Walking, Walking, Walking!

When I looked at what we would do this week, I pretty much left today blank. I wasn’t sure what kind of shape we’d be in, what there’d be to do right around us, and how far we’d really want to go. Turns out it was a good thing. Aaron’s digestive system hasn’t gotten over the time-shock and he was just feeling more energetic this morning when he ate chocolate pudding for breakfast. In retrospect, I should’ve warned him that dairy stuff is the last on the list of things to eat if your insides have been feeling a mite touchy, but I didn’t think of it and he got a really bad stomachache after he ate. We were thinking about going to the zoo and botanical garden in Stuttgart, but after we took a short walk outside Elizabeth and I were freezing and Aaron was suddenly looking pale. We came back to the hotel and Aaron laid down, but he wasn’t feeling better so after an hour Elizabeth and I made the decision (after much hemming and hawing) to go out and see if we could visit the shopping district in Stuttgart and leave the zoo either for later or for good depending on the weather. Our reasoning was that if we were going to pick a day to do shopping, better pick a day when Aaron wasn’t with us.

So at 11:30, we departed without our erstwhile navigator. Truly a step into the unknown, since Elizabeth and I have come to rely on him rather heavily for directional instruction.

We had two missions: exchange our American money for Euros, and get to Stuttgart and back alive. To do this, we had to figure out the bus system, figure out the S-bahn ticket-buying machine, and find a bank. The good news about the bank is that “bank” means “bank” in German as well as English. The bad news is that all the bus charters in Sindelfingen are written in German since there apparently isn’t much tourist trade.

At the start of the trip, Elizabeth and I had a 50 euro note and a 5 euro note between us. The 50 posed something of a problem since so many things are run by vending machines, but we were hopeful that the ticket machine would be different. We had to wait for the right bus since the driver was on lunch break, so we went into the mall and looked around. We actually had been in there earlier with Aaron when he started not feeling good and wanted to finish looking around.

Oddly enough, it turns out that the local supermarket (think Meijer or even Target) is lodged right inside the mall next to the usual clothing stores and food court. They were having a clearance sale on scarves, hats, and mittens (3 euro), so we bought Elizabeth a scarf since she was feeling the need of one. We then found a large display of Milka chocolate bars on sale too and of course had to purchase one of those since Aunt Peggy told us we HAD to try it. She is right, by the way: Milka is very, very good milk chocolate. My only regret is we couldn’t figure out exactly which flavor was which since the words in German didn’t bear much relation to English. I think we figured out the coffee flavored one (Kaffe), the Orange, and the Raspberry. The latter because they had bright orange and pink stripes on the package with a picture of raspberries and chocolate on one and oranges on chocolate on the other. But all the rest were in bright blue wrappers with white writing and not much clue as to what was inside. I think the one we got is hazelnut flavored but doesn’t have any hazelnuts. Or that could just be how plain Milka tastes. Beats me!

It was odd to go shopping at a grocery store, though, and not be able to exchange pleasantries with the cashier. She said a bunch of things to me, but I was only able to smile and shake my head. Turns out the best solution is to say something in English and then everyone knows what your problem is! Honestly, though, I feel either very rude or like a three year old. It’s a victory every time we’re able to communicate with someone.

At any rate, after strolling around the mall (and finding a CVS-type pharmacy downstairs from the grocery store, along with a McDonalds packed with schoolkids on lunchbreak), we headed back outside and caught our bus. We used our 5 euro note and got all the way to the Goldburg Bahnhof, marched down the three flights of stairs, faced down the ticket machine by telling it to speak English…and had it spit out our 50 euro note with a picture on the screen of a 5, a 10, and a 20, and an X through a 50. Very clear, no English needed, thanks. What it meant was…we were stuck since the bus driver wouldn’t take 50s either.

The Sindelfingen Goldburg Bahnhof is basically two strips of cement along a double row of train tracks with a few ticket machines under weather-shields sort of like a bus stop. It is located in the middle of a subdivision with no stores or restaurants nearby, so Elizabeth and I decided we’d go back to the closest restaurant we’d spotted on the way up the mountain: ironically, a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I really didn’t want to eat my first lunch in Germany at a KFC, but it seemed rude to go in and ask for a change for 50 without buying something.

The KFC was also a LOT farther away than we’d realized. Later, we noticed that we’d walked right past a bank where we probably could’ve walked in and cashed our pile of American 20s, but neither of us noticed it and we walked all the way down the mountain through some very pretty townhouses to the KFC, which was at the bottom. We got a sandwich, exchanged our 50 for two 20s and a 5, and sat down to rest our feet. Neither of us was very hungry after the walk, and we spent more time watching all the kids coming in to eat lunch than actually eating. It was strange to see kids no more than our little brother’s age (probably about 8 or 9) coming in with their backpacks to eat lunch. You’d think a country as much into the social party as Germany would have a highly developed school-lunch program…unless they hand out money to school kids to go to McDonalds and KFC as a school-lunch program. We saw little kids riding buses and the S-Bahn completely on their own, obviously out for lunch or on their way back.

