Well, the flight was actually remarkably pleasant and short-feeling. All of my gifts & souvenirs are laying out on the dining room table for display. It's over, I guess. The sadness and disorientation are overwhelming, but I think it will not last for too long.
My friend Hannah coined the above expression to describe her feelings about a romantic prospect, but it works pretty much all the time.
So, um, it's 1am on Monday, and I'm flying home tomorrow. I have packed everything except my CD wallet and my datebook. They do not fit. I'm unsure what I'm going to do. I already have a one-liter beer mug stuffed with clothing in one [of two] carry-on[s]. I also stuffed an Ultimate jersey into my nalgene and a blouse into my Ikea thermos.
I'm simultaneously very sad to be leaving but very happy to be going home - I don't think that needs to be mutually exclusive. The past few days have been full of "lasts" and goodbyes, which have taken their toll emotionally. I was in Dresden with Jess on Thursday and Friday, and was in higher spirits then - and thus was worrying less about flying. Now my anxiety is in full swing, but I'm going through the motions because that's how these things work. Assuming all goes well, I should be in Boston in about 24 hours.
I've been mostly nostalgic/frustrated of late. Nostalgic for obvious reasons, and frustrated because the impending "missing" of Regensburg is palpable, but there's nothing I can do. Even if I could somehow sooth that spot, I don't even know yet what weird-ass things I might miss. I have learned how to make pretzels and obatzda, have a plan for making apfelschorle, and am 21. It is out of my control now.
I am counting on a combination of sleep, booze, Gretchen and Harry Potter to get me through this flight. A post about Dresden, a few posts about my family's visit, and many, many posts about my feelings are on the horizon.
Here are some photos from Dresden:
(The blaues Wunder or Blue Wonder is the oldest suspension bridge in Saxony, built in 1893. A fair amount more interesting is that it has no support pylons in the Elbe River itself)
bis dann!
Well, nothing is happening. In an appropriate follow-up to the previous post, the Uni will not give me back the $10 deposit on my Mensa card, because it was next to a red card in my wallet and turned slightly pink. I sure wish they had explained to me the CONDITIONS OF THE DEPOSIT when they gave me the damn card. I also just stubbed my toe. Hard.
It's funny that school lets out and there is just nothing to do. We partied on Thursday. And Friday. Now Will's back in New York, Rachel's in Innsbrück and Gretchen and Jess are on their way to Hamburg. I won't see Gretchen and Rachel until we take the bus to the airport. We're dropping like flies, we are!
On Friday Regina (our German friend) threw herself a going-away party, because she's going to Australia for a semester or two. Will and I stayed until the end, which ended up being at around 5am. So of course we did the natural thing and watched an X-Files episode until 6am when the flea market opened, and then went to the flea market. At around 7 we went out to breakfast, and then went to wake Jess up. Will's flight out was on Saturday, so at around 9 we said our goodbyes and I walked to the nearest bookstore to buy the last Harry Potter book, and then took the bus to the train station where I met Charles. We took the 9:44 train to Munich, and Will said I'd crash by 11, but I was FINE! We went to another flea market in Munich near the Olympiastadion that was GREAT. Which brings me to my next point: I am throwing out all of my socks most of my underwear, and a pair of jeans in order to fit everything in my suitcases, and I'm still not convinced it'll work. I bought a second, pink dirndl in Munich. I think I'd kick myself if I didn't so it's now over and done with.
I have since finished "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and I thought it was totally sweet, but it's starting to sink in that there aren't going to be any more books! So sad!
Today I went gift shopping, and found it difficult. I probably should've never started, but I got cool earrings from Hannah when she got back from Georgia, so what was I to do?
Tomorrow is more shopping, laundry and maybe one last (er, second) trip to the conveyor belt sushi place. And hopefully some photo-taking. And hopefully NOT the crushing realization that I haven't been to a single museum in Regensburg (oops, too late!).
Wednesday is packing. And a second trip this week to KFC. Sorry, Mom, they have air-conditioning and free refills of dense calries! I guess this is where the photos will start:
Thursday morning I take a train to Dresden to meet Jess again. Then we spend Friday in Dresden, and on Saturday we part ways and she goes back to Berlin while I go back to Regensburg.
Sunday I go to a one-day frisbee tournament on the shore of the Ammersee, which should be sweet, if not eleventh-hour.
