Once you’ve lived abroad for long enough, you stop noticing the little differences between your home and adopted cultures. Then one day an old friend arrives at the Frankfurt Airport, and you’re back looking at your adopted home through a newcomer’s eyes, through the eyes of the visitor who hasn’t spent the last four years living and breathing German culture.

You stretch and strain, trying to remember how it felt to be new here, to see through a lens of excitement (at all you find exotic), shock (at all that you find strange), and euphoria (at all you find even better than what you are used to at home).

Saturday I picked up one such old friend at the airport, and, through her eyes, began my journey back through the cultural initiation I have spent the last handful of years experiencing.  What should I tell a guest to expect?  What should I caution against?  What should I laud?  You know you’ve been in Germany for a long time when…

A short walk around the Mainz train station had not sparked enthusiasm.  “Well this isn’t a very attractive city,” she’d said.  “That’s because it got bombed during World War II.  This is all quick rebuild architecture, not like the stuff that would have been here had the war never happened.”

So we took a day trip to Wiesbaden, the capital city of Hessen.  Less of the city had been bombed there, and a more grandiose architecture still lines its streets.  Even in the modernized shopping district, if you look up, you will find detailed stone work, romantic-looking spires, and green hints of fertile roof-top gardens.

We walked through the city center, through an upper-class residential district, and through a park that our native guide told us had been laid out in the 1700s.  On one side of the path ran a little stream, on the other a green meadow and monumental pines.  At the end of the park we arrived at the Neroberg Bahn—a little train that takes tourists up the hill and to a  picturesque view of Wiesbaden and Mainz from on high.

Though the train only cost 2,20 Euros per ride, we were too cheap to pay; instead we walked.  Beside the train Neroberg Bahn track a steep path zig-zagged through forest that looked uncannily like the Pennsylvania forest I grew up in.  We huffed and we puffed, and we came out in a clearing in front of a white-columned gazebo that looked out over the city.

Thinking back, it seems that every German city had a little mountain or castle or palace from which one can look down upon the orange-tiled roofs of the city.  From such a height most of them look the same, yet the first few that you see are impressive, intoxicating.  Just like the first few cathedrals, castles, and palaces.  Even they can become habit, a daily sight too easy to take for granted.  But with a new set of eyes, the lens of the uninitiated, the view of exotic beauty falls over the landscape once again.