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.