Was fur ein Automaten?
I've never really considered myself an adventurous person. I don't take risks, I'm seldom spontaneous. I do what comes easy. So I really don't know what possessed me to decide to sign up for a summer immersion course in Germany my junior year in college.
I'd taken two years of French in high school and carried that over to college. I had a couple of semesters under my belt when one day one of the German professors came into our French class. Herr Wohlert was in his 50's and kind of looked a little like Benny Hill but the guy oozed charisma. He beat the hell out of the boring French professors and French had sort of lost it's luster for me so I made the jump to German. And I loved it! I didn't much care for Herr Wohlert's wife, Frau Wohlert (she was the complete opposite of him), but I still loved the language. It was fun and it came easily to me plus, I was pretty good. So when the opportunity to spend a summer living in Germany, working and learning the language came up, I signed up. I had to interview for the program and I had to come up with the airfare but I was determined that I wanted to do it. And I was accepted. I remember leaving the interview and going straight to the get my passport pictures and application.
They wanted to put me at an information desk at the Hamburg Airport because I spoke French and German but I wanted to work on a farm. Auf dem Land. Don't ask me why I chose a farm. Maybe I had visions of some place up in the hills, getting up in the morning, milking cows and generally living the life of Heidi. They made all of the participants take a prep class over the second semester. We had to learn German customs (don't open the windows on a moving vehicle, don't switch the knife and fork when you eat, etc) and we all had to learn vocabulary associated with our work places. I got words for farm animals and tractors.
I left on June 8th There were three of us traveling together from Tulsa to NYC then on to Frankfurt. While I had done a lot of flying in my life, none of us had ever been overseas before so it was quite the shock when we arrived in Frankfurt and then at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. We were told no one would speak English and there were signs reiterating that. My friends were going in different directions than me so we all had to make our own train reservations. My assignment was with a family, the Jakobi's, in a small town in the Sauerland in North Rhine- Westphalia called Brilon. Elisabeth Jakobi (the mother) had written me a welcoming letter before I left, explaining that I would need to take the train to Brilon-Wald. I bought a ticket for Brilon. The woman at the station said something about taking a bus but I only had a couple of semesters of German under my belt and let me say, hearing people speak it in class versus hearing a native speaker talking 90 miles a minute? Not the same. I had a planes, trains, and automobiles kind of trip and something that should have taken a couple of hours took me all day. Yup, I buggered it up good. At one point, a German couple took pity on the obviously American girl and took me to their place, fed me, and then drove me to the Brilon-Wald Bahnhof. Elisabeth lectured me on how I could have been kidnapped and sold for meat (definitely lost in translation) but honestly, I was so tired, I could have cared less. But I wasn't too tired to notice that she wasn't taking me to some cozy farm in the hills. Nope, we were driving to the city. Parking on the street next to a house across from a bakery. There was no Heidi. I met the family: Albert the dad who bore a striking resemblance to Patrick McGoohan, Anna, the oldest daughter, Bettina, the awkward middle child, and Elgin, the baby. Elisabeth was the mama and lordy, that woman had a pair of lungs on her. Plus some pretty corrupt sinuses if the snorting noises she constantly made were any indication.
They showed me up to my room (Bettina and Elgin's room, complete with bunk beds) and then told me I needed to write a letter home to let everyone know I was ok. Then I had to show them on the map exactly where Tulsa was. They knew Denver (Der Denver Clan aka Dynasty) and Dallas and that concluded their knowledge of the US. The girls spoke a little English but mama and papa did not. They fed me some soup that was amazingly good and then asked me what kind of car I drove. Apparently, they had high hopes of making me their chauffeur but I crushed their hopes when I told them "ich fahr ein Automaten". If any of you speak German, you're probably laughing as hard as they did. Because I didn't tell them I drove an automatic, as I'd meant. No, I said I drove a vending machine. They told that story for a couple of months. Probably still telling that story.
