final installment - thanks to anyone who attempted to read
1/11
Day 15:
I packed up my stuff and left for Munich at around 8:30am, and I just made it onto the train because I had some trouble finding the part of the station with long-distance trains. I mean, it wouldn't have been a problem because there was a 8:40am train that got there at the same time, but I still just wanted to get on and not have to wait at all, and also I thought the train passing through Salzburg might have nicer scenery (it did). Of course, like an idiot, I was sitting in the section that was not going to Salzburg, but I was lucky that the conductor pointed this out to me, though I had to walk five trains over to the cart actually going to Salzburg. I spent most of the ride either typing in my journal or reading 1984. I transferred in Salzburg, which had this beautiful backdrop of snowy mountain peaks, and got into Munich at around 2:15pm. I sat in the train station until about 2:50pm waiting for Sara to show up, and I got a little bit concerned because we were supposed to meet at 2:30pm, and I was afraid that maybe her plane had been delayed or she was lost or something, and I didn't know it because I forgot to check her plane schedule and everything. I kept reading my book and sitting on my suitcase right under the big Coca Cola sign, and it was such a relief when she showed up and everything was okay.
We went and locked up our stuff in a locker, though it was a pain because I had to look for some place that would exchange my 100 euro bill into smaller change, since the stupid ATM in Austria not only cost me ATM fees but fed me a 100 euro bill. Then we walked around for a bit trying to find the direction of Landsbergerstrasse where the Budget was. We figured we had some four hours in Munich, we might as well follow the Ling's deutsche bank theory of exploration and walk until we find the Budget. We grabbed some waffle/curly fries for a pseudo lunch and then headed out, and it turns out that we just had to walk down Bayerstrasse, which turned into Landsbergerstrasse, albeit pretty far down the street. It was probably a good 20 minute walk to get there, and we were glad we discovered this before trying to drag all of our luggage with us. When we found it, we just walked around in that area and saw a nice church that was closed and then a playground! At the playground we sat on the swings for a while and took some timed pictures with the church and the sunset in the background which were quite nice. Then I felt queasy as I always do on swings and got off to lie on the rope pyramid thing, like what they had in Nice. It was really nice to hang out with Sara again because this whole time I've been with people who have at the most a brief three month history with. Sara and I know tons of common people and were in both high school and at least in the same college area together, and we could catch up a little bit on people that we knew (Carmen, I was also able to further spread your amazing-best-piece-of-hs-gossip).
After a while we decided it was starting to get cold and that we should head out to a cafe or something, but there was a U-bahn stop right there, and we realized we were only one stop away from the train station. I decided that, since I still had my Eurail pass, I would just go over by myself and grab our stuff and come back, so that Sara wouldn't need to buy an extra ticket. If I would have know that we were so close though, we could have just ridden over in the first place instead of locking up our stuff in a locker, which would have saved some money and time walking. It was also kind of a pain in the ass to carry all of our luggage by myself, but it was a fairly short trip, so it was endurable. Then we headed to the Budget, stopping at this pizza place on the way where we got some tomato-cheese pizza that was pretty good but not that filling because the crust was pretty thin. I missed NY pizzas, I really think they are the best in the world, even better than Italy, where they came from, I suppose because some bastardization made them even tastier.
At Budget we had a minor scare because the woman said our reservation was canceled, even though we had just changed it to an earlier time, and the woman was like, "We don't have any more automatic cars." We were both like, "Um... we don't drive stick." Then, magically, she was like, "I have one more automatic car," though I haven't the faintest clue were she pulled it out of, maybe she was just lying the first time around. Even cooler, the car was an Audi, not the cheaper car we were initially going to get, and the price stayed the same, so we got a sweeter deal. So, we loaded our luggage and headed out to Fuessen.
It was a little bit stressful driving at first because I was so afraid that I was going to hurt the car. But once I convinced myself that driving in Germany was basically exactly the same as driving in the US, it wasn't so bad anymore. The only sort of annoying thing was that the windshield was either too clean or slanted at a strange angle, but it was making me feel a little bit dizzy, the way that a pair of brand new glasses does. We had a little bit of trouble getting out of Munich as well because the google directions thought we were on the other side of the road and therefore made us U-turn, which ended us on the wrong side and confused us immensely. Luckily the street we were on just peeked in on the side of the map I had saved on my computer, so we were able to figure it out and put ourselves on the highway.
Two errors in driving the first day. First was that I didn't have my lights on because the lights were in this weird place where you turn a dial instead of click, but I was lucky people flashed me and let me know before I got onto the highway. Second error was bad though. We were on the right side of the road, and I saw the guy in front of me pass the car in front of him, so I thought I would follow suit. There was a dotted white line in the middle of the road. So I was taking my time on the left side passing, when I see lights coming towards me which flashed me suddenly. I swerved back into the right lane, and I was so lucky that I was sufficiently ahead of the guy behind me to not have hit him swerving back in. Turns out that a dotted white line means passing on a two-way street, not a one-way street as it would be in the US. As I was informed by a mocking Andriy, the yellow line is some parking denomination, not a distinction between two-way and one-way. Stuff like that is pretty important, they should mention it in some manual or something if they don't require you to have a separate license outside of the US license to drive in Europe.
After some time and a little bit of getting lost in Fuessen, we ended up at our hostel, which was really some guy's house. We parked right up front, and the guy was so nice. I spoke German to him the whole time, and then he said he would bring up breakfast to our rooms in the morning. Then we got to the room, which was really nice, and it had a balcony. We went outside onto the balcony, and the weather was nice with a calm breeze, and partly because of the air and partly because of the bamboo mat along the balcony fence, I really had the sense that I was in Belize, that one day when we walked way out on this super long dock into the middle of the water and sat in hammocks with dark water surrounding us on all sides. That was one of those magical moments, and I just felt so calm thinking about it while leaning on this balcony and feeling the air on my face. Also, in Fuessen the stars were amazing, and I was already in the Belize mood because I had told Sara that no matter how amazing those stars were, she should've seen the stars in Belize, which covered every square centimeter of dark expanse. I especially love when you can see the clouds of star clusters, those are really magical. As I guessed, Fuessen was such a nature-y and totally calming place, I think that in the morning my skin was the best it had been in Europe because of the air.
Before going to sleep we had about two hours where I was using the internet and trying to figure out what the hell to do on the Romantische Strasse. For such a tourist destination, the online coverage of it is really lacking, they don't even tell you which road is the physical road, probably because it connects onto a variety of different roads, which made me sort of nervous. We finally just decided that we would wing it and hope for the best, since I was getting tired and we wanted to be up as early as possible to get a head start on Neuschwanstein.
1/12
Day 16:
The next morning the owner came up and woke us up with breakfast at 7am, which was good because I would've otherwise not woken up. Sara said she was impressed I could still speak German when I'm half delirious and just woken up, though I argue I speak better at those times because I just don't think. But I did make one grammatical mistake which I still remember, by saying "wir haben noch nicht bezahlen." Ouch, that hurts me (it should be "haben bezahlt"). Anyway, the breakfast was tasty - lots of bread, a hard-boiled egg, some fruit juice, and tea - and then we were on our way.
Schwangau was only like five minutes from where we were, we could have probably walked there, though it would have taken longer. It was definitely a Leaning Tower of Pisa moment, where we were like, "Okay, which way are we going? Oh! There's the castle. Right. There." It was smaller and sort of less magnificent than I would have thought, though I suspect that is because of the angle we were seeing it from, which didn't quite match the tremendous helicopter shots that you always see. At least Neuschwanstein was up in the mountains though, poor Hohenschwangau was right there on the side of the road, as Sara said, "prime real estate."
We had gotten there at around 8:30am, but the ticket office didn't open until 9am, so we thought we would go check out Marienbruecke while we were waiting. Unfortunately, we realized it was right next to Neuschwanstein, so it didn't make sense to climb up there and then climb back down for the tickets, so we decided to walk around a bit instead. Since we realized that Hohenschwangau was right there, we decided to walk up to that and take lots of pictures. Chen's tripod came so in handy this whole trip, I took so many shots using that thing, and also night shots later on that required no shaking. Best present ever. It was cool because it was too early for most people to be there, so it was sort of like when we were in Rome at the Palatinate after closing because we were the only ones just strolling around like we owned the place. There were a lot of nice views from Hohenschwangau, though in my opinion it was rather small to be fit for a king.
When we came back down it was around 9:15am, and we got tickets, parked our car in the parking lot, and started the hike up to the big castle. That was quite a hike, it took about 20 minutes and was pretty tiring, but we were nowhere near as tired as this one guy. This guy was soooo weird, he kept panting and talking to us in something that sounded Southeast Asian, though I'm not sure what. He was with a lot of people who were Japanese, but I don't think he was speaking Japanese, and what he was saying was completely unintelligible to me. I don't know if he thought I understood him, but he was just one of those crazy old Asian guys. He was probably around 55 years old and a little tubby, and he was walking at least four times slower than us and panting the whole time, and then he would laugh and say something that gave off the air of "hey you girls can really walk." Then later he passed us sitting on the horse carriage with a bunch of other people, and we don't know what he paid the guy to pick him up halfway, but when he passed us, he laughed again and then yelled a bunch more unintelligible stuff. That guy was hilarious in a definite wtf way.
Our tour was set for 10:24am, so we thought we had about 30 minutes to walk to the bridge and take pictures, so we bought some souvenirs and headed off, passing by the crazy guy who yelled at us some more. Turns out that the road to the bridge was closed, which was totally frustrating and sucky because that was supposed to be a really really beautiful view, and from what we saw of it out the windows of the castle, it really would have been. It is suspended over these huge gorges (probably super scary), and would offer a spectacular vision of Neuschwanstein from above, with Fuessen in the background. I could definitely understand why the road was closed though, it didn't look too safe to be heading all the way out there when it was already slightly icy down below. Without being able to go out there, we had some time to kill taking pictures, and that passed by very surprisingly quickly with all the pictures we took.
