Hallo

When I first visited Bavaria in 1991, I learned how to greet folks in the Bavarian style. One could say Grüß dich/Griaß di to individuals, or Grüß euch/Griaß eich to groups, or Grüß Gott to anyone. All of these are short versions of Es Grüße dich/euch Gott, meaning "May God greet you-singular/plural." If one wanted to demonstrate one wasn't from these here parts, one could say Guten Tag (good day), or simply Tag (hiya).

For the non-native speaker wanting to blend in, the advantage of saying Grüß Gott rather than Grüß dich/euch is that one doesn't have to feel awkward using the informal dich/euch with complete strangers, even though the informal words are implied. The disadvantage is that Grüß Gott sounds explicitly religious, far more so than it's English partner, "goodbye" ("God be with you").

In Bayern, what one was to never ever say was Hallo.

Hallo was reserved strictly for telephone interactions, as in Hallo, hier spricht die Liz ("Hello, here speaks the Liz"). (The German use of definite articles with names, as in die Liz, der Jens, and whether such use is regional, grammatically necessary, or utterly ridiculous, is a topic for another post.)

Thus it has come as a bit of a shock, on my walks and jogs in Steinebach this week, that when I say Grüß Gott to folks, they say Hallo in response. This has happened multiple times.

I tested the inverse, thinking that perhaps if I said Hallo, Bavarians would remind me of my foreigner status by replying Grüß Gott. So far, the response to every Hallo has been Hallo.

I asked Stefan about it.

"It's possible that you're only meeting people from out of town," he said. "Now is Ferienzeit ["vacation time"] in the north, and Steinebach is swarming with tourists. But it is also possible," he added solemnly, "that you are witnessing the degradation of the Bavarian character."

I mentioned my observations to Stefan's Tante Puppi. She is 93 and sharp as a tack.

"Oh!" she said with a disgruntled frown: "die Hallo Krankheit." The Hello Sickness. She declared it "furchtbar." Terrible. The linguistic plague has its hold on southern Germany.

Every time I visit Germany, I learn a new word that comes up so frequently in conversation that I wonder how I ever got by without knowing it previously. This visit marks the first time I've noticed familiar words fading away. Farewell, Grüß Gott. Hello, Hallo.

Faux pas at the Bäckerei

We're back in Germany. The first important thing we did after disembarking yesterday was to visit a bakery in the Munich airport.

Here is photo from another bakery, in Steinebach. I had to take the photo there instead of at the airport, because we had committed a faux pas at MUC.

See that plastic tray on top of the display case, with the advertisement in it? It probably has a special German name--maybe even a word that is also used for something completely unrelated. For now, we'll simply call it a Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray), which sounds like a perfectly legitimate German word.

At the airport, while Stefan was picking up the rental car, Elias and I trotted off to buy two Butterbrezen and one Frischkäsebreze mit Schnittlauch. The grand total was €5.20. At first I was worried that I didn't have enough money and would have to run back to Stefan to get some more, but after I counted the coins out on top of the display case (woe! instead of on the Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale), I breathed a sigh of relief: we had exactly the right amount.

The cashier attempted to remove the coins. She was clearly not practiced in the gauche art of display-case coin removal, presumably having experienced only the refined art of Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalemünzeentfernung (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray coin removal), and the consequences were embarrassingly unsanitary. Half of the coins fell, plop, right into the puff-pastries behind the counter, and the cashier glared angrily at the dumb Americans as we made our hasty retreat.

On the bright side, I finally understand why Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalen were invented, and I will be careful to use them for monetary transactions from here on out.

Update: Stefan said, "try googling Wechselgeldschale." Turns out that's the German word for Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale.

Benediktbeuern and a new cousin

Could it be, could it be--the last Wadlstrumpf post of the 2014? I close with photos from two quick southern Germany side trips.

