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Published: June 16th 2006
Welcome to a change of Scene
Heres what it looks like in this area where im staying, this taken from the top of Falkenstein's castle, about 8km away from my grandparent's house.So here I am, all the way in Europe, it’s hard to believe I had spent 3 months of my life trundling around the USA after so many months… about 7 months of planning in fact … and I had already completed half of my journey. ‘Half’ … yep that’s right, I still have the western and northen reaches of this new and bizzare foreign speaking continent to explore before I can return home to reality and lazy afternoons playing video games on my days off from work. Note: I haven’t played a game for way too long, im having withdrawels.. Prey must be out by now.. the expansions for Half Life 2? The Twilight Princess?? Im sure Bangers has already completed it and Michael has downloaded all the new PC games.. how I long for hours to waste on games again… and then there’s the music im missing out on, too… I havent found a ‘music store’ in Germany yet, I asked at an information place in the city and was directed to a department store, which had the entire ACDC and Nightwish back catalogues but nothing even remotely interesting for me. Can’t anyone out there understand how much im
The Last Supper
The remains of our last meal in America. I had large fries, the spicey chicken sandwhich and 8 nuggets. Horse beat me I think but not by much. suffering? Does anyone care? Nope, because you’re all wishing you could be lazing about on the other sides of the world instead of working and I should be thankful for my position. This traveling business isn’t easy you know. Join with me now as I document my first 20 days or so in Germany, beginning with the flight here…
After hating the trip from Sydney to LA, Horse and myself had prayed for a nicer trip from NYC to Frankfurt. We were greeted by a lot of much younger flight attendants, nice attractive german girls with crazy german accents. Half the people on the plane were German or seemt that way and the other half from other parts of europe and then a small handfull of tourists, like Horse and myself and VERY FEW Americans (but unfortunatley still some obnoxious slobs sitting near or around us) It was a small sacrifice because for at least the next couple of weeks I would not have to speak or in anyway interact with one. Thee flight was pretty short, lasting roughly 8 hours. I enojoyed some bourbon and a beer as I laid into my book and some music. I declined
Further Religious Experimentation
The art in the old churches in Regensburg was esquisite. There are millions of churches all over Bavaria, I guess theyre all over Europe, too... dont know how much I can take in before my brain melts. on the hearty airline banquet due to Horse and I gorging ourselves on Mc’donalds before leaving the US. The staff on the plane were pretty cool, one particular girl we talked to briefly as she taught us some basic german pronounciation. There were a couple of cool other ones but also a grumpy one who didn’t really like the fact that we didn’t speak german and treated us a bit… funny… perhaps confusing us with americans? I hope not. I tried my plan, the whole ‘pretend that it’s a different time and trick my body into not being jetlagged’ … I thought it was working. I only drifted between concious and half-concious for 30 mins or so and after we had landed, it felt like I had ‘a sleepless night’ … you see, we took off at 9pm and landed at 10am the next morning! Perfect! Horse wasn’t faring as well as I was and looked like he was ready to leap from the mortal coil at any time. Frankfurt airport sucks ass, there’s no other way of describing it. I understand it’s huge but it’s at least a 2-3km walk from getting off the plane to the bagage claim
Sacreligious Experience
hmm... my camera captures some weird shit. and customs. We eventually got out stuff and walked to customs and Immigration. I was preparing for another verbal onslaught just like in LA but this time in a confusing language but to my utter joy, the officials only glanced briefly at our passports, stamped it and sent us on our way. Not even a word was exhanged. German effiency? That was the easy part and at this stage I was still feeling like I could run a small marathon (but still lose) but Horse.. mein gott was he dying. Poor guy The one great feature about Frankfurt airport is that the Train Station (Bahnhof) is ‘connected’ to the airport. By connected I mean, an indoor stroll for about 11km. I had decided to train it to Regensburg, which is the closest city to my Grandparents home, instead of getting a connecting flight to Munich, which would have seen my grandma (known from now on as ‘Oma’ as is my Grandpa ‘Opa’) drive for 2 and a half hours to pick us up, instead of 30 mins to Regensburg. I always feel bad about people taxi-ing me about but where we were headed the busses weren’t exactly convenient. The best
Another Church Affair
