What I learned in German class today:
- Seven hours on trains one day after seven hours on a plane is not a recipe for a healthy back.
- When the pre-sunrise countryside is shrouded in frost and mist, the single trees make the world look like a tilt-shift photo, or a model train set.
- Stuttgart looks like the grayest place ever.
- The trains don’t all run on time.
- I can survive an hour stuck in a town named Ulm.
- I could probably survive a lot longer in Ravensburg.
- There’s a youth group or something called Gegen Nazis. Which, it turns out, means “Against Nazis”, but I was freaked out when I saw a teenager stomping down the sidewalk with that on his T-shirt.
- I figured I would end up in Germany trapped behind a fence, staring up at three tiers of barbed wire, but I didn’t think it would happen in my first full day in country.
