Salzburg

Thursday morning I was up and on the train by ten. It was raining in town and had been since last night, which meant chilly weather and ice on the slopes. As it turned out, I had timed my visit perfectly: arriving after the snows had passed, when the sun was shining, and before it warmed into rain.

I had forgotten to turn in my ski pass and I thought about going back over to the Hausberg base to turn it in and get the deposit back, but I figured that would take longer than was worth the five-euro deposit I put down on it. Instead I packed up and caught the next train to Innsbruck, and then on to Salzburg. This would probably have been a quicker and cheaper journey if I went back through Munich instead, but I wanted to see more of the countryside while I was in the territory.

The train runs along the length of the valley between the ridges that harbor the twin towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen, and then passes into Austria's Tirolean Alps. The landscape was covered in white, evergreen trees hung heavy with winter's snows. Innsbruck nestles in a valley, larger than the valley I had come from, but equally surrounded by slopes cut with the open swaths of ski trails. The town itself was less than exciting, at least from the inside of the train station. I had about an hour or so to wait - too short to stow my luggage and go see the town, too long to sit around. I got lunch in the train station, and tried to get hot chocolate, but was driven out of the cafe by cigarette smoke so thick I could feel my eyes getting itchy and burning. That's something I will never get used to in Europe: the cigarette smoke. People have no compunction about lighting up at the breakfast table, in the restroom, wherever. Or in this case, lighting up and tapping the ashes out into the ashtray on my table, apparently out of being too lazy to look around for the ashtray on the bar. Being from San Francisco, I'm spoiled this way. Although I'm not sure "spoiled" is the right word, since by the time I left that cafe ten minutes later, I could feel the wheezing starting up in my lungs - I'm not sure that's anything I'll ever get used to.

The train out of Innsbruck was set to arrive a little late, and by the time it actually did come in, it was close to an hour and a half past due, and dozens of chilly people were standing on the platform waiting. When it finally did roll into the station, I climbed on but had a hard time figuring out exactly where to sit. Some seats are reserved, some seats are tucked into glassed-in cabins but not reserved, and between all that I wasn't really sure where I was supposed to go. I finally collapsed on a seat and no one told me to move, so I didn't. I was sniffling and tired, so I just napped for the next hour or so. The gal sitting next to me turned out to speak English (though she was Dutch), and she clued me in that Salzburg might have been a better place to fly into, since Ryanair runs cheap flights in from Stansted, one of the many smaller airports that circle the suburbs of London. Good to know for next time.

The train was moving rather slow - at times I thought I could probably outrun it if I tried - so it rolled into Salzburg not too long before the sun went down. The hostel was exactly as advertised - ten minutes' walk from the train station. It was clean and comfortable and on the first night I had a room to myself. Which was good, because I still had the stuffy cough and had long since run out of sudafed and hadn't been able to locate a pharmacy to get more.

But, ten minutes' walk from any downtown train station is usually not a great part of town. I remember Salzburg from visits years ago, and I remember it as a cute little baroque town, cobblestone streets and narrow alleyways beneath the towering fortress perched on the peak of a steep hill. The part of town I stayed in was more like the dull industrial side that every city has but that tourists rarely visit, given what little there is to see there. I walked out to get something to eat and had trouble finding anything besides dingy-looking bars, while all around in the distance I could see the spot-lit collection of historical edifices that surround the edges of town. I finally settled on a pizza place where at least the waiter spoke enough English that I could order in a combination of broken languages, and after that I went back to the hostel and fell very fast asleep.

The next morning marked my only full day in town, so I made my way to the old quarter that backs up against the ancient fortress. Here marks the place where Mozart was born, the landscape that inspired The Sound of Music. I walked just about every alley and square in the old town, then started up the hill toward the fortress. But the trail was blocked by a sign I couldn't piece out - I got most of it, but one long word was lost on me. So instead I kept following the winding road I was on, which lead along a wooded ridge from which I could see two sides of town at the base of either slope. It was a sunny day and a spectacular view, surrounded by Alpine peaks studded with just wisps of cloud. I turned around to a breath-taking view back toward the fortress, and started the walk back toward town.

After a couple more laps around the old city, I decided to go ahead on up to the fortress. There is another way up besides the road - an old funicular that makes the near-vertical ascent from town to the old embattlement. I wandered the open areas, and finally figured out what that mysterious sign at the trailhead meant: "Danger: Roof avalanche." Which is a loose description of what happens when a thick snow starts to melt and drop off onto whatever unsuspecting passerby happens to be walking underneath. It will probably snow again before the season is out, but for now the city is in a thaw.

Inside the fortress I recognized the place where us three kids once had our picture taken perched atop a cemented-together pile of cannonballs. Just like Garmisch, there are places here that I wouldn't know that I know, and sometimes those places are startlingly familiar: at home my parents have an old picture of Bruce in profile looking toward town from along a reinforced wall edging the precipitous cliff, from this very place. I never knew where it had been taken, but it was certainly here.

After wandering the outer walls I caught up with a tour in the inner chambers, one of the stranger tours I have ever taken. At the entrance everyone was handed a hand-held radio-like device that had the text of the tour recorded into it in a couple dozen languages. The tour guide asked which language each person wanted, told everyone which number to dial into on the radio, and off we went into the medieval walls that now house remnants of those earlier times. Particularly notable was a set of models that showed the various stages of the fortress under construction over the many centuries, dating back to empires long fallen (to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "Ah, the Romans were here!"). They say that the stone walls were so impenetrable that the fortress was one of very few in Europe that was never taken by force - only once did it fall into foreign hands, when it was handed over quietly to French troops during Napolean's incursion.

The rest of the museum was an odd collection of World War I memorabilia and unnerving examples of medieval farm instruments turned weapons-of-war. In one spacious room, a loop of film ran in larger-than-life proportions on the blank wall, the content of which appeared to be entirely dedicated to making fun of foreign visitors, with close-ups of yawning aged yuppies in golf shirts and crowds of Asian tourists all watching through the lens of video cameras. Even stranger were the collection of metal skeletal warriors clutching scythes and pitchforks, all lunging variously toward the wall, throwing their shadows against the film in a pattern vaguely reminiscent of an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I suppose this was some kind of installation art piece, and though I'm not entirely sure what exactly it was meant to imply, it was, uh, memorable.

