The whole thing with the travel agent that made us want to kill her started innocently enough. Mary's father Tony teaches a course on the Spanish island of Mallorca every year, and this year he invited Mary and me to visit him there for a week. Not only that, but he invited us to travel with him through Germany for another week. He said he'd call his agent and set it all up.
After being forced by Tony's travel agent to pay for our tickets in cash (who ever heard of a travel agent that didn't take credit cards?), we started planning the trip (actually, Mary did all of the planning). Our trip started off on the wrong foot when our airline informed us that the flight from Newark to Frankfurt had been cancelled due to engine trouble, and that we had to take a flight to Boston and from Boston to Frankfurt on a different airline. Admittedly, it wasn't the travel agent's fault, but we still suspect that she had something to do with it. The detour worked out surprisingly well, although Mary's vegetarian meal didn't come with us to the other airline.
After landing in Frankfurt am Main, we picked up our rental car from the Alamo booth, and were informed that part of the rental agreement was that we were not allowed to drive into "eastern countries"-- specifically the Czech Republic and Poland. As we already had hotel reservations in Prague, we kept quiet while Tony signed the agreement and we set out for Heidelberg.
Ahhh,
the Autobahn. I had always had a mental picture of some sort of futuristic
speedway with lunatic drivers careening this way and that. Actually,
it was identical to the highways in America with several important
differences:
1. Of course, there's no speed limit. Every high school kid knows this.
2. Hardly any police cars (see #1).
3. No matter how fast you're going, there's always a Mercedes coming up behind
you like you're standing still.
4. Surprisingly few accidents. We only saw one, and that was on a rainy day
in one of the omnipresent construction areas. There is a speed limit in the
construction areas, although I'm not sure Tony knew how to read the speed limit
signs because there were so few of them and he kept his speed at a constant
170 km/h (It's 185 km/h in that picture- that's 115 mph to you non metrical-types.)
We arrived in Heidelberg and started looking for our hotel, which was a Holiday Inn. After cruising into the center of town, we spotted the famous Holiday Inn logo and went inside, hoping for a nap before exploring the town. Turned out that our Holiday Inn was actually in the neighboring town of Waldorf, thanks to Tony's travel agent. Fifteen minutes outside of Heidelberg. It wasn't even on the map that the wrong Holiday Inn gave to us to help us find it.
After driving to Waldorf and getting lost in the town (being the only somewhat German-speaking one, I had to ask for directions-- fortunately the lady in the bookstore spoke English), we finally arrived in the hotel to find a giant display of American flags and a teddy bear dressed like Uncle Sam, advertising their "American Barbecue." (see top of page) Sure, that's why we took a plane for 9 hours, to eat barbecued chicken.
Heidelberg
is a really beautiful town, complete with an ancient castle at the
top of a mountain. Germany was not at all as I had expected it to be.
The people were really nice, and didn't walk around barking out commands
in jackboots. Of course, all my concepts of the German people came
from watching "Hogan's Heroes."
After taking dozens of photos of the town and riding the ancient funicular train up the mountain, we returned to the hotel for a nap and a late supper. We were surprised to find really trashy American soft pornography on TV (overdubbed in German, no less), sandwiched between Mentos commercials and ads for Coca-Cola.
The next morning, we had our fill at the breakfast buffet and set out for Prague. This was some serious Autobahn driving, with Mary and me as the navigators, from the west side of Germany into the heart of the Czech Republic. On the way we stopped in Nuremberg to see the courthouse where the famous trials were held, although nobody in the town seemed to be aware that these trials had happened, let alone where the courthouse was.
Anxiously we approached the Czech border, visions of the border patrol
detaining us for our illegal rental car excursion in our heads (perhaps
inspired by innumerable iron curtain spy dramas), only to find that
they sent us through without a stamp. Tony insisted that they stamp
our passports, annoying the people behind us in line. Finally we were
through. We stopped and exchanged some money and headed out into the
great unknown.
A
few kilometers from the crossing we were greeted with a makeshift marketplace.
We had to stop to see what sort of wares they would sell. What could
you only get here-- the one thing that would make Germans steal across
the border, not unlike the American driving to Tijuana for illegal
drugs? That one thing turned out to be. . . garden gnomes. Yes, that's
right. Garden gnomes. Store after store selling armies of elves, dwarves,
jockeys, windmills, minstrel figures and little jazz musicians. Were
these illegal in Germany? Perhaps for reasons of taste more than anything?
