Yesterday, he had a language arts lesson in which he had to do a compare and contrast essay on the music he likes, and that which is parents like. He found it difficult, since we all pretty much like the same thing. However, for the next day’s lesson, he has to review and deconstruct someone else’s essay on the same subject, so I had to write one too. In the end, I realized I’m turning into my parents. Well, ok, my father (he was the one who loved classical music; I didn’t want to get into Heino). And I never thought I’d be digging classical music, and that when I would, I would discover both my father and I were into emo classical. Here’s the essay:

I like listening to indie rock bands like Everclear, Oasis, and Brand New. My parents liked to listen to classical music, especially the Romantic composers like Schumann and Strauss.

At first, I thought our musical tastes had nothing in common. Rock music is faster and more energetic. It also has lyrics I can relate to: it’s like musical poetry.  It takes a long time to listen to a symphony, while you can listen through a rock song in about 3 minutes. If you really like the song, you just listen to it again, while you can’t really repeat a one-hour symphony.

But now that I’m older, I see the similarities. Indie rock bands express emotion; so do the Romantic composers. They just do it in a different way. For instance, Gustav Mahler, a romantic composer, put syncopation into his 9^th Symphony to make it sound like a broken heart. Some people call this a “symphonic poem” and it’s like an all-music version of the poetic lyrics I like in rock music. Also, romantic classical music almost always has a motif running through the symphony, so you essentially have a song that repeats itself within the a bigger musical story.

So it turns out my musical preferences really may not be that different from my parents’ after all.

In March, we drove to LA in my new car to a really awful comic book convention. But the children got to see LA and I got one of my favorite new shirts there.

Then Peter went to Germany, to a comic book convention, just as gas prices climbed to an outrageous level that put me on a driving strike.

Human Computing moved into new offices downtown, which are ever so much nicer, and better located, than where he used to be, in the office building purchased by, er, Ray. I’m sure I mentioned the new offices are across from the basilica, and I didn’t get around to mentioning that the new office building management put up spectacular Christmas decorations, on a level to match those at Christmas in the Park.

Neil found a boy scout troop to join, and I officially became a homeschool teacher. At the beginning of the summer, Neil found some neighborhood friends, which lightened my concerns about his social life. Little did I know that by the end of the year, I’d be homeschooling my daughter, too.

I also saw the San Diego Comic-Con again for the first time in several years, took full geeky pleasure in seeing Jim Butcher and Steve Coogan, and managed to keep myself sane by taking it in in only small portions.

We took an epic cross-country journey which let us see friends and family, as well as see and understand our fellow countrymen, plus get to know some of our most important national monuments. While we were traveling, the economy apparently decided to go to hell. But at least we knew all our other countrymen were in the same situation, no matter their situation or philosophy.

I have to say that I never expected that the fallout from Happy Happy Lenderman would be as dramatic as it turned out to be. I figured the banks were eating their lending mistakes, but it turned out the whole mess gave them massive indigestion–and the rest of us have to pay up now, too.

Our presidential election went well, but I’m not as excited about our president-elect as some other people are. Frankly the over-the-top adoration of him creeped me out, and I see a ordinary (perhaps egotistical) man who’s facing a tough situation, with an awful lot of overly-high public expectations. This tongue-in-cheek article from the Onion probably encapsulated my view of Barack Obama’s victory best.

But I go into 2009 in good health, with my family, and with a good freelance writing gig. For myself, I know 2009 won’t be as exciting as 2008, but it should be a’right. I hope all my friends and family will have a great new year, and if there are any rough spots that they’ll sail through them quickly.

I put one present for Peter and Neil, the laser strategy game Khet, under the tree. On it was an envelope containing the first clue:

I thought Peter and Neil would almost immediately go to where the next clue was, in Neil’s history book, Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul. But they put too much thought into it. The Gaul were mainly French, right, so did we have any French books? Could it be found in a Latin text? All the Asterix and Obelix comics (in various languages) got a through look-through, until I finally hinted it had to do with the Gallic Wars. The next clue, hidden in the text’s pages was:

I knew Peter and Neil would recognize “green eggs” right away because I’d been drooling over the Latin version of Green Eggs and Ham all Christmas season–and Peter gave it to me. “Cenabis” was the lame Latin I had to come up with myself, which means “We will dine.”

