Europe Trip: Tourists in Paris

Fortunately, our hotel in Paris was so much nicer.  We stayed in Les Halles, and enjoyed Paris from the first moments.  It's so much more familiar, at least to Mary and me, which helped make it a good way to end the trip.

Our first night we walked over to a neighborhood bistro and David had his steack-frites, Sarah had French onion soup (in July???) in a real Parisian cafe, and we began to settle into the city.  Saturday morning, July 3, was the only time it really rained while we were there.  We decided to walk over to the Louvre, which was just a few blocks west of our hotel.  I was afraid the line would be long, given the weather (everyone would want to be inside), but no, it was reasonable.  We saw several famous works of art, and began exploring the Egyptian section for David, when Sarah announced she was tired and wanted to go back to the hotel.  Mary took her there, and David and I headed instead to Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.

On arriving, I explained the history of Invalides to David, and showed him that it's now the French army's national museum.  He was thrilled with the chance to visit it, so we toured the WWI and WWII sections of the museum.  Afterwards, we went to the basilica to see Napoleon's tomb.  On walking out, we found that there was a wedding taking place in the chapel.  I supposed to one of the guards that the bride or the groom had to work there in order to get married there.  Nope, he said, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign of "money."

That night we rode a bateau-mouche, the tour boats that take an hour's cruise along the Seine.  We had a great chance to introduce the kids to the rest of the city and see the major landmarks that way.  I even had the chance to pick out some glorious homes alongside the Seine that would make terrific retirement places...imagine walking out on your balcony and looking over the Seine every morning!

The next day, July 4, we celebrated America's birthday by touring the symbol of her oldest ally: on a cloudless sunny day we toured the Eiffel Tower, and spent more time there than I think in any of our previous visits.  Sarah was *so* excited to tour the Tower, but first we had to wait in line for-freakin'-ever before we could take the elevators up.  We ate lunch on top of the tower from the little fast-food place there, and enjoyed the view before heading to the middle level.  We walked around there, and walked down the stairs to the first level, taking our time and exploring it all.  I didn't remember seeing half of what we saw this one visit.  Late in the afternoon we finished, and walked over to a cafe near the Ecole Militaire to recharge.  A beautiful day of memories.

Our final day in Paris, we went to Notre Dame and the kids were suitably impressed, even awed, by the Rose window and the beauty of the place.  David and I scaled the steps to the towers, and even got to do something new: I never remember being able to go inside the South bell tower before, and see the ancient timbers holding up the massive bell of the cathedral.

After Notre Dame we had our final bistro lunch in Paris and headed to the Arc de Triomphe.  The insane traffic around the circle was notable even to the kids, who haven't even had their first driving lessons yet.  One last meal in Paris that night, then home the next morning out of Charles de Gaulle.

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We truly had a terrific vacation.  We all learned a lot about the Klepping(er) family history that we would not have had a chance to experience just stateside.  The kids were awesome foreign travelers (once we figured out the food situation), and to listen to David, well, you can tell he learned a lot about Europe while we were there.

People who know I didn't study German ask if we had any problems over there.  I have to say, the Germans were universally welcoming and accommodating to my pathetic efforts to speak their language, helping in English almost everywhere.  Would I go back to Germany?  Oh yes.  But I still feel more at home in Paris.  Who knows when our next foreign trip will be, but at least for 2010, the kids have something special to remember.

Europe Trip: Tourists in Germany (Part II)

Thursday, July 1, was the longest day of our trip, and the kids handled it like champion travellers.

We awoke in Gunzburg, and when the gates of Legoland Deutschland opened at 10, we were there.  The kids had a terrific time in the park.  It's a small park; there's really only one roller coaster to speak of, and David certainly has ridden more terrifying ones.  But we had a great time exploring: I loved seeing the mini-Europe scenes, all made from Legos.  I remembered being a kid, playing with Legos, and hearing of a magical place in Denmark where they had this park filled with miniature replicas of famous places in Lego.    To see it in person was terrific.

We rode the rides, we splashed in the water rides, we saw the Lego safari (all the animals made of...well, you know), we ate lunch in the restaurant (one of the few places where I just pointed blindly at the menu and said, "I have no idea what this is, but bring it to me anyway."), we shopped in the store...and by 2:00 we were done with what we wanted to do in Legoland.

We hopped in the car and drove southwesterly towards Neuschwanstein, the fairy-tale castle of King Luwig II of Bavaria in the 1860s.  Coming upon the Alps was tremendous: they just rise, almost vertically, without warning, on the horizon.  We made our way to the tiny town at the base of the castle, and bought our tickets in the mid-late afternoon.

