I’m flying off to Morocco tomorrow with some friends, then making my way to Portugal after that! This next month is going to crazy with how much I’m attempting to squish in. Hopefully I’ll be heading up to Berlin for a few days to really see the city and then work on an organic garden on the city’s outer part for another few days. After that is an even bigger question mark (Prague? Canary Islands? Ireland?)
Now if only I can fit in a German literature paper in there somewhere…
I’m currently writing this while flying back to the US. This is the first time I’ve had to actually sit down and reflect upon what I’ve been doing for the past few months! Sorry my updates are so sporadic, I suppose we’ll just have to settle for a few snapshots of my experiences instead of a complete volume.
Since we’ve last talked, I’ve had a ton of very memorable experiences. My mom came to visit me over Christmas break and we spent our time hanging out with Jana’s family and visiting the surrounding area of Heidelberg. It was really great to see my mom again, but also a little strange; my life at home and my life abroad are two very separate entities in my mind, and when they come together it feels a bit odd, like a movie commenting on the fact that it’s a movie (I hope that makes sense). Christmas in Germany is in fact startlingly similar to a typical Clark family Christmas: lots of lounging around in comfy clothes, reading things you’ve finally meant to get around to reading, eating big meals and snacking in between, and just being with family. In that respect I felt completely at home. Jana’s family has become more and more of my own and I’m pretty sure my mom feels the same way. The only thing missing was a late night Target run with the cousins!!
After my mom went home, I decided to venture back to Baden-Baden and try out one of the famous thermal baths. This has always been kind of a secret wish of mine and I figured going out on my own was the best time to try it. This particular bath was the Friedrichsbad, built in the latter part of the 19th century and has been frequented by the grace of Mark Twain himself. The design is a mix between a traditional Roman bath and an Irish bath. The idea is to go through several different types of temperature and baths. There are roughly 17 steps, ranging from hot, to sweltering hot, to steaming hot, to comfortably warm pools to freezing baths that would make a Scandinavian holler. Another big selling point is the “textile-free” nature of the baths. I’m fairly ok with nudity as far as being American goes, but there was something so appealingly taboo and European about the concept; needless to say, this was a big drawing point for me.
What I gained from the baths was a sense of well-being, both physical and mental. I certainly felt rejuvenated and clean afterwards (perhaps a bit too clean, my brush and soap massage was administered by a rather surly German woman who seemed to need to take her frustrations out through her brush strokes). What was perhaps even more refreshing was the reminder that there is no typical type of body. Old, young, fit, curvy, there was no one particular body type that dominated the baths. In fact, everyone seemed to have really diverse body types. I didn’t realize just how advertising-dominated my sense of what a body looks like was until I was face to face with figures that I had never even contemplated before. I went into the baths feeling pretty good about myself, but came out feeling even better. A 35 Euros well spent, I should say.
I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg, say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
-Mark Twain, The Awful German Language
Researching Mark Twain’s visit to Heidelberg in 1878, this is a passage describing the town in A Tramp Abroad:
Away down on the level, under the black mass of the Castle, the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate cobweb of streets jeweled with twinkling lights; there were rows of lights on the bridges; these flung lances of light upon the water, in the black shadows of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this fairy spectacle blinked and glowed a massed multitude of gas jets which seemed to cover acres of ground; it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread out there. I did not know before, that half a mile of sextuple railway tracks could be made such an adornment.
One thinks Heidelberg by day- with its surroundings- is the last possibility of beautiful: but when he sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that glittering railway constellation pinned to the border, he requires time to consider upon the verdict.
I’ve been looking for a way to describe how I feel about night in Heidelberg, as it has strangely become my favorite time of the day, and this truly encapsulates it. Leave it to Mark Twain to put it best.
I’m sorry I haven’t updated in a long while, I’ve been in the throws of student life here and haven’t had enough patience to sit down and describe what I’ve been up to. I’ll do it in sections so there won’t be some HUGE chunk of text to go through.
Liz’s Visit:
My sister Liz came to visit me in October for a week and a half. It was really nice to have someone who really knows you around for a while! We redesigned my room, which now looks awesome, and cooked lots of new dishes, which are still in my cooking repertoire. Nightly teas and Nutella toast were crucial to say the least.
She brought a polaroid camera and we experimented with that whenever we could. Although it was a little bulky, it was definitely worth the shots we got!
The second weekend Liz was here, we travelled to Munich. Our hotel room had a really cool design and maybe the best shower I’ve ever seen. The theme was Cocoon, but really I think they ended up with a Hannah design:
We wandered around the Pinakothek der Moderne (the modern art museum), saw some Bauhaus originals, and a really interesting photo collection comparing the lives of Western and Eastern German citizens throughout the pre-unification years.
We then proceeded to have the best German meal that I think I’ve had to date: vegetable soup, panfried potatoes, salad, and schnitzel, washed down with a cool wheat beer. We were so full afterwards, I could barely walk, but it was more than worth it.