I got seafood for dinner then headed back in the direction of the hostel after the sun was down. I was lying on my bunk reading when my new roommates appeared - two American girls from small-town Missouri, just a little over college aged, who were completing a student teaching gig at an army base in Bomberg, Germany. We exchanged stories for a couple of hours - everything from teaching to living on army bases to traveling around Europe - before I fell asleep, hoping my lingering cough didn't keep everyone else in the room awake.

The next morning I packed while the two roommates slept in, and I was on a train before noon. Back to Munich.

Hausberg, again

I woke up again with the stuffy head and cough, and again doped up with Sudafed so I could get out on the mountain for my last day here. The high winds that had blown on the Zugspitze yesterday had brought with them a bit of a storm, with a light cloud cover thickening up as the morning wore into noon and the afternoon wore into the evening.

I caught the bus to Hausberg and stood in line again to get up the main gondola. Between the two days of skiing and that annoyingly persistent cold, I wasn't up for a very adventurous day, so I took a lot of small runs over on the Hausberg side of the mountain. These particular resorts allow something that we don't really see in the US: hikers can take the gondola up and wander around on foot, mostly on winding trails that are probably jeep roads in the summer time. Since I was on the flatter runs, I spent alot of time dodging these pedestrians, though I have to agree that it would make a nice walk if I weren't more enthusiastic about skiing than hiking when the snow is right. Stranger than that, from the low altitude of one particular phigh-speed chair, I watched as a long train of people, armed with telemark skis and backpacks, huffed their way up the hill I had just come down. I was wondering what would possess a bunch of tourists to volunteer to put themselves through that particular exercise, until I got a closer look and realized that they were all in army fatigues, and that in all likelihood, the whole lot of them were probably wishing that they were not having to ski uphill on this day or any other.

I stopped for lunch in the mid-afternoon, and from inside the lodge I watched as the clouds burst out into a shower of big fluffy snowflakes. I dawdled around inside until the blizzarding conditions let up a bit, flipping through the German dictionary I carried, looking up a few words I had been scrambling for over the last few days. At one time I did speak a fair amount of German, enough to get by anyhow, but that was many years ago. Now when I go to say something, I have to sift through several layers of languages that I know bits and pieces of to find the right phrase, with the German phrase usually coming somewhere after the French and slightly before the Russian version. The one thing that makes it all harder is that I've lost the facility in German to figure words out, even if they are written in front of me. My fair command of Spanish allows me to get the gist of other romance languages, but German is an entity all to itself. But then there are moments in which, for no reason at all, I understand everything. I was waiting in line in for the restroom on the hill when the gal in front of me, instead of entering the stall, walked up and inspected it from floor to ceiling, glanced behind the toilet, shrugged a few quick words to the woman behind her in line, and left. I must have looked mystified, because the woman turned to me and said in German, "Oh, she just lost her ski pass." Even though I didn't know that I would know those words, it made perfect sense, and it took me a minute to realize that it had been spoken in German. And with that, I should also note that I have become very accustomed to simply walking up to people and asking (in German) if they speak English. I figured this just cut to the chase, since I had started many conversational moments in German only to have the waiter/ticket seller/lift attendant answer in English without skipping a beat. Oh my, is it that obvious?!

After lunch I skied out from the lodge and took a few short runs, though with the snow still coming down I realized I probably needed goggles to keep going safely, since the falling flakes were so thick that they were sneaking in through the sides of my glasses. I thought I'd take the long run down to the base of the mountain and call it a day, since it would easily be three o'clock by that time anyhow. Only, I was on the far side of the ski area, and I was fairly sure if I didn't catch just the right turns I would end up at the base of the Alpspitze - which would have been fine, except that I had to return the skis at the bottom of Hausberg. So of course I took the straight course right to the bottom of the Alpspitze. I got off my skis and hopped on the smaller gondola, back up the mountain. I got it right on the second try, when I realized that I had to take a turn onto an uphill trail in order to traverse back over to the right side. I came down to the base just as the lifts were starting to close up, making it a full day on the hill. From there I trudged the distance (a little longer than I though it might be) back to the ski shop to turn the gear back in, and from there back to the hotel. After a quick snack I retraced my steps to the Alspitze Wellenbad and once again soaked in the warm water to undo some of knotted muscles in my neck, and from there went to get a last dinner in Garmisch. Tomorrow I leave for Salzburg.

Zugspitze

After my exhausting adventures on Hausberg yesterday, the little sniffle I had been ignoring for a few days bloomed into a full phlegm-fest overnight. Besides the stuffiness, I developed a throat so sore I was afraid I was in the early stages of strep, which would indeed be a very complicated glitch in my vacation plans - especially since I had gone through the process of getting an NHS card that covers medical care in continental Europe, and then left it neatly stacked in a pile of paperwork back in my studio in London. After suffering through that all night, I got up and got breakfast, but then decided to go back to sleep for another hour and do a shorter day on the slopes. I had promised myself that on the next clear day, I would go up to the highest peak in the Bavarian Alps: the Zugspitze. Not knowing if I would get another sunny day, I dragged myself out of bed, geared up, and headed out. The stuffy cold was nothing that a double dose of Sudafed couldn't hide for a few hours.

I wasn't entirely sure how to get the several miles down the valley to the base of the mountain, so I asked around for the right bus station. I got a couple of confused answers, waited around at one bus stop for a while, then realized that I had seen the train station that leads up the mountain just on the other side of the main tracks, and the confused directions to the bus station were probably due to the fact that there isn't really a bus that goes there. I hurried over, and within a few minutes I was on the streetcar that leads to another set of tracks where the historic cogwheel train leads steeply up the side of the mountain, and eventually straight up through the belly of the Zugspitze. I can't imagine who thought it would be a fine idea, many decades back, to blast a near-vertical tunnel through solid rock of the highest mountain in Germany, but there it is. An hour later, I was up at the last stop.

