I had been staying in a Viennese suburb called Gablitz in late September 2007, and I needed to get to the train station quite early for my trip back to Munich. There’d been a few misadventures securing the train reservation a couple of days before, and, on my own, I’d had to navigate not just the city subway, but the bus system along the twenty kilometre route to the outskirts of town. I later discovered the trip was a wasted one, because I’d made the reservation for the wrong class. I was set on arriving at the station as early as possible the morning of my departure, hoping I’d get a good seat on the train of my choice.

My father drove me to Westbahnhof. I’d just concluded a two week tour of Italy and Austria with my family, and I was leaving for Canada the following day. I had been on my own in Munich for the first few days of this trip; I would end it by being alone there for the last two.

Americans and the world

I boarded a car that was not as modern, nor as spotless, as the train I’d taken en route to Austria. My reserved seat was unfortunately a single that was set back from a window frame, so the trip would be taken while sitting mostly beside a wall. Such are the vagaries of last minute reservations, I suppose. No matter. I would likely spend most of the time reading.

Unlike the car on the trip to Westbahnhof, this car was not compartmentalized. All the seats were aside a central aisle, with no sliding glass doors. Once on the train, I watched it slowly fill up. The passengers were mostly American tourists who spoke with that unusual flattening of the long vowels, which, when listening to a Canadian, causes them to hear the two words a boot instead of the single word about.

Accents are all relative, I suppose. Once one learns German, the difference in accents between provincial Austrian and urban German is remarkable. A speaker from either of these groups must invariably think the other is doing something terrible to the language.

American tourists have a reputation of being unworldly. Actually, the reputation borders on the sense of them being xenophobic, which makes one wonder what they’re doing travelling to all corners of the globe. Recently, we went on a wine tour of the Niagara region, and stopped at Niagara-on-the-Lake for a detour. We parked at a municipal lot and went to get a ticket. A middle-aged couple seemed to be having a lot of trouble with the machine, and looked quite forlorn. They were confounded by the fact that it wouldn’t accept their American coins. “What’s wrong with our money,” they asked, quite seriously, in an oppressive South Carolina drawl. One of our group wasn’t too patient, and made some cracks about their not having noticed the border crossing. But he was the first to smile, and he dropped in enough (Canadian) coins for them to have a couple of hours of parking.

There are three hundred million citizens of the United States. A few of them are bound to suffer culture shock when confronted with the unforgiving parking metres of Canada, for example. But the unworldliness of the American traveller is a myth.

During my many years as a waiter in downtown Toronto, I’d met literally thousands of people, a large percentage of them American, and many were well-heeled, savvy travellers with an impeccable sense of fine food and good wine. In Munich, I shared the floor of my hotel with a group of Americans that included a man who not only spoke perfect German (with a midwest accent), but carried the charming urbanity of the most demanding of European hotel patrons, contrasting sharply with the huffy gruffness of some of the Germans there. And on the corner of University Avenue and Dundas Street in Toronto, near my office, one is likely to be set upon at most times of the year by boorish German or British or Canadian tourists wrestling with an oversized map.

It isn’t the nationality of the traveller that impacts his behaviour, but rather, his familiarity with travel, and his openness to the newness of new places.

Citizen Incognito

A German businessman in his late forties took the single seat facing me, offering a clipped Guten Tag before unfolding his newspaper. There was an American family directly beside me across the aisle: Dad, Mom, two teenaged sons. Eventually, the train moved out of the station, and began winding through the Austrian countryside. I couldn’t see much of it. I concentrated on my book.

The family seemed restless, and switched seats with one another several times before even half an hour was up. They took advantage of the food service cart to fuel their impatience. What I will admit to being typical in the American tourist, as much as with the Germans, is a lack of auditory restraint. They were loud. The entire car knew of their various discomforts, and the nature of their small interpersonal relationships. The man in front of me seemed interested in all this, and paid much attention to them while reading his paper. He glanced at me and smiled.

“A little out of their element, maybe,” he said, or something like it. A year ago, my comprehension of German spoken by natives was not good. I usually had to piece together meaning from long sentences, only half of whose words I might understand, or I’d have to quickly refer to my mental translation dictionary if a rapid response was expected of me. This time, though, it would be good enough for me to smile and say, “Yes, so it seems.”

I admit to some measure of shallowness, and I was pleased that he took me for a German. My German teacher, also a native, had told me that my accent was good, and would not be noticeable as foreign to most Germans in quick casual conversation. My companion seemed satisfied with my response, smiling a little smugly, maybe, as he kept watch over our fellow passengers, so obviously foreign. And so I was happy to be mistaken for a native. I have always wanted to travel immersed, and flow with ease through the daily life of the city I’m currently in.

