I approached our upcoming trip to Europe with fear and trepidation. It was something both Celia and I wanted to do but never having been overseas before, I worried how us old folks past the age of fifty could manage. We were reassured that employees of the railroads and hotels in major towns could speak English -- but what if they couldn't or what if we had to stop in a small town? We prepared for the trip by getting tour books on Europe and the Berlitz book on German from the bookstores and talking to friends who had traveled recently in Europe. I memorized as much German as I could from the Berlitz book, reviewed my one semester of college German, got our Eurail passes, our airline tickets and we left for Germany.

I had planned to speak only English (but have a backup of German words in case of emergency), to see the European countryside and to get used to traveling around in Europe. In some future year, I thought, I would have learned enough German to speak to the "everyday people" one might meet. Two events in the first twenty-four hours of our trip[ drastically changed that point of view.

The first event occurred on the plane flight from St. Louis to Frankfurt - a college student from Germany who was returning home after spending a year studying in Oregon chatted with me. He reassured me my German was fine and the "people in Germany like to have you speak German instead of their being expected to speak English. Your German doesn't have to be perfect." Event number two happened an hour later when Celia and I were beginning a more than two hour train ride from Frankfurt to Freiburg. We ended up in a train compartment with a young woman and her two year old son. I shared with her my interest in speaking German, but my uneasiness about it. She was the right person in the right place at the right time and for the next two hours she and I carried on a conversation in German (with my translating for Celia as we went along). We covered everything from questions I had about train travel in Europe to information about her family, our family, her home and environment, our home and environment, friendliness towards in different parts of Europe, the effects on her family of the slit into East and West Germany and many other things. She was patient and would try other words in place of words I didn't understand; she would ask me questions to clarify what I had been saying. She made no effort to terminate the conversation, even initiating a new topic after a lapse in our conversation. After those two hours, I eventually decided that for the rest of the trip in Germany and Switzerland, I would initiate all conversations in German, although apologizing for my poor German. As a result, although we saw the things tourists are supposed to see and did the things tourists are supposed to do, the most memorable moments of our trip involved the people we met, the people with whom we shared a bit of our lives.

Yes, we did see some interesting things. Riding on a tour ship up the Rhine River, we passed a tugboat with a flat roof. On the roof was a play pen - nothing else. Nothing else, that is except the baby in the play pen. We also saw beautifully landscaped cemeteries -- everywhere. We saw small fields in Switzerland, and large expanses of uncultivated land in Norway.

There was one strange coincidence. Traveling by train down the Rhine River, we had just passed the Lorelei rock on our left when we glanced out the train window to our right at a parking lot and saw a license plate with the work "SIMS" on it. I don't know the exact spelling of the baby's name from Illinois that was recently murdered, but Lorelei Sims comes strangely close.

The first postage stamp machine in Germany that I met was a challenge to operate. With the post office closed by the time we arrived at our hotel in Freiburg during our first evening in Germany, the only way to be able to mail a post card was to get stamps from the machine. The German words clearly indicated where to put the money, what kinds of coins to use, and what button to push. The only trouble was, upon pushing the button, the money came out instead of the stamps. Only after several failed attempts did I notice a small crank or handle near the bottom of the machine much like the old telephone crank. Sure enough, after putting the money in, you were supposed to turn the handle - twice around. Then you got the stamps.

It was enjoyable to view the ruins of old castles and other fortifications. At one site they had rock tablets that indicated the site had been used by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago.

It was a surprise to us, while eating dinner at a hotel in a small German town to hear, as background dinner music, the strains of "Greensleeves", "Shennandoah", "Oh Mein Papa", and "Until we Meet Again".

One evening Celia and I were walking along the Rhine River and looking over at the vineyards on the opposite side of the river. The river valley was deep at that point so we were looking up - as if at the side of a mountain. Celia noticed that a huge storage shed near the top with the trees around it looked exactly like the top part of the face of a giant bear coming over the mountain - such is the stuff memories are made of.

Those are some things that we saw. What about the people? Perhaps partly because I spoke German and perhaps partly because I apologized for my poor speaking ability in German, everyone we met seemed to go out of their way to be helpful, kind and considerate, generating for us fond memories of our trip.