The first week of my stay was spent cleaning things. Germans are very clean. My host family and most of the people I came in contact with in Brilon didn't smell very good but there's a reason for that and I kind of joined them at some point. I also spent that first week listening to Frau Jakobi yell at me. She wasn't angry with me, she just yelled everything. I finally had to tell her, auf Deutsch, that I can hear her just fine but I can't always understand her. She got it and didn't yell at me any longer. Also during that first week I found out that the Jakobi's owned several hectares of land as well as a coal business (the only one for all of Brilon and the surrounding areas). The barn for their cows was actually connected to the house so during the summer, they fill the barn rafters with hay and then in the fall, they herd the cows through the streets of Brilon to the barn. So, my first venture to the country was that week, when we had to go up to the fields to plant kohlrabi. Good times. But that was an easy job. Later it would get much harder, hotter and dirtier.
The house itself was pretty cool. I'm not sure how old it was but it was very, very old and as was the custom, had been in the Jakobi family for many years. Probably going back until the house was built. Albert Jakobi inherited the house from his uncle, who had no children. Custom dictated that the house go to the oldest male so that's how it went to Albert. Albert had three daughters so there was talk that the house would go to a nephew when he died. Also, as customary for the houses in Brilon, the history of the house was painted along the front. As I said, there was a barn attached to the back of the house but you'd never know it. The house itself was beautiful, very traditional German. The inside had a marble entry way and staircase, three and a half bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The whole house was heated by hot water flowing through pipes. When they made a fire in the basement, they had heat. They also had hot water for baths. Bath days were Wednesdays and Saturdays. That was it. I could go without the bath but not washing my hair? No way. So I spent a lot of mornings dousing my hair in the bathroom sink.
I can't recall what the Jakobi's paid me but it was good money considering I didn't have to pay room and board. For the most part, they treated me like I was a member of the family but I was still the hired hand. Mostly I was a Putz Frau, a cleaning woman, for Elisabeth, but a couple of days after I arrived, they sent me on a little trip to Soest and Mohnesee with Bettina, Elgin and a busload of others. I also got to go with Elisabeth and some of the farm ladies (they really did live on farms) to Wuppertal. The drive to get to the bus that took us there very nearly gassed me out. Seriously, I was squeezed into the backseat of a Mercedes with five women who hadn't bathed in anything but perfume and Aquanet. It was hot and of course we couldn't roll down the windows. But Wuppertal and the Schwebebahn were a lot of fun. And so where the ladies (I was by far the youngest). I also got a one week vacation about halfway through my summer. This was a trip to what was at the time West Berlin. The Jakobi's gave me an extra 100DM and an orders to bring back a bottle of Metaxa (nasty, nasty stuff).
West Berlin was a gas! All of us who were in the program met up in Muenster and rode a bus across East Germany. We were told we could not exit the bus except at the rest stop and we could not bring in any printed materials. I remember the East German guards who came on the bus were pretty scary, never smiling as the checked our passports and looked through our things. But the worst was the rest stop in East Germany. First it's in the middle of nowhere and yet, it has an attendant. We had to pay 50 pfennig to use the toilet and another 50 for toilet paper. This was my first experience with a toilet that had the tank over head and I remember pulling that chain and running out of the stall. I had this fear that water was going to flood over the side. West Berlin was awesome! We had a guided tour every day so we saw everything, including the Wall (and Stevie Wonder, visiting the Wall) and the Reichstag. I have to say, I'm really glad I got to see Berlin before the wall came down because it really made me appreciate what it meant when it came down. We did pass through Checkpoint Charlie and spent one day touring East Berlin with a very cool East Berlin tour guide. You could definitely see the differences in the two cities, most notably buildings that were shot up during WWII and still hadn't been repaired. One of the guys with us actually pulled a casing out of a piece of stone near a park--that was playing Michael Jackson music, I should add.
While I was in Brilon, we'd gone to one of those buy in bulk places. They had a bin full of these crazy looking house shoes called Birkenstocks (the clog we call Bostons) so I bought a couple of pairs. This was long before they became popular in the US and all my friends and family thought they were u-gly. But who knew I was a trendsetter!
