The school trip
(#18) 📍 Rüdesheim am Rhein // a place I didn't know I'd visited
A few months ago, I found a scrapbook detailing my Year 8 school trip to the Rhineland. The week’s activities were described in careful German. My teacher wrote, ‘Ausgezeichnet!’ on the back in red biro.
What struck me most about this scrapbook was the names of the places we visited: Koblenz, Boppard, Rüdesheim am Rhein. I would not have been able to point out any of these towns on a map. When I looked them up on Google, I was surprised to see how close they were to Frankfurt. I marvelled at the way, aged thirteen, I could get on a coach and submit to being driven around the Continent without any real idea - or even interest in - where I was going.
Other aspects of that trip also seem funny to me now. We were housed in a (very) budget hotel, all rock-hard mattresses and odd bathroom arrangements. My friend who had severe food allergies was exiled to the distant Dietary Requirements table every time we had dinner. We were taken to a winery to sample Rhenish reds which had been ageing for years in an underground cellar; most of us took a couple of sips, giggled, and tipped it down the drain, while the winery owner grinned at us through gritted teeth.
I now appreciate what a nightmare the trip must have been to organise. I pity the teachers who spent twenty-six hours travelling to and from Germany on a coach full of hysterical adolescent girls; I hope the wine-tasting helped.
I am not sure whether the experience did anything for my German. Occasionally we were deposited in a large plaza and told to ask strangers for their opinions on the local area. The German Exchange trip, two years later, was actually worse in this regard: my exchange partner spoke perfect English and wanted to spend all her free time watching old episodes of Family Guy.
But something about the trip must have stuck with me, because I did eventually go on to study German at A Level. When - for complicated and boring reasons - I had to do a three-week Covid ‘washout’ in a low-risk country before returning to Hong Kong, Germany was the country I chose.
I still have fond memories of the Rhineland trip, the seeds of things I would later come to love: ruined castles perched on hills overlooking the river, precarious gondola rides through mountain valleys, chips with mayonnaise and paprika salt.
I may never return to Rüdesheim am Rhein, but I’m glad I’ve been. Increasingly, as I get older, these are the destinations I appreciate most: random towns in beautiful countries, slices of life in places I’d never otherwise think to see.
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I like the Rhine, and have been to Rudesheim. We ended up camping the night there on the way back from the Oktoberfest to Calais in 1986, after two of our motorbikes were reversed over by a large dumper truck near Wurzburg. Can't say I remember too much about the town. I much prefer the Mosel, it's the cuter baby brother of the Rhine.