This is the fifth in a series of stories from our recent trip to Germany and Austria. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.
One of the reasons we enjoy traveling so much is having experiences we can’t have at home.
For instance, on our recent Germany/Austria trip, we attended a classical concert at Mirabell Palace in Salzburg. Five string musicians and a clavier player performed pieces by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart in a magnificent marble room with perfect acoustics. But what made it so special is that Mozart himself played in that room in the late 18th century!
Incidentally, a tour guide later told us that the Mozart portrayed by Tom Hulce in “Amadeus” was pretty close to how the rambunctious genius acted in real life. And that Mozart’s father essentially invented going on the road by taking the very young Wolfgang to play venues in other European cities on tours that lasted as long as two or three years.
Here’s another experience example. In Vienna, we went to a clock museum which displays hundreds of timepieces of all sizes, some dating back to the 16th century. They ranged in size from tiny pocket watches to table clocks to grandfather clocks to mechanisms that had hung on the outside of large towers in city squares throughout Europe. In many, we could see the inner workings. Others did more than display the time — they kept track of the phases of the moon, sunsets and sunrises, as well as days/weeks/months. In quite a few, the ornamentation (carved wood, gold, and silver) proved the skills of the craftsmen who created them — some took as long as five years. We spent over two hours looking at every item in the collection.
It’s not always just the language and culture that differ from what we have at home. In all five cities we visited, there were newsstands and newspaper vending machines all over the place. Bookstores, too. You don’t see many of those in the USA anymore.
Their drug stores are much classier than your average CVS or Walgreens. Officially called apothecaries “Apotheke,” they didn’t have shelves of non-pharmaceutical products, harsh fluorescent lighting, overstuffed aisles, and limited staffing. When I needed some Tylenol (known there by its generic name, paracetamol), I had to ask one of the white-coat-clad clerks at a counter, who — despite it being a non-prescription drug — had to retrieve it for me from a drawer in another room.
When you buy a soda or bottled water in Germany/Austria (and throughout the EU), the plastic bottle caps don’t come all the way off when you unscrew them. They remain “tethered” to the ring around the top of the bottle. Consumers pay a deposit of eight to twenty-five cents when they buy beverages in bottles, but they can’t get their money back unless the cap is back on top. Initially, I found the tethered tops annoying, but got used to them pretty quickly.
Europe is also one of the few places you can ride in a funicular up to a mountain fortress which has guarded a city for hundreds of years against enemies who wanted a better view of the area so they could take awesome selfies.
In addition, the cities cater to tourists quite nicely by providing signs whcih tell us exactly where we’re expected to go:
Despite a lack of fluency in German, we were able to get around just fine. Google Translate was a big help, particularly in deciphering public transportation options and restaurant menus with no English. As in the rest of the continent, the vast majority of the public is at least bi-lingual, so nearly everywhere we went, when we asked people, “Sprechen sie Englisch?” (Do you speak English?), the answer was almost always “Ja!” (Yes!).
Still, to prepare for the trip, I learned another phrase I thought would be important: “Ich sprechen kein Deutsch,” which means “I speak no German.” I planned to use it when I encountered someone who, like me, was mono-lingual. On our penultimate day, I was waiting in line to enter an exhibition when a man and woman approached and asked a question in German. Finally, I could whip out my newly-learned phrase!
When I did, the man gave me a strange look, almost as if he wanted to say, “You know that was German, don’t you?”