The next big event while I was there was the Schutzenfest. This takes place over the last weekend in June but the celebration lasts the whole week. All the flower boxes are prettied up with bright flowers and the house fronts, including the flower pots and the curbs, are scrubbed clean. There's a parade, complete with king and queen, and then on the Monday after Schutzenfest there is the Schnadezug.
The Schnadezug is a 15km walk around the city. Many, many, many years ago, Brilon was a walled city. There's still a little of the wall and one of the gates left and the Jakobi's have a painting that shows the city as it once looked, complete with the wall. To commemorate the wall and the fact that the town survived raping and pillaging, they have this 15km walk around the city to retrace the wall. All the men gather early in the morning and the women are there to see them off on their journey. They are loaded up with sandwiches and schnapps and they're decked out in those Tyrolian hats with a feather in them. Albert wore something akin to lederhosen (I wish I could find the picture) and carried with him a large sausage and a flask. Yeah, interpret that as you will. They walk and drink and pee on trees. And at some point, the women join the men and they all do the final 6km back to the city together. Oh, and the site we all meet up at is significant because this is where the schnade stone is. This is where the newbie gets his butt dragged over the stone and then gets a medal commemorating the moment. Albert's nephew or friend or something gave me his medal, which I still have and use as my keychain. It was pretty entertaining on the way back because like I said, all the men were very drunk and singing and every so often, they would run over to a tree to take a pee. I remember walking through a cloud on the way back. I've walked through a few clouds since then but that was the first time. You always remember your first time.
At some point there was a massive celebration at the big Schutzenhall. I'd probably had oh, a dozen beers (they were in small glasses) and was sifting my way through the mass of humanity when all of a sudden I heard a voice say "follow me". In English. I hadn't heard English in a month so I followed and was lead to a table full of Scotsmen. They were from Brilon's sister town, Thurso, and most of them were boy scouts and their leaders. I met a very nice kid named Malcolm who told me he was a vegetarian after they took a tour of a slaughterhouse. I said I'd be a vegetarian too. I drank a whole lot of white wine with them and well, you can probably where this ended up. If you said me in the backseat of a Volkswagon Golf screaming for Elisabeth to stop the car because I was going to throw up, you'd be correct. Worst hangover ever! The Germans say "die Loewe macht ein besuch", which literally means, the lion visits. And visit he did. I roared into the toilet at least twice the next morning and then one more time after breakfast. The green tint to my skin was a great source of amusement to my host family. And even better? The trip sponsor, a man named Dr. Seefeldt, was coming that after noon to check on me. I was so hungover but my host family never ratted me out. But they did kid me about it for days.
When I went to Germany and found out I was going to be on a farm, auf dem Land, I had one thing I wanted to accomplish: twirl around in a meadow and sing "The Sound of Music". One afternoon I went up to the fields with Albert. We rode up on the tractor and then he left me in a field while he went down to check on a bull that had a bad hoof. I was all alone. In a field. Yes, I twirled and I leaped over pretend streams and I sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music" in my horrifically bad voice. Life was complete for that moment.
And speaking of cows, the family took a vacation to Tirol for one week leaving Anna and I alone. We went to the lake (I saw some things at the lake that should have burned my retinas--please, please, please, get a razor), we washed her car, we checked on the water in the fields. Well, I did anyway. It had rained and I had on my nice, white Nikes. Anna made me walk through the field to check on the water level in the tank. I made it over there, checked the level and was starting back when I hear "Passe auf, kuhe". I look behind me and there are a couple of pissed off steers coming my way. I took off as fast as my little Nikes would carry me. I was running for my life. My feet never touched the ground. Literally. When I jumped onto and over the gate, I looked down at my shoes. Not a bit of mud. And I'd just come through a massive mud puddle. Fear does incredible things.
