This is going to be very, very long, so be warned.
18 February 2007After twenty-four hours' worth of train rides and a day in Sibiu, I'm in my room at the Evangelical Academy Siebenbürgen (Sibiu, Romania). It's been quite the past couple of days. Twenty-four hours of travel is not actually as bad as it sounds -- at least, for me it wasn't, but then I am a huge fan of train travel. Twenty-four hours on a plane would be torture. (That's how long it takes to fly from Germany to Australia, my Australian friend from Kepler Gymnasium, Sophie Prior, told me.)
The best part of the trip might have been that my passport got stamped four times. (I know that the point of traveling it to see places, not to get your passport stamped, but it still makes me happy every time they stamp it.) The worst was getting off the night train in Romania while it was still dark out -- not so much because of it being scary to be in a strange place while it's still dark as because they don't announce the stops on the night trains (to allow you to sleep better, presumably) so if there aren't visible signs on the stations you have no real way of knowing where you are, especially if the train's not running on time. But I found a nice lady and somehow got across the question, "Is this Simeria?" and she got across to me that no, it wasn't, but it was next, so all was well.
I was really feeling the inability to speak the language today, not just in that incident. (That one turned out fine. Well -- they all did, but that was the least stressful of them.) In Simeria, after spending most of my two-hour layover (6:47 to 8:44 a.m.!) watching stray dogs eat scraps of food off the waiting room floor, I went to ask the ticket lady which track my train left from because the Deutsche Bahn itinerary didn't say and, as you might have guessed from the stray dogs bit, Romanian train stations aren't really the sort of places that have timetables clearly posted (not Simeria's train station, anyway) and while Siobiu seems to be moving up in the world, seeing as it's one of the two European cultural capitals of 2007 (along with Luxembourg city) and is currently building a new train station to reflect that, currently its train station consists of a snack stand/ticket counter shack. So I'd figured out that the word for "track" is "linea" from having heard announcements for nearly two hours. (It is so incredibly frustrating listening to Romance languages that I don't speak, by the way, particularly Italian and Romanian, because I keep recongnizing bits of what people are saying to me and keep feeling like, if only I'd concentrate a little harder, I could understand them.) I showed the lady my Deutsche Bahn itinerary with the stations and times on it and said. "La linea?" But instead of telling me which track it was on, she thought I wanted to buy a ticket (which, having a Eurail pass, I didn't) and I stood there being miserable and incapable of explaining that I didn't, until finally a nice man behind me (who spoke no German -- so much for German being the Verkehrssprache of Eastern Europe!) figured out more or less what was going on and took me to the train. Which was a very nice train, I should note -- much like the local area bus-trains in Freiburg. I wouldn't have known I was in Romania were it not for the fact that the train was going through dirt road villages.
The third instance of language issues came after I was already in Sibiu. The rest of the group I'm here with (a student trip from the Freiburg uni led by a professor named Michael Walter, whom I'd never met until this afternoon but like a great deal already) was coming by bus, while I came by train (since I have the Eurail pass, and Romania's included on it, so my trip was already paid for) and I got here a few hours before the rest of them. The Eurail pass utterly baffled the Simeria-to-Sibiu ticket controller, by the way. He wrote on the back of it, and and the Kontrolleur on the Vienna-to-Simeria train stapled my reservation to it, and I'm really beginning to fear for the train ticket's survival for the next three months at this rate.
But anyway, I figured I'd wander around Sibiu for a bit, find a café, hang out and eventually make my way to the Evangelical Academy. And so I wandered into the old city center and found Piata Mare, which is a lovely open plaza, and sat on a bench there. A somewhat odd-looking middle aged man was sitting on the other end, but it didn't really seem like an issue: it was lovely and sunny outside, if a bit cold, and I was enjoying the day. But gradually I noticed he'd been moving closer to me and then he got up and threw something away, and when he came back he sat really a little too close for comfort and started talking to me in Romanian. I hadn't a clue what he was saying and said so in German and finally he wrote down what he was saying and showed it to me and enough of the words were Spanish cognates that I got the gist of what he was saying, which was something like, "I'm in love with you." At which point I skeedaddled real fast, which I probably should have done earlier than I did -- because okay, maybe it's kind of flattering, but it's about eighteen million times more sketchy than it is flattering.
