Templefahrt

In German when you want to describe a certain type of something you just squish all the separate words together.  So instead of two words, temple trip, you have one word, templefahrt.  Here's another one:  Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen. That's general (general) and staat (country, nation, state) and verordnet (decreed, enacted, ordained, ordered, prescribed) and versammlungen (congregations, gatherings, meetings).  Mark Twain says that means "meetings of the legislature". 
(Btw, here is a hilarious article written by Mark Twain on the German Language  http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)

Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was our driving experience.  It would be about a 4 hour drive to the temple in Frankfurt, but there was a stau (traffic jam) for about an hour so it took more like 5 hours, even when we can go 140 km/hour, which is about 93 mph.  That seems fast, but the cars in the far left lane just whip by us.  There's a huge difference in speed from the right lane to the left lane.  It seems crazy, but it works really well because everybody follows the rules.  You can never go faster than someone on your left.  If you're going faster than someone in the lane to the left of you, you need to move left and they need to move right.  If you're in the middle lane and people are always passing you and then moving back into the middle lane in front of you than you need to move right.  I frequently drive in the far right lane because my van doesn't have much get up and go (or maybe I should say getupandgo).  But if I am coming up on a truck that is going slow I'll check my mirror and move left to go around the truck and then move back right.  Sometimes when I'm on a longer trip I'll go mostly in the middle lane and drive faster.  I hardly ever venture into the far left lane because even if I look in the mirror and there's no one close, by the time I get over there and pass the car in front of me, some BMW or Audi station wagon is right on my tail and maybe flashing me.  They come up really fast.

There are sections of road where there are speed limits, like in a tunnel or if there's bad weather.  (Some speed limit signs are permanent and some are on LED screens and can change according to the weather.)  But other times they have a line through the speed limit and that means there is no speed limit.  If there is a limit, everybody follows it pretty well. 

It took awhile to get used to but now I like it.  You never have to worry about someone coming up fast on your right side.  Also, if there is traffic merging in on the right everyone moves left to let them in.  The entrance lane is not very long so they don't have a lot of time to get in.  Also, the exits curve fairly sharply and pretty fast.  When you move into the exit lane you have to slow down quickly to go around the curves of the exit.

In town driving you always give right-of-way to the person on your right unless they have a yield sign.  Sometimes there is a sign to show you that you have the right of way at an intersection, but sometimes you have to slow down and check to see if the traffic on your right has a yield sign.  So if you're driving on roads you don't know well you pretty much have to slow down for each intersection until you know who has the right-of-way.  German drivers sometimes don't even look left, only right.  For example, the road leading up to my house is a pretty big road compared to the cross streets.  In the US you'd have the right of way on that road because it's bigger than the others and you're going strait.  For the first 5 cross streets there are signs that tell you that you have the right of way.  After that I have to slow down at each intersection in case a car is coming up and I have to stop suddenly to let them turn in front of me.  That's in addition to pulling over for any oncoming car because the road is too narrow for two cars to pass each other because of other cars parked on the side.

We stopped at rest stops on our templefahrt.  The WC's, or water closets, are in their own building and they cost between 50 and 80 cents to get in.  They actually have a machine and turnstiles to regulate entrance.  But it's worth it!  That money pays for an attendant to keep them clean and the coolest toilet seat cleaning device.  I need to take a video of it.  When you stand up it automatically flushes and a column slides out from the back to cover a slice of the toilet seat.  Then the toilet seat starts to rotate (and it contorts while it rotates like an eery elongating mirror effect) so that the whole surface of the seat passes under this column which cleans and dries the seat as it rotates.  So with each flush the toilet seat gets cleaned and sanitized and dried!

We drove to Frankfurt on Friday night and stayed in housing that the temple provides for a very nominal fee right on the temple grounds.  Our family was in a large room with 4 bunk beds and 8 cubbies like in elementary school.  There was a communal bathroom.  Then the next morning the older kids did baptisms and then they came back and the adults went to an endowment session.  All of us English speakers wore headsets.  I was in charge of breakfast for everybody and I hadn't shopped ahead of time.  I meant to but something always came up.  So we got there after 8:00 pm and all the stores close at 8:00 pm.  (We couldn't stop on the way because we were supposed to check in to the housing before 8:00.)  Then no grocery stores open before 7:00 am, and that's when breakfast was supposed to be so the kids could get to the baptistry in time.  Luckily there was a bakery open early so I bought 35 rolls and pastries and all the bottled milk they had.  I keep forgetting that there's no shopping late at night or really early in the morning.

One more quick thing.  Before a light turns green it does a short flash of yellow.  Everybody gets ready to go so when it turns green everybody is already rolling.