Monday, last minute shopping and room cleaning.
And on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007, after six months, I get the hell back to Boston.
Some photos:
Today was not THAT bad, but it was probably the worst-for-the-stupidest-reason day of my life, I would say.
It's a little convoluted, I don't know quite where to start. One thing that's important to know, however, is that the smallest paper denomination of the Euro is 5. 1 and 2 are significant amounts of money, but are in coin form. Moving on.
I have slept for six hours in the last two days because I was writing a paper. It was only 4.5 pages long, but it was in German, so cut me some slack. The paper was due at 10am, and I had class from 9-10, so my only option was to get up early and get to school at 8:30 to print it out.
I get to the lab, and turn the computer on (you have to turn them off when you're done so someone else can use them. Smart plan #1). I wait for it to boot, and then I choose the operating system out of a list of four. I know from experience that from this time it takes five minutes until you can actually DO anything on the computer. Four minutes later, I get my prompt for the user ID and password. (My user ID, by the way, is: .fom02657.7.stud.uni-regensburg.de, Smart plan #2). My password is an expletive, because it makes me feel better when I'm jumping through all these hoops if I can insult the computer. After another minute, I am finally free to open Firefox.
(For the record, these steps must be undertaken any time you want to use a university computer)
I open the web browser and download my paper from the Wesleyan server, where I saved it. I finish the citations and hit "print". BLAMO! ERROR MESSAGE!
I didn't have enough money in my computing account to pay for the six pages I needed to print. See, at Wesleyan, your printing gets charged to an account that sends you a bill, so this can never happen. I look in my account to see how much I DO have, in case maybe I can print a few pages (as if that would help me), and I discover why I am out of money. Yesterday I tried to print something, but the printer was broken, so I went and printed it somewhere else. And so of course I paid for that printing twice, leaving my balance at zero Euros and zero cents.
I go to class, and at the end of the class everyone is going up to hand their papers in, including this blonde girl who always looks at me like I'm something she needs to scrape off of her shoe, and I just stand there. Good students dealt with, the professor turns to me and I tell her that I couldn't print it out. She is quite nice about it, and says that if I hand it in to her secretary today or tomorrow, I will still have my grade by Friday. Cue mad dash to print paper, despite backache, sleepiness and general crankitude.
Here is where the real stupitude kicks in. In order to put money/credit into your computing account, you have to physically go and buy slips of paper called "wertcoupons" with series of numbers on them. Do they sell these in computer labs, or even the "helpdesk"-type facility? Absolutely not. They sell them in the cafeterias of course. I go to the nearest cafeteria, where I am told I cannot buy them with cash, I have to buy them with the "mensa card" (the card you load with money so you can eat in the cafeterias). This would not be a problem, except that the mensa card machines only take paper money.
So although I had six euros, I could not buy the two-euro coupon I needed to print 24 cents worth of essay.
Eventually I was able to go to the campus grocery store, which is not near any computer labs, and use cash to buy a wertcoupon so I could walk back across campus, manually register the coupon into my account, and then print out the essay.
What a pain in the behind.
(P.S. Did I ever tell you that I had to come back from spring break early so I could register for a class by filling out and HANDING IN A PAPER FORM between the hours of 1 and 2 on ONE particular day?)
Okay, Picnic Chaser:
(More pictures exist on this blog of Walhalla, but they're from the family visit so they do not exist as posts yet)
Sometimes, you just come home from frisbee practice and there's a jazz festival on your street. Especially likely to happen when you're wearing a sweaty trucker hat backwards and kinda smell.
Other non-news:
When I move out of my room, I have to wash the curtains and the windows, and dry clean my pillow and blanket. I also have to make an appointment with the Hausmeister to go over the room to assess damages. I have to do this ON THE DAY I LEAVE and then give the keys to him when I walk out the door. The problem with this is that I have an international flight at 11:50 from Munich, which is an hour and a half away, and everyone in the program has to do this procedure after 8 am the same day. When I asked the program director how we were going to do that, she looked at me quizzically and then repeated the last, unrelated thing she had said before I had asked. Par for the course.