As soon as they’d translated the cartoon, Peter and Neil found my green eggs in the refrigerator. The night before, I’d mixed alum and vinegar and written the next clue on the eggs. It’s supposed to soak through the egg shell and imprint on the egg white of a boiled egg. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, so I had to give them the next clue directly:

In tympanum est.

Peter immediately knew this meant it was in a drum. He and Neil searched all the percussion instruments in the house until he found Neil’s Mathematica book (another present) on a drum in a drum case. Neil, our resident mathematician, loves codes and ciphers, so I gave them this one:

It’s a playfair cipher with “virent ova” as the key. But wouldn’t you know it: Neil translated the key, and tried solving the clue with “green eggs” as the key. That resolved into gibberish, which Neil tried to use anyway: was it a scrambled clue, or hold a message within it? Peter tried it with “virent ova” but he didn’t quite understand the mechanics of the playfair cipher and got it wrong as well. Finally, he figured it out, and read:

How Abbe Faria discovered the treasure map

Neil just read The Count of Monte Christo last year, but he was as baffled as Peter was. They had to figure out where Abbe Faria come from and then brush up on the great novel. For the rest of you who haven’t read or don’t remember the details of The Count of Monte Christo, the treasure map was written in hidden ink on a bookmark inside a breviary. The map was revealed only when the Abbe was about to throw the bookmark into the fire and the heat revealed the message.

I’d placed a bookmark in Neil’s Mathematica book. The night before, I’d written the next clue in lemon juice on a bookmark, but the letters had browned instantly. So instead I used milk for the secret ink. It worked just as well, but it takes more heat to make the message come out. Nevertheless, Peter and Neil, through various methods, Peter and Neil got the bookmark heated up enough to reveal the words:

INSIDE PRINTER

Inside our printer was a present with this written on the wrapping:

and a desktop calendar I’d bought when I was in Germany. The date was in European style, and it was easy to find on the date in the calendar:

And on the other side, the answer:

Both Peter and Neil speak German well enough to understand that it referred to the Sesame Street song. Behind the Sesame Street’s 25th Celebration DVD I’d hidden the next present: a Blu-Ray version of Life of Brian, the Christmas (Brian-mas?) story for our geek farm.

On there was the last clue:

Neil immediately recognized the pre-Germanic runes from his German/history lesson, and transposed them to the clue: Stairway to Heaven. I was afraid it might get the boys into a Led Zeppelin jag, or trying to read meaning into the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven.” But maybe a sarcastic comment I made about stoner Led Zep fans sent Peter immediately in the right direction.

He climbed the stairs to our attic and found a video game based on a movie we all recently saw and loved, Bolt.

All in all, the treasure hunt took just under 2 hours, and all had fun doing it.

Neil and I had read And Then There Were None together and the heliograph with which the people on the island used to send signals to the mainland was a new concept for us. The dictionary just said it was a device for signalling with mirrors. Here in the Museum of Communication was an actual heliograph, which looked somewhat different from how I’d imagined it:

The museum had the full history of the German postal service, from when mail was delivered on carriages, to the days when it was sorted en route in special train cars, to all the various modern German postal service vehicles, including this motorcycle:

These days (and long back into the early 1900s at least) everything associated with the German post is boldly painted yellow, including the mail boxes, the mail bags, and the jackets the postal workers wear. The bugle, also a symbol you’ll find on all their material, dates back to the days when mail was delivered by horse, and the mailman would sound the bugle as he rode into town, so people could come pick up their mail and packages.

