Hello all! As many of you know, I am travelling in Europe right now and promised to keep you all up to date with some kind of travelblog. So here it is . Obviously if any of you no longer want to hear about my adventures let me know and I’ll take you off the list.
My crazy adventure began a little more than a week ago (Thursday) when I spent what was literally a day in transit (left my house at 6 am, got to Frankfurt at 8 am). It was a relatively smooth journey except for the pair of toddlers that refused to stop crying or sit down and caused the plane to turn around after sitting on the jetway for half an hour in order to let them off the plane. I’ve never seen anyone actually get kicked off a flight before, so that was interesting. The delay was annoying (especially cause the flight was already scheduled to be 9 hours), but I figured it was better to get them off the plane than have them cry the whole way to Germany. At least the flight was made slightly more bearable by the fact that I was
sitting next to an extremely hot 20-year old German guy who also spoke English (he goes to college in the US).
I arrived in Germany Friday morning and Anna (one of my best friends from high school who lives in Germany) came to meet me at the Frankfurt airport. In a blur of enthusiasm and borrowed energy I vaguely remember taking the train to Mainz (the city neighboring Frankfurt), walking around the University of Mainz, visiting the botanic gardens, having lunch with Anna’s school friends, and nearly falling asleep in one of her psychology classes. After a brief nap (that Anna claims lasted three hours) we met up with three of her friends and made a quite gourmet dinner in the dorm kitchen—lemon fillet of salmon with a bed of pasta with homemade tomato feta sauce. We felt like such cooks After ice cream (note: ice cream count = 1) we went to bed.
Saturday brought with it more exhaustion, coupled with lots of walking around Mainz and sightseeing. The whole city felt very European to me, and I took an excessive amount of pictures of the buildings and scenery. We had lunch in one of the
city centers, which had a great view and led to fascinating people watching. People here behave differently, but it’s hard to describe how. They are less outwardly friendly in general, and yet I was caught off guard several times throughout the week by people I’d just met giving me hello-or-goodbye kisses (or two, or three). Sigh, culture shock… One thing I really love here is how restaurants almost always have more tables outside on the cute cobblestone streets than they do inside. It’s a very relaxed and cute atmosphere. After lunch we went to ice cream (ice cream count: 2) and walked around a mall. Amazingly enough, when they built the mall they found Roman ruins so now you can take the escalator down to the bottom floor and see the remains of a Roman monastery IN THE MALL. The contrast between the ancient ruins on the bottom floor and the high-end jewelry and makeup stores on the floor above was hilarious. After ice cream we walked down to the Rhein River to read our books. On the way we walked through an open-air market that had the most delicious looking food, including fresh fruits and vegetables and eggs that
had literally just been lain by the hen standing on the table by the eggs (talk about fresh…).We found a really cool artificial beach along the river and read while digging our feet into soft white sand. I didn’t think I’d be able to do that in Germany, but it was really fun. At night we went out for dinner (we sat outside, of course) and I ORDERED MY FIRST EVER ALCOHOLIC DRINK. It was so weird. I simply said “I’ll have a mojito” and they brought me a mojito. Unbelievable.
On Sunday we woke up to go downtown for brunch at this really amazingly delicious and European restaurant. They had the best orange juice I’ve had in my life (by far) and the breakfast was AMAZING. It had ham/eggs, croissants, three kinds of jams/butters, four kinds of cheeses, and a little salad. SO GOOD, mmmmm. We then spent the afternoon taking the train from Mainz to Habach, a little villiage at the base of the Alps where Anna’s family has a country house. It was basically the most beautiful landscape ever, and the train was actually ON TIME and FAST (read: American trains have annoyed me a lot
in the past). The scenery was rolling green hills, beautiful trees, and cute little houses dispersed along the fields. And there is a bright yellow flower that is everywhere here, so that some fields look bright yellow from a distance. It really does look a lot like the landscape you see in The Sound of Music. When we arrived in Habach Anna’s family came to pick us up, and they were all so nice and relaxed and fun to be around. After a delicious dinner made by Anna’s dad I went outside with Anna and her two sisters for a game of badminton. It was really fun and relaxing after two days rushing around the city.
In the morning we woke up to go have a tennis lesson. Anna’s sisters and dad came with us, so we played doubles and singles. And it was a DIRT COURT (cool!). Anna and I actually looked pretty good out there (Go BHS girls’ tennis alums!). After tennis we drove up to the Alps and went for a hike. We started at a gorgeous blue lake called the Walchensee. Anna and her parents went up to the little board where they have all
the hiking trails and spoke German to each other for awhile, after which Anna pointed to the top of this humongous looking mountain and said “we’re going here and then here” as she pointed to another neighboring peak. My heart sank. That looked sooooooooo far, and I had already spent most of my energy playing tennis. “That looks really far, but I’ll do it” I said, trying to convince myself that I would be able to make it up the mountain. After all, it would be embarrassing to wimp out when Anna’s two little sisters both seemed eager to confront the mountain. After walking around a corner, I saw the reason why nobody else seemed phased by the magnitude of the challenge in front of us: we were taking the gondola all the way up the mountain and only taking a short hike along the ridge. Thank goodness….
