Goodbye to That or the Other Thing I Won't Miss

Saturday we fly home (sort of) to the U.S. After fifteeen months in Berlin & Vienna, we've learned to love a lot of things. Eve has gotten used to seeing horse drawn carriages galloping by periodically. I now enjoy the rhythm of shopping each day for food.

And then there's the things we don't love. Hate to finish on a sour note, but I've got one last thing to get off my chest: the mind-boggling absence of humanity among service personnel.

I departed Berlin on one of the first trains to leave the newly built main station. The fine folks at Deutsche Bahn provided me with a good sense of closure.

The brand new luggage carts were too small for my four large suitcases, portable crib, computer, and bike seat, but I rolled along anyway into the gleaming, eerily clean station. I followed what I thought were the signs to track 2 but ended up at a small, sad looking elevator that didn't seem right. I asked the uniformed personell in the office nearby. No, the man said, that elevator goes to the parking garage. Ok. But the signs say there is an elevator to tracks 1-2 right over here. Well, he said, as if he didn’t notice the piles of suitcases in danger of tumbling, go to the main entrance to the station and there is an information desk (i.e., up one floor and a 5 minute walk back through the station).

I give him my best “are you insane?!” expression and moved on to look for the right elevator. 10 minutes later I was back in front of his office. All the other signs for tracks 1-2 led to escalators or stairs. The correct elevator had to be here somwhere in the vicinity of the parking office. Suddenly I noticed a small, non-descript elevator with no sign on it. It was approximately 4 feet from the parking office.

My old friend and his colleague were now standing talking with a group of travelers in front of the elevator.

<> I asked the colleague, does this elevator go to track 2? “Keine Ahnung,” she said matter-of-factly. “No idea.”

How naïve of me to think -- after one year of living in Germany -- that someone wearing the uniform of the German railroad might be curious about whether the elevator next to his or her office carries passengers to the tracks. How naive of me to think that he/she might feel some vague rumbling from deep down in the bureaucratic subconscious of an obligation - moral, spiritual, legal - to help a person that some cultures call "customer." And what about empathy? Mitleid, Mitgefuehl, Emphatie - the Germans have an impressive number of words for a sensibility that they are so adept at surpressing.

I know that Americans' cheery, sacharine manner can be off-putting. I know that there is a certain amount of employer domination and oppression that goes into making American workers so smiley and ready to help. Ok! But still......

On the train.

Fellow passangers were great. An American student helps me get one of my massive pieces up on the rack. When I return he’s gone. (Probably in dread of the possibility that I would need his help again.) I started to struggle with the next bag, and the woman in front of my seat offers to help. She’s a strapping gal, but the last ounce of chivalry and sense of embarassment as 20 passengers look on, is getting the better of me. No, I start to say, and then suddenly, overwhelmed by visions of a 9-hour train trip chomping on tylenol, I give honesty a try.

Obervogelsang! Never heard of it before, but it's extraordinarily beautiful. Right near the Czech border. Bike paths along the river. Horses, sheep. Enclosed in a valley. Everything impossibly green.

Wehlen is the first town in a while. Looks like a spa.

South of there, still along the river. Striking rock formations jutting up from the river. Kayakers on the water. Sunning bridges. Outcrops of rock with climbers on them.

A beach along the river, but with sheep instead of people lounging, foraging, enjoying the scene.

Another town. Bikers, ut not too many. Intriguing roads, paths leading up into the hills. Koenigstein.

A stop in Bad Schandau.

And then eventually Vienna.

Vienna is a good place to finish up with the theme of congenital unfriendliness. Which story to choose? My favorite is when we were in the supermarket and the clerk whirled our wine bottle past the reader a little too fast. The bottle rolled off the edge of the counter and smashed on the floor, just in front of my two year old, sitting in her stroller.

No shards hit Eve, just a little bit of white wine, but of course Nicole & I freaked and we spent five minutes fussily examining Eve for any damage. The incredible thing is that the woman behind the counter, though embarassed and eager to find us another bottle of the same wine, never said anything in the way of "sorry" or "is your baby alright?" or "gosh, you must have had a bit of a fright." She just put the new bottle of wine on the counter, collected my cash, and said goodbye.

Extreme, but not an anomaly. There is something emotionally catatonic about the entire culture. They live in a beautiful country, with great social benefits, reasonable politics, general prosperity, good health. Am I missing something? Would it cause a crisis in national identity to smile once in a while to a stranger, to connect? I dunno. Funny how American I feel right now.

I guess I'm ready for the Midwest.

