At this point, Riot thought about pulling out some money to see how much more we would have to pay to rectify the problem.  But before he would have made a fool of himself, the conductor went and drafted a fellow passenger into serving as the interpreter.  We breathed a sigh of relief.  She started translating and her words came out in French.  French!  He thought we were French.  Normally, we, Nez and Riot, would have been delighted if someone thought we were French.  But here, in this situation, it was like going from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek; it was still a foreign tongue to us.

But all was not lost because surprisingly, we somehow managed to understand the gist of the issue.  Turned out, we had paid too much for our tickets; “plus cher,” said the translator.  With a group of seven, including three children, apparently we could have gotten a deeply discounted family ticket.  The conductor was frustrated that we had spent more than we should.  It was a disturbance in his universe that he must make us aware.  We thanked him and the lady both profusely for imparting upon us this knowledge for knowledge’s sake.  For at this point, we had already paid for and used these tickets and it was unlikely that we would travel from Paris to Koblenz again in the near future to make good use of this kernel of truth.  We did, however, appreciate his fortitude and sense of duty.

We laughed about it and chalked it up as one of those things you must leave your home to experience.  A little later we adults encountered another comical situation of ironic timing.  Kingskid had been watching old Indiana Jones movies on his portable DVD player to pass the time and was clearly intrigued by one peculiar, but constantly appearing, symbol used by the bad guys.  Like any curious child he asked his dad to explain what it was.  And, like a good father the Language Chameleon would have gladly done so except that it didn’t seem the best time nor place to be discussing with an inquisitive boy the swastika and its use by the Nazis on a German train in modern day Germany.  And so, this thirst for knowledge would have to be left unquenched for the time being.

16 May 2008.  When the train from Saarbrücken pulled into what should be the Koblenz station, the Language Chameleon unleashed a phrase he had lifted from the back of Rick Steves’s Germany & Austria 2006, “Wo ist Koblenz?”  Before the friendly passenger could say hier, the eagle-eyed Nez had already spotted her dad waiting on the platform in the thicket of the detraining crowd; she was exuding the joy of a preschooler being picked up at the end of the day.  This was a talented family indeed. 

Of this first reunion at the train station, the Kaiser wrote in his diary:

I met them at the train station in Koblenz on Friday.  I thought I would have trouble locating them when lots of people were busting out of the train.  Of course I didn’t need to worry, Nez spotted me within seconds. . . .  

[W]e were supposed to head on to St. Goar within 12 minutes but they looked hungry.  So, since it was their first time in Germany I thought McDonald’s at the train station would help with the transition.  At lunch, I learned that Joie’s husband is a language chameleon.  He is learning German at an impressive rate.  Back at St. Goar, we settled in and walked around the scenic town and down by the Rhein.  For dinner, we had pizza at Heerstraße.  I wanted them to jump into German culture – thus, hamburgers followed by pizza.

St. Goar is a small town that hugs the fast-flowing Rhine, named after a saint who lived here in the 7th century, and situated beneath the shell of once the mightiest castle along the river.  To us, it was a one-street introduction to small-town Germany, with a towering ruin of a castle nested high upon a hill. 

A few steps from the train station, or bahnhof, was the town’s church, one of two that occupied both ends of the main pedestrian thoroughfare.  This one, a Protestant church, was once a Catholic church and contained the tomb of the town’s namesake; the other, a Catholic church that is still Catholic.  A few more steps on the uneven cobblestone street was our hotel:  Hotel am Markt St. Goar located at Am Markt 1.  All of our three rooms looked out upon the picturesque Marktplatz below and cost a fraction of what they would in a major city.  The noticeable difference in prices continued to amaze us during our entire stay in these small towns.

With it being the evening and this not being Paris, the itinerary was short and added to that we had an early day tomorrow.  We did manage to walk the entire length of the pedestrian street, Heerstraße, visit a cuckoo clock store (with the “largest cuckoo clock in the world” prominently perched over the entrance), have our first taste of bratwurst and bier, go for a short walk along the water, and relax over refreshing ice cream, or eis, in the by-then nearly-deserted street.  Sitting there, in front of the ice cream store and being there in St. Goar, it was as if time came to the proverbial screeching halt.  We, too, after the hustle and bustle of Paris felt the noticeable change in pace within us.  The castle looked at us longingly from high above but it would have to wait.  We were turning in early tonight (except Riot who delighted in discovering that his room had free Wi-Fi and proceeded to do some work into the night).