The following article is from our August 2008 issue.

Coming Home to an Alien World "Geek-o-tels," Art Déco ferries and a German-to-German interpreter from Sri Lanka - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Every year, our correspondent, a German based in the U.S., comes home to Europe for the summer and is perplexed by what has changed and what has not. This time he crossed the English Channel on a car ferry seemingly straight out of the 1930s, stayed at a chain hotel tailor-made for computer geeks and was charmed by, of all things, a small-town passport office just outside Cologne.

Don't say you have heard the word Geek-o-tel before. I just invented it to celebrate Germany's entrance into the 21st century. Geek-o-tels are lodgings for peripatetic laptop lovers, hitherto fleeced in my state-of-the-art homeland by hoteliers too niggardly to give their guests what every seedy $39-motel in the U.S. generously provides free, "wireless fidelity" (WiFi) Internet access.

Finally, the breakthrough has come. On a visit to the German capital, The Atlantic Times booked me into "Motel One," a low-priced establishment next to the former West Berlin's main station, Bahnhof Zoo, which has been sadly reduced in rank to a mass-transit stop only usable for people adroit in figuring out its automatic ticket distributors - aliens need not apply.

Of course you know what geeks are. Geeks are earnest folk intently peering at their portable monitors. When I checked into the "Motel One Berlin-Ku'Damm," which is part of a new nationwide chain offering comfortable double rooms for ?59 ($92), scores of geeks were surfing at small Plexiglas tables in the airy lobby.

On the other hand, you won't find a phone by your bed here. This hotel group found that there was no longer any need for that. With cells and laptops, guests are sufficiently connected. Give them W-LAN free of charge and a good breakfast, pour them a beer, and smile as they approach the reception desk. That will make them happy. In Berlin, a young Sri Lankan speaking perfect German did the smiling. Indeed, we are living in a new era and this is one of its more pleasant aspects.

That said, my homecoming to an alien land also propelled me back to a familiar past. My wife and I had left our car in a Gloucestershire barn after last year's European sojourn. This now necessitated a journey from England across the English Channel to the continent. As we came to Dover, the radio announced that there would be no ferries to Calais for 36 hours because French fishermen, protesting the high cost of fuel, had blocked their nation's Atlantic ports with their trawlers.

"Plus ça change...," we murmured. Ever since the French Revolution, when the "tricoteuses" sat knitting by the guillotine applauding each rolling head, "schadenfreude" had become a fringe benefit of class struggle. It is, of course, neither logical nor civilized to make strangers on the far side of an international waterway linger in a parking lot for two days because you think diesel is too expensive. Mark this off as an ugly tradition similar to the custom of French public transport workers going on strike annually at Advent, tormenting Christmas shoppers. What happened to English tourists this time was an exercise of a "right" to hurt.

So we motored on to Ramsgate from which ferries travel to Ostend, a Belgian port immune to the wrath of French fishermen. An old-fashioned tub named "M/F Larkspur" accommodated us. Operated by a Belgian line, she sailed under a Bahamian flag, had her website designed in the Pacific island Republic of Vanuatu, and was staffed by Serbs and Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes and Kosovars, "all ex-Yugoslavs," as the purser told me. I politely refrained from mentioning the ongoing Balkan strife.

Though emblematic of globalization, the "Larkspur" was a quaint craft with Art Déco lights and wood-paneled public rooms, curved stairways and the aroma of goulash wafting out of the galley. A sign above the "Crows Nest Bar" invited me to sample wines from Slovenia and so I bought a decent bottle of Merlot from the "Vrhunsko Vino ZGF" winery for $11.30.

I suspected that this vessel might have shipped Hispano Suizas and Bugattis from Dubrovnik to Ancona before I was born. Yet an Internet check informed me that the "Larkspur" was built in 1976 in Bremerhaven and once linked Travemünde in Germany with Gedser in Denmark. Still, it was nice to discover that we Germans produced something this charming in the turbulent 1970s.

Five hours later, we were in Belgium, the hub of the United Europe. I always pitied this small nation, which most motorists cross nonstop in three hours on their way from Britain to Germany or Germany to France. So I wanted to do something kind - give the Belgians money. As my windshield wipers needed replacing, I thought it would be nice to buy a new set here.

Now do drop this hint to Brussels Eurocrats annoying the continent with useless directives such as the one regulating the curvature of bananas: On the 160-mile trip to the German border, I stopped at four service stations along the A10 freeway. Each had a shop offering teddy bears, potted flowers and plenty of beer and wine. But did they sell windshield wipers or other motoring paraphernalia? Nope! Thus the idea to write about my homecoming to a strange world was born.

It wasn't until I arrived in Germany that I could treat my old Audi to new wipers. It was in Germany, too, that I received a great surprise. I needed a new, biometric, post-September 11 passport that includes chips containing one's personal data. I was warned that this involved fingerprinting and other annoying procedures exacerbated by German red tape.

