Good Girls Don't Wear Hooker Dirndls

Our real vacation started about a week after my last post. Of course we started off late leaving his parent's house. We had plans to visit our friend Thea who happened to be in Frankfurt. She's 85 or 86 years old and she was visiting her friend who was about 90. Apparently the older one still rides her bike to the supermarket. She's about 5 feet tall with glasses just as big. I can't imagine she can even see where she's going. Talk about a road hazard. The two of them had just come from Würzburg and told us of a very nice guesthouse. I should have known their definition of nice and mine were very different. More on that later.

We drove along the Rhine to see the little villages and look at the Loreley. The GPS was barking at us in German the whole way. On a positive note, I am now capable of giving very angry driving directions in German. The unfortunate thing was the angry woman took us to the wrong side of the river. Conveniently they hadn't built any bridges either. We finally found a ferry to take the car across. All of this to see what was essentially a rock. I'm not quite sure why an entire town has named hotels and restaurants after a rock.

We arrived late in Würzburg and checked into the hotel. First we hauled our luggage up a flight of stairs (no elevator) and down a hall decorated with posters featuring the greatest hits of human suffering (compliments of Amnesty International). We walked into our room to find two beds on opposite sides of the room, white concrete walls and a tiny bathroom. So much for romance. To compensate for our accommodations I picked the most expensive restaurant in the travel guide (which isn't saying much since my husband has a fixation with Lonely Planet guides - aka the backpacker special).

The restaurant turned out to be a very cool sort of hunting lodge. They specialized in meat, meat, meat and taxidermy. I ate a very nice salad under a stuffed pheasant nailed to the wall. In the middle of dinner I decided to pull out the Bavarian travel guide and think about our driving plan for the next day. My husband gave me a horrified look. I took that opportunity to remind him of the "New Orleans Incident". We were in the middle of Mardi Gras one evening and he pulled out a travel guide with the intention of doing a walking tour. People were half naked and vomiting around us and he wanted to discuss Architecture in the French Quarter. I pretended not to know him.

I asked him if he was embarrassed by my Bavarian travel guide.
He replied “A little”
I said “Good”
He said “That’s pretty sad that you’ve been waiting six years to do this”
I said “Whatever”

We went back to the scary hotel and made an honest attempt at sleeping in the same bed. I woke up in the middle of the night because he had stolen all the covers and shoved me off the bed. I gave up and moved to the other side of the room. We got a fairly early start and since we had declined the fabulous hotel breakfast we drove into town to find something to eat. His father had done us a huge favor by going through our travel guide and picking out the “must see” sites. We decided to hit The Residenz since it opened at 9AM. We arrived shortly before the hour and waited with a group of school children on a field trip, a group of Japanese tourists of equal size and an elderly couple. The sign on the door said that it was temporarily closed for overcrowding. (Huh? It’s 9AM) We waited 10 minutes or so and a gentleman came out and signaled the school children and old couple in. My husband inquired in German how long we would need to wait. He replied in English, “Not Japanese, you come in”. This obviously makes very little sense on many levels, but I’ll take it. It was indeed a very cool palace with the largest fresco in the world. The Mainfrankisches Museum was our next stop which had the largest collection of Tilman Riemenschneider sculptures in Germany. Apparently Tilman liked to carve detailed things out of wood that are now located all over Franconia.

We walked around a bit and left for our next destination, Weikersheim. The castle here was the last home of a couple that died childless in the 18th century and basically no one has touched it since. We were advised that the castle was nice, but the garden gnomes were the real gems. There was an entire wall of garden gnomes that were not your typical suburban variety. These were all stone, created in the various trades of the day. We decided to take pictures with them and then we left.

Onto Creglingen where we didn’t have a specific plan. Another Riemenschneider wood carving in a church that was built on the site where a sacred host was found. Let’s talk about this for a moment. When we were kids you always knew at least one kid who used to sneak communion out of church. Ten bucks says some kid did the same thing in 1384 and it caused the entire town to build a church. Catholics… We passed on the Fingerhutmuseum. For those of you who can’t translate that one, it’s a museum of Finger Hats otherwise known as Thimbles. I hope I don’t regret that decision later in life.