My one ghostly experience came in Brilon. We were sitting around the table one night, probably watching "Derrick" (German krimis are the best!), and afterward Elisabeth and Albert were telling me about the history of the house. Elisabeth said Tante Mali died in the house and every year on this particular date, she pays them a visit. I didn't give it much thought and went to bed. I slept on the lower bunk and always closed the door. I'd been asleep when all of a sudden I heard a noise. The room is super dark so if the door had opened, I'd see the light. There was no light. But there was someone in the room with me. I could "feel" the presence. It was so strong, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. But there was no one in the room. Except Tante Mali. She'd paid me a visit.
When it finally came time to leave, there were tears all around. I truly enjoyed my time there and my host family, although they drove me nuts, treated me like one of the family. The send off was something out of the movies. They took me to the train station--it was an eisenbahn (a real choo choo train) and the tracks ran next to a stream at the base of a mountain. To make it even more fairytale, I got on the train and lowered the window and there was my family, standing on the platform, Elisabeth waving a hanky as the train pulled out of the station. And then I had to close the window because lord knows, if there's a breeze on a moving vehicle, you'll catch your death and die.
I had every intention of going back after I graduated but that summer a bomb went off in the Frankfurt airport and my family was a little freaked about me going back. I often wonder how my life would have been different had I gone to Germany that summer because I really think I would have stayed. I'd gone to Germany with good comprehension of the language; I came home fluent. So fluent that my mom would stop me every so often to tell me to speak English--I'd just rattled off an entire conversation in German. But the biggest compliment came from a woman on the train to Frankfurt. I had to show her my passport to prove I was American. She told me my German was so good, she thought I was German. That still makes me smile.
I'm sad that I never did anything with my language. I've mostly lost my fluency now--except when I'm in Italy (!) or I drink. But those three months and the memories I have from them were the best risk I ever took.
One minor footnote: on the flight home I had a layover at JFK. I was waiting near the gate, which was shared by the red-eye to L.A. I was sitting by a window watching the people go by when all of a sudden, here comes Patrick McGoohan! I looked at him and I'm sure my expression said "OMG, it's Patrick McGoohan" but I kept my cool. He looked at me, gave me that little, familiar smile, nodded, and kept going. I was in heaven! Timothy Hutton also walked by trying to look inconspicuous in a floppy hat that just made him look conspicuous. He was a yutz.
I'd taken two years of French in high school and carried that over to college. I had a couple of semesters under my belt when one day one of the German professors came into our French class. Herr Wohlert was in his 50's and kind of looked a little like Benny Hill but the guy oozed charisma. He beat the hell out of the boring French professors and French had sort of lost it's luster for me so I made the jump to German. And I loved it! I didn't much care for Herr Wohlert's wife, Frau Wohlert (she was the complete opposite of him), but I still loved the language. It was fun and it came easily to me plus, I was pretty good. So when the opportunity to spend a summer living in Germany, working and learning the language came up, I signed up. I had to interview for the program and I had to come up with the airfare but I was determined that I wanted to do it. And I was accepted. I remember leaving the interview and going straight to the get my passport pictures and application.
They wanted to put me at an information desk at the Hamburg Airport because I spoke French and German but I wanted to work on a farm. Auf dem Land. Don't ask me why I chose a farm. Maybe I had visions of some place up in the hills, getting up in the morning, milking cows and generally living the life of Heidi. They made all of the participants take a prep class over the second semester. We had to learn German customs (don't open the windows on a moving vehicle, don't switch the knife and fork when you eat, etc) and we all had to learn vocabulary associated with our work places. I got words for farm animals and tractors.
