Last Days in Germany

It's time to wrap up my time in Germany already! It flew by and I can't believe it's over. I've learned so much but in so many ways I feel like I'm just starting to really get a feel for things (language, culture, etc). Auf jeden Fall (in any case), I've come a long way from where I was on Day 1 and that's all that matters.

Things I will NOT Miss About Bayreuth:

1) Rain all day long every day.
2) Spending my evenings in my room with instant pasta and my computer. (Nothin' like Grey's Anatomy or Cinderella auf Deutsch to entertain me in the evenings. I am REALLY looking forward to having a kitchen again!)
3) Mensa food! (Salad: lettuce, cucumbers and carrots. Every day for lunch. For seven weeks.)
4) Not being able to go to church.

Things I WILL Miss About Bayreuth:

1) Being able to get delicious ice cream on every street corner (Cinnamon is the best flavor ever!)
2) The European "Cafe culture" - where all you do on weekends is rotate from one cafe to the next.
3) Going to the movies and having it feel like you are being productive and educational (since it's in German!).
4) Visiting a new city/country every weekend. (Ellen and I joked that we're going to have to take trips on the weekends in Evanston too.. to cool places. Like Milwaukee.)
5) Sprachkurs every morning where you discuss current events and just about everything else under the sun with your classmates. (Fact: I just capitalized "Sun" and had to fix it. Because it's a noun. I have maybe spoken a good bit of German recently. :))
6) Saying "Genau!"(exactly!), "Echt?"(really?), "Nei!" (Nah or No way) und "Stimmt" (Yep! or That's exactly it!). German expressions are just so much better than English ones!
7) Being able to flash my student ID card and taking the bus anywhere I want for free.
8) Learning SO MUCH even though it feels like you aren't learning anything because you don't have to do very much homework.

Overall, my time in Germany has been amazing and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I'm so glad I came, so glad that I spent these seven weeks in Bayreuth instead of anywhere else. My German skills have really exploded while I've been here and I can now say that the immersion experience is definitely worth it (and it works amazingly quickly!). In the course of seven weeks, my comprehension skills have gone WAY up (I can understand basically anything now, except for really technical German) and I am completely comfortable speaking German all day, every day. I will definitely miss speaking German all the time, but at the same time, I'm ready to get back to Northwestern and start my junior year.

Hooray for learning! Hooray for Bayreuth! Hooray for German! :-)

A Day in Salzburg

This was my last weekend in Germany and so I wanted to do something special. I went back and forth between a lot of things in my head, trying to decide between doing the university tour (to Weimar) or maybe even going to Berlin.. I kept getting stumped, because Berlin was going to be just too expensive (train tickets alone were 120 Euros!) and I really wanted to do something cool. While talking to my dad about my dilemma, he suggested going to Salzburg. It's only four hours away by train AND it's in a different country. I looked it up and the train tickets were significantly cheaper than Berlin, and so I decided to go for it! None of my friends had the desire to spend nine hours on a train for eight hours in Salzburg, so my trip ended up being alone.

My train left at 5:48 on a Saturday morning and I got to see what Bayreuth looks like at that incredibly early hour. The only people on the streets were definitely people that hadn't been to bed and had been having "fun" the night before. But I got to the train station ohne Problem (without problem) and all my transfers to Salzburg (Bayreuth-Nuremberg, Nuremberg-Munich, Munich-Salzburg) went smoothly.

The first thing I decided to do upon arriving in Salzburg was to see the Mirabell Gartens, which was where part of the Sound of Music was filmed. I took pictures by the steps and imagined myself singing my way up the steps - which I would have done if I hadn't been by myself. I was reminded of something an acquaintance of mine told me when I was fifteen: Looking crazy by yourself just means you're crazy. Looking crazy with friends means you're having fun.

Next on my list was to climb up to a castle on a hill, overlooking the city. On the way there, I strolled through Old Town and enjoyed gorgeous architecture on all sides. I also passed by a gigantic church - the Dom Cathedral. Next to the church, there were people drawing portraits of tourists and I was reminded of another of my childhood dreams. As a child, I got my portrait drawn in a big park in Almaty. For some reason, I really want to have that done again. I'm not entirely sure why, but it"s just been something I've always wanted to do. Needless to say, my college student budget-oriented mind did not allow me to sit for a portrait in Salzburg, but maybe someday!

The walk up to the castle was decently steep, which was fine on the way up but made the walk down a bit more difficult for my knees. I missed having my hiking poles! But the view from the top down onto the city was absolutely gorgeous. Add the castle to another of the things I have climbed to get my view of the city below!

After coming down from the castle, I stopped for some afternoon coffee while I looked around me to decide what I wanted to do next. My time in Salzburg was incredibly limited and didn't allow me to see the Trick Fountains or a couple of the other things that are located outside of the city. But, incredibly enough, right next to the place where I was having coffee I saw a museum dedicated to Mozart! I knew I couldn't come to Salzburg and not see something Mozart-related (besides all the Mozart Kugels everywhere), so after I rested up with my coffee, I bought my ticket, got my audio guide "auf Deutsch" and made my way through the museum. It was nice, not too big, and I got to hear a lot of Mozart's music played, which was cool, since he's my favorite composer.