I have a paper due on the 17th, and then two finals on the 19th. Then Will leaves on the 21st, and I will probably go to a frisbee tournament in Spessart that weekend. Then, I clean my room furiously, buy gifts furiously, pack furiously, and then go to Dresden for two days before returning to Regensburg, taking photos furiously, probably going to ANOTHER frisbee tournament, then *washing my windows* and getting the hell out of dodge. The long term goal is for my plane not to crash.
Two reader participation items:
1) If you want a specific German trinket, and are crossing your fingers that I will buy you one, you should probably instead send me an email telling me what small, inexpensive item you will surely die without.
2) I own too much crap. I am unsure if I will be able to fit it all into my previously owned suitcases. Does anyone know anything about bringing an extra piece of luggage on a flight OR exactly how people do this shipping thing they're always talking about without spending $200+.
This post is going to be all pictures, because there isn't really much to say about the content of those pictures. That said, by the time I finish this post, I'm sure there will be plenty of text. Like that.
And that.
And that.
Just kidding, but I do want to say two things:
1) Janice, if you're reading this, I just wrote you a post card, got interrupted before finishing it, forgot that I hadn't finished, and mailed it. So sorry that it's weird and unsigned, among other things.
2) I shouldn't drink out of white mugs here. The water is yellowish in both the kitchen and the bathroom, but there are fewer specks in the bathroom water. Just a tip for y'all there.
(We won the Uni Tournament on Monday. We were the only non-gym-class team there. L to R: Back row: HaJu, Max, Ingrid, Moritz, Thomas. Front row: Michaela, me, Wolle and Clemens)
Every time I go to blog, I feel guilty for not having even finished the FIRST post from my family's visit. Gah. After this one, should I finish it tonight, there will be a 4th of July party, a trip to Dresden, a trip to Schloss Herrenchiemsee, another frisbee tournament and likely other stuff to blog about in the upcoming four weeks. AHHHHHHH!!! FOUR WEEKS!
Maya and I took the train to Freiburg on Thursday after my class, and arrived around 9pm. We went straight to the hostel which was bizarrely hard to find, but had a lovely view of a vineyard out the back. Maya, being an absolute genius had thought ahead and brought a jar of pasta sauce and a package of spaghetti, so we made dinner on the cheap, did a little schoolwork (for serious) and then went to bed - but not quite to sleep. We had each saved three euros (*facepalm*) by bringing our own blankets, but not pillows of course. AND it was freezing in the dormitory. It was a bit of a long night, and my balled-up sweatshirt got the first of many drool-marks.
As always, I was shocked at how few people in the hostel were willing to get up early. As an unintentional homage to the German spirit, we started the day by climbing up a big hill. The Schlossberg was the hill behind the hostel on which the vineyard was located, and we walked up for a view of the city. The Münster's scaffolding-enveloped tower was simultaneously par for the course and irritating. I guess July and August are the big tourist months in Germany, so ALL of the construction is done in June (and early July, it would seem). This morning I couldn't hear my alarm going off because the machinery was so loud.
We then went out looking for breakfast, starting at Münsterplatz. The breakfasts there were a bit steep, but we did check out the Münster itself, and strolled through the market set up there.
I will admit to buying a cream cheese-stuffed pepper, it wasn't the right kind, unfortunately, and grossed me out. Attempts to wander toward the University area led to us having breakfast at a ice cream (and waffle and crepe) parlor on the Rathausplatz, which was quite pleasant. I am on a fierce raspberry kick and had raspberry crepes. Thumbs up.
Judging by my photo account, we then headed to the Columbiapark, and checked out the exterior of the Prehistory Museum, which is "...a nineteenth-century villa built for a Spanish countess." (Rough Guide to Germany, p. 304). That was a brief but generally neat stop.
I now recall that we were in that neighborhood, because we were looking for a church we'd seen the day before. It's actually quite strange: You arrive at the main station, and the most remarkable building in sight is this church with two green tile-topped towers, and it's NOWHERE in the tourist literature. We went to see it anyway!
There was a bridge right next to the church, and under the part of the bridge NOT spanning railroad tracks, there were giants!
We then headed back to the Münster, hypothesizing that we might want to see the inside of it. To be honest, it looked a lot like the inside of the Regensburg Dom...which isn't an insult, but rather an indicator of how spoiled I am. Oh, but on the way there, we walked down this street called Fischerau, which um...had a canal down it? (Requires further research)
Research has yielded this YouTube video of ducks, and nothing more.
