My mother and my daughter left this week on a two-week trip to Germany, which has me remembering my own trip to Germany with my Oma. I was a year younger than my daughter is now, a high school junior rather than a recent graduate. The first part of the trip was a school trip–our school had a summer exchange with a school in Würzburg, and that was our year to go for three weeks. After the school trip ended, I met up with my grandmother and traveled with her for two or three weeks. My mother and daughter will see some of the same friends, though my grandmother’s generation is gone. They’ll go to Hannover, where my grandparents grew up, and Hamburg and Berlin.
I had taken three years high school German by the time I went; my daughter studied Spanish and Japanese. We have a few German language rituals left in our family, but it’s not quite a conversation.
I wonder what my daughter will most remember, years from now.
I remember all the social awkwardness of high school transposed to a trip abroad, the overlapping layers of trying to fit in with the group (or the right part of the group) and trying to navigate a new place. I remember my host brother’s horrible caged bird pecking at itself, and discovering nutella, way back when it didn’t exist in the US. There was a formal welcome at city hall and a giant cream puff on my birthday. We visited churches and art museums. Then my classmates went home, or on to their own extended stays, and I found my grandmother. I expect she came to meet me somewhere.
Oma and I stayed with a friend of hers from when they were governesses together in Chicago in the 1930s. I think they met at the park, out airing their charges, but maybe I’m making that up. Her friend was a heavy smoker, a devoted chocolate-eater, an honorary aunt. I was hungry for books in English (it’s hard listening to another language all the time) and read Gone with the Wind at her house, a gratifyingly thick book that was also thick with smoke. We visited her daughters and their families–my daughter will meet the grandchildren. We went to the toy museum in Nürnberg (I still have the poster) and to Dürer’s house. I was introduced to a newly-returned exchange student, just back from Illinois, her accented English meeting my stumbling German. We Went swimming. 
And I remember tagging along as Oma and Tante Erna shopped for a new raincoat. Something trench-coaty, dressy. I remember Oma weighing a clear beige against one that was faintly pink, or maybe it was rose-colored. Most of all, I remember being struck at seeing my grandmother spending the day with a peer, having a reason to be in the world, something to do, other than being my grandmother. Equal measure, equal time, friend to friend. Turn around, how does it look? Let me see from the other side.
Of course, I knew that, didn’t I? I should have. But that day, seeing Oma not at any family function or occasion but out with a friend of her own, it was obvious. I wouldn’t have used film on that department store light, and they would have been embarrassed if I had, but I remember them among the racks of coats and the florescent bulbs and three-way mirrors, somewhere in downtown Braunschweig, and I’m grateful for that.
Gute Reise!