One section upstairs in particular is a philatelist’s dream. There’s a letter on display that fell out of the burning Hindenburg zeppelin, since zeppelins were used for express international mail delivery:

If you look closely, the stamp is a Third Reich stamp with a swastika sun behind the Earth. Nearby are plates you can pull out showing German stamps dating back to the 1800s. They include the different stamps from World War II reconstruction era with American/British sector stamps, French sector stamps, and Russian sector stamps. Peter likes stamp collecting because he says it gives you a glimpse of history, and the Museum of Communications’ stamp collection certainly reflects that.

Personally, I still like the impressive phone section, which even reflected the linguistic change from “Fernsprecher” (distance speaker) to the more international “Telefon.” Here’s what a commercial telephone looked like in 1878, if you were one of the few people to have one:

The museum showed how human operators worked, but it also had a mechanical switch. In front of it, you could place a call from one rotary telephone to another and see how the circuits connect.

And the easily forgotten telephone technology of yesteryear was fun to see too. There were the huge radio and satellite telephones, and the massive bricks that were the early cell phones of the late 80s and 90s. There were pagers (hey, remember those!) complete with the advertisements promoting them. And there was a reel-to-reel answering machine from way back in the day:

The microphone in front is what you’d use to record the message that played when the device picked up a call.

I was also intrigued by the television section, which included a huge bank of televisions on which you could see snippets of West German television shows from the 1950s to this decade. In comparison, there were pictures of what early television broadcasts look like. If you had a TV in 1929, your television image would look like this:

We’ve come a long long way from that to HDTV!

The museum includes some communication related art, like some sheep made out of landline telephone coils and paintings of 1800s mailmen in action, but the actual communication devices are more intriguing. For instance, check out this funky television set/console from the 1960s:

or this doily macrame phone:

Or this really attractive classic radio microphone:

In the most modern corners, there’s a display on computer technology as a communication device, from early acoustic couplers

to internet telephones dating to 2000, and a few internet stations for children.

Upstairs there’s more for children, in the form of a play area, where the children can create their own cards and even set print. When I found out the museum’s guidebook was in German and English (they’re all about communicating in whatever way works for you), I bought one. It was definitely a worthwhile museum, and if you find yourself in Frankfurt, I highly recommend it.

“The f**k you didn’t,” he said, but moved on. For once, I was amused. In just 9 days, I’d come a long way from Fräulein Heidelbergerbürgerin and her refusal to speak anything but euro-English with a German-incapable ‘tard like myself.

Frankfurt is rather underrated, especially by people who come to Germany to well, experience Germany at its fullest. Frankfurt is one of the few (perhaps the only) German cities that decided to modernize rather than rebuild after it was bombed to smithereens in World War II. Its downtown has modern skyscrapers in which the business of trade, which has been Frankfurt’s industry since at least the 1300s, goes on. And it’s also spectacularly international: whatever language you speak, you’ll find it spoken here, and it’s a mistake to assume anyone to be limited to any one language. You can find any cuisine you want, whether it’s German, Cambodian, Greek or whatever else. Heck, there was even a Burger King at the train station, and unlike the rest of Germany, it took Visa.

And, honestly, after having had such an awesome, great time with full force Germany, I was just fine with some Germany lite. Just like Germany, Frankfurt had old churches, like the Church of the Three Kings

And a big cathedral, the one piece of Frankfurt that hadn’t been bombed, but which at this moment, was undergoing some renovation:

It had Roman ruins, and if you can believe it, after having visited Roman ruins from Dossenheim to Cologne, I was actually Roman ruin’d out for the moment. Frankfurt kept its Romans ruins to a minimum, just enough to admire for a moment:

I visited the Frankfurt City Museum, which was rather dull compared to the spunky, personality-filled Cologne City Museum, but it did its job in educating me about the city’s history. It’s been an international center of trade and commerce since long, long before there was an airport, and numismatists would love the old coin collection. I walked into a medieval chapel remnant and an old king started reciting some love poetry he’d written to me:

Oh, those charming Germans! Alas, I could understand Saxons and Bavarians by this time, but I still wasn’t fluent enough to understand medieval German.