First up, Benediktbeuern. We made the 45-minute drive on a Saturday to meet up with friends from home--another American mom-German dad family--and friends and family of theirs. They've been visiting Benediktbeuern for the past several summers, and we can see why: a pretty Kloster, a train station, and hiking trails that are kid- and parent-friendly out the wazoo (a trail of wood and stone sound sculptures; a trail that rewards an hour's hike with an eco-playground, zipline, and raft hidden in a wooded marsh; and a "barefoot path" that encourages you to take off your shoes and feel the textures underfoot).

This worm was longer than a 7-yr-old's shoe

The day began with sunshine, and then a storm swept through in the afternoon. We returned from our walk just as the skies opened up. 

Finally, a quick trip to meet the newest member of the family.

Baby L is E's first cousin once removed

We enjoyed dinner in an award-winning establishment...

...that is part of the "nice toilets" movement. (We thought that was funny, until I looked it up online: new public toilets are expensive to build, so participating establishments post the sticker to let the public know they're welcome to use the toilet for free. Smart, and very German.)

Fürstenfeldbruck

We arrived in Steinebach on Monday afternoon (6/23) and commenced our ritual of hanging out and eating. We did build some local excursions into the mix, including a trip to Herrsching for big-town errands and gelato.

Three generations of post-gelato smiles

Back in Steinebach, the ginormous cat appointed S "Assistant Royal Tummy Scritcher"

We also took a trip to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck to go to our favorite kitchen gadgets store to gawk--but apparently the kitchen gadget store closed a few years ago. I guess we should have gone more often than once every five years. We did find a new kitchen gadget store that had bannetons (which we had forgotten we were looking for) and a special slicer for making Prinzregententorte (would that be cheating? We didn't get one, although we did try a piece of PRT at a bakery and decided it couldn't possibly be worth all the effort).

Fürstenfeldbruck city center appeared to be entirely under construction, with cranes and bulldozers and torn-up streets and sidewalks everywhere. With the old kitchen gadget store gone, the streets seemed unfamiliar. While crossing one street, we saw this memorial statue:

The plaque reads, "Hier führte in den letzten Kriegstagen im April 1945 der Leidensweg der KZ-Häftlinge aus den Todeslagern Kaufering/Landsberg vorbei ins Ungewisse" (Here, in the last days of the war in April 1945, the suffering path of the concentration camp prisoners from the death camps Kaufering/Landsberg passed into the unknown). The memorial, by Hubertus von Pilgrim, was erected in 1994 and is one of 22 copies commemorating towns along the KZ-Dachau death march; the first was erected in Gauting in 1989 (copies are also at the Dachau KZ museum and the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem). These close-to-home reminders are sobering, but a good thing. Even after coming to Germany regularly for the past 24 years, I still sometimes find it strange to see or meet folks of a certain age; the common thread is that no one knew yet everyone knew, no one participated yet everyone participated. And we say "Never again," but these sorts of things nonetheless continue around the world.

We saw the memorial in a relatively quick crossing of the street; the rest of our afternoon was spent at the FFB Kloster, which we had never visited before.

Organ info and up-close photos are here

Music notation on the ceiling! "Veni sponsa Christi."

Random happy dog

Five countries in one day

The day after the Gran Fondo Giordano, we drove from Aprica, Italy, to Steinebach, Germany, via Switzerland, Austria, and--because we could--Liechtenstein. It turns out that driving across the Alps with stuffed sinuses leads to serious eardrum pain. To minimize sneezing, I had my eyes closed most of the time. S let me know when there were views worth sneezing for. 

Looking back as we headed up Bernina Pass

Bernina Pass

Beyond St. Moritz

Julier Pass

We aggravated Das Navi by needlessly crossing into Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein looks like Switzerland

Appeasing Das Navi: crossing the border from Liechtenstein back into Switzerland

Aprica

We spent summer solstice driving from Volterra to Aprica. I remember passing Carrara, looking at the mountains, and wondering why there was so much snow--until we realized we were looking at mountains of marble. Most of the rest of the time, I had my eyes closed to avoid sneezing. Our chipper E turned 13 that day and cheerfully put up with our failure to adequately celebrate his transition to teenage-hood.

