10 posts tagged “regensburg”
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:
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.
It's Pentecost Monday today, and so we don't have class (tomorrow either!). I'm using today to clean my room for my parents' visit (yay!) and blog, and tomorrow a couple of us are going to Passau. None of us actually know what's IN Passau, but it comes highly recommended by everyone.
In other news, the weather here has been very well suited to my tastes. Mostly the days have been warm (in the high 70s to mid 80s), and then in the evening epic thunderstorms roll in and all the allergens get washed out of the air. Plus, in the window where the pressure is changing and the clouds moving in, there are really nice, almost haunting cool breezes.
On Saturday, Lauren, Rachel, Kay and I went to the Weltenburg Cloister, then on a river cruise, and then climbied up to the Befreiungshalle in Kelheim (another Ludwig I endeavor). It was part of a program with the Akademisches Auslandsamt, the office on campus that deals with foreign exchange students.
The boat ride was only 20 minutes long, which was kind of disappointing, but we got gelato during it, so all was not lost. At the end of the boat ride, we were led through Kelheim to a path up to the Befreiungshalle. The path had to be like 60 degrees above the horizontal where it started. I was scared. (We didn't get to see much of Kelheim because we weren't close to the center, or at least didn't know where it was.)
In the end, the hike up was not too bad, especially with company, and it was super-duper worth it. The multi-colored rectangles are not the result of different colored stone, but rather painting. It looks pretty sweet up close.
It says "The German Fight for Liberation, Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, 1863"
Believe it or not, the inside was even cooler than the outside.
Strangely, you can also walk behind those angels.
Photos from Dult:
Three views of the heart cookies that were everywhere. They have strings so you wear them like a necklace.
1) The Circle of Life: In a recent post, I discussed Obazta, a Bavarian cheese dish. I promised that the next time I ate it, I would take a photo. I ate it today, but I didn't have my camera. Then, Jess sent me a photo of some Obazta we had in Bamberg. That's Gretchen on the right.
2) I have been making my way through "Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen", and the author at one point mentions the places she'd been in the United States: New York City (naturally) and Vinalhaven! The same, 1200-person Vinalhaven that we can (theoretically?) see off in the distance when we visit the beautiful summer home of family friends on another island in Penobscot Bay. In other news, I'm definitely translating that for my thesis. *gulp*
3) On Wednesday, I leave for Vienna for three days. The plan is to get there around 4 pm, stay Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night, and then spend as much or as little of Saturday there as I want. Hopefully I will not go crazy with solitude as I did in Switzerland. I've gotten four guidebooks from the library, as well as the Rick Steeves' "Germany and Austria" that my Dad left here. I think Rick Steves is kind of a stupid jerk, and normally I'd say that at least it was useful for the maps, but he draws his own, because he is kind of a stupid jerk. So...I'm using it to get an overview before using the German-language guides for more specific items. RS promotes this BS-type of "have-your-eyes-pass-over-everything-without-seeing-anything" tourism. It's like, "Here is how to see everything "important" in a city in one day", and it's unfortunate. It also makes him look dumb when he refers to anything in his best-selling guidebooks as "off the beaten path." And lastly, today, I found this in the book (referring to cake shops): "Shops like this boast "K u. K" - good enough for the König und Kaiser (king and emperor, same guy)." I am currently enrolled in a class for four hours a week about how König and Kaiser are not the same guy. I am not going to get into why he's wrong, but what really gets me is that he made this fairly obivous error while saying something that had no other purpose but to make him look "smart". Okay, I'm going to stop myself there.
4) On...Thursday? I went to the Trinity Church (Dreieinigkeitskirche) on Gesandtenstr. (here in R'burg) and climbed up into the steeple, as it is open for a nominal fee during the summer. Here are a few photos from the visit (click to embiggen):
(The rest of the photos are also in the "photos" section of the blog.
5) This weekend I went to Aschaffenburg, which is near Frankfurt right on the Hessen border. Our friend Regina's parents and brother live there, so five of us went to visit and stayed with her and her family. The biggest deal in Aschaffenburg is the castle, which is quite large and is red.
