Hallo, Bonjour, Hej Hej & Sveiki!
our first month in Europe has been full of surprises…not just for our friend, whose wedding we crashed.
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| The Hawaiian Wedding Crashers |
We had our share of surprises, too:
- When we were in the train at the last stop before Stuttgart, we did not expect a 3+ hour detour
- When we arrived in Stuttgart, I did not expect to jump of a church tower the next day
- When we sat down in our aunt’s living room one afternoon, I did not expect to end up at a punk rock concert a few hours later
- When we booked our flights to see my brother’s family in Sweden, we did not expect to “discover” a new country along the way
We had been warned that flight delays and cancellations are very common these days. So we were very pleasantly surprised to make it from Boston to Frankfurt with no problem. We even caught our high speed train just in time and were one stop away from Stuttgart when a bird decided to fly into some electric wire at the main station in Stuttgart and caused train traffic to Stuttgart to shut down for several days! Our detour included three more trains before Sandra’s sister picked us up from the closest town we could get to. The last 120 miles of our journey took almost as long as the first 3,600 miles!
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| Looks like Emma wasn't lying when she told us 473 times how excited she was that we're coming |
But our timing once in Stuttgart could not have been any better: The day after we arrived, there was a neighborhood festival. My favorite part was the “Abseiling” from the church tower. I thought it would be just a fun activity. I did not expect to be so scared after climbing over the fence looking down at Sandra more than 100 feet below. The most surprising part for someone coming from America: I did not have to sign a single waiver! It’s almost like they did not expect me to sue them, if I had fallen to the ground.
Sandra’s sister Petra had given me a book to read last year. Even though I liked the beginning, I never got to finish it. But as I mentioned: Our timing was perfect: The theater right next to Petra’s place was performing “Achtsam Morden”. It’s a really funny play about a guy who is sent to a mindfulness seminar by his wife and ends up learning how to kill more mindfully. We loved it and it made up for all the theater plays we miss at the Iao and ProArts theaters back home on Maui.
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| With our moms at my hometown Breisach, viewed from France |
Then we spent a week in my hometown at my parents with Sandra’s mom. We made it to France twice and went for a fun dinner and a walk in the Black Forest.
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| I want to look (and more importantly hike) like that when I'm 83. |
Usually, we would have also played a lot of games, but since my parents might be the only people in the world who actually want to see all of our 2000+ photos of our road trip so far this year, we did that. Good thing we are in Europe long enough, so we can still play some games with them later! We also looked through some old family memorabilia with my mom and found out that we are not the first ones in the family who emigrated to America.
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| Does anyone know an "Oskar Tauer" who lived in Indiana about 150 years ago? |
We returned to Stuttgart the next weekend and went to visit our aunt. It was meant to be a “harmless” lunch followed by the traditional German “Kaffee & Kuchen”.
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| Traditional "Kaffee & Kuchen" with our favorite aunt |
Aunt Rose's granddaughter and her boyfriend joined us and when they mentioned that they were going to a concert that night, I innocently asked who was playing. When they replied “Die Toten Hosen”, I couldn’t believe my luck and immediately decided to join them. It’s only my favorite punk rock band that I had not seen in 27+ years. It’s surprising that they are still around after drinking and touring for 40+ years…and they seem to be more popular than ever! The 65,000 tickets were sold out. But here’s another silver lining of the pandemic: Someone’s son couldn’t come because he tested positive and that’s how I got my ticket right before the concert.
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| Quality Time with distant family and a few strangers at the Toten Hosen concert |
It was such a hoot: I enjoyed the flashbacks to my teenage years during the old songs and catching up with what they have been doing since. I couldn’t agree more with Campino: “An Tagen wie diesen…wünscht man sich Unendlichkeit!”
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| Looks like the Toten Hosen found plenty of replacements for the fans who moved to Hawaii... |
More good timing: Our friend Barb from Oahu just happened to be in Stuttgart, too and we were able to meet up with her twice. Not totally coincidental, but still lucky that we were also in Stuttgart for Petra's birthday: One of those long, warm summer nights of eating Greek food and drinking German beer with friends until midnight.
