A weekend in Tuebingen
Getting a flight at 7am on a Saturday morning for a quick weekend away in Germany always seems like such a good idea, until the alarm goes off at four. Having not had more than five hours sleep all week, it was somewhat of a struggle to drag myself out of a nice warm bed into the freezing cold and darkness of the house, with the result that I was hardly ready when my taxi banged on the door. The taxi driver seemed friendly enough, apologising profusely for the fact that the temperature in his taxi was sub-zero, but he then proceeded to drive me to the airport via a route which, in my long experience of taking taxis to the airport, no other taxi driver had ever taken me before. I felt a trifle disconcerted. I have a strange phobia that taxi drivers will either wilfully abduct me or misunderstand me and take me somewhere entirely different to where I wanted to go. The former has happily not yet occurred. The latter unfortunately has on at least one occasion.
I arrived at the airport far too early and was surprised to find it empty. On reflection I suppose it isn’t wholly shocking that multitudes of people do not choose to fly at 7am on Saturday mornings in November, but it was a refreshing change not to have to queue for check-in and to walk straight through security. There were no queues for the internet terminals either, and a great deal of my time and small change suddenly seemed to disappear down a black hole, so that I scarcely had time to swallow a cup of coffee and a chocolate cake which I didn’t actually want before my flight was ready for boarding.
The aircraft was also peculiarly empty, with the result that I had an entire three seats to myself and avoided the necessity to make small talk with a random businessman. The flight passed relatively quickly whilst I tried to avoid choking on the Lufthansa regulation cheese sandwich and attempted to telepathically absorb as much of my German grammar book as possible without actually opening it. I did genuinely mean to read through it and refresh my memory because I feel like my German has been somewhat neglected of late, but there is something mesmeric about travelling which means I just want to sit and stare blankly out of the window.
I guess the great thing about being on a plane is that you’re not supposed to be doing anything else. I mean, there is very little you can actually usefully do in that sort of environment. And thus you have no qualms about giving yourself that rare permission to do nothing except be, and that can be rather enjoyable. It always interests me to discover what sort of thoughts come unbidden into my mind when I relinquish control of it. Today I ended up contemplating those dreadful three weeks over the summer when my boyfriend split up with me. I think that I came to it via the thought that the last time I was on a plane was one of the happiest days of my life to date; coming back from a holiday in France with him, which had initially been a little awkward due to our not-exactly-a-couple status, but which was perfected on the final drunken evening when he told me that he wasn’t going to leave me and start a new life in Korea. Now life is on an even keel again and August is at a safe distance to be contemplated without tears. And yet at a distance, as I discovered somewhere above Belgium this morning, it is even more frightening that it was at the time. As I ran over each encounter, each conversation, each argument, I was struck anew by how tenuous the happy ending actually was, and left almost breathless by how the pain of what might have been almost was.
I wasn’t particularly daunted arriving at Frankfurt airport by myself, having been there several times before and thus feeling fairly confident that I could navigate my way through it successfully on my own. This confidence proved to be misguided. I believe there is a gap in the market for someone to start selling guide books to Frankfurt, preferably complete with several maps. My first aim was to find baggage reclaim, which seemed a modest sort of goal for someone who has just arrived at an airport. I found myself directed down a maze of corridors and escalators, which culminated in an enormous and disorderly queue for passport control. German officials are very hot on the control aspect of passport control, and on a prior journey I have actually been reprimanded with “Nicht laecheln!” (“Don’t smile!”) for daring look cheerful during such a solemn ritual.
Eventually passing through this, I narrowly avoided being shepherding onto a connecting flight to New Delhi and proceeded to walk what felt like several miles down a rather chilly tunnel. I find long hikes in airports rather tiresome, but the admitted advantage is that if you do finally have to good fortune to arrive at a baggage carousel, your bag has not only long since been unloaded from the plane, but has already done several laps on the conveyor belt and is started to get out of breath.
Baggage safely reclaimed, my next goal was to make my way to the station, and so I was cheered to see a sign with a train and an arrow on it. Following this hopefully down a very steep staircase, I found myself in an unpleasant-looking underground subway. It felt like the sort of place where something dire was always on the verge of happening, but never actually did, probably as a result of the surfeit of policemen who seemed to be frequenting it. Walking past an Irish pub which looked like if you entered it you might never be seen again, I followed a series of further train pictures and was conducted round in a large subterranean circle before proceeding back up another escalator which returned me to the level where I had started. Resisting the temptation to reclaim another piece of baggage, I became entangled in a queue of people waiting to fly to Tel Aviv and in an attempt to at least not end up there, I started walking in a direction in which train arrows were not pointing. Curiously, I promptly found myself in the airy and spacious glass-roofed station building which I had been expecting to see all along.