Afterwards, I wandered around the city for a bit more and then it was time for me to catch my train back to Bayreuth! I wish I had had more time in Salzburg, because it was, without a doubt, one of my absolute favorite cities. It was beautiful, simple, with lots of incredibly things to see. I was very glad I went! (I also am now one country up on my brother. We have this competition about who can visit the most countries and as most of our traveling up until this point has been together, we're fairly close to even. He's been to Hungary without me, though, and I got the Czech Republic earlier this trip - which made us tied. Now, though, I've been to Austria, so I'm winning. In case anyone was wondering.)

I also had a pleasantly surprising experience on the train back to Bayreuth. On one of my legs, I sat next to a very talkative German older woman who engaged in an hour and a half of active conversation with me. Now anyone who knows me knows that I'm not such a fan of talking to strangers in general - but, when the strangers are speaking German, it's a completely different story. I was also struck by something. On my very first day in Germany, on the train to Bayreuth, it was quite difficult for me to understand the people on the train when I asked them if the seat next to them was taken. They were very nice and tried to explain to me that it was reserved but the person with the reservation wasn't there yet - but I had no idea what they were saying. And now here I was, six weeks later, engaging in absolutely normal conversation with the woman next to me on the train. Yes, there were words here and there that I didn't understand, but I would say my percentage of understanding was 90%! I guess that just goes to show you what significant time in the country that speaks the language you are learning does... I was quite pleased. :)

Munich!

Since our afternoon classes were canceled today, we took advantage of the extra hours (and of the "Bayern Ticket" which allows up to 5 people to travel within Bayern for a total of only 28 Euros) to head to one of Germany's most beautiful cities: Munich! I booked us a youth hostel for the night and Anna, Ellen, Donya and I took one of our best weekend trips yet.

Friday afternoon we wandered through the city, enjoyed gorgeous buildings and famous sites. Ellen guided us through the city with the help of her camera, which had pictures from the last time she visited Munich, three or four years ago.

Despite my fears (online bookings are always a little bit iffy!), our youth hostel ended up being great. Very clean, we had a room for the four of us, and 5 minutes walk from the center of Old Town, which was great for site seeing. We had dinner across from the main square and then sampled some local ice cream: the Orange Chocolate flavor was a big hit!

After a leisurely morning and some of the best pastries we've had yet, we went to the Deutsche Museum. Though the name makes it sound important, it really was a somewhat boring, hands-off science museum. We got huge discounts for being students, though, so we laughed our way through it and enjoyed the few things where you could "press buttons." My personal favorite was a weaving machine, where you had to pull the shuttle across the frame using the correct amount of friction.

Our afternoon adventure was much more successful, though. We had a late lunch at the Hofbrauhaus, which is one of Munich's main attractions. The place was HUGE inside and was absolutely packed with both tourists and regulars. Live music accompanied our search for a table.


Once we were seated, we perused the menu while the other girls ordered what the brewery is actually famous for: beer! One of the main attractions of the Hofbrauhaus is that you can order beer by the liter - a specialty which was not exactly to my taste. Here I am, sampling Anna's beverage (a disgrace to the German nation!):

My personal favorite memory from the Hofbrauhaus? A Bretzl (German pretzel) the size of my head!

After lunch, we climbed St Peter's Church, a church near the main square which allows you to look out over the entire city. I have to say that after touring quite a few cities this summer, climbing a tower is one of my favorite things to do. In Dresden it was the Frauenkirche, in Prague it was the clock tower, here, Peterskirche... it's a great way to get an "überblick" of the city - to see huge chunks of the city at a time.

But our time in Munich was short-lived, as evening drew nearer and the last train back to Bayreuth approached. We wandered through the city some more and Donya discovered the "coat of her dreams" in Benetton (a beautiful green fall coat which she later convinced her mother to let her buy).

Overall, the weekend was an incredible success and I would have to say that Munich was one of my favorite cities! Beautiful, clean, not overcrowded with tourists. The buildings are all quite quaint, in a grandiose sort of way. If I had to choose a city to spend more time in, Munich would definitely make my list!

Underground Adventures and What Santa Claus Does in the Summer

Today, instead of going to the Literature Fachkurs with my friends, I departed on the excursion that I have been waiting for since before I came to Bayreuth - underground caves and a hike! I was a bit worried that I only had my tennis shoes with me (since my hiking boots did NOT make the weight cut to come with me to Europe), but as my friends reassured me, my expectations of what a hike is supposed to be are slightly different from that of normal people.

The bus ride there only took 35 minutes, which was wonderfully short, and we got out of the bus and began our hike. True to my friends' opinions, it was maybe a 20 minute walk (albeit up and down a slippery hill, but there was a path/railing the whole way) to the underground caves. At that point, I decided it should not be called a hike. A walk. A nature stroll. Anything less than an hour does not get to even go NEAR the word "hike." And actually, anything less than a DAY isn't a hike, but that's being picky.

