Laurel Came for a Visit!

Laurel and me on top of Schlossberg

Hello, loyal readers. I am going to try this 'quick entry' thing again, because it worked out alright last time. No, my giant Rome entry isn't done yet. Honestly, until my 12 page research paper due in 12 days is done, I probably won't get it posted up here. But never fear! I will regale you with tales of my time in the Eternal City...sometime. I promise.

I did want to let you all know, quickly, how I have been in the last two weeks or so. First, I made another photo album (where you can see pretty pictures like the one to the right), with photos from the past three months or so from Freiburg and a couple day trips (Strasbourg and Heidelberg).For some reason, there are not as many pictures as I thought. Maybe because the longer I wait to put them on the internet the more picky I become. But also because I stopped taking so many pictures of Freiburg the more I got settled in actually living here. I still need to put up Rome and Munich pictures, but that will happen later.

Anyways, what's been happening with me lately? Well, Laurel, a good friend from high school, came to visit last week! This was sort of a last-minute arrangement, but I was very glad to see a familiar face. I basically decided to take a week of vacation from work and schoolwork to show her the city, and except for a few meetings and my uni class which I had to attend, it was a relaxing, pleasant break (the calm before the storm of paper-writing I am in this week and next...).

Speaking of storms in the metaphorical sense, there were a lot of storms in the literal sense in Freiburg last week. People who are native to this city say the weather is unusually bad. Despite the rain, Laurel and I still traipsed around downtown Freiburg, from the Münster to St. Martin's Gate ("Mcdonald Gate"...see the picture) and back again. We went out to dinner at Tacheles one night, home of the famed 7.50 euro schnitzel dinner, had a beer (or two...or three) at Feierlings Brewery, and enjoyed the Freiburger Winefest, which conveniently took place just as Laurel was visiting.

McDon- I mean, Martinstor

The winefest was set up on the Münster square every night for a week, and we went the first night. You paid a little bit to get a glass, and then a little bit to fill the glass from various tents representing regional wineries. This area of Germany and also eastern France is well known for white wines, so we sampled some varieties, engaged fellow festival goers (mostly older Germans) in conversation and procured recommendations from them (they were very happy to practice their English skills on us), and had some delicious flammkuchen.

On Friday afternoon, we decided to take a chance that the impending clouds in the west were not going to pour on us, and visited Strandbad, an outdoor pool very close to my room. It was a little cold for swimming, though we took a dip, but then we spent what turned out to be a pleasant, partly-sunny afternoon on the pool grounds. The storm held off until we got home, and then it hailed, a lot:

Hail on our balcony

Saturday was the 4th of July, and Laurel and I were invited out to a barbeque other IES students still in Freiburg were throwing. This was at a park west of where I live called Seepark. There were at least two other big groups of American students also out in the park celebrating the 4th. There are a lot of foreign students in Freiburg from a lot of different study abroad programs and universities. We grilled food, drank German beer, ate "Cool American" Doritos chips, tossed a frisbee, and had a nice, relaxing afternoon and evening.

I am not making this up.

On Laurel's last full day in Freiburg we climbed Schlossberg, the big hill overlooking the city, and also scaled the 30 meter observation tower at the top. It was my first time going up there, and the somewhat confusing hike was definitely worth the view. The sun was setting and the clouds were dramatic and all the walking allowed us to digest the huge döners (think Chipotle burrito, but Turkish) we had eaten for dinner. Freiburg really is situated in a beautiful region-- I sometimes forget that the hills of the Black Forest are just out of sight and rising everywhere to the east and north and south.

Littenweiler from Schlossberg

Laurel left Monday morning for her own adventures and travels beginning at Lake Konstanz, and this week I have been paying for the week of impromptu vacation I took. I have been working every day at my internship and trying to begin my university hausarbeit, or final paper. This morning I scheduled my room check out date: July 22. That's coming up soon. Time has been moving quickly in these last few weeks. I'm going to head out to the local bakery, grab a chocolate croissant (I am really going to miss German bakeries), and settle down for a full day of hausarbeit writing/reading.

A "Quick" Entry: Classes, a Summary of My Freiburg Life in General

It seems like I have lost the art of simply writing quick little blog entries to let people know how I've been doing. I have been plugging away on an entry about my trip to Rome, but, as usual, I am writing far too much and it is taking way too long.

So now, my attempt to write a quick entry about how I have been. It is a cold, grey June evening in Freiburg. For a city that claims to be the sunniest in Germany, I have not been impressed. It has been rainy and cool for the past few days, very much unlike what I would imagine the first real week of summer to resemble. This may be for the best, though, as it is also the last week of IES courses, meaning I have a decent amount of work to complete indoors. I say a "decent" amount of work because it is nothing like the last week of school at Grinnell, but I have papers or projects in every class to turn in this week, including my group's final film.

Yes, I am in a film-making class. It has been a lot of fun. We had a few lectures about film-making theory, such as camera angles, match cuts, etc., in which we got to watch some cool clips from movies, and then we had two weekend-long film praxises. In these praxises we got into the real technical details about film-making. We got to know the cameras really well on the first day, and practiced how to use the aperture, manual focus, set the white balance, etc. We also got to play with the lights they had, and practiced framing scenes. We were then released onto the streets of Freiburg for an afternoon in groups of three and filmed our own short movies. The next day, we learned how to use the editing software, Edius, by creating our own edits of the footage we'd taken the day before. I ended up with this:

Eis from Hanna Liebl on Vimeo.