Fortunately I had had the sense to buy my ticket online, and so was spared at least one further trauma. All that remained was to sit and wait for my train, a wait which was much shorter than I had anticipated after so much unexpected and time consuming exercise. The journey from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was very pleasant, on a big intercity express. I was surprised how quickly we got out of Frankfurt and into the surrounding countryside. It was a shame that I didn’t have time to stop off in the city itself, which from my limited acquaintance with it seems like a fascinating place, but time was so short that it was imperative to press on to Tuebingen.
Sadly there was a fifteen minute delay in Mannheim whilst we waited for a late incoming train from elsewhere, and so I arrived in Stuttgart two minutes too late for my onward connection. Looking at the departures board I realised that there was another local train leaving in five minutes and a rather undignified sprint enabled be to reach it seconds before it pulled away. Collapsing in a hyperventilating heap in the bicycle compartment, I was immediately interrogated by the inspector, who was upset by the fact that my ticket was specifically valid on the preceding train only, and therefore not on this one. There followed an interesting discussion as to whether or not the fact that I had missed the preceding train was the fault of Die Deutsche Bahn and whether I therefore had the right to expect to be compensated for my delay by being allowed to use the next available train without paying a fine. The inspector didn’t appear wholly convinced by my rather incoherent and breathless arguments, but in an uncharacteristic display of German flexibility, he agreed not to arrest me on the understanding that I stayed in the bicycle compartment and didn’t cause an obstruction. Bicycle compartments are not very comfortable places to sit but I was anxious not to be delayed by the hours of German form-filling bureaucracy which would ensue if I was done for Schwarzfahren (travelling without a valid ticket) and so I readily agreed. I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard to look like a bicycle. The journey was mercifully short and so by half past one I was standing on the platform at Tuebingen and wondering if that rather grown-up looking young lady who was standing a hundred metres away staring expectantly at the swirling mass of passengers, could actually be my little sister.
It was, of course. She looked different though to how I remember her looking when she left home to go and study in Germany three months ago. She seemed taller and thinner somehow, her hair was surprisingly long and she was wearing more make-up than usual. When she caught sight of me she ran towards me and hugged me, which was somewhat of a shock since we never traditionally go in for that sort of thing in my family. A pleasant shock, though…
And so began a weekend which, if truth be told, consisted largely of eating and drinking. First stop was my sister’s flat, which I have to say is both the largest and the cleanest student apartment which I have ever seen in my life. To be fair she has moved into a block which has just been extensively refurbished, and so it stands to reason that the kitchen is clean and bright and shiny, but I was impressed that the inhabitants had kept it that way and that there wasn’t as much as one piece of unwashed up washing up on the draining board. That’s Germany for you I guess! One of the conditions of the tenancy is that you make a cleaning rota and the caretaker can apparently request to see it at any time if he requires proof that your cleaning is not sufficiently organised.
From there we caught a bus into the town proper and headed to a little bakery where I had the first of the ten Latte Macchiatos which I managed to consume within two days (there’s just something so exciting about drinking hot coffee out of a glass with a straw) and something called Flammkuchen which I believe technically are from Alsace and consist of a pancakey sort of mixture with pizza toppings. It sounds a bit unusual, but is really really nice 
That fortified me for a strenuous afternoon’s sightseeing in Tuebingen. My sister gave me the guided tour, which actually didn’t last that long because the place is much smaller than I expected.
That is to say, the actual town is a fair size in terms of outlying suburbs but the actual centre, the Altstadt, is rather compact and doesn’t have a terribly wide range of shops. In terms of the chain stores which you might expect to see in any European town these days, I saw H&M, The Body Shop and Benetton; that was it. I assume there must be a MacDonalds somewhere, because I can’t bear to believe that there still exists a spot on the planet which true civilization has not yet reached, but I regret to say that I didn’t actually see it with my own eyes.
Tuebingen is also rather hilly, far more so than I expected, and so I found myself getting somewhat out of breath from time to time as my sister, now accustomed to it, charged off up the hill to the Schloss ahead of me. When or why the castle was built I really can’t tell you without consulting Wikipedia, but it was suitably picturesque and the view from the ramparts was very pleasant even on the dull, grey sort of day that we had. I was a bit surprised to discover that in the area where the moat must once have been, a large group of people were practicing archery at very high speeds. Being somewhat unnerved that one of them might inadvertently hit us in the eye, we made a hasty retreat and went for a walk down by the river.
