Wednesday, 29 August 2012

It's a beautiful sunny weekend. We are in Germany. What a great day for a wedding!

We have just had a brilliant weekend over in Lower Saxony helping to celebrate the wedding of our friends Heinz and Birgit.
These guys have been an item for twelve years, so I guess it was only a matter of time before they finally got around to tying the knot.
Birgit is a great individual, full of life and interesting. Over the years I've been amazed at how well both these guys bond with each other. Great stuff!
As for Heinz, well Julia, Heinz and myself go way back to 1979 when we first met whilst Heinz and I were working for Lep International in Auckland.
The wedding venue and accommodation were located in the middle of nowhere, down country, about 80km south of Hamburg.
We will get into the trip south in a moment, however a word first about the festivities.
We were booked into a country retreat called Gut Thansen near Soderstorf (fingers on the Google Map.......GO!) Gut Thansen is a classy getaway of two old heritage buildings of the court, the former pigsty and stables. Needless to say, we drew the short straw and bunked down in the pigsty.  The wedding took place within an old windmill (Muhle) in another metropolis called Eyendorf.  As for the ceremony, well, .....it was in German. Let me just summarise by saying the celebrant dotted all the 'i's and crossed every 't' in sight. The highlight for me was the tenor Birgit had organised for the occasion. In front of about eighty punters this young guy fairly let rip into a couple of numbers. I have to say that this chap's performance was a tad emotional. I had a word with this dude afterwards (he answers to Stefan ) who confided to me that he had been a little nervous as he had never performed before without being accompanied by the piano.
The reception, it's the same wherever you go. Heaps of happy guests having a great time, lots of eating , drinking and dancing and both of the happy couple putting in the hard yards leading the charge.
It's a bit of a weird feeling watching a good mate of thirty something years getting re-hitched. Both Julia and yours truly came away feeling really good about the weekend .
Now, back to the trip down.
Things started to liven up after having arrived at Hamburg airport. We approached the Avis rental counter to pick up the car.
As I neared the counter I was confronted with the sight of two check in desks, the one on the left free and manned by a pleasant looking young woman and the counter on the right with one customer (a really amusing Pom) and manned by a really fierce looking middle aged woman. She appeared like she was about to burst out of her uniform and was giving off very scary vibes.
Naturally, I approached the free desk on the left and was just about to stick my documents into the outstretched hands of the young woman when her mate on her left gave me a "death ray " withering look and barked at me "ARE YOU A PREFERRED CUSTOMER? IF YOU ARE NOT - YOU CAN'T APPROACH THE PREFERRED CUSTOMER COUNTER. WELL?"
OK, I freely admit it, I got a hell of a shock by her delivery so I immediately went into reflex mode and responded "I think I am"  "ARE YOU!  YES OR NO?"
"Alright, then that's a yes."
This scary woman then barks at her fellow worker. I didn't need a translation . You could read it in her eyes "you just watch that English man with the funny accent. Don't let him trick  you. If he can't prove he's a preferred customer send him over to me. I'll deal with this foreigner."
At this moment the Pom in the queue next to me broke into a laugh, turned to me and says " you better behave yourself, I think you have got her angry."
Then in the blink of an eye, this angry ant stares us both down and barks " I AM NOT ANGRY!........... I am not angry."
I don't quite know what it is about these type of conversations, however what I can tell you is that when they happen both Julia and I generally end up laughing hysterically and falling all about the place.
On this occasion we followed a safety first option and kept our poker faces on until we had exited the rental area. 
What a woman!  Where do they dig up these characters? Julia suggested she must have been a distant relative of the now retired Wynn, the Devil Woman who used to terrorise the front counter back at our Dolphin Sqaure apartments.
I would like to tell you that was the end of the day's dramas.  No such luck!
There are two main arterial routes ex-Hamburg airport that head south in the general direction of our destination. Highway 1 that blasts straight through the central city area as it heads south and highway 7,  that avoids the central area. Heinz suggested we should check our GPS system should be tweaked to ensure we use the more circuitous route to avoid the city.
It was a great plan in theory, however less than a minute into our planned sixty minute journey we started hitting heavy traffic. What we didn't appreciate is  this route travelled under the Elbe river, a bottleneck that was suffering from total vehicle overload. In the first two hours of our journey we travelled no more than 20kms, and at one point we sat for forty five minutes in the middle of our four lane highway with our vehicle engine turned off.
Isn't it weird? Germany prides itself on it's ruthless efficiency and here we were stuck in the middle of a massive traffic jam. It's kind of reassuring to know that on the "road front" Hamburg suffers the same sort of traffic hassles that London and other big cities are pilloried for as examples of poorly organised transport systems.
None of these dramas dampened our enthusiasm of our weekend. In fact all this pre-arrival action only served to heighten the enjoyment of our weekend experience.

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