Other than that incident, though, everything's been great. I got my coffee eventually (at The Gallery, which was showing Da Ali G Show in English with Romanian subtitles) and I made my way to the Evangelical Academy without problem, and everyone else showed up maybe twenty minutes later -- the bus had made much better time than expected. Since then we've gone on a tour of part of the old city center, eaten a rather sketchy cordon bleu dinner, and met with the head of the Romanian Orthodox church. Pretty cool.
20 February 2007Now that I've been here a couple of days, I've got kind of mixed feelings about Sibiu. On the one hand, I think it's a fascinating place. The mix of cultures is awesome -- there's a reason it's a European cultural capital of 2007, namely that its other name is Hermannstadt, and it's had German settlers since the 1200s -- and earlier today I discovered that the Freiburg uni offers a Romanian for Beginners course and thought, "Yeah! That'd be awesome! I'll definitely take that!" (Let's ignore the fact that learning yet another language essentially only spoken in one country would be silly for a moment.) But then later today I was thinking, "But what would I do with it?" At least with German I like the country and could maybe see myself becoming a German teacher or doing something related to German. But my feelings on Romania are rather mixed at the moment, and apart from living here, what would one do with Romanian, really?
Cool things we've done: met with the German consul (the consulate is in former dictator Ceanescu's son's house); eaten all sorts of unidentifiable meat dishes at the restaurant right next to the Evangelical Academy, La Sepp (two meals a day there); braved the Romanian post office (thankfully with Christina, who's originally from Romania, now lives in Canada and is spending a year in Freiburg); listened to talks about the Romanian economy (okay, not really my thing, but some of it was interesting); and visited the office of the German-language weekly newspaper, the Hermannstäter Zeitung. We'd learned about this area, Siebenbürgen, in my German as a Minority language class: settlers from Sachsen came here starting in the 1200s and their descendants still speak German. Siebenbürgen consists of sseven cities in Transylvania that together form a Sprachinsel (literally, "language island" -- it means they kept their language and culture, weren't integrated, and still to this day consider themselves German). It's weird but cool to have learned about this place in class and now be here.
But my feelings are mixed about Sibiu, and off the top of my head I'm having trouble thinking about just why. The center of the city is beautiful and modern (the cell phone store especially is incredibly nice-looking, better than the ones in Freiburg) but a five-minute walk in any direction leads to streets that are incredibly dirty, and often actually made of dirt. You have to take a taxi from the Academy whenever you want to go into town, and far fewer taxi drivers speak anything other than Romanian than Professor Walter had given the impression of. Alison and I have been hanging out with Christina, so that hasn't really been that big of a deal, but occasionally it has -- and here more than in a big city it's incredibly frustrating not being able to speak the language. I feel like we really stick out as foreigners here -- although I guess the locals can pretty well always tell who the foreigners are. In Freiburg I don't feel like that so much, maybe because it's got so many students, but in Stone Harbor you can always tell who the foreign kids are, generally from the dress alone -- and it's gotten me thinking about how so many places have the attitude that you should stick to your own country, where you fit in . . . I don't know if I'm getting this down properly. I just find it interesting how one sticks out so often in a foreign place with which one isn't familiar and wonder just how it is that people can so easily tell who's local and who's not. I mean, I can do it too, when I'm in the States, but I don't really understand it.