Nearby, some of the old city has been restored, but it’s not that exciting when you find out it’s all fake reproductions, not original treasures like the 600 and 700-year-old restaurants I’d been in along the Rhein River.

The skyscrapers in the back are the real Frankfurt, and you need to appreciate it for its modern internationality.

Personally, I loved Frankfurt, especially along the river Main, along which is also a row of excellent museums. It was an excellent place to end my fabulous German vacation, and to start thinking about going home.

It was almost like Fate was steering me away from it. First of all, getting the kind of accommodation I wanted was surprisingly difficult. As a single female traveller, the idea of booking a room in a private house appealed to me: it would be inexpensive, and I think a family would take notice and care about a suddenly-missing lodger quicker than a hotel would. But getting public internet access in Bacharach was hard, and I couldn’t get through to Peter on the phone at what was to him the middle of the night. The day I was going to Wiesbaden, I got him to book what I thought was a private room in central Wiesbaden, but he didn’t quite understand the response, so I called the owner directly. It turned out the room was actually an apartment the owner let out to visitors, and he couldn’t make it available on such short notice.

I went to Wiesbaden anyway, and I was just appalled by the enormous amount of graffiti on the walls as the train pulled into the station. I know, I know, German graffiti is not the same as American graffiti, but it still makes me uncomfortable. The train station itself was creepily quiet, and some of the ticket machines were broken. Not seeing internet access immediately, I just called a hotel listed in my book. They were booked up. After asking a few questions, I was directed to an internet cafe/casino just around the corner of the train station.

Now Wiesbaden is known for its casinos, but I have no idea why people gamble there. If I wanted to gamble in Germany, I would go to only one place, Baden-Baden, where I could gamble in a palace in style. Wiesbaden just seemed to me like Chinatown gambling, or Las Vegas suburbs gambling. Anyway, this particular casino was an internet casino, where you could gamble sitting in front of computers while the staff brought you drinks and paid you your winnings. There were two coin-operated internet stations which looked like the chair Number Two sat in in The Prisoner. Wiesbaden was thoroughly stressing me out by now, so I splurged on time.

In the end, I found what became my favorite hotel ever (comfortable, safe, friendly staff, cable TV, free internet stations, and a completely free minibar) in Frankfurt, and decided I’d forego Wiesbaden for the big, international city nearby.

I swear to you, my German’s pretty good, but I seriously did not understand it. I thought the first word was missing by some accident, and it said “Long Live Vegan!” What an odd message, I thought. Does someone have (or had) an Indian friend they deeply admire? Does the Hindu religion include a god Vegan, and this is how you honor him?

Later, much later, I realized the message said exactly what it said: “Live Vegan!” But that really didn’t make any sense. Here I was in Germany, with the most freakin’ awesome cheese I’ve ever had; fantastic, sometimes freaky, but always amazingly delicious cold cuts and sausages; and some of the world’s best milk chocolate. And here was someone suggesting living vegan? What???!!! Do you wear hair shirts and flagellate yourself as you walk over the cobblestoned streets in your plastic shoes, too?

I can’t believe it. I think it still says Long Live Vegan.

Cruising along the Rhein is a popular tourist activity, but unfortunately, they’re extremely limited in the off-season. So instead, for only 10 euros, I rented a touring bike from Bacharach’s friendly bike store, and rode along the bike path that runs right along the Rhein River between Bacharach and Bingen.

At first, I headed south towards Trechtingshausen, a path that took me past two castles. One was closed for the winter, and a briefly considered checking out the other. But it seemed like overkill: after all, I was staying in a castle already, and no castle tour can compete with that.

And I was thoroughly enjoying the beautiful Rhein River, where I could watch shipping boats sailing down it, ferries furiously fighting the current as they carried cars from one side of the river to another, and the trains running along either side.