We rock-paper-scissored to determine who would be the lead, and it ended up being me. There are some rough spots, which shows how well you have to plan out filming before you go out and do it to avoid jump cuts, and clearly, I'm not an actress. It was interesting to see the other two edits my group members came up with-- there was a surprising amount of variety even within the limited amount of footage we had.

We did a longer movie for our second group project, and practiced editing in a group. We had the past month or so to work on a final, five-minute film. I will post that later-- it turned out alright. Looking back you can always see the mistakes, but there is no time now to correct them. Still, I learned a lot about film making, in particular how to plan shots with movement that are natural from one frame to the next. I also learned a lot of technical film terms in German for which I don't know the English equivalents!

My other three IES courses have also been going well. I'm doing an internship at the University of Freiburg's E-Learning Center. I am making English language tutorial videos for them, using a screen capture software called Camtasia. That has been surprisingly fun. I enjoy the process of creating the videos, even if the content isn't so exciting. Plus, I am getting paid an hourly wage in euros, so I have no reason to complain. I have to write a paper for the academic portion of that class-- we had three lectures on different aspects of German life (the education system, the healthcare system, and the recent city and state elections) and are expected to write a six page research paper adhering to German academic standards on one of those topics. I still have a month to do that, thankfully.

I decided to take courses I normally wouldn't be exposed to at home, hence the film-making course, and also my reason for selecting the IES drama course that is also wrapping up this week. We saw a lot of plays in Freiburg (and an opera in Basel), groups presented on the background of each play, and we discussed the production afterwards. There have been a few written critiques due and some class presentations. Going to modern theater productions has been interesting...almost all of theater in Germany is modernized (as in, Shakespeare with guns) and almost every play we've gone to so far features at least some nudity. Honestly, most of the plays we've seen have been really weird, though we saw what I thought was a great production of Through the Looking Glass this past weekend. We also saw a production of The Beggar's Opera (only the name bears any similarity to the original play, however) a few weeks ago, in which they hired people from Freiburg who are very close to being homeless (none of them were actually without homes, but they would be, in America, living beneath the poverty line) to present their stories along with professional actors. It was an interesting experience, to say the least.

My last IES course is the required German course. I placed into the highest level class, taught by a wonderful professor named Klaus. We have read and discussed a lot on different themes, like intercultural competence and German identity, and just completed the final project, which we presented on last week. The project involved doing interviews with local people on a particular topic and then presenting our topic to the class and writing a paper. My partner and I presented on food in Freiburg, and how it relates to the environment and health. We interviewed the manager of one of the many organic food stores in the city, and conducted some surveys in organic food stores, an Aldi, at the local farmer's market, and in people's personal gardens. The results aren't scientific, but provided us a good opportunity to practice our German with strangers and learn more about an aspect of Freiburg.

And, of course, I am taking one university course. One of the nice things about this IES program is that I am allowed to enroll as a student at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. I had thought I would take two courses at the university, but once I got here, I had more of an interest in doing an internship and taking both the IES drama and film courses, which meant I only have time for one university course. The course I am taking is called, translated, "The Supernatural in German Literature." It is a Germanistik Proseminar, an upper-level course (at the equivalent of bachelor's level in Germany...most likely like a 300-level literature course at an American college) in which we read short stories and novellas that have something to do with the supernatural or otherworldly (for example, we have read Der Sandmann, Das Marmorbild, a short story by Thomas Mann, etc.). Some of them are ghost stories, in a way, but most of them are more complicated than that, for example, subtly demonstrating how one can make literature suspenseful by describing character's reactions to a particular event rather than just describing the event (like a good horror film).

The course is, for the most part, interesting, but also different in some ways than any other literature seminars I've ever taken. It only meets once a week for 1.5 hours, and every week, a group presents on the reading material, not the professor. The professor certainly adds her opinion and gives guidance, but the students, in general, pick the direction they want to take with the class discussion. The grade in the course is determined by class participation, the group presentation, and one final, 12-15 page research paper. I suppose that aspect is similar to my previous experiences, but I am used to professors leading class discussion almost every time, not students. And I think I prefer when the professor is the one presenting the guidelines and direction for the discussion.

I was visiting a Vorlesung, or lecture course, at the university about mysticism in Buddhism for a few weeks, but I found the academic German in the class to be above my head. A Vorlesung is very different than anything I am used to at Grinnell...the professor, in this case, an old, distinguished Bavarian man, stood in front of a group of fifty or more people and lectured for 1.5 hours, often without stopping to write anything on the board or referencing any type of handout. It was very taxing, and as the lecture dealt with a lot of philosophical terms and background I didn't know anything about, I decided to not take that course. It was interesting to see who was in the audience of that class, however. German universities are free (well, almost free, they pay 500 euro a semester and it is a huge scandal here), so people from the public can come to lectures. Half of the people attending that lecture were obviously well beyond student age. That was very interesting, and honestly surprising to see how many community members came out week after week to hear a highly complicated lecture about Buddhism.

So, that is my academic life, in a nutshell. How about life outside of class? I don't have a close group of friends here, and the community in my dorm, both among the Germans and the American students, is not as good as it is in other dorms, which is disappointing. I am far away from most of the other American students with whom I have become friendly with, and it is hard to get together sometimes-- I am not an easy walk down the hall or across the quad, but a 30 minute or longer commute across town. The social aspect of study abroad has not lived up to my expectations in a lot of ways. Partly I am to blame, but it there are a variety of circumstances, including just bad luck about where I was placed to live. There was also never a person with whom I "clicked" with in the way I have clicked with a lot of people at Grinnell and in Granville. I have, in the past few weeks, gotten to know some people better, but, sadly, they are leaving at the end of this week as they are not taking any university classes- again, just bad luck on my part. The ultimate frisbee team has been a disappointment as well. I can only make one or two practices a week, don't see the same people at practice from one week to the other, and have found them to be, in general, quite reserved and in some ways almost exclusive-- very much unlike the ultimate community in America.