The view from the top was SO BEAUTIFUL and we actually had to walk through snow at times. I got some amazing pictures at the peak and used a program called photo stitch to make them into a panoramic shot. The seams between the pictures aren’t perfect, but it doesn’t look
Surfing!playing around with surfboards on a little lake by Anna's countryhouse
too bad. On the way back we stopped at a little lodge and had coffee/hot chocolate, apple strudel, and a German food called kaiserschmarrn that tasted like a cross between funnel cake and shredded pancakes. Delicious. On the way back from the Alps we took THE AUTOBAHN. Oh yeah, THE AUTOBAHN BABY! We drove 190 kilometers an hour (=116 mph) and it was so exhilarating. When we got back to Habach we went swimming in a pond by Anna’s house, and it was really refreshing (aka cold). There were surfboards there that we paddled around with though, and it was cute playing with Anna’s sisters. Then we had teatime at Anna’s house (Anna’s parents seem obsessed with teatime—I swear we had tea at least four times in a little more than two days. On the day we left we were running late for the train and I had to pack really fast and when I emerged from Anna’s room her dad wanted to know whether I was having coffee or tea. I thought it was a joke, but apparently there’s always time for a quick cup of tea).
On Tuesday we went to the town of Murnau to walk
around and visit shops and look at a gallery where the photography of Anna’s aunt was on display (this included a photograph of Anna. It was weird but cool to see her picture hanging in a gallery). And of course, we all went to ice cream (count: at least 3, I might have forgotten one by now). We spent the afternoon at a lake called Staffelsee where we rented a boat and went out to an island to swim, have a picnic, and read. It was really beautiful there as well, and we had a nice view of the Alps in the distance. Towards evening we took the train to Munich and rode bikes to a little garden outside the city owned by one of Anna’s friends. We had a barbeque there with several girls that Anna and her friend knew. It was funny and cute hearing them speak English. By the end of dinner I was TIRED: in two days I had biked, swam, played tennis, taken a hike, paddled a boat and a surfboard, played badminton, and walked all over Germany (it seemed). Anna and I fell asleep to the movie “the Princess Diaries” (in German).
Wednesday
was spent exploring Munich, seeing all of the landmarks, and (of course) getting ice cream (count: 4+). We climbed up to the top of the tower of Munich’s oldest church (306 steps) and got a great view of the city. And for lunch I tried Kaesspatzn, which I said was like “gourmet mac’n’cheese” but Anna and her friend seemed to think that was insulting. At night we went out to dinner and had cocktails with Anna’s boyfriend’s dad, which I thought was a little weird but the food was good (and free) so I can’t complain. And he was really nice, it was just a bit of an awkward situation.
Thursday Anna’s boyfriend flew into town and we all went to the Chinese tower biergarten in Munich. We ordered beer and had strange white veal sausages that were good, but I really wanted some ketchup to eat them with. Anna informed me that I would probably be killed if I tried to put any ketchup on them though, so I happily ate them plain. The biergarten was cute for sure, but it seemed pretty touristy. In the afternoon we took the autobahn (this time going up to about 210
kilometers per hour, or *128 MPH*) to Anna’s boyfriend’s house in Muehldorf (about an hour outside Munich). We walked around town and had ice cream (ice cream count: 5+) and had a nice dinner with his family. We all hit the sack pretty early, especially because I had to get up at 3:30 am to go to the airport.
Overall my week in Germany was really fun and I feel very lucky to have an amazing friend living there to host me and show me around. Towards the end of my stay not knowing the language began to get to me a little bit, but really the cultural differences between Germany and the US were much less pronounced than I had expected. I’m beginning to realize that the world really isn’t that big of a place—it seems that people are really fairly similar everywhere, only the little things are different. I did notice a few quirky cultural differences though, including the following:
1. German words are very long. I guess I knew that already, but I kept taking pictures of signs because 20-letter words were the norm.
2. The German language is actually kind of cute…. or, at
least it’s not as mean and harsh sounding as most people think.
3. The exchange rate sucks right now. I try not to think about it, but most of my meals are costing the equivalent of like $15 (food is expensive here to start with, and the dollar isn’t worth much these days). I have to eat though…
4. German boys are hot and German girls are cute (for the most part).
5. As you may have noticed from my blog, Germans eat ice cream almost as frequently as they drink water. I could barely keep up with all the ice cream eating (we went at least 5 times in one week!). To be fair, though, ice cream here can actually be cheaper than water (water at dinner is like 2 Euros, a large dish of ice cream at one store we went to was only 1.40 Euros).
6. There are no hostesses at restaurants, even nice ones. You simply walk in and find an empty table.
7. Almost all of the music here is same as the stuff we listen to in the US, but it seems incredibly out of place and weird. A few days ago I was
walking down a cute little cobblestone street between ancient buildings and around an open air market when suddenly someone started blasting OneRepublic. It just didn’t seem to fit.
8. Many Germans have cute little gardens outside the city because there is no room in the city. It’s a cute idea, but seems kind of inconvenient to me.
9. There are Jesuses EVERYWHERE in Germany: When you least expect it, you’ll look up only to find a crucified Jesus hanging right in front of you. Anna swears that not everyone here is super-religious anymore, but the abundance of Jesuses remains.
10. Germans prefer to eat their french fries with MAYONAISE rather than ketchup. And to make things worse, they seem to think that this is the way Americans do it as well. NASTY. When I ordered fries at a restaurant, they came with mayo and they wanted me to pay extra for ketchup. I’m afraid paying extra for ketchup with fries against my principles.
So yeah, that’s all for now. I am currently sitting in my hotel room in the Greek city of Heraklion on Crete waiting for the rest of the Duke students to get here. I’ll be
travelling around Greece for the next month taking a philosophy class on “The Birth of Reason”. I’ll send out another blog in a week or so, depending on when I can get internet access. I hope you all are doing wonderfully and I miss you all so much. Feel free to comment on this blog or send me an email, any news from you guys will cheer me up :)
Germany's Flag
Map of Germany