Here is the Monastory (sp??)near Kelheim on the River Donau. I lost my ability to spell there. part of being in europe and not being able to speak german very well is trying to read train timetables that are so intense and complicated that even if you did speak german, well you would still struggle. There were no ‘destination’ signs for ‘Regensburg’, infact Regensburg wasn’t mentioned anywhere. I started having stress attacks and wanted to be back in an english speaking country again. I checked on the net before I left home that there was a connektion from Frankfurt to Regensburg and the internet never lies. I walked over to the counter and asked the guy ‘hello, is there a train to regensburg soon and from where do I catch it?’, in the vain hope that he would understand english and he did, this was excellent. My stress levels dropped 0.3% as he spoke fluent english and said ‘platform 4 at 12:01pm’ … so I beckoned for Horse to come to me and we quickly ran downstairs. It was 11:57am at this stage, so I was saved by the bell I guess, or some other cosmic force of compassion. We got to the platform and briefly I looked and studied the modern looking bahnhof (trainstation in german…
Dunkel:Heit Beir
The Darkest beer ever, brewed by the monks in Weltenburg, went down a treat. bahn meaning ‘tracks’ and hof meaning something else, still unclear to me) I looked around at the signs… track 4? Check.. train rolling into platform on time? Check… but nowhere did it say Regensburg… stress levels rising 10% by each passing second. I quized Horse as we stood there dumbfounded staring in the open doors of this super looking modern train (ICE, Intercity Express, germany’s premiere Train, reaching speeds in excess of 200km/h), I asked him if we should get on at try our luck. He mumbled something, a corpse like gasp which sounded like yes, so that we did… dumped our bags at the end of the car and stood there gaping out the windows as the doors closed as the train began to glide off to it’s unknown destination. We hadn’t bought tickets either, neither Horse or I wanted to get stuck into our eurail passes, not just yet. I started to stress out, the stress had trippled since I stepped aboard. Imagine being yelled at by a german ticket officer in a cray way and speaking slooooow english and using foolish hand movements to explain that we have no idea what to do or say in this
Inside the Cake
König Ludwig's Little Playhouse which looked like a delicious sweet was actually very beautiful inside. situation. Horse fell into a chair and I left him there and walked along the train towards the back. Walking past a ton of people, I presumed all germans on either daily outings or routine. I got weird looks from them all, I must have looked pretty hard with my black hoodie and beanie and a horrid look on my face, stress turns me into a raving lunatic. I guess everyone at that stage had reason to look at me funny. I walked past some strange little man with a snack cart (mmm snacks direct to my seat, no more walking 4 carriages and down a lot of stairs like on amtrak trains for me!) I walked through 4 identical carriages and gave up… an endless sea of passengers with correct tickets, hell I even bet they knew what station to get off at! I walked back to my seat, the 2 strangers in our booth had been reduced to one, the nice young lady had vanished but as jetlag began gripping at my soul, it was the least of my concerns. I felt like curling up and sleeping for an eternity and maybe ending up in Greece somewhere and
Oooh it Doesnt get Old. Ever...
Another beautiful scene, this one taken on the second time I got lost. The town im staying in is identical, however. then starting the journey to Regensburg anew the next day. Horse managed to speak to the snack cartsman… somehow he must have understood ‘regensburg’ and he whipped out a timetable for this train. On the front it said ‘Hamburg à Passau’ … didn’t mention Regensburg but didn’t mention Frankfurt either. I flicked through it and saw it stopped in Regensburg! And Nürnberg! And a whole heap of other towns. My stress levels quickly deflated to almost zero. I had forgot to mention that I was to meet my Oma at 4pm, the train luckily arrived at 3:28pm, had we had to fart around on and about other trains, we could have arrived much later and screwed up the arranged time, too. I believe that im going to get even more confused as I travel europe but It pays to know your geoagraphy. Everybody knows that Frankfurt is directly South of Hamburg, right? Hey I bet everyone knows that Passau, directly on the german/austrian border is east of Frankfurt and that Regensburg slots RIGHT in between nice and snug? I bet no-one but my dad would know those details. I do now, though and I will use this basic geographical understanding to guide me across europe like a paraglider on a windswept sunny afternoon in some picturesque scene somewhere far aqy from here. The ICE train slipped out of Frankfurt’s downtown terminal (we got on at the the Airport station) and we were on our way…