Still, I certainly do sometimes do things with other people, and in the past few weeks there have been class get-togethers, which have been lots of fun. There was also a wonderful IES weekend trip to Munich about a month ago. I take time on the quiet evenings I have to exercise regularly and cook for myself, and can keep myself busy in general for a long time without needing anyone else. So, yes, I am very excited for good friends to come visit me at the end of July, but until then, I am doing fine. Traveling alone in Rome was a rewarding experience in a lot of ways, but one reason was that it showed me I really don't need someone else with me to explore an area or go on trips, and particularly since coming back from there, I have been much more happy with being more independent than I had perhaps anticipated I would be before coming to Germany.

Expect an entry about Rome soon-- it was an amazing experience. Until then, tschüss!

Berlin over Easter

I came back from Berlin over a month ago. I finally have my pictures up here. I visited over my week and a half long Easter break, flying out of Basel on Thursday after my last class. The visit was wonderful-- a much needed break from the surprising and somewhat hidden stresses of study abroad. I didn't realize just how much I had missed seeing familiar faces and even somewhat familiar places until I came to Berlin and got to Esther and Reinhard's apartment. Mama was there, which was lovely, and I saw a lot of relatives I hadn't seen in six years, also lovely. Additionally, I got to see Claudia's husband, Sven, and my second cousin, Leona, for the first time, and was lucky enough to be there to see her brand new sister, Paula!

Me, Großmama, and Mama

Mama and I made a lot of trips to Potsdam to see Großmama, who is happy in her beautiful little room there, right on the Tiefer See across from Babelsburg and across the street from where she went to teacher's school 60+ years ago. It is a poetic, circle-of-life situation, I think, though she said many times during our visits when Mama explained to her where she was and that she had gone to school just across the street, "you know more about my life than I do!" She remembered who I was, though, and we took many nice walks around the area, including one long and fun walk around the Heilige See- Großmama has not lost her sense of humor, and there were many times when Mama and I would be doubled over from laughter at her antics.

I got to see a lot of Potsdam in general during this visit. Early on in my stay, Mama and I walked from Großmama's place down across the Glienicke Bridge and then by the water, going along a street that used to be an island of East Germany in what was otherwise West Berlin. We crossed into Babelsberg and walked by the water some more, passing through a neighborhood full of beautiful old villas that used to belong to the wealthy people involved in the Babelsberg film industry. Mama said they looked much better now than they did when she lived nearby, more than 30 years ago. We stopped by one of Mama's old school buildings and she told me some stories about growing up there as we walked all the way to downtown Babelsberg that day. The next day, again, after a visit to Großmama, Esther, Reinhard, Mama, and I walked around in Park Babelsberg, the work of Frederick the Great, still featuring well-kept paths and gardens, a castle, and Flatow Turm (tower), one of my favorite places in the park from lots of earlier visits.

Park Babelsberg

Another day Mama, Esther, and I walked around Sanssouci, again, one of Frederick the Great's summer palaces, a magnificent example of lavish Rococo architecture, with fountains, statues, gardens, fake ancient ruins, and a giant Chinese tea house. Mama and I continued walking through all of downtown Potsdam that day, going down the main commercial district and then through the Dutch Quarter, a neighborhood of brick houses made to look like houses from the Netherlands, a ploy to attract skilled Dutch laborers to the area by another of those crazy Prussian kings. Potsdam is a truly beautiful area-- it was the place for Prussian kings to go in the summer and relax and unwind, and with its many small lakes, rivers, parks, and forests, it has remained a natural location for people from Berlin to come for weekend hikes and bike rides. We saw many people out doing just that during the Easter holidays.

Sanssouci

On a last excursion in Potsdam, Esther, Mama, and I took Großmama on a walk to the Friendship Island, a beautiful park in the middle of Potsdam, located on an island on the Havel. We walked around, Mama and Esther admired the plants, Großmama collected seeds, and I took lots of pictures. There was a huge, gorgeous tree that made for some great pictures, and lots of sculpture, too.

Mama and Großmama on Friendship Island

Großmama and me on Friendship Island

Mama and I also did two days of sightseeing in Berlin. I had seen a lot of the major attractions in the city in previous visits, but for some reason I hadn't made it to the Reichstag yet, so Mama and I started off our first day in the city there. We were almost going to leave the long entrance line, when a women who heard Mama speaking German came up and asked us if we wanted to come to a presentation in the plenary chamber (the main parliamentary chamber of the Bundestag) in a few hours and bypass the lines. We happily agreed, walked down Unter Den Linden a bit, saw the Brandenburger Tor again and walked down to Gendarmenmarkt, a big square with two churches, and came back just in time to enter the Reichstag through a special group entrance, bypassing the line and even the admission fee. After going through security the group of maybe 60 of us or so were seated in the visitor's section of the plenary chamber and heard a 40 minute or so presentation in German about the building and Bundestag. The party system is different than in the USA, and it was interesting to see how the chairs in the room can be reorganized and regrouped to accomodate different numbers of people from different parties depending on how their percentages change from one election to the other. He talked a lot about how votes are tallied and how people who don't show up to vote get fined. He explained the architecture a bit-- the building is a combination of the old Reichstag building from the 19th century and a new, modern structure built within and around it, completed in 1999. The most notable feature is the huge glass and steel dome on top of the building, which visitors can climb up inside and walk around in. There are also huge glass panes in front of the building, inside the old exterior-- representative of how what goes on in the building should be apparent to the outside world. Indeed, you can see right into the plenary chamber from outside. The building is a large tourist attraction, the most visited parliamentary building in the world, and the second-most visited building in Germany (behind the Kölner Dom).