I got told off this morning for going outside with wet hair by a woman who works at the Academy in some sort of housekeeping function. "You should never do that! Never! When you're old you'll have terrible headaches!" It was a serious telling-off, too: we're talking three, four minutes here. Later I was telling Alison and Christina about it and Christina said, "Oh, the Romanians are very into traditional medicine. But that one's true! Your head shouldn't stay cold for too long or you will get headaches when you're old!" Old wives' tale, Alison and I think, but when I'm old and have awful headaches I'll know the Romanians were right.
I'm going to be so excited to get to Vienna and be able to speak the language again. I'm excited about Budapest as well, where we're headed tomorrow night, but Hungarian (or rather, Magyar) is a far crazier language than Romanian -- but Budapest is a far bigger city and has public transportation, so at least having to talk to taxi drivers shouldn't be an issue. But nonethless, it'll be so good to get to Vienna, be in a familiar place where we speak the language, even if it's only for a few days, and then we're off to the Czech Republic, whose language is also crazy.
In the past few days I've been speaking so much German that it's been hard to write this in English -- pretty cool, eh?
27 February 2007We're in Vienna now -- and yes, it is nice to be able to speak the language. It was pretty frustrating not being about to speak the language in Hungary, too, although there at least I had the consolation that Magyar is freaking impossible.
(continued on
28 February 2007, on the way to Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic)
The thing with traveling is, I get so caught up in doing whatever it is I'm doing that even though I want to write, there just isn't time, it seems, and before I know it a week's gone by and I've fallen terribly far behind. I keep on composing entries in my head, too, and then just don't get the chance to write them down.
So anyway, a week ago today we met with Florian Cioba, king of the Roma (gypsies), who spoke only Romanian (and presumably also the Roma language, but at any rate not German) and Silvana, the girl on the trip who came from Sibiu, was translating for us, but even though her German's quite good it was difficult to understand. But whatever. We walked through the Roma section of town on the way to meet King Florian, and it's funny: there are plenty of pretty nice houses through there, but bascially all of the roads are big piles of mud. Also, we saw a dead kitten. Apparently roads are pretty low on the infrastructure priorities list, behind things like the sewer system, but man, is it ever dirty.
We met with King Florian in the Roma Pentecostal church, and on our way there we met a Roma woman who thought we were coming to convert to Pentecostalism and who told us we were people with quiet souls and invited us to the church service that evening. She also told us her personal conversion story, which Silvana was translating for us with some of her own commentary ("She says this, but that can't possibly be true") and involvevd taking a train to Budapest, maybe -- it wasn't very clear.
It occurs to me that, as usual, I've neglected to mention a rather important bit of information, which is how I came to be in Romania in the first place. I said something about the student trip before, but just to clarify: Alison and I went with a student group from Uni-Freiburg, led by a professor named Michael Walter. He'd taught some sort of political development in Eastern Europe class in the political science department this past semester and wanted to lead a trip to Budapest and Sibiu. (Apparently he does this sort of thing pretty often: other kids on the trip had gone with him to Poland and to Iran. As an American I cannot imagine going on a student trip to Iran.) Apparenly not enough of the actual students in the class could go on the trip for it to reach a critical mass, so Professor Walter opened the trip up to the entire polisci department. Alison heard about it through her polisci professor in November or so, and signed up then. I head about it through her not long after that, thought it sounded like a pretty cool idea but waffled back and forth about it, and then in January realized that the semester break was about a month off and I didn't have any plans for it. Plus, when was I ever going to go to Romania? (Katie and I discussed going to Transylvania over Christmas break, actually, but in retrospect I can definitely say it was a much better call to go with a group that included a couple of Romanian speakers than it would have been for me and Katie to go alone.) So that's how I came to go to Romania: I emailed Michael Walter, he said I could come, and I broke in the Eurail pass I got for Christmas. I intend to give that pass quite a workout. Already have, really, what with everyone writing all over it and stapling it. You'd think they'd make it out of something sturdier, like the plastic paper used for Romanian money (lei), which is super cool. But back on topic:
Budapest is a very pretty city. Even though it was gray if not outright raining the entire time we were there, it's a very pretty city. Right on the Danube -- the river actually divides what used to be two cities, Buda on the right side of the river if you face downstream, and Pest on the left -- and loads of beautiful buildings including the church where Sissi was crowned queen of Hungary. Sissi was Kaiserin Elisabeth of the Hapsburg empire, and her life story has been Disneyfied in three movies that I've never seen but pretty much every German girl has. I've heard it said that the Sissi movies are to Germany what The Sound of Music is to the United States, if that helps.