See, the problem with enormous, gothic, German churches is that there's almost no point in taking photos, because they're too big and too atmosphere-y (which is ruined with the flash).
One cool thing about this church, though, is that you could go back behind the altar/stage area, and there were about ten individual chapels (the first picture is of one of the chapel altars). The university heads, the high-ranking clergy, and extremely rich families could have one of these chapels - for quite an offering I'm sure.
We tried some Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte (Black Forest cake) at a trendy-looking cafe on Rathausplatz, and were thoroughly disgusted. Though I was first shocked that it looked exactly like what Americans call "Black Forest Cake", I was overall grossed out by the [traditional] addition of Kirschwasser, a "clear brandy". They used too much and it was astonishingly foul.
We then went to the Wentzingerhaus Museum, which had dioramas and historical tidbits relating to Freiburg. It also had a round staircase that rose up to a Rococo (or so they tell me) mural on the ceiling that flowed into a few complimentary wooden figures along the top of the wall. Meh. The photo I posted earlier of Freiburg after the war was also in this museum.
Having with that essentially covered the whole Altstadt (it was pretty small, actually), Maya and I set off for the grocery store to purchase food for two more dinners and two (astonishingly German) breakfasts. Total cost was around 7 euros.
Then, groceries in hand (bag), we got a little snack to tide us over:
Back at the hostel I got a lecture from a woman about how to do something that I know how to do and was in the process of doing. I really hate that. The hostel had a gas oven, and I've lit gas ovens before, and it went out after catching, so I went to do it again, and got accosted by this woman making tea next to me. It kinda ticked me off, but this is all irrelevant.
The next day we went to Triberg (which is pronounced "treeberg", which I struggled with). We picked it out of the handful of relatively nearby Black Forest towns because it supposedly had the world's largest cuckoo clock, which we ironically didn't see. Everywhere you went in town, there were two signs to the cuckoo clock pointing in opposite directions, and yet nobody seemed to acknowledge that there was a problem. They just calmly told us where "Die Kuckucksuhr" was, with both of the people we asked pointing us in opposite directions. Yeah
We walked up to town from the train station, after a brief scare that there WAS no town. The main street slopes up for maybe half a mile before splitting into a T at the base of the waterfall.
Unlike most of the people mulling around and letting their small children run into traffic (seriously, on a blind corner, he was SO lucky), we went to the Black Forest Museum to learn things about things! Maya was REALLY into it. It was pretty cool. Most of the exhibits were about handcrafts of the Schwarzwald like wood carving and hat making, and there were some about the railroad, and winter sports, and clock dealers (that was a biggie). Dad would've liked the working antique Orchestrions:
The museum looked pretty small, but it extended underground and had like fifteen rooms, including a "mineshaft" full side replica that you could go inside.
After the museum, we went looking for the Bergsee, which we kinda both thought the other one of us had heard good things about. The hike is a pain in the ass, and the "lake" is about the size of my Aunt Jane's faux pond. But I took a photo that makes it seem bigger:
I do not remember exactly if this happened before or after the torte eating, but it's essentially irrelevant. We saw a parade:
Upon exploring the Stadtfest more thoroughly, we discovered that to get to the other side of the fest, we had to go through this fake bunker/tent setup surrounded by Bundeswehr (army) guys. They even had that camo netting hanging over the whole shebang. It was a little offputting, but we went through, and they had lined the tent with beer hall tables, one on each side, and were displaying weapons next to sheets of information about them. Oh, and they were doing facepainting on little kids, but they were doing it with those green/black army compacts you always see in Vietnam movies. I think this freaked out Maya further, but I just went "OH MY GAWD, A PANZER FAUST! MY BROTHER WOULD BE SO JEALOUS!" I think the guy chaperoning the guns heard me, because he gave me a look when we walked back through. Whatever, Greg would've been totally jealous.
We eventually dragged our butts back to the waterfall. We chose a path from the pamphlet and followed it, perpetually getting stuck behind slow walkers. Until, of course, we passed the point from which I took this photo:
I misspelled "identity" on purpose, for reasons that will become clear later.
