Grilled Mice—Saonara, Italia

From the airport in Munich we drove to the BMW dealership, picked up Gary's new car, then drove south to Padova, which is near Venice. I had felt disoriented, jet-lagged, and shy at the airport, with the taxi driver, at the dealership, at the roadside restaurant in Austria, and all the way to our destination. The only German I spoke was a few a barely-discernible iterations of "danke schoen". But after we freshened up at our hotel I felt more adventurous, though admittedly fragmented.
Our front desk clerk recommended we take our dinner at the Antica Trattoria "Al Bosco" in the nearby town of Saonara.


It was charming, and suddenly it actually felt as if we were on our vacation instead of in some group hallucination. Before the trip I had taught myself a little Italian and brought my phrase book with me to the restaurant. Hoisting my courage, I confidently asked for a table—un tavelo per tre, per favore. Unfortuately, the hostess understood me perfectly, and asked me a question in response. (Upon reflection I realized that she was asking whether we wanted to sit outside or inside.) I responded with a stuttered, "I don't speak Italian very well" (though I kept myself from slipping into English). She fetched a lovely waiter in his late forties who escorted us to an outdoor table.

This man must have been the English speaker of the bunch. He brought out menus in English, kindly tried to help us order, and let himself be amused at our attempts to speak Italian. Kasey ordered dried horse meat with polenta. Concerned that she might not understand what she was in for, he asked if we knew what it was. We said yes, but he insisted, telling us that we were in fact ordering grilled mice.

Astonished, we asked him to repeat himself. He explained that the polenta was the "grilled mice." A quick game of mental Tetris revealed that he meant grilled corn, grilled mais.

It was delicious.

A Route Map—For All You Visual Learners

This map of my route shows exactly where I was during the more than thirty-four hours we spent driving in Europe.

Alendorf, Germany

[Slide show at end of post]

The last place I visited before returning to Munich for the flight home was Alendorf. Gary had left for Paris while we were in Trier. Kasey and I were picked up in Trier by Edgar—my seventh cousin twice removed—and his sixteen-year-old niece Carolin—my eighth cousin once removed. (For an explanation of these terms, see this genealogy article or this relationship chart.) We stayed two nights in Alendorf, at the home of Maria, Edgar's mother and my sixth cousin thrice removed.

I am related to these folks through my father, who is descended from the families that inhabited several towns in the area known as the Eifel. Our bloodline includes three different last names, due to frequent inter-village marriages as well as to the farm culture. An example: one fellow several generations back married his distant cousin but took her name because they were taking over her family's farm. Fortunately, our relatives in the Midwest have researched the lineage and were able to figure out our exact relationship. Two of these closer relatives (my fourth cousins) have been out to Alendorf before, in the early and late eighties, respectively. I was the next, only the third American descendant to visit our ancestral village.

While driving the hour from Trier to Alendorf, Edgar asked what we wanted to see. I didn't know, just the town, I supposed. He laughed and said that would take all of half an hour. (It took a little longer than that . . . but not much, as the population is about two hundred fifty persons.) Kasey asked if there were any castles nearby. He chuckled again and from that point on made sure to mention every castle we passed. "You like castles, right?"

Edgar and Carolin speak much better English than I do German. Edgar has been to the states several times and Carolin has studied English for six years in school. Carolin has also studied French and travelled in France for three weeks, but she likes speaking English better. It think it's partially because she is better at English, but it seemed like she liked it better per se.

When we arrived in Alendorf we lunched with Maria—Edgar's mother, who was widowed several years ago—and Franz-Joseph—a friend of Maria's who was around most of the time that we were there. Neither Maria nor Franz-Joseph speaks English, and the Eifel boasts a thick accent, so I felt a bit worried at this point. I have studied German for a couple years, but that doesn't get one far with native speakers, especially in a different dialect than one learned. However, we figured out how to communicate surprisingly well: I listened intently. Maria and Franz-Joseph spoke slowly and tried to choose words I understood. I nodded my head often or gave enthusiastic affirmations when I got what was being said. By the time we left, Maria looked to me to translate to Kasey what she was saying. (That was quite gratifying.)

