Final Trip

I finally did it: I visited all 16 German Bundesländer in one year. The last one got checked off the list last weekend, as I took a quick two-day trip down to Saarland to visit Saarbrücken.
Saarland is actually smaller than the state of Rhode Island and barely twice the size of Berlin, with less than half the population of Berlin. So it's tiny.

Near the city hall

Saarbrücken, the capital city, sits right on and over the Saar River. There are a few bridges that cross over it, which is actually kind of nice. It's a relatively small river compared to the Rhein, but with the Autobahn situated on one bank of the river the divide between city halves is still sizeable.

The bummer was that I came in on a Sunday and left on a Tuesday. That meant my full day was a Monday, and pretty much every museum takes Monday off, so I missed out on visiting a couple of galleries and historical museums I thought looked interesting. Instead I just walked around the outside of them and did a lot of strolling through the city.

However, it was still a busy weekend in the city. The Euro 2012 soccer final was playing the first night I was there, and I found a plaza that had a big screen up and lots of people watching. It was pretty fun to see everybody wrapped in flags or scarves, carrying an assortment of noisemakers and snacks. Whenever something exciting happened, half of the crowd would stand up and shout and wave their flags around.
There was also an "Altstadtfest," or some sort of street fair in the old town, complete with live music and the German equivalent of fair food, so that was nice. I kinda sorta stole/didn't return a beer glass to keep as a souvenir.

City hall.

My poor shoes after a year's use.

Actually pulled a muscle on this one. Embarrassing, but
my excuse is that I had really pulled it just a couple of
weeks ago.

Part of an early development project by a famous
architect, I think in the 1800s.

On the Saar

I'm now in the last stages of packing for home. I just put two boxes in the mail full of stuff I won't really need for the next month, but I'm hoping they'll actually show up at home before I move to Spokane for the year. We'll have to see... I've also got two large bags to check, a carry-on rolling suitcase and my daypack. These four things have to be transported by me to Düsseldorf on Sunday. That'll be somewhere around 150 lbs of luggage to schlepp on three separate trains and who knows how far around the city. I'm also planning to spend the night at the airport since I have to check in around 5am. All this trouble just to get back to the US for the first time in 10 months.

Three Weekends of Travel: Part III - There Were Three Jolly Fishermen

So begins the camp song that I especially liked for the chorus about Amsterdam. Being able to say "Amster- Amster- Dam Dam Dam" was my favorite part of the song, as I think it was/is for most groups between the age of 12 and 15. Now, at 23, I finally got to visit the place where these three jolly fishermen should have gone to instead of Jericho.

My friend and fellow English assistant Christine convinced me to go with her, since we'd both never gone before. I figured it would be a good chance to go somewhere outside of Germany and she knew somebody local, so it worked out well. People always talk about it like it's one of those "must-see" places, so it must be worth it, right? Right.

Apparently I'm the worst at preparing for weather this spring. I even do more checking the forecasts than I have ever done before and still get it terribly wrong. I swear the forecast was for sun and maybe a bit of light rain, so I was trying to pack as light as possible for a three-day trip. Since I thought it was going to be nice, I only brought a pair of shorts, a light sweatshirt, and enough t-shirts to get home. I even packed the sunscreen to prevent a repeat of my first disaster.

The weather was nice on Saturday when we arrived, but Sunday morning was cold and rainy. Not like a little rainy, but a legitimate full-on rainy day. Lucky me and my non-waterproof hoodie, shorts, and shoes with more holes than a salad strainer. Since the walking tour we had planned on taking on Saturday (good weather) was full, we had to postpone until Sunday (not-so-good weather). So. A three hour outdoor walking tour, for which I was already wet just by walking to the meeting point from our hostel. We broke down and bought cheap umbrellas from a souvenir shop on the corner, which was genius. I only hated myself a little bit for being from Seattle and having to buy an umbrella to make it through the day. But my feet were soaked and cold and I had a camera to keep dry.