We had more talks in Budapest, this being a university trip, about the Hungarian economy and school system and such, and we toured the Parliament building. A lot of Budapest has a rather Disneyland-like feel to it, particularly in Buda. Lots of money got thrown around in weird ways there.
On Friday we went to the smokiest club I have ever been to in my life and stayed out past five in the morning, and a few hours later got right up and went to the the House of Terror, which played a role as a jail and interrogation center both under the Hungarian Nazis and under the communist regime that followed. I really need to educate myself more about both. Visiting was interesting, but we did a tour that went too fast, and as Alison put it, the entire museum was like a postmodernist work of art. The tour guide said something like. "This is to symbolize this," in every single room, and it was cool, but it would have been nice to have moved through a little more slowly.
We met up with Alison's friend from Grinnell (where she goes), Will Boney, who's doing a math study abroad program in Budapest that some Pomona kids are also in, as it turns out: James Tener, Austen Head and Elliot Shields, possibly among others. Alison and I went to dinner with Will and their friend Anne, also from Grinnell, and ate goulash soup, which was delicious, and afterwards we went to Anne's apartment and messed with James's mind, because he'd had no idea I was going to be in Budapest -- and I can see that it'd be pretty odd to be in your friend's apartment in a foreign city and have someone you know from school but haven't seen in the better part of a year walk in.
We'd heard that the Turkish baths in Budapest were awesome, and one of them, Fürdö Rudas, is open until four a.m. on the weekends, so around midnight we headed over there. It took ages to get in -- they had a one-person-leaves, one-person-enters policy going, because I guess it was packed -- but it was totally worth it: super old-looking inside, with all different pools with different water temperatures, dark and steamy and old stone colums and a dome over the largest pool . . . I love Eugen Keidel Bad in Freiburg, but Rudas was awesome.
Sunday morning we went on a futile search fo the drugstore DM. Alison's purse and jacket got stolen at the club on Friday night, luckily without her wallet, passport, camera or cell phone in them, as she'd stuffed all those things in my purse, which I was carrying around -- but she still lost a fair bit of stuff, some of which she wanted to replace from DM. We didn't turn down a street fairly early on, and ended up walking quite a ways and eating breakfast at McDonald's, which was actually awesome. In Germany, where we speak the language, the menu is entirely in English -- but of course it would be our luck that in Hungary, where we don't speak the language, the menu is in Magyar. So we just kind of pointed and hoped and I ended up with French fries somehow in addition to scrambled eggs with ham and cheddar cheese (which is always very exciting for me, since continental Europe doesn't really do cheddar cheese) and English muffins and coffee, but whatever. And we gave some money to a woman who came up to us and showed us her missing left hand -- because as Alison pointed out, "It might not actually be a sob story, but it still sucks not to have a hand."
I want to say something about the omnipresence of beggars and crazies and handicapped people in Europe as opposed to in the States, but my thoughts there aren't fully formed yet so I'll save it for another time.