Filled with dread, I walked into the passport office of Pulheim outside Cologne where I am registered. After a 10-minute wait, I entered a sunny bureau staffed with jolly, warm-hearted civil servants eager to cut bureaucratic corners in order to make this an enjoyable experience for me. Enjoyable? A passport office? Smiling, I left it a quarter of an hour later: Things have changed in my country.

This proved that one must shed stereotypes, including the cliché that due to decades of prosperity, the German Gasthof, or village pub, with its hearty regional specialties had disappeared. That is, it's not so much that the Gasthof has vanished but more so that many proprietors have chosen the good life in the Canary Islands over the drudge of feeding farmers. Koreans, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Turks took their places and one must be grateful for their emergence in German gastronomy. Still, a Swabian tavern run by a gentleman from Hong Kong does not seem truly authentic, regardless of how valiantly he tries to copy southwestern German recipes for potato salad.

Well, authenticity has staged a comeback. On our drive across southern Germany, innkeepers speaking local dialects with perfect ease welcomed us and their regional dishes tasted perfect too. Yet often their names were not German. In a Württemberg village, for example, we stayed in a lovely inn whose owners were German Greeks with dual nationality and whose headwaiter was a Sicilian with German and Italian passports. It amused me to hear them converse in a broad Stuttgart burr while we ate Maultauschen, the Swabian type of Ravioli, and drank a Trollinger, the quintessential red wine of this area.

"Will you return to Sicily to live one day," I asked the waiter. He shook his head. "I would love to open a bar in Sicily but not after a friend of mine tried this, giving up his job with Daimler-Benz," he replied. "After one year, he was back in Germany looking for work. He had refused to pay the Mafia protection money so his bar was firebombed and he had to run for his life." This was a sad story to be sure. Still I was glad to learn that Germany has become a safe haven for refugees from the mob - just as it had once given shelter to my Italian ancestors fleeing from religious persecution.

Sociologists of knowledge would say that clichés like the one about German taverns are as much true as false. On our journey further south, we found that this also applied to the stereotypical claim that the Iron Curtain had ceased to exist almost two decades ago. I swear it's still there but now it has wheels. Down the autobahn A 3 all the way to the Austrian border, we passed a solid wall of trucks compared with which the I-95 in the eastern United States seemed a "Semi"-free zone.

There were Austrian, Belgian, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Iranian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Turkish trucks, converting the world's remaining drops of petroleum into diesel fumes and all moving like an endless train but, alas, not on rails. Sometimes, when one breaks down, the rolling wall becomes a solid wall, and 200-mile traffic jams occur. Don't let them tell you that this globalized world is not in some ways blatantly nuts!

Then again, we encountered globalization in a most agreeable form. At Neuwaldegg Castle near Vienna, we attended an international forum on "Post-Christian Europe and Resurgent Islam" and, in a throwback to the happier days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, found it to be catered superbly by a company from Prague, a city that used to be part of that empire before World War I, World War II and the real Iron Curtain wiped out its glories. Like on board of the Larkspur, we were grateful that some of its legacies are manifesting themselves again.

But as Vienna has its own cuisine worth sampling, we sneaked out of the conference and into a local restaurant called "Schwarzer Adler" where once again we ran into a Sri Lankan contribution to globalized Europe. This one was a waiter who spoke Viennese German with such eloquence that he actually translated a local expression into High German for me. "Palffygulasch," he informed this Nordic ignoramus, "is a goulash covered with finely cut fresh vegetables." Where did he learn that, back home on the island of Ceylon? I almost flipped when he then proceeded to recommend, in the jargon of sommeliers, a 2006 Steinriegel-Bossi Zweigelt (a local red wine) for its "well-balanced fruitiness."

Call me crazy but to my mind, the logical sequence to this excursion into a modern Europe mitigated by mementos of its enchanting past occurred a week later when I was hospitalized in Périgueux, France, with a coronary condition, which called for the implantation of two stents in my chest. As I watched the procedure on a monitor, my nose began to itch so fiercely that I asked the nurse to rub it for me. This she did so lovingly that I grabbed her rubber-gloved hand and kissed it. When the operation was over, she walked alongside my gurney and said, "My name is Arlette."

At that point, I recalled how I had once triggered an emergency meeting of female editors in a classy New York publishing house by complimenting one of them on her sublime choice of clothes and perfume. The crisis ended mildly with my office being moved to another floor. "Remember, he is an old-fashioned European," the managing editor told her colleagues, soothing their outrage.

Now don't get me wrong: I love New York where I had spent much of my adult life. But right then with two new stents in my chest and the smiling Arlette on my side, I was thankful to be in old-fashioned France.