Google Maps lets us all down sometimes

Germany intrigued me – mainly for the train system, if I’m being honest, but also for the people. Not so much for the beer – sacrilege, I know.

I went from Berlin, where my interest was largely historical, to Hamburg and its canals, and ended in Cologne for the cologne, obviously[1].  And I did learn quite a bit, but almost nothing about what I expected or intended to learn.

In Berlin, I learned that confidence, persistence, and just a touch of naivete can you get you almost anywhere – even if “anywhere” wasn’t really where you wanted to go.

I was told that to visit the Reichstag building [2] and its giant glass dome, so when I got to Berlin, I mapped the location about eight times and took off into the pouring rain. The walk was a little long, but I figured the number of people that had raved about it assured that it would be worth it. I didn’t see the dome on my approach to the building, but I figured it was a Mona Lisa-type thing (daintier in person). There were several signs outside that I assumed told me where the dome was, but they were all in German, so I wasn’t sure. I thought the lack of translations was a little odd, but whatever, good for them for not ceding to the English-takeover.

I walked straight into the building, since there was no line, and was greeted (well, glared at) by two security guards. I tried to ask a couple of questions (where was the dome), but with no luck, since they either didn’t speak much English or didn’t want to speak to me. So, I did my usual thing: I gave them my most hopeful smile and started pointing inside[3]. It took a little bit, but with a lot of grimacing and aggressive x-raying on their part, I was let in.

…to see a handful of Germans in suits in a giant room with a glorious red carpet and no glass dome.

I had gone to the wrong government building. Realizing this far too late, but unwilling to admit my mistake to the security guards by leaving so soon, I wandered around, pretending to understand the signs and unintentionally making several diplomats wary of me as I wandered by what looked to be Very Important Conversations.

After enough time, I did eventually leave and found the Reichstag – which was right around the corner with an incredibly long line that did not budge despite the onslaught of rain.

So, lesson learned, I moved onto Hamburg, where I learned that if you’re on a bus and the man next to you says he’s a masseuse and tries to show you videos – move away immediately, just to be safe.

But Cologne. My promised land. The home of cologne and bone churches[4]. I got off the train and wandered through the massive shopping center, where a Rastaman was mercilessly beating a drum set in the middle of the walkway, and a fry stand was being mobbed across the way. I had found where I belonged.

And home indeed it was because my home has to be a weird place. After my meander around the neighborhood, I checked into my hostel, found my room, and was immediately confronted by a shirtless man sitting at the table in the room. While I inched around the room, staring at the ceiling, the man started chattering about how he was in town from Austria for a sales conference, and how the conference was killing him, but really it was his pinchy shoes that were killing him, and what was I doing there, and was I okay because I looked tired.

Eventually, he ran out of words, or maybe the room ran out of oxygen, and put on a shirt to meet his friend [5]. As he left, one of the other roommates walked in. Who was wearing a shirt, but more importantly – turned out to be a Fulbright scholar [6].

And it turns out that my roommate wasn’t alone. There was a whole group of scholars staying at the hostel, having just come from their orientation at a monastery in the middle of nowhere (Can you blame me for thinking they were some sort of mystical unicorns?).

Somehow, I got an invite to their night out (which strangely was a little more enticing than the invite to a low-key hostel room rave that I received in the elevator from a mildly drunk dude). Since I’m perpetually unclear as to what any night out entails, I had no idea what to expect from a night out with scholars. Fulbright scholars.

Turns out, it means walking a little over a mile, while several internationally recognized intellectuals attempted to figure out Google Maps. To sum that experience up, let me just say: it wasn’t pretty.

We eventually made it to the bar they’d been hunting for – which I will admit is a cool bar, although I was too busy rambling about Steely Dan to notice the finer details.

We hung out in the bar for all of 5 minutes and then we moved out into the street, with the rest of the German youth in Cologne. At 11 pm, I began the careful dance of extracting myself from the street gathering – a very careful dance indeed when you’ve been the lone English-only speaker speaking to absolutely no one. But I made it, breaking all of zero hearts with my departure, just in time to catch about 5 hours of sleep before I caught my first of three trains to Texel in the Netherlands.  

 [1] Before you judge me; I also went for the bone church. More on that later. 

[2] Reichstag translates directly to “imperial parliament” and was a reference to a series of governing bodies of earlier eras, but now the “Reichstag building” now houses the Bundestag, which is the modern legislative body. It first was used in 1894 up until the fire of 1933, which prompted the renovation that resulted in the now-famous glass dome.

[3] I get much weirder looks when I do this at my friends’ houses.

[4] The bone church I’m talking about is the Church of St. Ursula, which is a regular church that just so happens to contain a room filled with bones. The bones are housed in the Golden Chamber and supposedly belong to the 11,000 virgins storied to have traveled with Saint Ursula on her pilgrimage to Rome, all of whom died during her stop in Cologne. During their stop, they were attacked and beheaded by the Huns and buried in a mass grave. How much of this story is true is up for debate, but either way – the room is awesome.  

[5] He came back for all of 5 minutes to show me the heart-shaped laser pointer that he had found…somewhere.

[6] Here’s the embarrassing part. Since I was little, Rhodes and Fulbright scholars were like rock stars to me. I thought that they were super geniuses that were nationally and internationally recognized as geniuses because they could do lots of things… And I say things because up until I met a Fulbright scholar, I had no idea what they did or how they were selected. For those of you that similarly may not know, Fulbright scholars are part of an international exchange program for American scholars to study, teach or research abroad, and for foreign scholars to do the same in the US. Rhodes scholars, on the other hand, receive awards to study at the University of Oxford. The more you know.