Eventually the ticket man meandered onto our carriage and Horse and I flailed our arms about widely making universal signs for ‘huh’ or ‘wooooaah ahhh … huh?’ but eventually he squeezed 61euros out of us each for the journey to Regensburg. Horse and I were groping with the german language, we took out our german dictionairies and phrase books and practised a little. On the verge of Lord Jetlag taking us to the land of subconcious slumber and paranormal dreams, we began talking german to the guy across from us, he looked like he wanted kinship from 2 Australian losers with no grip on the German language. He looked at us strange as we asked him great question after great question such as ‘wie heisen sie?’ which is ‘what is your name?’ in english followed by another atempt and different pronounciation. He laughed a little and smiled, not a great answer. Yet we still tried our luck. After 10 mins he lent over and said ‘I have a secret, Im not really from germany, I am from Romania’ … oh Horse and I felt like idiots. We then had some small english conversations and gave him a quick summary of our trip and he told us what he was doing. In fact he was going home after spending time with friends in Holland, so a direct train route through the belly of Germany, quite scenic, I bet. Eventually the conversation torrent dried up into a small stream (or Bach, if you will) and Horse fell at the hands of Captain Jetlag. His sleep positions on the comfortable yet upright seating was quite funny but Im not the type to take embarrassing photo’s of friends. I wanted to sleep too but I had visions of Vampires and death with robbery during my sleep, as our Romanian friend across the table eyed us off lazily. I don’t like trusting strangers so I battled long and hard for 2 hours not to sleep. Traveling through the european countryside was already like a fairytale, the green grassy hills flowing into each other and wonderful yellow and white flowers scattered around in random patches, a mixed sky of blue with portions of grey or white clouds floating and creating shadows across the land outside my window. Cars and trucks were overtaken by our speeding train, I could see it’s speed because at the end of each carriage is a speedometer and also an electronic board displaying the stations (Regensburg not mentioned) the speeds were occasionaly topping 200k’s but most of the time a brisk 150km/h. Unlike the USA when it was One gigantic metropolis then an hour and another huge city… Germany’s south east was (and still is, Im sure) littered with tiny villages and towns, each with that distinctive Bavarian look that I indeed remember from when I was here last (as a 6 year old) and I have seen on TV since. If you have no idea what im talking about. Ill have to add some pics as examples. We stopped in Nürnberg, Bavaria’s 2nd largest town (München the largest) and I enjoyed the views over the old town district and the awesome castle atop the hill looking out over the town, as it had done for centuries but I shall cover that town in detail in 1 or 2 journals time, after I actually make It there eh. Horse still slept. According to the timetable we had 1 hour and 24 mins left before Regensburg. I started to lean against the glass and my eyes were closing, the immense relief I was feeling wanted to sweep we away on a euphoric tidal wave but I kept fighting it. Eventually the train arrived, dead on time, amazing, seeing as though some amtrak trains were 8 hours late at times. Horse and I got off and up the escalaters and into the waiting area… rush hour. Students everywhere. Regensburg has a relatively new UNI here and theres a Highschool in town, too. I was being paranoid and felt like a moron looking at weird looking signs that probably meant ‘no staring here’ or something even more mundane but this was europe.. it was new. I felt like exploding though, like I knew I would struggle to fulfill this trip. German is just one language.. what about swiss german in Switzerland? What about French in France? Uhh and what do they speak in Luxemburg? And how will I address Wouter’s family in Belgium… do I need to learn flemish? Ahh and then there’s dutch… danish… swedish… norwegian… finish and whatever it is they speak in the Eastern European paradise of Lithuania… I hope it’s not czech! All these thoughts were buzzing in my jetlag screwed mind. My body was screaming for death or sleep but my mind wanted to keep me thinking until my head finally explodes and kills innocent bystanders. After 20 mins or so, my Oma appeared and Horse and I greeted her (was it in German?) and after a hug, I finally felt a bit more welcome In this crazy place …