Anyway, despite the misnomered nature stroll, the caves were quite cool. There were stalactites everywhere and the inside was quite damp (dripping-water-on-the-head kind of damp). We walked around, took pictures, and heard a tour in dialected German that I only understand about half of (well, and halfway through I stopped paying attention. Details!).


After the caves, we went back to tour a nearby castle, taking a shorter and less steep way back, proving Claire's point, that the walk was "nur für Spass" (just for fun). Claire is a French student who filmed my video project for me in August and I spent the entire day with her and her group of friends (a guy from Belgium, a girl from the UK, and a guy from South Korea). We spoke only German (since that was our most common language), so that was nice.

The castle proved to be a bit of a misnomer as well, though. It has been turned into a hotel, built on the grounds where the old castle used to stand (though it was actually destroyed several hundred years ago). The most amusing part, though, was our tour guide. He looked exactly the way you might expect a German Santa Claus to look and I decided that Santa must be a tour guide in the summer. Economic crisis, you know, you have to be versatile to pay the bills.



All in all, it was quite a successful excursion! One of the best yet! And without question better than classes. :)

Weekend in Nuremberg

Our lovely friend Fiona was able to work in a return trip to Bayreuth for this last weekend and came to the gala and the last party with me and my group of friends (two girls from NU - three, if you count me, a girl from France, and a guy from England). We all took the train on Saturday into Nuremberg, where we enjoyed a breezy afternoon seeing the sights and shopping around.

Nuremberg is a beautiful, old city with lots of history. We saw the "National Socialist" history last time we were in Nuremberg, and this time we took the time to wander around and see beautiful buildings. Like Prague (and other old cities), Nuremberg is divided into the "new" and "old" cities. The Alt Stadt (old city) is divided from the rest of the city by a huge, old wall.

In the middle of the old city, there is a large cathedral/castle, which bears an enormous resemblance to the cathedral in Prague. I guess ancient architects worked together?

We answered Sporcle quizzes late into the night and spent the night in a gorgeous hotel, sponsored by Fiona's mother (to whom we were ever grateful). On Sunday, we said goodbye to Felix, as he headed back to England to continue his studies. Sad day!

The four girls hung around Nuremberg for a bit longer, enjoying Belgian waffles and quality tea. Fiona is from the UK and thus values a cup of good tea with milk as much as I do. In fact, Saturday night, when I ordered hot tea with milk, the waitress asked me if I was British. "No," I thought, "Asian."

Another wonderful perk of Nuremberg? Starbucks! Bayreuth is a small town and thus doesn't have many chains and certainly no international ones. I don't mind because the local food and coffee are quite good, but I was pleased to order and enjoy a skinny hazelnut latte. Ah, life's smaller pleasures!

Sommeruni Gala

As most of the students at the Sommeruni are only staying for four weeks, we had a gala last night where the music, film, and journalism students presented the things that they had been working on in the course of the quarter. There were four short films, three journalism pieces, and 18 (yes, 18) musical pieces. The gala lasted for over four hours - which was a bit on the long side, but it was impressive that students who hadn't known each other at all a month ago were able to pull something together in that amount of time.

It was a bit strange for everyone to be saying goodbye, though, because I'm still here for three more weeks. I will meet new people, have new experiences, and not say goodbye to Germany quite yet. But 230 out of 260 students are leaving, so it made perfect sense to have a big "to-do" for them.

All the people who participated were given a rose (thus the picture) and we walked home late at night in the (unsurprising) pouring rain, laughing the whole way.

This weekend, my dad came to visit me in Bayreuth and take me on a trip to Prague. How excited I was when I woke up Friday morning and saw that the weather prediction: chance of rain, 0%. I have never seen that here (since it rains basically every day, no joke) but I was so pleased that it happened on the day when my dad was coming!

We spent Friday night in Bayreuth and I took him around to my favorite places - a coffee shop, a nice dinner place, the "best ice cream in the city" (according to Ellen, one of my friends here). We got up Saturday morning and drove the 3 and a half hours to Prague, with me as a navigator, which only ended in us getting lost once - and even then, it was the "scenic tour of working Germany."

Prague was filled with beautifully architectured, old buildings. It didn't rain the entire weekend, which was a novelty for me. We did the "tourist" things - and in Prague, there are quite a few tourists - saw the clock tower, toured the (gigantic!) castle and cathedral.



Friday night, we went to a beautiful fountain show with music, dancers, and fountains that danced and looked like fireworks. It was quite interesting because we had never seen anything quite like that.


We enjoyed Starbucks, shopped around a little, but mostly enjoyed some really wonderful conversations. I am so, so glad that we got to spend a weekend together! It was great to have someone from my family here, as I am a bit alone in Germany. The weekend together allowed me to get recharged and be ready (and excited!) for my next four weeks in Germany.