Heidi Chronicles

Neal’s Uncle brought this outfit back from India for Liam ages ago.  He put it on and of course we tried to make him dance.  We’re going to have to work on his rhythm.  (Sorry, dude.)

and locked our luggage in the owner’s stgrage area, rehid the key, and headed to Oktoberfest.

This time we were actually in the tent.  It was still cold, but at least we were able to enjoy the traditional slapping dances and whip cracking.

And the giant boars.

Oh, and the traditional t-shirt selling and teddy bear vendors. (My camera card is corrupt, so I lost the other pics.)

I was simply amazed at how big the tents are.

And just look at all of those roasting chickens.  Mmmm!

No comment necessary.

We had a long time to talk, so I began to wonder things, as I tend to do when faced with time to actually think.

• I wonder how many chickens they go through each year.
• I wonder how much money they make.
• I wonder how many glasses get broken.
• I wonder how many times they use the same cups.

This got Aaron started:

• I wonder how many times the waitresses have to take pictures of people at their table.
• I wonder what it would be like to talk to someone who speaks English as poorly as I speak German.

Some things lead to other conversations, but for the most part, they just drift into the air like the smoke from the ciggarettes since the ban has been lifted for the tents in Oktoberfest.

Really.

Turns out, though, Aaron’s German is actually good enough to have a conversation about politics with the nice German man at our table – as long as he can shake his head “no” when he’ hears the word “Bush” and say “Obama” over and over.

Just kidding…actually, his German is awesome.  We’d be nowhere without him!

After a few liters of beer and sparkling water, we headed out to capture the rest of Oktoberfest.

You pay someone so that you can get in one of the cages and use your weight by pushing backward and forward to try to get it to make a circle.  It’s called, appropriately (I guess), Disco Loop.

We left and headed back to grab our stuff and got a cab.  It took us almost an hour to get to the airport.  And when we got there we sat in the Lufthansa Senator Lounge and I read and Aaron slept.

And on the plane?  I read.

We got back and I drove home, in perfect Heidi fashion, running into curbs and scaring Aaron into a near-death experience thanks to the round-a-bouts.

It was nice to get to the house, but now I’m dreading studying for my driving license test.  I just know they’re going to make me do the big round-a-bouts.  I must say it a lot when we’re driving because Liam now volunteers to anyone talking about driving in London:  “My mama can’t do the big around-a-bouts.”

Anyhoo, tomorrow is back to the old grindstone…just me and two kids who’ve had 1:1 attention for the last six days.  Woo hoo.

It turns out that I did not come properly prepared for the weather here.  That seems to be the theme of my trips these days.  I’m either cold or hot – and here, I’m cold.

We determined that we would not be going to Oktoberfest today – after we finally got up (did I mention that word from the home front suggests that L and E were up at 4 a.m.?) – and decided to check out the city instead.  We took a three-hour walking tour.  It was great.  I highly recommend doing it in any city you visit if you get the chance.  However, I also highly recommend doing it on a warm day.  Today was freaking cold – but not rainy, so not quite like being at home (although it was lovely and sunny when we left London. Go figure.).

Anyway, the tour was very fascinating as it was one not afraid to come right out and talk about Hitler’s involvement here – yet another opportunity to see how much of an asshole he was, but in his “home” town.

It is interesting the way that Munich has dealt with its history.  It’s very subtle, but the remorse clearly exists throughout the city.  They’ve placed plaques where the buildings were  trashed on krystallnacht and there’s a place in Dodger’s Alley where they’ve memorialized the people who did not want to walk by Hitler’s guards and perform the salute.

They’re trying.

This is the synagogue – heavily guarded of course.

I learned a lot from our Irish tour guide. (Did you know…someone in Munich took very detailed pictures of all of the buildings before the war so that they could reconstruct them afterward?) I am very glad that we did the tour, even though we’ve been home for nearly two hours and my toes are still freezing.

On a completely unrelated note…I’ve been cold in Germany twice before.

I first froze my ass off here in 95/96 when I came to visit my friend Nelly, who was living in Giessen at the time.  We had cold toes in Hamburg, and Berlin.  We spent New Years at the Brandenberg Gate where I ate my first crepe (mmmm), and first got shot at with fireworks. (No, they didn’t warm me up.) (We also went to Poland, but that’s not Germany, so freezing our asses off there is a story for another time.)

The second time I froze my ass of here was in December of 2002 when we came with Aaron’s family and stayed in Berlin.  We mostly stayed in the hotel, but we did make it out a couple of times between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when it was light) where we saw all of the stuff I didn’t get to see the inside of last time I was in Berlin because everything was closed New Year’s Day.

And just look at me now…freezing my ass off in Munich.  Clearly Germany loves me.

(There was that one time in 2001 when I was here with Aaron in Freiburg and it wasn’t cold, but we’ll gloss over that one for the sake of the theme.)

