Adventures in Deutschland: Day 50 - Meersburg and a Little Bit of Switzerland

View from the castle in Meersburg

Monday was another gorgeous day. My mom, Dave, Therese and I headed out to Meersburg for the day. My mom and Dave had really enjoyed their time the night before in Ludwigshafen. They found a nice little restaurant to have drinks and a light bite to eat. Their room was also plenty cool even without air conditioning. Here all of the windows and sometimes the doors are a single pane of glass with a handle where a door knob would be. If you turn the handle upward, the top of the window (or door) tilts inward while the bottom stays closed. They don't have screens, but bugs and rain never make it through the window. If you tilt the handle to the side, the window opens like a door. If you tilt it down, it locks. These windows are great.

Right, so Monday we met at the train station and headed to Konstanz. Once there we caught a bus and a ferry to Meersburg. The ferry ride was beautiful. The day was so clear and the air was still a little cool. Once in Meersburg we could see the Swiss Alps across the lake. It was so clear that we could see the snow very distinctly on top of some of the mountains. Since it was still a little cool we thought we should head up the steep narrow streets to the castle right away. We toured the castle (I did this with my dad as well). Last time Therese slept through the whole thing. This time she did not. She tantrumed and ran around and tried to slip under the chain ropes, declaring that she wanted "to jump on the beds" and "sit on chairs" from centuries ago. Every once in awhile we could calm her down by talking about how princesses used to live in the castle (perhaps a small lie). She then wanted to see the princesses :-). When we left her to wander and walk by herself she did ok. She enjoyed picking up rocks in the castle garden, but then she wanted to carry them around the castle and throw them out the windows. She eventually put them on the outside of a windowsill thinking they were going to reach the lake beyond.

After traversing the castle, we headed for lunch down on the main street at the bottom of the town. We were hoping to get chicken but there were no seats at the restaurant showcasing the spinning spits of whole chickens so we ended up next door at an Italian place. Therese was having a major melt-down by this point, screaming,"REESE WANT CHICKEN!" over and over again. We asked the waiter if there was any chicken on the menu. He pointed to the one item he said was chicken. It was not. It was turkey. I do know enough German at this point to know the difference. Reese ended up crying and screaming so loudly that I had to take her out of the restaurant and into some nearby shade to have a talk. I asked her to use her words and to tell me what she wanted. She said, "Reese wants to cry!" So she did. Eventually she calmed down and we agreed to go into the restaurant and color. While we were away our drinks came and my mom and Dave ordered our food. When the food came out, my dish was a few small pieces of turkey (of course) in a mushroom sauce and some spaetzle. My mom and Dave were going to split spaghetti carbonara, but they were given a bowl of spaghetti bolognese. The two are nothing alike - they do not look alike (one is white with bacon, the other is red with ground meat), they do not taste alike, and, most importantly, they do not sound alike. My mom and Dave stopped our waiter and told him that he had delivered the wrong dish, that they had ordered carbonara. The expected response, at least in the US, would be something like "Oh, I'm sorry. I'll be right back with your dish. [insert friendly smile and maybe an apologetic look]." Not in Germany. The waiter said, "No, you ordered the bolognese." When they insisted they had not, he simply said, "Well I understood you to have ordered the bolognese" and left. I know, you are thinking, "Oh, he must have been having a bad day" or maybe "Don't generalize one particular person's behavior." But you are wrong. Read my next blog post.

After lunch we got ice cream and sat on a bench in front of the water. Well, my mom and I sat. Dave and Therese ran around. We then caught a ferry on which Dave and Reese blew bubbles by holding a little bubble wand up in the air as the ferry sped across the lake. Therese thought this was the best thing since string cheese (which we have to constantly remind her they don't have in Germany).

After the ferry, we caught a bus and met Todd near the main square in Konstanz. This is where we should have called it a day, but we didn't. I showed the lovely prostitute port statue to my mom and Dave and then we all headed to a really neat public park just across the Swiss border. Todd's former teacher had shown it to him the week before. Once you cross the border (no, their are no guards - just a small car barrier), there are Swiss flags painted on the sidewalk leading to the park. Cameron, Todd's classmate from Iraq, couldn't understand this- why would the Swiss want people to walk on their flag? Apparently there is a painting of the American flag and GW Bush on a sidewalk in Baghdad for people to walk all over.

My mom and Dave, worn out from the extreme hills of Meersburg, stopped at a nearby bar and had a drink while we took Therese into the park. There were a number of play sets - one that looked like a train, one that was made of logs, one that was all ropes. They also had zip lines, a swimming hole with a hose, and a number of bouncy metal toys. The best, however, was the little farm of animals. Therese got to feed baby goats, mountain goats, bunnies, and pigglets. She really wanted to feed the bunnies, but the goats kept catching wind of it and they chase the rabbits off to try to get the food. It was the same for the baby goats and even the mama goat. The alpha kept coming over and chasing the others away and then reaching his little mouth through the wire fence groping the air for food. Therese also saw a little donkey drinking milk from its mother. She pointed to it and said, "Horsey!" We told her that this was actually a baby donkey. She paused for a second and then said, "Donkey eats horsey!" By the time we joined back up with my mom and Dave, she was sharing her new knowledge, telling everyone, "Donkeys don't eat horseys."