The river Neckar flows through Tuebingen and is very wide, although it doesn’t appear to be terribly deep. In the summer people punt up and down it in strange little boats not quite like the ones which they have at Oxford, but by November all these had been safely stowed away somewhere and I didn’t get to see them. It was quite a strange feeling for me to stand on a bridge and look at the Neckar. For a start I confess to being a bit of a geek about rivers; I get awfully excited every time I go to a new city which has a river, even if the river is fairly minor, and if a place I go to should have a famous river running through it then my excitement is very intense indeed. The first days on which I saw the Inn, the Rhine and the Danube stand out for me as important events in my life. No really, they do 
As for the Neckar… not the world’s most prestigious river and one that perhaps few people in England have ever heard of. I know I had never heard of it, aged seventeen, when a certain someone described it to me for the first time. It is a long story, which is not ever going to be told on this blog, but I once had an emotional attachment to the town of Heidelberg, through which the Neckar also flowed, and so I spent many years dreaming on a day when I would finally stand on a bridge and look at it.
It is strange how we finally get the things we wish for. I have now fulfilled my dream to see the Neckar, even if I have never been, and probably never will go, to Heidelberg. And actually, I must say I have seen better rivers!
That said, it is hard to get the full impact of the thing because someone, at some unspecified point in history (this being the narrative of my sister, of whom history is not her strongest point) collected a big pile of rubble from somewhere (no idea where) and dumped it in the middle of the Neckar. Well, not just dumped, but sort of flattened out and put earth on top of and made into a big long promenade, a quasi-island in the middle of the river, with tree planted on it, and benches, and statues. Die Platanenallee, they call it, and it would be a rather pleasant place to walk a dog, if you happened to have one, which I never would, being scared of dogs.
Down by the riverside there is a sort of tower, in which died a famous German playwright called Hoelderlin. My sister informed me of this in a solemn sort of way and did my best to look suitably impressed and not like a very ignorant person who had no idea who an evidently highly important German literary figure actually was.
“What was it Hoelderlin actually wrote, again?” I tentatively asked her after ten minutes or so of fruitlessly mulling it over in my mind.
“I have no idea,” she confessed, “but I’m sure he was someone important”.
Far more exciting than the demise of poor Hoelderlin then, is Currywurst. Now I confess that I have never eaten Currywurst, nor seem likely to, seeing as I have a strong aversion to curry. But I mention it here because Currywurst has recently taken on a strange sort of significance in the Tuebingen psyche.
For the past few months, an anonymous graffiti artist has been walking round the town in the dead of night and using stencils to spray peculiar slogans about Currywurst on any available space. This being Germany, I think people paint over or wash off the slogans as quickly as possible, but I still saw quite a selection of random phrases, Currywurst wider Krieg (Currywurst against war) being the most frequent. According to my sister, only a few weeks ago a rival artist has started spraying similar messages about Falafel. Falafel aendert sich nie (Falafel never changes) could even be seen painted on the side of poor Hoelderlin’s tower. I confess to not understanding this craze in the slightest, but my sister claims Falafel is Turkish and thus thinks the messages may have some sort of racial undertones.
Before night fell I went to check into the hotel where I had reserved a room for the night. The staff were Eastern European and had not very talkative, but the room was adequate considering that it was setting me back less than thirty quid including breakfast. The only annoyance was the lack of sufficient light to read, but seeing as I wasn’t going to be there long enough to actually want to read I can’t really complain
We soon headed out to sample the delights of the Tuebingen nightlife. There is a rather nice pub-like establishment down by the river called Neckarmuller, which specialises in different sort of beer, served in big tall glasses which look like vases for roses with exceptionally long stems. I had one of the nicest Schnitzels I’ve had in a long time, despite the fact that it was served in a beer gravy and I don’t like beer in the slightest. There was a variation on Spatzle as an accompaniment but it was completely different to the sort of Spatzle which I’ve had before; far more pasta like. My sister and I both fancied a pudding but unfortunately all Neckar Muller had on offer was ice-cream and it felt a bit too cold to experiment with it. We resolved to leave and go elsewhere on a quest for cake.