The Zugspitze is unlike any other place I've ever been skiing. The train station opens out onto the face of a wind-swept landscape, far above the tree line. The ski area sits on the "gletscher" - which, as its cognate suggests, is a permanent glacier that tops the peak. On this day, the light breeze in the valley belied a whipping wind high on the mountain, which barreled down the precipitous slopes pushing a sandblast of tiny ice crystals before it. Spindrift blown off the high altitudes funneled down in small twisters of dry snow. If I had been mountaineering, this would have been a sign to pack up and go home post haste, but downhill skiing is of course a much tamer sport, with the cogwheel train waiting whenever skiers tire of the weather.

I buckled my boots, stepped into my skis, and headed off down the hill. The snow was surprisingly powdery, which - I quickly discovered - stayed that way because of the constant stream of snow being blown off the upper reaches and onto the slopes. I took the main chair - another high-speed, six-person lift - a couple of times to warm up, and then I faced a question. I hadn't realized that all the other lifts on the mountain were t-bars, so if I wanted to go anywhere interesting, I was going to have to get over yesterday's glitch and hop back on the horse, so to speak. Which was doubly interesting since most of those t-bars were the only way out of the runs that led to them. On the plus side, being so far up the glacier, there were no trees at all, so if I fell I could just ski off instead of getting mired in forested territory between the lift and runs.

After a couple of runs up the t-bars I was much more comfortable with it, and with that I was able to cover most of the mountain except for the farthest reaches at the right side of the large bowl that made up the patrolled area. I was skiing very conservatively, being on unfamiliar gear and realizing that if I were to twist a knee on the ice it would be very hard for me to get down the mountain alone, much less all the way back to London without help. And, without chair lifts, the thighs never get a rest and I could feel the old twinge of a couple bad snowboarding moments creeping back into my knees. So I kept to the comfortably intermediate runs, though "intermediate" here is a little more adventurous than "intermediate" out in California.

And in any case, I was up there as much for the views as for the skiing. From the entrance to the train station, you can see nothing but mountains in every direction. A gondola takes visitors up to the actual peak, but there is no skiing up there - just a view so sweeping that it includes several nations and a handful of mountain ranges. And from that peak, you can take a separate gondola back down toward town over the opposite face. This is a journey I remember from childhood, that winter in 1985 when we last skied here - just a quick glancing look at the glacier-scape that runs up the mountain. This is not a gondola over a nice open slope; this is a ride over wind-blown ice formations and crevasses that don't seem any safer because of the open air altitude that separates the gondola from the rough, remote slope below.

After a couple hours I stopped for a late lunch and to give my tired legs a rest. Even inside the lodge, tiny shards of icy snows blew in every time someone opened a door. By the time I went out again, the weather was getting even wilder - warm enough while I was moving, but blasting cold on the long t-bar rides back up. Clouds were forming over the highest peaks, fed by the winds that picked up drifts of snow that joined with the clouds rather than falling again. Mountains like these make their own weather.

When the shadows got too long I headed back to the train station and caught the last ride down the mountain, back toward town. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was pretty chilled, and yesterday's adventures in the powder had left one side of my neck with seized up muscles. This region is known for its spas and imaginative complexes of swimming pools, and I had happened across one of them when I was walking around town on a previous night. I thought that a long soak in warm water would help unclench the soreness in my neck, so I grabbed a quick snack in the center of town and walked back to the Alpspitz Wellenbad. I thought I might have been there before, back when I was here with family over twenty years ago, but I wasn't at all prepared for the experience of walking into a place and knowing every corner of it without having known that I would recognize it. The complex has three large pools side by side: a warm pool, a diving pool, and at the far end, a pool that has lap lanes most of the time, except for the ten minutes or so every hour that they clear the lanes and switch on the large rotating blades hidden under one edge which turn the whole thing into a wave pool, with swells generated on one end and breaking gently over the other end. We had certainly been there before, and it seemed very strange to be here without family. The warm water helped enough with the cramps in my neck, and I skipped the wave pool since I was still feeling the chill of this cold I've been fighting and didn't want to go into the cold water. Afterwards I grabbed a pizza to go and headed back across town to the hotel, fell asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

Hausberg

I was up early Monday morning and got breakfast at the hotel. There's one thing about Germany that you just gotta go with even if it seems a little odd at first. The rules.

The guidebook I've been carrying around notes that German people tend to be "compulsively law-abiding," and I don't think that's an entirely unfair assessment. What they don't mention are the little rules you can't fathom but that everyone but you seems to know. A little example: breakfast at the hotel. I grabbed some food and sat down. The woman who was minding the goings-on in the large dining room came over and told me I could not sit at that particular table, and didn't I see the sign? On the table was a little yellow sign. I didn't say "reserved" in any language that I could discern, and moreover, every table that I could see had the same sign on it. So I had just picked a table with a sign and sat down. But no! That sign means the table is reserved, and wasn't it obvious? Uh, no, but in any case, I asked in broken German where I could sit, and she pointed me far to the other end of the room, where one or two tables were yellow-sign free. This reminded me of a vague story I'm not sure I remember correctly, from when I was very little and living in Germany with my parents and equally young siblings. We stopped at a roadside stand to buy a picnic basket, but when the woman discerned that the basket she was selling was to be used for picnics, she refused to sell it. It was a bread basket, certainly not a picnic basket! What mystifies me is how I always seem to be the one person in the room who doesn't know the rules, and I'm the one looking lost and confused when everyone else seems to be in on the secret.

Anyhow, after breakfast I headed out to try to figure out the skiing thing. I did get skis, boots, and poles at the shop I had visited the evening before, where thankfully they spoke enough English that I didn't have to complete this transaction in my very mediocre German. I could have walked to the base of the slope from there, but it would have been quite a journey carrying all that gear, so I caught the shuttle instead. At the base of the mountain I waited in line again, this time for lift tickets. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to ski all three days I had scheduled to stay in Garmisch, but I bought a three-day lift ticket anyhow that would get me into any of the resorts in the region - mostly so I wouldn't have to wait in line again. After that was the line to get onto the main gondola, which was the only way up the hill that I could tell, unless I wanted to hang out in the flatlands with the kiddie ski schools. This took nearly 45 minutes to negotiate among the jostling crowd, and I was duly concerned that every lift line on the mountain above was going to be equally lengthy, though as it turns out this was just an unfortunate bottleneck on an otherwise reasonably crowd-sparse mountain.

