Former Home Towns Are Former For A Reason

The girls are bouncing like rubber balls with excitement. Opa waves us goodbye from the platform as our train pulls out of Salzburg Hbf (short for Hauptbahnhof = train station, but which the kids jokingly pronounce "hibbbff") towards Passau, Germany, where we lived for much of 2005. The ride through the bright, rolling countryside is smooth like only a German train can be. Seriously, you could perform eye surgery while riding on these trains.

This visit presents a challenge for Therese and me as parents, for there is no real agenda and no dominating attraction; we're here mostly to bring back the memory of having lived here. In practice this means a lot of dragging tired kids through crowded streets and pointing at things.

"Look, Cornelia, there's the statue you used to climb on as a toddler."
"That's really great, dad. Can we move into the shade?"

At the end of one such tour, we climb to the Oberhaus Castle above the Danube river which cuts the city in two. The climb is exhausting for all of us, but the hope of the Oberhaus Café's world-famous Linzertorte (a hazelnut-raspberry cake)

that I remember so fondly drives us on. Miraculously they still have it, and it's just as delicious as I remember. The kids gorge themselves on the raspberry jam filling and buttery crust, forgiving their parents in an instant for the climb we'd just put them through.

We recuperate over a delightful dinner at the home of old friends. While the adults prattle on about the Salzburger public theatre and its funding needs, the girls discover these heavy granite balls in the back yard; meant as ornamentation to go with the garden gnomes, the kids use the balls as grist mills to smash currant berries into pulp. Ostensibly this is to provide the birds with currant jam to spread onto their breakfast worms, but we know what's really involved: this is all about watching red things go splat.

On the train ride out the next day, Cornelia and I discuss the merits and demerits of public pay-toilets, a maddening and ubiquitous feature of Passau and much of Germany.

Passau's city centre has undergone beautiful renovations since we lived there, but by clinging to their 1950's-pay-toilet culture and by actually curtailing their bus service (perhaps as a demented, satirical way of paying for the new bus terminal), the city planners blew their chance to make their new city actually enjoyable as well as just, well, new. I am now even more pleased with our choice to live in Salzburg and have no need to see Passau again.

Escape is in order! To the topaz lakes, wild-flower meadows, and surround-sound mountains of Weißenbach where Therese's parents own a 1/3 share (complicated, story best saved for a fire-side chat over brandy) in a summer lake-side home. Weißenbach provides a refreshing taste of pure enjoyment after our tedious, more-dutiful-than-pleasurable visit in Passau.

We go for a dip in the bone-chilling lake, putting genuine smiles on everyone's faces for the first time in many hours.