The last time I was in Europe, I was a 15-year-old exchange student. Now I'm an almost-32-year-old Exchange teacher. My trip began with a frenzied rush of packing; my dry cleaning wasn't ready until about 10am, and my flight from HSV-ATL left at 2:20pm. In the rush, I left behind one pair of dress trousers, my dress belt, and my leather jacket (but more on that later). Thankfully, I did manage to pack all the stuff I actually needed to get my work done.

We had a nice family lunch together at Taco Bell, then Arlene & the boys dropped me off at good ol' Huntsville International. I checked my 50-lb suitcase (thanks, Delta) and turned in my systemwide upgrade coupon. Most airlines, Delta included, give their most frequent flyers several ways to upgrade. For international flights, you can use a systemwide to upgrade a relatively cheap coach ticket (mine was $1500) to the equivalent of a much more expensive business-class seat ($7062 on the flight I took.) Delta makes a really big deal out of their BusinessElite service, and I have to admit that it was pretty nice. Big reclining seat, lots of food, and so on. I wasn't particularly attracted by their wine service, which is supposed to be one of the big advantages, but the thought of being able to take a nice snooze on the plane sounded good.

My flight ex Huntsville was late: big surprise there. The 2:20 is only one time about 50% of the time. This time the delay was due to a flow control hold put on us by Atlanta air traffic control. Along the way, the FAA somehow managed to throw away every flight plan for aircraft awaiting takeoff throughout the southeast, so we had to refile. Net effect: we left an hour late. I wasn't worried, since I had plenty of slack time to make my connection to Stuttgart, but I should have been, because the gate agent stiffed me with a center seat. I sat between two very nice people, one of whom more than filled his seat. The other guy was from Intergraph, and we had a nice chat about people we both knew.

In Atlanta, I was supposed to meet Mac Wheeler, the project manager for our team, and Benji Walvoord and Richard Wakeman from ECMS, at the Crown Room. I got there so late that Delta had already called boarding for my flight, so I got on the plane. I spotted Benji by his ECMS shirt, and we chatted for a few minutes, then Richard and Mac came aboard.

The flight was so uneventful that I have nothing much to say about it: the cabin crew was super friendly, my decongestants worked great, and I slept almost the entire flight. There were a pair of 5-year-old twins on my left and a 2- or 3-year-old behind me. The twins were super-well-behaved for the whole flight, but the little boy right behind me kept crying because he didn't want his dad to put him to sleep. I fell asleep before he did, and he slept right through breakfast.

For some reason, we were 30 minutes late into Stuttgart, but who cares; we got there safely and that's what counts. After landing, our posse reassembled at baggage claim and we scooped up all our laptops and related stuff. After some help from the Delta BizElite concierge, we located the entrance to the S-Bahn (that's light rail for all you Americans out there. If you need more translations later, go here.), bought a ticket (after much fumbling), and got on the train to the Hauptbanhof, or main train station. A quick taxi ride later, and we were at our hotel, the REMA-Hotel Ruff.

Let me explain first that this is considered to be a nice hotel by European standards. My room was about 13' x 9', with a twin bed, a 13" TV, and a bathroom approximately the size of a phone booth. OK, I'm exaggerating. The shower is the size of a phone booth, but the bathroom is so small you can't use the toilet while the door is open. The hotel staff quickly gave us our first introduction to German surliness, but it was not to be our last.

Our German counterparts were supposed to meet us at noon, but they didn't show up, so we set off into the great unknown to find lunch. After walking about 1,000,000 km (well, it seemed that way) we found an Italian restaurant that appeared to be frequented by high school girls and old men smoking pipes. As we were all delirious from lack of food, we ate there anyway. Richard decided to order something that looked good in German, and he ended up with a pizza made of saltine crackers (or at least something closely resembling them), yellow käse (cheese), corn, and shrimp, plus some kind of incredibly bitter green vegetable. The rest of us ordered stuff we could recognize. After an interminable walk back to the hotel, we all went to shower and clean up, and our German friends arrived after dinnertime. None of us were very hungry after our late lunch; I had an apple and a box of room-service Erdnüsse (peanuts). We met with Juergen and Michael for a while, then it was off to bed, but not before I discovered German TV.