My Mum had warned me not to get into my Oma’s car if I could help it but if I didn’t have a choice I should always buckle up… because she’s a ‘crazy driver’ … I laughed this off at the thought but within 10 mins of the trip home, I understood my Mum completley. My Oma zoomed at light speed, if she had to brake for even a milisecond she cursed (mildly) at the person in front. It was quite funny actually. Unfortunatley for my Oma, the entrance to the Autobahn was closed (the autobahn is like a highspeed freeway where you can drive at unlimited speed) so I was trying to work out how to tell her ‘drive to a different entrance’ but I had no idea how to say it. My Oma’s english skills are OK but not enough for me to somehow convey that statement to her with any success. The autobahn cuts roughly 20 mins travel time out of the trip to Aumbach (the town where we were headed, where my Oma and Opa lived and where my 2 Auntie’s whom starred in previous journals grew up and of course, my own mother …) We took the scenic route home, through similar villages I had spied while on the train. Villages with less that 100 people, maybe only 50 … seperated by 1 or 2km. Each with it’s own cute name and of course ‘Gasthaus’ (Guesthouse, note: place of public drunkeness) eventually we got to Wörth a.d Donau (pronounced Vert on the Don now… the Donau in english is Danube and is a famous wild river that disects a lot of germany) which is the closest ‘big town’ to Aumbach, it has a supermarket but sadly no Minigolf course. 3km later and we were in the front side of my grandparents house…. Ah the memories of the 1989 winter I spent here… I stayed here for 7 months in this house) and well… it seemt a lot smaller now, but then again im 16 years older and at least 3 times the size (well maybe 4..) The smells… the firewood smell… the fire burning… the grass… all the unique ‘Aumbach smells’ that im sure my Dad can remember quite well. It’s like an old memory being released from it’s neural cell via hypnosis or halluncinagenic drugs. It was amazing. My Opa and my Uncle Hans were standing in the doorway and I rushed over and gave them a hug, for a moment I thought I was 6 all over again. They still looked the same in my eyes even after the years of pretty much no correspondence about what their lives were doing. Not that I bothered to care, mind you… but still maybe I should of? Hmm.
We sat down in the kitchen dining area, it was SO TINY … woah but it still looked the same even though one of the walls had been removed. I couldn’t imagine just how small it would have been had the 2 rooms still been separate. My oma gave us food… sooo much food. Würst (Sausage in german) but it generally covers anything sliced or diced from a living creature. With the tons and tons of meat came bread, pickled gurkins and sempf (Mustard of course!) and this type of meal would be the staple of Horse and I’s diet for the next 2 weeks… at least one meal a day would feature a platter of delicious (and some horrible) looking meat, which my Opa insisted each time was ‘Pferdfleisch’ (Horsemeat) he then belowed with a rich beer bellied laugh and his own cheeky humour was something that Horse and I came to adore, however I don’t think my Opa has always been a barrel of laughs and goodtimes. After an hour Horse and I were getting stuck into the beer (beer would also become a staple of our diet, breakfast, brunch,lunch,supper,dinner or desert would be IMPROPER without beer! The real beers here come in 500ml bottles, called a ‘halbe’ or half, in english and my Oma had a cupboard filled with traditional beer glasses for that ‘halbe’ it was quite impressive but I think this house has been one where beer has been the star of the show for 3 generations. The beer was awesome, later I found out that my Oma buy the best brand, costs 3euros more by 20 pack than most of the other beers. A white beer (weise) or the dark beer (dunkel) and both were as good as each other. The dark beer is a perfect side dish to a hot meat dish, say Roast Pork with Dumplings and Sourkraut or… something more extreme like Pork Schnitzel mit Pomme Frits (chips!) and gravy too. The Pork salad, a cold dish served with bread was more suited to the white beer. Note: Pork (Schweinfleisch) is the meat of choice in Bavaria and I would estimate I have devoured a whole farm’s worth thus far, in under 3 weeks… After food and beer and some weird talking in something a mix between english and german stuttering (with plenty of bizzare hand movements to help proceedings) we were greeted by 2 of my Opa’s drinking buddies, Sigi and Dusty, both were cautious of us 2 young Aussie louts but after a couple of beers everyone was in Highspirits. Hell Sigi and Dusty even started speaking english a little, they informed us they learnt it in school but after 20 years in the workforce and no need to keep it up, it had slipped out of their vocabulary but Horse and I were enjoying having them around, which is just as well because guaranteed that either one, sometimes both or 1 of 4 other guys, all my opa’s mates would pop into the Schwarzfischer platz (this side of the family’s german name) for a beer on any given night of the week. Monday through Sunday. No shortage of beer drinkage here. After 4 (2 litres) bottles of brew, Horse and I departed from the party and hit the hay so to speak. I didn’t sleep well… jetlag wanted me to suffer a bit longer and my head spun from beer and dillusions. Crazy dreams, crazy thoughts …. Madness.