We lined up for the English tour, and we were let in by this guy with a spectacular mustache like the guy from Monopoly. The woman who gave our tour was nice, but she sounded exactly like an audioguide and had a peculiar sort of half-British half-German accent, and it was sort of awkward because she would give her spiel, and then we would all go to the windows and take pictures because we weren't allowed to take pictures of the insides of the building, and she would just sort of stand there smiling for a while. I asked her a question about who painted the walls (art students from Munich), and she was very knowledgeable, so it was too bad people didn't ask her more questions. To be fair, the view out the windows were quite spectacular.
So King Ludwig II was kind of a nut job. I thought he died young, but actually he was in his forties, so it wasn't that young. Sara and I spent a good amount of time laughing at the pictures of him on postcards on the wall downstairs in the visitors area. He was obsessed with swans, so the swans were everywhere in the castle, and he was also obsessed with Wagner, so the whole castle was dedicated to Wagner, with all paintings depicting some Wagner opera. Which, btw, I didn't know that Tristan and Isolde was an opera by Wagner, and that goes against the claim of the movie where it goes "Before there was Romeo and Juliet..." because Wagner was definitely after Shakespeare. I really liked all the paintings, they were very well done and reaffirms my question of why some people become famous while others are just students, when they are clearly just as talented. There was also a nice room in the castle that was decorated with some two hundred or so swans everywhere, which was cool.
After the fairly short tour we were left to ourselves to visit the kitchen and the guest area, and Sara and I went inside this "multivision" screening room that had just about the most bizarre video collage about King Ludwig II. It was a bunch photos and kind of ambience, like if they were talking about something that happened on a foggy day, the screen would be all foggy, and of course there was bad acting in the background, with the dialogue presumably read from a diary or letters of the people involved. We stayed and watched that for about five minutes before we headed down the path back to the car again.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to get back down to the car (and to the two glorious pieces of bread that we had taken from the house that morning), and we didn't end up leaving Schwangau until about noon, which put us already an hour behind in a very tight schedule. Sara drove for a while up and down this windy roads in a very beautiful setting until we got to Augsburg. I really lamented that we didn't have time to stop by a lot of the little towns because they seemed nice, but I suppose that after a few they would all start looking the same anyway. The scenery was very nice for a while until we started getting closer to Augsburg, at which point it was more industrial and not romantic at all. Then, the weirdest thing, they had all these signs for Augsburg, but as soon as we got close to Augsburg the signs disappeared, and we were not really sure where exactly Augsburg was or how to get to it. We turned off at an exit, but it seemed to be the wrong place, so after a while we gave up and decided to just stop at Rothenburg ob der Tauber and forget about Augsburg all together, which would also help us get back on schedule, since I had allotted one hour at Augsburg.
At that point I started driving, and the roads started becoming beautiful again, with lots of green fields and vast expanses of sky. The thing that I really liked about it was the feeling like I could just reach up and touch the clouds, though I imagine it's something like that in middle America as well, makes me think of Counting Crows "Omaha". Actually, I think Counting Crows would have been good music for that ride, but we were listening to the local radio station, which was pretty good except the music to talk ratio was incredibly small, for some reason they were discussion crime among youths. The entire time I was driving I thought of how much my dad would like that place, because it sort of reminded me of our home, except the villages were smaller and more quaint. While I was driving I so wanted to take pictures out of the window, but I don't think Sara's camera could handle the quick shutter needed (I'm not sure mine could either), and frankly I don't think she was too interested in out-of-the-window pictures anyway. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who sees shots when they present themselves, like whenever I went traveling Sam while my camera was broken I had to restrain myself from constantly saying, "Can you take a picture of that?" because I thought surely he would also feel the irrepressible urge to take a picture but he didn't. I also cannot understand people who take pictures where the skyline is slanted, or building shots where half the building is cut off. Sara would always say, "You're tiny in this picture," but for me being tiny in a picture just magnifies the grandeur of the building and I didn't mind it at all.
Finally we got to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, parked the car, and went wandering through the town. We had just one hour, but at least we were on schedule now. Unfortunately, I don't know if it was because it was a Saturday in the winter, but the town seemed sort of dead. In all information about the Romantische Strasse, people said Rothenburg was the number one tourist destination on the road and was just a classic medieval town, and supposedly some people had seen puppet shows there or something, and I think in the summer it was really happening. It was okay though because our time was short, so we just took pictures and headed toward a restaurant in Sara's guide book. Unfortunately that restaurant was on vacation ("ruhetag") and we ended up at the restaurant next door, which was actually pretty good. A cute toddler was with the waitress scribbling nonsense on a piece of paper pretending to take orders, and I spoke to her in German, which was cool because you know you can't be too bad if a little kid can understand what you are saying. The red-headed kid next to us, though, had just about the worst American accent ever, I think he only know like two phrases in German, and I had to cringe. I know it's snobby to say, but I really can't understand accents like that, it sounds like he didn't even try in the least, or that he just doesn't have ears, but I suppose it's like being tone deaf, maybe he just can't hear it.
I got a bratwurst with potatoes and sauerkraut, which was all a little bit too salty (I should have guessed when it said "salzkartoffeln") but not bad. I don't particularly like bratwurst, but I realized that I had never had any in Germany before, so I figured that I should. Sara got veal schnitzel, and that was tasty with a tasty salad and fries, and I remembered that I should just always order schnitzel because I love it. We also stopped by this shop that apparently had no name to buy these "schneeball" that were mentioned in Sara's guidebook to be classic Rothenburg. They were kind of crazy looking, they really were the size of snowballs, except that it was more like a baseball because of the sort of zigzag pattern that was on it, and they looked like they would be really soft, but they were actually pretty hard and broke off in pieces of cinnamon-y goodness. Dinner lasted just a little bit longer than our one-hour parking, but we made it back with no penalty and got back on the road. Here's where the trouble began.
We drove for a while making good time, and I was feeling really good about getting to Frankfurt in time to return the car. Then somewhere nearing Wuerzburg we got stuck in traffic. It was okay at first, I got to relate the story of the Portuguese girls and their love for saying "drei kilometer Stau" because it was the only thing they knew how to say in German. Then it got to be a little bit ridiculous, we were moving at about 10 km per hour, and we were still about an hour away from Frankfurt at a normal 120 km per hour pace, with only like forty minutes left. We couldn't figure out what happened, there were some police cars and ambulances that drove by, but the traffic didn't end past where they stopped, and even now I have no idea if there was really an accident or what. I so wanted to just scream and honk my horn. It would have been immensely satisfying to start a honking wave down the line of cars, it would've at least been fun. We did break out into massive giggles over this guy who pulled into a ditch on the side of the road, and we thought maybe he misunderstood the "exit" sign.
Sara got tired of sitting there, so we switched and I "drove," and we started getting a little bit silly out of frustration and boredom. We tried calling Budget, but the German number wouldn't go through, and we couldn't figure out if we were putting in the zero in the wrong place, and then we called the American number, and they let us know that we had an hour of leeway after the deadline. This made us feel a little bit better for a while until we were stuck for another hour and realized that there was no way to make it even with an hour more, unless we drove at 200 km per hour. This was rather depressing, but at least after an hour and a half of being stuck we finally got out, and I drove at 160 km per hour, which is 96 mph. It was really not scary though, I think that if I have a goal and purpose (or when I'm angry), I don't think about being cautious on the road anymore, I just go with the flow. I figured that if I can't get there in time, I should try to get there as fast as possible, so that we could honestly say, "We tried to get here as fast as possible."
We got to the airport area around 8pm, when the car was due at 6:45pm and the final hour was over at 7:45pm. Then we had to get gas, but we luckily found a place right outside the airport which wasn't too much more expensive than everywhere else. We go to fill up the tank, and what does it come out to? 51 fucking euros. WTF?! So we were feeling severely ripped off, like how much does this fucking tank hold?! 48 liters?! Of course, later we converted the units on my mac, and that was only like 11 gallons. Essentially, gas in Europe costs about $7 a gallon. Lesson learned: don't drive in Europe because it is fucking expensive as hell. That is just ridiculous. But at least we felt a little bit better, because were thinking for a while that maybe we messed up pumping gas and the thing never jumped and maybe the leftover just went to some unknown location and we pumped too much. And at least we had diesel, which was the cheapest, if you can call that cheap at all.
We went to the Budget stand to talk to the lady, and the lady was so nice, she was like, "You're only a half an hour past the 25 hour deadline, so I won't charge you." And then she answered all of our questions about Deutsche Bank and about taking a free shuttle to the hotel. We were so relieved, because if she charged us for a second day, then we would have to make use of it by keeping the car, and then we would have to deal with parking it, and then we have to drive it the next day and park it, and find the roads, and it would be so annoying. We got some cash out of the ATM (I love Deutsche Bank for the no fees, it was 5 dollars plus 1% at the Bank of Austria and whatever bank in Poland...) and then headed out to wait for the shuttle, and I made another grammar mistake by saying "das Bus" instead of "der Bus" when calling over the intercom to ask when it would show up. After some time our particular bus came and we headed to our hotel.
First impression of the hotel was that it was super nice, and it said rooms were somewhere around 300 euro, which was a lot more than I thought they were when I looked them up online. That should have been a warning to me, because after asking, the guy said we were at the wrong hotel. We were at the Mercure in Kalsterbach, but we should have been at the Mercure Wings in Raunheim. The worst part was, the guy said that we would miss the last shuttle if we tried to get back to the airport, so we were forced to take a taxi. Technically, there were other options, which we figured out later, but they would've been slightly inconvenient, so we sucked it up and paid 18 euro for the taxi to the other airport. Geez, that was a day of really bad luck, all day long. I do think, however, that the guy could have asked the driver for the other Mercure shuttle to swing by and pick us up, because we found out later that that shuttle passed by the Kalsterbach location on every ride. An alternative would have been to ride back to the airport and then take the train to Raunheim, but we didn't know the way at the time, and it would've still cost like 7 euro for train tickets. Plus the taxi driver was funny, we kept joking because he was sort of teasing us for taking the wrong bus, reminds me of when we took the taxi in Munich late at night when we decided not to go clubbing and the last subway had passed, and that taxi driver was nice too. Maybe it's a German thing.