The Reichstag

One final interesting thing I learned in the talk: a huge, flat, metal eagle, the symbol of Germany, hangs in the plenary. The architect thought it was too grim for the building (it's massive and imposing and fierce looking), but as it's an official symbol (it's the eagle that appears on the German one and two euro coins), the side that faces out into the parliament is the official frowning eagle, but the other side, not accessible to the public, sadly, that faces out (through another glass wall) in the other direction, apparently has a friendlier face and not such imposing claws.

Inside the Reichstag

After the presentation, we rode the elevator up to the roof, which afforded great views of Berlin. Like a lot of European cities, Berlin doesn't really have a distinctive skyline, and since it was a divided city for so many years, there is not one distinctive downtown area, so every direction had a different imporant or famous site to look at from afar. Finally, we went up the winding path inside the dome. There is a huge, multi-faceted pillar of mirror running up the inside of the dome, and I thought the many reflections in the middle of this giant glass and steel structure were beautiful. I thought the whole building was beautiful; a well-crafted blend of old and modern architecture with interesting and accessible areas for the public to see.

Dome on top of the Reichstag

After visiting the Reichstag, Mama and I walked to Alexanderplatz, past the museum island and by parks filled with lots of sunbathing Germans. There is a giant TV tower at Alexanderplatz, a church, and Neptune's Fountain. We took the 100 bus across the city to Tiergarten, passing by a lot of famous sites along the way, including the Berliner Dom and the Siegesaulle. We were both tired by this point, though, so we called it a day and headed back to Esther and Reinhard's apartment.

On our second visit to the city, Mama and I visited the Holocaust Memorial. Actually, it's not officially the Holocaust Memorial-- the proper name is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There are separate memorials to homosexuals and Roma people killed in the Holocaust across the street. The memorial is controversial for that reason, and also because the architect never explained the meaning behind the hundreds of black stone slabs that make it up. Walking through the memorial really was an experience, though. The slabs gradually get higher the deeper in your go. They are arranged more regularly than I thought, but not all of them are perfectly straight or parallel. The effect is disturbing and a little claustrophobic. We visited the museum/information area underneath the memorial, which gave a brief history of Jewish persecution during the Holocaust and personal stories from diaries, photographs, and the like.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

After that sobering experience, we walked to Potsdamer Platz, a huge public square. The Berlin Wall used to run right through the middle, but in years since its destruction, many new buildings have been built there, including the Sony Center, a huge, beautiful center with theaters, restaurants, and shops enclosed within a beautiful glass, metal, and sail roof. We ate dinner at a potato restaurant and walked around a bit before heading back to visit Paula, my new second cousin.

Leona meets Paula for the first time

I got to see a lot of family over this visit to Berlin, which was, as always, wonderful. There were many afternoon coffee and kuchen meetings, in Reinhard and Esther's garden and Daniel and Claudia's apartment. Reinhard took us Geocaching one day in a city park that used to be an S-Bahn station, and there were lots of relaxing evenings spent at Esther and Reinhard's apartment. We spent Easter Sunday at Großmama's. Mama and I brought some Niederegger marzipan eggs and hid them around her room and had Großmama find them. In the afternoon everyone came over, and we had more sweets and coffee and cake.

Großmama finds an Easter egg

Easter 2009

Like I said above, visiting Berlin really was a great time. It was a needed break from the first month of study abroad, and when I got back, I was ready to get into the swing of things in Freiburg-- university classes, IES courses, and generally getting into a regular schedule here.

A Recount of my Hamburg Trip

I went to Hamburg almost a month ago, but I wrote a good portion of this right after the trip. Then I went to Berlin for a week and a half, and then University courses started, and so it took me this long to finally put this entry all together with pictures and everything. I created a separate photo album from Hamburg if you are interested in seeing some more pictures. I will try to post a Berlin entry soon.

We left by train for Hamburg last Tuesday morning and got there that afternoon. After putting our luggage in our hotel, we boarded a ship and took a tour of the harbor. The weather was cold and partly cloudy but not raining, luckily. First we went around Speicherstadt, an area of the city with lots of canals and old brick warehouses that are now oriental carpet stores, offices, and apartment buildings. We passed by HafenCity, the largest construction site in Europe, an area that will later be lots of ritzy office buildings, but is now filled with cranes and half-completed steel structures.

The tour continued by going out into the industrial part of the harbor. Hamburg is on the river Elbe, which connects to the Atlantic a couple hundred kilometers to the north, and is the second-largest port in Europe behind Rotterdam (and the 9th largest port in the world; the biggest ones are all in East Asia). We saw a lot of shipping containers and a good number of huge, docked container ships. We also passed by floating dry docks, an old Shell oil refinery, and lots of big cranes for loading containers onto ships. Seeing the cranes and ships with their entire hull exposed on the dry docks was particularly impressive. After the tour we had free time, but I didn't go out that night.

