Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 10 November 2003

# 9:20 PM (GMT+1)

I'm writing this in the Brasserie Engel, on the Hauptstraße in Offenburg, Germany, which is a little more than a third of the way around the world from where I was when I wrote the last entry.

The journey occupied the last twenty-four hours, counting from when I walked out the door in San Francisco to when I walked in the door of my hotel room here. If you deduct time spent sitting around in airports waiting for a connection, it comes to more like 18 hours actually in motion. Or, turnabout, counting the nine hours lost to changing time zones brings the grand total to 33 hours.

The airline part of this was too much trouble. I had to change planes twice, because (a) the airlines do not understand the "grand tour" style of vacation, and (b) hub-and-spoke flights are all very well but when they add six hours to my in-the-air time I must respectfully decline. So I wound up going SFO -> JFK (New York) -> Heathrow (London) -> Frankfurt, which at least has no retrograde motion involved.

Once I got to Frankfurt I had to go the rest of the way to Offenburg by train. This part was quite pleasant. Die Bahn's InterCityExpress (ICE) trains (don't know why the name is in English) are modern, all-electric, fast and eerily silent. Which is a joy, if you've just spent sixteen hours on noisy airplanes.

Not-in-Kansas moment for this trip: there's a casino in the Frankfurt airport.

I wish I spoke German properly. I can dope out things on signs, but I can't communicate with waiters in restaurants for beans. Michael (my friend who was just in this country) and Dara (my sister, whom I am visiting) both predicted this would not be a problem, because "they all speak better English than you do, anyway." This may well be true in the capital or in academic Saarbrucken, but it sure isn't true here.