My mother lived in Frankfurt for a time. Sadly language proficiency is not genetic. I've visited southern Germany (Ettal, Oberammergau, etc.) but all I can really remember are the pretzels.
What's really embarrassing is being first-generation American where German was spoken at home and I
still can't speak it well. I'm hopelessly lost on the genders of objects or even
why they have genders (
Das Flugzeug? Die Flugzeug? Der Flugzeug? The damned thing's an inanimate object, for cryin' out loud!).
I remember being in Mom's home town trying desperately to buy tungsten (or "indoor") Ektachrome in a camera shop. After struggling for about 15 minutes, trying to come up with the German terms for "color balance" and "incandescent light", or even "3200 degrees Kelvin", the storekeeper, in perfect English, asked if I wanted to show him what I wanted in the London edition of the Kodak catalog. <*sigh*>