For an hour, my travelling companion read his paper, then folded it neatly and held it out to me, saying something so rapidly, and while chuckling, that I simply couldn’t get it. “No, thank you,” I said, holding up my hand. He rolled his eyes toward the American family, still fussing and vocal, and leaned toward me conspiratorially. His voice strained by withheld laughter, he delivered another rapid spate of idiom-laced German, and I instantly foundered. In the few seconds I had before my non-response would be uncomfortable, I tried my best to pick out parts of his sentence that were clear to me to gather meaning from the common, but it was no good. And, I had already forgone giving away my foreignness. I would feel foolish asking him to repeat himself, or to reply in English. Were I to suddenly admit to being a native English speaker, his embarrassment might be depthless at realizing he might have been speaking to the very kind of tourist at whose expense he was apparently having a few jibes.

I merely looked back at him, politely attempting to smile. I suppose he sensed my discomfort, but probably interpreted it differently, and he smiled and nodded, saying, “Well, there you have it, although it is interesting.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” I said, turning the meaning to suit my little problem. He closed his eyes and leaned back into his seat. I quickly put in my earplugs and turned up the music to close myself off from any further trouble.

The journey continued through Austria, and eventually into the mountainous southeast of Germany. I believe the family had departed in Salzburg. I dozed for a while, or I tried to glance out the corner of window glass that was accessible to me. When we pulled into Hauptbahnhof in Munich, I followed the businessman to the door. Before disembarking, he turned to me and politely said goodbye, smiling warmly.

I felt a little small at my behaviour. I hadn’t had the courage to admit to being non-German when the moment of crisis had arrived. And despite this, I was still proud, in a petty way, of being mistaken for a German.

Leaving the train, I made a straight line for the station’s interior, knowing exactly which exit to take. I pictured the corner I would wait at, with the crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change; before I reached it, I could see in my mind the long street, Paul-Heyse-Straße, stretching in the distance toward my hotel. Other names of streets in the neighbourhood went through my mind: Pettenkoferstraße, Goethestraße, Bavariaring. Those and two dozen more had been underfoot already. I walked to Uhlandstraße and my hotel. I would have the afternoon to continue into other parts of the city.

Louis About me, Germany Americans, Austria, Europe, Germany, Munich, Tourists, train, Travel, Vienna

I had only a single full day in Munich when I went to Europe in September 2007, and I tried to see as much as I could, but unfortunately, there were glaring omissions. I didn’t see the Isar at all, nor the Englischer Garten, and I missed the Deutsches Museum and the Pinakotheks. I did, however, familiarize myself with the city, including the oldest part of the altstadt. My trip to Dachau was memorable but sad, and occupied most of that day.

Communal eating

The evening before I left, I walked to the city centre. It was pleasant and mild, and the streets seemed crowded with Müncheners. I’d been looking for something. I can’t remember what, or if I’d found it, but on the way back, I needed to get something to eat. Seeing a brightly lit shop with food in the window, I went in.

It was a kind of deli, and there were no tourists inside. People were grocery shopping, or eating at a few long, high communal tables near the entrance. It was nice to get away from the tourists and their haunts, and the kitschy atmosphere of some of the shops, although these are refreshingly few in Munich if you know where to go.

I walked to the back of the store, and watched people pile food on plates from a serving table, to be taken and weighed by a cashier. There were take-out trays and dinner plates. Grabbing a tray, I went over the offerings, and invented a meal of various pastas and vegetables. I went to the tables at the front and enjoyed it while listening to a family of three, with a girl about ten or eleven, talking about the minutiae of their day. They seemed to be discussing the girl’s school, and things for her to do in the evening. She looked at me every once in a while from over her plate of sausage, probably wondering why I was eating inside from a take-out tray instead of a ceramic plate.

They soon finished and left, and others came and went, alone or in pairs, talking, or eating quickly and silently, and it was one of the most enjoyable meals and experiences I remember from my entire trip. You can eat a lot of beautiful goulash in Austria, or innumerable varieties of pasta or fish in Italy, but sharing a rough meal in common with the local population of a city you have a special fondness for makes for a lovely memory.

Professor of Annoyance

I was to meet up with my family in Vienna in two days, and I’d reserved a seat on the train for the next morning for the four hour trip from Munich. I boarded about mid-morning; I seemed to be the only one on the entire car. Seats were arranged in banks of threes facing each other, and contained in compartments with sliding doors. It was cozy and modern, and impeccably clean. I settled in my seat by the window and dozed, waiting for the train to depart.

