, justifying our abandonment by assuring one another that Brant could fend for himself, and perhaps it might've even be a road he wanted to go down. Who were we to pass judgment? So we left, chuckles trailing behind us down the stairs.

When I awoke the next morning, I was relieved to see that our sauna companion had not come to our room (I was also a little disappointed, but that was more the disappointment that I couldn't use the story as blackmail). He said that she laid a sob story on him about all the tragedies which had befallen her lately and was looking for a room for the night, hence why she "couldn't find" her card to get into the Oasis in the first place. Brant told us that he politely reminded her that the two other full sized men that were in the sauna previously were his roommates, so she got the idea that there wasn't exactly a lot of extra space. That didn't, however, stop her from standing right next to him as he got dressed, commenting in her broken English "Mmmm,you're such a beautiful boy. Zis is a pikture I'm not forgetting..."

Budapest

We trekked on eastward, crossed the line into the post-communist part of Europe and landed in Budapest. The difference between the violins and chocolate decadence of Salzburg and the dilapidation and urban commercialism of Budapest was striking. Almost as striking, in fact, as the amount of meat and fried cheese we ate for dinner that night. Following the recommendation of the hotel concierge, we went to a traditional Hungarian restaurant specializing in the distillation of schnapps. Our overly-polite waiter handed us each a menu, but in our impatience we simply asked for "three plates of whatever those guys next to us are having." Minutes later we were delivered what can only be described as the most manly, Viking-esque meal I have ever seen, let alone eaten. Imagine a mountain of almost every type of meat (the common stuff here, no horse or dog), wrapped around cheese or bacon or both, then deep fried to a golden crisp. There were fried eggs piled on top of tender legs of duck neighboring cordon-bleu all surrounded by little peppers stuffed with raw garlic or onions. I've been trying to eat with some restraint these days, but that night all deals were off: it was a total free for all. Forks and knives blurred as the food was devoured; it was an exercise in competing for food while simultaneously trying to avoid getting stabbed. Such a heavy, fried meal isn't normally included in my diet and as a result I suffered a couple days of gastroenteritis, but I would gladly go through it again. Well, maybe not gladly, but it was worth the experience once.

One of the unique aspects of Budapest is that it lays on soil containing some of the highest percentage of hot springs in the world, and the Turks, during their occupation of Hungary in the 16th century, capitalized by building bath houses all throughout the city, the largest of which we spent an afternoon in. The water was warm, smelled of pungent sulfur, and was filled with oversized Hungarian and Italian men in undersized bathing attire. The bath had quite the array of different options, ranging from the big warm bath, to the whirlpool bath, to saunas and steam beds. Brant, Stef and I tried everything in the spirit of exploration, with longer visits to the whirlpool and more truncated stays in the 50 degrees Fahrenheit pool. It was a very relaxing afternoon, also one in which we learned that a Hungarian towel is really just a bed sheet. At first when the lady handed it to me I thought she didn't understand what I had asked for, but then when I saw other people carrying them around, I figured it was the norm. Maybe, I thought to myself, I was too quick to judge and that this thing in my hand that looked like a bed sheet had amazing drying properties, kind of like a ShamWow. Wrong. It was just a bed sheet. I was disappointed, and still wet. I used one of the wall-mounted hair dryers to finish what the sheet could not and we headed back to the hotel, warm, tired, and content.

In addition to satisfying our inner hedonism, we did see a lot of the city and learned a lot about the struggles Hungary has endured, especially in the last century. Our tour guide explained that Hungarians have almost always been a subsidiary, so to speak, of a larger power, thus Hungarians carry a follower-mentality and are having a hard time knowing how to handle their freedom. Under the 20th century grip of communism the country was stifled from any personal expression, travel, language acquisition or any of the finer points of culture. When the communist regime fell in 1989, Hungary began to flourish, but without direction; they are so accustomed to someone else holding the reigns. Today their exists a divide between the older generation and the younger generation, a contempt for the difference in lifestyle which has ultimately created a social hurdle. It will be interesting to see how Hungary evolves in the decades to come as the younger generation begins to explore and appreciate globalization and self-rule.