Finally we got to the right hotel, and of course it was super easy to check in, and even when the girl was like, "oh, I thought you had a single room," and I just said Sara was with me, she was like, "No problem, I'll just change it to a double." Our place was definitely not as nice as the first hotel, but it was definitely okay, and free, and we were just relieved to be able to put our stuff down and know that it could stay there for the next three days. I think, though, that hotels are sort of overrated when you can go places like that place in Fuessen for cheap at a comparable quality. We did have TV, though, and we watched some French concert performance with lots of artists, including KT Tunstall singing "Satisfaction" with some French chick, which was pretty good.
1/13
Day 17:
We woke up at around 9am after a rather nice sleep, stretched a bit and lagged in bed, and finally got out around 10am. The next shuttle wasn't until 10:35am, so we just waited in the lobby reading our books until it showed up. At the airport we went to the ticket machines to look up ticket times and pricing. We had the intention of going to Trier on the Schoenes Wochenende ticket, but we realized that it would take us four hours to get there and three to get back, and if we wanted to get on the shuttle back, we would only have one hour in Trier, which was sort of pointless for eight hour train ride. However, after a lot of looking up, we realized we could just take the train the next day directly from Raunheim, bypassing the shuttle, for only about 4 euro more using a combination of day pass to Mainz and a Bundesland ticket in Rheinland-Palatinate. This utilized both the ticket machine and the awesome awesome train scheduling machine that also lets you buy long distance tickets and is awesome. Seriously, that machine is so useful and easy to use, it should be everywhere and is precisely why Deutsche Bahn rocks my socks off. Plus, using that machine always makes me feel good about myself because it highlights my powers of optimization. If I do say so myself, I am amazing at optimization, my whole life is a giant optimization problem, it's so fun. With the new schedule we had six hours in Trier, which is a lot more and totally sufficient for seeing a city, and our travel time was cut down to seven hours.
By the time we were done with all this, it was right around noon. We had decided to stay in Frankfurt for the day, so we bought a day pass around Frankfurt and headed on our way. When we got there we started walking toward the river and thought to stop at an Indian restaurant on the way. I wasn't particularly in the mood for Indian, but I thought it would be okay. I ordered something chicken and a mango lassi, which was delicious, but the chicken was too spicy, and in the end Sara and I had to pay 4 euro for a 0.5L bottle of water because they didn't have tap. That is just unfair, if I would've known the water was so expensive I would have just gotten another mango lassi. Lame.
The view by the river was beautiful. We saw some kids skateboarding on mini half-pipes, and I was amazed because some of these kids looked like they were seven years old or so. The general aura of Frankfurt really really reminded me of Koeln, in both the river and the city itself. They even had the KD Koeln-Duesseldorf boat cruise stations setup, made me a bit nostalgic. Another thing that was similar was the area with the Historisches Museum, which reminded me of this one building in Koeln, and the weird thing was that there was some display of giant photographs of NYC right in front, which we couldn't really understand, but the photos were rather nice. We walked around the old town a bit, bought some souvenirs, and then tried to track down all of the churches. We saw quite a few nice ones, but most of the cathedrals look kind of new from the inside, which is presume is some result of reconstruction. One thing that was really cool was that right behind the main cathedral (St. Bartholomeus) there was some archeological uncovering of something like a roman bath or something like that, and they called it a Historischer Garten, so we took a bunch of timed pictures of us there using the awesome Chen-tripod, which Sara deemed "like a little animal." It reminds me of the lamp in Pixar and how that moves.
After some major tracking down, we finally figured out that the building which we thought was a Parliament building was actually St. Peter's cathedral, which had actually been turned into a historical exhibit about the German Parliament, which had a lot to do with Frankfurt and that very building. It was pretty cool because there was a lot of information, and I had previously known nothing about German government before the Third Reich, so I thought it was interesting to see, though I definitely think they could have benefitted from some benches in front of the posters. It was bizarre because the place didn't look like a church at all, though I suppose most of that was due to reconstruction after the war, when they decided to make it a dedication to democracy.
Since we had done so much church-seeing, we had to balance it out by going to the Jewish cemetery. It was pretty cool because the wall around the cemetery had all of these little blocks sticking out with names, and some had a rock placed on top. Sara explained to me what this was for, but I forgot (Sara? help?), but they made for great artistic pictures. Also, there weren't very many tombstones inside, since a lot of them had been destroyed in the Nazi era.
At this point it started to get dark, so I took a ton of really nice sunset shots (followed later by a ton of really super nice nighttime shots), and we went to the Communications Museum, since the description of it in the guidebook sounded pretty cool. Even though we didn't get to see any of the stuff that they mentioned like invisible ink stuff, we did spend a while in the robots exhibit. All the captions were in German, so it made it easier to pass by them and only read the interesting ones, otherwise it would be too tiring. There were a couple of cool ones, like the robots from the Bjork "All Is Full Of Love" video. There was this really weird giant robot that took up so much space for so little functionality, since you had to dial a number up on its telephone for it to perform the corresponding lame action, like shake your hand. There were also random videos, like this robot band that played robot music. Other than the robot section, there was something on "Offener Brief" (Sara and I gathered this to be something like a pamphlet or editorial, though now I see that the direct translation of "open letter" actually means something in English, which I didn't know), the post, and various other boring stuff. The only other thing that was cool was this machine where you could type in your name and then move the flaps on a virtual telegraph pole to match the letters. It doesn't make sense to describe it, and I'm not sure how it relates to Morse code exactly, though it might be an older form if telegraph? Also, there was a sculpture with sheep made out of telephone wires, with telephones for heads.
After the museum, we went looking for this Italian place called Vapiano's that was mentioned in the guidebook. If anyone else goes to Frankfurt, you HAVE to go to this place, it is AWESOME. So at this place you get this card on which they put your tab every time you get something, and then you stand in line and wait for the guy to cook your food, with the card being an easy way not to have to exchange money. The whole place smells absolutely scrumptious, and the guys are super good at cooking the food, so they just make it right there in front of you and put all the stuff in and make it delicious. You sit down anywhere at these kind of bar level tables that have little basil and mint and whatever you want plants growing in the middle, in case you need some more fresh garnish. Our guy was nice too, and he posed for pictures too. The salad I got was just about the most delicious salad I've ever had, due to some mystery house dressing impossible for me to replicate, and the pasta was simple with just garlic, olive oil, and spices, but somehow it tasted absolutely amazing. It was really the right choice to go there, so I highly recommend it.
We headed back to the airport via an express train and caught the shuttle home. It was really bizarre because the guy made a turnaround partway into the hotel and drove the rest of the way backwards, which we thought was rather inefficient but exciting at the same time. After we got home we thought we would do a dry run of going to the train station, just to make sure we knew how to do it for the next day. We found some directions at the front desk, and we walked out. I don't know if we were just tired, but we were walking super slow, and it actually took us longer (25 min) than the estimated time (15 min), which never happens. The Raunheim train station really really reminded me of Leverkusen, the way it was set up, with the bus area and everything. Raunheim was a small town kind of like Leverkusen, and there was even a pharmacy with a Bayer sign on it, and Frankfurt was so like Koeln. So the entire time I was there I was sort of reminiscing about Mr. Chicken and my lovely BKG. When finally got back to the hotel we just showered and got ready to get up early the next day for Trier.
1/14
Day 18:
We got up at 6:45am to go to the train station, since our train was at 7:38am. It wasn't until halfway out that I looked at the printed schedule and discovered our train was actually at 8:08am because this route had a shorter on-train duration. Luckily, we had also missed the first street to turn into the station, so we accidentally stumbled upon a little bakery with a lovely owner that was open at that early morning. So we decided to sit down for twenty minutes and grab something to eat before our 3.5 hour ride. I got a delicious chocolate infused croissant like the kind that Pascal's dad would give me, and a cup-bowl of dharjeeling tea. Which confused me because the woman asked me if I wanted mint or black tea, at that was the black option, even though it wasn't black at all. And Sara successfully conducted a transaction in German, even though she knows no German. It's amazing how fast the human brain can learn.
The train ride was uneventful, with both of us reading most of the time. There was a beautiful sunrise around us at the train station before we left, and I took lots of pictures of that. The first train was actually running like five minutes late, and we were really really close to missing the connection in Mainz. To tell the truth, I was hoping a tiny bit that we would, because I discovered that the Bundesland ticket wasn't useable until 9am, and we were going to start using it from Mainz at 8:30am, and I really didn't want to have to deal with what happens if a conductor comes by and says no (though I suspect they would've let it go). Plus, then we could spend an hour in Mainz, though I know full well there isn't much to do in Mainz. We did get on the train, though, and I figured our excuse would be that we didn't speak German, in which case it made perfect sense that we wouldn't understand what "gueltig" meant (it means "valid"). But I still didn't want to deal with it, so I gave the ticket to Sara and made her be the ignorant American, since it would be easier to play the role if she didn't know German anyway. I kept checking the time over and over with heart pounding, but then a half an hour passed and we were home free after that. In fact, it wasn't until we switched trains in Koblenz that we got checked for the first time.
I tried to point out the Lorelei to Sara on our way up the Rhein, but as I remember, it was nothing special, and I only noticed it right as we were passing it and the woman said "St. Goar," with only enough time for me to see it and not Sara. There were some nice views though, I kind of wish she would have stopped reading for a longer time to take it all in, but when I remember our five hour boat ride I sympathize. I was afraid that it would be totally dead and dreary in the winter, but the bare grape branches still marked out the plots, and the hills were still rolling, and the castles were still standing, so everything still looked pretty, though less green. I wanted to be able to show Cochem to Sara, but the train really didn't offer a very good view of it, so I didn't bother. Cochem still lies very dear to my heart, with it's narrow streets and wine shops and Oma living in her darling little house.
