Sun 6 Oct 2002
Wayne and Susan have arrived!
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany
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Carissa and I picked them up in Munich yesterday. They had a long flight but they made it.
Carissa was happy to see them. We made a little sign like the ones that taxi drivers hold up that said “Atherton” on it. Carissa held it while walking through the airport.
The Munich airport was a lot further away than I thought. Carissa and I left at 6:00, thinking that it would take about two and a half hours to reach the airport. That way, we would arrive about the time Mom and Dad got their bags and made it to customs after their plane arrived at 7:55 in Munich. Unfortunately, it was a little after 9 when we arrived because the ariport was further away than I thought, and then it took us another half-hour to find them.
Carissa and I went to the wrong gate, but it didn’t take too long to realize our mistake.
Mom and Dad were waiting for us, having sailed through customs and retrieved their baggage in record time. It was after 9:30 when we found them.
We aren’t planning to spend any time in Munich during Mom and Dad’s stay, so yesterday was a good time to go to the Dachau concentration camp, which is very near the airport. Dad mad mentioned it as one of the places he wanted to see while he was here.
While we were there, there was a work crew working on the Russian Orthodox memorial, which is a small church of remembrance for the thousands of Russian officers killed by the Nazis at Dachau. The renovation was nearly complete, and the crew was re-installing the cross on top of the building. After they placed the cross, they crew sang a short Russian hymn.
After we left the memorial site, we drove into the old center of Dachau to eat at a small Biergarten I read about in one of our travel guides.
I thought I spoke enough German to at least communicate a food order, but this was a special case. I think the waiter was speaking a Bavarian dialect, or at least had an accent that I didn’t understand very well. In addition, he was the only waiter working at the time, so he was running around like his pants were on fire. Or as Dad said, the waiter was as busy as “a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest.” You get the idea.
When he first approched us for our drink order, we didn’t know what we wanted, so he dropped off a menu and left. When he returned, he took only our drink order, and left again. When he returned with our drinks, we tried to order, but he rushed away too quickly. That wasn’t such a bad deal for us though– we were having a lot of trouble understanding the menu. After that point, everytime he brought someone’s order out of the kitchen, he stopped at our table first, and tried to give it to us. We kept trying to explain that we hadn’t ordered yet, to no avail.
I finally got his attention long enough to give him our order. By that time, we had decided to order something different based on the meal the people at the table next to us. Once we ordered, it didn’t take long for the food to arrive.
We had a dish called “Krustenbrot’n”– at least that’s what the menu board said. It consisted of pork roast in a dark beer sauce and was served with a spiced Knödel, which is somewhat similar to the type of wet dressing that is often served with Thanksgiving dinner. It was really good, and it was a good way to start off Mom and Dad’s trip. Dad and I also had a dark beer brewed in the building right next to the restaurant.
Funny story:
Mom needed to go to the restroom while we were there. She asked how to tell the women’s room from the men’s, and I told her that they would likely be labelled “Herren” for men and “Damen” for women. She left and returned shortly thereafter. By that time, I decided I needed to take my turn in the restroom. So I went into the restaurant, and found the rooms, but they were labelled differently than I expected. It was no big deal, though, because there was a picture of a man on the men’s room, and a picture of a woman on the women’s room. I noticed as I entered that the men’s room consisted of a pissoir (meaning that you pee on the wall and it drains into a trough on thed floor) and a toilet in the back of the pissoir. After I finished, right as I walked to the door, Mom and Carissa (who had decided she needed to go too) came walking in. Mom, after having not seen the words on the door I told her to expect, and having not seen the pictures, had used the men’s room earlier. But hey, there were no urinals, so how was she to know?
On the drive home, the long trip started to catch up with Mom and Dad, plus it was past time for Carissa’s nap. I would hear Carissa and Grandma talking in the back seat, then there would be silence. I would look back and both of them would be asleep. A few minutes later, I hear them talking again. Carissa would say, “I went to sleep just like you, Grandma!” Dad would ask me a question, I would answer, and then he would nod off. We were driving into the sun, and he says that hen you are tired, it’s hard to squint without falling asleep.
I thought it was funny. It was like driving with a carload of talking ground hogs. The groundhogs would pop out of their holes, say something, then disappear again for a while.
Carissa and Papaw at Dachau KZ. As sober as the concentration camp site is, it’s hard not to be happy when your three-year-old grandchild is happy.
Here is the Russian work crew putting the cross back on top of the Russian Orthodox memorial church.
Here comes CeCe to greet us when we arrived in Niedereschach. She was a little unsure of Grandma and Papaw at first, but it didn’t last long.
This is the floor of our house five minutes after my parents arrived. They brought a lot of stuff from the states for us, plus a lot of gifts for the kids from all four of the grandparents. It looked like Christmas morning!