After a bit, the door slid open, and in bustled a large man in his sixties. He looked at me over his glasses and rumbled an obligatory “Guten Tag,” then took quite some time to settle in. He was expansive, in his width and his movements. He pulled out a newspaper, a binder, and other items, and took up most of the tiny table under the window as a kind of desk, while we waited for the train to leave the station.

He was kind of amusing, kind of curt. His voice was deep and gravelly. He had a thick grey beard, and wore an old herringbone jacket (complete with patches on the elbows) over a tattered cable-knit sweater that looked particularly scratchy. His glasses were half-rims, so it was easy for him to glance over the top of them at whatever might have been annoying him at the moment. And he did seem to be in a state of perpetual annoyance.

I suddenly noticed an overturned paper coffee cup with a lid on it in the middle of the floor, very slowly leaking hot coffee into the carpet. Unless I’m half-blind, or stupid (or maybe a little of both), that cup was not on the floor when I entered the spotless compartment. I politely interrupted the gentleman to ask if he had dropped it, pointing to it as my voice trailed off in the face of his stony-eyed stare. “Not at all,” he said, “do you suppose it has been sitting there all this time?”

My German isn’t perfect, and my comprehension of spoken German — particularly German spoken by an irascible and perpetually annoyed man in his sixties who would probably be difficult to understand in the most cordial of circumstances — is even worse. But that was the unusual gist of what he said to me. “I – I’m not sure,” I said, a little confused by his disowning of this item. “Hum,” he puffed, “strange.” And he went back to his paper.

Okay. I stood, picked the cup up, being careful not to dump the remainder of its contents on the floor, and left the train to throw it out.

When we finally departed, it began to rain. It was very grey and misty out, and unfortunately the landscape was invisible. I looked at my companion. He was reading not a German newspaper, but perhaps a Czech one, or Slovak. After some time, he turned to his binder and began to make pencil notes in the margins of what appeared to be a typewritten Czech manuscript, before going back to the newspaper. A Slavic writer of some kind? I hadn’t noticed anything but a perfectly German accent. He certainly fit the description of a sixty-ish middle European novelist, elbow patches and brusqueness and all. I was reminded of Yuri Testikov, the growling Russian writer on a Seinfeld episode.

After an hour or so, two young Japanese girls, quite obviously tourists, came into our compartment and sat opposite one another, chatting quietly. This did not impress my companion, who used both his half-rims and the top of his paper from which to shoot darts at these young women. When they began to unpack a lunch of noodles and biscuits, it was barely tolerable for him. Since they didn’t have access to the table, their little picnic was spread out on the seats beside them; meaning beside myself as well as my companion.

I have never heard anyone actually snort. One may read this in fiction occasionally — “He snorted his contempt,” for example — but I think one very rarely has the luck to actually hear someone snort contemptuously in real life. When the odour of the noodles reached him after a few seconds, his paper snapped in rapid succession three or four times, and he huffed and snorted — yes, very contemptuously — making his deep displeasure known to us all. Except that for reasons unknown, perhaps cultural ones, this passed high over the heads of the young women, who happily chattered and ate, and drank from bottles of brightly coloured liquid while he stared at them sidelong, barely able, it seemed to me, to contain his revulsion.

It was difficult to feel sorry for anyone. Yuri was master of his own displeasure, and the girls had no idea they were unsettling him so grandiosely. He glanced at me once or twice, maybe looking for a comrade in disgust, but I did my best to ignore the whole situation. In fact, I had to make sure that I wasn’t smiling too much in order not to insult him.

Luckily, the girls left the train shortly afterward, and he could go back to his newspaper and manuscript. He also slept for a while, stretching his legs on the seat beside him, bohemian style. I read, listened to music, or watched the rain streaking along the window. The landscape was a misty rush beyond it.

Finally, hours later, we entered the Viennese environs. My companion gathered up his belongings and his luggage a few stops before Westbahnhof, which was my destination. As he left the compartment, he turned to me and offered a very polite and dignified goodbye. Entertaining though his demeanor might have been, he was still quite classically the gentleman, and I was glad to have made the trip in his company.

My stay in Vienna was short, and over the course of the next two weeks, I’d met my family, and we’d traveled throughout Austria and Italy before arriving back at Vienna. From there, I would take the reverse trip back to Munich.

Louis About me, Germany Europe, Munich, train, Travel, Vienna