Boogying on Hitler's Grave... sort of

That's right! Only yesterday did yours truely visit several historical places in Berlin, one of which included the site of Hitler's bunker where we were invited by our tourguide to dance (and do a number of less polite things) over the location of his "cremation". Not only was this the site of Hitler's bunker, but it was only a hundred feet or so from the location of what was once the Berlin wall. As the tour guide put it... this is the most important piece of earth in the 20th century. How ironic is it that it is now the site of 70's-style low income apartments. How unepic, yet deliciously ironic! Our tour guide's name was Barnaby and he hails from Wales, but is living in Berlin because he is a musician and they prefer cheeper cities. The tour was really excellent, and Barnaby was both knowledgeable and funny. Amongst other things, we saw the university were Hegel taught Marx, which also happens to be directly accross from square which was the site of the famous Nazi book burning (sorry, AJ, but Hitler was not actually there signing autographs). The square now has a small room just beneath it with a glass roof where you can see enough empty white shelves to store all of the books that were burned. We also got to see remnants of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and possibly the only square on earth with two churches, one built by Protestants for Catholics, and another for Protestants built by Catholics. Only in Germany...

Today, we travelled by S-Bahn to Potsdam to visit a few castles from Frederick the Great, but they were mostly closed. On top that, it was a really gray, depressing day, so we returned to Berlin proper somewhat defeated. Or spirits were thankfully lifted when we decided to visit the Reichstag and were able to get in and visit the dome. You're actually allowed to walk all over the entire roof of the Reichstag and then you can enter from there into the giant glass dome, which doesn't even have doors to enclose it from the weather. Since I'm at an internet kiosk at my hostel (The Circus), I can't upload any pictures, but I'll do my best to describe the dome. It's made up of levels of glass panels around the inside of which winds two cork-screw walkways to the very top of the dome which has a huge opening at the top and from which we could lay back and look up and the grey nighttime sky of the city (cool, but it would have been nicer if the stars were out). The dome sits directly over a giant circular sunroof that looks right down into the giant meeting chamber where the Bundestag meets (in fact, you can see into that room from the streets - the Germans clearly believe in the transparency of government!). At the center of the dome is what can only be described as pillar of mirrors in the shape of tornado designed to bring as much light as possible from outside into the chamber. It was absolutely the coolest thing I've seen in a good while. For pictures (not mine) click here.

More updates when I have the time! Berlin is amazing!

Like Billy Pilgrim...

After a long day on the train, Rachel, Tommy, Annie and I have made it to Dresden. We actually ended up sharing the train with several of our compatriots from the Goethe Institut who were heading back home, so the first train ride was a nice sort of unexpected reunion.

It still hasn`t quite hit me that I`m spending the night in the city where Kurt Vonnegut was held as a prisoner of war. This may be because Dresden is something of an ultramodern city (having been almost completely destroyed by a British/American bombing raid during WWII and since rebuilt).

We spent about 6 hours on the train and then checked into our hostel at the "Mondpalast" (Moon Palace). This place is nothing like I expected a hostel to be... it`s quite modern, well decorated and has a bar/restaurant attached. We recieved breakfast vouchers with our stay along with a discount card for cocktails and beer. And, of course, there`s an internet café built in. Why stay in a hotel (other than to have a room for yourself)?

We had dinner at an Italian place and then walked around the city briefly just to get a first look. As I said, much of Dresden is very modern, both archetecturally and technologically, but there are also several romantically lit churches dotting the lanscape that cast a neat sort of reflection on the Elbe. The city has a very quiet, very fast, very punctual streetcar system which makes it very easy to get around. Dresden also has a lot more young people than Schwäbisch Hall and there seems to be quite a big night-life here. German youth are... interesting to say the least. They seem to be stuck in the 80`s as far as fashion is concerned.

In any case, that is all for now. Until the next int0rnet cafe...