Giant cranes on the harbor tour

The next day we started bright and early with a tour of Holsten Brauerei, a Hamburg brewery that was recently bought out by the Carlsberg group, the fourth largest brewery group in the world. They still brew Holsten pils and other local beers there, but also the global Carlsberg products. Our tour guide was good, and we got these nifty headsets so that we could hear him even with our large group and in noisy factory rooms. First we saw how the barley is malted in giant heating tanks, then we went into a huge, cold room with 60 meter high storage tanks in which the yeast is added and the beer is bottom-brewed. We walked by the "modern brewers'" control room, a fancy looking computer terminal station from which the brewers can precisely control the ingredients and temperature of the beer they are making. Next, we went to the bottling facility, and saw a bottle cleaning and recycling machine much like the one we saw last week at Breisgau Milch. The tour finished with a tasting session, of course. They gave us two pieces of delicious, dark German bread, butter, schinken (smoked ham), and two drinks. I tried out Holsten Pilsner and Duckstein Ale, both more bitter beers than I normally like, but both good, especially with the food they gave us.

Next, we took a bus tour of Hamburg. We drove through a residential section with lots of nice villas and lakes and parks and then saw the main sights of Hamburg: the Reeperbahn, the main street in Hamburg's red light district, the harborfront, various churches, and the commercial district around the main train station. It was interesting...but being on a warm bus for more than an hour after having two beers meant I feel asleep in the middle! After the tour, I went walking with my friend Mark and a few others. Mark was in search of a school his grandmother attended when she was young as well as the house she was born in. It was a good way to get away from the noisiness of the downtown area and see some of the nice residential sections north of the city.

That evening, we ventured to the Reeperbahn just as it was getting dark and all the lights were coming on. I saw the Beatles plaza, built there because the Beatles, (or at least John, Paul, George, Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best, and sometimes Ringo) got there start there. They had some silhouette statues and a list of their singles inscribed into the ground. Most of the clubs where they played in the early 60s are gone or have changed names, but I did get to see the Kaiserkeller, still under the same name, but having undergone some reonnovations since the Beatles played there.

Me at the Beatles Plaza

Grosse Freiheit (street where the Beatles played) in Hamburg's Red Light District

On Thursday, the group took a day trip to Lübeck, a city about an hour's train ride north east of Hamburg. Like Hamburg, it is an industrial city with a large harbor, but the city is smaller and features an old inner city area much like Freiburg, with a pedestrian zone and cobblestone streets. This old city area is encircled by the River Trave, and after a boat tour, going out into the port and around the city, we spent all of our time on this island. My friends and I first headed to the Lübecker Dom, a giant brick and copper Luthern cathedral near the edge of the island. I think the tour guide said it is the third largest church in Germany, but I could be making that up. The building was impressive, but I have to say, I prefer the more ornate style that sandstone allows.

Lübecker Dom

The weather was intermittently rainy and always cloudy, but we walked around for another hour or so, looking at the beautiful Rathaus (townhall), market square, and just wandering around the old part of the city. We stopped in at Niederegger, a famous marzipan store and company based in Lübeck. I don't like marzipan, but they sold all kinds of other chocolate, so I got a couple eggs for my relatives and a few for myself, including maybe the best krokant chocolate I have ever eaten in my life.

The entire IES group met up in the afternoon at Buddenbrooks House, now a museum. This is the house Thomas Mann and his family lived in, and Mann named his novel Buddenbrooks after it. The museum is now a Thomas Mann museum, and we got an interesting tour from a professor-like man, who taught us about Thomas Mann's life, his family's history, and a little bit about the book. I have never read any Thomas Mann, so it wasn't very relevant to me, but still interesting. Next we got a brief tour of the Günter Grass House, now a museum and art gallery devoted to Grass, another German author. Once again, I've never read any of his books, but the museum had some of his artwork on display, and that was interesting-- I didn't know he was an artist in addition to a writer. We had some free time afterward, so we walked around a bit more. On the way back to the train station, we got to see the Holstentor, a big, gothic, brick city gate, one of the few remaining signs of the medieval fortifications that used to surround the city.

Holstentor

On Friday, the whole IES group when to the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the largest art museum in Germany. I started off in the special Edgar Degas exhibit they had there, which had a lot of bronze casts of the models he used as studies for as well as some pastels and paintings by him. I did a short tour through the main wing of the museum, which had some great German art, such as Casper David Friedrich paintings. The weather was nice outside, though, so I hurried through the rooms, and didn't even get a chance to see much of the contemporary wing, because I was eager to see more of Hamburg when it wasn't raining.

A couple other people and I began an afternoon of walking around the city with a visit to St. Michaelis Church, one of the main landmarks of Hamburg. There are five main protestant churches in Hamburg, but I think St. Michaelis is the most beautiful. It has a giant, copper, baroque steeple, and though most of the back of the church was under construction, it was still a beautiful building. There is a large statue of Martin Luther on one side of the building, and a huge statue over the main entrance of the church- St. Michael's Victory over the Devil. This statue was awesome...take a look:

St. Michael's Victory over the Devil

We decided to go up to the observation platform near the top of the 132 meter steeple, and because the line for the lift was long, we walked up many, many flights of stairs to get there. It was cold and windy at the top, but the view of the city and the harbor was well worth the walk and the cold. It was even partly sunny when we got there!

View of Hamburg from the top of St. Michaelis Church

At the top of St. Michaelis

St. Michaelis Church

Next, we walked to a park nearby and looked at a monument to Otto von Bismarck. It was very...stoic, very German, with swords and eagles, and huge...the pictures I took don't have any context for how large it was, but it was massive. The statue is probably four or five times as high as I am, and you couldn't even reach it, because the base is too tall to climb all the way up on.