I left on June 8th There were three of us traveling together from Tulsa to NYC then on to Frankfurt. While I had done a lot of flying in my life, none of us had ever been overseas before so it was quite the shock when we arrived in Frankfurt and then at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. We were told no one would speak English and there were signs reiterating that. My friends were going in different directions than me so we all had to make our own train reservations. My assignment was with a family, the Jakobi's, in a small town in the Sauerland in North Rhine- Westphalia called Brilon. Elisabeth Jakobi (the mother) had written me a welcoming letter before I left, explaining that I would need to take the train to Brilon-Wald. I bought a ticket for Brilon. The woman at the station said something about taking a bus but I only had a couple of semesters of German under my belt and let me say, hearing people speak it in class versus hearing a native speaker talking 90 miles a minute? Not the same. I had a planes, trains, and automobiles kind of trip and something that should have taken a couple of hours took me all day. Yup, I buggered it up good. At one point, a German couple took pity on the obviously American girl and took me to their place, fed me, and then drove me to the Brilon-Wald Bahnhof. Elisabeth lectured me on how I could have been kidnapped and sold for meat (definitely lost in translation) but honestly, I was so tired, I could have cared less. But I wasn't too tired to notice that she wasn't taking me to some cozy farm in the hills. Nope, we were driving to the city. Parking on the street next to a house across from a bakery. There was no Heidi. I met the family: Albert the dad who bore a striking resemblance to Patrick McGoohan, Anna, the oldest daughter, Bettina, the awkward middle child, and Elgin, the baby. Elisabeth was the mama and lordy, that woman had a pair of lungs on her. Plus some pretty corrupt sinuses if the snorting noises she constantly made were any indication.
They showed me up to my room (Bettina and Elgin's room, complete with bunk beds) and then told me I needed to write a letter home to let everyone know I was ok. Then I had to show them on the map exactly where Tulsa was. They knew Denver (Der Denver Clan aka Dynasty) and Dallas and that concluded their knowledge of the US. The girls spoke a little English but mama and papa did not. They fed me some soup that was amazingly good and then asked me what kind of car I drove. Apparently, they had high hopes of making me their chauffeur but I crushed their hopes when I told them "ich fahr ein Automaten". If any of you speak German, you're probably laughing as hard as they did. Because I didn't tell them I drove an automatic, as I'd meant. No, I said I drove a vending machine. They told that story for a couple of months. Probably still telling that story.
The first week of my stay was spent cleaning things. Germans are very clean. My host family and most of the people I came in contact with in Brilon didn't smell very good but there's a reason for that and I kind of joined them at some point. I also spent that first week listening to Frau Jakobi yell at me. She wasn't angry with me, she just yelled everything. I finally had to tell her, auf Deutsch, that I can hear her just fine but I can't always understand her. She got it and didn't yell at me any longer. Also during that first week I found out that the Jakobi's owned several hectares of land as well as a coal business (the only one for all of Brilon and the surrounding areas). The barn for their cows was actually connected to the house so during the summer, they fill the barn rafters with hay and then in the fall, they herd the cows through the streets of Brilon to the barn. So, my first venture to the country was that week, when we had to go up to the fields to plant kohlrabi. Good times. But that was an easy job. Later it would get much harder, hotter and dirtier.
The house itself was pretty cool. I'm not sure how old it was but it was very, very old and as was the custom, had been in the Jakobi family for many years. Probably going back until the house was built. Albert Jakobi inherited the house from his uncle, who had no children. Custom dictated that the house go to the oldest male so that's how it went to Albert. Albert had three daughters so there was talk that the house would go to a nephew when he died. Also, as customary for the houses in Brilon, the history of the house was painted along the front. As I said, there was a barn attached to the back of the house but you'd never know it. The house itself was beautiful, very traditional German. The inside had a marble entry way and staircase, three and a half bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The whole house was heated by hot water flowing through pipes. When they made a fire in the basement, they had heat. They also had hot water for baths. Bath days were Wednesdays and Saturdays. That was it. I could go without the bath but not washing my hair? No way. So I spent a lot of mornings dousing my hair in the bathroom sink.
I can't recall what the Jakobi's paid me but it was good money considering I didn't have to pay room and board. For the most part, they treated me like I was a member of the family but I was still the hired hand. Mostly I was a Putz Frau, a cleaning woman, for Elisabeth, but a couple of days after I arrived, they sent me on a little trip to Soest and Mohnesee with Bettina, Elgin and a busload of others. I also got to go with Elisabeth and some of the farm ladies (they really did live on farms) to Wuppertal. The drive to get to the bus that took us there very nearly gassed me out. Seriously, I was squeezed into the backseat of a Mercedes with five women who hadn't bathed in anything but perfume and Aquanet. It was hot and of course we couldn't roll down the windows. But Wuppertal and the Schwebebahn were a lot of fun. And so where the ladies (I was by far the youngest). I also got a one week vacation about halfway through my summer. This was a trip to what was at the time West Berlin. The Jakobi's gave me an extra 100DM and an orders to bring back a bottle of Metaxa (nasty, nasty stuff).