By the time I got to the top and got on skis, it was near 10:30. But the skies were clear in every direction I could see, and some of that new powder was still on the ground, and I headed downhill. The Hausberg ski area overlaps seemlessly with the nearby Alspitze ski area (on the mountain called Osterfeldkopf), and I traversed between the two for most of the day. One steep run called the Kandahar Descent was being used as a race course (although it looked mostly like practice runs from where I stopped to watch from the sidelines), and I remembered being here when I was very young and watching the racers go by on their way to the course. If I remember right, this is where Karen got knocked over by a high-speed racer on his hurried path to the top of the race.

There was another landmark that looked strangely familiar: the t-bar lift where, in about 1985, Kathy & I had collectively fallen off, and someone (someone who shall remain nameless, though there were only two of us there and it wasn't me!) suggested that instead of skiing back down to the bottom, we should just take our skis off and walk to the top, which shouldn't be too far. About 30 minutes later, we crested the top of the run, to find Bruce scratching his head and wondering what could possibly have happened that took half an hour for us to get up there. In retrospect, that seemed like a very good question indeed, though to be fair, we both thought the top was much nearer than it actually turned out to be!

About halfway through the day I stopped to get lunch at the chalet-like hut at the top of the main lift. I warmed up to hot soup with a view straight down the slope into the valley laid out in front of me. After lunch I explored farther out away from the main gondola, where most of the lifts are not the high-speed six-person chairs that populate the main runs, but high-speed t-bars of the sort that I never quite got over since that little incident twenty-one years ago. But I wasn't particularly paying attention when I got myself way off on the side where the only way out was via a rather precipitously steep t-bar. I hopped on without thinking about it, but somewhere in the first stretch I didn't get the bar quite set right. It was crawling up my back and turning ever-more vertical when it should have stayed horizontal under my rear end. I think I could have fixed it if it hadn't been for the fact that I had a one-strap backpack slung around me, which I had originally thought I would leave in a locker somewhere, but which turned out to be very handy to have with me (among other things, it carried the shoes I had worn until I picked up ski boots in the morning). Anyhow, the t-bar was caught up in it, I was sliding off, and I finally decided it was time to quit fighting it. Better to drop off it, ski back to the bottom, and start all over again.

That was the plan.

That was not, however, the way it turned out.

I let go of the t-bar as I would at the top of the run, but I hadn't accounted for the fact that the backpack was still catching on it. I still don't know exactly what part was wrapped around the lift apparatus, but when I let go, the backpack did not come off with me but snapped to tension as the t-bar headed up the hill without me. And all of a sudden, I was face down on the track being pulled uphill by the strap of the pack still hung out on the crossbar, skis and poles splaying out in whatever direction gave up the least resistance. I realized this was also not a good position to be in, and I somehow managed to get both arms up over my head, at which point the backpack slid off and I was free of the dragging lift. Except...

I expected that the backpack would slide off once it was no longer under tension from dragging my 165 pounds up the hill. Nope! I looked up to see the backpack, now hanging neatly off the crossbar, making its way up the hill without me. Next I looked downhill, where there happened to be two people on the next t-bar down the line, shouting at me in German to watch out, since the only worse damage I could do at this point would be to trip up another pair of people and have the three of us piled up in the middle of the track. I managed to get myself off to the side in time for them to get by safely, but then I was on the border between the steep track and trees, which were mired in thigh-deep unspoiled powder. I considered skiing back down the t-bar track since the lift was fairly lightly used, but every half-dozen t-bars another couple of people came along, making it impossible for me to use the track. Instead I chose the trees, and immediately sunk in several feet and lost my balance, falling over to the side. And there I sat for a few moments, gathering my energy again now that I was out of danger of getting ski marks across my face. Standing up again was a struggle, with my poles sinking their entire length into the snow. By the time I got to my feet and back on the main ski trail, I was covered head to toe with snow, every muscle was exhausted, and I still had to make my way back down to let the lift operator know about my errant backpack. I must have been quite a sight, and I had to half-pantomime the backpack situation to the lift operator, since her English was about equally as limited as my German. She and I were both laughing when she finally got the picture and went in to call her colleague at the top of the lift to watch out for it.

And, of course, I had to get back on the lift. Albeit without my backpack, which probably simplified things enough that this time I made it to the top without incident. Though I did figure out exactly why I had fallen, and since it was really an unavoidable part of the run, I decided it would be best if I avoided getting myself down to that lift again. I found my backpack set on the side of the track, dusted it off, and headed out on my way.

I headed back toward the central area of Hausberg, following whatever lifts and runs looked appealing at the moment. I caught the upper-most gondola which rises high to the top of the mountain, and it was about that time that the afternoon chill was starting to settle in. It was past 3:30 when I finally glanced at a clock, and after the adventure on the t-bar my thighs were sufficiently tired to have settled into a general burn that didn't let up. Around that time I remembered something that Bruce had said before I left - describing our visit to Hausberg in 1985, he reminded me that we had taken a series of lifts up to the very top of the mountain, and then taken the whole day to ski down. The whole day, eh? Yup, it was three-thirty, I was exhausted, and I was up at the top of a mountain that once took the five of us a whole day to descend.

