September, 1994 (continued): After surviving the attack of killer bees in my hotel room in Frankfurt, Germany, I flew to Munich, where I conducted my AIR PERSONALITY PLUS+ seminar for Jim Sampson and the staff of Bavarian Radio.
This was a very short visit — less than 24 hours — so, once again, I didn’t do any sightseeing. Jim did, however, treat me to a very nice Italian lunch and later procured an American-style submarine sandwich for me to eat on the plane that evening.
(That’s a great way to drive your fellow passengers crazy: “You mean you didn’t get one? They were handing them out as we boarded; go ask the flight attendant if she has any left.”)
When Jim picked me up at the airport and we went to his car, he asked, “Do you want to drive?” Seeing my puzzlement, he explained, “Most American visitors want to drive on the autobahn” — where there are no speed limits.
Although the opportunity to drive an unfamiliar road at high speeds while exhausted and surrounded by speed demon American tourist drivers certainly was tempting, I left the driving to Jim.
Before retiring that evening, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was introduced to a German tv show called Nachtshow — “Night Show.” I featured a guy with a goofy grin, seated at a desk in front of a backdrop depicting a big city, bantering with his bandleader, and reading a nightly “Top 10 List.”
Sound a bit familiar? They took The Late Show With David Letterman and translated it into German. (I didn’t watch long enough to see if they had a German Larry “Bud” Melman.)
At the end of our seminar, I returned to the airport to fly to Leipzig, Germany, for the Leipzig Radio Show. Now, I’m always hearing people talk about running into some colleague or friend at an airport, but this never has happened to me… until I checked in with Lufthansa for my flight to Leipzig. As I approached the counter, I heard a voice exclaim, “Dan O’Day!”
Turning, I saw Gert Zimmer of BCI, the big German radio consulting firm. Of course, this really wasn’t such a great coincidence; he was booked on the same flight as I, to attend the same conference.
I believe in all of my previous travels, I had been paged in an airport only once… again, until this trip. While waiting for my bags to appear inside the small airport in Leipzig, a voice on the intercom intoned, “Den O’Deh…Den O’Deh”…. with a lot of German words I didn’t understand. It turned out to be the driver of the sedan that had been sent to pick me up. But I’m confident that the others in the airport were suitably impressed at how important I must be to have been paged.
Leipzig is in eastern Germany and had been staunchly communist until just a few years earlier. I had no idea what to expect. The city was constantly under construction, which made an automobile trip of even a short distance potentially very time consuming.
I had hoped to find time to walk around the city (among other things, Leipzig is where Johann Sebastian Bach worked as a church choirmaster), but the conference took up all of my time. Based upon my media-induced perceptions of “East Germany,” I was fully prepared to be housed in a dreary, primitive hotel with virtually none of the amenities that Westerners take for granted.
Instead, I discovered that the Hotel Intercontinental was a wonderful, first-class hotel — certainly the finest I stayed at during my entire trip and one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
One neat touch that I still haven’t seen anywhere else: The guest room hallways were dark…until someone entered. A sensor instantly reacted to any motion, and immediately the hallway was completely lit.
Wherever I travel, I practice saying “thank you” in that country’s language. As you know, “thank you” in German is “danke shoen.”
As an odd result, throughout my entire Leipzig visit I — completely against my will — kept finding myself humming that stupid Wayne Newton song, “Danke Shoen.” (Every now and then I’d catch myself humming it aloud. If anyone overheard this, they were kind enough to pretend not to have noticed.)
It was at the Leipzig Radio Show that I ate my first real, traditional East German meal: goulash, sausage and cabbage. (It was pretty good. Even if you don’t believe me.)
On the second night, there was a big reception for speakers and attendees. (I was there to participate in panel sessions on Morning Shows and Station Promotions and also to present a seminar on Creating Radio Commercials That Sell.) It was held at the Auerbachs Keller, a restaurant old enough to have been immortalized in print by Dante. (The food was okay. The ice cream was great.)
Auerbachs Keller
Auerbachs Keller is among an arcade of restaurants and bars. I popped into one to get a soft drink, and it was there I learned how to tip a German barman. You don’t leave the tip on the counter. When you pay your bill, you tell him how much to give back to you.Same with a taxi driver. Rather than the driver handing you your change and your then slipping him or her the tip, you tell the driver how much to keep.
With one driver, I made the mistake of telling him how much to give back to me (his English was as limited as my German). Out of five marks change, I wanted him to keep one and give me four. So I said, “Give me four back, please.” Thinking he was following my instructions, he kept four and gave me one. (No, I really don’t think he deliberately “misunderstood;” I just didn’t have the mechanics of German tipping quite right.)
Two lasting visual impressions of Leipzig, as viewed in 1994 during my various taxi rides between the hotel and the conference site:
1) The many identical block-like apartment buildings, each consisting of scores of identical apartments, each building the same as the rest. (The communist influence.)
2) Quite a few dilapidated residential buildings — damaged roofs, cracked walls — that would be condemned in the West but obviously were occupied, despite the structural weaknesses.
Next week: The infamous incident at Leipzig Airport — where a certain radio consultant’s alleged sense of humor almost got me arrested.
