04 Aug 2012: The Twilight Zone

04 Aug 2012:

The Twilight Zone

Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany/Freiburg, Baden-Württemburg, Germany

H: 27/28 L: 13/15 Weather: Clear/Light Showers

He was just a normal, American twenty-one year old on a normal trip to Europe.  He woke up.  He headed to breakfast.  He was told by the hostel staff that he had to pay for a breakfast pass to eat in the hostel dining room.  But little did he know that, when he stepped downstairs to pay for the pass, he would be leaving Frankfurt, and entering... THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

The conversation went a little something like this.

• Me: Hi, I want to buy a breakfast voucher.
• Her: What room number are you?
• Me: 25.
• Her: What's your name?
• Me: Chris Heffner.
• Her: ...Chris Heffner checked out already.

I wasn't quite sure what to say to this.

• Me: ...no I didn't?
• Her: Yeah, it says here that Chris Heffner checked out already.
• Me: I don't think so.
• Her: Uh.
• Me: Hrm.

At this point, we're clearly both extremely confused.

• Her: Yeah, someone came down, and said they were Chris Heffner and that they were checking out.
• Me: Well, it wasn't me. (takes out ID) I mean, I'm Chris Heffner...
• Her: Yeah, I believe you.  I just... I don't know how this happened.
• Me: Me neither.
• Her: Is there anyone else under your reservation?
• Me: No...
• Her: So no reason for someone to have the same name as you here?
• Me: No... not unless there's a big coincidence...
• Her: Er, yeah.  Let me just... sell you a breakfast voucher.
• Me: Oh, okay.

So, yeah, I have no idea what happened.  Nor did she.  ... yeah.

I went up and had breakfast, then came down again, prepared for the receptionist to declare me Wilhelm X, Margrave of Hesse-Kassel.  Instead, she informed me that I had bought the towel that I had paid for the night before.  Uh, oops?  Apparently, when I thought I had been borrowing a towel (which is a thing that often costs money in hostels), I had actually been purchasing one.  For what it's worth, it was a nice and fluffy white one, much better than I would've expected out a hostel.  However, it also made my carry-on bag improbably large.

I met up with Martin again, and we decided to go off to see Frankfurt's cemetery.  At first, I was a bit worried about whether this was a sensible place to go touristing in, but I found myself much more interested than I thought I would be at first.  European cemeteries (I can generalize from an n of 1) are quite different from American ones.  They're not wastelands of perfectly-manicured green lawns.  They actually, like, have trees.  Trees everywhere.  And nature and shade and light and flowers and plants.  And tombstones that are individualized and have every member of the family who's died since like 1850 all on one tombstone because they're all buried next to each other.  It was actually quite nice!  Martin and I's favorite game was to try to determine who was married to who and who was who's child, because in-laws often shared the same tombstone.

After a while, we tired of that, and we stopped at a coffee shop to get some food.  I got a bagel with some random toppings on it—I don't remember what they were, but I do remember the bagel dripping orange something all over the place.  I also had a smoothie.  Martin complained about the encroachment of American food on European cuisine, but I munched away happily.

He headed back to his apartment, while I looked for something to keep me occupied for an hour or so before I left for Freiburg.  Martin had mentioned that one of the best international bookstores was across the street from my trippy hostel, so I headed there to see whether I could replicate my Amsterdam bookstore experience.  I was sorely disappointed.  None of the books were old, for one, and there were no maps at all.  wtf?

I made my way to the train station.  There, unfortunately, one of my least favorite things about European trains showed up: a passenger alert not in English.

I can't even attempt to break this apart into morphemes.  Linguist fail!

The white bar indicates the passenger warning, "umgekehrte Wagenreinhung".  Sometimes you can get cognates.  Dutch sometimes looks surprisingly like English.  French looks like English or Spanish but very rarely neither.  German... look like "umgekehrte Wagenreinhung".  I think "Wagen" is the start of the word for "train car" in German.  Or it is the word for the car of a train.  Or something.  But I really had no idea what it was saying.

Whatever it did say, it didn't affect my commute, as I made it to Freiburg without incident but with another fantastic German train ride.  There I met up with my very good friend who is also named Chris.  Chris and I share a long history of being mostly functionally equivalent.  So it was wonderful being able to see him again—by this point he had been in Freiburg for A WHOLE YEAR and it was aaaaagonyyyyy :( :( :(—and to meet his awesome Freiburg friends, who are pretty amazing.

We stopped for döner on the way to the train station.  Unfortunately, I didn't have much of a chance to try out my Turkish skills, as Chris had warned me beforehand that one of his favorite workers at the döner place was Kurdish and hated using Turkish.  After dropping off my stuff at his dorm, we made our way to a biergarten and had a bier or two with some of his friends.  (The stuff was good!)  It started to rain, but it was such a lovely evening that it hardly fazed us; the rain was pretty slow, anyway!

Chris was nice enough to let me use his bed for the night, which also felt pretty darn good.  I went right to sleep once we got back.