Bismarck monument

After visiting Bismarck, we made our way down to the water. We passed by two other churches: St. Nikolai Church, mostly in ruins from World War II, but still featuring a tall gothic steeple, and St. Katherin, which had an exhibit of children's art from the city inside of it, including a cool wall of graffiti right underneath the main stained glass window-- I thought it was an interesting contrast.

Finally, we came to the waterfront, and walked around the Speicherstadt a bit as the sun was setting. The long brick warehouses and canals which we had seen briefly from the harbor boat tour were interesting to see on foot.

Speicherstadt

Saturday morning, IES gave us the option to either go to the emigration museum or another museum of our choice. My friend Andrew and I decided to go to the House of Photography, a photography gallery near the central train station. They had an exhibit presenting media awards from 2008, including awards for photojournalism but also fashion photography, advertising, and magazine layout. So, they had lots of photographs on display but also magazine pages. The entire exhibit was really interesting, especially to see photographs of a more traditional "high art" tradition next to glossy advertisement photography.

Saturday afternoon I tried to find a supposedly famous erotic art museum in Hamburg; I later found that it had closed a year before, though the website for the museum has no mention of this. I went to the address, a few blocks away from the Reeperbahn, and found a place that claimed to call itself Erotic Art Museum Hamburg. An old man, the proprietor, came out and said, "Do you want to come visit the erotic art museum?" I said yes, and he took me inside. There were a couple other people there already, so he gave his introductory speech..."I am 90 years old and still kicking, people from all over the world have come and visited my museum" etc, etc. He was a little hard of hearing and repeated himself a bit, but after talking he allowed us to walk around his museum. And it was definitely not the erotic art museum I had come to see, you know, the one with Picassos and Renaissance art. It was basically this man's private art gallery. I suppose I should have realized this upon walking into the place, which was covered in these odd collages that he has made over the past 20 or so years, but I thought, well, maybe there's an upstairs or something...no, definitely not. It was very odd, the best way to describe it would be like a roadside attraction in America. He took photographs and newspaper clippings and objects and pasted them together to make collages...I guess you could call some of them "erotic," but more of them had to do with the history of Hamburg. He had a lot of old doors labelled with the addresses of famous places in Hamburg and then decorated them according to their history. He had a Beatles door, for example. All in all, it was kitschy and a bit of a letdown, but the old man was nice and so I signed the guestbook and took a picture with him because he seemed really excited about that.

I still can't find any information about why the museum closed. I asked the man if he knew about another erotic art museum in the area, but he kept on talking about how he "owns the whole thing now" and the city never gives any money to erotic art museums. I think he may have been a little senile or didn't understand what I was asking. The only information I found through some Googling is that the building that used to house the art museum is going to be turned into a Beatles museum eventually. Too bad that wasn't around yet!

Anyways, after that little adventure, I went back to the hotel and hung out for a few more hours or so, and then headed back via train to Freiburg. There is still more to see in Hamburg that I didn't get to: the famous fish market, the town hall, the largest model train museum in the world, a submarine museum, and other parks, churches, and museums. The weather was awful for much of the trip, and I have heard from various sources that Hamburg really is a wonderful city, especially when the weather cooperates. I was still happy to get back to the warmth of southern Germany and the smaller-city life of Freiburg, though.

Dancing and Hiking: A Weekend in Freiburg

This entry is about last weekend. I was in Hamburg for most of the past week, but I did a lot and took some good pictures last weekend, so I want to write about that first. Hopefully tomorrow I will start to cover the Hamburg trip.

Anyways, last weekend was my first real weekend in Freiburg, as there was no IES orientation trip or anything else I had to do. On Friday, I went to a discotheque with some friends, and danced until 3:30 in the morning! I had never been to a club before, and so everything, the lights, the DJing, was new and exciting. The group of people I was with decided at 11:30 to stop being the cool kids in the room, so we descended onto the empty dance floor and began the party, literally, because then everyone else came and started dancing. The DJ played hip-hop, and all but five songs or so were in English, very common for any of the music, on radio and TV, that I have heard in Germany. At least it meant we knew a lot of the words! We had to fend off the advances of some men with gelled fauxhawks and mullets, but other than that, it was a really fun night.

Saturday the weather was beautiful, so I went to the city in the afternoon and finally took some pictures. I wandered around the oldest part of the city, near Schwabentor, pictured below, one of the two reconstructed gates that lead to the old city. This part of town, like much of the inner city, is all a pedestrian zone, allowing only the street trains and bikes. The bächle, gutters carrying water diverted from the Dreisam river, run through the cobblestone streets. Most of the buildings are in an old style, giving the entire area an historic, medieval feel.

Schwabentor, bikes, and bächle

I made my way to the Münster and finally got some pictures of it in daylight. I passed a global warming protest on the way there, people carrying huge blue balloons representing daily CO2 emissions-- just another Saturday in Freiburg.

Closeup of the Münster clock

Every day there is a farmer's market in the plaza around the Münster, and it was just packing up as I got there. The steeple is under renovation for the next five years, sadly, hence the scaffolding.

The münster steeple

I am amazed at the colors of some buildings in Germany. This tiny alley is one of my favorites.

Alley by the Münster

I finished my walk at Bertoldsbrunnen (Bertold's Fountain), the center of Freiburg, where all the street train lines cross. Bertold was one of the old founders of the city. As you can see, there were a lot of people walking around, as there always are, no matter the day or time.

