Apologies, as I digress a bit from the theme of this blog. With the election coming up tomorrow, I can’t help but be more reflective of current events especially in light of the places we visited the last couple of days.
We went to Berlin this weekend and saw what was left standing of the Berlin Wall, which is built over the ruins of what was the Gestapo and SS Headquarters from 1933-1945.
I really wasn’t prepared for how somber the visit would be. We first walked along the foundation of the Gestapo and SS Building, which runs parallel to and just under the section of the Wall that is standing.
It was a rather cold day, on the order of 6° C (43° F) but also beautiful and clear.
A certain heaviness weighted the air along that 200 meters of brick and mortar. Murderous men had done evil’s bidding right here, as recently as 71 years ago.
Trying to comprehend how humans can be so vile to each other is a dark pursuit.
As soon as we begin thinking that we are different from another human, that we are more deserving of basic human rights, we are only one degree away from turning into the same sort of people that would be complicit in these terrible events.
Remember, we were all once immigrants to this amazing country. When it comes down to it, we are all just skin and bones and electricity with hopes and dreams and the heart-wrenching need for our children to be safe.
Tomorrow is Election Day and I appeal to you all to vote for humanity.
Don’t vote out of fear that is so often the narrative that is thrust upon us. The natural result of fear is to act selfishly without regard to the well-beings of others.
Vote out of love for your fellow human beings. By raising up other people, you are in turn doing the same for yourself.
Exactly a week before we left for our trip, I was making breakfast in the kitchen. The husband had just left for work, the four year old was playing with a doll, and the two year old was…oh crap, where’s the two year old and why is he so quiet?
I did a quick scan of the house. Oh there he is, sitting in the middle of the dining room table throwing Duplos across the room.
I rushed over to pick him up off the table, swung around, and started walking….directly into the base of the solid wooden bench at the table.
I had a momentary thought of “this is going to hurt”…and then I looked at my toe.
If most of my toes were pointing north, my middle toe was pointing distinctly northwest and slightly up to the sky, as if flipping an angry toe bird to my life before children.
Turns out, I broke a bone in my middle toe. Probably not the best way to start off the trip, but whatcha gonna do?
And it wasn’t all that bad. Lufthansa Airlines (German for “Air Lasagna”) took pity on me and wheelchaired me to the gate, which was pretty fantastic for me because I got to sit back and relax all the way through security. My poor husband had to deal with both kids and handle all the various carry-ons by himself. Sorry honey.
We made it to the gate with time to spare. So, my husband walked all the way back across the airport to grab food while we waited to board; leaving gimpy me with the two kids at the gate, so what could go wrong?
And here is where the fun begins… enter the 2 year old…
The kids had their faces glued to the window leaving sticky kid handprints and toddler sauce (a combination of drool, snot, and whatever else is stuck to their face) all over the windows while they yelled “Airplane!” every single time they saw one…meaning about every five seconds, because…airport.
When that got old we played on Snapchat.
Here’s one of my son as a 25 year old stoner living in our basement.
Anyway, food was taking a while, so the kids ran around a divider to look out the windows on the other side of the seating area, to scream anew about the same airplanes. I hobbled over to where they were just in time to hear my son, the two year old, start crying.
There are two large steel support beams rising out of the floor of the airport extending up through the ceiling. There is a small gap between them, just less than the width of a toddler’s head, which he was in the process of measuring for himself… using, what else, his own head.
So, of course, he had somehow managed to get his head firmly stuck between the columns. Not happy with the results, he was now yelling for Mommy.
Now, it didn’t look all that bad. I calmly hobbled over to him, so as not to freak him out, I reassured him a little and then tugged at his little body to extricate him. He didn’t budge.
Okay.
I panic a little.
I try again.
Oh crap, nothing.
Now he’s really crying loudly and a few people have come over to help, except nobody knows what to do! His head is really in there and how in the hell did he do this?!?
I’m wondering do I call 911 now? Are firemen going to have to cut him out? Is this going to be on a reality show about bad parenting?
I’m freaking out internally but trying my best to stay calm for the little guy.
Finally, a man calmly sitting nearby gets my attention and says, “ I think he went in the other way. I think he put his body through first.”
It takes me a second to make sense of his words.
I pick up his little body, rotate it so the shoulders will fit between the columns and push him back through.
It works!
He’s like a puzzle! One of those little country horseshoe or twisted nail puzzles you get at Cracker Barrel. Apologies to all of you who have no idea what a Cracker Barrel or a horseshoe puzzle is.
Cracker Barrel – “Would you like butter, cheese, and gravy on that?”
Anyway, crisis averted and now we have a new party trick.
Made it onto the plane. The flight was pretty uneventful if you don’t count two hours of turbulence while we ever so slowly cross the jet stream as we entered Canadian airspace – thus incapacitating my husband and daughter with airsickness; while the 2 year old party trick exclaimed, “fun!” with every bump and jolt.
In general, the flight was 11 hours of trying to get the kids to sleep so that we could sleep but then realizing that we couldn’t sleep because the only way they would sleep is draped across our bodies in such a way that we couldn’t move.
I found myself watching whatever was on the monitor of the person in front of me through the little crack in between seats because that was more appealing than moving and possibly waking a kid so I could turn on my own seat back television.
All was going great as we approached the Frankfurt airport. Everyone was well fed, the kids had actually slept a few hours each, and we’d made friends with our angry German flight attendant (mostly by my husband trying to practice his German with him) so he wasn’t angry anymore.
The flight attendants had started readying the cabin for landing and the four year old suddenly has to go the bathroom.
One superpower that kids have is the ability to go from 0 to “I have to pee!” in 0.0003 seconds. I swear, it makes no difference if you take them to the bathroom every time you see one or ask them every few minutes.