Finally we got to Trier. We followed the signs down the street to the tourist office, and there was the Porta Nigra. It was like in Pisa, it was just right there in the middle of this busy intersection amidst all of this modern stuff. According to wikipedia, Trier is the oldest German city, dating to before 16 BC, and was closely tied with the Romans, being a capital of the Roman province Gallia Belgica. We had wanted to go there because the whole Roman thing sounded really unique amidst a lot of similar cities in Germany. We unsuccessfully tried to fill up Sara's phone card and then stopped at Nordsee for a sort of lame lunch of fried seafood assortments, which was not really a lot of food (I got the small mixed box) but held us over until dinner. Then we went back to the Porta Nigra and bought a combination ticket for the Roman ruins, though unfortunately half of them were close for either Monday reasons or January reasons. I think by the time we were done we had the feel for it and didn't really need to see more ruins, though, so it was okay (though the woman said the ticket was valid all year...).
We walked up and down the Porta Nigra, which again really reminded me of being in Rome in the Palatinate because we were just all by ourselves, something that I felt at all of the other Roman structures as well. I guess winter is just not a popular tourist season, but it was cool. There was a brief time where this other family was there and helped us take a blurry picture of us. The structure had apparently housed some guy, maybe a monk (note: according to wikipedia his name was Simeon), who decided to spend his hermit years there. It was actually kind of small, all things considered, but offered a nice view and many photo opportunities.
We left the Porta Nigra because we wanted to make it to the other two locations before they closed, though it was only about 1:30pm and they didn't close until 4pm (last entrance at 3:30pm). We sort of walked the long way to the Kaiserthermen (imperial baths) because I thought there would be a more interesting view, but since it was right on the outskirts of the city, there wasn't actually much around. We did pass a museum that had this giant foot in front of it, apparently a replica of the foot of Emperor Constantine from some really tall statue, which we caressed and took pictures of. We later saw two more of these scattered around the city, so I guess they were really into this Constantine guy. The baths were really cool too. I'm still not really sure what Roman baths are supposed to be like, despite visiting all these ruins AND the audio report I did with Breanne in ninth grade world history, because the ruins all look like mini-Colosseums and are not really bath-like at all. This one had all this green are in front, which I don't know if this was a courtyard in the past or what, but it used to house a lot of wealthy or royal families or something like that. The coolest part about this place, though, was that there was a labyrinth underneath. I'm not sure what people have labyrinths for in general, other than to trap people with Minotaurs or just for fun, but I really love them. These were kind of creepy too because of the aforementioned us-being-the-only-ones-there thing, but we went underneath the ground for a little while and then saw patches of light and tried to get ourselves lost and then found again. It was fun and I took a video, and by the end we were actually well acquainted enough with the labyrinth that I saw a section peeking from above ground and was like, "Hey we were there!"
Finally we walked a distance away to the ampitheater, which was out in the middle of nowhere. The cool thing about it was that, though the seats and most of the steps were no longer there, the whole thing was overgrown with grass, which was surprisingly green for that time of year. Sara stayed down while I climbed up to get a better view, and then we both went down into the cellar areas, which were full of water and sort of dark, and I'm not sure what actually happened down there, if they housed the animals there or what, and if the water had always been there. I just sort of lament that there weren't any real signs at any of these places to explain anything, except for at the baths, but those were in German. There were free tours on weekends in the summer, but we were sadly there at the wrong time.
We sat down at the benches just outside the ampitheater to rest and decide what we were going to do afterwards. We decided to just see some of the churches around and then grab something to eat before going home. It took a while to walk back to the city center. We passed this palace, which was a lovely pink, and spent a little while walking through the garden with lots of statues in the back courtyard which had been pooped on by birds. We sat down at some benches there for another while and watched this guy riding around on one tire of his bike, up and down stairs. We thought this guy was infinitely funny because he just kept showing off his little fake-unicycle tricks, and while that stuff is really cool, in a sense it's also kind of pathetic. After the palace we tried to get into the basilica, which apparently had the throne hall of Emperor Constantine, but it was also closed on a Monday. We did go into the Liebfrauernkirche, which was a rather nice cathedral.
We looked around for places to eat and settled on a restaurant that looked cheap that we found in a side alleyway. It was pretty cheap and the food was great, and the best part was that they played Wir Sind Helden, the two best songs "Nur Ein Wort" and "Von Hier An Blind," in a playlist of good songs on repeat. It was awesome. I got jaegerschnitzel, and as by my new vow to only get schnitzel in Germany, it met all expectations and was delicious and came with salad for a full balanced meal. Sara got gnocchi.
After dinner it was time to catch the train home, and it was awesome how well we planned everything to work out right on time. I read and slept for a while on the trip, and then during the walk back we lost our way a little bit because we had both gone into this zone where we completely disregarded our surroundings. It was kind of like when you drive and suddenly arrive at your destination like, "Wait, I don't remember that entire ride," which made the walk seem a lot shorter. When we got back, the TV was working again, so we settled down and watched some Friends in German, which was actually really funny and I could understand it! It was awesome, because I remember watching French TV at Pascal's, and the funny jokes went over my head because I don't know much French, but the German was totally okay! It helped that it was also Friends, and I did knew the gist of what was going on, since Sara was also laughing a lot and couldn't understand the words. I had to pry myself away to shower, but it was definitely a glorious feeling knowing that I was going to be going home the next day.
1/15
Day 19:
Final day in Germany. We got up around 8:45am and stretched and relaxed in bed for a few moments before finally getting up. Everything was basically packed, so we took the time to enjoy ourselves a little, and then we got out for the shuttle at 9:35am. During checkout the woman actually asked me which room I was in, but she spoke in German, and I hadn't heard her, and Sara was like, "35." So in the end, Sara was the one to carry on the German conversations! Awesome!
At the airport we said our goodbyes. It was definitely awesome to have had Sara around and have somebody that I was already friends with and already comfortable with, but that we would both be tourists experiencing the sights together, almost like Sam, though I must admit I still miss the good old Sam days. I found the Lufthansa check-in finally, and the guy said that I didn't have a reservation. For a minute I thought of Sam and his escapades with "Donald Werner," and I got so scared and started arguing with the guy that surely Lufthansa booked me on the plane. Finally I was like, "Does this mean that I might not get on the plane?" and he was like, "Oh no, you definitely get on the plane, we just can't assign you a seat until boarding." I was relieved after that, but I still think it's rather peculiar that, if everyone else does have a reservation and I'm guaranteed on the plane, then surely they know which seats are left and can assign them? Weird.
Even weirder was that I went through security and got to the gate, and instead of lots of seats of people waiting to board, everyone was lined up outside the seating area. Apparently Lufthansa made you board to sit down, which I considered rather ineffective, and I was surprised because I don't think that's how it was the last time I traveled. But even weirder than weird, I looked in the line and saw Dimitrios. He was on a transfer flight from Greece. I think that the 15th was a really popular day to come home because it was right smack in the middle of January, and we had talked briefly earlier about him passing through Germany and maybe stopping in Munich to visit friends. It was such a random coincidence that we were on the same flight though, another example of such a small world.
I had to stand in a different line for them to give me a seat, and even then the woman said I could just board into the seating area and she would page me later. So I kind of cut by standing with Dimitrios, and we chatted for a while and then sat down together to chat some more, mostly about traveling and what we are doing when we get back and if he was TAing or not. On the one hand I did sort of want to just read, and I was afraid of the conversation going awkward, but I think the timing of actual boarding was just right, so that worked out. I still had to wait around for my number, so I started reading this newspaper that mentioned the Taiwanese presidential elections, and I was happy to see that they mentioned Ma Ying-Jou was ahead. Finally, after a lot of waiting, we got up to ask one of the women, who scrambled together some seat numbers for us. Of course, I got onto the plane and sat down, and then a family came by and said they had the same seat number, so I had to get up and wait for a new one. We were all waiting there for a while, all these families that came too late and were having trouble getting seats together, it was all kind of crazy, and I was surprised that Lufthansa would be so disorganized.
I finally got a seat near the wing, right in between two guys, one of which was this big fat American who talked with everyone around, and he also had one of those digital book readers, and he was a very jolly guy, the kind of American that I missed while I was in Europe. I finished 1984, though I must admit that it didn't particularly move me, and I thought the ending, though expected, was highly unsatisfying. I know that those books are just social commentaries, but I really just want my stories to be stories for the sake of stories. Sorry Zach, I didn't really get it. They also played this movie called "My Martian Child," starring John Cusack, and that was a darling movie with the feel-good ending that made me tear up, so maybe I was just in that kind of mood.
Finally I got into Boston and got on the T back home, and there was an awful long wait where I remembered how crappy the Boston metro is compared to Germany, but it was definitely good to be back. On the train there was also this girl with the most awesome hair ever, it was short with tufts of all different colors, and the different colors matched her rainbow earrings and general outfit. That is the type of style that I love, that I used to have. Also, there was the hottest guy ever right in front of me, the kind of Justin-Long-kid-from-the-logs look with the amazing hair, but more sophisticated because of his I'm-in-a-band tight clothes and jacket. Seriously, that kid had the most amazing hair, I couldn't stop looking at him, and I was sorry that I looked just like I'd gotten off an airplane. I think he had been flying too, judging by his luggage, and I commended him on how good his hair looked for being on an airplane.
