We managed to pack more social engagements into our last five days in Freiburg than into most of the previous five months (thanks for dinner on Saturday, Familie M.! Thanks for breakfast and the ride to the Hauptbahnhof today, Familie R., not to mention the Plaetzchen for the road! Thanks Paul, Ricarda, Friedi, Johannes, and Anne for being Elias's best pals!), and still found time to thoroughly scrub and scour our apartment before handing the keys over to our landlady and promising to meet up with her the next time we're in town. Stefan traveled by suitcase-stuffed car and Elias and I by train, and I choked up again as I watched the snow-covered hills of the Schwarzwald--and some ruins we hadn't gotten around to visiting--passing by outside the window.
The train ride itself offered some solace, thanks to an ever-changing variety of compartment companions. For the Freiburg-to-Karlsruhe leg, we were greeted by a woman who insisted we had the wrong compartment. "No, you can't have reserved these seats: this compartment is full." I disagreed. "No," she insisted, getting up to show stupid me the electronic reservations sign outside the cabin, "you're wrong. See, it says right here...Oh, wait, you're right. You have that seat. This seat is mine. See, it says right here...Oh, apparently you have this seat too." She got up and took someone else's seat. Eventually she realized that all of the seats in the cabin were taken, and she quietly slunk off to find another spot.
We changed trains in Karlsruhe. Having a bilingual child is a great conversation starter, so I know the woman we sat with until the first stop was training in Freiburg to be a midwife and had dreams of traveling all over the U.S. and eventually ending up in San Diego. "Americans are so open and welcoming," she said wistfully. After she departed, we were joined by a student coming home from Koeln. She had been waiting for late trains all day and was delighted that ours was on time. We gave her a clementine, and she showed Elias how to whistle with four fingers. After she left, a well-dressed older woman with dyed hair and a leopard-spot scarf stepped in and sat down next to Elias in the uncomfortable-looking fold-down seat. "I have to ride facing the direction the train is going," she explained, while I pondered whether German etiquette demanded that I switch to the other side of the cabin so she could have one of the cushier seats. She rode with us until the next stop, where she got off and was greeted with a loving embrace by a man on the snowy platform.
In Ulm, we were joined by two well-dressed but pungent-smelling men who spoke cheerfully to us in a dialect I could barely understand. While they engaged in enthusiastic conversation with one another, I started surreptitiously taking notes in my Sudoku book and suddenly realized their vocabulary sounded familiar--Hoam, guat, da Ding, weida zu bringn. Stefan says if I couldn't understand them, they were probably from Austria rather than Bayern, but the shift from Alemannisch to Bairisch-ish made me feel like we were returning to familiar territory.
On the S-Bahn ride from Munich-Pasing to Steinebach, Elias discovered the joys of static electricity. We also discovered that the S5--the name of the Herrsching-to-Munich S-line for the past 37 years--has been replaced by the S8 and now runs from Herrsching all the way to the Munich airport.
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