amdavidson

Small Town Germany

posted on 2010-03-31 - amd.im/rLVJ

This week and part of last I have spent in a very small town in Germany.

I grew up in a different small town in California, and in some ways it reminds me of home, but at the same time, it is ever so different.

The hotel’s sign and front yard

The hotel I am staying in has somewhere around 10 rooms. Mine is on the 3rd floor, right next to the owners’ apartment. It’s my understanding that all the employees of the hotel are family, and it appears that all, or nearly all, of them live there. Because the guy who checks you in also cooks you dinner, and the lady that brings you coffee also hooks up your internet (more on this later), it has a bed and breakfast feel.

The first night I stayed in this hotel, I arrived rather late after having driven all the way from Frankfurt, both GPS-less and hopelessly lost. I panicked to see that all the lights were off and the door locked. After spending a few minutes wondering who to call to resolve this (I had not made the reservation myself), I noticed that there was an intercom somewhat near the door. I rang it and was told in heavily accented english that “[I] must be Mr. Davidson, and that my key was inside on the chair and I could let myself in”. Sure enough, they unlocked the front door and my key was sitting on a chair with a hand written note with my name and room number.

A couple nights ago, I think I was the only guest staying in the hotel. I’m told this is commonplace during weekends as most people only come to visit the few companies here and leave for larger cities on the weekend when they are not working. I followed suit and went to Stuttgart for the day (see my earlier museum posts).

When I returned I found that again, the lights were off and the owners nowhere to be seen. This was another inconvenience but not because I couldn’t get in (I now had my key) but because I was planning to eat at the hotel and I needed the lady to log my room onto the internet, a daily process that seems horrifically antiquated but provides a reasonably fast internet connection.

Fortunately, I had a remedy for the food. Earlier in the day I had asked for recommendations of good places to eat from one of the vendor’s employees and he gave me the name and address of a restaurant not far from the hotel. I plugged the info into the GPS of my new rental car and got there with no trouble. I was surprised to see that the restaurant was being run out of what appeared to be the living room of a man’s substantial home. I walked in and was again the only person in sight, besides the owner/waiter/cook. He was a nice gentleman who spoke excellent English (again fortuitous because I could not read the menu). He told me that his ‘deer medallions’ were excellent and that I should order those. They were, in fact, quite good as were his ‘black forest noodles’.

The internet was resolved in a different way. I took the early evening of the innkeepers as a hint and laid down with a book early.