The tour was really great though! We walked all over Amsterdam and learned lots of interesting tidbits about the city and some of the famous people who lived there. Other places we visited during the weekend included the Anne Frank House and the Historical Museum of Amsterdam.

Didn't realize I was about to jump into a puddle.

Breakfast. With ice cream.

It's made out of sand! I thought it was breathing at first.

There was a beach soccer tournament in the big square.
We got to see a few minutes of Germany vs. Holland.

A barge whose only purpose in life is to store bikes.
So awesome.

 Christine's friend took us to a really cool restaurant called Moeders, which translates to  "Mothers'," if I remember correctly. The walls are covered with pictures of people's moms, which you can bring with you and leave after you eat, and they'll put them on the wall or on the windowsills, wherever there is space. By that I mean you can leave pictures, not your mom.

Each dish and piece of cutlery is different from the rest, so everyone at your table gets a little different look for their meal. The story is that when the restaurant opened, they asked everybody to bring their own dishes. If they left them for the restaurant, they got a free meal. It's a pretty neat idea, and the place is really popular. The food is great!

More pictures of mothers at Moeders.

Statue of Anne Frank around the corner
from where she lived with her family in hiding.

Now I've only got two more weekends left and I'm on my way home! I can't believe it. But that's going to be another post. I have one more trip planned in a week and a half. Stay tuned...

Three Weekends of Travel: Part II

Rostock. 7 hours northeast of Cologne by train, just inland from the East Sea. It's an old Hanseatic City that still has chunks of the old city wall standing, and you can even walk along a part of it. There's all kinds of old historic buildings, and one of the coolest looking churches I think I've seen here. You can tell it was built by sea traders somehow, because it's huge and looks like it could be used for a trading center or something.

My train ride took me back through Bremen and into Hamburg, where I had to transfer to a regional train for the last leg up to Rostock. Apparently it's a very popular tourist destination on weekends and holidays because all the seats were full and most of the entryways were packed too. I ended up standing for 2 1/2 hours with a loud and energetic soccer team.

Three Weekends of Travel: Part I

When May rolled around, I suddenly realized that I had several places still on my checklist that I needed to get to, so I scraped together the rest of my paycheck for the month and bought my tickets. Three weekends in a row, covering quite a bit of the northern area of Germany and a bit west to Amsterdam.

My first trip was a twofer - two days in Hannover to catch Enercity Swinging Hannover, a jazz festival, and two days in Bremen.

The jazz festival was held in the plaza of the city hall. The stage was small, just enough to hold a big band and about chest-height to the audience. I arrived before it started, although I was a few minutes late according to the agenda posted on their website. I was only beat out for a front-row standing spot by a large group of retirees with lawn chairs who set up right at the fencing in front of the stage.
The lineup of performers was quite varied, from a ridiculously talented accordionist from New Orleans to the New York Voices, or from a British funk/R&B/acid jazz group to an actual Big Band from Hannover.

The weather reports I read had called for rain, so I packed an umbrella expecting to get a little wet. Instead, the sun was out all day. Instead of getting wet, I got burnt. But I wasn't willing to give up my prime spot near the front, and as the afternoon wore on the oldies picked up their chairs and left, so I got even closer, although people kept managing to worm their way in front of me.

I spent the evening looking for a store open on a bank holiday that sold aloe and sunscreen. But by then I was tired of standing so I didn't really feel like I was missing out on much. Plus, as a bonus, my hostel (hidden on the top two floors of a swanky-looking hotel) gave me a private double room instead of the 8-person dorm I booked. Instead of having to share a room with drunk people crashing around like blind elephants, I got a room that came with a bath towel, hand towel, and washcloth; my own personal refrigerator, and a cookie on my pillow!

Coolest band ever: Incognito, a British jazz/soul/funk group.
The horn section had choreography!

This guy is being that guy.

