1 post tagged “neuschwanstein”
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.