A Tearful Goodbye

What a busy week!  Since having recovered from my sickness I've been doing so much.  So here's the long and short of it.  On Tuesday, my friends and I decided to visit the town of Rothenburg, a city that is still contained within its medieval walls.  We hopped on a train after classes were over with the idea that we would be able to see the town and visit one of not some of the town's many museums.  We discovered soon after our arrival that all of the museums had closed before we arrived, were only open on the weekend, or were closed during the tourist off-season.  However, we still had the opportunity to take pictures of this absolutely amazing town in all of its ancient glory.  This made the trip more than worth our effort, especially since we arrived during sunset, which cast the down in a delightfully dramatic light.  The pictures were amazing!  On top of this, Rothenburg, being such a tourist attraction has more souvenir shops than anywhere else we've been.  I was able to find both a German and an Austrian flag.  My spirits were further bolstered after having a full conversation with the Germans working at the souvenir shop.  It felt so good to put my speaking abilities to the test and see that, yes, I had improved since attending the institute. 

 

Currently, the background on my computer.

 

Wednesday brought with it the opportunity to visit the Haller Löwenbrauerei, the local brewery.  A group of us from the Institute were treated to a full tour of the facilities by one of the Institute faculty members.  She showed us the whole process of brewing from the hops to the bottling, and we even got to try out the freshly brewed beer on tap right at the bottom of one of the tanks!  The automated bottling plant was perhaps the most interesting part, where we got to see all of the machinery at work.  We were then treated to as much beer as we wanted along with dinner, which consisted of some kind of hot dog-meatloaf and pickled potatoes.  It was very tasty, very German, and an excellent compliment to the fresh beer.  Well worth it.

 

 

On Thursday, we decided to visit ruins that Rachel had discovered on her own a week or so ago.  These ruins are within Schwäbisch Hall itself, set high on a hill overlooking a good majority of the town.  It seems to have once been a fortress for protecting the town (I later learned that it is 1,200 years old) and had since crumbled.  There were catacombs, turrets, towers, and tunnels, all in various stages of ruin and much of it covered in ivy.  It was absolutely full of Indiana Jones excitement and I took a disgusting amount of pictures.  It was a very satisfying sight to see after having hiked all the way up a very steep hill to get there.  We have vowed to return with a picnic lunch.

 

  

Thursday evening brought with it my second meeting with my "tandem partner."  I met Beate, a middle-aged mother, on Sunday for our first meeting at a local cafe.  The idea was that I would help her improve her English and she would help me improve my German.  The first meeting (Sunday) was somewhat awkward since the fact that we were complete strangers was somewhat compounded by the language barrier.  However, our second meeting (Thursday) went much more smoothly since we had gotten to know each other.  Beate has a 12-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter and lives in town, near the castle-church we visited on our first weekend.  We talk about all sorts of things, most often related to hobbies and interests and the differences between America and Deutschland.  It really does work well as an opportunity to exercise my German and it is fascinating to get to know someone from such a different world view.

 

Thursday night was the last of the Goethe parties to be held this month.  Many of the international students I've gotten to know so well are leaving after this month, and this was the last opportunity to hang out with them and say goodbye.  And Friday was our final day of class for the month.  I will miss the class that I've gotten to know so well.  I've come to love all the international quirks and it was extremely hard to say goodbye.  This was especially true when Pawel, a Russian student gave each of the class-members an individualized gift and handwritten letter.  He gave me a Russian Christmas tree ornament and a bottle of Russian vodka inside a giant Russian doll, with the following explanation in his letter: he had heard that I had been sick earlier in the month and wanted to give me some kind of medicine.  In Russia, he says, the best medicine is vodka.  You can't make this stuff up.
 

Top: Terrada (Japan), Pawel (Russia), Ana (Venezuela), Frau Lukasch (Germany), Me.  Bottom: Le (Vietnam), Darko (Bosnia), Tommy (America), Jin (China), Reira (Japan), Rachel (America), Bernardo (Brazil), Adnan (Saudi Arabia).
 

Tomorrow, we're off to Berlin for the week with a stop off at Dresden for the weekend.  I can't wait to visit the setting of Slaughterhouse-Five and do all there is to do in Berlin.  If I can find an internet cafe while I'm there, I will try to post and keep everyone updated (though I doubt there will be pictures).