I got off at my stop, got into my room, and just turned on the TV. It was amazing. I sat at my computer and checked my zillions of emails and waited for Andriy to get home, which wasn't until like 7pm (it was only 3pm when I got home), killing time by watching Next Top Model and chatting with Lev. I had a great time in Europe, but I must say that it's starting to get a little bit old, and I'm quite tired of it. I would have enjoyed just hanging out with more people rather than sight-seeing so much towards the end, though Vienna was actually very nice. I think I'm definitely ready for a change of scenery, like South America, but I think for now I've resigned myself to being too tired to do any traveling of any kind, at least until spring break. By spring break, I will, of course, be lying in a Caribbean sun. =P
Day 15:
I packed up my stuff and left for Munich at around 8:30am, and I just made it onto the train because I had some trouble finding the part of the station with long-distance trains. I mean, it wouldn't have been a problem because there was a 8:40am train that got there at the same time, but I still just wanted to get on and not have to wait at all, and also I thought the train passing through Salzburg might have nicer scenery (it did). Of course, like an idiot, I was sitting in the section that was not going to Salzburg, but I was lucky that the conductor pointed this out to me, though I had to walk five trains over to the cart actually going to Salzburg. I spent most of the ride either typing in my journal or reading 1984. I transferred in Salzburg, which had this beautiful backdrop of snowy mountain peaks, and got into Munich at around 2:15pm. I sat in the train station until about 2:50pm waiting for Sara to show up, and I got a little bit concerned because we were supposed to meet at 2:30pm, and I was afraid that maybe her plane had been delayed or she was lost or something, and I didn't know it because I forgot to check her plane schedule and everything. I kept reading my book and sitting on my suitcase right under the big Coca Cola sign, and it was such a relief when she showed up and everything was okay.
We went and locked up our stuff in a locker, though it was a pain because I had to look for some place that would exchange my 100 euro bill into smaller change, since the stupid ATM in Austria not only cost me ATM fees but fed me a 100 euro bill. Then we walked around for a bit trying to find the direction of Landsbergerstrasse where the Budget was. We figured we had some four hours in Munich, we might as well follow the Ling's deutsche bank theory of exploration and walk until we find the Budget. We grabbed some waffle/curly fries for a pseudo lunch and then headed out, and it turns out that we just had to walk down Bayerstrasse, which turned into Landsbergerstrasse, albeit pretty far down the street. It was probably a good 20 minute walk to get there, and we were glad we discovered this before trying to drag all of our luggage with us. When we found it, we just walked around in that area and saw a nice church that was closed and then a playground! At the playground we sat on the swings for a while and took some timed pictures with the church and the sunset in the background which were quite nice. Then I felt queasy as I always do on swings and got off to lie on the rope pyramid thing, like what they had in Nice. It was really nice to hang out with Sara again because this whole time I've been with people who have at the most a brief three month history with. Sara and I know tons of common people and were in both high school and at least in the same college area together, and we could catch up a little bit on people that we knew (Carmen, I was also able to further spread your amazing-best-piece-of-hs-gossip).
After a while we decided it was starting to get cold and that we should head out to a cafe or something, but there was a U-bahn stop right there, and we realized we were only one stop away from the train station. I decided that, since I still had my Eurail pass, I would just go over by myself and grab our stuff and come back, so that Sara wouldn't need to buy an extra ticket. If I would have know that we were so close though, we could have just ridden over in the first place instead of locking up our stuff in a locker, which would have saved some money and time walking. It was also kind of a pain in the ass to carry all of our luggage by myself, but it was a fairly short trip, so it was endurable. Then we headed to the Budget, stopping at this pizza place on the way where we got some tomato-cheese pizza that was pretty good but not that filling because the crust was pretty thin. I missed NY pizzas, I really think they are the best in the world, even better than Italy, where they came from, I suppose because some bastardization made them even tastier.
At Budget we had a minor scare because the woman said our reservation was canceled, even though we had just changed it to an earlier time, and the woman was like, "We don't have any more automatic cars." We were both like, "Um... we don't drive stick." Then, magically, she was like, "I have one more automatic car," though I haven't the faintest clue were she pulled it out of, maybe she was just lying the first time around. Even cooler, the car was an Audi, not the cheaper car we were initially going to get, and the price stayed the same, so we got a sweeter deal. So, we loaded our luggage and headed out to Fuessen.
It was a little bit stressful driving at first because I was so afraid that I was going to hurt the car. But once I convinced myself that driving in Germany was basically exactly the same as driving in the US, it wasn't so bad anymore. The only sort of annoying thing was that the windshield was either too clean or slanted at a strange angle, but it was making me feel a little bit dizzy, the way that a pair of brand new glasses does. We had a little bit of trouble getting out of Munich as well because the google directions thought we were on the other side of the road and therefore made us U-turn, which ended us on the wrong side and confused us immensely. Luckily the street we were on just peeked in on the side of the map I had saved on my computer, so we were able to figure it out and put ourselves on the highway.
Two errors in driving the first day. First was that I didn't have my lights on because the lights were in this weird place where you turn a dial instead of click, but I was lucky people flashed me and let me know before I got onto the highway. Second error was bad though. We were on the right side of the road, and I saw the guy in front of me pass the car in front of him, so I thought I would follow suit. There was a dotted white line in the middle of the road. So I was taking my time on the left side passing, when I see lights coming towards me which flashed me suddenly. I swerved back into the right lane, and I was so lucky that I was sufficiently ahead of the guy behind me to not have hit him swerving back in. Turns out that a dotted white line means passing on a two-way street, not a one-way street as it would be in the US. As I was informed by a mocking Andriy, the yellow line is some parking denomination, not a distinction between two-way and one-way. Stuff like that is pretty important, they should mention it in some manual or something if they don't require you to have a separate license outside of the US license to drive in Europe.
After some time and a little bit of getting lost in Fuessen, we ended up at our hostel, which was really some guy's house. We parked right up front, and the guy was so nice. I spoke German to him the whole time, and then he said he would bring up breakfast to our rooms in the morning. Then we got to the room, which was really nice, and it had a balcony. We went outside onto the balcony, and the weather was nice with a calm breeze, and partly because of the air and partly because of the bamboo mat along the balcony fence, I really had the sense that I was in Belize, that one day when we walked way out on this super long dock into the middle of the water and sat in hammocks with dark water surrounding us on all sides. That was one of those magical moments, and I just felt so calm thinking about it while leaning on this balcony and feeling the air on my face. Also, in Fuessen the stars were amazing, and I was already in the Belize mood because I had told Sara that no matter how amazing those stars were, she should've seen the stars in Belize, which covered every square centimeter of dark expanse. I especially love when you can see the clouds of star clusters, those are really magical. As I guessed, Fuessen was such a nature-y and totally calming place, I think that in the morning my skin was the best it had been in Europe because of the air.
Before going to sleep we had about two hours where I was using the internet and trying to figure out what the hell to do on the Romantische Strasse. For such a tourist destination, the online coverage of it is really lacking, they don't even tell you which road is the physical road, probably because it connects onto a variety of different roads, which made me sort of nervous. We finally just decided that we would wing it and hope for the best, since I was getting tired and we wanted to be up as early as possible to get a head start on Neuschwanstein.
1/12
Day 16:
The next morning the owner came up and woke us up with breakfast at 7am, which was good because I would've otherwise not woken up. Sara said she was impressed I could still speak German when I'm half delirious and just woken up, though I argue I speak better at those times because I just don't think. But I did make one grammatical mistake which I still remember, by saying "wir haben noch nicht bezahlen." Ouch, that hurts me (it should be "haben bezahlt"). Anyway, the breakfast was tasty - lots of bread, a hard-boiled egg, some fruit juice, and tea - and then we were on our way.
Schwangau was only like five minutes from where we were, we could have probably walked there, though it would have taken longer. It was definitely a Leaning Tower of Pisa moment, where we were like, "Okay, which way are we going? Oh! There's the castle. Right. There." It was smaller and sort of less magnificent than I would have thought, though I suspect that is because of the angle we were seeing it from, which didn't quite match the tremendous helicopter shots that you always see. At least Neuschwanstein was up in the mountains though, poor Hohenschwangau was right there on the side of the road, as Sara said, "prime real estate."
We had gotten there at around 8:30am, but the ticket office didn't open until 9am, so we thought we would go check out Marienbruecke while we were waiting. Unfortunately, we realized it was right next to Neuschwanstein, so it didn't make sense to climb up there and then climb back down for the tickets, so we decided to walk around a bit instead. Since we realized that Hohenschwangau was right there, we decided to walk up to that and take lots of pictures. Chen's tripod came so in handy this whole trip, I took so many shots using that thing, and also night shots later on that required no shaking. Best present ever. It was cool because it was too early for most people to be there, so it was sort of like when we were in Rome at the Palatinate after closing because we were the only ones just strolling around like we owned the place. There were a lot of nice views from Hohenschwangau, though in my opinion it was rather small to be fit for a king.
When we came back down it was around 9:15am, and we got tickets, parked our car in the parking lot, and started the hike up to the big castle. That was quite a hike, it took about 20 minutes and was pretty tiring, but we were nowhere near as tired as this one guy. This guy was soooo weird, he kept panting and talking to us in something that sounded Southeast Asian, though I'm not sure what. He was with a lot of people who were Japanese, but I don't think he was speaking Japanese, and what he was saying was completely unintelligible to me. I don't know if he thought I understood him, but he was just one of those crazy old Asian guys. He was probably around 55 years old and a little tubby, and he was walking at least four times slower than us and panting the whole time, and then he would laugh and say something that gave off the air of "hey you girls can really walk." Then later he passed us sitting on the horse carriage with a bunch of other people, and we don't know what he paid the guy to pick him up halfway, but when he passed us, he laughed again and then yelled a bunch more unintelligible stuff. That guy was hilarious in a definite wtf way.
Our tour was set for 10:24am, so we thought we had about 30 minutes to walk to the bridge and take pictures, so we bought some souvenirs and headed off, passing by the crazy guy who yelled at us some more. Turns out that the road to the bridge was closed, which was totally frustrating and sucky because that was supposed to be a really really beautiful view, and from what we saw of it out the windows of the castle, it really would have been. It is suspended over these huge gorges (probably super scary), and would offer a spectacular vision of Neuschwanstein from above, with Fuessen in the background. I could definitely understand why the road was closed though, it didn't look too safe to be heading all the way out there when it was already slightly icy down below. Without being able to go out there, we had some time to kill taking pictures, and that passed by very surprisingly quickly with all the pictures we took.