West Berlin was a gas! All of us who were in the program met up in Muenster and rode a bus across East Germany. We were told we could not exit the bus except at the rest stop and we could not bring in any printed materials. I remember the East German guards who came on the bus were pretty scary, never smiling as the checked our passports and looked through our things. But the worst was the rest stop in East Germany. First it's in the middle of nowhere and yet, it has an attendant. We had to pay 50 pfennig to use the toilet and another 50 for toilet paper. This was my first experience with a toilet that had the tank over head and I remember pulling that chain and running out of the stall. I had this fear that water was going to flood over the side. West Berlin was awesome! We had a guided tour every day so we saw everything, including the Wall (and Stevie Wonder, visiting the Wall) and the Reichstag. I have to say, I'm really glad I got to see Berlin before the wall came down because it really made me appreciate what it meant when it came down. We did pass through Checkpoint Charlie and spent one day touring East Berlin with a very cool East Berlin tour guide. You could definitely see the differences in the two cities, most notably buildings that were shot up during WWII and still hadn't been repaired. One of the guys with us actually pulled a casing out of a piece of stone near a park--that was playing Michael Jackson music, I should add.
While I was in Brilon, we'd gone to one of those buy in bulk places. They had a bin full of these crazy looking house shoes called Birkenstocks (the clog we call Bostons) so I bought a couple of pairs. This was long before they became popular in the US and all my friends and family thought they were u-gly. But who knew I was a trendsetter!
The next big event while I was there was the Schutzenfest. This takes place over the last weekend in June but the celebration lasts the whole week. All the flower boxes are prettied up with bright flowers and the house fronts, including the flower pots and the curbs, are scrubbed clean. There's a parade, complete with king and queen, and then on the Monday after Schutzenfest there is the Schnadezug.
The Schnadezug is a 15km walk around the city. Many, many, many years ago, Brilon was a walled city. There's still a little of the wall and one of the gates left and the Jakobi's have a painting that shows the city as it once looked, complete with the wall. To commemorate the wall and the fact that the town survived raping and pillaging, they have this 15km walk around the city to retrace the wall. All the men gather early in the morning and the women are there to see them off on their journey. They are loaded up with sandwiches and schnapps and they're decked out in those Tyrolian hats with a feather in them. Albert wore something akin to lederhosen (I wish I could find the picture) and carried with him a large sausage and a flask. Yeah, interpret that as you will. They walk and drink and pee on trees. And at some point, the women join the men and they all do the final 6km back to the city together. Oh, and the site we all meet up at is significant because this is where the schnade stone is. This is where the newbie gets his butt dragged over the stone and then gets a medal commemorating the moment. Albert's nephew or friend or something gave me his medal, which I still have and use as my keychain. It was pretty entertaining on the way back because like I said, all the men were very drunk and singing and every so often, they would run over to a tree to take a pee. I remember walking through a cloud on the way back. I've walked through a few clouds since then but that was the first time. You always remember your first time.
At some point there was a massive celebration at the big Schutzenhall. I'd probably had oh, a dozen beers (they were in small glasses) and was sifting my way through the mass of humanity when all of a sudden I heard a voice say "follow me". In English. I hadn't heard English in a month so I followed and was lead to a table full of Scotsmen. They were from Brilon's sister town, Thurso, and most of them were boy scouts and their leaders. I met a very nice kid named Malcolm who told me he was a vegetarian after they took a tour of a slaughterhouse. I said I'd be a vegetarian too. I drank a whole lot of white wine with them and well, you can probably where this ended up. If you said me in the backseat of a Volkswagon Golf screaming for Elisabeth to stop the car because I was going to throw up, you'd be correct. Worst hangover ever! The Germans say "die Loewe macht ein besuch", which literally means, the lion visits. And visit he did. I roared into the toilet at least twice the next morning and then one more time after breakfast. The green tint to my skin was a great source of amusement to my host family. And even better? The trip sponsor, a man named Dr. Seefeldt, was coming that after noon to check on me. I was so hungover but my host family never ratted me out. But they did kid me about it for days.