Vienna

Our look at Austria's capital was brief, just a stop through from Budapest to Prague, but very intriguing. The city sports monumentalist architecture: big marble buildings that seem larger than life, gleaming in the morning sun. That is, unless they are covering in infamous European scaffolding. On every trip to Europe, it seems like every other big building is being restored and hence is covered in ugly steel latticework. My dad and Brant dreamed of making it big in the scaffolding business while wandering in through the streets of Vienna and my mind wandered the the regalia of the city, a haven of fine art, fashion and exquisite cuisine. I let my thoughts further drift as I slept on the grass, enjoyed some of the first nice weather we had on the tour and I awoke to what sounding like a British band playing a hybrid between metal and alternative. I found out that they weren't English, but Teutons when they reached the chorus: "Come into the Walley of the gate!" They totally blew their cover by switching 'v' for 'w'. Classic German mistake.

Prague

The area where Austria and the Czech Republic touch is farmland. Beautiful rolling fields as far as the eye can see, either freshly plowed, or teeming with crops like sugar beets, or corn and peppered with clusters of forest. But when you reach the border itself, the scenery changes. You come into what Sigi so endearingly calls "Prostitute's Kilometer." Given the less strict regulations in the Czech Republic, the area right across the border is a place for Austrians feed their vices, whether gambling, strip clubs or underage hookers. It's a sad, depressing place, the clean countryside polluted with flashing neon signs, huge parking lots and withered faces of lives sold for sex. The Czech Republic, also caught in the limbo of post-Soviet communism is a poor country, struggling to stand fully on it's own legs. That is, however, with the exception of it's capital, Prague.

Praha, as it's called in Czech Language (yes, that's what they speak in the Czech Republic; very creative title), is an oasis, even more so than the sauna in the Salzburg Ramada. Surrounding by gray, worn towns, the city's color and vibrant energy stands in striking contrast. Creative architecture, live music in almost every plaza, art, fashion, old cars, beautiful bridges and a gorgeous castle all make Prague a destination for tourists from all over the globe. Well, that and beer that is cheaper than water.

We spent a nice couple of days touring the city, touring that which Rick Steves deemed worthwhile punctuated with coffeebreaks and people watching. After having been there twice, I feel fairly acquainted with the city, familiar with the bends of the streets, the mixing of languages and the sights it offers. The last night of the trip, we had dinner at a gorgeous restaurant Brant found, right on the waters edge with a great view of the famous Charles Bridge. It was good closure to our trip, an affirmation of the bond between our two families, and some damn tasty food to boot. The next morning we took a last stroll through the city, jumped in the cars and tore away on the Autobahn towards Germany.

My family stayed another week in Dingolshausen at the Walter's house. The time was spent relaxing, making small day trips and eating inappropriate amounts of food. As the days toward their depart wore down, it started to become more and more real to me that I wasn't going to see them for a long time, so I tried to make the most out of the remaining hours. I spent a lot of time talking with my dad, having philosophical conversations about friends, the future, his past, catching up before we fall behind again. Although the castles and art are beautiful, it's the moments with people that I treasure most; probing the wisdom and experience of someone who knows you, listens and entertains your questions is a moving, yet grounding endeavor. Building an honest, communicative relationship with my parents has been good for me, a healthy outlet, an advice post, a rally point when the waters in my life are rough. I was happy to have gotten the opportunity to share that time with my dad before we part ways for the next several months. In spending time and sharing myself with my dad, mom and brother it helped me to remember that family is transcendental, that halfway across the world they are still with me, as we are all so much a part of each other that the distinctions become blurred. I am going to miss them very much in this, the next story of my life, but I know that in a blink of an eye I'll be seeing them all again. Until then I will see and experience things that make me grow, make me humble, make me wiser and make me fuller as a person. My life in Germany started when this vacation ended, so enough typing, time to go start living.

Picture Captions (from top to bottom):

A tour of Prague in a 1932 Skoda (Czech car company) with no brakes and a top speed of 30 kph. From left to right: Brant, Reid, Dave Haflich, Sigi Walter, Erich Walter, Eileen Haflich.