We lined up for the English tour, and we were let in by this guy with a spectacular mustache like the guy from Monopoly. The woman who gave our tour was nice, but she sounded exactly like an audioguide and had a peculiar sort of half-British half-German accent, and it was sort of awkward because she would give her spiel, and then we would all go to the windows and take pictures because we weren't allowed to take pictures of the insides of the building, and she would just sort of stand there smiling for a while. I asked her a question about who painted the walls (art students from Munich), and she was very knowledgeable, so it was too bad people didn't ask her more questions. To be fair, the view out the windows were quite spectacular.
So King Ludwig II was kind of a nut job. I thought he died young, but actually he was in his forties, so it wasn't that young. Sara and I spent a good amount of time laughing at the pictures of him on postcards on the wall downstairs in the visitors area. He was obsessed with swans, so the swans were everywhere in the castle, and he was also obsessed with Wagner, so the whole castle was dedicated to Wagner, with all paintings depicting some Wagner opera. Which, btw, I didn't know that Tristan and Isolde was an opera by Wagner, and that goes against the claim of the movie where it goes "Before there was Romeo and Juliet..." because Wagner was definitely after Shakespeare. I really liked all the paintings, they were very well done and reaffirms my question of why some people become famous while others are just students, when they are clearly just as talented. There was also a nice room in the castle that was decorated with some two hundred or so swans everywhere, which was cool.
After the fairly short tour we were left to ourselves to visit the kitchen and the guest area, and Sara and I went inside this "multivision" screening room that had just about the most bizarre video collage about King Ludwig II. It was a bunch photos and kind of ambience, like if they were talking about something that happened on a foggy day, the screen would be all foggy, and of course there was bad acting in the background, with the dialogue presumably read from a diary or letters of the people involved. We stayed and watched that for about five minutes before we headed down the path back to the car again.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to get back down to the car (and to the two glorious pieces of bread that we had taken from the house that morning), and we didn't end up leaving Schwangau until about noon, which put us already an hour behind in a very tight schedule. Sara drove for a while up and down this windy roads in a very beautiful setting until we got to Augsburg. I really lamented that we didn't have time to stop by a lot of the little towns because they seemed nice, but I suppose that after a few they would all start looking the same anyway. The scenery was very nice for a while until we started getting closer to Augsburg, at which point it was more industrial and not romantic at all. Then, the weirdest thing, they had all these signs for Augsburg, but as soon as we got close to Augsburg the signs disappeared, and we were not really sure where exactly Augsburg was or how to get to it. We turned off at an exit, but it seemed to be the wrong place, so after a while we gave up and decided to just stop at Rothenburg ob der Tauber and forget about Augsburg all together, which would also help us get back on schedule, since I had allotted one hour at Augsburg.
At that point I started driving, and the roads started becoming beautiful again, with lots of green fields and vast expanses of sky. The thing that I really liked about it was the feeling like I could just reach up and touch the clouds, though I imagine it's something like that in middle America as well, makes me think of Counting Crows "Omaha". Actually, I think Counting Crows would have been good music for that ride, but we were listening to the local radio station, which was pretty good except the music to talk ratio was incredibly small, for some reason they were discussion crime among youths. The entire time I was driving I thought of how much my dad would like that place, because it sort of reminded me of our home, except the villages were smaller and more quaint. While I was driving I so wanted to take pictures out of the window, but I don't think Sara's camera could handle the quick shutter needed (I'm not sure mine could either), and frankly I don't think she was too interested in out-of-the-window pictures anyway. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who sees shots when they present themselves, like whenever I went traveling Sam while my camera was broken I had to restrain myself from constantly saying, "Can you take a picture of that?" because I thought surely he would also feel the irrepressible urge to take a picture but he didn't. I also cannot understand people who take pictures where the skyline is slanted, or building shots where half the building is cut off. Sara would always say, "You're tiny in this picture," but for me being tiny in a picture just magnifies the grandeur of the building and I didn't mind it at all.
Finally we got to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, parked the car, and went wandering through the town. We had just one hour, but at least we were on schedule now. Unfortunately, I don't know if it was because it was a Saturday in the winter, but the town seemed sort of dead. In all information about the Romantische Strasse, people said Rothenburg was the number one tourist destination on the road and was just a classic medieval town, and supposedly some people had seen puppet shows there or something, and I think in the summer it was really happening. It was okay though because our time was short, so we just took pictures and headed toward a restaurant in Sara's guide book. Unfortunately that restaurant was on vacation ("ruhetag") and we ended up at the restaurant next door, which was actually pretty good. A cute toddler was with the waitress scribbling nonsense on a piece of paper pretending to take orders, and I spoke to her in German, which was cool because you know you can't be too bad if a little kid can understand what you are saying. The red-headed kid next to us, though, had just about the worst American accent ever, I think he only know like two phrases in German, and I had to cringe. I know it's snobby to say, but I really can't understand accents like that, it sounds like he didn't even try in the least, or that he just doesn't have ears, but I suppose it's like being tone deaf, maybe he just can't hear it.
I got a bratwurst with potatoes and sauerkraut, which was all a little bit too salty (I should have guessed when it said "salzkartoffeln") but not bad. I don't particularly like bratwurst, but I realized that I had never had any in Germany before, so I figured that I should. Sara got veal schnitzel, and that was tasty with a tasty salad and fries, and I remembered that I should just always order schnitzel because I love it. We also stopped by this shop that apparently had no name to buy these "schneeball" that were mentioned in Sara's guidebook to be classic Rothenburg. They were kind of crazy looking, they really were the size of snowballs, except that it was more like a baseball because of the sort of zigzag pattern that was on it, and they looked like they would be really soft, but they were actually pretty hard and broke off in pieces of cinnamon-y goodness. Dinner lasted just a little bit longer than our one-hour parking, but we made it back with no penalty and got back on the road. Here's where the trouble began.
We drove for a while making good time, and I was feeling really good about getting to Frankfurt in time to return the car. Then somewhere nearing Wuerzburg we got stuck in traffic. It was okay at first, I got to relate the story of the Portuguese girls and their love for saying "drei kilometer Stau" because it was the only thing they knew how to say in German. Then it got to be a little bit ridiculous, we were moving at about 10 km per hour, and we were still about an hour away from Frankfurt at a normal 120 km per hour pace, with only like forty minutes left. We couldn't figure out what happened, there were some police cars and ambulances that drove by, but the traffic didn't end past where they stopped, and even now I have no idea if there was really an accident or what. I so wanted to just scream and honk my horn. It would have been immensely satisfying to start a honking wave down the line of cars, it would've at least been fun. We did break out into massive giggles over this guy who pulled into a ditch on the side of the road, and we thought maybe he misunderstood the "exit" sign.
Sara got tired of sitting there, so we switched and I "drove," and we started getting a little bit silly out of frustration and boredom. We tried calling Budget, but the German number wouldn't go through, and we couldn't figure out if we were putting in the zero in the wrong place, and then we called the American number, and they let us know that we had an hour of leeway after the deadline. This made us feel a little bit better for a while until we were stuck for another hour and realized that there was no way to make it even with an hour more, unless we drove at 200 km per hour. This was rather depressing, but at least after an hour and a half of being stuck we finally got out, and I drove at 160 km per hour, which is 96 mph. It was really not scary though, I think that if I have a goal and purpose (or when I'm angry), I don't think about being cautious on the road anymore, I just go with the flow. I figured that if I can't get there in time, I should try to get there as fast as possible, so that we could honestly say, "We tried to get here as fast as possible."
We got to the airport area around 8pm, when the car was due at 6:45pm and the final hour was over at 7:45pm. Then we had to get gas, but we luckily found a place right outside the airport which wasn't too much more expensive than everywhere else. We go to fill up the tank, and what does it come out to? 51 fucking euros. WTF?! So we were feeling severely ripped off, like how much does this fucking tank hold?! 48 liters?! Of course, later we converted the units on my mac, and that was only like 11 gallons. Essentially, gas in Europe costs about $7 a gallon. Lesson learned: don't drive in Europe because it is fucking expensive as hell. That is just ridiculous. But at least we felt a little bit better, because were thinking for a while that maybe we messed up pumping gas and the thing never jumped and maybe the leftover just went to some unknown location and we pumped too much. And at least we had diesel, which was the cheapest, if you can call that cheap at all.
We went to the Budget stand to talk to the lady, and the lady was so nice, she was like, "You're only a half an hour past the 25 hour deadline, so I won't charge you." And then she answered all of our questions about Deutsche Bank and about taking a free shuttle to the hotel. We were so relieved, because if she charged us for a second day, then we would have to make use of it by keeping the car, and then we would have to deal with parking it, and then we have to drive it the next day and park it, and find the roads, and it would be so annoying. We got some cash out of the ATM (I love Deutsche Bank for the no fees, it was 5 dollars plus 1% at the Bank of Austria and whatever bank in Poland...) and then headed out to wait for the shuttle, and I made another grammar mistake by saying "das Bus" instead of "der Bus" when calling over the intercom to ask when it would show up. After some time our particular bus came and we headed to our hotel.
First impression of the hotel was that it was super nice, and it said rooms were somewhere around 300 euro, which was a lot more than I thought they were when I looked them up online. That should have been a warning to me, because after asking, the guy said we were at the wrong hotel. We were at the Mercure in Kalsterbach, but we should have been at the Mercure Wings in Raunheim. The worst part was, the guy said that we would miss the last shuttle if we tried to get back to the airport, so we were forced to take a taxi. Technically, there were other options, which we figured out later, but they would've been slightly inconvenient, so we sucked it up and paid 18 euro for the taxi to the other airport. Geez, that was a day of really bad luck, all day long. I do think, however, that the guy could have asked the driver for the other Mercure shuttle to swing by and pick us up, because we found out later that that shuttle passed by the Kalsterbach location on every ride. An alternative would have been to ride back to the airport and then take the train to Raunheim, but we didn't know the way at the time, and it would've still cost like 7 euro for train tickets. Plus the taxi driver was funny, we kept joking because he was sort of teasing us for taking the wrong bus, reminds me of when we took the taxi in Munich late at night when we decided not to go clubbing and the last subway had passed, and that taxi driver was nice too. Maybe it's a German thing.