Sunday morning around eleven we headed to Vienna. I really like that city. Alison and I had both been there before, so we didn't feel any pressure to see all the touristy things, which was really nice. We stayed with her cousin Greg, his German wife Hanna and their two-year-old daughter, Molly. (She's named after Molly Darcy's Irish pub in Vienna, where they met.) She is so cute and completely reinforced my desire to have a small bilingual child. Alison's cousins live in the Third District on Löwengasse, literally right next door to Hundertwasserhaus, with which I am a little obsessed. Awesome location. Pretty much right after we arrived we went to dinner at a restaurant near the opera, and then met Alison's friend Duane at the opera to see La Bohéme. The standing room only spots we got were awful -- you could see maybe a third of the stage -- but they were only two Euros, and it was kind of something I felt like I should do once, go to the opera in Vienna, but only once, as far as I'm concerned. I am not an opera person. But there was a live donkey pulling a cart on the stage, which was just about worth the price of admission. We hung out with Duane and Alison's friend Corinne from high school at a bar called 1516 afterwards. Corinne's doing a music program with IES Vienna.
Monday was pretty low-key. We played with Molly in the morning, went to H&M (where I bought a very necessary pair of jeans and a not-so-necessary skirt) and then met up with Corinne at Stephansdom, the Viennese cathedral, which Alison and I had never seen the inside of. We had a very low-key evening at Corinne's apartment, cooking stir-fry and relaxing.
Yesterday we actually kind of did the touristy thing, albeit unplannedly. We went to the Riesenrad (giant ferris wheel) with Molly and Hanna -- seven Euros for a view of Vienna, which was expensive but a cool thing to do once -- and ate lunch at Pizza Bizi with them (near Stephansdom), and then Hanna took Molly home for a nap (which she didn't take) and Alison and I went to Albertina, a museum I'd been to when I was in Vienna in October. Its permanent collection is tiny, though; it's all about the temporary exhibitions, so there wasn't that much repetion there. This time it was Biedermeyer art upstairs (Biedermeyer being the time after Napoleon but before the 1848 revolutions in Germany and environs) and Georg Baselitz downstairs. I think I liked the Picasso exhibit last time better, but it was cool anyway. And then Hanna and Molly met us at Café Sacher for Sacher Torte and coffee -- another touristy thing neither Alison nor I had ever done. The cake was pretty good, although dry, but what really amused me was that pretty much everything in Café Sacher seemed to be for sale: the cups, the plates, the menus, the menu stands . . . It was like the American girl collection or something. We were joking that if you looked under the table you'd find a price tag there, too.
We ate dinner at the apartment and then watched The Third Man, the Orson Welles movie filmed in post-war Vienna -- yet another classic Vienna thing to do that neither of us had done. And then we met up with Duane and Corinne for a bit at Molly Darcy's Irish pub, and now we're on the way to Cesky Krumlov, our random small Czech town, and about to change trains, so I'm out.
2 March 2007Cesky Krumlov was a marvelous place. In the summer I'm sure it's completely full of tourists, but with good reason: it's completely adorable. It's got a crazy painted castle, a river that bends around the town, good bridges and loads of lovely hostels, cafés and bookstores. We ate entirely too much delicious Czech food at a restarant called Na Louzi after getting in around 6:30, and spend the night at a hostel called Krumlov House, which is about the cutest hostel ever. Staying there felt like staying at some really cool person's cozy house rather than at a hostel. Only complaints: the inexplicably painful rugs (they actually hurt to walk on barefoot) and the lack of breakfast. I'm a huge fan of free breakfast. But those are minor complaints.
We didn't really do much in Cesky Krumlov other than wander through the castle and the town. We went into multiple bookstores and admired books in Czech, and I bough a book by a Franco-Czech author, Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I'm about fifty pages into it (reading it in German, by the way, because it was originally written in Czech, so it'd be in translation no matter what -- in German it's called Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins) and I'm really enjoying the writing style so far. We sat in Café Van Gogh, which had copies of Van Gogh's paintings and a warm wood-burning stove, and read for a while, and eventually we bough dinner from a grocery store (bread, cheese and truly delicious yoghurt) and then caught a train to Prague.