Of course, it's all in German, and thus totally incomprehensible. Lots of talk shows, with more than a few ancient US TV shows (Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for example) thrown in. The good news: we get CNN. The bad news: it's CNN Europe. Worse still: that's the only English-language channel. Thank heavens for the Internet, or we wouldn't be able to keep up with Big Al's ongoing efforts to steal the Presidential election.

Today was the Marine Corps' birthday. Semper fidelis! Besides that, we went to the customer site and had a long meeting with various members of their organization. We have an office, but no furniture, telephones, or Internet access. We did manage to stumble across a vending machine, which was a darn good thing. Germans like to drink Mineralwasser, which is carbonated, bitter, and generally nasty--and don't think they serve it cold. Once I found a machine that would sell me a 1/2-liter bottle of fruit juice I was a happy camper.

For lunch, Herr Berger (our customer manager) took us to a schnitzel house. I had Pfefferschnitzel, which was sort of like a fried pork chop with peppercorn sauce. It was good, not like there are many ways to make a bad fried pork chop.

After our meeting was done, we attempted to find the U-Bahn station to take a train back to the hotel. Since we had no idea where we were, and since our host gave us bogus directions, we ended up at a shop whose name translates to Ceramic Tile Depot. Mac went inside and got us a taxi, and we went back to the hotel. Since we were hungry, we stowed our gear and went to the nearest restaurant. I wouldn't exactly classify that as a mistake, but it wasn't the best meal I've ever had by any stretch. The restaurant was run by some folks from somewhere in the Balkans (as evidenced by the Balkan specialties on the menu), and they spoke no more English than we did German. Benji and I ordered cordon bleu because we knew what it was; Richard and Mac were more adventurous and paid the price-- Mac ended up with liver & onions, and Richard had what was supposed to be sauerbraten.

Mac and I left after dinner; the ECMS crew stayed for "one more beer", which ended up turning into a cross-culturual expedition with one of the Bosnians (or whatever) from the restaurant. They were in sorry shape the next morning. Let that be a lesson to any of you who are thinking about drinking, particularly German beer.

Ah, a day of semi-leisure. I celebrated by waking up about 0130 in excruciating pain from the worst sinus headache I'd ever had. I quickly swallowed a decongestant and tried to go back to sleep; about 4:30 I dropped off again, but then I woke up about 7. "No problem," I thought. "I've got an Amex card, so I can have them find me a doctor." Yeah, right.

First I tried to call their collect number, but it was busy continually. So I broke down and used my calling card to call their 800 number. After a short hold time, I was connected to Sue, a friendly lady with a British accent. I told her I wanted a doctor for my sinuses, and she promised to find one and call back within an hour. But, she never did. Bad, bad Sue. A 40-minute shower with the water as hot as I could stand it helped a great deal (did I mention that my cold-water faucet wouldn't turn?) and I was able to meet Benji and Richard for breakfast, go downtown, and buy some stuff for David and Thomas. Our route downtown took us down Köenigstrasse, downtown Stuttgart's main drag. There were tons of shops and cafes, and huge crowds of people. In Germany, shops can only open until 8pm on weeknights (and not even that, in many cases), and they have to stay closed on Sunday, so there were a lot of people trying to get their errands done. The 11th also marks the start of Carnival season in Germany, a sort of ongoing winter holiday that lasts until mid-January. We saw an ice-skating rink set up near the Schlossplatz, and we walked around looking at some of the cool old buildings.

Mac missed out on all this fun, because he had taken the train to Heidelberg with a group from the customer's office. On the other hand, he got to see the big castle, so I wonder who really missed out?

Accustomed to staying in American hotels, I left a bag of laundry and a laundry ticket in front of the bed in my room. It was neatly put away when I returned, so evidently that's not the right way to get your laundry done. That meant that I wouldn't have clean casual clothes for Monday, which was unfortunate snce the group we were working with had an American-style dress code instead of the much more formal dress standard of most German businesses.