This Quest for Cake turned out to be resemble the Quest for the Holy Grail in far too many respects. As the knights of the Round Table had no idea where they might find the Grail, so were condemned to wander aimlessly through the dark forests in search of adventures, so we had no idea where in a small German town one could reasonably expect to find light refreshments of the cake variety being served after seven pm in the evening, and thus condemned to wander aimlessly up and down the hilly side streets. Mirages of cake appeared in front of us, always visible but never quite attainable due to bakeries being shut and what not. We contemplated going into a restaurant and asking if we could skip the starter and main course and just take dessert, but in the end we chickened out and had a coffee, before heading to a bar to drown our sorrows in Gluehwein.
The Gluehwein had cherry juice in it and was rather delicious. Sadly it also had cloves floating in it, and cloves being something I would rather not have to swallow whole, no other course of action was available than to try fishing them out. This proved to be difficult enough sober, never mind an hour or so later, and it’s probably a good job most of the people in the bar were German and hopefully too rusty on their English to understand our paranoid exclamations of “There’s something hiding in my drink! I know it’s there, I just cant find it!”
Breakfast at the hotel came too soon and proved to be rather an embarrassing affair as I was the only guest partaking in it. Having got up and checked out early enough to attend half nine Mass down the road, it transpired that half nine Mass had actually been cancelled, so we had a long and rather chilly walk into town on time for eleven.
My sister sort of insisted on going to Mass, but to my mind it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Unfortunately it was a special youth Mass which meant the prayer books had inexplicably been removed. Without the words, the only responses to the German Mass which I was able to muster were Amen and “und mit deinem Geiste”. The elderly lady sitting next to me evidently thought I was a heathen and halfway through asked if she could have my hymn book seeing as I didn’t seem to be making much use of it. The normal course of the Mass was interspersed with random interludes of children singing American gospel songs. It was difficult not to crack up when they burst into a rousing rendition of “Swing low, Sweet Chariot” just before the sermon; that strange way Germans refuse to believe that English people do not render the letter a meant that they kept singing about a “cheriot”; and the whole spectacle just seemed completely incongruous with the very Germanic surroundings.
The ordeal over, I expressed the desire for more cake which led to a minor dispute with my sister over how cake is defined. When I said I wanted cake I meant something along the lines of a pastry; something light, without vast quantities of cream, which I could eat without spoiling the dinner I had spent most of Mass fantasizing about. My sister, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a more continental attitude of defining cake as a sickly gateau-like substance, and this led to disharmony over the sort of cake-establishment we wished to grace with our custom. In the end we both ended up with doughnuts we didn’t want, and moved straight on from the cafe to the pizzeria where we had already agreed to eat.
We must have sat there for two hours or more, talking about this and that. It was so nice to get the chance to talk to her properly again, and it brought home to me how much I miss her. It had got to that awkward time where we were both silently counting down how many hours we had left. We had a desultory walk round the town once more to point out a few lesser sights I might have been forgiven for missing first time round, then found another cafe in which to sit and try and pretend I wouldn’t be getting on a train in ninety minutes. And in the end I was glad when it was time to catch the eye of the waitress and leave, because there is only so long I can keep up bright conversation for whilst trying very hard not to try.
It was very strained on the platform, we both focussed on talking about something totally and utterly pointless (my boyfriend, in fact ) and then the bright red train became visible at the end of the platform and we both burst into tears and hugged each other.
The journey back, which I had almost been looking forward to, being quite a fan of travelling, turned into a bit of a nightmare. The train to Stuttgart was fine. It arrived on time and I managed to run across Stuttgart station once more and make my connection with about sixty seconds to spare. The ICE to Frankfurt, however, left something to be desired. For a start, the entire train appeared to have booked their tickets online. Now this is in principle A Good Thing. I had booked my ticket online too, and received an email telling me that I would be sitting in carriage 23 and giving me a seat number. The problem arose from the fact that a hundred other people had also received emails allocating them seats in carriage 23, they all seemed to be boarding at Stuttgart, and train carriages are too narrow to allow two people to pass in the aisle way. It seemed that everyone with seats at the top of the carriage had got on and the bottom and vice versa, with the result that there was a very ugly and ill natured traffic jam in the middle and I’m not exaggerating if I say the train was twenty minutes into its journey before all were comfortably seated.
There followed ten minutes of peace and quiet, then an announcement that we were on the outskirts of Mannheim. The train stopped, and vast quantities of people who had only just found their seats jumped up assuming we were at the station. A few minutes later there was a further announcement asking everyone to sit down and not to leave the train. Confusion reigned before clarification came in the form of another message on the tannoy. The train had broken down, something wrong with the brakes, and we were going to sit here until someone could come to look at them.