German Medicine

For about a week now, I've been fighting a cold that has come and gone again and again.  Eventually, I realized that the study abroad lifestyle isn't exactly well suited to getting better.  When you're here, you want to make the most of everything, seeing as much as you can see, doing as much as you can do, exploring as much as you can explore.  Unfortunately, that means always exerting yourself and having very little time to rest.  I had been laboring under the idea that this might extend my cold, but that I would eventually get over it.  

 

Finally, this Friday, tired of waking up and feeling miserable until about noon, I decided to skip classes and get some rest.  I went to a local apotheke (pharmacy) to look into getting some cold medicine I had used up over the course of the week.  As soon as I was talking to the woman behind the counter, however, I realized how limited, if non-existent, my knowledge of German medical terms.  I eventually asked the woman if she could speak in English.  "A little," she told me, and proceeded to explain to me how a certain medicine would help me with "the hurt" in places she couldn't name in English, like the throat, arms, so forth.  I was amused, and bought some expensive German cold medicine and fortified cough-drops that, all told, cost me 14€.  It was extremely expensive, but I had no way of finding cheeper stuff.  In the end, though, I was glad I bought what I bought.  The German cold medicine seems to be working very well, and I feel much better than I did... it's powerful stuff.  On top of that, not only do the German medicinal cough drops taste pretty good, they do wonders on your throat.

Today, I'm still engaged in the art of getting better, but it seems to be working.  I've had to postpone some adventuring, and I feel cooped-up here in my room while everyone is out doing said adventuring, but I know I'll enjoy the experiences to come I've I can just be rid of this damn cold.  In any case, I postponed my "tandem" meeting until tomorrow.  At this rate, I should be feeling at least 90% by then.

The Events of a Birthday Abroad

Before I settle in to watch the new Apple Keynote and salivate over all the new stuff, I need to relate a few amusing anecdotes from the Continent. Today Rachel (another American student here through Central College) and I went to the library to do homework / journal writing. We had noticed a seemingly random German street musician playing guitar outside the library, and I resolved to stop by on our way out and ask if I could take his picture. When we left the library, I did just that, dropping a 1€ piece on his guitar case, asking "Kann ich dein Foto machen?" Before Rachel or I knew what was going on, the minstrel started rambling off in thick Scwäbisch (a dense local dialect), relating to us some story about someone else who had come up to him while he was playing guitar in the town park. I can't remember the first story he told, or the punch-line, but when he proceeded to tell a second story, I understood him: "Another woman came up to me in the park and was asking me all sorts of questions. Then she asked if I had any kids. I told her no, but we could make some." That makes him easily the most colorful Scwäbian I have met so far. I did succeed in getting a picture of him, though.

Yesterday in class, we began a new "theme," history. We somehow got to talking about the Berlin Wall and how big of an event it was, and Frau Lukasch told us how she personally remembers the event. The way she spoke about it reminded me of the way in which all Americans from my generation can remember the exact moment they heard about 9/11, or likewise for my parents'/grandparents' generations with the JFK assassination. She told us that she had been packing for a vacation to somewhere else in Europe and had been listening to the radio at the time. She had not felt the need for a TV back then, so she was constantly listening to the radio. She was concentrating so much more on her packing than on the radio that it didn't really sink in that they had just announced the fall of the Berlin Wall until a few moments later. After that, she said, she sat on the bed for a while, not believing it to be true. Two years earlier, she could remember having told someone that she believed that Wall would one day fall, but that she would never see it in her lifetime. And then, at that moment, she wished she had a TV.

It's hard to believe that I was alive during such an important historical event as well, but, of course, at two, I couldn't have been expected to understand such things. It may as well have happened before I was born.