We returned around lunchtime, and my friend Siegfried Weber joined us later that afternoon. He lives in Munich, which isn't too far away, so he hopped the train and came over. It was delightful to have someone who spoke fluent German with us, but Siegfried insisted that we help him practice his English, so we compromised: we spoke pidgin German, and he used his excellent English. First stop, the Porsche museum in Zuffenhausen. We piled into a little tiny cab and set out on our pilgramage.

What a treat! If you like cars at all, and more so if you enjoy Porsches, the museum is a real find. Admission is free (always güt), and there are about a dozen Porsches inside, ranging from a 1958 police car to a 1998 race car. The best part was while we were standing outside waiting for a taxi; we saw probably 15 different Porsches go by, driven down the street at high speed. Germans tend to drive fast and aggressively, and I guess I would too if I had a car like that.

The taxi returned us back to the hotel (but not without some griping in German from the surly taxi driver). We set up our laptops in the hotel and got busy with some tricky code for our project. Eventually we got hungry, but not before losing Richard, who was still hung over. Too bad; the rest of us went to a great Bavarian restaurant, where I had Kartoffelzuppe and some kind of meat sampler that probably had about 5,000 fat grams. It's a miracle that not every German weighs 400lbs, considering their diet. The average German eats 5.5 oz of pork per day. I guess here chicken would be the "other white meat"; in fact, very few of the restaurants where we ate served it. There are several words for different kinds of pork: schinken is ham, schwein is pork, and there are other words for roast and so on.

Full and happy, we went back to the hotel, worked for a bit longer, and hit the rack.

Sunday in Germany! We met for breakfast, then walked with Siegfried back down to the train station to bundle him back on the Inter-City Express (ICE), the German bullet train. It takes about 3 hours to go from Stuttgart to Munich, and the trains have laptop power outlets, special mini-cells to make sure cell phones work, and so on. Sounds like a glorious way to travel.

While we were at the station, Benji and Richard rented a BMW 520i diesel so they could go drive fast on the autobahn. I went back to the hotel to await the arrival of our server, and they went to the airport to pick up their car. Subsequent to that, they drove to Zürich, which took them about 90 minutes because they were going, on average, about 190km/hr. They came back happy as clams with fresh Swiss border control stamps in their passports.

By acclamation, the most interesting car we saw would have to be either the Mercedes A-class (think of the M-class SUV, only much smaller) or the SMART, which is built by Mercedes but designed by Swatch. It's tiny and weighs around 1000 lbs, but it carries two passengers and keeps them out of the elements. Since parking space and fuel are both expensive in Europe, the car is quite popular, but it's nowhere near crashworthy, which is why you won't see them in the US any time soon.

While Benji and Richard were indulging their need for speed, our server (and our colleagues) arrived at the hotel, so I helped them set it up in the hotel's conference room and began installing the necessary software. About 8pm, the CEO of the firm we're working with and the manager from the customer site showed up for dinner, so we went to the restaurant at the Hotel Steigenberger Graf Zeppelin, which was unfortunately named Zeppelino's. The food was pretty good-- not unlike what you might get at an upscale hotel in the States-- but very non-German.

It was a business dinner, and I was sandwiched between two talkative Germans. This made for a long evening, but it was compensated for when Mac explained to the Germans that I wasn't drinking because I was a member of the LDS Church. Much questioning ensued, and I had a great opportunity to explain what our temples are for, why we believe in eternal marriage, and so on. Of all the places I expected to have a missionary opportunity, that would have been about the last one. The conversation soon turned into a discussion about why the Church of Scientology is banned in Germany ('cause the German government thinks it's a cult), and that was interesting too. We finally got back around midnight, and I hit the rack to prepare for a full day of work at the office the next day.

Almost overnight the weather went back to normal: 40°F, cloudy, and drizzling. I really felt like I was in Germany when I looked out the window in the morning, and from what I could decipher from the morning weathermeister it wasn't likely to get any better. I was able to convince the desk clerk that the hotel had to take my laundry since they put a laundry bag in my room, and it was promised to be ready when I returned that night.

Mac rode to the office with the server, and the rest of us went to the Hauptbahnhof to return the BMW and learn how to get to the customer office via the U-Bahn. That turned out to be so easy that we were able to help some American tourists who couldn't figure out how to take the train to Porschestrasse to see the museum.