To get to the castle, you can walk uphill for 45 minutes, or take a horse-drawn carriage, or take a bus.  Mary, ever the romantic, wanted to take the horse-drawn carriage, so we did.  The horse puffed us up to the top of his route, at which time we were told to climb that path over there, uphill, about another 10 minutes.  (On the way back, Mary said, enough of the climbing, let's take the bus...so we followed the trail to the separate bus stop, which turned out to be--you guessed it--uphill as well.)

Neuschwanstein is enormously tall, and suitably imposing when you arrive.  But inside, it's largely unfinished, so we could only tour certain rooms--fortunately, the glamorous throne room and king's apartments were part of it.  The throne room was just ridonculous: gold leaf everywhere, mosaics, marble...so over-the-top as to make Versailles look almost reasonable by comparison.  But the castle sits on this absolute precipice: to the south the rock walls just fall away, hundreds of feet, to the river below in the chasm.  It's truly amazing to think how it got built in the first place.

We stayed and toured longer than I had anticipated, so it was late by the time we got back down the mountain, and later still by the time we made it to Munich for our last night in Germany.  I returned the car just at 9:00, then we got McDonalds at the train station across the street from our hotel.  I am amazed at the amount of mayonnaise the Germans think a Big Mac needs.  The kids found the ketchup to be not quite right, too.

Our hotel that night was easily the worst of the entire trip.  The 1st Creatif Hotel Elephant got chosen for its location, so we could drop the car off, then walk easily to the train station for our train to Paris in the morning.  Little did we realize the room was tiny, and it had no a/c on a hot summer's evening.  We had to leave the window open, which of course meant all the urban street sounds crashing into our room.  None of us got any sleep that night, so we were really ready for our train the next morning.  Paris, here we come!

Europe Trip: Tourists in Germany (Part I)

After spending Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday morning in Berlin, then Monday night and Tuesday exploring Dortmund and Soest, and Wednesday morning driving to Pfungstadt, we had exhausted the three places with family connections in Germany that we wanted to visit.  We now became out-and-out, no-good, dirty rotten tourists.

Wednesday afternoon we arrived in the city of Ulm, which held two points of interest for us.  First up was the Ulm Munster, or Cathedral, which boasts the tallest steeple in the world--over 500 feet tall.  And yes, you can climb up it.  We arrived in the late afternoon and started up.

Mary was the first to call "Uncle," stopping at the first level--a cool room atop the bells in the steeple with windows set up so you could look down onto the massive bells.  "I'll wait for you here," she said, and Sarah, David and I headed up.

We reached a point that seemed pretty high up, and only then noticed the staircase in the middle of the steeple that went even higher.  That's where Sarah called it quits; she sat down on the metal that formed the roof of the steeple (or base of the topmost part) and waited for David and I to ascend that last staircase.

When we reached the top, the view was fantastic.  I kept worrying about dropping the camera over the side; David was just ecstatic about climbing that high up.  We walked around the narrow catwalk (all done in stone, very impressive) and looked out over the Danube, the city, and the plaza below.  Then we headed down, collecting Sarah on the way, then found Mary for the descent to the base.  When we got all the way down, my calves certainly knew they had had a workout that day.  There are 768 stairs, which is to say 1,536 going both directions.  I felt them all by the time I was done.

We toured the main body of the Munster itself, and admired the German coats-of-arms along the walls.  We looked in vain for the Kleppinger coat of arms, but I realized the chances were slim; we were too far south and east for where our family had been.  David and I explored a crypt, which seemed (if my middle German is any good...and it's not...) to hold the remains of some bishops from the Middle Ages; impressive in a church whose record-holding steeple was finished only in the early 19th century.

After the Munster, and a bite of refreshment in a cafe in its north shadow, we discovered a note from the local constablulary on the windshield of the car: we'd parked and failed to pay at the meter, so I got a 5-euro parking ticket.  Grrr.  We then drove over to the second thing we wanted to see in Ulm: Albert Einstein's birthplace.  David, on learning this spring that Einstein was born in Germany, announced he wanted to see it, and so we did.  The building itself is gone, but in its place is a whimsical memorial to the genius featuring his famous tongue-sticking-out grin.

That evening we drove to Gunzburg, outside of Legoland Deutschland, and rested for our longest, and most packed, day of the trip: Thursday July 1.

Europe Trip: Where We Come From

One of the principal reasons for the trip was to celebrate the 700th anniversary of recorded Kleppinger family history: we apparently trace to 1310 in the town of Dortmund, with later emigrations to Soest and Pfungstadt.  And so we made a point to visit each place, in turn, to see where we're from.