Hostel Elf, where we're staying here, has pretty much a polar opposite feel from Krumlov House. (Well -- Bob's Youth Hostel in Amsterdam would be even more so.) Krumlov House was like a house, if one owned by super-relaxed people who gave you free reign of their place, whereas Hostel Elf is unmistakably a youth hostel. It's big and young and loud, although the rooms themselves are clean and fairly quiet, and it does give you breakfast, albeit a pretty perfunctory one (corn flakes, milk, tea and coffee, plus some pastries). Casa Caracol in Cádiz is still the winner for best simple breakfast with the awesome muesli, I'd say, although Bob's breakfast (two hardboiled eggs, bread, butter and jam) is becoming a Kunzenweg tradition between me and Katherine (who's currently in Turkey with Jerry and her friend Jessica -- weird). And of course Ostello Archi Rossi had an awesome breakfast, too.
So Alison and I kind of took our time getting out of the hostel this morning -- even though I woke up at 8:30 ready to go. After breakfast we took the bus (#133 or #207) to Florenc metro station and from there headed into town. We wandered across the river and uphill into Petrinské Sady, the part containing the miniature Eiffel tower (the Petrin tower, but no one calls it that, at least not that I heard). Looking down on the city from up there it still hadn't hit that we were in Prague -- too many cities in too short a period, I think. Within the past two weeks we've been in Sibiu, Budapest, Vienna, Cesky Krumlov and now Prague -- and I'll be in Berlin (by way of Frankfurt) and Munich before I'm back in Freiburg. Really quite the whirlwind tour.
I ate the last of the bread I'd bought in Cesky Krumlov and then we headed back down, explored town a little more. We wandered through the winding streets and discovered the wonders of the cheap Czech postal service. (12 kroner to mail a postcard to the States! It's about 20 kroner to the dollar, if that helps, or 28 kroner to the Euro -- and it costs a Euro to send a postcard from Germany, so the Czech prices are super cheap.) We also found Kenvelo, the store in Romania where Alison bought the jacket that was stolen in Budapest, and they miraculously had the same jacket there, which she bought. Guess she was really meant to have that jacket.
We ate bratwurst from a streetside vendor and then went and got Corinne from Holesovice train station. Dropped her stuff off at the hostel, went out for dinner ("traditional Czech" -- pretty delicious, although Na Louzi in Cesky Krumlov was better), ate overpriced but delicious gelato while freezing outside and took pictures of the castle by night. And then, since we are lameos, we came back to Hostel Elf and have been here ever since. I'm all right with it, though. The craziness of last Friday night in Budapest was enough to last me for a while -- my throat was still hurting from all that cigarette smoke for days,
Tomorrow we're hanging out in Prague again. Alison and Corinne head out on Sunday while I'm leaving tomorrow night at eight to take a night train and meet the family in Frankfurt on Sunday morning! I can't wait.
6 March 2007I think I would have needed to have spent more time in Prague than I did in order to properly get a sense of the city. I was there for slightly more than two days, and the impression of Prague that I came away with was that it was really the most touristy city I'd been in in quite a while. I'm sure Cesky Krumlov is ridiculous in the summer, but Prague was pretty touristy even on the second and third of March -- I can't even imagine what it's like in the high season.
Day Two in Prague: visited Prague Castle (Prazsky Hrad), which in my opinion is not really worth doing. Or rather, walking up the old castle stairs and wandering through the courtyards is cool, because buildings like St. George's Basilica are really cool-looking from the outside, and the views of the city are quite good, but the inside's kind of lame. The Alcazaba in Málaga wins for best castle I've seen I've seen, I'd say, although I remember Heidelberg's castle as being pretty cool as well. Afterwards we got poured rain on, went to a café and hung out for a bit, then walked over the Charles Bridge (Karluv Most) and then bought food at a grocery store and ate dinner at Bohemia Bagel. Mmm bagels. You don't really see bagels in Europe as a general rule -- Alison was speculating that the only reason you could get bagels in Prague is because of the city's Jewish history (Jews, Czechs and Germans lived together in Prague).