The open container laws in Germany make it so that people can drink on the go. Sometimes it's just interesting, like when people convert garden wagons into rolling keg carriers complete with a countertop tap. Sometimes it's entertaining, like the man in the picture above. Sometimes it's uncomfortable, like the time a guy and his girlfriend made out so intensely on the train that they fell on the floor and couldn't get up. And sometimes it's just messy. People bring cases of stuff to events like this jazz festival and leave the empties on the ground when they're finished. It's an interesting transformation, like the opposite of a wave on the beach. A wave of people wash up onto a clean concrete plaza, and when the wave retreats, what's left is broken glass, trampled plastic cups, soggy cardboard boxes, etc.

Thankfully, the city workers are very good at cleaning up quickly. And then you can walk around the city some more and you see other things that are cool.

At the Herrenhaeuser Garten, a really cool garden place.

After Hannover came Bremen, another hour north. The feel of the city is much different. It feels a lot older, more like a "real German city," if that's actually different than just a "normal German city." The market square is like a thousand years old  several hundred years old, and there are lots of things they preserved around the city that make it really interesting.

I didn't get so lucky this time with the hostel. It was actually kind of like the hostel gods were trying to even out my hosteling experience. First of all, the first sign you see for the hostel is on the opposite side of the building from where the real entrance is, so they put up a sign saying to go around the corner. Then of course, the first door you come to is actually the entrance to a private apartment building, but the people who live there were nice enough to put up a handmade sign saying "NOT THE HOSTEL." So you continue down this little side street until you chance to look up at the building and see the much smaller hostel sign above the main entrance, which looks like the back door to a house. Once inside, the receptionist is friendly and helpful, but there's no lock on the door to my 6-bed dorm, and while they say there are lockers, there are only two in the hallway for the entire floor. They're already used.

There was a large contingent of Americans in the hostel; a group of university students from somewhere in Louisiana are here for a three-week "intercultural module," in which their professor takes them to a museum or other activity during the day, and they drink all evening. As I made dinner one night I got a chance to talk with a couple of them as they pregamed the UEFA Champions League soccer match between FC Bayern München and Chelsea. They're actually pretty interesting people, and getting to talk with them made their debates about which order to drink their bottles of alcohol all the more entertaining. While I was eating, two guys finished a bottle of strawberry wine ("aww man, we were supposed to use that as dessert after the vodka!") and most of a fifth of cheap vodka ("I just love 5 Euro Russian vodka!"), which was mixed with orange juice at a roughly 1.5:1 ratio.

Luckily, I wasn't rooming with any of them. After watching an exciting, but finally disappointing soccer match (Chelsea won), I headed upstairs to sleep on my rock-hard mattress.

I was woken up around 4am by what felt like a minor earthquake. Once I was coherent, I realized that one of my roommates had arrived and was snoring. When I say snoring, I really mean something more like his lungs were trying, with some success, to consume his tongue. Every minute or so, just when you're convinced he's stopped breathing, his throat opens just enough to get a gasp of air in, and then it's like the room is a giant balloon and his lungs are the space all the air is trying to escape to. The process literally shakes the whole room. On the second night, the girl against the wall opposite me actually got up to go poke him to try to get him to shift. It didn't make any difference. I slept with half a kleenex in each ear, and my head under my pillow and a sweatshirt, which also didn't do much, seeing as half the problem was the room shaking.

The city itself is awesome though!

Statue of the Bremer Stadtmusikanten,
or the Bremen town musicians,
immortalized by the Brothers Grimm.

Part of the "Schnoorviertel," an old
fisherman's quarter where the street is
about 3 feet across.

Stone-cold gangster

Lucky I decided to leave relatively early in the afternoon. Good ol' reliable Deutsche Bahn ("always on time") pushed my train back by 40, then 45, then 90, and then 160 minutes due to technical problems. The same train service runs once an hour. But because of the backup, the next two trains were so full they were only letting people with seat reservations on. They finally re-designated another train to take the rest of us, so I got on the train about the time I was originally supposed to arrive back in Cologne.

Good times.