After lunch we walked through the town to the old church at which Edgar had served as an altar boy. It's at the edge of the city. At some point the distance became too much of a nuisance, so they built a new church in the middle of town. These are very Catholic communities, it seems, because all my relatives there are Catholic, and the only churches I saw were Roman as well.

From the old church we walked along the Stations of the Cross (click to learn what these are). This path leads up to the top of the hill from which one can see the entire town and a good deal of the countryside. The final station is a crucifix from which Jesus has surveyed the city since 1675.

We did see the ruins of one castle up close, at Kronenburg—where we ventured with Carolin, Christiane (Edgar's wife), and Lukas (Edgar's son) after a post-hike coffee break. Almost as soon as we reached the ruins, rain began pelting us like little boys playing in a gravel pit, so we ducked into a cafe for hot cocoa and then went back home, to dinner.

Edgar, who—like most of the family members—lives in one of the larger towns outside Alendorf, observed aptly that the most common activity in this village is eating. While in Alendorf I ate ungodly amounts of cheese, and cold cuts, and bread, and cake. I drank dark, flavorful coffee (the exception rather than the rule in Germany and Switzerland, I found), pale Bitburger beer, or some persuasion of wine at every meal, along with the Gerolsteiner mineral water that originates in Gerolstein, just minutes from Alendorf.

My most vivid and cherished memories of Europe are of eating and drinking (along with failing to communicate), so the meal descriptions in my journal probably are a bit overboard for this blog. I promise I will highlight some of the most interesting ones though.

Dinner turned out to be a family affair. Maria's brother, Theo, and his wife came, as did Helmut, Edgar's brother. We all ate (sans Edgar and family) while trying to talk about every one's professions, how we are related, and what Kasey and I do in Oregon (in both English and German, depending on who addressed whom). We also talked about the previous American visitors; they lived near the Mississippi River, after which Maria has christened the creek running through her yard "The Mississippi."

We retired early that night; for the next day we had planned a trip north to Cologne/Köln (details to follow). After spending the day in Köln we (the whole family minus Theo and Susanne) met for dinner at an old mill converted to a restaurant where we toured the mill works (there are flour, mustard, and other mills in the complex), ate incredible food, chatted, and parted ways. After this last night in Alendorf, Gary picked us up and we were off for Munich.

Our hosts were nothing but hospitable, made us feel nothing but welcome, and treated us like family despite the great genetic divide. Though I left with a bit of a headache from thinking so hard about everything I said and everything I heard, and a consequent thirst for English, I enjoyed the visit thoroughly and hope to go again. Hosting them out here would be a blast as well.

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Swiss Fondue

This is not in my trip journal, but it's related, and amusing. While in Switzerland I bought a red sleeveless shirt just like the one pictured below; today it brought me into contact with a most interesting fellow.I only bought one hokey Switzerland souvenir and this shirt was it. If it makes things better you can know that it's actually a nice shirt in its own right; I like red, too. Anyhow, I wore it today with slight trepidation. No terrible reactions. While walking back to work from lunch in the park I noticed a grandfatherly man standing outside a decked out van and sporting another souvenir t-shirt: "Venezia, Italia," it read. I shuddered internally and kept walking.

He noticed my shirt too. "Are you from Switzerland?" he asked.
"No, but I was there not so long ago on vacation."
"Oh, I am from Switzerland, so I was just curious."

Turns out this guy lives in Springfield, just one town over from Eugene. He grew up in Switzerland and started travelling Europe during his days as a pro soccer player. After he was bored with Europe he moved on to the States. He married here and raised his kids on a farm an hour south of Eugene. Now he still travels, can't get the bug out of him he said.

We discussed a lot in the five minutes we spent chatting. I found out that German-speaking Swiss also learn High German in school. When they go to Germany, then, they can understand and converse with the Germans, but the Germans haven't a clue what the Swiss are saying. They're clever, those Swiss. We shouldn't expect anything less from a country with air force bases built into mountains and pocket knives supplied with endless implements.

