I come from the land of chocolate

 We arrived after an uneventful flight, at least uneventful for me because I slept for nearly the entire trip. The Munich airport is full of delights. After going through immigration, a woman approached us with her boarding pass, asking what her gate was. I tried to explain that they hadn’t assigned her gate yet. We have encountered this before, that Lufthansa doesn’t assign a gate until 1 hour before takeoff. Anyway, my explanation wasn’t helping but Jane noticed she had a Chinese name on her boarding pass. She asked her if she spoke Mandarin, and the woman was visibly relieved and excited. Jane explained that she had to check the monitors, helped her find her flight, and explained the time at which she will know her gate. I thought the woman was going to hug Jane, in a very non-Chinese manner, but she settled for the close vigorous handshake. I recall a few trips to Munich ago when Joel and I had to wait in long customer service lines to be instructed on how the Munich airport works. We understood her relief but were mostly intensely proud of Jane. I bet the woman retells the tale of the American teenager in Munich that spoke Mandarin. 

After that, we spent our layover perusing things we didn’t need in shops. Highlights included:


Busty German rubber duckie


The food and drink robot

A bag that comes with extra rhinestones, because they know you’ll lose some

A shockingly expensive net bag, reminiscent of fishing net

Very comfortable pajama-like clothes

Just party wieners for sale in the airport

airport art of a German actor and his dog

Giant Dummies

This toy that is marked as “not a toy”

the branded smoking lounge worth a Winston

And finally, this German wiener dog in lederhosen pictured on goods sold all over the airport.


Comments

  1. MikeMarch 9, 2025 at 1:57 PM

    Jane to the rescue! What are the odds of encountering a Mandarin-speaking Texas teenager at a German airport? No doubt, that poor lady was both stunned and relieved. Your Munich shopping tips will be very helpful this Christmas. Danke schon!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sylvia.griffith@gmail.comMarch 14, 2025 at 6:13 AM

    Jane's exchange with the Chinese woman did more for the image of the American teenager than a million positive public service messages could do! In years to come, everyone in China will assume that American teenagers are all polyglots.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Smile, Laugh, Travel

Image
We had a booked walking tour of Naples at 1000.  However, and I’d really like to stress how dark our rooms were, we slept until 10am.  Drat.  Nevermind, we decided to freestyle our own walking tour. Though you can’t tell from the face she’s making, Jane still loves a hotel breakfast. We all laughed about the slogan for our hotel, “Smile, Laugh, Travel” so Joel and Jane acted it out for you here: Our hotel gave us a free ornament of some type.  The explanation only said it was a symbolic of Naples, but didn’t clarify what it represented.  We guessed a horn.  The same symbol is on our furniture too.  As we started our walking tour, we discovered it was a pepper and they were everywhere.  Considered a good luck symbol on jewelry, we saw peppers all over, from street vendors to shops. We stopped in the Duomo cathedral. Saint Gennaro’s blood is apparently an ancient relic in this church.  The sign says it turns from viscous to liquid, a scientific...
Read more

Welcome Home.

Image
Sorry for the skipped post.  Yesterday turned out to be a busy and exhausting one.  Jane and I treated ourselves to sleeping in and going to bed early with no blogging. The Kuala Lumpur airport was like every other, but also fairly easy to navigate.  Large and modern, there were many choices for eating and shopping.  Again we failed to find breakfast we could stomach so we stopped in an airline lounge instead.  I have never been more relieved for a club soda with lime and a veggie omelette. This dim sum restaurant was doing a massive breakfast business.  We just stared and repeated the word “nope” to each other. Nothing here looked appealing.  The quick grab options all had turnoffs.  Room temperature lunch meat was a no.  Yowza, at any time of day.  Our credit card allowed us entry into our pick of 5 lounges. We picked this swanky joint.  We were pretty dang hungry at this point.  While the airport functioned like all other ai...
Read more

Minecraft by Swarovski

Image
Welcome to Part 2 of our Singapore story! I’ll be writing this portion as I meet up with Jane for the end of her program. We then head to Osaka to visit Mio, our exchange student from last summer. For me, the first step was from our new home in Traverse City, MI. Beth and I are thrilled with our new digs, and have greatly enjoyed watching it take shape as we unpack and arrange everything. I can’t wait to return in a few weeks to see how much it will have shaped up under Beth’s direction. The Traverse City airport (Cherry Capital Airport) is tiny. For example, the United counter had three automated check-in kiosks, and two were out of service. But there were still only three people in front of me checking in, so the wait was negligible. Similarly, at Security, the longest part of the process was waiting for the conveyor belt to carry my bag from the bag scanner to the place where I could pick it up. And with the National Cherry Festival wrapping up the weekend prior, this is a busy ...
Read more