Surprisingly the German train from Amsterdam to Mannheim was delayed by a whole 10 minutes. This crushed the stereotype that all Germans are punctual and mechanically savvy.
Any who we arrived at the train station pretty much on time and met my dads good friend, Thomas. Thomas has an older brother who owns a car rental business so renting a car for 3 days and handing me the keys wasn't a problem. Wooh!
I was getting very excited at the idea of traveling around Germany in my own personal car when I noticed a gear stick protruding out of where there should have been a cup holder. This is where it gets interesting. Basically I can't drive a manual car and we have no way of getting to the house without abandoning it. Thomas decides that the best solution to this problem is to give me a quick 20 second theory lesson and a one minute practical. After a series of unsuccessful jagged starts and stops and accidental engine shut downs, Thomas sighs, looks at his watch and tells me I'm ready to drive 10km to his house.
Shit scared doesn't even begin to describe what I was feeling. Here I was driving on the opposite side of the road, in a country I'm not familiar with, in a car ive never seen, that's not an automatic. I'm pretty sure pablo was as scared of death as me, but he put on a very convincing poker face and ended IP assisting me every now and then by grabbing the wheel when I focused on changing gears. We probably got closest to death when the car stalled in the middle of a round about. Fortunately we made it without any major casualties and got to visit the entire ficher family.
Over some amazing food and great whether we talked about past adventures, how much I had grown, and what we planned to do in Germany. Overall we were treated exceptionally well.
Its pretty crazy to realize that all the emotions I wanted to experience while in Germany including; fear, excitement, joy etc were all experienced in the first hour of being in Germany.
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