We also walked around the shopping area of the downtown a little, looking for a mothers day gift for Regina to buy for her brother to give to her mom. Hah. Unfortunately, my camera died right before I was able to take a photo of a giant knife that served as the sign for a kitchen store. I was able to take one photo in the toy store:
We went for a walk through the neighborhood and into the hills on Sunday before we left:
The following cat was not interested in the competition:
7) One more photo from Regensburg:
Regensburg is one of those rare places that is a curiosity itself, but is also a functioning, vital city. Though I had planned on sleeping in, I woke up at nine this morning and went out to breakfast at Cafe Prock, just off Kohlenmarkt. The cafe is really beautifully furnished inside, with paintings and prints of Regensburg icons. But not in a kitschy way. Plus, they have really yummy looking goodies to take home.
I brought a book ("Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen" (As Nature Didn't Intend) by Hilde Domin), and sat inside by the window so as not to be too distracted. As I sat sipping tea and looking out the window, about two tour groups would go past every five minutes. Each stopped right outside, and a few members in every group took a photo of the tower across the street. I realized that I didn' t have a photo of that tower, or of many other things that I passed ten times a day. So, after breakfast, I went on a Stadtbummel (stroll around the city - but isn't it great that they have ONE word for it?) and took about 30 photos. Here is the cream of the crop:
There are also a few more in the photos section.
Most importantly, I am just finishing a cone of chocolate-rose petal-pink peppercorn gelato. I wish I could tell you that it is as delicious as it is bizarre, but that's a tall order, and it's still pretty good.
So, I met my tandem partner, Sabrina today. The idea of tandems is that you meet up with a German and speak German for half an hour, and English for a half an hour. We ended up talking for about two hours, and she invited me to come with her to her hometown (Landshut) which is home to the tallest brick tower in the world. If the weather is nice we'll probably go on Saturday.
I finally found the Regensburg Public Library, and got an 8 Euro library card. This should be a more cost efficient way to find a text to translate than just buying books willy-nilly. I found two books by Hilde Domin, a Jewish German author who left Germany in 1932 and then returned in the 50s. I really admire the people who were able to come back after the Holocaust. It must have been extremely hard.
The library itself is really neat. It turns out it's about a block away from my room and I just never noticed. I will have to post a photo later, as it is covered with scaffolding. It shares the building with a handful of other offices and businesses, but the reference desk backs up to a door that opens to a balcony overlooking Haidplatz. Being that librarian must rule. The library is also cute and tiny. It is one floor with a mezzanine above it. It has a whole room dedicated to foreign language materials, and just looking in the American section was a little jarring. They had the Moosewood cookbook, Mom!
The most surprising thing about the library is that the building it's in has this ridiculous Italienate courtyard. I promise to take a photo of it. The inner walls of the building are lined with these elaborate marble-looking arches. I don't know how to describe it.
ETA: Okay, so the libary is in a building called the Thon-Dittmer Palais, and here is a photo of the interior. Also, here is a website about the area. It's in German, but the pictures are what matters.
Obatzda/O'batzta/Obatzter is a standard, beer garden cheese dip snack food. Its main ingredients are camembert, cream cheese or butter, beer and paprika, and it's served with raw, sliced red onions on the side. It's generally pale orange due to the paprika, but I have eaten a whitish version (in Berlin).
It is traditionally served in either a dallop or a series of scoops on a plate with what Americans would call pretzel stix protruding skyward. Thus, it either looks like a hedgehog, or a dead, comic-book caterpillar. It is extremely delicious. I had some for dinner last night. Unfortunately, I did not think to take a photo. I promise one in the near future.
In other news: Mom, Dad, I have a really stupid idea for our Christmas card photo. Contact me privately.
ETA: I have been mentally compiling a list of "Ways to seem like a local" in Regensburg. At the moment, most of the list escapes me, except for my personal favorite: Comment on the poor quality of Thurn und Taxis beer. Everyone will think you're super cool. I think I may have even been patted on the back once for saying that.
Sepp was in the band! How cool is that?! They played a lot of silly American and British summery songs. It was pretty great.