We went to Aprica so that S could ride the Gran Fondo Giordano. After riding the Medio Fondo section (155km, 3600 height meters, over the Gavia and Mortirolo passes), the dude decided he'd had enough, and he skipped the Gran Fondo's last 20km and 1400 height meters.

A few of the 2000+ riders getting ready to start

And they're off! Can you spot S?

Atop the Gavia Pass. Hooray for professional race photographers!

Atop the Mortirolo Pass. Doesn't look like much in this photo, but it's one of the most strenuous passes in bike racing, with a gradient that maxes out at 18%.

Coming back down into Aprica

A band played at the start of the race. The players spent the next several hours hanging out enjoying drinks near the finish line; as the first, second, and third place finishers of each race (Fondo, Medio Fondo, Gran Fondo) approached, the band regrouped to play a few measures of celebratory music (the cyclists passed by pretty quickly--why play longer?).

Volterra

Lucca, Pisa, San Gimignano, where to go, where to go? Rick Steves wrote that Volterra is his favorite small town in Tuscany, so after Siena, E and I went to Volterra--with all the other tourists who have discovered this formerly not-overly-touristy hill town.

Now a beautifully preserved small town atop a big hill, with a bazillion shops selling alabaster jim jams, Volterra had a city-state territorial reach during the Renaissance that extended all the way to the Mediterranean and included Siena. Centuries before that, the city was the last Etruscan holdout against an expanding Roman Empire.

Growing boy enjoying much-needed bruschetta carbs under an olive tree 

Window decor--best looking Schlumbergera ever

In the 4th c. BCE, the Etruscans were trying the keep the Romans at bay, and they built a wall around Volterra that was about 4 miles in circumference. A millennium later, when Volterrans were trying to keep other aggressors at bay, they reduced the circumference of the wall to a more easily defended 2.5 miles. In the process, they eliminated all but one of the original gates. The remaining Etruscan gate is one of the oldest known (if not the oldest) half-round arch (~2500 years old). The Romans added some busts to it that, as Rick Steves writes, "show what happens when you leave something outside for 2000 years."

Toward the end of WWII, about three weeks after D-Day, the German soldiers occupying Volterra made plans to beat a hasty retreat. The plans included putting obstacles in the way of approaching Allied troops, so they posted signs warning Volterrans to stay away from the arch because it would be dynamited the following morning. Volterrans spent the entire night blocking up the arch with stones--a risky move, since the Germans had guns and a demonstrated willingness to use them against civilians. In the morning, the Germans decided the gate was suitably blocked and they could better use their dynamite elsewhere. The American troops that arrived to liberate Volterra expected the German occupiers to still be there, so spent a few hours bombarding the town, killing 8 residents, before they noticed the lack of return fire. There's a plaque outside the gate commemorating the effort to save the arch.

Just outside the town wall on the North side of Volterra are the ruins of a Roman amphitheater (ca. 40 BCE). Around the 4th century CE, residents decided they needed nice new baths more than they needed an ancient amphitheater, so they recycled the stones. Eventually, the theater site became the town dump. In the 1950s, archaeologists started digging up the dump, with help from convalescents at the local mental hospital (for whom the digging was considered therapeutic), bringing the amphitheater back to light.

Zig zags

Duomo exterior detail

Medici Fortress in the Archaeological Park, now used as a maximum-security prison.

At about 6pm on our first day in Volterra (6/19), I was felled by the sudden onset of a common cold that stuck with me for a long week, followed by a sinus infection that I finally conquered in an airplane flying over the Atlantic on July 3rd.

S joined me and E in Volterra midday on the 20th. We went to the fabulous Etruscan Museum together after lunch, but I bailed early and went back to our B&B to sleep. What little of the museum I saw might best be described as "abundant Etruscan artifacts meet 19th-century catalogers"--or, for readers familiar with the University of Illinois, "Etruscan artifacts a la Altgeld Hall display cases." S and E also climbed the tower of the town hall and took some photos to prove it.

Hill town Volterra