Fortunately, I'm not 10 years old anymore, and I didn't have a herd of kids in tow, so it really took me only about half an hour to make the whole descent. At the bottom I must have just missed the shuttle bus, but another one came in about 20 minutes, just as I was starting to get uncomfortably cold. Back at the hotel I took a nap (after negotiating another one of those German quirks: you can't take skis upstairs, but they don't tell you that, nor do they tell you that there happens to be a room in back set aside specifically for snowy gear), and then headed out for dinner. Italian this time, since Monday is the day that many restaurants are closed, and this one was both open and near enough for a short walk home afterwards. And I slept very well that night.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen

I arrived back in Munich with about 15 minutes before the next train left for Garmisch, my next destination. The trains left on the half hour, so if I missed this one I'd be in for a bit of a wait. So I dashed back across the street and down a block or two toward the hostel, grabbed my things, and ran back to get a ticket. I made it on to the train with about 30 seconds to spare, having run the last 200 yards to the farthest set of tracks with a pack on and a duffel bag jostling in one hand. By that time, I was glad to sit down for the hour or so ride south.

Garmisch lies in the south of Germany, where the Bavarian Alps rise precipitously and without warning from the plains, much like the Rockies rise out of nowhere when you drive into Denver from the east. The town stretches out along the length of a valley that winds between rows of peaks; only through a narrow slot pass between two mountains can you see back toward the nearby flatlands. Otherwise, all you can see is Alps, on every side, reaching skyward.

I got in while the sun was still up and set out to look for the hotel I had booked at. I wandered a ways along the street marked Bahnhofstrasse (literally, the train station street - there seems to be one of these in every town), which turned out to be in the wrong direction; when I returned to the station, I saw the hotel right where it was promised to be - just across an open parking lot from the train stop. I checked in and asked in a very broken mixture of German and English where I could go to rent skis. The woman at the desk pulled out a tourist map and drew arrows to the opposite side of town, so after I dropped my gear in my room upstairs I set out to figure out the skiing situation. It turns out that the shop she had pointed me to is only a few minutes walk from the hotel, and it's located at the crossroads between the main street and the street that leads up to the base of Hausberg, the nearest mountain. And, the free shuttle to the hill picks up right outside the shop. Perfect.

Having that errand taken care of, I set out to see the rest of town. Actually, two towns. Garmisch on the west side of the train tracks, where most of the ski areas lie, and Partenkirchen on the east side of the tracks, where the hotel was located. Since I was already on the Garmisch side, I walked into the center of that town. Rarely is the local architecture so perfectly suited to the natural landscape as in the Bavarian Alps. Cute little houses with peaked roofs and carved-wood balconies where flowers will bloom in primary colors in the spring, a church with an onion-domed tower, and a thick dusting of snow atop everything. You couldn't invent something as perfectly pretty as Garmisch.

I ate a quiet restaurant along the the main street. Though I'm still stubbornly half-vegetarian, there is still much to choose from: soups and fish and salads and that strange half-Pepsi half-Fanta soda they have only in Germany, and local beer. Because I have vague but fond memories of visiting the Aying brewery when I was very little, I ordered an Ayinger beer and was pleasantly surprised that I actually liked it, being that I find most beer tolerable but not tasty.

Stepping back outside was disorienting the half-dark of the nearly full moon. I saw lights high above the horizon that I thought must be stars or satellites until my eyes adjusted to the dark: not stars, not satellites, but the lights of the lodges half way up the ski mountains. And then, out of the grey-black darkness, the outline of giants came into relief, the outline of towering mountains standing guard one every side of me, surrounded by Alp, surrounded by mountains peaking so far from the valley floor that you have to crane your neck back to see the tops.

From downtown Garmisch I walked back to the centerline where the tracks run between the two towns. Back on the Partenkirchen side, I walked the length of the main street and turned back toward the hotel only when I ran out of street to walk on.

Will we ever say Never Again and mean it

I had to be out of the hostel fairly early, so I grabbed breakfast and packed up. I'm still not so sure about this whole hostel concept...it's just kind of odd sometimes. I really hadn't talked to the other two girls in my room (again, they didn't speak much English or German that I could tell), and there wasn't really any way to ask them to please not take up every open surface area, chair, and table while I was trying to pack. And then I walked back into the room to finish things up, and one of the girls was sitting at the table talking. The room had lots of nooks and corners, so I figured the other girl was sitting somewhere I couldn't see, especially since I wasn't really looking for her. But nope, it turned out, the other girl was somewhere else, and this one was quite loudly and adamantly talking to herself. Um...ok. Probably better that I didn't understand any bit of what she was saying - I didn't really want to know.

I dropped my luggage in the designated room where it could stay until I was ready to leave the city. Walking toward the train station, I crunched through a layer of slick ice - all that was left of yesterday's snow which had melted in the afternoon then frozen again overnight. At the train station I puzzled over the instructions to get tickets, trying to sort out how I could get to my intended destination and back with the proper fare - especially since the Munich subways and street cars don't check tickets at the door, but send innocent-looking and often plain-clothed individuals around at random intervals to spot-check that passengers are carrying the correct ticket. The summer of 1991 when I lived outside of Munich and took language classes in the city, I navigated this system every day, but it has been years since I've entirely forgotten how it works.

My destination was a small-town suburb about half an hour north of Munich. Of all the time I have been here, I've never visited this particular historic landmark, and I figured this was as good a time as any.

Dachau. A blandly typical if perhaps exceptionally pretty Bavarian village with a river running through it and cute little downtown district full of bakeries and shops.. And, oh yeah, the seat of the worst genocide ever perpetuated against humankind, because this is where the Holocaust started. Even as early as 1933, prisoners of various sorts were being brought to the complex. In the early days, mostly political prisoners - communists, dissenters. Later began the arrival of ethnic groups to be cleansed - gypsies and Poles and Jews. At the height of the war, entire cadres of Russian prisoners of war were shipped here for wholesale execution. As the third reich was clawing its way to the end of the war, coal was so scarce that bodies were buried rather than burned, and waves of typhoid weakened the starving prisoners so direly that the Nazi rulers could not even keep up with the demands for prisoner labor in the war factories. It was American forces that liberated the camp in April of 1945, and because it was one of the first camps to be opened to foreign eyes, none of the troops had any idea what they were about to face. Thirty thousand people are documented to have died at this camp alone - not counting many more who died before they were registered as prisoners.