Brant and I on one of Prague's many bridges.

My dad and I playing in a fountain in Budapest. There were weight sensitive stones around the inner and outer perimeter or the fountain that, when touched, would stop the flow of water in that area. We had fun playing Poseidon and getting totally soaked.

Stefan and I on a carriage ride through the countryside near Dingolshausen the week following the tour. All nine of the Haflichs and Walters were together in the same place for the first time ever.

My mom (left) and Sigi overlooking Salzburg. They get along like they've known each other their entire lives.

Steamrolling Amsterdam on a Budget

In my daydreams leading up to my arrival in Germany, I envisioned my trips on the famed, mostly speed limit-less Autobahn to be motor revving, high speed, glamorous rides in a beautifully engineered German automobile. I hoped that renting a car and driving to Amsterdam would help me realize these dreams; my fantasies, however, remained as such. While the motor in our fun-sized French hatchback did rev, it did so at shamefully low speeds. The comfortable maximum was 130 kph (about 80 mph), so naturally I spent as much time flirting with 100 mph as possible (Mom, you didn’t just read that.) Nevertheless, driving on the Autobahn is a wonderful experience. The pavement is flawless, traffic is light and drivers understand how to use a two-lane system, making it a safe place to travel.

[Just to dispel some myths about the Autobahn that us Americans often have: it is not one road, it is the name of their interstate system, an extremely extensive network that connects the entire country. And there are speed limits on the Autobahn, mostly when in metropolitan areas, but out in the countryside you are free to drive as fast as you’d like. There is something so exhilarating about passing a policeman at 130 mph, then getting passed by an Audi or BMW driving upwards of 150 and the whole thing is legal.]

Six hours, 550 kilometers and one bizarre shopping trip later, we arrived in Holland’s most popular swamp, welcomed by cool, gray skies. We parked our car in a park and ride just outside the city center, pulled our disassembled fixed-gear bikes out of the trunk (both called ‘Surly Steamrollers,’ their name being eponymous to the title of the post), threw them together and took off. Although our two and a half days in the city were pretty rainy, Brant and I as fanatic cyclists fell in love. Take this as a reference point: Portland has the highest percentage of bicycle commuters of any city in the United States at about 8%. Amsterdam’s commuter percentage is 55%. There are seas of bikes that stretch city blocks and waves of bicyclists so large, their ebbs and flows dictate the flow of traffic and the energy level of the city. It’s really a sight to behold.

The cycling infrastructure in Amsterdam is so extensive and of such amazing quality that it deserves it’s own paragraph entirely. Anybody who has ridden a bike in an American urban setting has undoubtedly been honked at, been on a bike path that abruptly ends or been sucked onto some road, interstate or bridge that causes him or her to yell “#*@& bike riding!!!” These frustrations don't exist in Amsterdam. There are separate, bright red bike lanes on almost every street, both in downtown and in the suburbs around the city, there are special bike drawbridges over many of the city’s Venetian-like canals and when it comes time to dismount, there is almost never a shortage of places to park, including a number of humongous, multi-level bike garages which are entirely covered to keep your seat (and subsequently your hind quarters) nice and dry. When we came up to the first one, Brant and I had to just ride up and down it a couple times to make sure that it was real and not just some figment of our bike-crazy minds.

