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Conspiracy? We made it a policy to get lost twice a day and most days easily surpassed our quota. Throughout the day we cycled past rolling stinky farmland-Germany was heavily into natural fertilizer; traversed a forest; mysteriously emerged on a small road we had not intended to travel; and even managed to follow a sign post that had been reerected incorrectly. Was there a conspiracy afoot? After riding four kilometers in the wrong direction, we backtracked to the fouled sign and discovered it had previously been knocked down by a vehicle. Whoever replanted the sign in its hole had pointed it in the wrong direction. As we peered at the sign, lamenting our rotten luck, a farmer and his wife drove past on their tractor. The woman yelled out in German warning us the sign was incorrect. "Ya, ya," we called back. Why was it always after the fact that we received helpful words of advice? Once in Kempten we managed to find our host family's house after asking directions three separate occasions. We were getting good at asking directions in German. Unfortunately, we were still struggling a bit with understanding the response. The last directions were accompanied by a map. We succeeded in following them. Anke and Heike, daughters of Margaret our elephantcrazed host (she had collected over four hundred miniature elephants) made us comfortable and fed us supper. Anke was going to school in Bamberg. Heike still went to school in Kempten. Margaret was a teacher; her husband a lawyer. I noticed many Time magazines around the house. Flipping through one I saw where Anke had gone through articles painfully underlining or highlighting English words she had to look up to discover its meaning. I read a new article to her and she stopped me whenever I read a word she didn't know the definition of. At the conclusion of the article she smiled and said it was a lot faster than having to look up the individual words herself. The only negative aspect of our accommodations was the multitude of stairs we had to descend to use the washroom facilities during the night. Normally that would be a minor concern. However, we had consumed several pots of herbal chocolate tea that caused problems during the wee hours. |
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