First, le teaser:
What you will notice about that last photo (besides that it reflected the flash and was poorly photoshopped) is that despite 180 degrees of destruction around the Münster (cathedral), the church itself is untouched. This has not gone unnoticed by the people of Freiburg. (Also, Wikipedia tells me that Freiburg, like Schaffhausen, has a remarkably unlucky bombing history: GERMAN bombers accidently dropped 60 bombs there in 1940. (Schaffhausen was the only Swiss city bombed))
On to feelings!
As Maya and I had breakfast in the hostel kitchen the day we left, we mused aloud about all of the ways that we'd become "Germanized" without even noticing.
- We went to the grocery store to "buy breakfast" and ended up walking out with cold cuts, cheese, rolls, and orange juice, knowing that there was tea, butter and jam already at the hostel. The classic German breakfast, without any discussion toward that goal.
- I drink Apfelschorle (a mixture of half carbonated mineral water and half apple juice) all the time, despite never having liked carbonated beverages.
- I can distinguish one type and brand of beer from another. I once did it by smell.
- I can go on about beer styles at length, and have.
- I can hike/climb hills to tourist attractions faster than most Americans.
- When I think about getting a quick, cheap snack, I think of either wurst or döner. Mostly wurst.
- When counting on my fingers, I start with the thumb.
- I get uncomfortable when Americans talk about Hitler loudly in public.
- I look forward to having a nice beer with lunch next year (eep!)
First off, I think this is my favorite blog banner yet. Wild asparagus people! WILD!
Eeew! My hot milk has a skin on it!
Okay, but seriously, I have made a few attempts to blog The First Acutal Vacation The Foos Family Has Taken In My Lifetime (well, I guess I'd have to count Savannah too, so second!), but it is kind of daunting, and it turns out there IS actually schoolwork to do this semester. I figure I should keep blogging other events as they happen, otherwise nothing at all will get posted.
So Bürgerfest was unofficially announced to the uninitiated with little digital signs at all of our bus stops saying that there was going to be no bus service from Friday to Sunday due to this mysterious "Bürgerfest". Eventually (on Friday morning!) I did some googling and discovered the schedule of events for Bfest. There were a lot of events, but the official keg-tapping (yeah) was at 5pm, so I did nothing for a while. It was great.
At around 5, I took a shower (heh...) and headed out to Neupfarrplatz, which I feel is the platz most likely to have a party going at any particular time. Sometime during the night or afternoon, probably concealed by the defening noise of the constant construction on both of the streets that my building straddles, a stage and a metric ton of food & beer stands had been set up. Of course I had some Flammkuchen, which is never a bad idea. Trader Joe's actually has some pretty good frozen flammkuchen if it sounds good to you!
I strolled over to the Domplatz, to check out the scene there, as they'd blocked off traffic all over the Altstadt and I was curious what they'd set up in the streets. First let me add that the overwhelming theme of Bfest was stages with live bands set up ON EVERY CORNER. It was literally (which I am using in all seriousness) impossible to get out of earshot of one band without entering that of another. In my opinion it was kind of a dumb idea. But anyway, there was a band playing on Domplatz, but they had to stop playing when the BAGPIPERS came through!
The reason there were bagpipes is that the city of Aberdeen, Scotland is one of a handful of sister cities to Regensburg. Others include Pilsen (Czech Republic), Odessa (Ukraine) and Tempe (Arizona, USA). The hands-down best part about the bagpipe corps was that they were just marching in loops around Regensburg ALL DAY for three days.
So back to Domplatz. I met Lauren back at Neupfarr, where SHE got some flammkuchen, cause DUH, and then we went back to Domplatz for a beer. There we saw totally cool dudes in lederhosen that had green felt suspenders, instead of matching leather ones. They were off duty from whatever they were doing, so we didn't take photos.
One by one the other kids from the program checked their darn emails and cell-phones and Gretchen joined the party. I feel like I may have also made her get flammkuchen. But who knows. I think we just wandered around for a while and eventually went home when all of the stands started to close around 11:30. The "light show" on Bismarckplatz was unimpressive, but the snack stands were great:
Jess met us in the rain (sorry!) after the play let out, and Gretchen and I got crepes (strawberry and nutella, natch) and we all went strolling down Ludwigstrasse and into a big ol' loop of Regensburg. To our delight, there was a German rockabilly/50s band on Keplerstrasse. It ended up being one of those funny situations where the English song ends and then the singer starts speaking in German, but incorporating things like "Rock and Roll!" in a thick German accent and you kinda laugh but then you feel bad. It was par for the course, I guess I would say.
