First off, I think this is my favorite blog banner yet. Wild asparagus people! WILD!
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!
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:
On Saturday, Gretchen and I met on Haidplatz to see a play at noon that was being put on by a Scottish (Aberdeen again) drama group from an arts high school. It was a short piece called "Connections" that was at least partially based in truth about the end of World War II. Apparently creative writing groups in both Regensburg and Aberdeen sat down and wrote about their experiences at the end of the war, and this play was the result of one woman's writing. It was set at the 50th anniversary party of a couple who had met in Regensburg during the war - a Scottish soldier and a German girl. The story was told through recollection, and by their grandchildren "reading" stories out of a collection of family stories. It was a little "scripted" sounding, but it was very emotional and by the end I really liked it and was glad I'd gone. They also had a bagpiper during interludes, and the whole cast sang "Auld Lang Syne" and it totally nailed the sap in me. Oh well. In another surprise-that-you-kinda-saw-coming, Gretchen knew the words.
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 not too long Jess and Gretchen had to go to play rehearsal, and just as I was setting off elsewhere, I realized that it was about to rain like cats and dogs. So I walked leisurely back to my building and sat in my room for an hour or so watching tourists screaming and running from one awning to another. It was heartwarming.
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.
Gretchen was all "I guess I'll play, I haven't played in a while" and then, again, in true Gretchen style, mopped the floor with poor Jess. "My fifth grade teacher was kind of a chess nerd, so we always played it during recess," she admitted later. What a sneak!
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...
The touristiest place on earth! (More Americans than the Eagle's Nest and Dachau put together!) We totally caught this American girl saying, "So are we like, in Germany now?".
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.
So basically, Charles and I spent the whole 4 hours getting there talking about how boring it is that everyone takes the same damn photo when they go to Neuschwanstein. So of course my solution was to draw a face and a crown on a banana, dub him King Ludwig II von Bavarianana, and pose with that. Of course, it would be irresponsible of us not to tell the whole story, so we have also made a plate of Ludwig's tragic end:
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.
Even with the 4 hour train ride, we made it back by 6pm. The only mishap was that *GASP* we got stuck on another Czech train! Since the German rail system is running this "Prague Special" (which Greg and I took to Prague, which is why I know I hate Czech trains), a couple of regional trains every day are replaced by the "direct train from Munich to Prague". They're just unpleasant and I hate them. While we're playing fortunately/unfortunately, I'd like to play my trump card and introduce you to...
I picked this little doozie up in the Munich train station during our 40 minute layover. It is: a pretzel stick, flayed open, filled with cole slaw and topped with a sausage (which contains cheese within the casing) which is then in turn topped with two types of mustard and ketchup. It made me eurphoric and then eventually ill. I have no regrets.
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.
