Posting Again on the advice of Daniel Beaumont

Today My bride sailed down the Rhein River from Amsterdam and went past my father’s hometown of Sankt Goarhausen.  The town from the picture my bride messaged me looks the same as it did the last time I saw it as as 16 yeard old in 1965.

In that year  my parents took myself and my two brothers to Europe for three months touring the continent. It was three months of 5 adults crammed into a Beetle driving  from church to museum to relative then repeat. I preferred to be home listening to the Beatles.  The experience made me a non tourist for life.

My idea of seeing Europe is to backpack all day  and then converse extensively with the locals in pubs, coffee houses and wine tastings.  And so I backpack alone192 miles from Frankfort to Bonn next week, climbing 35,000 feet in the process, walking past 24 castles and innumerable pubs and wine houses. 72 % of the Rheinsteig trail I will be hiking looks down on the Rhein River from a height of 1000-1500 feet.  At the end of the day I come down to the village below, find my pension and converse with locals in tongue.  September is wine festival season along the Rhein.  All of my lodging has been carefully picked to avoid English speakers: mostly pensions and AirBNBs.

To this end I have spent three to four hours a day since April relearning German, a language I have not spoken since my father passed in 1978.  I found a podcast called News in Slow German that I hear and repeat during long practice hikes.  In the morning I hang out on the Easy German youtube site learning German from street interviews conducted in the language. At night I increase my vocab using Babbel.  Finaaly I have used a site called language exchange that pairs users who want to practice each others language either by texting or chatting online.  It is so much easier to learn a language now.

The Easy German site has numerous interviews with non native soeakers who speak German fluently despite having never been to Germany.  One interview that stands out is with a Singapore resident who speaks like a native German.  The German interviewer asked him how he learned to speak so well. The student replied that he has longed walked around speaking  German to himself as he describes what he is doing and experiencing.  Discipline is remembering what you want and I have taken up his approach.

Sankt Goarhausen 2018 as seen from a glass of wine on ship

A friend I met on the Facebook page for the El Camino Northen Route wrote an excellant blog today regarding the need to write on a daily basis to, among other things, organize ones thoughts and fine tune the ability to express oneself. I thought this an excellant piece of advice, rarely seen amongst the tribal postings of social media.  My 27 year old friend moves me to post daily of which this is the first.  Daniel is correct; I do feel more energized having written this.