I recall being very excited. The real kind of excitement. A mixture of expectation and anxiety. Of imagination and wonder and possibilities. Of Germany. The landscapes. The cities. Food. People. History. Language. What would it all be like?
But also of anxiety. Is that the right word? Not fear. Not trepidation. Not insecurity. None of those things. Otherwise I never would have gotten on the flight. Perhaps anxiety is not the right word. I had never flown across the Atlantic Ocean. I had never left the United States. I was going to a country where I had never been, to speak a language I did not speak.
I still laugh til this day when I tell the story. We landed in Frankfurt at about 6:15 in the morning. Not sure how much I slept on the flight. I gathered my bags from that revolving thing in backage claim. Including a rather large, clumsy brown box. In it was my Peugeot bicycle, dismembered into parts and taped together. Why in the world did I feel the need to take a bicycle to Germany with me? As if there were no bicycles in Germany. Dumb.
Anyway, I trudging through Frankfurt Airport with my backpack on my back, the large piece of luggage in my one hand, and that dumb-ass bicycle box in my other hand. I had to go to the bathroom. Badly. I flagged down a friendly-faced, middle-aged woman who looked like she worked there.
“Könnten Sie mir bitte sagen, wo das Badezimmer ist?” I must have practiced that sentence for at least ten minutes while scoping out someone I could throw it at. “Could you please tell me where the bathroom is?” No problem, right? Pretty straightforward. You. Please. Tell me. Bathroom. Where. I gotta go.
Well, she looked at me rather confused. I repeated the sentence. Still confused. Then her eyes got big, her upper body twitched: “Ach, Sie meinen die Toilette.” Yes, I had meant the toilet. You see, in Germany a Badezimmer, literally a bathing room, a bath room, is where people go to take a bath or a shower. Although modern airports these days have such facilities, back in September of 1981 most did not.
The message was clear: “Hey, John, we’re happy to have you here in Germany. We’re excited that you’re excited. And we heard that you even learned some German at that great Jesuit university, in that great capital city, of that great superpower, the United States. However, you’re in Frankfurt now. In Germany. We speak German here. And not English translated literally into German. So, if you have to take a pee, no problem. Let me show you where. If you think your gonna take a bath or a shower, you got the wrong place. This is an airport. If you gotta pee or poop, you need a toilet. Neither a bath nor a shower stall will help you with that.”
First day in Germany. Wait, first minutes in Germany. And already a big fat lesson. Translating English literally into German won’t do it. Well wait, it might do it. But not very effectively. In fact, doing so can make things complicated, and quickly.
The woman was very helpful, as the Germans, by the way, always are when asked. I got to the toilet, did my thing, and was ready to rock and roll. Made my way to the trains, which intersect with the airport. Got on one heading to Ulm in southern Germany, south and east of Stuttgart.
It was early. I got an Abteil, a cabin, seating for six. Empty. Heaved my ill-constructed backpack on the overhead rack. Heaved my over-stuffed piece of luggage on an empty seat. Then proceeded to tear open that dumb-ass bicycle box. I swear it must have taken me an hour to put that dumb-ass bike together. Passengers walked by, stopped briefly, looked at the nonsense I was up to, then continued on. I can imagine what their thoughts were: “Who’s that dumb-ass guy, putting together a dumb-ass bike, in one of our modern-ass trains?”
I made it to Ulm in about three hours. German trains. I’ll come back to that topic time and again. I’m from the Philadelphia area, went to college in Washington, DC, have taken trains up and down the East Coast. Amtrak compared to Deutsche Bahn? Sad. Tragic. Borderline criminal.
Ulm. In the West German state of Baden-Württemberg. It has a cathedral. Back then, perhaps still today, with the tallest steeple. I dragged my stuff over to a hotel, to a Gaststätte, a kind of combination hotel and restaurant, right in the middle of town. One overnight there and then I would take the train to Blaubeuren, to begin my ten-week intensive language course.
I can’t remember a single detail about the hotel. Check-in? I’m sure that they, too, found my German a little odd. Embarrassing myself was never a problem for me. Never a deterrent. Why should it be?
I was excited. The weather was stunningly beautiful. Soft blue skies, with a lovely assortment of puffy white clouds meandering about, the air fresh and sweet. I’m writing these lines on a Tuesday, in the first week of September, in the year 2025. Transition is literally in the air. From late summer to early fall. A great time to be in Germany.
I went for a walk around the old town in Ulm, die Altstadt. Through the market. It was a Saturday. Over to the Dom, the cathedral. I cannot recall the emotions, the feelings, what my senses were taking in. How could I, it was just about forty-four years ago. And since then I have spent more than thirty years of my life in Germany. Almost all of my adult life.
However, I can imagine. I can go back. I can peel back. Because time and again I have those same, or similar, feelings, emotions, reactions. They’re always timeless. Wondering. Wandering. Imagining. Often overwhelming.
Picture yourself for the first time in a certain place. A place you have always wanted to go to. A place you had thought about so often. Read about. Heard about. Seen pictures, movies. Scenes for the eyes. Scenes for the imagination. Excitement. Anticipation. And then, as if all of a sudden, you are there. The intensity of it all. Senses. Emotions. Sights. Sounds. Smells. Thoughts. Feelings. Fullness.
I made my way back to my hotel. On the ground floor was the Gaststätte, the restaurant. Wood everywhere. Tables. Benches. Booths. The colorful tableclothes. The pictures on the walls. Germany of old.
I was hungry and thirsty. And had a handful of Deutschmarks in my wallet. I spotted a booth with three men, maybe four. Older guys. In their fifties, maybe sixties. Traditional clothes on. Ruddy-looking faces. With long-ass glasses of beer in front of them. And a basket with soft pretzels in it. Not the kind you get in Philadelphia, kind of pushed together. But instead real pretzels. Round. Thick. Lots of salt on them. The beers had a rich orangish color to them with a serious amount of foam at the top.
You readers of mine can probably guess what I did. Yup. I waltzed on over to them and invited myself to join them. I have zero recall as to how they reacted. But, looking back, I can guess. Easily spotted me as not German. Tall, lanky, clean-shaven, friendly-looking. Looks like an upstanding young man. Certainly not shy. “Have a seat, lad.”
All I can recall from that scene was the following. I had two or three of those long-ass beers. They must have been Weizenbiere. That was most definitely one or two beers too many for me. I was, and always have been, a light-weight when it comes to alcohol.
I engaged in conversation with them. That is I attempted to engage. They must have chuckled inside at my broken German. I suspect, though, that they also thought this young guy’s got courage. Not afraid to make contact, to talk to strangers. Not afraid to open his mouth. Not afraid to embarrass himself. We like this guy.
I do recall well that I hardly understood them. Most likely they didn’t bother to switch from their local dialect into Hochdeutsch, high German. Or maybe they did and it still was almost unintelligible to me. Maybe it was the beer.
Either way, I enjoyed being with them. In Germany. In a famous Swabian town. A stone’s throw away from a magnicent catherdral. Across from it a German farmer’s market. Me. In a traditional Gaststätte. Fresh off the plane, with my dumb-ass French bicycle. Downing too much beer. Chomping on salty pretzels. In a booth barely large enough for four grown men. Being accepted. Trying to understand. And understanding some. Certainly more at the end of that first day than at the beginning of that first day.
I am a Christian. A Roman Catholic. Greatly influenced by the Jesuits. Our Father in Heaven has been very good to me. He was most certainly good to me back then. I was in Germany. John in Germany.
My mother drove me up from suburban Philadelphia to JFK airport. It was late September. The flight, I suspect, departed at something like 6:00 p.m. The drive up was about two hours.