The old concentration camp is on the eastern outskirts of the town, and it took me about an hour to walk there from the train station. Just outside the gates, paths lead through trees and little hills and if you didn't know better, you'd think you were out for a day at the park. A plaque at the entrance gates thanks the American troops who faced lingering Nazi resistance when they forced their way into the camp on that spring day in 1945. But what is most striking about the site is not some sense of the sinister, but its utterly unassuming banality. Especially under a fresh coat of pristine snow, it's difficult to understand this place as anything other than a museum exhibit, far-removed in space as well as time from the place where all these things happened. One side of the camp abuts again a condo complex and then a school yard, where kids play and families grow up. The surrounding village gives no inkling of how its current residents feel about the fact that the world hears the name of their home town and shrinks in horror. I suppose you can't think about that and go on living there, yet there it is.

The museum at the camp is housed in one of the few remaining original buildings, and seems to me a strange mishmash of obscure political history and vignettes of horror. The exhibits are repetitive and difficult to follow, but the one that stays with me is a map of all the camps and subcamps across Germany and the occupied territories. And this is what I hadn't known - I've heard of Dachau and Auschwitz and Sobibor and can name about a half dozen more. I did not know that there were hundreds of installations, all over the nation, that housed and murdered prisoners. I suppose this should be obvious - you can't take out six million people at one place. But the thoroughness, the calculation, the precise arrangement of such a vast system of internment offers its own view into the horror of the Holocaust.

I left the Dachau camp through the same gates I came in through, gates that once separated the doomed from the free. Along the way I passed the sign that reads in five languages: Never Again. Nie Wieder. Plus Jamais. And I was reminded of a song by the spoken-word and hip-hop artist Ursula Rucker, who spoke of Rwanda and dozens of other modern-day atrocities when she asked:

Will we ever say Never Again and mean it?

I walked a shorter route back to the center of town, across the creek and along picturesque pathways, and then hopped back on a train toward Munich. Out of the past, back to the present.

Munich

After my last test on Friday, I hopped the slow train to the airport, and from there got onto a flight to Amsterdam. This wasn't my final destination, but I spent an awful long time there. The three-hour layover was delayed into a five-hour layover, and finally the KLM desk let on that heavy snows on the ground in Munich were to blame. Lufthansa had already cancelled their flights into Munich, and I figured if they weren't going there, it was unlikely that anyone else was either. And if I wasn't going to land in Munich that night, I wanted to know about it soon, so I could at least see something of Amsterdam before it got too late to go into town. But, I couldn't be too grouchy, since snow on the ground in Munich implied fresh powder in Garmisch, and that is after all the point of this journey.

But it turned out that by the time they delayed my flight, the snow had let up and they were just clearing out the tangle of circling planes that had gathered during the passing storm, trying to get the long-distance flights on the ground before they let a whole new raft of planes come in from the rest of Europe. I landed just before midnight, and waited nearly another half hour for my luggage to make it to the carousel; I wrestled a ticket out of a machine that offered less help in English than I understood in German, and hopped the next train to the city center. It was past one in the morning when I finally made it to the hostel, wondering if my bed at the hostel was still open. It was, and I knocked on the door to wake my temporary roommates to let me in; the two were friends, apparently Chinese, but I wouldn't know because they spoke only a few words of English and no German that I could discern. And the room was hotter than many tropical countries in the summer, so I had to play charades to get them to turn the radiator down a notch.

I was up early the next morning and out before the other two girls were awake. Breakfast at the hostel was one of those uniquely German meals, an all-you-can-eat buffet of breads and cheeses and meats that hostels in no other country would bother to lavish on their guests. I started the ten-minute walk into the city center and the Marienplatz, the town square fronted by an ornate town hall building with its famous marionette figures that stand still up high in the towers and come out to dance at turn of the hour. The snow began to fall again, blanketing the city into the quiet of a windless blizzard. Munich has always possessed a fairyland quality for me, like the technicolor figures inside a snowglobe. It had been years since I had seen the city under snow - just over twenty-one years, since the winter I turned 10 years old.

Despite the snow, the weather still felt warmer than my weekend at Folkestone not more than a few days ago, confirming my suspicion that even a blizzard in Bavaria harbors less of a chill than an average winter day in Britain. But the charm of strolling in a snowstorm eventually wears off, so I ducked into the Deutsches Museum to spend some time out of the weather. I wandered through the exhibits, some which were obviously newer than since the last time I had visited there and some of which I vaguely remembered from previous visits - medieval musical instruments, half-functional biochemistry experiments behind glass whose purpose I could only estimate through my far-less-than-fluent German. I was getting ready to step back out into the weather when I saw a sign pointing down a staircase into a mock mine in the basement, so I thought I'd check that out before donning hat and gloves for the snow again. Beneath the museum they have managed to carve out a set of winding tunnels so extensive that it takes most of half-hour to navigate through them; along the sides are mock-ups of miners in shafts and equipment running on tracks and horses who pulled trolleys along until the days of electrification. Even in the safety of a mock-up, this is an occupation that I cannot imagine - so far underground, such cramped conditions, with so little holding up the mountain of earth above the small tunnel of air. I walked through quickly; I was not interested in staying long.

By the afternoon the skies were clearing and the snow was starting to melt off. I covered the center of the city several times over, in overlapping circles, trying to see every corner I remembered from my former days here, even those I didn't know I would remember. I visited several churches too, reminded of another axiom of European climatology: the place that is reliably colder than Britain in the winter is the inside of German religious edifices. My parents used to joke about sending my little brother to one of these places if he did not behave - places where the air inside bears a chill that even a winter night can't match, and any heat introduced promptly floats into the arched ceilings dozens of feet above.

Toward the late afternoon I had reached that stage of travel where I have to make myself sit down and rest, when I wonder why I'm feeling tired and cranky until I realize that I've been on my feet for seven or eight hours without rest. I've long had a habit of eating while walking, and my recent travels have compounded this: I grab a sandwich and keep moving, forgetting hours later why my feet are achy and sore. I think I'll invent a fad diet: you can only eat while you're walking. I'll call it the Shin Splints diet, for that splitting feeling you get in your lower legs when you walk on concrete for too long. I finally stopped for a snack and a hot chocolate before heading back toward the hostel with the setting sun.