In other news, I finally signed up for the Goethe Institut's "tandem program" and received my "tandem partner." The program is designed to set up Goethe students - particularly Americans, since there's so many of us this spring - with local residents who wish to work on their English. The idea is that we will have the opportunity to work on our German with someone who is likewise interested in improving their English. I sent off an email to my partner last night and am anxiously awaiting the reply. We're supposed to get together sometime this Friday, and I'm extremely excited to get this opportunity to get to speak at length with a German native... bridging cultural gaps is amazingly exciting. I hope my partner is nice.

Not an uneventful birthday so far, no sir. Tonight, we're going to get Döners for dinner and then head to the pub! Thanks to everyone who's been thinking of me today!

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Crying Babies, Debussy, and a Lollipop

I realize it is necessary to make a qualification about my last post.  Though I may have gotten the wrong impression about the coldness of German beer from my German professor, he was most definitely right about its usefulness in lubricating the foreign language speaking process.  His theory was roughly this: one beer or so increases your language skill because it eases your feeling of awkwardness when speaking a foreign language, but after that, successive drinks only serve to help your speaking decline.  He actually made a graph out of it.  I can't really speak to how bad language must get, but after some beer, I have most definitely found myself more willing to speak German openly.

 

Moving on... This past weekend was surely a busy one.  On Friday, my friends and I started out with some Italian food, that, surprisingly, was not nearly as good as Italian food in New Jersey, though I am without a doubt closer to Italy than I have ever been before.  After that, we saw I Am Legend auf Deutsch and I was happy to learn that it still got me misty-eyed in a Ol' Yeller kinda way even when it was in another language.  Following this, we went to the Goethe Pub, which is just what it sounds like: a pub that the Goethe Institut has for students.  The event was the weekly "Goethe Party," the idea of which is to bring students together to talk in German in a less formal environment, have fun, and, of course, do what the Germans to best, drink beer.  The aforementioned beer-language corollary was definitely in effect (more so for some than others).  Being someone who is not quick to socialize, I was pleasantly surprised at how good of a time I had and how much easier it was for me to talk with new people from other countries outside of class.

 

On Saturday we went to Stuttgart with a group from the institute.  The city was really neat, though we mostly just saw the strip and the inside of a Chinese food place (ordering food in German in a Chinese restaurant is very much an interesting endeavor).  After that it was three hours in the Stuttgart StadtTheater for a ballet performance.  The summary of this was... the first act was a traditional ballet and therefore boring (thought the music was Debussy , which was cool), but the second act was a strange avant-garde adaptation of Don Quixote, complete with random electronic sounds, violin screeches, and babies crying... plus they wore colored outfits.  Exciting!

 

Me, outside the new castle in Stuttgart.

 

Sunday we went to the nearby town of Ellwagen to see an annual Catholic carnival/parade.  Apart from an opportunity to see every different kind of wacky costume and mask ever conceived, it was also a really good time to test out my advancement in speaking German.  An older woman and an older man from Schwäbisch Hall ("Schwäbs," as we've taken to calling it) acted as something like tour guides for us, and I had the pleasure of having an extended conversation the the older man; he was extremely nice and we talked for a good while about the differences between America and Germany and of all the places that he had travelled.  I wish I could remember his name.

  

One of the many, many, crazy costumes.

 

In any case, the carnival was absolutely amazing and entertaining, especially since we were standing next to a tiny little German kid that couldn't have been more than three years old and dressed up as a gorilla, and he attracted all the various and colorful characters in the parade over nearby us.  Along with dressing up, it is also customary for those in the parade to throw candy to children in the crowd; costumes and candy - sounds like a familiar holiday.  I seemed to attract a lot of attention too, since I was standing somewhat off of the sidewalk in order to take better pictures.  At one point a guy in a gorilla-esque costume stole my hat and pretended to walk away with it.  Better than that, I had another monster-person-costumed-thing tell me in German to open my mouth (I don't know why I complied) and promptly had a lollipop stuck in my mouth.  Only in Germany.

