Traveling in Germany

Alex, Tibi, and I went to Freiberg, Germany the week before last (Oct 21-28) with the Oradea district temple trip. This was my fourth trip to Germany in my life (2002 Stuttgart with Grandma, 2005 Frankfurt/Stuttgart for Andrea Jung's wedding, 2005 Freiberg for Sari Kriszti's wedding).

This time around, my German was even more pathetically nonexistent than before! I did have some opportunities to have short conversations in German, and by the end of the week I had warmed up enough to have a 20-min conversation with a man staying in the room across the hall. I forget where he was from, but we discussed the weather (freak snow storm), his family (children in Switzerland) and where the other temples are in Europe. (I had forgotten there were several in western Europe, like in the Netherlands and Denmark, etc.) He also told me how much he enjoyed seeing foreigners (non-Germans) at the temple.

A couple other observations about Germany: the Schengel treaty means I didn't get any new stamps in my passport. :-( Once I cross into Hungary or Germany, I can essentially go wherever I want without having my passport checked at all.

One thing that really, really bothered me was that NOBODY CHECKED MY IDENTIFICATION AT THE AIRPORT. Not a single person! We left the secure area in the Dusseldorf airport on the way there, then had to go back through security and get chewed out for not speaking German by the woman who searched us. In retrospect, I should have pointed out that if they had asked for our ID like real security guards, they would have realized we weren't German.

The point is, anyone could have taken my boarding pass and gotten on the plane. After I passed security, if a man had stolen my boarding pass, he could have taken my place without a hitch, since the airport staff just has everyone scan their own pass as they get on board--no one even looks at the data as it's passing through. It was very disturbing to me. It was true in Dusseldorf, Dresden, and Munchen--all three German airports we passed through.

One last note: even though I was in Germany, and even though I didn't ever get around to opening my Romanian language book, I seem to have broken through to a new level in Romanian. Having to communicate so much in Romanian with our fellow travelers helped me make a breakthrough, and it's suddenly easy to express myself. I'm really pleased! Now if only I could figure out the rest of the possessive pronouns...