Okay, word 86’ is suggesting to me that this is Seite 5 (page 5) and that I have covered one day in Europe haha… so now Im just going to document the next 18 days, which most nothing happened at all.
The town of Aumbach has 100 people? I don’t know really but it’s tiny as a shoebox but much prettier. It’s Nestled amongst some low valley’s and up a nice slope. 1km off from the main road. My grandparents house is located on top of that hill and you can see 100’s of k’s into the distance. The Danube is a snake which bends it’s way across the green grassy carpet in the distance. It glistenes at dawn and shimmers at dusk as the sun sets over hills to south (well I think it’s the south or does the sun set in the East or west everywhere??) -
my dad will know that one… and well this town is just so damn scenic but it’s so damn small… sure it has a garage for fixing Purgeot’s but I don’t have a car let alone a Purgeot and then of course it has a Gasthaus for consuming beer but when beer grows on trees at my Grandparent’s house, why would I need to go there? Ive lasted 19 days here as I type this, be more like 23 by the time I upload this journal complete with pics and im liking it but the madness is beginning to cramp in. I spoke to my mum on the phone this morning she asked me ‘are you deppressed or anything?’ I shrugged this off as one of ‘my mum’s questions’ but reflecting on it, I guess everyone in this town either would get depressed or silently go mad and eventually after a few too many beers and under a northern full moon, hop in a tracktor and run over some dogs. Wörth and Falkenstein are the 2 closest places where you can do shopping, look at girls (that youre not related to) or enjoy a tidbit of touristy stuff like climbing a large amount of stairs and walking around a medieval castle. Horse and I spent a day in Falkenstein, our first outing from Aumbach after 4 days of sitting around being a but bored. We did the castle thang and ate a nice lunch. I got eyed off by some ‘biker thug’… a 13 year old on a Vesper. You aint shit in rural Bavaria if you don’t have your 50cc beast to travel between shitty backwater to the next (how I wish I had my own and could travel around by myself :’()
Heh… Falkenstein… what else did we do? Well we met my Cousins, Sandra and Marion, I remember them from 16 years ago and well they still look the same and arent much bigger either haha. Then my other 2 cousins Sonja and Anna, my other Uncle, Klaus, his daughters.. one was 16 and the other 12, neither were born when I was here last. They all seem nice but don’t talk to much, I musnt look interesting to them, or maybe they get a cousin from the other side of the globe come see them on a regular basis? I understand a 16 or 12 year old girl not being interested in me (never have) but my 21 year old twin cousins I would expect them to maybe spend some time with Horse and myself, or after Horse leaves just myself but the language barrier must be so thick it’s visible or they just don’t give 2 shits. I’ll have to remember this treatment just incase they come to Australia one day. I spent some time with Uncle Klaus, the youngest of all the 5 siblings from Aumbach, met his wife, she seems nice enough and brings me a drink when I sit here using their PC for 3 hours at a time doing my journals! But the language barrier is too intense. No one besides My Oma and Klaus have any grasp on English and I KNOW german words but it’s putting them into a congeled sentence that I cannot muster without sounding like an imbicile. Klaus has been the coolest guy, seems to be more in touch with reality and less of a farmboy than his father or older brother. He owns a ski-haus (skiing and drinking beer in winter, drinking beer in summer haha) and Horse and I spent out first 2 Saturdays there drinking nonstop. It was gross… most drunk I have been since that time way back when … hehe well more drunk than I had been at any stage in the US, it was disgraceful. We made it to my Oma’s house at 3am, after a 2km walk from the ski-haus and we were locked outside. I walked into the barn and passed out on the floor. The smell of hay and horse manure filling my paraletic nostrils (but there’s no horses in that barn…) I laid there for christ knows how long until Horse managed to wake my Oma up (romanticaly throwing pebbles at her bedroom window, I was lead to believe) and eventually made it upstairs where I slept for 11 hours. Next week wasn’t quite as bad, I mean we didn’t drive to a Discotech in Wörth with a drunk 40 year old woman (I wonder if my Mum went to school with her?) and dance like idiots but hey it was just as cool. Klaus’s drinking buddies were closer to our age and the atmosphere was pumping. Klaus has an old PC with roughly 7,000 mp3’stored on it. I scoured through them hoping to find some gems… tons of ACDC, some Iron Maiden, plenty of Ozzy and then The Consultancy by none other than Amplifier yay! So I cranked that, must have been a minor hit over here in Europe… good times, even now that Horse had abandoned me here, I went back by myself on the passed Friday and managed to enjoy myself. Even drinking the fabled ‘Ausbach’ … a hideous 38%!a(MISSING)lc drink that tastes so sweet you could drink 5L within an hour and then collapse in a gibbering heap shortly after. Jagermeister is also flowing through my veins too. Loved it at home and over here it’s DIRT CHEAP so im loving it even more. Sounds like there’s not much more to Staying in Aumbach besides getting pissed as a fart every night of the week? Hey you’re onto something there, hold that thought.
