Our temporary “vacation” apartment here in Tübingen is quite nice: lots of light, modern fixtures, pretty comfortable bed. There’s even a dishwasher in the kitchen, something we didn’t have in our 3 years in Bolzano.

Apartment Interior

And the view from that room in the other directions is nothing short of spectacular:

View from the living room of the vacation apartment, Tübingen

Those are the Swabian Alps off in the distance, and there’s a castle out way out there too, which you can’t see too clearly in that photo, unfortunately. Trust me, it’s there.

We’re in a ground floor apartment of a house built on a hill, which makes sense since in order to get that view from our apartment you have to be fairly high up. The road the house is on is rather below the level of the house, so the only way into the house is to climb up a few steps.

59 steps, to be precise.

The 59 Steps - first part before the turn

The 59 Steps - second part

A UPS delivery guy and I had a little bi-lingual discussion about him carrying the 11 items we’d shipped to ourselves up those very 59 steps. I wanted him to bring all the items to the door; he didn’t want to deliver past the bottom of the first part of the steps. Our discussion was initially him speaking in German, me speaking in English, with each of us claiming not to speak the other’s language.

Now, I really don’t speak German, so all I could do is smile sweetly, point from the truck up the stairs, and explain in English that I wanted the boxes carried up to our door. He would then reply in German, saying that he didn’t speak English; this would be followed by a brief diatribe in German about how he wasn’t going to carry the boxes up the steps.

This could have gone on forever, although I think it was only over a period of a few minutes that we did our little routine. I did begin to wonder what I could really do if the UPS guy refused to carry the boxes up the steps. However finally, in sheer frustration, the UPS guy added a new line the end of his German rant: “Not my problem!”.

But he said it in English.

Aha! Since I had been saying it was his problem to get the boxes to the door, since that’s what I’d paid for, his little addendum revealed he’d probably understood my arguments all along. Make a note: if you ever want to win a contest of wills during a conversation where each side claims not to speak the other’s language, be sure not to reveal you actually do speak the language if you want to triumph in the argument. Seriously. Once I figured out he did speak English, he’d lost his advantage. So, ultimately it was my arguments which carried the day, while the UPS guy was stuck carrying the boxes up the 59 steps. I did give him a generous tip for his troubles, but he didn’t seem all that mollified when he left.

Needless to say, we can’t ever ship anything else to ourselves via UPS while we live in this apartment. Not unless I want to carry the boxes up the 59 steps myself…