After the rain had cleared up and I had attempted to do some schoolwork but had actually just eaten another flammkuchen, Gretchen and Jess returned for me! We went out to the Jahninsel, which is a Danube River island halfway across the Stone Bridge, only to discover that they had a BEATLES TRIBUTE BAND! Ironically, they didn't play either of the two (I'm pretty sure it was only two) songs that the Beatles actually recorded in German. Besides "Hey Jude", "Yellow Submarine" and "Let it Be", they didn't really tend towards the big hits. Or maybe the big hits in my house aren't the real ones? I don't know.
In accordance with the German tradition of having really bizarre traditions, Jess and Gretchen played chess on the giant chess set that had been set up on the island.
Then, of course, more wandering ensued. Gretchen and I got some mini donuts from one of those awesome automated mini-donut machines that float the donuts down a river of oil and automatically flip them. Remember them from the Portland Market, Mom and Dad?
We ended up at Bismarckplatz again, where, while talking to Regina, we caught the attention of an American one table over. It turns out that he was a Colorado student in Regensburg 9 years ago. He'd married a German and had been living in Munich for 8 years earning 135 Euro and hour doing translations for a chemical company. They were on a last trip around Germany before packing up and moving back to the states - Boston, to be exact. It was encouraging. By then it was a little past midnight, and I went home to go to bed, because I had to be up for the 6:42 train to...
As Charles and I expected, it was a bit of an odd spot. When you're near or inside it, you can't really appreciate it because of the scale. We did find out, though, that contrary to what I'd always thought, the walls are blocks of rough marble (I thought it was some sort of stucco/plaster over stone). The way it works is that you buy tickets for 9 euros, and then walk 20 minutes up to the castle, and then wait for an hour or two until your number is called, at which time you see the three rooms of the castle which were ever actually finished. Charles wanted to leave "as little ripped off as possible", and I wanted to leave before nightfall, so we blew off the "tour". It was a pretty good idea, considering that by the time we'd checked out the castle up close and hiked around a little and were ready to hit the road, our "ticket time" (had we bought tickets) hadn't come up yet. So, in the end, curiously enough, it was a really GOOD deal for us. We split a 27 Euro Bayern ticket and everything else was free free free! I liked the landscape just as much as the castle, myself.
Photos!:
(The first one features Schloss Hohenschwangau - childhood castle to King Ludwig II, who grew up to build Neuschwanstein. Overall they're pretty unimpressive as photos go.)
And of the surroundings:
So the way it works is that you walk up to the castle itself, and go "oh. neat. it looks different up close." Then, you go up to the Marienbrücke, which is the bridge visible in the third photo of the first set, and you get shoved by approximately 498567356835 Japanese people, and then you take a cliche'd photo that would be easier to photoshop than to actually pose for.
But so anyway, after you climb up to the bridge, you presumably either walk back down or take the bus back down if you're REALLY American. Charles and I went for option C, and walked down to the stream at the base of this waterfall. We did so initially just to take this photo, but it turns out that there is a lovely, peaceful path that follows the stream and then leads you back to the ticket center where you can get on the bus back to town. It was quite a pleasant walk.
And then finally, a poetic end to the day and to Bürgerfest, and what I anticipate will be the first of many endings in the coming month: We all watched Sepp's band perform on the shore of the river.
For those of you newcomers in the audience, Sepp (on the left) was our grammar teacher during our first two grueling months in Germany. He is pretty much the coolest person alive, and always stops to talk to us when we run across him in one place or another. My parents met him while they were here.
The band he was playing in on Sunday was a french-music-type trio, and the woman was sipping on champagne the whole time and singing love songs in French. It was beautiful, and the sun was setting, and the water was flowing past, and then one by one, almost all of the 11 kids in my study abroad program showed up. They'd walk up and scamper over to where we were sitting and exchange a few words before sitting back and being captivated by the music. There was something very emotional for me about everyone coming from their varied activities in Regensburg and just once again forming this original whole that has changed so much since that first day in January.
I remember telling myself that day that though I was just meeting these people, I would know them extremely well before the semester was out. And I do.