Like any river, the Rhein River will rise and flood, so the villages are set back aways from it, and the walls to the village will often show high water marks. In many cases, the pathway towards the Rhein from the village has charming little arches like this:

Instead of biking up to a castle, I biked around Trechtingshausen instead, and came upon this painting on the local fire station:

The area was full of imagery that a fantasist would adore. Here’s a gnome running loose with the region’s most beloved foods, wine and sausage:

And remnants from Roman times are interspersed with more modern echoes of them, like these little clay heads I saw not only here, but in other places:

My bike was so fast, I’d made it to Trechtingshausen in far less than an hour, and my bike rental was good until 8 pm. So I headed back to Bacharach. My favorite place to have a beer was a charming little tavern in Bacharach called “The Coinery.” The proprietess puffed away, completely indifferent to the anti-smoking laws which have banned smoking from all public places in Germany. I don’t smoke myself, but I find it comforting to be with Europeans who smoke as Europeans should. The radio station she was dialed into played only songs sung in German, which included a cover of Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” After hearing Deutschland Sucht Den Superstar finalists singing in English with a German accent, I preferred to hear songs, even ones I knew in their English version, sung in German in Germany.

I asked the proprietress how old the building was, because the answer to such questions was almost amazing to my American sensibilities. “It dates back to 1356,” she told me. I must have looked really dazed, because her husband came and gave me a flyer with the story of Burg Stahleck (the castle), and how the king established this coin mint which created guilders for the area, until Friedrich the First moved the mint to Heidelberg.

I looked in my guidebook for suggestions on where I might bike to next, and asked the proprietress how far away Oberwessel was. “Not far,” she told me: “Maybe 5 kilometers at most.” I could hack that on my fast bike, so I headed north from Bacharach. I had to make do with a wide sidewalk instead of the bike path, and I was surprised to see quite a few people camping on the beach by the Rhein. There were official campgrounds on the Rhein just south of Bacharach, but these people had foregone even that. And even though it was a late drizzly weekday in February, they’d put up a tent and were kicking back by a fire.

Oberwessel is somewhat larger than Bacharach, and like almost every bend on the Rhein, has a castle that overlooks it:

And, just like Bacharach, it’s full of old Tudor houses and big wine barrels:

Once again, I went into a grocery store and stared dumbfounded at the cold cuts until a deli counter worker came up to me and explained them to me. At this point, I think Germans are convinced Californians have no food, or at the very least, no meat or good rolls.

By this time, I was pretty pooped out. I’d been biking up and down the Rhein River all day, and it was beginning to get dark. I returned my bike, and climbed the hill back to my castle. But my time in Bacharach has a postscript.

The next morning, I was trundling my suitcases down the hill, and I’d stopped to catch my breath and enjoy the view. A sprightly man came bounding down the hill and offered to help me. I took him up on his offer, and though I think he was older than me, he bounced down that hill, with me jogging to catch up. We stopped briefly when he wanted to point out the Werner Chapel to me, just above the village, and right on the way to Burg Stahlek:

It’s just a ruined shell now, but it has a dark history. From it spurred several anti-Jewish pogroms, and in that context, appeared in Henrich Heine’s Rabbi of Bacharach. Now it’s been rehabilitated as a symbol of tolerance between Christianity and Judaism, and it’s jointly owned by the city and the local synagogue.

Just below the Werner Chapel where some goats which I’d noticed earlier. The little rocky spot below the chapel seems like an odd place to keep goats, but my companion explained their presence: they’re used to keep the brush at bay in spots like this where a lawnmover would be impossible.

At the bottom of the hill, we parted and I asked him where he’d come from, because I thought all the townspeople lived in the village. But he, too, lived on top of the hill (though not in the castle), which probably explains why he was so fit and could bound over those steps so easily.

But when I found out that a castle on the Rhein River had been remodelled into a youth hostel, and a nice youth hostel at that, I knew where I was going to spent at least one of my nights in Germany. The Rhein River, especially between Koblenz and Mainz, is lousy with castles, old Tudor buildings, and narrow cobblestoned streets. It really has a magical fairytale personality, and especially in the summer, is a bustling tourist destination. And with my youth hostel card for just 23 euros ($35) a night, I could live like a princess.