Anyhoo, after our tour, we came home and sat on our frozen asses.  It’s lovely to be on vacation.

We got warmed up in time to head out to Nurnberger Bratwurst Glockl am Dom for a traditional Bavarian meal.  As we got off of the U Bahn at Marienplatz, I noticed an odd thing.  It seemed a little strange to me that the police presence had increased from none at our first stop to 50 at this stop.  Then I saw the riot team hanging out at the base of the entrance/exit to the subway.  They didn’t have helmets on, but they did have their helmets at the ready.

It freaked me out a little bit until we walked out and saw the huge barricade with police stationed about every 10 feet or so.  It seemed that the 10 people or so inside the barricade were enjoying themselves tremendously, while the people outside of it were taunting them.  I finally figured out that they were saying “No Nazi.” Turns out that the “insiders” were all about the National Socialist party and the rest of the world was there to drown out whatever they were trying to say.  It was nice to see them so outnumbered.

At the restaurant, we sat at a table with another couple and didn’t speak to them.  We ate our food and I downed a whole bunch of cabbage salad along with my pork roast, and left the “potato dumplings” on the plate.  That shit was nah-stee.  It wasn’t the tastes as much as it was the texture.  There were two different kinds and one of them tasted like liver and the other was squishy like jello’ only made from riced potatoes.

We finished diner and I was enjoying my sparkling water.  (Ahem, have I mentioned that I quit drinking?  No worries…I still want everyone else to drink.  It’s not that sort of thing – I just feel better.) when the quintessential Loud American Woman and her husband, Tom, sat down at our table.

Woman was from someplace on the East Coast and clearly wore the pants in the family.

First she fell madly in love with the sauce containers that they used to serve the…wait for it…sauces.  She told Tom that she wanted to get some before they left and he evidently looked at her like she was loony because in an irritated New Yorkish accent, she responded, “They’ll fit in my suitcase, Tom.”

Then in her excitement at finding such a treasure, she asked Tom to take a picture of them and she pulled out her phone.  Why she couldn’t take the picture herself is beyond me because when she handed the phone to Tom and asked him to take the picture and he fucked up her phone, she was NOT thrilled.

“Tom!  Don’t you know how to take a picture?  Give me that.  Now what in the world did you do to the phone?  I can’t get in to read Sandra’s message now.  If you knew how  many messages I get that require an emergency response….welll….” and she continued messing with her phone.  She finally decided that she’d have to mess with it later (“Sometimes you have to blow on the sim chip, Tom.”) because she put it in her purse and when Tom asked what she was doing, she told him as much – loudly, though she seemed to be trying to whisper it across the table to him.  It was comical (to me, anyway) and I was having a hard time focusing on Aaron.  Poor guy.

The waitress came to take their order, and even though I’d heard her discussing So-And-So’s recommendation of the bratwurst she decided to ask what was good…in English.

She wanted to know what “the people here eat.” I heard the waitress pipe in with “suckling pig” and wurst (pronounced versht), but before she could go on, the woman said something about the white sausage and offhandedly tried to order a different amount than was available on the menu.  After the waitress corrected her, she ordered something breaded and he ordered pork.

She really wanted everything to be good because she commented. “That this is the best X I’ve ever had.” for everything she ate.

I had to laugh when Tom took a bite of his “dumplings,” choked it down, and coughed, “well THAT was a mistake.”

She jumped right in and assured him that it most certainly was not and took a bit herself.  She tried to like it, but I could tell that it wasn’t settling so well.  He put some on her plate (that’s right…stick it to her, Tom.) and it was still there when we left after I couldn’t stand listening to them any longer – but not after I made a few notes.  (I love my bluetooth keyboard.)

Leaving was a stupid thing to do though.

We searched for a drinking establishment for about an hour without luck – nothing stays open past nine around the area.  Seriously…bars and coffee shops would die in the rest of the world if they did this.

We finally headed back to our apartment and changed clothes and walked up to the main street in our area where we located a drinking establishment titled [Something] Cocktail Bar.  We headed in only to find that the door was locked and we had to be buzzed in.  Hmmm.

Upon entry Aaron noticed that everyone was smoking, even though there’s a smoking ban in place.  Double hmmm.  Upon entry, I noticed that the bartender seemed to have a penchant for Phil Collins.

The set up was just weird.  The whole place was sort of neon pink.  The bar itself was stainless steel, L-shaped and the ‘tender had to squeeze in to the short end of the L to get to some of the patrons.   Fortunately the patrons at that end of the L were not the bartenders.  They would not have fit.

Aaron had one beer and we each smoked about three cigarettes secondhandedly.  In the time we were there, the music went from Phil Collins to reggae to Green Day to Notorious B.I.G. as I sat next to the fake floral arrangement, the real floral arrangement, the Buddha, and the picture of one of the Baldwin brothers or their twin sitting at a bar (not this one) next to a woman on horseback.

