We glided up a green river between greener hills into the foggy German countryside this morning, ready to dock in the charming German town of Passau. At Passau's famous confluence, we took the middle path up the dark green-brown Danube, watching the light green River Inn stream by on our right and the deep blue River Ilz on our right. Because it is the point where three powerful rivers meet, Passau is extremely prone to flooding. The city was built at the standard water level, with a little extra space for small floods that sometimes soak the streets along the river, but every once in a while, things get out of control. It was a appropriately raining day as we stepped off the boat, led by an exceptionally pleasant young lady named Annalina, who cheerfully pointed out a 30-foot-tall ruler painted on the side of the town hall marking the water levels during the worst floods in the city's history. At the very top, it read "15 Aug.1501," and, just three feet below it, more than two stories off the ground, the second highest mark read "3 Jun. 2013."
"We had to barricade our houses with sandbags, and we have special metal sheets that cover the windows and doors so we do not go swimming in our living rooms!" Annalina told us a little too cheerfully.
She pointed across the river at the Veste Oberhaus, a massive palace on top of the city's northernmost hill, which once belonged to Passau's prince-bishops before becoming Bavaria's equivalent of the Bastille -- a show prison for the few most infamous political prisoners. Painted in striking colors on the palace's side were dozens of fake windows (to avoid paying the sunlight tax) and Passau's heraldic symbol, the black wolf. Beneath it was a tremendously confusing inscription which read "1ᴥ99".
"Can anyone guess what this means?" Annalina asked us from under her red umbrella.
My best guess was something to do with a Jesus fish, which was not a good guess at all.
"It says '1499,' which is the year they have made the castle fancier. The second number is half an 8, which is 4, you see?" Annalina smiled as if that were a totally normal way for numbers to work.
As we wandered up the hill into the less flood-prone center of the city, Annalina regaled us with tales of crossing the border into Austria to buy cheap gas for her car, while Austrians crossed the opposite way into Germany for cheap toothpaste and shampoo.
"My boyfriend is a police officer who works at the border, but it is not very dangerous because Austria is very nice to us and we are very nice to them. Once, his friends pulled me over for speeding on my way to Austria and they said, 'Annalina, you can have a ticket or you can bake us a cake.' So I baked a cake for all the policemen over there."
The world does not deserve Annalina.
We toured the incredible St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is really massive compared to the size of Passau. It is the proud home of the largest church organ outside the United States, a very impressive structure with 17,774 pipes in all. It also has nine bells with tremendously fun names like Pounder, Striker, Preacher, Eleven O'Clock, The Sign, and Misery.
Passau is a silly place.
After Annalina released us to our free time with a cheerful, "'Smile at the world, and the world will smile back at you.' This is what my mother is saying!", my mom and I wandered down to Kaffeehaus Anton, a delightful, pastel-colored coffee shop popular with students from the University of Passau, for our mandatory mid-afternoon espresso. Pretty proud of my ability to order coffee in German at this point. We had a very pleasant stroll through the city, ducking into a few shops here an there and generally enjoying our time, before we were suddenly approached by a slightly panicked-looking German student clutching the arm of an elderly man who was unsteady on his feet and covered in bruises.
"Do you speak English? Can you help? He says he wants to go to the boat, but I do not know the boat!"
We immediately recognized the Avalon Riverways tour headset hanging from a lanyard around the man's neck -- lucky for everyone, he had stumbled across someone else from his boat in a slightly distant part of Passau.
Between the student's mediocre English and my mom's rusty Germany, we were able to figure out that the elderly man had been stumbling down the road and collapsed right in front of the student, hitting his head on the cobblestones and getting bruises all over his arms and hands. The elderly man muttered something about jelly beans in a thick New Zealand accent.
We carefully walked him back toward our boat, each of us supporting one arm and walking as slowly as we could, and when I got close, I ran ahead to grab someone from the boat to look after him. Some of the crew came out onto the road to help him up and onto the boat, followed by an elderly woman scolding everyone in her New Zealand accent and telling the elderly gentleman he should have taken his jelly beans earlier. Eventually we figured out that he was diabetic and had fainted due to low blood sugar after getting separated from the tour group in town. The crew quickly hustled him into his room to lie down and have some sugar, and by dinner time, he was up and feeling 100% again. We sat next to him and his wife at dinner every night for the rest of the trip. They would sit on opposite sides of the table to order, then switch to sitting in the booth together and whispering at each other until their food arrived. It was so sweet to see an elderly couple still so adorably in love.
The next morning, we disembarked in Passau and send goodbye to the crew as they loaded all of us onto motorcoaches for the drive inland to Munich. I was sad to watch the river fade out of sight and even sadder about how much everyone was vaping on the bus.
Our hotel was conveniently located near the train station, and we got settled in for a while before going on a slightly haphazard and very rainy tour of Munich. Luckily I'd been to Munich before, but I was sad that my mom didn't get the full experience. We stopped at Schloss Nymphenburg, the former residence of the Wittelsbachs when they ruled Bavaria. We didn't get to see the inside of the Baroque palace, but we did have a nice stroll through the gardens despite the cold and rain. We also watched a woman walk face-first into a very clean plate glass window.
Then the bus dropped us off at the Marienplatz, the city's main pedestrian district, which is home to a huge farmer's market and plenty of shops and biergartens. We were just in time to watch the famous Rat-haus Glockenspiel (literally "town hall clock game"), which is a massive cuckoo clock with life-size human figures that dance, joust, and generally do cuckoo clock things at certain times of day, commemorating the marriage of Duke Wilhelm V and Renata of Lorraine in 1568.
It was a very long day on the road, and we were expecting an equally long day to come, so we kept it low-key and had dinner in the hotel before climbing into our exceptionally plush German beds for a very good sleep.