 

A Word on Beer

The way my German professor described it to us there was not a cold beer to be found in all of Germany.  If that is true, Scwäbisch Hall is an island unto itself.  Home to the Haller Löwenbrauerei and their trademark brew, Haller Löwenbräu, Scwäbisch Hall seems to be somewhat well known for its beers, and they're all of them cold!  I tried their Edel-Pils with some sort of spinach-pocket local specialty dinner the first night we went out and I felt the beer snob in me grow.  However, I've reallycome to enjoy their Hefe-Weiße, a slightly darker brew that I've been ordering every time we go out.  In fact, I was just offered a taste of HL's Scwarzer Löwe by one of my fellow students and I like that one too.  It's hopless (I've also heard that Austrian beer pails in comparison to German beer, so I guess I'd best get my fill while I can).

On wednesday the Zivis (RAs) took us out the local pub, Olli's, where we were able to enjoy just about every alcoholic concoction known to mankind.  Needless to say, with a Hefe-Weiße in my hand, American frat-boys (who had come prepared to drink) to my right and the Brazilian equivalent to my left (they were venturing into absinthe territory), it was a very interesting night.  I'm not sure the Schwäbians knew what to do with us, and I was honestly a little embarrassed.  It has been something of a culture shock too to get used to the way in which beer is available alongside the Coke in just about every corner cafe and restaurant.  Still... the beer in Germany is an adventure in and of itself.

 

Die erste Woche

It is with a heavy heart and much trepidation that I resurrect this website from its former stagnant glory in an attempt to once again make it useful rather than a waste of both perfectly good space on the GoDaddy.com servers and 50 of my own dollars every two years.  In other words I guess it takes studying abroad to hasten me from my blogging slumber.  To that effect, I have decided to take advantage of my already established blog and, after clearing away the cobwebs, a few squatters, and charming the mistress that is blogger.com with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils I have taken up the old axe as a means for logging an account of my various adventures in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany and, eventually, in Vienna, Austria (not Australia, let's be clear), home to the Viennese Sexologist himself, Mr. Sigmund Freud.  My hope is that my family and friends can check in on what I hope will be, at the least, weekly updates thereby saving me from the carpal tunnel that would inevitably result from typing up accounts of my adventures over and over again in emails to various loved-ones or in posts on Facebook.

That said, I'd like to make a quick note about the website to anyone who is visiting it for the first time.  The long-and-short of it is that I've been masquerading as an internet-savvy webmaster since about the seventh grade on a website I call rob64.com.  Rob64.com takes its name from what has been my constant internet handle since the days when AIM was still an infant, which takes its name from the robotic character in StarFox 64 that flies the Great Fox.  It was called rob64.com long before it was actually located at http://www.rob64.com and was alternately hosted on Fortune City and Angelfire.  In those days the site had little original content and was really just me having fun with Microsoft Frontpage '97 and copying things I thought were cool from other websites.  During my freshman year of college, I decided it would be a good idea to revamp the site, buy the space called rob64.com, and make the site legitimate.  The result is what you see here... a sort of schizophrenic amalgam of my various forays into the territory of creativity and self expression, what can loosely be called a portfolio.  However, I haven't really touched the site since the Great Re-Vamping of 2005 and upon returning, I have realized that the surviving contents are less than flattering.  The written work in particular is atrocious, especially for someone who supposedly calls himself a creative writing major.  Therefore, I issue this warning: don't stray from the blog if you have any semblance of taste!  The exception would, of course, be my photographic work which seems to be light-years ahead of my written work, and of which I am still quite proud (my school has published my photography in various literary magazines on at least four separate occasions, two of which included my work on the cover, but has summarily rejected each of my desperate attempts to submit literary work).  I hope to update other parts of the site if and when I have time.

That said, on with the travel blog!

It was hard to say goodbye to Megan and my family on New Years, but I was equally as excited to be going as I was melancholy.  The plane ride was fine, though, unlike my brother, I cannot sleep anywhere and everywhere.  Only through sheer willpower was I able to get myself to sleep at all.  I think I slept perhaps three hours all told, but once again, my excitement acted as a kind of stimulant and it propelled me through the following day of travel throughout south Germany.