For a good twenty miles we passed nothing but stands that looked like
casting calls for Snow White.
Baffled, we continued through the beautiful Czech towns with their rounded church steeples, through Pilsen and finally to the outer edges of Prague. Oh, if only the travel agent had given Tony directions to the hotel. . . instead we were faced with driving through downtown Prague without a good map, something which one travel book calls "dangerous and stupid." After stopping at a tourist office where the woman didn't speak English and didn't have any maps to give us, we set out with a copy of a map from a travel book, which unfortunately didn't indicate which streets are one way, let alone which streets are for pedestrians only.
After
mistakenly driving down a one-way street that abruptly changed direction
in the middle for no apparent reason, we finally made it to the river
and managed to find a road on our map. It was near dark and raining,
and somehow we ended up driving right through the Old Town Square (see
picture), the big central plaza of the old part of the city, which
is normally only for pedestrian traffic and a host of outdoor cafés.
Surprisingly, after 30 minutes we found the hotel without killing an
innocent pedestrian or getting arrested, thanks to Tony's driving and
Mary's and my navigation. It was pretty terrifying, though. Fortunately,
it was still daylight and the rain stopped after we finished unpacking
so we got to see the city that had been a damp blur on the way in.
Let me tell you about Prague, my friends. It's stunning. Tony called it the most beautiful city he's ever seen, and he travels so much that the American Embassy in Bangladesh had to sew extra pages into his passport. Every building is astonishingly beautiful, with sculptures and intricate frescoes. It is the largest European city that avoided being bombed during World War II. It's cheap, too, and our money went quite far there. We're planning to return for a week next year.
The old part of the city has narrow cobblestone streets lined with all kinds of beautiful medieval buildings. The "new" part of the city was started around the 1300's, and much of the architecture has an art nouveau influence. Alphonse Mucha, one of the great art nouveau poster artists, was from Prague and made a stained glass window in the amazing St. Vitus cathedral. Then there's the Charles Bridge, a wide pedestrian bridge lined with beautiful sculpture on both sides and gigantic medieval towers at either end. Stunning.
We walked about a block and found a magnificent café where we decided to eat dinner. The menu consisted of only meat dishes, which was fine for Tony and me, but Mary, who is a vegetarian, could only find one item that she could order. It was called "Variation of Salt Pastry" and the menu claimed that it consisted of "home made cheese pastries, peanaults and crisps." We pondered what this enigmatic dish could be (I knew that "crisps" are what the British call potato chips), and then it came- a tray with pistachio nuts, pretzel sticks, potato chips and crackers.
We walked around the city for a while and took some pictures, but it started to rain again so we had to go back to the hotel for the night. All told, we only spent about 12 hours in the city-- I had wanted to give mail artist Ivan Preissler a ring, but we didn't have time to try and meet him anywhere.
The next day we got up early and walked around more of the city for three hours, spending much of that time searching for a post office to find out if our postcards would make it back to the USA. Sadly, we had to leave quite early as we had planned to (in the same day) drive to Dresden, Poland, and then on to Berlin.
On
the way out of the city, we stopped at one of the smaller concentration
camps called Terezín. Unlike the death camps of Poland, Terezín
was mainly a political prison and stopover for people being sent to
Auschwitz. Thousands of people were executed by the Nazis here, and
many were tortured to death. Next to the road that leads to the entrance
is a broad cemetery with the remains of about 5,000 victims from the
mass graves excavated in the back. All the tombstone dates ended with
the year 1945. The German inscription above the entrance to the cell
blocks reads "Arbeit Macht Frei"-- "Work Makes You Free." Incidentally,
I returned from the trip to find an e-mail from one Robert Faurisson,
a French holocaust revisionist with his outlandish and unsubstantiated
reasons why it never happened. The Jews faked the whole thing to get
money, he claims. They're all in a big conspiracy to play us for fools,
he insists. And people wonder how someone like Hitler could come to
power. . . Hey, if it's a big fraud, how come nobody said anything
in 1946? Maybe because there were too many witnesses to make such claims
50 years ago.
On the way out of the Czech Republic, instead of garden gnomes we passed an inordinate number of prostitutes. They were standing by the side of the highway near the border, gesturing to us as we headed towards Germany. The next stop on the agenda was Dresden to get some of that famous Dresden Porcelain for Tony's wife. Apparently she didn't know how much real Dresden China costs, because after tracking down the only place in that town that sells it, we discovered that it's $400 for a plate. Instead, Tony opted for some 75¢ dishes in a Polish thrift store a few days later.
