Catching up again. Our visit to Freudenstadt was mostly very pleasant, but was marred by someone vandalising the car we were borrowing from our French family. Someone put a long dent (but somehow, didn’t scratch the paint) on the passenger side. When we saw it we were sick about it, and remained that way for 3-4 days. Fortunately the French family was very good about it; they said that it was just a part of the risks you took in doing a car exchange. Still, we feel really bad about it and offered to pay whatever the cost of getting it fixed.
We discovered the damage the evening we arrived in Freudenstadt, and immediately afterwards Suzie and I went off to find a grocery store to buy some things for dinner. After 45 minutes of searching, we finally stopped and asked someone, who directed us to the “Kauffland.” This was a large building surrounded by a large, double-level parking lot (with a very miss-able entrance, we missed it twice). When we entered the store, everyone was pushing shopping carts filled with food, but there was no food to be seen anywhere. There were televisions, bicycles, electical cords, CD-Rs, underwear, socks, batteries, sporting goods … the place looked like Wal Mart, not a grocery store. Finally we found, at the very corner of this enormous space, a moving stairway that lead to a second, lower level, which was the biggest grocery store we’ve seen in Europe. Not quite as big as Safeway, but impressively close. But we couldn’t seem to find anything we wanted, maybe because we were tired from the day’s travel. It just seemed like a bad scene all around, the lines were long, the store had a very uninviting industrial feel to it, the people weren’t particulary friendly, and my German wasn’t being resurrected the way I thought it would be. I will always remember the Kauffland as being a bit surreal.
Our hotel was a small facility located in an area called Lauterbad about 1 mile south of the main city. One of the area’s claim to fame is its natural mineral water baths. Our hotel had a small indoor pool filled not with clorinated water, but with naturally-heated clear, soft mineral water. It also had a sauna. Very refreshing after the Kauffland experience.
The next morning we had breakfast in the dining room (it came with the room and was delicious), then hiked on a trail through the woods to the city. Another claim to fame of the city is its glass. There was a place where a man was making hand-blown glass, and we sat and watched for about 20 minutes. It was fascinating to see how deftly he could create various different pieces from the viscous hot material: vases, small animal ornaments, and so on. After that we walked around the city. German cities are almost eerily clean and ordered, pretty but in almost an unreal way, and this one was no exception. After lunch we walked back to the hotel, and then experienced the Panorama Bad.
The Panorama Bad is an enormous indoor swimming center. We saw ads for it and thought the boys would enjoy it. We had a great deal of trouble finding it (this was universally true in Freudenstadt). When we found the entrance, it was like we were on board the U.S.S. Enterprise (the Star Trek version, not the real thing). Rather than just taking our money and letting us in, we were given bands for our wrists that held one large circular colored disc. The disc, when placed against a larger round disc next to the entrance to the facility, caused the larger round disc to light up, and opened the entrance. Once past the entrace, we tried to find a locker, but the room we entered into was a series of maze-like aisles, some for people with shoes, some for people without shoes, some for men, some for women, some for both, some for families. None of them seemed to lead directly to the pool. I finally found an aisle that looked appropriate for a man and two boys with shoes, got a locker, and changed. (Suzie reported that she worked her locker by placing her wrist-disc against a disc on her locker, which lit up and allowed the locker to open. (I am not making this up.) Once we changed, we reached a point where we could see the facilities through a glass door … but it was locked (with no disc either). We finally figured out that you had to go through shower rooms to get to the pool, so we made it in.
And, it was quite a facility. A huge regular pool, a large diving pool, a heated half-indoor, half-outdoor pool, a baby pool, and a 110 foot water slide that emptied into yet another pool. Two observations: First, liability laws must be different in Germany than in the U.S., because basically the entire facility was unsupervised, even the diving pool, which had a 10-foot springboard diving board (you can’t even find a pool in the U.S. anymore that has a 10-foot springboard) and the water slide (which was a wild rush of children running, pushing, and landing on each other at the end of the slide). Second, I have never felt thinner in my life … or more tanned! I’m pretty white, but the people in this pool were as white or (scary to conceive of) even whiter than me. Suzie looked Middle-Eastern. So if you are ever feeling fat and pale, go to a pool in Germany.
We never figured out why the wrist discs were necesary, since there was only one entrance, and you couldn’t get in unless you paid. It was as if they were saying … we have this groovy technology and by golly you’re going to use it. I have to mention that the discs reminded me of the training collars that Captain James T. Kirk and his crew had to wear when they were captured and forced to be “Thrals” (gladiators that fought battles so that a higher-order intelligence could make wagers). I’m sure my fellow Trekkies will remember that episode, it had the striking blonde alien woman in the skimpy costume who falls for Kirk (well, maybe all the episodes did, but I seem to recall some brunettes too, and at least one fell for Spock).
Time to end this post. Pictures follow.
Categories: Travel -- France