Bertoldsbrunnen

On Sunday, after a French toast breakfast with other IES friends who live in Littenweiler (we have done a Sunday breakfast for the past three weekends), the four of us plus another guy on the IES EU program went for an all-day hike to Schauinsland, the hausberg ("house mountain") of Freiburg. Basically, it is the largest mountain near the city, 1284 meters or 3281 feet tall. We left from Littenweiler, because about two minutes from my dorm the Sudschwarzwald nature preserve starts. The trail first ran by houses and little farms, and then into switchbacks the higher we went. There were some great views of Littenweiler along the way. We got to the top of the ridge at an 800 meter high point called Kybfelsen and had a quick lunch on a beautiful rock outcrop there. There was a great view to the south and west, and we could see down into the southern part of Freiburg.

Lunch at Kybfelsen

Sudschwarzwald

Our hike was far from over there, however, and we pressed on, going back down to a picnic area, past the occasional mountain biker and trail runner, and then going back up again on the long climb to Schauinsland. There had been some snow on the trail before, but now, as we got higher, the snow got a lot deeper. I would estimate maybe a foot and a half or so, maybe even a bit more, but it was packed snow so we could walk on top of it. The climb up was hard. The snow was slippery and the elevation change was fairly intense for the last hour or so. We finally got to the top, however, and climbed up the observation tower that was there. I had to fight my fear of heights, but I am glad I made it to the top, since it gave a great view of the surrounding area. You could see Feldberg, the mountain we went snowshoeing on three weeks ago, and lots of other peaks in the area. There was some cloud and smog, but it was still worth the three or so hour climb.

Feldberg from Schauinsland

We decided to be hardcore and hike all the way back instead of going down the gondola and catching the train. We stopped at Kybfelsen on the way back again, just as the sun was beginning to set behind a layer of cloud or smog, which made the view very different from before.

View from Kybfelsen on the way down

Going down was a lot easier, of course, and we got back just as it got dark and had a well-deserved meal at Pizza Boxx (yes, two Xs).

The weekend was a lot of fun, and I look forward to spending more of them in Freiburg to see what else the town has to offer. Look for a Hamburg update soon. Also, I hope you like the new layout.

Hiking Schlossberg and the Last Week of Language Classes

This is the last week of our language orientation classes. Today and tomorrow we take placement tests that determine which German class we take for the rest of the semester. We have also continued with our outings around Freiburg. On Tuesday we toured Breisgau Milch, a milk factory on the outskirts of town. The tour guide rambled a lot and there were too many of us to really hear what he was saying most of the time, but walking through the packaging rooms was cool. We got to see a giant machine that took in recycled bottles, cleaned them, and then sent them back out to be filled with milk. The company takes milk from famers all over the Black Forest, so it is a regional milk company. We even got a goody bag with yogurt and chocolate milk at the end. I went out for St. Patrick's day on Tuesday evening with some people, to one of two Irish pubs in Freiburg. It was crowded but fun, and I tried my first ever Irish car bomb.

On Wednesday all three IES language classes went on a hike to Schlossberg, the hill overlooking the city. We stopped at an observation area and took pictures because the elevation afforded a nice view of the surrounding area. That day was a bit hazy and the sun was in the wrong spot, so the pictures could be better, but here, finally, you can get an idea of how Freiburg looks.

The Münster is undergoing renovation, and sadly the steeple is covered in scaffolding. But you can get an idea of how dominant in the cityscape it is from this picture.
I took a panorama of Littenweiler, the area where I live. My dorm is on the left side of the picture, near the base of one of the hills there.

We ended up walking around the ridge for maybe forty minutes or so until we came to a little chapel, St. Ottilien's (or St. Odile in English). The chapel (and restaurant, this is Germany, after all, and every hike ends with a restaurant) supposedly marks the spot where Ottilien fled from her enraged father and the ground opened up for her so she could hide from him. Now a spring begins there (see right for a picture of the grotto), and its waters are said to cure eye maladies, because St. Odile is the patron saint of eye afflictions (and of the Alsace region, by the way).

Her symbol is a Bible sprouting eyeballs:
We walked down the hill and I took the train back to Littenweiler. Tomorrow I have an oral exam, and then the weekend begins!

"It's the healthy mountain air!": Sledding in the Alps

In the story Heidi, Clara goes to the Swiss Alps and recovers her health, and so did I this past weekend.

Last week I had a cold, which kept me inside for most of the week when I wasn't at class, but I decided I couldn't miss an opportunity to go to Switzerland for the first time with IES on Saturday. We drove the three hours to Grindelwald, a small town in the Swiss Alps (the Bernese Mountains, to be specific). There is a large skiing area all over the mountains around Grindelwald, so we took a gondola up to a stop called First (7,113 feet) and were given sturdy wooden sleds with metal runners. We couldn't begin our sledding from First, however, because of avalanche warnings, so we went down one spot to a place called Schreckfeld (6,414 feet, also what a great name) and were told we could sled down to Bort (5,150 feet).

I did this route a total of three times. At first, I had difficulty steering. You had to put your feet on the runners and push down in the opposite direction you wanted to turn. At higher speeds little shifts in body weight changed the direction of the sled, and at some points the trail took sudden, sharp turns and featured drops into big snow fields. We also had to cross skiiing paths at some points...my friend lost his sled down one of these tracks at one point, which was humorous in a dangerous way. I was waiting at the bottom of a turn for people to catch up when I see him running down the hill, his sled in front of him. Once you let go of a sled on the side of the mountain, it keeps sliding down a long way. Anyways, I tried to jump in front of it to stop it, but it ran over my legs and fell down into the skiing area, prompting a lot of shouts of "achtung!" from the people on the slope until it disappeared from view. We never actually found the sled.

