Home Sweet Germany

Time has sped back up in Germany. The past week has gone by very quickly and I've begun to realize that the time has come to say goodbye to Schwäbisch Hall and Germany, both of which have begun to feel a lot like home. When we first arrived, two months seemed like such an incredibly long time to be in a foreign place, but I guess it makes sense that the less foreign a place becomes the shorter the time seems to be.  Similarly, living in Schwäbisch Hall has become more routine and less of a constant exploration. We've seen most of the area and explored most of the different parts of Schwäbisch Hall, so that now everything feels like a rerun.  That isn't to say that life here has become boring, by no means, but rather that these are the things that have come together to make this small town in the south of Germany feel like home.  I noticed a week or two ago that I recognized a few people in the local pubs and cafés that I had seen elsewhere about town during my time here and it struck me that I was becoming, if only marginally, a part of a community. That said, I'm excited to move on to Vienna and for the coming of spring and for all the new possibilities for exploration that will come with it, but there's still that sense of melancholy understanding that I have to uproot myself yet again, like moving to or away from school for the summer.

 

Of course, that doesn't mean there haven't been adventures.  Last weekend was another day trip, this time to Nürnberg.  The morning began with a two hour bus ride from Schwäbs, accompanied by a local who either knew a lot about Nürnberg or had lived there.  He introduced himself over the bus's loudspeaker and told us some basic facts about the city, the history, the population, culture and so forth.  After about fifteen minutes, he sat down, but it wasn't five minutes before he had picked the microphone back up and begun talking again.  The loudspeaker was just that, loud, and I, having had a hard time falling asleep the night before, just wanted to sleep or gaze at the German landscape as it passed us by.  Nope, not happening.  Our guide proceeded to babble on about the Autobahn, the different meanings of the different colors of the different signs along the Autobahn, how you could tell this or that truck was Polish, and eventually, he just broke down and made annoying noises for the duration of the trip.  Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but he did talk the entire time, and I'm sure it was mostly for the sake of making noise. Thank the dear sweet iLord for iPods.

 

Nürnberg from the Nürnberg Castle.

 

Luckily, as we stepped off the bus, he mentioned that we were welcome to follow him around the city and take part in his tour, or we could simply go off on our own.  After another ten minutes of his prattling on at the local art museum, my friends and I decided to ditch the tour and explore Nürnberg for ourselves.  We were all mostly interested seeing things related to the Nürnberg Trials, but as it turns out, most of that happened in a nearby suburb or something and required the better part of a day and a good chance of missing the bus to experience.  The things we did experience were: the only scrambled egg-serving café in the entirety of Germany, the most bizarre statues ever (see below), at least three epically echoing churches, a fortress/castle that was once home to several generations of Holy Roman Kaisers (the giant wooden door had the Austrian coat of emblazoned on it, oddly enough), the unfortunately locked door of the Kunstbunker (yes, Art Bunker), and the best damn pizza I've ever had, as made by bona-fide Italians from Italy.  

 

There's more to this statue, but it would be grossly inappropriate to show.

 

However, my favorite part came when I went into one of the numerous gift shops looking for a Bavarian flag to satisfy both my ancestral yearnings and my newfound obsession with flags.  When the woman went to sell me the flag, she told me the price in English, but as I was counting out my money, I repeated the amount in German.  "Oh! Sie sprechen Deutsch?" she asked me. "Ja.  Natürlich!" I told her.  And we proceeded to have a conversation about where I was studying, how nice of a city Nürnberg was, and how I had family ties in Bavaria.  I marched out of that gift shop not only with a deliciously awesome flag of my ancestors, but also with the knowledge, that, yes, I had actually learned some German and could converse with an actual German without making them cringe!

 

It could only get less epic from there, of course.  All week I've been getting ready to move to Vienna (kind of) and spending time on a tangential obsession called geo-fiction that is a sort of fall-out from my vexillology obsession.  The long and short of it is, you participate in an online game where you're in charge of creating the entire culture, history, government, and just about everything else pertaining to a fictional country of your own design on a fictional Earth-esque planet.  It's basically a legitimized version of what's been bouncing around in my head since about the age of 10.  More about it later, including a link to my country's website, once it's finished.

 

Geofiction may or may not be a thinly disguised excuse for flag design.  The fact that this flag contains the colors of the German flag crossed with the colors of the Austrian one is entirely coincidental.

 

Oh yeah... and it looks like my school may finally be publishing one of my writing pieces in a literary magazine!  Apparently, both a short story of mine and a few poems are being considered for publication Rivercraft, which has summarily rejected everything else I've ever flung at it.  With any luck, something will get published!  Keep your fingers crossed!