Glatz in Deutschland!

glatzindeutschland — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:32:04 +0000

This weekend in Trier was the Altstadtfest, which was very hyped-up but turned out to be not a whole lot. It was a lot more low-key than we anticipated, but I was definitely glad to have a weekend to take a break from travelling and relax a bit. The trip to Munich wore me out a little, and we’ll be spending next weekend in Berlin (and flying out directly after that). However, several very cool things came out of the weekend:

1. Currywurst. I don’t even know if it’s a German thing (Turkish maybe?) but they had it at the festival and it was an excellent discovery.

2. There is a Virgin Mary statue high on top of a mountain that you can see from town, that as far as we’ve been able to find out, has no road or trail leading to it. A few of the guys decided we needed to get up there even if there was no trail and we had to crawl through the underbrush to get there, which we did. 2 hours later we dead-ended at a rock face that we could have climbed if it was on flat ground (which would have been merely a painful fall), but it was over the same steep and rocky slope that was the entire mountain (a deadly fall), so we opted to go back. And today we are going to go back a different way and try to find a safe way around this dumb ledge. Hopefully I can get some good pictures of this statue that has been evading us, as well as the Moselle valley forest (it’s beautiful!).

Bavaria!

glatzindeutschland — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:55:39 +0000

Sorry for no posts sooner… I had a very busy weekend in Munich!

So, Bavaria is by far the greatest part of Germany. We got in by train on thursday evening and were picked up by our host in a Fiat that was too damn fast. I asked him about the speed limit in the cities (more of a polite request to slow down) and he said ”I have diplomatic passport of Japan. I have no rules.” So riding around the city was a little harrowing but it turned out okay. We made friends with two hitchhikers from California who had bought one-way tickets to Europe with the intention of finding jobs, and one of them was learning his way around Munich in hopes of making money as a tour guide. So we spent all day friday getting a free walking tour of the city. We started at the Marienplatz (city center) and saw the famous Glockenspiel dance in the tower of the Rathaus, then onto the Hofbräuhaus for lunch, the Viktualenmarkt (huge huge huge open-air farmer’s market), Isartor, the Englischer Garten, another beer at the Chinese Tower, a small art museum, another biergarten for dinner, and then another bier garten to watch the Netherlands-France game. By the end of the night we had walked about 6 miles and each drank 4 liters of Munich’s finest beer. Lecker!

Saturday afternoon we spent at the Deutsches Museum, which they tell you is ”one of” the biggest science and tech museums in the world, but I can’t imagine a museum being any bigger than this one. It was also probably the most thorough and well-designed museums I’ve ever seen… very, very cool. After dinner we headed back to the Hofbräuhaus for the evening, where our host showed us one of the halls upstairs which is mostly reserved for locals, where they refuse to serve you anything but a liter because that’s just what Bavarians do.

Oh, and we also were lucky enough to catch the city’s 850th birthday on sunday, which meant free pastries, free music, and hundreds of locals in traditional dress milling around the city, doing what Bavarians do… having a beer at 10:00 in the morning and generally being quite friendly. Prost!

Deutschland vs. Polen

glatzindeutschland — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:09:23 +0000

Pictures from Köln are up! Just a few of the Dom and the Chocolate museum.

As some of you might know, the Euro Cup is going on this month and Germany played their first game (against Poland) last night. Which of course we won. Our friend Christoph led us to a little hole-in-the-wall pub to watch the game, which by kickoff was completely packed and the bartenders would yell at you if you talked while the ball was in play… but they gave out free plates of liverwurst sandwiches at halftime. After the match we were taught a game called ”hammer the nail in the stump,” which is exactly what it sounds like except you are surrounded by very old, very drunk Russian men and you have to use an ice-pick instead of a hammer.

Ich liebe Deutschland.

Köln, etc.

glatzindeutschland — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:17:15 +0000

Just got back from Köln! It was a short day trip, but we got to see a lot in a few hours. First to the Dom, of course, which was just as breathtaking as I remembered it from last time. The reconstruction work is going really well, they took down all the scaffolding from the front and sides and they’re rebuilding some of the gargoyles on the back side and along the buttresses now. We also went back to the chocolate museum (they call it the mmmmuseum- clever Germans) and I think I saw considerably more of it than I did on our trip in high school, they definitely added a few exhibits since the last time. Very cool. I might go back to the city for a longer day trip some other weekend before we leave, because there were a lot of museums and other places I would have liked to check out if we had more time.

People here are really getting geared up for the Euro Cup. I saw my first drunk soccer mob today in Köln, which I’m sure will pale in comparison to what will be going on tomorrow. Germany plays Poland tomorrow night, and all the biergartens and pubs are setting up giant projection screens for the game. We will of course be there.

Sorry, no pictures tonight! I took a pretty good set of the Dom and the museum, but I’ll put them all up when I get back to the campus on monday.

cathedral library

glatzindeutschland — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:27:00 +0000

Yesterday we vistited a smaller cathedral on the other side of the Altstadt market square. They have a small library for the clergy and seminary students, and a pretty large special collection of old illuminated manuscripts and other texts. Most of them were from the late 1400′s and at least the ones our guide brought out to show us were in near-perfect condition. One book was an explantion of music theory, and one was a book of case studies for law students. He was reading us one of the case studies (translated into modern german, but he spoke very fast so I only caught parts of it) about a woman who had a child out of wedlock and whether or not they should kill the baby. They killed babies but they also had law schools! Europe was wild.

The rest of the library pictures are in the Trier folder on my Flickr page.

My new mission for the weekend is to find the microbrewery (probably an abbey) in this city. My roommates and I went out to a convienence store last night to pick up a little beer and food, and they sold an amazing live unfiltered microbrew in little corked bottles. The bottle only says ‘made in Trier’ and has the ingredients (water, hops, barley, yeast… natürlich!) listed on the back. And of course, was cheaper than the cheapest beer in America. And tastier than the best.

glatzindeutschland — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:35:16 +0000

So, ich bin hier in Trier.

Sorry for no updates sooner, the trip over here was a little wild and it took a few days to get oriented with the city. I got myself good and lost the first day as I was exploring the city, and I ended up getting directions from a hooker (they are everwhere!! Prostitution is legal and government-regulated so they’re all actually very professional). I’ve been given a map and much better directions, so I’m starting to understand where things are, or at least how to get back to our hostel.

Anyway, the city is gorgeous and I’ve only seen a small part of it so far. I have a few pictures of Porta Nigra (the old Roman city gate, which is the largest one outside the city of Rome), but we’ll be touring the inside of the gate (it’s more like a castle really) as well as some of the other ruins later next week so I’ll put those pictures up then. The only thing I’ve been able to explore in depth was the Dom. This might be the most stunning cathedral I’ve ever seen. It’s much smaller than the one in Köln but architecturally its much more interesting. The original structure was built in 250 AD and parts of the foundation are still intact as they kept building over it. Most of the current structure is from the Rennaissance, but there are parts from different periods.

Classes started yesterday and are going well. They gave us a DaF (Deutsch auf Fremdsprachen- german as a second language) teacher so that’s been really helpful as none of us can really speak it that well. The university is very cool, i’ll have to put up pictures of it later because the architecture is insane. I’ve never seen anything like it, the whole campus looks like a Lego space station. It is also the only place in the city where you can find cheap coffee (under €3!!) because the government subsidizes the food for students.

The rest of the Dom photos are here (I have so many on my camera but the computer I’m working on has a slow connection so I only added a few- more later!)http://www.flickr.com/photos/18357363@N00/sets/72157605386257452/