However, with every sweet there must be a bitter and Amsterdam’s bike scene is no exception. The bike lanes in the city are pedestrian-free zones, which is to say, pedestrians shouldn’t walk in them, lest they get mowed over by a caravan of bikes. However, bikes are not at the top of the food chain in these red lanes as Vespas are granted access as well. Even though they possess the ability to go as fast as a car at city-speeds, scooter drivers feel some need to buzz by, honking their stupid little horns and swerving between bikes and the side view mirrors of parked cars. I moved to the side to make room for the first few, but I quickly became hardened and bitter, much like a New Yorker on the subway. We took to chasing after them, yelling slanderous phrases in English which we can only hope they understood. Other than the inconsiderate scooters, riding in a heavily urban area is a pure adrenaline rush and was absolutely thrilling. Dodging in and out of moving traffic, skidding by masses of picture-snapping tourists, drafting behind supply vans and blasting through intersections on yellow are all ways to get your heart pounding and your lungs burning. In our two and a half days we probably rode just shy of 100 miles in and around Amsterdam, 90% of which I did without any brakes (Mom, you didn’t read that either). When I built up my latest bike, the brake from my old one didn’t fit, so we had to search to find one. In the meantime I wasn’t going to walk my beautiful new bike around, so I just rode it. Don’t’ think that I was going around with no ability to stop – I’m not that dumb. On a fixed gear you can naturally brake by pushing backward or locking up the back wheel in a skid, but neither is as effective as a good old brake. I have no idea how the thousands of stick thin hipsters all across the US on their brakeless fixies haven’t seriously injured themselves yet judging by all the close calls I had in just two days. When I finally found one were all but done riding in the city. Oops. At least my next rides will be safer.

The city of Amsterdam itself is very pretty, a web of canals peppered with private and commercial boats, most of which are still floating and some of which are dilapidating and sinking. Imagine a labyrinth where all the paths look oddly similar and the signs to tell you which canal or street is which are all misspelled. (This is me airing my frustrations with Dutch. As an English/German speaker, Dutch looks like a drunk Englishman and drunk German got together to create a new language. I can almost read it and half understand it when spoken, but I couldn’t help but feel like it it's similar to Pig Latin – you should be able to get it, but for some reason, you just can’t.) The buildings in the city are tall and narrow, often visibly leaning out over the streets, with façades so intensely detailed, it’s almost hard on your eyes to take in a whole row of them at once. The sum effect of the miniaturized buildings, picturesque canals and hundreds of bikers humming all about is a city that is too quaint for words. Also worth noting are all the colors used throughout the city. In a place with gray weather for many days out of the year, Brant and I supposed that brightly colored windows, lights, roofs and architectural accents were an effort to lighten the mood. Oftentimes the bright buildings were of a very modern design with beautiful wall-sized windows, creating an interesting contrast between the modernist new development and the more classic European style of the residential areas. And no trip to Amsterdam is complete without visits to the well known red-light district, which truth-be-told is quite disappointing (go to St. Pauli in Hamburg if you really want an exciting red-light experience…), and the numerous “coffeeshops.” Dutch “coffee” is only drinkable in smoke form and is sold in over 300 shops throughout the city. And once you figure out coffee was Dutch slang for marijuana, you have to figure out which coffeeshops sell more than just java. The special Amsterdamian shops have a green and white sticker discretely placed in the corner of the front window, slyly advertising what you could probably have already smelled as you strolled by. These shops, while not of my personal interest, provided perhaps some of the best people-watching of my life – business men share pipes with backpackers who sit next to groups of paranoid American teenagers who all buy their goods from the Dutch mother behind the counter. A web almost as tangled as the city itself.

Traveling through the city was all good and well, but there did come a time when we had to lock up our bikes and go to sleep. Not much was discussed in the way of nighttime accommodations before we got to the city and once there, the discussion was pretty short. Actually, it was more of a look that Brant and I exchanged with each other and we just knew: the car. We had paid to rent it, we had paid to park it, why not save and sleep in it? The first night when we had gotten sufficiently wet biking around we headed back to the Sloterdijk Park & Ride (which we later found out is pronounced Slooter-dyke – the subsequent source of many puerile jokes) and tried to prepare for bed as discretely as possible. This involved eating dinner out of the trunk, brushing our teeth using bottled mineral water as wash, and voiding ourselves in the bushes, all while people were wandering through the parking lot from the adjacent train station to pick up their cars and actually leave that miserable patch of asphalt we called home for two days. (We coolly wrote the leers off as jealousy for our ingenuity.) We had parked under the elevated train tracks so as to shield bikes from the rain. You see, we couldn’t put the bikes inside our clown car or else we wouldn’t have enough to lay the seats down. The stroke of genius came to Brant that we would lean them against the car and use our chain/U-lock combo to lock them to each other and the car door handle so that a would-be thief would wake us up when jostling the bikes.