The area I visited in Switzerland is evidently famous for its fondue--which makes sense since the cheese there is amazing--so he informed me that I missed out by not eating fondue there. He told me that I could look up the blend of cheeses and make it here myself, but I had to be careful to include a dry white wine and cubes of French bread in the course. When the Swiss eat fondue, he said, they always scrape the bread against the sides of the pan, and whoever loses a cube of bread buys the next bottle of wine for the party. Do not, under any circumstances, pay more than $10 for your bottle of wine, he insisted.

I don't feel so silly for buying the shirt now, but I am hungry for some cheese.

Favorite Morning

The past few days many people have asked me to tell them my favorite place I visited in Europe. I have surprised myself by answering Italy. Specifically, I would say Florence (although the Tuscan countryside now also holds a revered place in my heart and my palate). There are, I think, several explanations for this. One of these is that while our limited time in each place left much unexplored, unimbibed, and unappreciated, Florence is the first place I would return, should I have the chance. I'd make the journey in winter, as I can't stand being an English-speaking tourist among so many other (rude and obnoxious) English-speaking tourists, and I hate standing in lines.

Another of the reasons I feel so fondly for Florence (that's for you, Jen) is that one of my loveliest mornings was spent in Florence, in a little square (piazza piccola, perhaps?) that served as the convergence point for several streets very like the one pictured above . . . I am pretty sure this one had more than four sides, too, Nick.

Anyhow, the last morning we spent in Florence was "free time." Gary went to see the inside of Il Duomo. Kasey found Galileo's stuff in a science museum and marvelled at the Santa Croce cathedral. I walked to an unassuming cafe with outside seating and wrote in my journal, sipping the espresso I had ordered in Italian. The morning was already hot, but the espresso was perfect somehow. On my patio sat a group of middle-aged men chatting on and on about something. A blonde berated someone via cell phone while her two male friends looked on.

I watched the tourists. I watched the locals watch the tourists. I felt the locals watch me watching them watch the tourists, and then got back to writing.

Music came over the loudspeaker, all reminiscent of blu 102.9, a radio station in Santa Fe, NM that boasts of its genre as the newest craze in Europe. Astor Piazzolla's tango music filled me with some strange sense of home without wiping away the unfamiliarity. And then Variety Lab's "London in the Rain." I wanted you to be there, Jen. You would have loved it too.

One of the middle-aged men was joined by his two young sons, who were ill-behaved and whined loudly enough to break even that powerful ambiance. A puckered old woman who had recently joined our corral caught my eye, looked at the boys, disapprovingly glanced at their father, and shook her head; she connected her gaze with mine again just to make sure I agreed.

A blond couple sat down and began conversing in Italian, but I wondered if they were from a different area, or if Italian was not their first language--it sounded very different from the Italian I was used to hearing at that point.

After a while I wandered into one of the tobacco shops--which sell everything--to buy postcard stamps, and I made it through that in Italian. Even buying the book from the vendor under the funny little loggia I passed every day went off fine without any English. Finally I sat in the park near my hotel and listened to the families at the carousel as I read aloud to myself a couple Baudelaire poems--first in French, then in Italian. Then I moved on to Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, a historical fiction about Michelangelo, set in Florence. It was all perfect.

I think what I liked best about this morning was not feeling like a bulging red thumb, or one of the hundreds of them, that held the city hostage during the day. One of the most difficult things for me about Europe was feeling--to greater and lesser extents--terribly intrusive and out of place. And I felt less so that morning. I felt like a welcome house guest rather than the unannounced visitor to whom the household is anxiously waiting to say goodbye.

It's all a little sappy sounding, perhaps, but this was one of my favorite times of the entire trip--the morning I wasted in Florence.

An Italian in Muenchen

This bridge came up right before we entered Munich on our second-to-last day in Europe. I kinda like it, in a from-a-distance, don't-really-think-I'd-want-it-in-my-city kind of way.

It might be bad form to start off with the best story, and one from the last part of my trip, but it deserves its own post . . . and it really is a great story.