So the first time down featured a lot of stopping and awkward braking with my feet. The trail got steeper and steeper the further down we went, running along by little mountain cabins and trees and even a little Alpine stream. The day was warm, so there were a lot of other sledders on our trail, and I heard something like 5,000 people were on the slopes that day in total. We rode the gondolla back up to Schreckfeld and went down again. Each time down got easier, and eventually I picked up speed and made it around some corners easily. I was no expert by the end, however, and still crashed a few times (luckily the snow on the sides of the trail was really deep, so any impact was soft). I never got comfortable enough to entirely let go and stop braking on the steepest parts.

Being in the Alps was wonderful. I have never been in or around mountains that high, and certainly never in winter. You could always see the giant, 12,000+ feet peaks to one side, Wetterhorn, Schreckhorn, and Eiger, complete with ice-blue glaciers.


I did end up feeling a lot better after being outside and active for most of the day, and now my cold has almost subsided. Sledding was the last weekend trip IES had planned for us, so this coming weekend I am staying in Freiburg. Next week is an IES trip to Hamburg, and then the week after that IES classes start already!

SC Freiburg Fußball Game vs. Alemannia Aachen

On Sunday I went with a few other IES students to a soccer game, SC Freiburg vs. Alemannia Aachen. Freiburg is in the Bundesliga 2, Germany's second-tier pro soccer league, but they are currently undefeated after six games, so if they continue to do well this season, they could move up to the first league. This was my first time attending a professional soccer game, and I had a lot of fun.

We stood in the cheap standing-room section behind the goal, but I still had a good view of the field, and it was fun to be close to some of the crazier fans. We got there too late to get a spot right in the middle with the guys who were beating drums and waving flags, but there were still some dedicated fans around who got really into yelling at the refs and players.

The game was exciting. Aachen tied it about halfway through and there were some tense moments, but then Freiburg scored a header in the last ten minutes to win 2-1. There were lots of great fan cheers and everyone sang the fan song at the beginning and end of the game:



The full fan song is on Youtube, if you're interested.

This week has been normal so far. I have a cold, so I have been trying to take it easy, because on Saturday we're taking another day trip with IES, this time to Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps for sledding!

Colmar and Wine-Tasting in Alsace

Yesterday we took our second IES weekend outing, this time to Colmar, a city about 45 minutes west of Freiburg in the Alsace region of France. Upon arriving by bus, we got a tour of the city. In the process I learned about Alsace, which has had an interesting history, having switched between French and German possession a few times. The people of Alsace, especially the older generation, speak in a distinct French dialect that adds in some German words and flavor. I got the impression they think themselves a bit distinct from the rest of France, if only because the rest of France has at times looked down on their peculiar dialect. The tour guide pointed out lots of shop signs made by an Alsatian artist, and he described how every sign he made not only uses the French colors (blue, red, and white) but also depicts something distinctly Alsatian, like a traditional costume, for example. You can see the women in the sign below is wearing such a costume and also the French colors in her clothing:

The old city is beautiful, with lots of half-timber houses painted in wonderful colors, cobblestone streets, old Dominican cathedrals, and delicious-looking French bakeries and patisseries. There were at least two street musicians playing the accordion, which lent a suitable and also cheesy French air to the whole place. It was also a new experience not knowing the language being spoken around me. I usually ended up panicking responding in both German and English when shopkeepers would say "merci" or "au revoir," even though I know a few basic French words. Here are a few pictures from walking around:

A typical street in the old part of Colmar

St. Martin's Church

This church had a big stork nest on its roof. Alsace's symbol is the stork, because they represent faith and happiness and also are said to bear children. To keep storks in the region, the Alsatians have been good about giving them good places to nest and also, because frogs are getting scarce, importing frozen frogs for them to eat. Some of the storks like it so much in Alsace that they stay there through the winter.

Little Venice district

We had lunch at a place called...Flunch. It was a cafeteria-style almost fast food restaurant, but it had a cheap buffet option, so we made the most of a hot lunch. We had two hours to walk around by ourselves, so we went into St. Martin's church and then got some coffee (cappucinno, probably some of the best I've ever had). The museums were all closed from 12-2, right when we had free time, so we didn't get to see the famous Isenheim Altarpiece.

After having an opportunity to walk around the city ourselves, we drove to Eguisheim, the home of Wolfberger winery. We got a brief tour of the winery but it was mainly useless except to see the giant barrels they use. Then we got to taste the wine. And by taste it I mean drink it. They gave us this almond cake called Gugelhopf, and then a lady walked out and poured us glasses from four different types of white wine, a sparkling wine, riesling, pinot gris, and a spiced wine called gewürztraminer (they are best-known for white wine in this region). No one told us a thing about what to look for or how to taste the wine...no fancy glass swirling or anything, so it basically just ended up being all of us drinking different glasses of wine. It wasn't exactly the educational experience I expected, but it was fun nonetheless.

We drove back to Freiburg, where I went out with some people to dinner and then walked around a lot with them, ending up in a bar but going home early because of the long day. I took some pictures of the Münster at night, however, since it was lit up and the moon was perfectly positioned:
Sadly, they are restoring the steeple, and will be working on it for the next five years, so the scaffolding will not be gone in my time in Freiburg. Even so, it is an impressive building.