So the 4 year old is doing the pee pee dance in her seat with a panicked look on her face, the flight attendants look like they are still running around picking up trash, and so the husband picks her up and whisks her to the bathroom. At this point, angry German flight attendant comes around the corner and starts yelling, “what is he doing? We are ready to land!” He then starts banging on the bathroom door screaming, “You have to come out right now!”
The flight attendant runs over to me and yells, “Because of your husband we are going to have to divert this flight!”
I manage to eek out, “We thought we had time, my daughter really had to go!” The flight attendant rushes off to bang on the door again and then goes to the galley and I hear him yelling, we have to divert!
I’m slinking down in my seat and I can feel the hot stares from the other passengers. My husband and my daughter make it back to their seats just in time apparently as the flight was not diverted, we still get to Frankfurt early, and angry German Flight Attendant went back to being…well, angry at us.
Oh, and that is not the end… we just catch our connecting flight to Dresden, finally get a rental car from a Hertz attendant trying to double the price of our reservation, and arrive at our Airbnb in Dresden.
21 hours door to door!
So far feeling less like Anthony Bourdain in “Parts Unknown” and more like a Griswold in “European Vacation.”
Next up: Chapter 3 – Dang It! Nobody Speaks English here!
So here’s the deal. My husband is a professor at UCLA and was invited to do some smarty-pants research for the next three months at a university in Dresden, Germany. He then had the not-so-smarty-pants idea of inviting the rest of his family to go along with him for the ENTIRE three months.
Did I mention that said family included a four and two year old?
So, in the interest of living in a foreign country for a few months and possibly learning another language…we packed up three months worth of clothes best suited for the (they shouldn’t even be called this) winters of sunny Los Angeles and headed to Germany to freeze our butts off.
We had the delusion that we were going to learn as much German as we could in the two months before the trip, continue learning while we were there (a la immersion), and then by the time we left in January, be virtually fluent in German.
I pictured us happily mingling with the natives drinking German bier and eating (vegan) bratwurst (I’m on a mission to find veggie bratwurst and sauerkraut – more on this later) and laughing at off-color German jokes in a German tavern as if we had been living there forever.
The kids of course would be off singing in the hills with their German nanny who had made them cute little German outfits out of the draperies from our Airbnb. Oh wait, that was Austria…whatever, they’ll figure it out.
Anyway, our prep for Germany thus far has been:
Learning German Method 1 – Watching Little Pim DVD’s with the kids
Little Pim is the kid’s variation of the Pimsleur Technique for learning languages. I’m really not familiar with the adult version, but if it doesn’t have a German-speaking cartoon panda like the children’s version, I’m probably not interested. (who wouldn’t want to learn from that guy?)
Anyway, here is how that typically goes-
Me: Hey kids! Let’s watch Little Pim!!!
(groans)
4 year old: (whining) Noooooooo….not Little Pim! I don’t want to speak German…EVER! I only want to speak English…and French because it is beautiful!
She kind of has a point.
Me (to my 2 year old): Hey, how about you, buddy?
The 2 year old: Watch trash trucks! WATCH TRASH TRUCKS!!!
He is more than a little obsessed with garbage trucks these days.
Me: awesome. Sooooo…Little Pim it is! Yay!!!
30 minutes later
4 year old: (grumpily but in a pretty damn good accent) You know what I’m going to say to people in Germany? Ich spreche kein Deutsch! I only spreche Englisch!!!
Almost 2 year old: Wasser, mama! Trinke Wasser!
Me: Seriously??? (kids’ brains are f’in sponges…pretty sure mine is a rock)
Almost 2 year old: Trash trucks! Watch TRASH TRUCKS!!!! DUMP ITTTTTT!
Learning German Method 2 – Online language-learning platforms (specifically Duolingo and Babbel)
These are pretty fun, especially Duolingo because it makes a game of learning languages, it is very visual, and it has a tracker on the top right that tells you how fluent you are based on your progress. According to Duolingo, I am now 35% fluent in German. Now, the reasonable side of my rock brain knows this is bulls***, but I rarely listen to that side anyway, so yeah, I am 1/3 fluent in German y’all.
Where Duolingo is heavier on the vocabulary and using the vocabulary in sentences, Babbel is more conversational. It has more useful phrases that you might need on a daily basis, like this one:
Guten Tag! Ich bin Kristi. Ich spreche kein Deutsch, weil ich ein Amerikaner bin, und wir schätzen es nicht, andere Sprachen wie den Rest der zivilisierten Welt zu lernen. ’Murika!
Which loosely translates to:
Good Day! I am Kristi. I don’t speak German because I am an American and we don’t value learning other languages like the rest of the civilized world. ’Murica!
Anyway, for the last two months, my husband and I would put the kids to bed, grab our laptops, jump on the sofa, and settle in for some heavy German language learning. Sexy.
Learning German Method 3 – German Films and Television
A couple weeks before we left, we thought it might be a good idea to watch some German movies or TV shows.
We found a series titled, “Rita” on Netflix. Quick synopsis -it’s about a chain smoking, cursing high school teacher, who also happens to be banging the principal. She is great with her students but not so adept at her personal life.
We sat down to watch, completely expecting to understand at least a word or a phrase here or there (keep in mind at this point we were at least 28% fluent in German)…but nothing. We didn’t understand a Single. Dang. Word.
At one point, Richie and I just looked at each other like, “we are so screwed.”
A couple of days later I was browsing the show’s IMDB page and discovered we had actually been watching a Danish television show all along and didn’t even realize it.
Danish.
Soooooo…we can’t even tell the difference between German and Danish?