Even the young man with whom we shared a train compartment as we went from Freiburg, Germany to Basel, Switzerland fit this category. Perhaps just out of his teens, he sat listening to a radio/cassette player through a set of earphones for a while, then talked with us about the trip he was taking from Norway to Italy. At this point, the customs official came in, since we were about to leave Germany and enter Switzerland. The customs official treated him quite rudely, questioning his identification papers, pawing through and scattering his luggage and challenging his reason for having various items in his luggage. At that point the official turned toward us so I started to hand him our passports. He declined to even look at them, wished us a good day, and went on down the train. I expressed surprise to the young man, who was repacking his luggage, about the differences in the way we had been treated. "Oh", said the young man, perhaps wise beyond his years, "that's because you look respectable".

Choruses of "-ee-ii-ee-ii-oo" filled the second class train car occupied by Celia and me and thirty or more youngsters, ages seven and eight, along with their teacher, some room mothers, a room father and a large, sometimes noisy, dog. They were going on a Saturday field trip into the Swiss mountains. The teacher's loud whistle, worn on a cord around her neck, called the students to attention whenever necessary. At other times she played her harmonica and the children sang along. At still other times they joined in action songs. It is amazing how many children's songs from other countries you can recognize from the melody even though the words are from another language - even the actions (clapping hands, stomping feet, jumping) are the same. When the room mother across the aisle, and then the teacher, learned who we were, they came and chatted for a while. Trying, I believe, to make me feel better about my poor German and so Celia would not feel left out of our conversation, the teacher decided to tell us a joke in English, and between the teacher and the room mother, they figured out the English words. It goes like this: It seems that a young man who didn't know German very well went to a salesgirl in a store and asked for a cushion. But the German words for "cushion" and "kiss" are very similar and the girl thought he was asking for a kiss. Since he was very handsome, the story goes, she decided to pucker up and accommodate him. He then realized he had made a mistake and said, "No!", and to help explain what he wanted, turned away from her, bent over and pointed to his bottom. That's the end of the joke.

We remember the very helpful train conductor who, when he learned we were going to Mainz to board the excursion boat up the Rhine, told us, "No, you don't want to stay in a hotel in Mainz. The small town of Bingen has less expensive and nicer hotels. The train station, the hotels and the ship's dock in Bingen are all very close together. And you speak German so you'll have no trouble." He gave us directions - he was right - it was a most enjoyable stay in Bingen.

Our day in Westerkappeln, Germany, is a whole other story, but with the same conclusions. It was a pleasure chatting in their home with third cousins of mine I had never seen before.

A highlight of the trip was a visit to some of Celia's distant relatives in Norway. We had been graciously invited by one of Celia's mother's second cousins to visit him and his wife in a town near Oslo. We did so - they spoke English fluently and so began a cordial visit. They told us we were invited to visit "Aunt Gerda", a lady in her eighties who was the niece of Engebret and Gusta Mysen, Celia's great-grandparents who had emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. Although Aunt Gerda spoke only Norwegian, our hosts translated the comments both ways, and we enjoyed spending time with her. As the evening progressed, they brought out family pictures. Because Celia's family had been quite close to her mother's side of the family, Celia was able to name virtually all of the common relatives in the pictures: "Oh, that's Engebret and Gusta", "That's got to be Aunt Carolyn when she was a girl" (Celia's mother's Aunt Carolyn!), "There's Aunt Gussie", and on and on. Aunt Gerda was clearly very pleased. Much conversation about the Mysen family and about the pictures followed. As we had gotten up to take our leave, Aunt Gerda took us to her bedroom, to show us a large framed picture of her Uncle Engebret and Aunt Gusta, that had been hanging for a long time over her bed. She reached up, took it off its hook, handed it to Celia and, we were told, said to her in Norwegian, "Here, you take it with you. Then you can say the Engebret and Gusta went to America a second time". Overwhelmed by her gift, we accepted, amazed that she would give a prized family possession to a person she had known only a few hours.

When I think of what we would have missed if we had tried to avoid the "common folk", I become dismayed. I'm sure we would not have had most of the experiences I've described above, nor the conversation on the train with a German World War II veteran who walked with a cane who had been wounded by an American artillery shell, nor the woman beggar in downtown Freiburg, nor the elderly nun on the train who asked me for reassurance that she was on the correct railroad car to Bern, Switzerland.

I'm glad things turned out the way they did!

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