It was a leetle weird.

Good things about traveling without kids:

• Didn’t have to cordon off an entire section of the Luftansa Lounge before the flight to keep them in one spot.
• Read books and didn’t talk on the plane.  I didn’t have to get in the overhead bin to get anything out…nor did I have anything under my SEAT!
• Passport Control knew we were here for Oktoberfest, vs. to see the 100 years of teddy bears museum.
• Did not have to fold up a stroller in order to take a cab. (Though we did take a cab that was a Mazda 5, the car that Aaron wants me to drive when me move back to the states – if Obama is elected.  Otherwise, we move to Germany and I drive a Mercedes.)
• We’re staying in a quiet apartment in the city, where the kids would have nothing to do, but A and I are happy with our wifi.  And, we didn’t have to pay the Oktoberfest deposit because we look like nice people.  Or wait…is that bad?  Do we look too lame to party?  Hmmm.
• No carrying the stroller down the steps of the U Bahn.
• Riding old trains on the Oktoberfest route because people probably vomit on them and not worrying about vomit getting on the children.
• Hanging out in the rain outside of the Augustiner tent at Oktoberfest and watching people while Aaron drank huge beers
  

  and ate a huge pretzel,

  

  without listening to color commentary about the funny clothes people are wearing, or the girl has that “thing” in her nose, or the guy that just fell down, and then having to answer questions about why that guy just fell down and getting into a long discussion with L about alcoholism and how he’s going to have to be careful because it runs in the family etc., etc., because that would just be a real downer.

• Discussing the strategy and tactics of the group of guys at the table next to us who were trying to get with some high school girls at the table in front of us.  I believe Aaron called them “lecherous.”  It didn’t take long for us to realize that they were American,  (Americans are a very loud people and can be easily spotted outside of America.) and Aaron commented that they had that “Jersey Boy Face.”  Hmmm turns out they go to Rutgers.  Yay stereotyping in Germany.
• Sitting in one place long enough to actually watch the guy hitting on the younger girls make his move by sitting down next to one of them and starting a conversation with “So, is this like a once a year type thing?”
• Learning the opening lines Aaron used to use, such as:  Let me show you the rest of the house.  I said it was lame, but he said it worked.
• Walking – everywhere – with no concern about taking stairs.
• Using a private bathroom without being noticed due to the child loudly singing her ABCs to keep her from screaming during a diaper change.
• Going to the Haufbrau House and the Augustiner beer halls and laughing on the inside at the poor people who have their children with them in the smoke and the noise.
• Giving money to a homeless guy to direct us to the Haufbrau house after at least an hour of trying to locate it ourselves and not being a bit concerned about getting the children home in time for bed.
• Eating dinner at 8 – in a restaurant.
• Discussing politics with my sister on Skype late into the night because I won’t be woken up at 6 a.m. by the children tomorrow.

As you can see, thus far it’s been a lovely trip.

Aaron got his new camera when his parents arrived and has been taking advantage of it.

On Friday we took the fam and headed up to Portsmouth for the day.  We were originally going to go to Paris, but the Chunnel fire put a stop to that.  Instead we took Southwest Trains and Liam was thrilled.

Grandma and Grandpa had a pretty good time too.

I would have preferred to have been left at home.  But that’s me all the time unless I’m by myself.

We grabbed some lunch at the mall type area

and headed over to look at the ships.

We had to wait for the harbor tour to start and thought we’d get a good picture of Grandma, Grandpa and the kids.  Elena wasn’t having anything to do with it.
Liam LOVED the harbor tour.  The boys sat out on the front of the boat and the girls stayed inside the covered area.  I was just exhausted.  Elena made her way back and forth between the two areas.  Social butterfly, that one.

Evidently this thing has no other purpose than to give tourists a view of the harbor.  Our cabbie wasn’t impressed with it one bit.  According to the Portsmouth website, “The development of the tower has had many technical difficulties to deal with and has been subject to various criticisms on the political front, in terms of cost and timing, but these have now been overcome, except for the external lift which is still not operational.”

So, very British!

After the harbor tour, we went to the WWII Museum.
Then we went back to the harbor to see the HMS Warrior or the HMS Victory.  (My memory is a little foggy since this was two months ago.)

Liam LOVED the cannons.  He came home talking about “pounders” and with a newfound love for big guns.

The train ride home wasn’t as peaceful, but we made it.  Elena finally fell asleep on the tube ride home.  Of course she woke up when we got off and cried the whole way home.  It was awesome.

But, the dawn of a new day and all she wanted to do was lick the peanut butter jar.

She was very proud that she got the lid off.

Aaron and his dad went to Churchill’s Bunker this morning for the Open House London tour.  Aaron did it last year and knew his dad would enjoy it, so they planned this trip around that, and then we planned our Munich trip knowing that they’d be here.  Aren’t they nice for keeping the kids?