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| Happy Birthday, Petra! |
Stuttgart offered us even more: I will admit that we only went to the “Start Up BW Night” because Petra made us go there. It’s an event for young entrepreneurs in the area. That’s not usually something we seek out, but Petra was involved in organizing the event and wanted us to go. So we went ….and we loved it! We enjoyed listening to the wide variety of pitches. There were students competing with ‘imaginary’ projects: For example, we loved the idea of a shampoo that also works as a sunscreen or glasses that can tell a blind person what he’s not seeing. Then there were young entrepreneurs presenting very real companies, looking for investors. Our favorite was “Alphavan”: they build very high end camper vans. I went back to their demo model three times and if we were richer and lived in Europe, I would have ordered one right there.
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| Concert at the "Start Up BW Night" |
We could not find a good time to see my brother and his family in Switzerland, so we decided to visit them in their cute vacation cottage in Sweden. The cheapest flight we could find was with a 16 hour layover in Riga, Latvia. We were excited to “discover” a new country in Europe. “Discovering” of course in the same sense as Europeans “discovered” America. There were already people living in Latvia before we got there. In fact, over the past millennium, they built a beautiful city.
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| Town Hall Square in Riga |
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| Outdoor dining options galore! |
We enjoyed walking around Old Town Riga and had a nice Latvian dinner. Of course with the obligatory “Black Balsam”, which supposedly is a cure-all medicine. How often do you get to take shots and can claim doing so for health reasons?
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| "Dampfross", the most notorious board game in our family |
We got to Sweden just in time for my nephew’s 16th birthday. Once united with my brother’s family in Sweden, the games quickly began. It’s always a friendly competition: I let him win in chess, he lets me win in Dampfross and we all usually let Hannes win in disc golf. But we played enough rounds of disc golf and came up with enough silly special rules that everybody got to win at least once, even Sandra and my brother.
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| Hannes is smiling because he knows he's winning. No idea why the rest are smiling. |
Considering we were there in the middle of summer, it was surprisingly cold. We are also not used to the very long Swedish summer days, so when my brother suggested going swimming at the lake at 10pm, I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding. But when we got there, we weren’t even the only ones.
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| At the lake just after sunset (which is also shortly before sunrise; it was already light when we got up at 3:30am on the last day on the way to the airport) |
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| The only way for me to get into the cold water |
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| Enjoying the warm puddles afterwards |
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| The Swedish Coast is very pretty and pretty cold |
It’s a rare opportunity to crash a good friend’s wedding.
Under normal circumstances, if you are good friends, you’d be invited and you can’t crash a wedding you’re invited to. But we got that rare chance: Sandra had a little hanai sister when she first moved to Munich. We were very close, but 26 years ago we moved to the other end of the world and 11 years ago Claudia moved to the other end of Germany, so we didn't even see her on our visits to Munich anymore. Even though we haven’t seen each other (or even spoken or written much) since 2008, we jumped at the chance when Marianne asked us to come to the wedding as surprise guests. Surprise guests sounds so much friendlier than wedding crashers.
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| The long lost sisters united again! |
The surprise, the wedding and the party turned out perfectly: Claudia was as surprised as she was happy to see us. Sandra also had some salty discharge in her eyes. As uninvited guests, we got stuck with the most fun table at dinner. There are many things I prefer in America, but in general we find German weddings to be more fun. We like traditions like the games, the wedding newspaper and the dancing all night. But I have to admit that we were in bed before 2am, while the crazy Germans were dancing for three more hours...
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| Bremen is Beautiful! |
Bremen would have been worth a visit even without the wedding. Last time I had been there was as a teenager. I didn’t remember much and I probably did not appreciate the pretty and pretty old buildings back then. We got to climb up the church tower, I went to an organ concert, we had drinks under a windmill, we visited two museums and the “Bürgerschaft”. That’s the state capitol of Bremen. They had a great photo exhibition, but overall state capitols in America are way more impressive. Of course we also paid the Bremer Stadtmusikanten a visit since the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about them, along with Beck’s beer and the soccer team are pretty much the only things that every German knows about Bremen.
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| Bremen at Night |
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| It's been too long! |
But our favorite part about Bremen was crashing the wedding. In fact, we would consider doing this again some day, so watch out if you don’t invite us to your next wedding!
Aloha, tschüss, salut, hejdå & čau from Europe,
Chris, Sandra & Ohana