After Dresden, we were planning to head over to Poland, but it was getting late and we decided to get to Berlin and relax a little early. We got to Berlin without any idea of where our hotel is, so we stopped for directions at the first big hotel we found. Not only hadn't the lady there heard of the Best Western "Hotel Avus," but she hadn't even heard of the street it was on, nor could she find any record of it in any hotel directory or even in the Berlin yellow pages. She called the number on our reservation form for us and there was no answer. Then she called back and found out approximately where it was, and the real name of the street (Tony's wonderful travel agent had written something totally wrong). We found the street, but it turned out to be an Autobahn on-ramp. Not wishing to get on the Autobahn, we drove around for nearly 2 hours, asking at least 3 hotels for directions, before we finally accidentally got on the Autobahn heading away from Berlin. At the next exit, we turned around and came back, and then we saw a sign for the hotel on the highway. The explanation-- it was a truck stop hotel in the middle of the Autobahn. No kidding. Public showers and everything. The "check-in desk" was at the bar of the restaurant.
The
next day we set out to explore the city of Berlin. Fortunately there
was a bus stop within walking distance, so we didn't have to try to
figure out how to get out of the hotel without getting on the Autobahn.
We took the bus to the main part of the city and walked around for
a while, and then took another bus over to the former East Berlin.
Upon our arrival at the Brandenburg Gate, we were greeted with a large
number of peddlers selling all manner of curiosities from obsolete
empires: East German uniforms, Soviet money, Nazi stamps and coins,
and a mind-boggling assortment of lighters and pocket watches. We tried
to find "Checkpoint Charlie"
only to find a new modern office building called "Checkpoint Charlie Marketing
Center." It turned out that Checkpoint Charlie was in the middle of
a construction site next to this building (actually, Berlin is known
for having the largest construction site in the world). We found a
vacant lot with some pieces of the Berlin Wall in it and some remnants
of guard towers, and Tony got yelled at for climbing up on a construction
trailer stairway to take some videos.
After trying to see six museums in one hour, we returned to the Brandenburg gate exhausted to catch the first of two buses back to the hotel. Again, we fully blame the aforementioned travel agent for what happened next, because if she had booked us into a hotel from which we would have been able to walk or even drive into the middle of the city, we would not have been on any buses in the first place.
The first bus was so crowded with after-work commuters that we had
to stand, and this was the site of the great tragedy of the trip. Mary's
wallet was stolen by a long-haired guy who was missing a front tooth.
By merely bumping into Mary, this 
guy
got past a gauntlet of zippers and snaps to hop off the bus with $200
cash, a driver's license, a credit card and a student ID. He was wearing
a green trench coat and he speaks English (Do not try to apprehend
the suspect if you spot him-- dial our international tip line: 1-800-ASKALICE).
Mary didn't notice until we had gotten onto the next bus, and while
we were in a panic trying to figure out what to do about the theft,
the bus inexplicably took a completely different route and the driver
told us we were at the last stop and we had to get off. We stood there
at the final bus stop for fifteen minutes trying to figure out what
had just happened (yes, it was the right bus. We checked). We eventually
took a taxi back to the approximate area of the hotel (we didn't want
to try to explain to the driver how to get there) and walked the rest
of the way back to take a nap after such a traumatic day. That night,
Tony decided that he wanted to go to Poland in the morning.
Mary and I weren't too excited about the prospect of getting up at 5 AM and driving four hours out of the way just to go through two more border crossings, but we went along to make Tony happy. It turned out to be a lot of fun.
After driving east from Berlin through Frankfurt am Oder (the "other" Frankfurt) and into Poland, we were perplexed as to what we could buy to get change. Poland itself was a beautiful country where big trucks actually pull over to the side of the road to let you pass. We drove around looking for a place to spend our new Polish money and finally found the tiny town of Borzow, which had a thrift store! Mary and I ran inside, wondering what they would sell in a Polish thrift store, only to find pretty much the same selection of old computers, appliances, books (in Polish), records (Polish, German, American), souvenirs, dishes and glassware we would find in the United States. I bought a glass that says (in German) "Berlin-- The Capital of East Germany" (hey-- communists have to buy souvenirs too, you know) and Tony bought some "Non-Dresden" plates for his wife at 75¢ each.
