Our friend, J., had always wanted to visit the Christmas Markets in Europe. One morning during my previous stay in the States, we were discussing my travel plans. I wanted to be back to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family but would go back to Slovenia to spend my first Christmas in Goce.
"Sometime, I'm going to go to the Christmas Markets in Germany, J. said.
She was flipping through one of the university alumni travel brochures she received every couple of weeks. This one featured a river cruise in Germany during Christkindlmarkt.
"Well, there you go," I said gesturing toward the brochure. "You can cruise down the Danube and through the Christmas Markets."
"I'm not interested in a cruise," J. said. "You spend too much time on the boat and not enough time shopping."
"So, why don't you fly back to Europe with me in December? We'll fly into Munich and have RM meet us there. Then, we'll work our way down to Slovenia, stopping and shopping at Christmas Markets in Germany and Austria," I said.
J.'s eyes lit up. They always twinkled when she had a trip to plan....
I was back in the USA for less than three weeks. I never seemed to have enough time on either side of the pond to accomplish everything I needed to. And now that I owned a home in Slovenia, I needed to work on the application process for a resident permit. Until I had one, I'd have to leave Europe every 90 days and that would become incredibly expensive. The process wasn't overly complicated, but the timing required was tricky. I knew I'd be measuring my time in Slovenia in three-month increments for awhile.
Those short three weeks were a blur of client meetings, lunches with friends and the Thanksgiving weekend with my family. I was excited about visiting the Christmas Markets and looked forward to flying back to Europe with a friend for the first time. I figured companionship would make the long trip more enjoyable. Of course, I was ready to see RM again, waiting once more at the airport arrival gate in a foreign land.
The travel time did, indeed, seem to go much faster than usual. During the past year, J. and I had spent enough time together to know that while it was fun to do things with someone else instead of always on your own, as single women often do, we both need our own space. If we went shopping together, for example, we preferred to just agree on a time and place to meet up again, then went our separate ways. Traveling together would be just the same. We could enjoy each other's company while still giving one another plenty of personal space. And since J. is a very petite woman, I knew I wouldn't have to worry about spending the long flight leaning sideways to avoid contact with some large person in the seat next to me.
After landing in Munich on schedule, we made our way through the process that was now becoming quite familiar to me -- baggage area, customs and passport control, where I'd get another stamp in my passport. J. and I had come prepared. In the spirit of Christmas, we'd each donned a set of those felt-covered, novelty reindeer antlers, complete with tiny bells. Our festive headwear did nothing to brighten the dour face of the German control official, seated in his little booth. He still commanded to each of us, "And vhat is your business in Germany?" before stamping our passports. But our antlers did put a smile on RM's handsome face as he shook his head and told us we were "obviously Americans." Apparently, travelers from other countries don't have such a sense of humor.
J. and I were tired from our long flight, but ready to hit our first Christmas Market. RM had stayed at a hotel near the airport the night before and since our flight arrived at 9:30 a.m., we had time to go to his room to shower, change our clothes and be back in the car before check-out time. We had roughly a 45-minute drive into Munich and it was snowing.
As our professional guide, RM had made arrangements for our accommodations and plotted our path from Germany, through Austria, down to Slovenia and then to Venice for a couple of days before J. flew back home. The voice on RM's GPS guided us into Munich. He had the language set on English and the female voice spoke with a distinct British accent. We dubbed her "Emily." RM had found an apartment for our two nights in Munich, which was more affordable than a traditional hotel. I was definitely on a tight budget and while J. wasn't, she was a seasoned, smart and thrifty traveler. During events like Christkindlmarkt in cities such as Munich, residents would pack their bags and stay with friends or family while renting out their apartments through tourist agencies. Personally, I can't imagine having a bunch of complete and utter strangers cook in my kitchen, use my toilet and sleep in my bed, but no doubt the money could pay your rent for a few months.
RM had plugged into the GPS the address of our destination, but the building Emily took us to looked dark and empty. He pulled out some paperwork from his briefcase and made a phone call, speaking German to someone on the other end.
"Well, this was supposed to be the place but now it isn't," RM said. "Apparently, they have a different apartment for us. We're supposed to meet Mrs......."
The name that rolled off RM's tongue was the strangest-sounding name I had ever heard. It sounded like "Chukulumochakulum." J. and I started laughing.
"What kind of name is that?" I asked, confident it wasn't German.
"Well, that's what I'm calling her because she has some Turkish name," RM stated.
His knowledge of languages also makes him a very good judge of the origin of surnames. Funny how you think that people who live in Germany are German, not Turkish German or Norwegian German or Irish German. Just German. Sure, Americans have last names that originate from every corner of the world. We are, after all, the ultimate melting pot of modern civilization. I laughed at myself for having the notion that other countries had somehow avoided the whole immigrant thing.