Finally we got to the right hotel, and of course it was super easy to check in, and even when the girl was like, "oh, I thought you had a single room," and I just said Sara was with me, she was like, "No problem, I'll just change it to a double." Our place was definitely not as nice as the first hotel, but it was definitely okay, and free, and we were just relieved to be able to put our stuff down and know that it could stay there for the next three days. I think, though, that hotels are sort of overrated when you can go places like that place in Fuessen for cheap at a comparable quality. We did have TV, though, and we watched some French concert performance with lots of artists, including KT Tunstall singing "Satisfaction" with some French chick, which was pretty good.
1/13
Day 17:
We woke up at around 9am after a rather nice sleep, stretched a bit and lagged in bed, and finally got out around 10am. The next shuttle wasn't until 10:35am, so we just waited in the lobby reading our books until it showed up. At the airport we went to the ticket machines to look up ticket times and pricing. We had the intention of going to Trier on the Schoenes Wochenende ticket, but we realized that it would take us four hours to get there and three to get back, and if we wanted to get on the shuttle back, we would only have one hour in Trier, which was sort of pointless for eight hour train ride. However, after a lot of looking up, we realized we could just take the train the next day directly from Raunheim, bypassing the shuttle, for only about 4 euro more using a combination of day pass to Mainz and a Bundesland ticket in Rheinland-Palatinate. This utilized both the ticket machine and the awesome awesome train scheduling machine that also lets you buy long distance tickets and is awesome. Seriously, that machine is so useful and easy to use, it should be everywhere and is precisely why Deutsche Bahn rocks my socks off. Plus, using that machine always makes me feel good about myself because it highlights my powers of optimization. If I do say so myself, I am amazing at optimization, my whole life is a giant optimization problem, it's so fun. With the new schedule we had six hours in Trier, which is a lot more and totally sufficient for seeing a city, and our travel time was cut down to seven hours.
By the time we were done with all this, it was right around noon. We had decided to stay in Frankfurt for the day, so we bought a day pass around Frankfurt and headed on our way. When we got there we started walking toward the river and thought to stop at an Indian restaurant on the way. I wasn't particularly in the mood for Indian, but I thought it would be okay. I ordered something chicken and a mango lassi, which was delicious, but the chicken was too spicy, and in the end Sara and I had to pay 4 euro for a 0.5L bottle of water because they didn't have tap. That is just unfair, if I would've known the water was so expensive I would have just gotten another mango lassi. Lame.
The view by the river was beautiful. We saw some kids skateboarding on mini half-pipes, and I was amazed because some of these kids looked like they were seven years old or so. The general aura of Frankfurt really really reminded me of Koeln, in both the river and the city itself. They even had the KD Koeln-Duesseldorf boat cruise stations setup, made me a bit nostalgic. Another thing that was similar was the area with the Historisches Museum, which reminded me of this one building in Koeln, and the weird thing was that there was some display of giant photographs of NYC right in front, which we couldn't really understand, but the photos were rather nice. We walked around the old town a bit, bought some souvenirs, and then tried to track down all of the churches. We saw quite a few nice ones, but most of the cathedrals look kind of new from the inside, which is presume is some result of reconstruction. One thing that was really cool was that right behind the main cathedral (St. Bartholomeus) there was some archeological uncovering of something like a roman bath or something like that, and they called it a Historischer Garten, so we took a bunch of timed pictures of us there using the awesome Chen-tripod, which Sara deemed "like a little animal." It reminds me of the lamp in Pixar and how that moves.
After some major tracking down, we finally figured out that the building which we thought was a Parliament building was actually St. Peter's cathedral, which had actually been turned into a historical exhibit about the German Parliament, which had a lot to do with Frankfurt and that very building. It was pretty cool because there was a lot of information, and I had previously known nothing about German government before the Third Reich, so I thought it was interesting to see, though I definitely think they could have benefitted from some benches in front of the posters. It was bizarre because the place didn't look like a church at all, though I suppose most of that was due to reconstruction after the war, when they decided to make it a dedication to democracy.
Since we had done so much church-seeing, we had to balance it out by going to the Jewish cemetery. It was pretty cool because the wall around the cemetery had all of these little blocks sticking out with names, and some had a rock placed on top. Sara explained to me what this was for, but I forgot (Sara? help?), but they made for great artistic pictures. Also, there weren't very many tombstones inside, since a lot of them had been destroyed in the Nazi era.
At this point it started to get dark, so I took a ton of really nice sunset shots (followed later by a ton of really super nice nighttime shots), and we went to the Communications Museum, since the description of it in the guidebook sounded pretty cool. Even though we didn't get to see any of the stuff that they mentioned like invisible ink stuff, we did spend a while in the robots exhibit. All the captions were in German, so it made it easier to pass by them and only read the interesting ones, otherwise it would be too tiring. There were a couple of cool ones, like the robots from the Bjork "All Is Full Of Love" video. There was this really weird giant robot that took up so much space for so little functionality, since you had to dial a number up on its telephone for it to perform the corresponding lame action, like shake your hand. There were also random videos, like this robot band that played robot music. Other than the robot section, there was something on "Offener Brief" (Sara and I gathered this to be something like a pamphlet or editorial, though now I see that the direct translation of "open letter" actually means something in English, which I didn't know), the post, and various other boring stuff. The only other thing that was cool was this machine where you could type in your name and then move the flaps on a virtual telegraph pole to match the letters. It doesn't make sense to describe it, and I'm not sure how it relates to Morse code exactly, though it might be an older form if telegraph? Also, there was a sculpture with sheep made out of telephone wires, with telephones for heads.
After the museum, we went looking for this Italian place called Vapiano's that was mentioned in the guidebook. If anyone else goes to Frankfurt, you HAVE to go to this place, it is AWESOME. So at this place you get this card on which they put your tab every time you get something, and then you stand in line and wait for the guy to cook your food, with the card being an easy way not to have to exchange money. The whole place smells absolutely scrumptious, and the guys are super good at cooking the food, so they just make it right there in front of you and put all the stuff in and make it delicious. You sit down anywhere at these kind of bar level tables that have little basil and mint and whatever you want plants growing in the middle, in case you need some more fresh garnish. Our guy was nice too, and he posed for pictures too. The salad I got was just about the most delicious salad I've ever had, due to some mystery house dressing impossible for me to replicate, and the pasta was simple with just garlic, olive oil, and spices, but somehow it tasted absolutely amazing. It was really the right choice to go there, so I highly recommend it.
We headed back to the airport via an express train and caught the shuttle home. It was really bizarre because the guy made a turnaround partway into the hotel and drove the rest of the way backwards, which we thought was rather inefficient but exciting at the same time. After we got home we thought we would do a dry run of going to the train station, just to make sure we knew how to do it for the next day. We found some directions at the front desk, and we walked out. I don't know if we were just tired, but we were walking super slow, and it actually took us longer (25 min) than the estimated time (15 min), which never happens. The Raunheim train station really really reminded me of Leverkusen, the way it was set up, with the bus area and everything. Raunheim was a small town kind of like Leverkusen, and there was even a pharmacy with a Bayer sign on it, and Frankfurt was so like Koeln. So the entire time I was there I was sort of reminiscing about Mr. Chicken and my lovely BKG. When finally got back to the hotel we just showered and got ready to get up early the next day for Trier.
1/14
Day 18:
We got up at 6:45am to go to the train station, since our train was at 7:38am. It wasn't until halfway out that I looked at the printed schedule and discovered our train was actually at 8:08am because this route had a shorter on-train duration. Luckily, we had also missed the first street to turn into the station, so we accidentally stumbled upon a little bakery with a lovely owner that was open at that early morning. So we decided to sit down for twenty minutes and grab something to eat before our 3.5 hour ride. I got a delicious chocolate infused croissant like the kind that Pascal's dad would give me, and a cup-bowl of dharjeeling tea. Which confused me because the woman asked me if I wanted mint or black tea, at that was the black option, even though it wasn't black at all. And Sara successfully conducted a transaction in German, even though she knows no German. It's amazing how fast the human brain can learn.
The train ride was uneventful, with both of us reading most of the time. There was a beautiful sunrise around us at the train station before we left, and I took lots of pictures of that. The first train was actually running like five minutes late, and we were really really close to missing the connection in Mainz. To tell the truth, I was hoping a tiny bit that we would, because I discovered that the Bundesland ticket wasn't useable until 9am, and we were going to start using it from Mainz at 8:30am, and I really didn't want to have to deal with what happens if a conductor comes by and says no (though I suspect they would've let it go). Plus, then we could spend an hour in Mainz, though I know full well there isn't much to do in Mainz. We did get on the train, though, and I figured our excuse would be that we didn't speak German, in which case it made perfect sense that we wouldn't understand what "gueltig" meant (it means "valid"). But I still didn't want to deal with it, so I gave the ticket to Sara and made her be the ignorant American, since it would be easier to play the role if she didn't know German anyway. I kept checking the time over and over with heart pounding, but then a half an hour passed and we were home free after that. In fact, it wasn't until we switched trains in Koblenz that we got checked for the first time.
I tried to point out the Lorelei to Sara on our way up the Rhein, but as I remember, it was nothing special, and I only noticed it right as we were passing it and the woman said "St. Goar," with only enough time for me to see it and not Sara. There were some nice views though, I kind of wish she would have stopped reading for a longer time to take it all in, but when I remember our five hour boat ride I sympathize. I was afraid that it would be totally dead and dreary in the winter, but the bare grape branches still marked out the plots, and the hills were still rolling, and the castles were still standing, so everything still looked pretty, though less green. I wanted to be able to show Cochem to Sara, but the train really didn't offer a very good view of it, so I didn't bother. Cochem still lies very dear to my heart, with it's narrow streets and wine shops and Oma living in her darling little house.