Before my trip I was warned to the heavens and back that I needed to beware the Italian men. "They are barbarians," I heard. "They'll undress you on the bus," I heard. "Dye your hair brown," I was instructed. After finding nothing unusually scandalous about the men we encountered in Italy, I remarked to K. and G. that I had been pleasantly surprised with Italy, especially in that I didn't have any strange run-ins with the guys there.

In Munich, the day before we flew out, I ducked into a leather store a couple blocks from the restaurant at which G. and K. were waiting for our food to arrive. The leather store was a funny establishment, with the ground floor serving merely as the entrance to the flight of stairs that brought the customers up to the area in which all the inventory was kept. I started mounting the stairs, only to stop at the motioning of the suited man above me. "Perhaps he works here?" I wondered. We started our ascent again soon, and just when we neared the top he asked me, in barely-discernible German, "It's pretty high, huh?" We'd only mounted a flight of stairs, so I decided at this point that he probably was not just a friendly employee.

As we landed on the second floor he started again, in a string of German nouns and participles that somehow got his point across. My clumsy responses in German also seemed to be understood. "Are you here on vacation?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm leaving early tomorrow morning."
"Where are you from?"
"America."
"I am on vacation too. I am from Italy, and I have never kissed an American before." I sheepishly wagged my head to convey my lack of interest in helping him remedy that problem and tried to look at the bags.

He followed me closely, very closely, with quite a meaningful gaze. "What are you looking for?"
"A bag, a bookbag, kinda."
"Here are some," he offered, as I tried to look intently at the bags.
"Want to get a drink?" he persisted.
"No, I have to meet my friends for dinner in five minutes."
"Later, then, in a half hour?"
"No, I can't."
"When? Where can we meet?"
"No, really, I can't at all."

After about ten refusals he finally decided I wasn't going to hook up with him and moved on. He sidled closer--for the Euro cheek kiss thing--and I figured "What the heck, as long as he leaves that's fine." He kissed my left cheek, but instead of my right cheek made straight for my lips. I shook my head again, gesturing no, and held him back with my palm on his chest. All this while we are standing in a leather bag store, remember. Then he gripped my waist with both hands and kissed my neck, though gently. After pulling himself away he looked me in the eyes before walking off with a final "Ciao, Bella."

My shock left no room for feelings of anger or even violation. I cannot even comprehend his motivation, so all I thought was something like, "Well, that just happened. And I don't know what to think about it exactly, but it's a pretty good story."

I didn't find a leather bag that I liked, but I did return to dinner with my prized "Italian Man" story. How unfortunate, though. I wanted to tell him that he should be careful, because he was ruining the reputation of not only his gender, but also his nationality. Oh well, I'll try not to hold it against them, and perhaps he wouldn't have cared anyhow. K.'s reaction was great . . . she wanted to go find him and sock him. G.'s reaction was the best though: "Want me to go kiss him back?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, "but only if you kiss him on the neck."

The Facts

Conceived by a friend of mine, Gary, this trip was in the works since March. Gary, my housemate Kasey, and I travelled to Europe to pick up Gary's new BMW. The itinerary was a compromise between Gary's insistence upon seeing Italy and the French Riviera, Kasey's lust for the Swiss Alps, and my fervor for spending time in Germany. We also wanted to negotiate our itinerary such that the engine was broken in by the time we reached the Autobahn again, so that the car could enjoy the speed-revelry that should be a part of the life of every BMW.

June 20 - fly from Eugene to Munich
June 21 - arrive in Munich, pick up Gary's car, drive to Padova, Italy
June 22 - explore Venice
June 23 - explore Padova, drive to Florence
June 24 - explore Florence
June 25 - catch a bit more of Florence, lunch in Lucca, drive the Azure Coast to Nice, France
June 26 - check out Nice, drive to Brig, Switzerland
June 27, 28 - explore Brig, the Alps
June 29 - drive to Trier, Germany, stopping for lunch in Strasbourg, France
June 30, July 1 - explore Trier
July 2, 3 - visit Alendorf
July 4 - drive to Munich
July 5 - fly from Munich to Eugene


I snapped this crazy-creative photo in Nice. (L to R: Gary, me, Kasey) We were waiting for a light across from a mirrored building and I couldn't pass up the photo-op. Impressed yet?