We headed out of Borzow and back into Germany. We passed over the flooded Oder river (funny headline in the paper the next day- "Germans Flee Rising Oder") and set out to do the Frankfurt-to-Frankfurt run. After nine hours of Autobahn driving, we finally arrived in Frankfurt am Main. Once again, we had no idea where the hotel was, but we were under the impression that it was close to the airport since the only reason we wanted to stay in Frankfurt was to be able to make our early flight to Mallorca. We found the airport and got a map from a helpful lady at an information desk. It turned out that we were staying in the middle of town, for once. By now we were eagerly anticipating dismembering the travel agent. The town was quite confusing, too. We nearly got into three accidents and discovered that drivers in Frankfurt are not as patient as drivers in other parts of the country. One guy drove up onto the shoulder alongside of us to yell at us in German.
We finally found the lovely Hotel Luxor in the middle of what appeared to be a gay red-light district. Frankfurters may contradict this, but there were all these young guys in leather pants standing around on the sidewalks in front of closed stores, there were no women around, there were lots of sex shops, and there were several female impersonator theatres. Either way, the atmosphere of the town freaked us out and we decided not to go out after dark.
The next morning, it was off to the airport for our flight to Palma
de Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. The flight was about
an hour, and we got a spectacular view of the French and Swiss alps.
We landed and were greeted with searing heat, even though the weather
was mild for that time of year. Oddly, the airport in Palma is under
construction and apparently doesn't have any customs booths because
you can walk right from the luggage claim to the taxi stands outside,
which we did after exchanging some money.
Mallorca is absolutely beautiful. It actually resembles Mexico in many ways-- beautiful tall mountains and azure seas. This island also has the tackiest souvenirs in the world. Apparently, one of the most popular items is a little wooden toilet with "Mallorca" written on it, and when you open it, a little wooden penis pops up. I'm not kidding. It was in every single souvenir store. Another popular choice was a casket from which, when opened, a man with an erection sprung. It was available as a keychain too. There were penis salt and pepper shakers, penis ashtrays that read "Make love don't smoke" and coffee mugs with the legend "for my best friend" and a little penis at the bottom of them (It's not the penises that bother me, but the bad jokes).
We
took a taxi to Tony's apartment, and it was amazing-- the balcony faced
the Mediterranean and was directly across from King Juan Carlos's summer
palace. There was a pool as well as a ladder off the coast to go into
the sea for a swim. The entrance to the building was at the top of
a cliff, and you entered on the 8th floor and had to take an elevator
down to get to the apartment.
The pace in Mallorca was catatonic compared to the running around of the previous week. We relaxed, swam, ate local foods (mainly meat dishes, much to Mary's frustration), shopped for souvenirs, took a glass bottom boat tour and dreaded coming home. Tony rented another car and drove us to the spectacular mountains, including the sheer cliffs of Formentor and the wonderful town of Valldemosa.
Sadly, August 2nd arrived and it was time for Mary and me to leave (Tony was staying for another week to teach). We took a flight from Palma to Madrid where we expected to get on our flight to Newark. Unfortunately, this almost didn't happen because the Madrid airport is, in reality, totally unstaffed. There was nobody at any of the help desks, there were no information agents who could tell us how to check in for our flight. What's more, it was crammed with literally thousands of summer travellers, all standing around and sweating in crowds because there's only like five or ten seats in the whole place and it's not air conditioned. Tony's travel agent (you guessed it) gave us about 45 minutes to find our way around this arid nightmare that calls itself an airport. As time ticked away, we ran from one end to the other, and found ourselves utterly unable to get to the airline check-in booth because the security agents wouldn't let us go through the other way. With about ten minutes to go, we finally found someone who was willing to help us, and she called the airline and got them to hold our reservations. The flight was delayed an hour, so we ended up standing around for 30 minutes. At one point, they checked us in and informed us that we would not be seated together since we checked in so late.
A week later, Tony came home. He had the same 45-minute layover that we had, and as a consequence, his bags never made it onto the flight to Newark. When they finally did arrive a few days later, they had been broken into and his camera, his gold desk set and all the videotapes from the trip had been stolen.
All we want to do now is see that travel agent die. Not right away, mind you, but a lingering and painful death, perhaps involving a million tiny knives tearing into her flesh. . .