I started to sweat. I was still half an hour’s journey away from the airport and I had been allowing myself exactly two hours to check in and navigate my way back across that maze. A slight delay was not a disaster, but every minute it went by took away a minute I could afford to spend wandering round in a lost bewilderment in an attempt to find a check in desk in Frankfurt airport.
The minutes ticked by. Announcements came thick and fast. No one could be found to mend our train. Someone had now been found. The problem was not very serious, the train could be repaired on the track. The repair would take five minutes. Just another five minutes ladies and gentlemen and then we’ll be moving. We thank you for your patience. And so on and so on. Meanwhile the conductor sprinted up and down the carriage like a frightened rabbit, trying to field questions about what would happen if people missed their connections to Amsterdam. Further polite announcements were made via loudspeaker, which basically amounted to the fact that anyone who had been trying to get to Amsterdam was screwed.
As for me, I was still in with a fighting chance of making my flight, so long as everything went smoothly. Quite clearly when faced with such a circumstance, things elected to go anything but smoothly. Exiting the train, I was quite pleased to see a sign pointing to check in after only two minutes walk. Less pleasing was the fact that only two check in staff appeared to be on duty. I felt myself lucky that I was somewhere near the front of the queue but it turned out to be fairly irrelevant, as the queue declined to move an anything beyond snail’s pace. The passengers from hell appeared to be checking in at one kiosk and were having a lengthy fight with the check in girl about whether they should or should not have printed off their own e ticket prior to arriving at the airport. Check in girl number two noted this and evidently decided it was time to call it a day, closing up her desk. A small riot nearly ensued when the passengers from hell were finally processed, and a pilot then jumped the now half a kilometre long queue and checked in before us. So many irate Germans waving passports is quite a frightening sight, and it soon inspired Lufthansa to locate the extra staff which ten minutes previous it had sincerely assured us it did not have.
having checked in literally the minimum hour before my flight, I had thirty minutes to find my gate. Sound doable? I promptly abandoned all hopes of finding a toilet or a place to buy a drink, and devoted all my energies to navigating. Things seemed to be progressing well, I got through passport control with less of a wait than one normal is subjected to at Frankfurt, and arrived at security check number one. For reasons I don’t quite understand, anyone flying to Britain has to undergo two identical security checks before they are allowed to get on a German plane.
Concentrating intensely on not smiling, I managed to bundle my coat, scarf, belt, phone, passport, pedometer and small change into a tray at an acceptable speed and felt rather proud, until I got reprimanded for putting my bag directly onto the conveyor belt and not in a tray on the conveyor belt. Naughty me! I avoided being taken into a little booth to be searched by a very unattractive armed policewoman, and began to redress myself whilst waiting for my bag.
My bag didn’t come. It took a few minutes for this to register, and then I became rather anxious. I noticed that it had been isolated over to one side, and that a number of people were alternating between staring at it and pointing at me. What on earth could be wrong? I was hit by the sinking realisation that I had left an empty bottle of apple juice in the side compartment. Could this be what was causing such a stir?
Eventually I was approached by a rather daunting official and asked to confirm that this was my bag. Having done so, he asked me to unzip the side. I did so, already forming the necessary German apologies for having forgotten the empty bottle, when I discovered to my surprise that this was actually the side with my purse in.
“Open your purse!” the German commanded, and I duly did so. He peered at it crossly, and informed me that I was carrying a suspicious number of Euro coins.
???!!!
Okay, so I did have quite a bit of small change, because I still haven’t quite got my head round euros and so prefer to also pay with notes for the sake of speed and convenience. But I didn’t have an excessive amount, it being only an average sized purse, and so I was rather nonplussed. I started to regret having admitted to speaking German, because I think sometimes they let you get away with more if you put on an act of being English and stupid. All in all I was detained for fifteen minutes while I struggled to convince the Germany security team that there was no sinister motive in me attempting to carry a moderate quantity of 5 cent pieces out of the country, but in the end I succeeded and started to move towards my gate with a slow jog. I had around ten minutes until boarding!
By virtue of my extraordinary sense of direction (?) I ended up at security check two just as my flight was called for boarding. I was somewhat apprehensive that I would have to justify my coins all over again, but luckily there was only one man on duty and he seemed far too preoccupied with the Polish passport of the lady in front of me to care about my collection of coppers. Phew! I literally ran onto the bus to my plane with thirty seconds to spare and that was it, one adventure successfully concluded
Now I can’t wait until next weekend, when I can do it all over again!