Bavarian animal barns are attached to the homes in which farm families live. That's not to say they mingle amongst one another, it's more like what we Torontonians would call a semi-detached dwelling. Connie's on one side, Elenka and I on the other - see photos of our semi-detached house vs a Bavarian barn/home. We paid a visit to one such farm, it was where Renate Schönbach was born and raised. Her brother Gunter still runs the farm with his wife and two children. They also take care of Renate and Gunter's 99 year-old mother. Mama doesn't say much, but she took a strong liking to me right from the get-go. Her face lit up like a Christmas tree every time we looked at one another. As it happened, I was left watching her while all the other adults were somewhere else. After a bunch of back-and-forth smiles she suddenly clasped my hand in both of hers and held it first against one of her cheeks and then the other. A couple of days earlier, Renate's older brother Georg had expressed his concerns about his mother, saying that she wasn't dead, but she wasn't alive either. With these smiles and the touchy, feely, there's more going on in this woman's head than meets the eye of Georg.

 
 The following day, I standing in line for the toilet at the back of our homebound airplane (we are home now). As I rested my hand atop a seat backrest the woman in front me held her, maybe one year old, baby girl. Suddenly, I felt something grab my finger. I looked down and it was the baby. I lifted up the finger beside it and the child clasped onto that one as well. Then she suddenly let both fingers drop and gave me a huge ear-to-ear smile, not unlike mama's. It's heartening to know that you can elicit such emotion from females when there's an almost 100 year age gap. Or do I just attract the ones who are coming in or going out?

 
The World Health Organization (WHO) gathers statistics on worldwide traffic fatalities. After my first experience on a German highway, where there are no speed limits, I rushed to my google device fully expecting to find that there are at least ten times more Germans killed on roads than there are in Canada. The only time a German driver doesn't exceed speed limits is when there are no speed limits. Speed limits do exist on certain roads. If the speed limit on a particular road is 60km per hour you can be sure there's a good reason for it, probably frequent hair-pin turns. The Germans, of course, are ready for this type of thing. They'll continue to drive at 80km - 85km, until just before the screeching turn. It's like being in a car at the Indianapolis 500.

 
By the time I got into the WHO site I was angry. How could German politicians allow these murderous, chaotic conditions? Were there no police in Germany? Then the site opened and moments later my jaw dropped. In 2013 there were roughly 50 percent more road fatalities in Canada than there were in Germany. 

 
I pondered this for days and think I have an answer. When I'm sitting in the back-seat of a car doing 160km an hour my brow dampens, armpits become moist. When a car passes the one I'm in, as though we are hardly moving, my whole body gets clammy wet. Does the experienced German driver feel the same way? Nope. And that, I believe, is because they have developed an acute alertness to their surroundings. Highway roads in Canada are limited at 80km - 100km per hour, even though we have similar super-speed cars. This in itself can make driving an activity where it is pretty easy to become bored. Boredom causes error. Error causes accidents. And that's my answer.

 
Back in the 70s a fellow I worked with spouted to all that the best beer in the world was brewed in Deutschland. Stupid square-head we all thought. Even the Yanks loved our Labatt Blue and Molson Canadian. But here, 40 years later, I found the b***** to be right.  

 
For Elenka and I though, nothing could touch the tasty Bavarian weißbier. But this is where it becomes tricky. Ask a Bavarian what weißbier means and half of them will tell you white beer, while the other half will say wheat beer. Add hefeweizen (yeast wheat) and weizenbier (wheat) to the mix and you're in for some big time confusion. Once, I got angry with a Deutscher who told me that it was called white beer because of the colour. I held a glass of it up to his face and said that it looked like a couple of spoonfuls of soil had been mixed into it and that 'murkybier' might be a far more appropriate name.  

 
German supermarkets devote probably twenty percent of their space to beer. And of that space, about ninety-eight percent is bottled beer, two percent cans. I was told that the only people who bought cans were smugglers or those unable to distinguish one taste from another. 

 
If you like beer you should visit Germany. Certain weißbiers, Erdinger for one, are available through our state owned liquor stores. Erdinger sells for about $2.50US. Our Canadian dollar takes that well beyond the three dollar mark. In Germany, a typical weißbier goes for about fifty US cents.