After lunch, we boarded another bus and went back up the mountain to the S-Bahn station, marched back down the steps, approached the ticket machine, fed it a 10 euro note and the Stuttgart code (which is 101, by the way) and were relieved when it promptly ejected a shower of change and two tickets. We weren’t completely sure what kind of tickets we bought, but from the price we thought they were either round-trip tickets or a ticket that would allow you to ride several zones in one day.

Elizabeth cheered when the tickets came out. A lady standing near us looked at us funny. It wasn’t the last time for the day, either. Apparently we don’t look English or American enough for people to expect English to come out of our mouths. Nana may be right about the German sense of humor, though: if I saw someone cheering for a ticket machine, I would’ve smiled, not given a funny look. But I digress.

When we arrived in Stuttgart, we went up into the Hauptbahnhof (or main train station) and were directed to the bank located right in the station. An elderly lady who spoke “a little bit” of English (which was a lot more than our “little bit” of German!) exchanged our money. We put $168 in and got E 135 back. Ouch. Guess the Nasdaq wasn’t doing so well today…or whatever it is that determines the strength of the dollar to the euro.

After that we roamed around a lot. It was a very cloudy and cold morning, but as we walked out of the station (which is as big as most shopping malls at home…and that’s not counting the U-Bahn station that we found later) the sun came out in time to light up some huge and beautiful old mansions built up on the sides of the mountains forming the valley where Stuttgart is built. I’ve read that those mountains are covered with vineyards, but I guess I don’t really know a vineyard when I see it or we just weren’t in the right place, because I didn’t see anything but a lot of trees and the beautiful red-tile-roofed mansions.

We decided to visit the shops lining Konigstrasse, which was very interesting. It seems that the Germans are very fond of bread, sausage, and cheese – about every hundred feet there was a bakery (or Bakerie), a sausage shop that sold cheese, and one shop that was devoted to cheese. Elizabeth is not intrigued with bakeries since she’s more or less off bread. She is the only thing that prevented me from gaining ten pounds in sampling pastries today. I didn’t try a single one. And it was hard. I’ve never seen so many food things I’ve wanted to try in my life. I can’t afford the clothes, I can’t read the books, and I’m not much into wood carvings…but I like to cook and the bakeries call my time.

But that was today. There’s always tomorrow, as Annie says.

We visited a huge department store a lot like Marshall Fields and admired the large supply of cashmere goods that apparently made up their cashmere sale. I’ve decided that cashmere is beautiful. It’s too bad it costs $100 to buy any of it. The colors and textures were beautiful, and I knew that I truly had inherited the German figure when we started looking at clothes. They don’t make everything for people with no hips here: they actually make clothes for people of my build. And no wonder: watching the woman walk buy, if they didn’t make clothes for women who have wide hips and small waists, they wouldn’t sell much unless the Italians and French were shopping!

We decided it was time to head back because we were wondering how Aaron was doing and knew he’d get worried if we weren’t back before Dad, who expected to get back to the hotel around 5:30. Elizabeth wanted to have some hot chocolate, but even though there were many coffee shops around, we couldn’t figure out what “hot chocolate” would be in German and couldn’t conclusively determine if it was on the menu. Finally I got the bright idea of going into a croissant shop since the traditional accompaniment to a croissant is hot chocolate, and sure enough, there on the menu was something called “Heiss Shocolade”. Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to pronounce “heiss” when she ordered, though, so she simply asked for “Svie Shocolade” and the lady responded with a lot of German and at Elizabeth’s blank look held up a chocolate milk carton and an insulated coffee cup. We realized she was asking if we wanted cold or hot chocolate and Elizabeth said, “Hot!” which was apparently an English word the lady understood. So by hook or by crook we did get two small cups of hot chocolate – which was very tasty – and we learned another very important German phrase. After all, how can you NOT know how to order hot chocolate??!!

We got back to the hotel just in time to find Aaron puzzling over how to make a call to our emergency-only cell phone to find out where in the world we were. Apparently he began reviving right after we left and was starting to get worried. So much for my flippant assurance to Elizabeth, “Oh, we don’t need to get right back – if he’s taking a nap we’ll just wake him up anyway”. He’d apparently gone for a walk around Sindelfingen and barely escaped being run down by a motorcycle (and thereby learning what “Achtung!” means when shouted at him by a fellow pedestrian) and being hard-sold into a German Bible by some earnest old ladies who didn’t believe him when he tried to tell them “Nein spraken sie Deutsche! I’m American – I can only speak English!”

About the nap, by the way: none of us slept too well last night because Dad didn’t sleep too well. I think he was nervous; but the thing about Dad not sleeping deeply is that he always snores before he falls deeply asleep and since he apparently never fell deeply asleep, he snored louder than we’ve ever heard him all night. Poor Dad! He’s all keyed up about the plant visit, since it’s apparently much too large to really be thoroughly viewed in the week he has to view it in…and he’s always nervous at the start of a job anyway. He was supposed to be back a half-hour ago and I haven’t seen him yet, so it must’ve been a long day. Hopefully it will have wiped him out and he won’t be able to help sleeping deeply tonight!

-Michelle