Finally we got to Trier. We followed the signs down the street to the tourist office, and there was the Porta Nigra. It was like in Pisa, it was just right there in the middle of this busy intersection amidst all of this modern stuff. According to wikipedia, Trier is the oldest German city, dating to before 16 BC, and was closely tied with the Romans, being a capital of the Roman province Gallia Belgica. We had wanted to go there because the whole Roman thing sounded really unique amidst a lot of similar cities in Germany. We unsuccessfully tried to fill up Sara's phone card and then stopped at Nordsee for a sort of lame lunch of fried seafood assortments, which was not really a lot of food (I got the small mixed box) but held us over until dinner. Then we went back to the Porta Nigra and bought a combination ticket for the Roman ruins, though unfortunately half of them were close for either Monday reasons or January reasons. I think by the time we were done we had the feel for it and didn't really need to see more ruins, though, so it was okay (though the woman said the ticket was valid all year...).
We walked up and down the Porta Nigra, which again really reminded me of being in Rome in the Palatinate because we were just all by ourselves, something that I felt at all of the other Roman structures as well. I guess winter is just not a popular tourist season, but it was cool. There was a brief time where this other family was there and helped us take a blurry picture of us. The structure had apparently housed some guy, maybe a monk (note: according to wikipedia his name was Simeon), who decided to spend his hermit years there. It was actually kind of small, all things considered, but offered a nice view and many photo opportunities.
We left the Porta Nigra because we wanted to make it to the other two locations before they closed, though it was only about 1:30pm and they didn't close until 4pm (last entrance at 3:30pm). We sort of walked the long way to the Kaiserthermen (imperial baths) because I thought there would be a more interesting view, but since it was right on the outskirts of the city, there wasn't actually much around. We did pass a museum that had this giant foot in front of it, apparently a replica of the foot of Emperor Constantine from some really tall statue, which we caressed and took pictures of. We later saw two more of these scattered around the city, so I guess they were really into this Constantine guy. The baths were really cool too. I'm still not really sure what Roman baths are supposed to be like, despite visiting all these ruins AND the audio report I did with Breanne in ninth grade world history, because the ruins all look like mini-Colosseums and are not really bath-like at all. This one had all this green are in front, which I don't know if this was a courtyard in the past or what, but it used to house a lot of wealthy or royal families or something like that. The coolest part about this place, though, was that there was a labyrinth underneath. I'm not sure what people have labyrinths for in general, other than to trap people with Minotaurs or just for fun, but I really love them. These were kind of creepy too because of the aforementioned us-being-the-only-ones-there thing, but we went underneath the ground for a little while and then saw patches of light and tried to get ourselves lost and then found again. It was fun and I took a video, and by the end we were actually well acquainted enough with the labyrinth that I saw a section peeking from above ground and was like, "Hey we were there!"
Finally we walked a distance away to the ampitheater, which was out in the middle of nowhere. The cool thing about it was that, though the seats and most of the steps were no longer there, the whole thing was overgrown with grass, which was surprisingly green for that time of year. Sara stayed down while I climbed up to get a better view, and then we both went down into the cellar areas, which were full of water and sort of dark, and I'm not sure what actually happened down there, if they housed the animals there or what, and if the water had always been there. I just sort of lament that there weren't any real signs at any of these places to explain anything, except for at the baths, but those were in German. There were free tours on weekends in the summer, but we were sadly there at the wrong time.
We sat down at the benches just outside the ampitheater to rest and decide what we were going to do afterwards. We decided to just see some of the churches around and then grab something to eat before going home. It took a while to walk back to the city center. We passed this palace, which was a lovely pink, and spent a little while walking through the garden with lots of statues in the back courtyard which had been pooped on by birds. We sat down at some benches there for another while and watched this guy riding around on one tire of his bike, up and down stairs. We thought this guy was infinitely funny because he just kept showing off his little fake-unicycle tricks, and while that stuff is really cool, in a sense it's also kind of pathetic. After the palace we tried to get into the basilica, which apparently had the throne hall of Emperor Constantine, but it was also closed on a Monday. We did go into the Liebfrauernkirche, which was a rather nice cathedral.
We looked around for places to eat and settled on a restaurant that looked cheap that we found in a side alleyway. It was pretty cheap and the food was great, and the best part was that they played Wir Sind Helden, the two best songs "Nur Ein Wort" and "Von Hier An Blind," in a playlist of good songs on repeat. It was awesome. I got jaegerschnitzel, and as by my new vow to only get schnitzel in Germany, it met all expectations and was delicious and came with salad for a full balanced meal. Sara got gnocchi.
After dinner it was time to catch the train home, and it was awesome how well we planned everything to work out right on time. I read and slept for a while on the trip, and then during the walk back we lost our way a little bit because we had both gone into this zone where we completely disregarded our surroundings. It was kind of like when you drive and suddenly arrive at your destination like, "Wait, I don't remember that entire ride," which made the walk seem a lot shorter. When we got back, the TV was working again, so we settled down and watched some Friends in German, which was actually really funny and I could understand it! It was awesome, because I remember watching French TV at Pascal's, and the funny jokes went over my head because I don't know much French, but the German was totally okay! It helped that it was also Friends, and I did knew the gist of what was going on, since Sara was also laughing a lot and couldn't understand the words. I had to pry myself away to shower, but it was definitely a glorious feeling knowing that I was going to be going home the next day.
1/15
Day 19:
Final day in Germany. We got up around 8:45am and stretched and relaxed in bed for a few moments before finally getting up. Everything was basically packed, so we took the time to enjoy ourselves a little, and then we got out for the shuttle at 9:35am. During checkout the woman actually asked me which room I was in, but she spoke in German, and I hadn't heard her, and Sara was like, "35." So in the end, Sara was the one to carry on the German conversations! Awesome!
At the airport we said our goodbyes. It was definitely awesome to have had Sara around and have somebody that I was already friends with and already comfortable with, but that we would both be tourists experiencing the sights together, almost like Sam, though I must admit I still miss the good old Sam days. I found the Lufthansa check-in finally, and the guy said that I didn't have a reservation. For a minute I thought of Sam and his escapades with "Donald Werner," and I got so scared and started arguing with the guy that surely Lufthansa booked me on the plane. Finally I was like, "Does this mean that I might not get on the plane?" and he was like, "Oh no, you definitely get on the plane, we just can't assign you a seat until boarding." I was relieved after that, but I still think it's rather peculiar that, if everyone else does have a reservation and I'm guaranteed on the plane, then surely they know which seats are left and can assign them? Weird.
Even weirder was that I went through security and got to the gate, and instead of lots of seats of people waiting to board, everyone was lined up outside the seating area. Apparently Lufthansa made you board to sit down, which I considered rather ineffective, and I was surprised because I don't think that's how it was the last time I traveled. But even weirder than weird, I looked in the line and saw Dimitrios. He was on a transfer flight from Greece. I think that the 15th was a really popular day to come home because it was right smack in the middle of January, and we had talked briefly earlier about him passing through Germany and maybe stopping in Munich to visit friends. It was such a random coincidence that we were on the same flight though, another example of such a small world.
I had to stand in a different line for them to give me a seat, and even then the woman said I could just board into the seating area and she would page me later. So I kind of cut by standing with Dimitrios, and we chatted for a while and then sat down together to chat some more, mostly about traveling and what we are doing when we get back and if he was TAing or not. On the one hand I did sort of want to just read, and I was afraid of the conversation going awkward, but I think the timing of actual boarding was just right, so that worked out. I still had to wait around for my number, so I started reading this newspaper that mentioned the Taiwanese presidential elections, and I was happy to see that they mentioned Ma Ying-Jou was ahead. Finally, after a lot of waiting, we got up to ask one of the women, who scrambled together some seat numbers for us. Of course, I got onto the plane and sat down, and then a family came by and said they had the same seat number, so I had to get up and wait for a new one. We were all waiting there for a while, all these families that came too late and were having trouble getting seats together, it was all kind of crazy, and I was surprised that Lufthansa would be so disorganized.
I finally got a seat near the wing, right in between two guys, one of which was this big fat American who talked with everyone around, and he also had one of those digital book readers, and he was a very jolly guy, the kind of American that I missed while I was in Europe. I finished 1984, though I must admit that it didn't particularly move me, and I thought the ending, though expected, was highly unsatisfying. I know that those books are just social commentaries, but I really just want my stories to be stories for the sake of stories. Sorry Zach, I didn't really get it. They also played this movie called "My Martian Child," starring John Cusack, and that was a darling movie with the feel-good ending that made me tear up, so maybe I was just in that kind of mood.
Finally I got into Boston and got on the T back home, and there was an awful long wait where I remembered how crappy the Boston metro is compared to Germany, but it was definitely good to be back. On the train there was also this girl with the most awesome hair ever, it was short with tufts of all different colors, and the different colors matched her rainbow earrings and general outfit. That is the type of style that I love, that I used to have. Also, there was the hottest guy ever right in front of me, the kind of Justin-Long-kid-from-the-logs look with the amazing hair, but more sophisticated because of his I'm-in-a-band tight clothes and jacket. Seriously, that kid had the most amazing hair, I couldn't stop looking at him, and I was sorry that I looked just like I'd gotten off an airplane. I think he had been flying too, judging by his luggage, and I commended him on how good his hair looked for being on an airplane.
I got off at my stop, got into my room, and just turned on the TV. It was amazing. I sat at my computer and checked my zillions of emails and waited for Andriy to get home, which wasn't until like 7pm (it was only 3pm when I got home), killing time by watching Next Top Model and chatting with Lev. I had a great time in Europe, but I must say that it's starting to get a little bit old, and I'm quite tired of it. I would have enjoyed just hanging out with more people rather than sight-seeing so much towards the end, though Vienna was actually very nice. I think I'm definitely ready for a change of scenery, like South America, but I think for now I've resigned myself to being too tired to do any traveling of any kind, at least until spring break. By spring break, I will, of course, be lying in a Caribbean sun. =P