The next day we battled the crowds and shopped around Marian Platz, also stopping in at a keenly designed indoor/outdoor shopping center.
The next day was spent running around the Olympic Park until we had to get on the train home again. We got to experience the upside of having everything closed on Sunday: the insanely busy square from Saturday was completely peaceful and for the most part empty on a beautiful Sunday morning. We shared a nutella crepe and walked around while the frost melted off the hills in the park. It was a really nice way to spend the last few hours in Munich!
Ridiculous word of the day: warscheinlichkeittheoretisch. That’s in my Psycholinguistik textbook. It means “probabilistic,” which is not much shorter or easier to say. Guess I better learn that one, you know, for Psychology.
I went on my Tuesday bike ride through the country, which will hopefully become a habit. It’s wonderful to get away from downtown Heidelberg; the city’s population and size isn’t large, and that’s exactly the problem, ironically. Too many people trying to squeeze through Heidelberg’s old streets. I feel like I’m traveling back in time to my childhood during each bike ride, the weather and the scenery is so similar to Ohio! The bike path takes me through the edge of Heidelberg, through the village of Schwabenheim, and ends up in the neighboring town of Ladenburg. It’s a refreshing and somewhat secluded bike ride if you go on a Tuesday, I’ll post pictures one day. The park in Ladenburg was rated one of the most beautiful public parks in Germany, and I would have to agree with this statement.
Today, I saw an interesting mode of transportation at the river’s edge in Ladenburg. I suppose they didn’t want to build yet another bridge, so they have a sort of modern ferry system instead. About 5 cars and 10 people can drive, or walk, respectively, onto this ferry to ride slowly across the Neckar river. I’m tempted to try this one Tuesday.
I also saw a man feeding the ducks and the swans on the banks as well. You might think, well this is a normal occurrence, quite picturesque actually! Well, yes and no. Swans may be beautiful, but they are the over-privileged, whiney bullies of the bird world. Give them a piece of bread and they will strut up to you menacingly, puffed up to show their whole girth and height (at least three feet), hissing like some horrible hybrid of a cat and a raptor. Soon, a whole spitting, gurgling gang of swans will approach and your only option is to swing your bag of stale bread at their heads, hoping they will back up. Because let me tell you, I’m pretty sure they would bite off your finger if they had the chance, partly out of spite and partly because it looks like a delicious sausage. So this poor man was caught in the middle of an unplanned stand-off, just him versus 6 massive swans. I watched as he carried out this strange dance with the swans, swinging at them and saying, “Hau! Hau!” (translates to “Get out of here!”), but then throwing them a piece of bread as soon as they were back in the water. What do you want from these swans, sir?
I didn’t stay to watch the end of this brash and hilarious take on Swan Lake, but if I return next week and see a monument for this man’s bravery next to the Neckar, I’ll know what happened.
Sorry I’ve been so out of touch as of late, I’ve been spending time with my sister! She’s flying home today, so I’ll be writing a large post about our adventures with plenty of pictures!
Last Wednesday I made my way over to Erlangen to visit my old exchange partner Jana. I think we are the only exchange partners that are still in contact with each other (3 years, woo!). I hadn’t travelled by train by myself and was a little unsure of how it was going to work out. Turns out it’s much easier I had originally thought, just look up train times and track numbers!
Being back in Erlangen was at first surreal. It’s just the same (why would it have changed?), the house even smelled the same! Smell is a strong tie to memory so it was almost like walking back into 2008! But as the day went on, it just felt normal to be sitting on the couch with Jana, eating delicious homemade treats, just relaxing.
I’m proud to report that everyone noticed a big improvement in my German since the last time I was there (phew, I hope I learned something in two years). It was really satisfying being able to communicate with her family with almost no trouble. By Friday night, my brain was a little fried, but it’s all about baby steps.
While I was there, Jana had the great idea to surprise Kirsten (another exchange partner) with a visit. She had no idea that I was in the area. Here’s the reunion picture!
As of now, I’m just trying to figure out this school schedule thing. Classes officially started this week, but many don’t start until next week (because that makes so much sense). The weather is purely autumnal here, it reminds me so much of fall in Ohio. The leaves are turning, it’s partly cloudy, and the wind smells dry, sweet, and leafy. The foliage with the backdrop of such a beautiful town like Heidelberg is beyond picturesque, I’ll try and take some pictures in my copious free time here! Unfortunately, I’ve come down with a bit of a cold, but that’s almost unavoidable with the weather change and taking 6 trains in 4 days. I’ve been drinking tea and eating spicy food to cope with the congestion.
My flatmate and his mother just offered me rice and lentils; in return I introduced them to Sriracha. It was definitely a surprise for them :)
button
Gypsy punk.
The Waterfall Nebula
HH-222: The structure seen in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex is one of the more mysterious structures yet found on the sky. Designated...