Regensburg, the place where we met my Oma, a city of 200,000 or so people, it’s pretty big but getting there sucks the big one. Choices are a)catch the bus from Aumbach at 5:30am … hmm? B)catch the bus at 6:30am…. Hmm? C)catch the bus at 2:05pm and have 2 hours in the city before the LAST bus departs to take you back into whup whup or finally d)Let my Oma drive us there. We chose D on 2 occasions. Spent one day doing all the touristy things as usual, exploring ancient churches and taking some super pics. So many tourists though… Regensburg is one of those cities, it’s big enough to trot around and you need 2 days to see it all but it’s an ancient Roman city and designed how the romans designed there outposts, like a small rectangle, so the outer walls and gates, aswell as the beautiful cobbled stone bridge are all in handy distance, even the romans could have walked to the tourist attractions without aide of a Horse (Pferd) had their outpost been a touristy city all those years ago. I really loved walking around and along the banks of the danube which disects Regensburg, well it cuts the old city (roman rectangle) off from the shopping malls and modern german homes on the other side. The old cobbled streets are a pleasure to Navigate, from a scenic perspective anyhow but following directions would be a pain because the streets twist and turn like stone snakes, unlike american and australian cities built of good old grids. The only thing which kinda ruins the immersion of being in a Medieval dream is the huge lumbering passenger communter busses that cut across the squares and streets, I guess horses and Carriages would have been doing the same thing centuries ago, so the Immersion is there just need to think in a twisted dimension while the bus roars past you. On our second visit we ate the Historisch Würst Kuche (Historical Sausage Kitchen) on the banks of the danube and in the shadow of the stone bridge. The Sausages and Saurkraut were great, the beer was okay but we got charged 50c for each TINY breadroll we ate, which were conveniently sitting there before we sat down (we thought they were free!) We also went to one of the 5 museums Regensburg has to offer and eventually to a netcafe, where after half an hour of struggling to upload pics, I was able to bring my last journal to you. There was no access to ‘my documents’ or ANY folder, not even the desktop for the public yet I could install what I liked, edit pics and store them on the network and have access to uploading the pics? Such a flaw in their ‘security’, I felt empowered to have beaten them at their own game.
Okay Im almost done here. Bear with me. I spent 3 days wandering around in the forests surrounding Aumbach… such grim forests. The closest id been to true norwegian grimness and it was awesome. The novelty has warn off now. Ive gotten lost twice now, the 2nd time I ended up emmerging in a town called Eitenzell, a 5km unsignposted walk along the mainroad with my Grandparent’s dog awaited me. Hey I actually enjoyed the experience after I worked out whether I was walking the right way or not. Hell I could have ended up in Falkenstein, which is 8km from Aumbach. I came out lucky. I loved the forest, though, while the charm lasted, now it seems I know all the paths, it’s less likely for me to get lost. I found a series of 3 gigantic lakes during the first time I got lost. I would kill to find it again before I leave and have my camera handy. I guess it’s a challenge for me. As far as wildlife is concerned, Ive seen 2 Hares and 2 deer so far. No foxes, no boars, no wolves, not even the rabid bear which has migrated here to Bavaria from Schwiez (Switzerland) for the season. Mostly it’s just me with my thoughts and my Iaudio blasting the best music for the occasion which is of course my selection of German black metal that I chucked on the iaudio before I left home. Here’s a playlist of music ive listened to while in the forest:
- Grabnebelfürsten - Von Schemen und Trogbildern (my fav german metal, well fav album, I just happened to not bring any Bethlehem...)
