While staying in Martin’s home town, visiting his friends and family, we decided to go check out some of the local sites and history of the region. Specifically, we took a day trip to Zollverein, once the world’s largest coal mine, and now a completely renovated museum. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was excited! I would finally be able to use my favorite Zoolander line in context - “I think I am getting a black lung Pop, it’s not very well ventilated down there.”
We signed up for the tour, including my individual headset to provide me the commentary in English and went for a stroll around the grounds waiting for the next group tour to begin.
I even found a miniature version of the site which had an uncanny resemblance to dozer buildings from Fraggle Rock.
At 1pm our tour began and I went to work…while Germans are normally process driven and incredibly organized, my headset and the corresponding markers on the tour were anything but. We began the tour at marker #31, jumped to 15, up to 26 and then back to 11, and those were just the markers I was able to locate. I would have normally just given up, but I felt obligated to try given that Martin’s parents paid extra for the headset and the tour guide was publically trying to assist me (the only non-German speaker on the tour)... After 2 years of living in Europe and countless travels across the continent, it finally took a German tour to highlight the fact that I don’t speak any other languages. My frustration was only exaggerated by the fact that it was 2pm and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast…at least the emergency snickers bar helped out there.
Overall the museum and surrounding area was amazing and very well restored/maintained. And other than the headset, I was only slightly bummed that we didn’t actually get to go “into” the coal mine.
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