And then I caught a night train from Holesovice Nadrazi (Nadrazi is Czech for "train station" -- see, I learned a little Czech! Kind of.) to meet up with the family in Frankfurt. I wasn't 100% sure I'd found the right exit from baggage claim, but I had -- and after a bit of scrambling we figured out that Lou Ann Laurance, the lovely travel agent lady we know from Eastern Shore Chapel and who'd basically planned the whole trip, had booked us a train out of the main station in Frankfurt rather than from the airport train station, but we caught a train over there and got there in plenty of time.
I don't think I actively realized just how much scurrying was going to be involved on this trip until Mom pointed out that we were heading to Munich right about twenty-four hours after we arrived in Berlin. Oy. And I thought the thirty hours Cheryl and I spent in Berlin was a short stay. (I just realized I've done the exact same trip we're currently on before: Berlin to Munich to Freiburg. We've done different things, obviously, and are spending different amounts of time in each place, but still, it's weird to be retracing my own footsteps from five months ago.)
We went to the Pergammon Museum on Sunday afternoon just after arriving, and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon is just as cool as I remembered it being when I saw it in high school. There was an Islamic art exhibit that was very cool as well. For dinner we found a random restaurant along the canal Weidendamm right by our hotel (Hotel Melia on Friedrichstraße) and then just crashed.
Yesterday we got up early and ate delicious breakfast (I might not have totally loved the staff at Hotel Melia, but the Friedrichstraße U- and S-Bahn stop is about a block away, which was lovely, and the breakfast was superb) and then we did a superspeedy bit of sightseeing: we were maybe ten minutes' walk from Unter den Linden (the big and lovely avenue that runs from the Brandenburg Gate over Friedrichstraße to the Berliner Dom, the cathedral) so we took it to the Berliner Dom, past Humboldt University and the opera house, then went down Friedrichstraße to Checkpoint Charlie (which I'd somehow never seen before) and to the last remaining bit of the Berlin Wall. I really wish we'd had a little bit more time -- my dad especially was enjoying reading the captions of the outdoor exhibit there. After that we took Prinz-Albrecht-Straße to Potsdamer Platz and up to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag (national parliament building). We had to check out of the hotel by noon, so we took the S-Bahn back to the hotel, checked out and left our bags there, then got right back on the S-Bahn to the stop Zoologischer Garten and walked (or should I say scurried) to KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens, "department store of the west") where we ate lunch (sausage, mmm) and Mom and I checked out the food floor and bought dinner (fruit, bread, delicious cheddar and provolone cheese, and chocolate) and the boys and Dad just kind of wandered around. Boys bought gummy bears for 5,50 Euros. Ridiculous. And then we retrieved our bags, headed to the train station, and got on a train to Munich for five hours and forty minutes.
Just writing about the amount of scurrying that has gone on is making me feel rushed. The moment Mom said we were leaving Berlin at 2:57 on Monday afternoon I realized we were trying to do too many things in too little time -- the family's only here for six days -- and everyone else realized it by the time we got to Berlin, if not sooner. This was the first time we'd ever done this sort of vacation as a family, though, so I guess we're learning things the hard way. I'm just glad I speak decently good German. Things would be much more stressful if I didn't, I think.
Today we got on a bus at 8:30 (earlier, really, but that's when we departed) and headed to Linderhof and Neuschwannstein, two of Ludwig II's castles, along with a brief stop in Oberammergau (home of the passion play that's put on every ten years): half an hour of what was quite literally a souvenir stop, although the mountains were pretty. The views from both castles were pretty awesome, and the interiors were incredibly ornate -- what was finished of Neuschwannstein was, at least, since Ludwig II died before it was completed.