- Lunar Aurora - Elixer of Sorrow (my fav trad black metal from Germany, simply coz it’s not so trad it sucks)
- Malus - Awakened Grimness (little known solo BM from Germany, packs a punch and reeks of german forests!)
- Drudkh - Forgotten Legends (not from Germany but the ultimate forest album, well I have 2 more up my sleeve for later…)
- Cult of Luna - The Beyond (for when black metal becomes tiresome, try some slow motion hardcore to enjoy the wilderness all the better)
Ive listened to A LOT of music since ive been here but those are the ones I listened to in the FOREST! J
Horse made arrangements to meet Belinda on the 7th of June in Paris (so romantic!) but I had no intention of leaving so soon. I mean, I doubt ill ever see my grandparents in this world and besides I had no signs that I was no longer welcome and I thought another 500kg of meat and dumplings and bread and thousands of litres of beer would do no harm. Who knows when I will eat so well again… perhaps Wouter knows 😉 I spent a long time trying to organise accomodation in Munich, as I was going to leave 5 days after Horse and begin my slow trek around Western Europe but because of the shitty world cup … ugh… lets leave this disussion for the next journal. Im leaving here for Zurich in Switerland, on the 25th of June, so that should answer your questions. I have 2 weeks from now to check out Bavaria, including a day trip to Munich sometime soon but I don’t need to touch these subjects just yet. Horse’s departure was sad, I know he loved it here and had a great time with my family and enjoyed the food and beer. It was tough to see him leave, our travelling companionship breaking apart so soon, only 2 weeks since we joined up again but hey, as everyone knows, we both have different priorities but with similar goals. We’ll probably meet up again in London but that’s 3 or 4 months away from now. So much will happen between then and now. It’s bound to. The day before Horse left, my Oma took us to the town of Kelheim, which is about an hour and a bit away, on the banks of the Danube (what town in Bavaria would be complete without the danube?) We only glanced at the town, our mission, however was to catch a ferry up the danube and goto a place called ‘Weltenburg’, a huge Monastry, where the monks brewed their own beer ( eine weis und eine dunkel) and they are great beers, after the scenic boatride we enjoyed one of the dark frosty brews over a pork dish with dumplings and Spatzle (like noodles made from Potatoes) Weltenburg was beautiful and I have a zillion pics to show to all of you (un)lucky people when I get home. We sailed back to Kelheim and checked out one of King Ludwig I’s constructions, which looked like a huge birthday cake (layered with cream, too, mmm) and Horse and I walked to the top and spied out over the vast village of Kelheim. That day trip was the coolest thing ive done in Europe so far.
So Horse left me on the 7th and ive been in Aumbach all alone… awww… not much to report apart from ive already mentioned in passing… forests…. Beer … err… but hey it’s great and I am grateful for my elderly Oma for putting up with a long haired lout in her home and making such a fuss over me (complete with motherly nagging, to boot) We made it to the Czech border and went shopping at duty free stores, which was as exciting as it sounds, I assure you. I wanted to go home as soon as I got there. Like a gross exageration of the Junction Markets, I think maybe 3 people who read this knows what Im talking about but it sucked.
Okay now Im done, only thing I forgot to mention was Minigolf but it’s of little importance (I shall get my revenge on Horse, however) My time in Aumbach is dragging me slowly into a pit of laziness, I must get up and start day tripping on Tues or Weds, I have a big 2-day affair planned but I fear Ill never get around to it. Time will tell, as I always say. Its hard to believe ive done so little in almost 3 weeks and that I could just about do it for 3 more… if I were closer to decent public transport. Its been a nice reflection time and a relaxation. Coming from NYC, pop of 10mil at peak hour to Aumbach, pop 200 in peak hour is probably the biggest culture shock you can achieve within a 12 hour period but it’s been worthwhile. I have no idea when you’ll hear from me next, probably on the road somewhere but you will hear from me, I promise. I have to apologise if I don’t reply to emails but it’s not so easy here in these circumstances but once I hit bigger towns it wont be a problem anymore.
… Until next time.
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Erika
non-member comment
bwahahaha
Pauley, darling! I read this and was so amused cos it never had occured to my spoilt european brain that we can be such a shock to anyone foreign with the language issues, overburdened with history and food. You are bound to get a serial of shocks by each time you enter another european country, cos they are all different, and so proud to be different. If you get a chance, please come round here. Hamburg is further up north, but you could catch an ICE of course ;) Kisses