Dortmund is now a major city, but in the medieval period it was a walled town in roughly the shape of an oval, and was a major trading hub for western Germany.  The major axis of the oval today is a shopping street, with lots of stores and boutiques, in a nod to its mercantile heritage.  Now. we didn't find any Kleppingers while we were there, but we did find two special things.  The first is the St Adolphus church, located just north of that major shopping street; it dates to 1250, and so while we explored that church, with its rough stone walls, we could just imagine our earliest ancestors, whose name was Klepping at the time, worshiping in that sacred space--or even helping to build it.

And the second was even cooler than that.  Coming just off the main street, in the southeastern part of the old town, was a pretty, tree-lined boulevard with more boutiques, shops, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, and a fountain at its base.  The street?  "Kleppingstrasse"--Klepping Street!  How cool is that?  The family history hangs together when telling of our time in Dortmund--apparently we were quite prosperous as wool merchants and traders, even to the point of loaning money to the English crown.  And apparently we did well enough, over these last seven centuries, to have a street named after us.

Our next site was the town of Soest, about 25 miles east of Dortmund, where the family moved in the 1600s.  Soest, likewise, was a walled city, and today retains much of its charm: it's just a picturesque German village, with timbered buildings, colorful walls, narrow streets, and little squares with a church on them absolutely everywhere.  We ate dinner here in a little restaurant off one of those squares, with a waitress who spoke no English.  Soest is famous for the green color of its limestone, and so many of the old churches and buildings are built with a greenish tinge to the stone.  It wasn't until later that I remembered chemistry class and what makes stone green, and then started to wonder how close we were to the uranium mines that the Nazis were using to try to build their own a-bomb.

Soest was a picture-perfect place, a tiny town with a lot of charm, just as Dortmund was a large city that had retained its charm as well.  Our final place, though, wasn't quite the same.  I believe that Pfungstadt is the town from which Johann Goerg Kleppinger emigrated to America in 1732, and in looking around at the place on Wednesday (June 30), I can see why he left.  It's beige: it's just a plain, simple, almost drab, colorless town 30 miles south of Frankfurt.  It's surrounded by factories, so it doesn't even feel very welcoming.  We did notice, though, that the landscape around town is reminiscent of eastern Pennsylvania; I could easily see Johann getting off the ship in Philadelphia, looking around eastern PA, and deciding, Yeah, this looks like home: rolling hills, farmland....  The other thing that was notable about Pfungstadt (in addition to its local beer) was a road sign we saw pointing that-a-way to the Town Archives.  Oh, if I had a pad of paper, a pencil, and two free days...!  But that's not why we were there, I reminded myself; this is the sampler tour, so we can come back another time to find Johann's birth records and the like.

Europe Trip: Exploring Berlin

After our ICE trains to Berlin, we found our hotel pretty easily (thank God for subway workers who speak English) and checked in in late afternoon.  We found ourselves surprisingly awake still despite the jet lag and the long hours awake, so we went exploring.

Our hotel was a few blocks inside what would have been East Berlin only 21 years before, and about four blocks from Checkpoint Charlie itself.  We walked over and the stories are right: there is precious little that remains of the Berlin Wall there.  There are murals along the street that bisected the wall, and running across the street is a two-wide set of cobblestones that marked where the Wall had stood.  But from a distance you wouldn't know it was ever there.  We toured the Wall museum that's there and the kids had some insight into what it meant, seeing the ways people used to escape and what happened when they didn't.

That night, and through much of our time in Berlin, we had surprising difficulty getting Sarah to eat.  She's usually our foodie, and so for her to become picky was not what we had expected.  We eventually hit on the key: Italian food.  Spaghetti, pizza...familiar things like that were OK with her.

Our full day in Berlin (Sunday, June 27) we slept in a little, then after lunch boarded one of those hop-on-hop-off city tour buses.  That enabled us to see all manner of sights, and as the weather was terrific, we could sit on the open-air top deck of the bus and really see everything.  We did see more of the Wall then; Berlin left a segment by the Spee River standing and it's now an outdoor mural site for local artists.

Speaking of other atrocities, David wanted to see where Hitler's final bunker was, and so we walked to find it.  It turns out to be relatively unmarked; there is a placard in front of an otherwise unassuming dirt parking lot in front of an otherwise unassuming set of apartment buildings, and you have to know what you're looking for to find it.  It's good, we decided, to not make a big deal of the place, especially given what atrocities were directed from there.  I felt a little uneasy standing there; the power of evil had diminished in the last 65 years, but it was still in the air.  Irony alert: nearby is the German memorial to the Holocaust victims.

Walking back to the hotel that night was interrupted by the squeal of vuvuzelas and the honking of thousands of horns; Germany had just defeated Argentina in the World Cup playoffs, and Berlin started going nuts with its pride for the team.  The row lasted until around 10--we could still hear some horns that late!  The kids got to understand how important World Cup soccer is in just about anywhere else in the world.