Wednesday, August 15, 2001
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Wednesday, August 15, 2001 |
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Honeymoon, part 2 By MICHAEL
BOYLAN In last week's column, I gave you my impressions of Amsterdam, the first city my wife and I (still sounds funny) visited on our honeymoon. After two days in Amsterdam we traveled by train to Koblenz, Germany. The train ride lasted about four hours and we saw a lot of cow country. It looked an awful lot like America's cow country, but the cows mooed in German. When we arrived in Koblenz, Sabine's aunt picked us up and took us to her hotel. It was about 10 minutes outside of the Altstadt, which literally means old city. The Altstadt is surrounded by a wall and houses many incredibly old buildings. Koblenz is on both the Rhein and Mosel rivers and the two rivers merge at what is known as the Deutsche Ecke. If you travel to Ehrenbreitstein, which is a fortress above the city, and the light is just right, you can see the two distinct colors of the rivers merging into one. Sabine and I visited some of her relatives in the afternoons and then went into the Altstadt at night for dinner and drinks. Though there wasn't as much variety as Amsterdam, we still had excellent food. We also found ourselves visiting an Internet cafe our first night in town, so we could e-mail our families and so I could see how the Braves and Red Sox were doing. Thanks to technology, these days you're never too far from home. During our stay in Koblenz we took day trips to nearby castles. We visited Marksburg Castle in Braubach, which was just a short way down the Rhein. Our tour guide looked like a female version of Gilligan and spoke a rapid form of German. Having taken German in high school and college, I understood 20 percent of the tour, while Sabine translated the rest for me. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Marksburg Castle, other than the fact that much of it is built into the side of a mountain, was that Japan wanted to purchase it, move it stone by stone and rebuild it in Japan. Since the owners of Marksburg declined, Japan built a replica, which is nowhere near a mountain and, from what we were told, looks really out of place. The other castle we visited during our stay in Germany was Burg Eltz, which was off the Mosel river. This castle was much more elaborate than Marksburg and had many paintings and tapestries from the 15th and 16th centuries. Again, our tour guide spoke a fast form of German, though by this point I was shaking the rust off and could understand about 40 percent of what he was saying. It also helped that I had descriptions of each room in English. Other than our day trips to the castles and our nightly jaunts into the Altstadt, our time in Koblenz was spent visiting with relatives. On Saturday, many of her relatives who couldn't make it stateside for the wedding gathered at the hotel for dinner and a video of the wedding. Sabine's family surprised us by coming over for the party, which was really good. Sabine's brother, Rob, is like me. He can understand a lot of German, but has trouble speaking it. Our brains translate the German to English and then have to think about how to translate our English answers back into German. By that point, people have moved on in the conversation. Rob and I talked a lot at the party. After Koblenz we headed back to Amsterdam. We now moved through the city like old pros. We had figured out how to ride the trams around town and we knew exactly where we wanted to eat that night. We also returned to the Casino, which was right across the street from our hotel. We won some money and decided to spend it on a canal cruise that night. We flew back to Boston the next day and to Atlanta the day after that. It was a great trip but we were happy to be home again, away from cobblestone streets, ancient buildings and crazy bicyclists. Everybody should go to Europe at least once. Though America and Europe share many of the same things, like cell phones, Internet cafes and Chinese restaurants, it truly is another world.
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