Brief Notes on a Short Trip to Israel

Went to Israel for 4 nights and 5 days for a friend's wedding. My first time there since 1981 when I lived there for 6 months. My 2 closest friends from that time are a) in Chicago and b) couldn't be found. My Hebrew language skills have drifted and disipated almost into oblivion.

So I can't really say that I'm a terribly good source for much beyond "pseudo-cosmopolitan" reflections, as a certain correspondent would say.

The depressing part was Jerusalem. We stayed near the Central bus station - a good ways from the famous religious neighborhoods where secularistas like us have been made to feel unwelcome. To my surprise, ultra-orthodox Jews were everywhere. Our first evening, we went for a walk around 10 PM. Yeshiva students were on their way home, a few couples were out for a snack - the men in skullcaps and fringes or with blackhats and sidecurls, the women in wigs and/or headscarves and with the "modest" outfits of the orthodox.

We stopped in a small urban mall with a 1970's feel, which had kosher pizza and a pastry & coffee counter in the center. I had shorts on and got dirty looks from the other customers. Nicole was dressed reasonably, I thought, but she's 8 months pregnant and not shy about showing it. She got dirty looks too.

The chocolate cake was egregiously bad. A sin against good taste, a betrayal of the supplicant's most simple longings. I marvelled that such awful cake was possible in a Jewish country. For this you brought us out of the desert? We seemed to be the only disappointed customers however.

The next day I studied the faces on the street and on the bus to the Old City. I could have been imagining it, but I thought I felt hostility and even contempt almost everywhere I looked. The orthdox seemed to sum me up in a glance: secular scum, superficial twit, pleasure-obsessed ignoramous. (The kind of idiot who comes to the Holyland expecting to eat good cake).

In the Old City, I sensed a different kind of hostility. Apparently, I look Jewish. I hadn't really confronted this fact in a long time. In Germany and Austria, no one - at least without knowing my name - ever guessed I was Jewish. I'd come to think of myself as Jewish-looking only in the subtle Paul Newman/Kirk Douglas rather than the transparent Adrian Brody/Woody Allen sort of way.

Well, my Semitic cousins see it differently.

Walking through the Arab suk, I experienced none of the bonhomie that I remembered from 25 years ago. Even people who were eager to make a sale, looked at me skeptically, impatiently. I should buy something or just keep walking. Don't linger. Don't stay to talk. What is there to talk about anyway? Here I was obviously a tourist (and tourism is way way down) but even the traditional traps were gone. No questions, no chatter about the gangsters in Chicago, or a cousin they have in Detroit.

On the "temple mount" it was worse. An older man offered us his services as a guide, when I politely declined, he turned on me. "What are you Jews doing, coming up here?" He stormed off.

Arab women and children sat under olive trees picknicking. I could smell the cucumbers from a distance, but tried not to look. I didn't want to be rude. Israeli soldiers were ringing the plaza, sitting lazily but ominously in the shade. An Arab boy was kicking a soccer ball by himself and began kicking it vigorously against the Dome of the Rock. No one stopped him. I took his picture. I felt I had to take his picture, but I felt suddenly like an invader and an idiot for even being there. I was relieved to discover that tourists (for whatever reason) were not being admitted to the mosques.

We had a fantastic lunch in East Jersulaem, just across from the Damascus Gate. The portions were generous. The service was perfunctory.

My friend's wedding was beautiful and uplifting. I was amazed at how at home I felt with the other guests. These Israelis were highly educated, sophisticated, charming, and well traveled. Seemingly everyone spoke English, and those who didn't took great pleasure in helping me rediscover my Hebrew.

It all seemed so comfortable, so familiar, that I began to wonder if this was in any sense the "real Israel." Wasn't I just in some funny island of the elites? We ate barbecued goose, tempura, greek salad. The whiskey was Irish. The wine was....I don't know....something really good. Man oh, sure was not Manischevitz.

The music was Brazilian, Spanish, American soul, hip-hop, North African, French,...you name it. Everyone danced. It was a beautiful scene.

At some point they played an Israeli folk song. For a moment the women formed one group and the men another. I sat down with Nicole and expected to see the kind of elaborate folk-dancing i remembered (and had tried to learn) during my visit to Israel years ago. But that's not what happened. No one knew the steps. The women and men just sort of danced chaotically,holding hands in a circle. It was like some random assortment of Americans who happened to have seen Fiddler on the Roof once or twice, boogying with a touch of yiddishkeit to "If I were a Rich man." It was like seeing Americans dancing at Oktoberfest.

The next song was an Irish jig, and the crowd transitioned seamlessly. It even seemed that a few people knew the steps. And everyone was just as happy dancing to this music as they had been a few moments before.

Funny place today, this "Jewish" state.