RM plugged a new address into Emily and we were off again. J. and I were hoping we could drop off our luggage and find a bus back to the Marienplatz where all sorts of wonderful sights, sounds and steaming mugs of gluhwein awaited our arrival.
By the time we reached the next stop, it had stopped snowing. So, we all three piled out of the car and stood near a storefront where, it seemed, women could bring their lingerie to be laundered. How odd to think that in Munich there were actually enough women who wanted someone else to wash their under things to support a business. Hmm.
A few minutes later, a woman stopped where we standing. She and RM greeted one another and we all introduced ourselves using a little English and a little German. She was a petite woman, although not as small as J., with dark skin, eyes and hair, probably in her 50s. She unlocked the door next to the lingerie launderette, flipped a light switch and motioned for us to follow her up the stairs. When we reached the top, she asked us to remove our shoes and put on some obviously previously worn slippers there. We entered the apartment in our used slippers and found ourselves standing in a tiny kitchen with a rather large table and chairs. I felt like I was touring a house for sale rather than my prospective hotel room.
Mrs. Chukulumochakulum never stopped smiling and talking, mostly in German but sometimes in broken English. It seemed she was trying very diligently to convince us that this was a great place to stay.
"Es nyze, ya?" she kept repeating over and over again.
She also kept asking us if we wanted her to make us coffee.
"You want co-fee? Ay make you Turkish co-fee," she repeated despite our polite refusals in every language, including Turkish, I think.
She opened the refrigerator door, revealing some bottled water and sundry jars and containers. Translating, RM told us that we could help ourselves to anything in there. I seriously doubted any of us would. Who knows what danger lurks in the darkness of a stranger's refrigerator in a strange land?
Although I couldn't understand all of the dialogue between RM and the Turkish woman, I could tell that he was skeptical about her and this place. He couldn't get a straight answer out of her when he asked her why we weren't staying in the apartment the agency had reserved for us.
The kitchen opened to a central hallway with a bathroom across the hall, a living room and bedroom on the left, and to the right, an open set of stairs that appeared to lead down to the lingerie laundry. We found this odd but upon questioning her, RM said the door was locked and no one could enter from there.
The bathroom was long and narrow with the typical equipment and a washer and dryer. The living room was large and had a huge sectional sofa in one corner. The bedroom was small and dark with a massive built-in cupboard along one wall, a small sofa opposite and a low, full-size bed stuck in the back corner. There were clothes in the closet and personal items everywhere -- signs that whoever lived here had vacated temporarily to make some extra money.
RM was speaking in German again, then translating for J. and me. He said he still wasn't sure why Mrs. Chukulumochakulum had brought us to this place. She seemed to be trying very hard to justify the change but I don't think her explanation satisfied RM who, after all, has spent years in tourism, checking to make sure the accommodations of his guests were as they should be.
"Our apartment was supposed to have two bedrooms," he told her in German.
"Yes, but that one was smaller and didn't have the other room where someone can sleep," the Turkish woman replied.
"But we were supposed to pay this amount for a two-bedroom apartment and this is not," RM countered.
They continued to discuss in German. Then, he took J. and me aside to explain the situation. Frankly, we were both tired and just wanted to stop wasting our first day here. The apartment, such as it was, looked fairly clean. We weren't going to spend much time here anyway.
One issue solved, Mrs. Chukulumochakulum created another problem. She wanted to be paid, in cash, right now. I hadn't had time to get to an ATM or currency exchange office so I had only about 20 Euros in my pocket. Fortunately, J., a seasoned traveler who always brought home currency of the countries she intended to return to, had enough to pay. But RM was not happy. The agency had told him we could settle the bill when we left. J. and I just wanted the woman to leave. Euros in hand, Mrs. Chukulumochakulum gave RM the keys and told him he had to move the car from where it was parked in front of the apartment. She told him to move it across the street and if he put five Euros in the meter, he could leave it there all night.
RM carried all of our luggage up the stairs which had become slick from feet wet with snow. Then, he took the car down and block, turned around and couldn't find a parking place that didn't involve driving into a drift of snow piled there by the most recent street clearing. Finally, the three of us set off down the street, headed to the buss that would take us just a few blocks to the city center.
I was the only one who hadn't been to Munich before. J. and RM had both been here and had both been to Oktoberfest. J. had actually spent time here with her Bavarian cousins. But none of us had been here for Christkindlmarkt. We found our bus and headed for the Marienplatz in Munchen (as it's called in German) -- the central plaza and the magical setting for the first stop on our holiday adventure.
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