I was extremely pleased that not only was I able to pretty successfully navigate the German transit system (more a credit to their organization than my prowess at navigation) but I was also able to converse when I needed to know where I was going.  It was mostly simple stuff like "Wissen Sie, ob diese Zug nach Stuttgart geht?"  But I did manage to fend off a guy who tried to con me in both German and English at the the Frankfurt airport.  All of this made me feel pretty confident when I arrived awkwardly in Schwäbisch Hall with my 2 million pounds of luggage.  

I say I felt confident, but that was only until I arrived at the Goethe Institut, where I was immediately thrown into the placement test process.  I got through the verbal interview fine, though not without the help of a lot of hand gestures, but when I got to the placement test I wanted to cry.  I would say that, to put it generously, I was able to complete a third of the test (I also didn't realize that you where supposed to stop when you couldn't do anymore).  In any case, the rest of the test might as well have been in Martian for all that I understood.  Either the test must be nastily hard or I did better than I thought, because I was placed in the B1 class, an intermediate class (as in A1, A2.1, A2.2, B1, B2, C).  I was then given my key and the Zivis (German RA's) drove me to my Wohnheim (student housing).  The Zivis, Alexander and Christian, are extremely nice and quite funny.  I had just enough time to unpack a bit and say "Hi" to my roommate before I passed out.  I slept from about 6:00 to 1AM whereupon I couldn't get back to sleep so I filled up on melatonin and zonked back out until 7.

Our first day of classes went well, considering I had 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours and then about 12 hours of sleep (that crazy kind of schedule might just be the cure for jet-lag; I think I must have confused my body so much that it just reset the next night).  As it turns out, B1 is a pretty good fit for me; it's very challenging and every day I come out of it feeling exhausted, confused, enlightened, and satisfied all at once.  Our classes run from 8:15 to 12:45 with a good half-hour break around 10:00, but they never seem to drag (until I got sick and all I want to do is sleep).  After that, it's lunch and then we have the rest of the day free.

The makeup of the students at the Goethe Institut is pretty diverse.  I've made friends with several Americans, of course, as well as a few Brazilians, a Ukrainian named Boris, and a 61-year-old Japanese man named Terada (he acts more like he's about 16).  Other students in my class come from Vietnam, Korea, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.  With all these various backgrounds, it is very interesting for the common language to be German - it's actually really nice because most of the time we have no choice but speak in German (when I'm around other Americans we tend to lapse into English in order to be able to better convey what's on our minds).

Over the weekend, we had the option to travel with a group from the school to Neuschwanstein (New Swan Rock... it was pretty funny to hear some of the Brazilian students saying "Neuschweinstein," on the bus, but thankfully we weren't going to New Pig Rock).  Neuschwanstein is the castle that they based the one in Cinderella off of.  We traveled three hours by bus out of Baden-Würtemburg into Bayern (Bavaria) and had the distinctive pleasure of experiencing a German truck stop, and let me just say this about the German truck stops... they still have a lot to learn.

Neuschwanstein and the nearby town of Füssen ("Feet," as in "at the foot of the mountain") were both beautiful.  Like Schwäbisch Hall, Füssen is a surprisingly successful combination of new and old... the traditional Bavarian style architecture and closely huddled buildings give a feeling of coziness without feeling cramped and yet all the shops (or all the ones we saw) were very modern. 

 

 

Füssen from one of its many churches.

The castle itself is nestled in the mountains and it looks pretty spectacular in the snow.  The institut set us up with a tour and we were able to see the inside of the castle, though we weren't able to take any pictures.  It's pretty clear that Ludiwig II, who had the castle built thought an awful lot of himself from all the murals and the lavishness of the castle and, as one of the students pointed out, while it is pretty, it wouldn't have held up so well under siege.  Still, it did my little German heart good to see all the Bavarian coats of arms and the beauty of that part of the country.

 

View of the Mountains from Neuschwanstein.

 

That's all for now.  I'm off to watch a movie auf Deutsch in the Goethe Pub: Das Tunnel.  Check back in the near future for more posts!