I have just realized that I play window-shade chicken every time someone checks into the hotel room across the way. As you can see from this photo:
My room looks directly into a hotel room. An EXPENSIVE HOTEL ROOM (ha ha!). THIS expensive hotel room. My ethernet outlet is right next to that window, and so my computer is too. Basically, when someone walks into that room, they set down their bags, and walk to the window to gaze upon their 200 Euro view of...an American reading boingboing. (I'm pretty sure my father's 43 Euro hotel room looked out onto a music studio with lots of plants in the windows). Either way, I effing live here, so unless I'm disrobing, my blinds are staying open. Usually their blinds close immediately. I have only once lost this little game of chicken. I don't want to talk about it. Modesty means different things in different countries.
If this were a book, there would be three spaced-out asterisks here to denote a change of topic.
I was moping around my room at four in the afternoon, and decided to respond to an email that A.J., a former frisbee teammate, had sent me while I was in Switzerland. Halfway through the email (about frisbee), I realized that I was missing ACTUAL frisbee practice, and went for the first time in two months. My German had improved (slightly), my playing had worsened (greatly). It was about what I expected, but it was fun, and we went out to a Biergarten afterwards. I think I have surmounted the language-barrier awkwardness, if not the language barrier, and feel better about going back next week. They're starting practices on Wednesday, in addition to Friday and Sunday, which is great because I will still be able to play twice a week if I'm gone on Friday.
3 x *
Gretchen and I left Berlin on Tuesday at 7:30, and arrived in Rügen around noon. I think. We weren't sure if the hostel was open for guests yet, so we locked our bags in large the train station. It wasn't actually large, in fact it was quite small, but not as small as that of the narrow-guage iron railway a few blocks down. The beach/boardwalk was only a few blocks away, straight ahead. On the walk there, we appreciated all of the soviet beach condos, which, ironically, make Binz (that was the name of the town: Ostsee-Bad Binz) look like every American beach-front city I've ever been to (Tybee Island, GA, Wildwood, NJ, Nantasket Beach in Hull, MA).
We were a little overwhelmed, because we wanted to see the beach, but we also wanted to see the Jagdschloss, which is a fancy hunting lodge from the early-mid 1800s on a hill overlooking the whole island. AND we had to eat seafood for dinner, buy snacks for our respective 9+ hour train rides the next day, and check into the hostel by 5pm.
We were going to get lunch from this "fresh fish" cart on the promenade, until we saw a) that the fish still had the shiny part on it, and b) the smoked eels, which looked like those giant novelty pencils dipped in tar. So we put that off, wandered around the boardwalk aka promenade a little, and then decided we should go to the Jagdschloss ASAP because it closed at 4pm, whereas the beach did not.
We were tricked (aka I forgot to read the guidebook) into taking this cute but absurd little train/car thing up to the Jagdschloss. It looked like a locomotive, but it was really just a car pulling two carts. The first...10? minutes of the ride was just bumbling around Binz very slowly while plugging restaurants and hotels. It was dumb. Very dumb. Eventually, we made it to the Jagdschloss ("hunting palace"), which is inside a nature reserve, and surrounded by (apparently) beautiful hiking trails.
I know this is a family blog, but I have to say - the Jagdschloss was a little phallic.
I say that mostly because the building is really oddly proportioned, in the sense that it has two floors - except when it has six. That makes the climb up the tower REALLY long. Also contributing to how long it feels, is the fact that the staircase is cast-iron and snakes around the inside of the tower, thus feeling rickety and leaving lots of room to look down. I was too nervous to take a photo, so here is someone else's.
Here are views from the top!:
Here are views from the inside!:
There were also a few museumy rooms on the first floor dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (the architect of the Jagdschloss and other buildings, including the Neue Wache in Berlin, though he isn't responsible for the most beautiful parts of it), and two rooms full of truly heinous modern art that lacked an artist's name. Good choice.
We did finally walk on the beach and eat after we returned from the Jagdschloss. I had pad thai and Gretchen had currywurst. Woo, seafood...
Then, of course, we went looking for gelato. Because that's how they roll here. Gelato, all. the. time. We ended up getting waffles from a gelateria (because that makes sense). I had one with raspberry sauce and whipped cream, and Gretchen got one with Nutella all up on it.
I imagine that from there we staggered back to the hostel and went promptly to sleep. I think that sounds about right. Oooh, and then the next morning I took my first shower in three days because the apartment in Berlin had something wrong with the shower drain.
So I think that's it for Binz.
Ciao.