All preparations complete, Hotel Sluter-Dick was open for the evening. We climbed in, leaned the seats back and rolled the windows on the bike side down to allow us to hear approaching bike thieves/police coming to kick us out. This led us to the discovery of our next problem: we hadn’t packed a single blanket or pillow. No worries, we’re tough. Our dirty clothes can be pillows and the bath towels can be blankets. We both fell asleep quite quickly, but our rest was anything but restful. I had strange dreams about people glaring at us pathetically huddled in our car and woke up in a couple fits of paranoia that our bikes were gone. Brant had the misfortune of being on the side of the car with the open windows, which permitted rain to blow in on him for several hours. He eventually mustered the energy to close the windows and the car then was nice and warm. One small oversight here, though: the car is tiny and there are two full sized men inside breathing deeply in their slumber. Our expectation was that uncomfortable sleeping arrangements would wake us up early and help us to get an early start to the day. Wrong. We woke up 12 hours after we had layed down to go to sleep, disoriented and heads pounding. My brain felt like it was operating at half speed; I just wanted to fall back to sleep. Brant looked like he had been roused from the dead, hair a mess and mouth agape. It clicked for us at about the same time: the car was hypoxic, another way of saying that the oxygen content of the air was lower than normal. We opened the doors and a rush of cool air blasted us in the face and it felt like coming out of hibernation. I still needed about 15 minutes of just breathing before I could be expected to accomplish anything requiring higher brain function, but we had figured out why we felt so sluggish and then we both felt slightly idiotic (and loopy) for the rest of the day.

Night two would be different, we promised ourselves. We got booted out of the pay area of the parking lot, so we moved 20 meters to the section that was free at night and set up Hotel SD for a second go around. The windows remained cracked the entire night as per an agreement we made with our brain cells, This night was quite a bit colder and for the second straight day we woke up feeling like we hadn’t really gone to sleep, but at least we didn’t fall into hypoxic comas. And who can argue with the nightly rate? We sure couldn’t. The third night was a bit different as our rental contact said we had to return our car in Würzburg by noon the next day. We were nervous that if we slept in Sloterdijk, we might wake up at 11 am and not have enough time to make the six-hour journey (another oversight we made was having brought no working time piece between the two of us, meaning there was no alarm clock to be spoken of) . So we set off at 9 pm with the plan to drive and sleep in cat-naps when we got tired. We made it about 150 kilometers to the first nap spot, and by we I mean I because Brant knocked out as soon as we hit cruising speed on the freeway. I woke up at 1 am, drove another 100 km, and then “fell asleep” at another rest stop to “wake up” at 6 am. We stopped in Cologne for breakfast, but at that point we were so dazed and in need of a shower that our visit lasted no longer than it took us to find a place to grab some coffee (German coffee, that is, which is actually coffee).

We trudged on to Würzburg only to get lost on the way to the rental lot and arrived 10 minutes after they closed, costing us another day’s worth on the car. Good thing we had saved so much by sleeping in the Renault, which probably took more years from our lives than we’d like to admit. Erich (Flo’s dad) showed up to give us a ride back to their house, but we decided to finish our trip the way it ought to be done, on our bikes. We gave him our back packs so that we could ride the 50 km with no weight, a choice that ended up benefitting us when the last 11 kilometers of the ride turned into a dead sprint to escape a thunderstorm which was bearing down on us. Upon arriving, we showered, ate and met our real beds with the most genuine relief you can imagine. It’s no surprise that I went sleep-walking that night after such a raw and aggressive four days, but that story is for another time.

Since Brant and I don’t get the chance to see each other all that often, our trip was a great chance to catch up and share in all the things that we like to do together (less falling into a low-oxygen stupor). We’ll always be able to look back on it as having been only the kind of tour you’d make while in your twenties – at least I hope that in another 20 years were not sleeping in cars and eating tomatoes and raisins for breakfast. :)