When I went to Germany and found out I was going to be on a farm, auf dem Land, I had one thing I wanted to accomplish: twirl around in a meadow and sing "The Sound of Music". One afternoon I went up to the fields with Albert. We rode up on the tractor and then he left me in a field while he went down to check on a bull that had a bad hoof. I was all alone. In a field. Yes, I twirled and I leaped over pretend streams and I sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music" in my horrifically bad voice. Life was complete for that moment.
And speaking of cows, the family took a vacation to Tirol for one week leaving Anna and I alone. We went to the lake (I saw some things at the lake that should have burned my retinas--please, please, please, get a razor), we washed her car, we checked on the water in the fields. Well, I did anyway. It had rained and I had on my nice, white Nikes. Anna made me walk through the field to check on the water level in the tank. I made it over there, checked the level and was starting back when I hear "Passe auf, kuhe". I look behind me and there are a couple of pissed off steers coming my way. I took off as fast as my little Nikes would carry me. I was running for my life. My feet never touched the ground. Literally. When I jumped onto and over the gate, I looked down at my shoes. Not a bit of mud. And I'd just come through a massive mud puddle. Fear does incredible things.
My one ghostly experience came in Brilon. We were sitting around the table one night, probably watching "Derrick" (German krimis are the best!), and afterward Elisabeth and Albert were telling me about the history of the house. Elisabeth said Tante Mali died in the house and every year on this particular date, she pays them a visit. I didn't give it much thought and went to bed. I slept on the lower bunk and always closed the door. I'd been asleep when all of a sudden I heard a noise. The room is super dark so if the door had opened, I'd see the light. There was no light. But there was someone in the room with me. I could "feel" the presence. It was so strong, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. But there was no one in the room. Except Tante Mali. She'd paid me a visit.
When it finally came time to leave, there were tears all around. I truly enjoyed my time there and my host family, although they drove me nuts, treated me like one of the family. The send off was something out of the movies. They took me to the train station--it was an eisenbahn (a real choo choo train) and the tracks ran next to a stream at the base of a mountain. To make it even more fairytale, I got on the train and lowered the window and there was my family, standing on the platform, Elisabeth waving a hanky as the train pulled out of the station. And then I had to close the window because lord knows, if there's a breeze on a moving vehicle, you'll catch your death and die.
I had every intention of going back after I graduated but that summer a bomb went off in the Frankfurt airport and my family was a little freaked about me going back. I often wonder how my life would have been different had I gone to Germany that summer because I really think I would have stayed. I'd gone to Germany with good comprehension of the language; I came home fluent. So fluent that my mom would stop me every so often to tell me to speak English--I'd just rattled off an entire conversation in German. But the biggest compliment came from a woman on the train to Frankfurt. I had to show her my passport to prove I was American. She told me my German was so good, she thought I was German. That still makes me smile.
I'm sad that I never did anything with my language. I've mostly lost my fluency now--except when I'm in Italy (!) or I drink. But those three months and the memories I have from them were the best risk I ever took.
One minor footnote: on the flight home I had a layover at JFK. I was waiting near the gate, which was shared by the red-eye to L.A. I was sitting by a window watching the people go by when all of a sudden, here comes Patrick McGoohan! I looked at him and I'm sure my expression said "OMG, it's Patrick McGoohan" but I kept my cool. He looked at me, gave me that little, familiar smile, nodded, and kept going. I was in heaven! Timothy Hutton also walked by trying to look inconspicuous in a floppy hat that just made him look conspicuous. He was a yutz.