We rode a tour bus down there and back, with the most ridiculous Euro tour guide imaginable. His name was Mark, and he wore all white (pants and jacket) over a tight green polo shirt, plus a fauxhawk (fake mohawk) and Elvis sunglasses. It was out of control. He maintained a running commentary all the way down there and back in really very good English, although both he and the castle tour guides occasinally made the typical German mistake of confusing "v" and "w" ("wisitors" instead of "visitors"), and I had to giggle when I heard, "We meet us back here at 11:00," because the German verb "to meet" is "sich treffen," which literally would be "meet us" -- but I'm sure Germans laugh at my mistakes all the time, so I think it's fair.
We ate an overlarge lunch at Hotel Müller in Oberschwanngau (the little town immediately below Neuschwannstein) and for dinner went to a restaurant called Dürnbräu, which wasn't five minutes' walk away from the Torbräu, our hotel -- a "typical Bavarian place" according to our hotel receptionist, complete with a waitress who clucked in disapproval when we didn't finish our meals. The portions were large and we had eaten a big lunch, but she didn't care; we should have struggled through nonetheless, apparently. Afterwards we got lovely coffee from a café down the street and took it back to the hotel, and I've been writing ever since. Tomorrow's Conor's birthday, though, so the scurrying's going to calm down a bit. (That was what he wanted for his birthday: a little less scurrying. I can't say I blame him.) We're sleeping in a bit, then watching the Glockenspiel in Marienplatz at eleven, and then at 12:40 we're headed to Freiburg. I really cannot wait. I know exactly where I'm going in Freiburg, so the scurrying can lessen. Thank goodness.
So Barcelona's really cool. The architect Antoni Gaudí is basically the city's darling, and with good reason. He designed and worked on La Sagrada Familia, the huge and nowhere-near-finished cathedral (started in 1882 and still under construction), and also built all kinds of cool palaces, houses and parks, like Park Güell. Originally Gaudí designed Park Güell to be a settlement for all the rich people in Barcelona; it would have everything they needed, and they could all live up on this hill overlooking the city and, presumably, be proud of how awesome they were. That's what I'd be doing if I were living in Park Güell, at any rate. We checked out a little Gaudí museum in the park, which wasn't all that cool, but we did first become acquainted with the awesomeness that is Gaudí's woodwork.
We became much, much more acquainted with Gaudí's woodwork a couple of days later, when we sucked it up and paid the ridiculous €13,20 to visit Casa Batlló, a house on Passeig de Gràcia that Gaudí redid the exterior, roof, attic and first floor of, if not more. (Those were the only parts we could visit, at any rate.) All the cool postcards we'd been seeing all over Barcelona were of Casa Batlló. And yeah, it was pretty darned cool. Gaudí was a little obsessed with the natural world, so there were all kinds of lovely shades of blue and woodwork all over the house. When you walk in they hand you an audio guide; you don't have a choice (except of what language you want) because a) you've already paid for it in the admission price; and b) there aren't any descriptions of anything in the house. 
And the audio guide is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever listened to. "The master Gaudí personally supervised the creation of every single piece of this house, from the doorhandles to the woodworking to the tiles . . . The darker shades on this wall might represent shapes from the undersea world . . . The bubbles in this glass panel have been there since the day they were blown." I kid you not. So Suz and I were joking that it should have said things like, "The soles of Gaudí's shoes personally caressed each individual floorboard." Truly beautiful place, though.
We went to the market multiple times, where one can buy whole piglets (kind of reminded me of tenth grade bio and dissecting the fetal pig), and we wandered down Las Ramblas, where one can buy canaries, hamsters and chickens, among other things. The first day I was there I wandered lostly around the city for an hour or so (this is a tradition when I first arrive in a city, I don't know why it's even a surprise at this point -- I can never seem to find the places I've booked to stay at without getting lost for a good hour or so first) and then after dropping my stuff off wandered around lostly on purpose, eventually drinking a tiny coffee near the contemporary art museum. So yes -- basically Barcelona is lovely.