After grabbing a dinner at an Italian restaurant (strangely, these seem to proliferate in German, though Italy isn't all that close by), I walked back toward the Marienplatz, quiet again now at night. Along the alleyways into the center, shop windows are backlit to reveal the that particular Bavarian aesthetic of immaculate kitsch, of so many figurines and knick-knacks and thimbles painted with the blue-and-white-checkers of the Bavarian flag that you wonder how they all fit on one shelf - but at the same time so tidy that not a mote of dust can be found between them. Like the way that some Latin American countries can get away with butting a salmon pink wall up against a tangerine orange ceiling and trim the whole thing in sea green, it's an aesthetic that only works in its own context, but in its context, it invokes a visual magic, a tangle of detail that sorts itself out into an order only it can follow.

I arrived back at the hostel just before my roommates came back for the evening; I packed some things for my departure in the morning, and put in ear plugs to sleep amidst their chatter.

Canterbury and home

Sunday morning I made my way to Canterbury by way of Dover again, since the trains were not running straight through due to track work. Canterbury is of course the mythical site of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Like Dover, its history goes way back - at least as far as the Romans, if not further. The still-intact city wall marks the old defenses, and inside the architecture reflects the layers upon layers of historical occupation of the town. Ruinous and re-constructed remnants of Roman constructions are overlain with medieval stone walls, and next to that a few remaining Tudor buildings squished between the inevitable uniform brick of post-war British suburbia. Towering over the town is the Canterbury Cathedral, a massive edifice that is a testament of the devotion of a newer Rome, having been built in the fifth or sixth century by a Catholic emissary of the pope. Like everything else in this territory, the whole complex was damaged during World War II, and in between those monumental occasions, the site was famous for other sundry incidents such as the murder of Thomas Becket over a frank disagreement with the king over royal control of the church.

Most of the city inside the walls is made up of narrow traffic-free alleys, and like most other gentrified cities, it was brimming with overpriced boutiques and coffee shops. But the old town retains its charms, with some alleyways replaced by slow-flowing canals and a winding stream-side park inhabited by an odd combination of ducks, pigeons, and sea gulls. I walked for a couple of hours, stopped for lunch at a little cafe, and wandered back toward the train station around four o'clock. Which put me back in Dover just as the sun was going down on a Sunday afternoon - not a stellar time to be looking for a bus. I did make it back to Folkestone after about an hour's wait. By that time most of Folkestone was also firmly closed for the evening, so I settled on a dinner of instant soup back at the B&B. In the morning I caught a mid-day train back to Charing Cross and was shortly back at home, in time for class at two.

Cloudy Skies Over the White Cliffs of Dover

On Saturday morning I got up with intention to go for a long walk, somewhere, after a quick breakfast at the Chandos. The friendly owner directed me toward the beach, where I could walk west and hit several small towns over the miles along the coast. I only lasted about an hour on this route, since the weather is indeed as cold here as in London. Even bundled up in half of my ski gear (snow pants were all I was missing) and walking fast, I couldn't keep warm enough to make it worth the journey or the views. I walked along the cliff-top for a mile or so, then dropped down toward a valley. An elderly man was standing at a bus stop, and I asked him if he was waiting for the bus back to Folkestone. Just about the moment I asked, I realized that this would be the case if I were in America, but here the traffic goes in the opposite direction per side of the street, so I was looking to go the wrong way. I laughed and explained that I was American (as if my accent didn't give that away), and he exclaimed with much enthusiasm, "Oh it's ok, I love Americans!" Which I thought was quite possibly one of the strangest things I had heard all week, until it occurred to me that he was much older, of a generation that remembers when my home nation came to aid of Britain and changed the course of an otherwise terribly gloomy battle. Back when the American war machine was engaged in far more honorable acts than beating up third-world nations for their oil. It struck me as tragic that we've thrown away the world's good will that we won at such a heavy price on the beaches of Normandy and the battlefields of the South Pacific.

Instead of going back to Folkestone, I hopped a bus straight through to Dover, which proved a much livelier locale than from where I had come, the with bustle of tourists even in the cold weather. I hadn't felt even remotely warm since I left the B&B this morning, so I first stopped to try to warm up with a cup of soup, which did little to lift the chill but gave me the energy to walk the several hundred stairs on the footpath up to Dover Castle, which perches atop one of the stretches of famous white cliff. This embattlement goes back to medieval times, but hardly a generation has passed that hasn't bunkered in against enemies from across the channel. Tunnels were originally dug into the soft limestone in the 13th century, and during the Napoleanic wars these were transformed into extensive barracks to hold an army prepared to fend off an attack from the sea which never came. But the castle's glory days came in the early years of World War II, when the tunnels were expanded into a major military outpost, housing command posts, communications centers, and battalions of men ready to defend the front lines, the closest point of access Germany had to the British Isle from occupied France. In the early days of the war, the white cliffs were hit hard from the air and the sea, and they were defended equally vehemently by gun emplacements that could rocket shells all the way to the coast of France, not more than 40 miles away. In 1941, as the German ranks broke the Magineau Line and closed in on the Allied stronghold at Dunkirk, commander Ramsay ordered a wholescale evacuation by sea of any soldier who could haul their exhausted body onto one of the hundreds of battleships, fishing dories, scows, and all other form of floating vessel that could be conjured up from the Allied waters and dragged back and forth to the beach at Dunkirk. They expected to pull out 30,000 men; in ten days, the luck of calm spring seas allowed the evacuation of over 330,000 British, French, and Belgian troops - troops who, just four year later, formed the backbone of the shock forces who took back the French beach in the bloody storm known as D-Day, and marched all the way to Paris one hard-fought mile at a time, to take back the capital city from the Nazis.