As I found out just while trying to buy a ticket to Bacharach, the place is not pronounced Bak-a-rak, as in Burt, but more like Bakh-a-rah, after Bacchus, the god of wine. In the winter time, the little town almost shuts down. The castle stands high up on a hill, looking down on the town, and thanks to a tip I’d read on line, I wisely called a taxi to get an 8-euro ride to the top instead of trying to pull up my luggage. Here is the castle about 3/4 of the way up on the path:

It’s every bit as old and full of character as you’d expect a castle to be, and in quite a few spaces there were no steps, simply long slate driveways, all the better for driving a carriage up the castle. Here’s what it looks like walking up to the entance of the castle:

I had a room that I daresay was bigger and brighter (and cleaner!) than my room in Cologne’s Altstadt, and it looked right over the courtyard. If I leaned out I could even get a view of the mountain we were on:

If a knight had come by to rescue me, I could have jumped right down from my window onto his horse. As it was, I made do to waving to the Japanese girls who sat smoking on the steps at night.

Out on the courtyard, there was an even more stunning view onto the little town below and the Rhein River:

I had almost the same view of the river from the castle’s dining room, where I enjoyed the included breakfast. In fact, the dining room doubled as the castle’s community room and also served lunch and dinner for a small surcharge, and was a very quiet bar at night. On my first night there, I was feeling lonely, so I went downstairs, since youth hostels are usually sociable places. But all I found was a group of young Brits playing a card game and speaking incomprehensible English. I could only understand about every third word as spoken by one of them who’d every so often break into Londonese, a dialect I have heard. I don’t know what the other ones were speaking though, and I was too shy to ask. It’s not good karma to play cards with people who speak a language you don’t understand.

The path up and down to the castle gave me great exercise, but it was scenic as well. Here’s the beginning of the path going back down to the town:

And the castle itself had lots of intriguing details, from the very old, like chains by the stairs and  this horse hitch on the side of the castle:

And more modern, like this dragon-shaped gutter spout:

I really loved being in a castle and the youth hostel type accommodation and the related price were a bonus. I ended up spending two nights instead of one, and I delighted in my housing as much as in the little charming Rhein River villages below.

On Monday morning, after I’d spent much of the cash I’d had on German commie postcards and music, Struwwelhitler, and other treasures at the House of History, I needed more to mail German comics to Peter and to pay my expenses for the next few days.

But to my horror, the ATM at the Cologne train station, the very same one which had dispensed money to me twice already, told me my ATM card was incompatible with the system. Half in shock, I went to another ATM, which told me the same thing. I started to panic. Had someone hacked my card? Was my bank account cleaned out? Back at home, it was the wee hours of the morning, my bank couldn’t answer, and Peter couldn’t talk to them on my behalf.

So I did the one thing I really really hadn’t wanted to do, but had to, and got a 200 euro cash advance on my credit card. I mailed Peter’s books off and bought a train ticket to Bacharach, and desperately hoped the ATM machine there would be more forgiving.

When I arrived at the youth hostel castle in Bacharach, I tried to pay for my room with my credit card, but to my complete abject horror, now my credit card wouldn’t run. I’d been proud of speaking German exclusively, but I was actually grateful there was a British clerk at the desk and she could tell me in language I could clearly understand that it was likely their card reader that was at fault, not my card. But it was still horrible. I went to Bacharch and had two beers at one of the few restaurants open in the off-season, and then made my dinner with the leftovers of my Kaufland stash.

My credit card worked the next day, but my ATM card was dead. Only when I got home and was able to pick up messages on my American cell phone, did I find out my bank had locked down the card after seeing transactions come across it from far away Cologne. While I should be grateful for the security, I was in a hard place, and I didn’t have another decent meal in Germany because I was afraid my cash would run out.