Sometime in the last couple of days we began using the phrase "stupid Americans", as in this exchange:

Benji: I want some ice cream.
Richard: But you didn't like the last ice cream because there's hardly any sugar in it.
Mac: Stupid Americans! They expect sugar in everything.

This turned out to be a very useful phrase in many situations, usually involving interaction with German citizens and our increasingly confident attempts to spreche Deutsche mit keine Englisch. In fact, we decided that our project for this customer should be code-named Project Stupid American.

We went to the customer office, found that some tables had been provided, and set to work building a prototype of the application we're developing. For lunch, we went across the street to the German equivalent of Super Wal-Mart: a big square store with groceries, a deli, bakery, electronics department, and so on. The food there wasn't too bad, and it was quick and cheap so we could get back to work that much faster. The Germans we worked with were super-focused; they'd come to work, put their heads down and work until lunch, come back and do it again after lunch, and leave, with very little fooling around in between. They're very punctual about leaving, too; the building emptied out around 4pm each day.

We finally left about 6:30 and took the U-Bahn back to the hotel; we decided to have dinner there, which provided numerous opportunities to use our catch phrase. There were probably five full tables in the restaurant, but there was only one person working there, and she definitely had her hands full.

When I went back to my room, was my clean laundry there? Of course not. Stupid American!

Today was pretty much just like yesterday: wake up, eat breakfast, take the train to the office, work, eat at Super Wal-Mart, work some more, and take the train again. One difference is that it was colder; another was that it was raining. Our project plan changed somewhat; Richard is still staying in Germany for another week, but we'll bring him home until we get a more stable build of the tools we're using, probably some time in December or January. That means that we had to show the customer what we'd done so far, work out the schedule with them, and so on, as well as saying our goodbyes in the afternoon. We took the U-Bahn back to the big train station and ate at a Block House, which is a chain of German steakhouses. I ordered a Block Burger which (you guessed it) was a big meat patty on a plate, not a hamburger. That was OK, because it was delicious. However, the darn place was so smoky we elected not to stay for dessert. I don't know what percentage of Germans smoke, but sometimes it seemed like 100%. You can't smoke on the U-Bahn, but restaurants, hotel lobbies, and so on are all fair game, so we all got quickly used to the stench.

Then, back to the hotel. I spent a good bit of time packing, and I watched a bit of German TV. I still couldn't understand any of the dialogue, but I am getting better at reading the captions during commercials, probably because they use such a small vocabulary. I did find my neatly folded clean laundry in my room tonight, so at least I'll have something clean to wear home tomorrow.

After breakfast with Benji and Richard, Mac and I headed for the U-Bahn stop up the street to catch a train for the Flughafen. That actually involved taking the #15 tram to the Hauptbahnhof, then switching to the S2 line for Echterdingen. Since there were lots of airplane icons plastered everywhere, this proved to be no trouble.

Going through the German airport was a little weird, since on one hand there was lots of familiar-looking Delta signage, but on the other there were green-clothed German police and lots of German chatter. Their airport security is quite a bit more rigorous than in the States; for one thing, they pay careful attention when asking you the security questions about your baggage, and they inspect your passport at a separate desk before you get to the ticket counter. I got checked in with no problem; Mac's ticket had a minor glitch which he were able to get fixed fairly easily.

I bluffed our way into the Air France lounge (I was flying BizElite and was entitled to enter, but Mac wasn't), where the attendant was a German who acted French. Talk about customer service. We had a small snack, and I tried a can of bitter lemon (hint: if you need paint stripper, that would be a good place to start.) The lounge attendant condescended to tell us when our flight was boarding, so we headed to the gate and got on the plane, where I am now writing this. Right now we're somewhere over the Atlantic, with about another 5 hours to fly. Since my laptop is plugged into the power port on my seat, and since there are still three more cans of caffeine-free diet Coke with my name on them in the galley, I say "fly on!" It's almost 5pm Stuttgart time, and by the time I get to Huntsville it'll be around 1am according to my body, so I hope to get a good solid sleep tonight. Tomorrow I don't have much of anything planned; time permitting, I'll set up the new workstation that came while I was gone (dual Pentium-IIIs, baby!), file my expense report, and play ball with the boys.