The tour of the tunnels was guided mostly by a sound system designed to mimic the heyday of military operations in the bunker. Drifting voices of ordinary soldiers bumming cigarettes off each other, commanders at their posts, surgeons in the operating theatre, and women running the vital communications switchboard led us down one dank hall after another. Brick lined the improved areas, strong enough to hold against air raids that came with such regularity that many men and women stationed there just never left the bunkers. In other tunnels, limestone was still laid bare, pock-marked with the glazed grey of flint stone; in these tunnels, water percolated through the unimproved walls of the porous cliffs, setting up a constant drip from all quarters of the ceilings and walls. The tour guide noted that the worst working conditions were experienced by the women who ran the switchboards, who worked under bare limestone and had the ill luck to be situated adjacent to the store of chemical batteries that ran the precious electricity supply on a potent mixture of sulphuric acid, which lent the constant smell of rotting eggs to their quarters. The last leg of the tour took us along the tunnel paralleling the cliff face, where Ramsay commanded his troops from his quarters, complete with a bay window overlooking the English Channel that was remarkably never hit by the thousands of bomber runs that attacked the white cliffs. That tunnel also boasts a row of private bathrooms with a first-class ocean-front view over the back of the toilet, though I'm not sure I would want to be on the toilet at the cliff face when the bombs began to shatter the air all around.

Exiting back into the mercifully fresh air, we stepped out on a balcony-like shelf overlooking the harbor where the ferries lazed in and out on their regular route from Calais - a route that was once only taken on the road to battle. From there I walked the perimeter of the fortress, along the embankments that drop steeply into a dry moat and across gun battlements that were built with medieval rock but buttressed with modern cannons and other artifacts of industrial war. A testament to the near-constant war-making that has dominated most of Europe's history, and the rare half-century of peace that has marked the countryside since the German bombs fell silent and will, with luck, last centuries more.

I walked back into Dover under a sky clearing nearly to blue and caught a bus back to Folkestone. I was surprised to find that it was past four o'clock when I reached the B&B and the sun was still shining strong - a sign that with the solstice passed in December, even under the brutal February chill, spring is coming. The days will only get longer and warmer until the time that I finally depart for far shores, for home.

There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see.

There'll be joy and laughter
And peace ever after,
Tomorrow
When the world is free,

The shepherd will count his sheep
The valleys will bloom again,
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again,

There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see.

- Nat Burton, circa 1941

Beaches

The weekend after I got back from California, I was already getting restless again. The sun was supposed to shine warm that weekend, so I got on the train south at mid-day Saturday to see the south coast at Brighton. I got a later start than I had wanted, largely because I had been up til all hours of the previous night plotting my getaway over the upcoming reading week in February (very jealous that I had to come back to London while the rest of the family drove up to the snow , I greedily decided to show them all what I thought of that by booking myself a complicated nine-day journey over to Germany, the highlight of which is four nights at the resort town of Garmisch, where the breathtaking Bavarian Alps rise vertical out of the southland plateau, and where we had all skied many years ago). After wrestling plane tickets and hotel reservations out of a couple of somewhat uncooperative websites, I didn't get to bed til two in the morning and didn't get on the train from Kings Cross the next morning until noon. By that time I reached Brighton, an hour and a half south, the weather was warm enough that in the sun it was uncomfortably hot to wear a jacket.

I grabbed a sandwich and headed for the beach, which is not entirely beach-like in that it's covered not in sand but in endless miles of pebbles the size of a child's fist. In all other ways it looks like any other resort beach town, with a mix of overpriced and basement-quality trinket shops, a boardwalk with screaming kids on roller coasters, families out for a day in the salt air and teenagers out to exchange some pheromonal communication, and a blocky medieval-looking heavily-fortified edifice planted clunkily at the east end of town. Ok, maybe the castle is not something you'd see at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk! Along the coast leading east out of town, the white cliffs begin that presumably run uninterrupted to their more famous counterparts at the port of Dover.

At the beach I arbitrarily turned left and walked until I had worn a hole in one sock and was quickly working through the top layer of skin. By that time, I had passed the boardwalk, the naturist beach (what we Americans more bluntly term "nudist beach," which was sheltered from the sensitive eyes of children by an artificial berm, which was largely unnecessary given that even the 65+ degree weather hadn't brought out anyone who actually wanted to brave the elements without any clothes on), the mall, the yacht harbor, and the seawall-protected port where the tiniest fishing boats I can imagine hide when the seas of the English Channel get too rough. In all I walked about five hours, grabbing snacks along the march and stopping only when I got back to the boardwalk and my feet gave out. The sunny day had brought out thousands of tourists and the traffic jams they bring - making me very glad that I haven't felt the need to drive anywhere since I got here. I had considered trying to find a B&B to stay out the night since I had come all this way, but in the end I decided to head back to London, giving that I had blown a large part of my monthly budget on reserving planes and hotels for my jaunt to Germany next month. I boarded the train not long after dusk and was back at King's Cross before long - home in time for dinner actually, since at this latitude "dusk" comes somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:30 pm.

So I went to Brighton for the sun. I came to Folkestone for the most opposite of reasons: to escape the cold. Well, not so much to escape the cold, because this is the season where there is no escape from the blood-thickening chill that welds even non-arthritic joints into stiff knots. I left more to escape the atrocious air quality that comes with the cold in London, a slight tone of acrid smoginess that is less than bracing and more like a vapory smack-down to every cell in my mildly asthmatic lungs. I came to Folkestone for clean air.

My classes were over at school by 1 pm, but with some last-minutes arrangements and errands to do, I didn't actually get on the tube to the train station until 4 pm. That mistake in timing put me on a commuter train out of the city, which was not exactly what I had in mind with the large rolling suitcase that was the only thing I could find to throw stuff into at the last minute. The crowd lightened up as the city faded into the distance, and by the time I got off at Folkestone Central, few were left. I got turned around a couple of times but eventually found the quiet and immaculately kept (not to mention eminently affordable) Chandos Guest House, where I had booked three nights, not having to be back in London until two o'clock Monday afternoon. I checked in and walked to the quiet off-season tourist strip and found a fish & chips place for dinner. Afterwards I wandered around a bit, then found my way back and fell deep asleep in my cozy room.