Hello, and welcome to Sprockets...

Ok, so I have always wanted to go to Germany...maybe not always, but for a long time. There's lots that has attracted me, with one of them being the idea of being in a country where there's an entire month where the country shuts down to drink beer. Ok...that's not really what happens, but the idea is cool anyway. Also, Germany is filled with history, and great food--in my mind anyway: meat, meat, and meat, with sauerkraut. How does it get any better than that?

So anyway, I finally got my wish, and here I sit in Germany. I was invited to a workshop here and am giving a talk on Tuesday. Given the effort that goes into such a trip (changing 7 timezones and sitting on a plane for long periods of time) I decided to combine the Germany trip with a quick visit with some friends in London. The London trip was very good, catching up with my friends Gareth and Jess, and talking with Gareth in some detail about a project we are working on together. The visit probably would've been slightly better had I not been so exhausted from jet lag...while I was able to stay awake the whole time, having arrived in London at 6:15 AM and getting to bed at 10:30 PM, my mind was definitely not nearly as sharp as it normally is. Nonetheless, I had a productive and fun visit...I just wish it was for longer and that I hadn't made the visit alone.

Anyway, after just over 30 hours in London, I departed for Tuebingen, Germany. I must admit, despite wanting to go for years, I was very nervous about the trip. The main reason being, I had no idea what was going to happen when I landed....

Ok, first things first, I really get nervous about traveling to a country where I don't speak the language...I feel so ignorant and like I'm playing the role of the American stereotype--you know the one who sits there and goes to a foreign country and constantly asks for things in English louder and louder as if the problem with people in other countries is that they're hard of hearing. So it always makes me feel guilty that I never learned a foreign language so that I could get over that feeling. Of course, I have now traveled to Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland and France, so it's not like having become proficient in Spanish would have helped me in any of those cases. So traveling the world and being able to communicate everywhere is not a realistic expectation. Nonetheless, I feel crappy showing up some place and hoping that everyone I need to communicate with speaks English.

So in preparation of my landing, I tried planning my route to my hotel so that I could at least get to a bed without much difficulty. In order to get to Tuebingen, I had to fly to Stuttgart and then take a 1 hour bus ride to the main train station at Tuebingen. Fortunately, I printed out maps from google that showed how to walk from the train station to my hotel (500 m, or roughly a third of a mile) and then from my hotel to the place at the university where the conference was to be held. Upon arriving at the bus station, I pulled out my map and started to make my way to my hotel.

Problem was, as I was trying to figure out where to go, I could not make any sense of the map. In looking at the train station on the map and make sense of the roads around me, they were not matching up at all. The direction that I seemed to need to go was one way, but based on how the sun was setting (oh yes, did I mention I was particularly nervous as I was arriving at sunset so I was worried about navigating a city I didn't know in the dark?) it seemed that west was in the wrong place. So I started walking where I thought things made sense...that brought me to some places that eventually fell on the map and made sense, so I started following the path that the map had. After a while, I was getting tired--I had definitely walked more than a mile, not just a third of a mile, but I still had a good distance to go to reach my destination. This made NO SENSE...

Of course, then I realized that I was looking at the map that had directions from the hotel to the university, not the train station to the hotel. This put me about half a mile away from where I wanted to be, and made the time that I was arriving even later than I wanted to be. I walked back the way I came, until I reached a point on the OTHER map that matched up with the directions and was able to find my hotel, though with a wrong turn along the way. But I finally arrived, about an hour later than I should have.

At this point, I was *STARVING* and *THIRSTY*. I sat in the hotel, sent a few e-mails to say that I made it, and then headed out to find some food at 7:45 PM local time. At that point, most of the normal restaurants had closed, so the only place to get any food was at a pub. Of course, again, my nerves started kicking in--this meant going in, ordering food off a menu that I likely could not read and hoping that I got something that I liked. I wandered a bit and eventually found a place whose menu was posted and had a dish with some things I didn't understand, but included "tomate" and "olivena" which I figured was tomato and olive...why not? So I went in, sat at the bar, and the bartender came over and said something German to me. I just pointed to a glass and said, "Biere?"

"No problem," he said.

THANK GOD! He spoke English!

"Can I get food?" I asked.

"Yes, let me get a menu," he said.

I could cry.

I looked at the menu, and it was the same as the one outside--lots of German, with some words that maybe easily translated into English. So I pointed to the "tomate and olivena" dish. When I pointed to it, the bar tender said that it was "Sheep cheese" with other things. "OK", I said, and drank my beer--which was about 3 oz. in size...it was tiny.

Eventually my food came out and it was a flat bread pizza with cheese (the sheep cheese), olives, tomatoes, and...sauerkraut! It was very good. As I finished my tiny little beer, the bartender asked if I wanted another. This time though, I tried to break out the little German that I *DO* know.

Ok, all of the German I know revolves around beer. I mean, really, doesn't it make sense? Anyway, I nod my head and ask, "Weiss?" The bartender gives me a big smile and a big nod....then pours me a BIG glass of heffeweizen. It was very nice.

Then came time to pay the bill...and I froze. I couldn't remember if I was supposed to leave a tip or not. I tried to remember, but I never looked it up as to what the etiquette was in Germany. I decided not to...turns out to be the right decision. However, because I wasn't sure, I booked it out of that pub very quickly.

So I came back to the hotel, because I'm tired, don't know my way around, and there's very little that is opened right now. So here I sit, typing this blog post, watching the German version of "American Idol" called "**SOMETHING** Superstar." It's weird because all the interviews are in German, but then they sing songs that are from American artists...I heard Rhianna, Beyonce, and others who I don't know, but definitely Americans.

So I leave you with this final question...why do non-Americans have accents when they speak English but don't have accents when they sing? It's really weird...

Til next time