We moved on to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. This town was 65% destroyed in WWII and has been restored to something between Disney World and The Sound of Music. There were huge buses of Japanese tourists rolling through and way over the top Christmas stores. We visited the Jakobskirche which, surprise, surprise, had another Riemenschneider alter. This one was called the Hellig Blut Altar, the Sacred Blood Altar. Apparently there were three droplets of Christ’s blood in a crystal. I swear I saw the same vial of blood in Brugge. I get the sense that there must have been a very good phlebotomist at the crucifixion of Christ.

We were making good time and seeing all the best that the Romantic Road had to offer. We headed off to Dinkelsbühl to something called the Golden Kanne, hoping that it wasn’t a youth hostel with a nice name. Dinkelsbühl turned out to be a lovely little town that somehow escaped both the 30 years war and WWII. We slept well and spent the next morning walking around town. At this point it was time to hop back on the Autobahn to take a ride out to Ingolstadt. For those of you familiar with the geography of Germany you might ask, “Why on earth would you go to Ingolstadt?”.

I’m glad you asked.

My husband has been reading about sleep phase alarm clocks for three years. He has yet to find one available retail. While we were in Düsseldorf my husband’s friend Max told him about his sleep phase alarm clock. And so we were off to purchase one of our very own in the only town that had them in stock. Basically it involves wearing a sweatband on your wrist that makes you look like Billy Jean King in 1973. It tracks your movements during sleep and decides the optimum time to go off, taking into account your desired wake up time (http://www.axbo.com/ for those of you interested in wearing sweatbands to bed).

At least this is better than the last alarm clock (a hockey puck sized disk that made the entire bed shake like a vibrating bed in a cheap motel).

With one fancy alarm clock in tow, we were back on the Autobahn to Munich. My husband loves to drive in Germany, I on the other hand find it confusing. Germans really like rules but I think they’ve taken it to a new level when it comes to driving. There’s not just one speed limit, there’s one for bad weather, one for trucks, one for specific times of the day, they even have signs for tanks. They also like to change the speed limit frequently, take it on, put it off, take it on, put it off. I spend so much time looking at signs I can’t watch the Porsches and sport bikes creeping up my rear until they’re right behind me flashing and screaming wildly. Needless to say he does most of the driving.

We arrive in Munich in one piece despite his need to drive at terrifyingly high rates of speed. We were finally off to Oktoberfest.

Everyone has seen the movies and knows that you can drink entire liters of beer in a sitting. What they fail to mention is that you have no other option. The beer only comes in one size. I guess they know there’s big sissies like me out there and offer a slightly girly version of the liter of beer. Half beer, half Sprite. It sounds disgusting but has a lovely taste and doesn’t get you quite as drunk. It was also helpful since my husband picked the hottest place to sit for the next 10 hours. His friends explained the difference between a good dirndl and a bad dirndl. Essentially the difference is quite similar to most women’s clothing choices. If you look like a hooker, that’s bad.

I observed several interesting variations of the dirndl.

The Paris Hilton Dirndl: Usually involves a woman with very bleached blond hair, stiletto heels, a short dirndl and lots of pushed up boobs. Oh, and a crucifix that hangs neatly between the pushed up boobs. At least she’s a good Catholic….

The Playmate Dirndl: Yes, there’s actually a Wies’n Playmate. I’ll leave this one to your imagination, you’re probably right.

The Cougar Dirndl: Usually involves a woman over 40, black lace, a red bra and some serious make-up.

The Tourist Dirndl: She just bought it yesterday and looks a bit uncomfortable. (probably because it’s cheap polyester and bought in the same place as the “I survived Oktoberfest 2007” T-Shirts.)

The Practical Dirndl: She’s a girl prepared for a long day of drinking. The dirndl varies but the common theme is the big construction worker shit kicking steel toe boots. She doesn’t drink the sissy beer.

The Lederhosen Dirndl: Not actually a dirndl at all, it’s a chick in leather pants. She has bypassed the practical dirndl and moved right to wearing the pants.

The people watching was fantastic and I was highly entertained. All in all, we had a delightful day, I got a tan, my husband got ridiculously drunk and I got to see 8,000 people dancing on tables to Gloria Gaynor sung by a traditional Oktoberfest band.