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Writing Nice and Riding High
2002-08-23 15:35:14
16.08.02
10.25
ICE trains kick ass. Why can't airplanes be like this? Tehre's tons of legroom, they're quiet (the trains, not the passengers), and the seats really recline well! This is high quality living and travel - I bet you were thinking of something else, too.
Anyways, the end of Rothenburg was quite re-energizing. I'd like to go into it in detail, but this loud screaming baby is breaking my concentration...even with calming classical music streaming into my ears from the train's entertainment system.
OK, the kid shut up.
Got up yesterday, showered, changed another set of bloody bandages, and went off to walk the walls. It really is peaceful and relaxing up there. Once you get past the numerous groups of Japanese and Italian tourists you really get some solitude up there.
Also Inspiring was the rooster tower (forgot the German name and as of the retyping I haven't dug up my tourist stuff from the town either), which offers magnificent views both in and out of the city. It costs, but it's worth it and about halfway through the walk.
After that I had a cookie and citrus snowball from a great bakery. LP says it's the best in the town and I'm very tempted to agree. Or was that after more walking/ I had an ice cream in all of this somewhere too...
Getting back on track, I didn't really do much tourism yesterday (the tower and a not as nice as st. jacob's church were about it), but I did get all non-manga gifts that I needed to buy people, as well as and english wool sweater for me - there's a scottish store in Rothenburg and after talking to a british tourist in the line at another store, I came to the conclusion that the price was right and now it's helping to pad other peoples' gifts.
I also got a little bit of heat exhaustion yesterday so I stayed in for a couple hours and read a bit on Dresden, as well as drinking lots of water and dozing a little. The total number of people in the room last night also came to 5.
The big adventure, though, was finding myself a way to get to where I am now - all of Dresden near the Elbe is flooded and it's still raining there. After about 4 calls to Mad (who had already arrived in Dresden from Berlin and drove to BOTH train stations in Dresden to get information in a storm I could hear over his Handy), we got an itinerary worked out. Right now I'm no the way to Leipzig and then I take the RE to Dresden Neustadt. Pity I didn't eat more breakfast - cut it short to ensure an early arrival at the train station. Should've had some fruit or grabbed bread to go or something. Ah well, I've still got 4 chocolate bars from Strobl with me, and I should be able to get more in München, so when it reaches 11 on my watch (about 17 min. from now), I'll dig into a Milka.
My only complaint about the ICE trains is that the luggage racks are solid - no nice place to lock down the bags (yes, the gifts took up so much room that I had to break out the collapsable). it makes me paranoid to have to get up and leave them behind while running to the WC. Of course, I'd have to find it first...I should do that.
Next post: From Dresden! -
Second Christmas
2002-08-22 20:46:40
14.08.02
18.46
Sleep is good. Had weird dreams about communal massive freestyling DDRMAX with funky non.covered buttons and the latin folk from the trip joining in...it also combined arcades in two different cities and had songs I've never heard before. Oh well, woke up as it was ending anyways and it's not the first DDR dream I've had either.
Breakfast here gets a 4.5/5 on the cool hostel breakfast scale. Brötchen (we're north enough now that they're no longer semmeln=, six kinds of jam, nutella, cheese, fruit salad, big glasses for juice, 8 types of tea available, yjogurt (thicker than austrian), and chocolate cereal. Yes, cereal. Because it was Kellogg's chocolate something or another and not a true European grain müsli, the hostel breakfast lost 1/2 a point. Picky, ain't I? At least I didn't take off for the yogurt not being Strawberry.
Walking the walls was great, but I ended up doing the short path. I went up by the Marktplatz and followed a branching street to the wall and turned right. It ended up putting me close to the hostel, which was nice enough. After a quick water refill and a run to the ATM (which was nice enough to give me a variety of denominations, something I'll miss) it was back into town. First stop: The Middle Ages Crime Museum. All I'm going to say is that folks here could have a great S and M party with with the stuff here. There's a lot to see, although the more academic stuff lacks English descriptions and translations, and my German wasn't so hot to be able to read all of it. Also had a couple annoying clusters ofa tour group who didn't understand that others wanted to read things in the displays. Otherwise, great.
More walking followed the crime museum, and I got a fruit something at a bakery for cheap (excellent) for lunch. A not.so.fast water refill and tourist info. read later and it was back on the road, first to the Reichstadtmuseum (Imperial City Museum). This also gets a "worth it, come see" award. It's nicely big, cheap for students (€1,50), and has a gorgeous, droolworthy collection of weapons from medieval through pre-romantic times. It also has some art and historical relics of the town and is housed in what used to be a convent. The art and stone age stuff (things dated pre-10,000 BC in the historical section, and there was a sword blade dating between the first and fifth centuries in the weapons collection) was neat, but the arms and armor was DEFINATELY where it was at.
I could have done without the next two stops, though.
First disappointment was in the town hall, the city historical vaults. While only €1,50 for students, it's a 20 min. visit, 30 tops, and only the dungeon (real) is worth visiting. The dungeon has a great atmosphere and you can actually go into one of the cells, but the cheesy 30.yr. war stuff sucked. Save your cash if you go.
Also avoid Rothenburg's Spielzeug and Puppen Museum (toy and puppet). At €3,50 to get in, it was the priciest museum to enter and has a 2:1 museum:gift shop ratio...OK for commercial emporiums like the Weinnachts museum (which has more like a 1:1 ratio), but not something small like this. All exhibits in the museum were unlabeled, and you got to take a poorly proofread (at least for the English, should've checked the Deutsch) and overly worn handout guide to walk with. The stuff on display really sucks too, unless you live your life for porcelin dolls and miniature doll housey stuff. I like toys and all that, but this was waaaaaaay too QVC for my taste. What also sucks was that the only puppets I saw were in one small marionette display. All the others were apparently off display and only for show when they do puppet theatre, which was not the day I was there.
Following these disappointments came more of tourism's favorite pastime, window shopping. Found another store with more pretty weapons including classic and replica guns. If someone out there has €200 that they'd like to hand over then I could get a gorgeous replica Walther P-99. Mmmm, sexy firearms.
I also met two people at the store as they were talking about something or another with knives and I kind of interjected myself into the conversation. It ended up being that they were Scadians and apparently a bit high up for where they were in the local German group. These guys were for real, knew all the tech stuff, group structures, etc. all great. We ended up going to a couple stores together and when we split off this guy gives me his real and SCA names, email addy, and home telephone number, saying to call and I could crash if I was ever in the area again. WTF! More proof that the SCAdians really are out of their fucking minds...
On the other hand, apparently SCA Europe is NOT as fucked up as groups back in the states and the politics are kept absolutely minimal here, although there are some administrative and financial issues with SCA central. Those aren't politics, though, they're just stupid fucked up shit.
I've also figured out what I'm buying everyone. Hapy! I can pay cash for a good amount of it! Happy! I may have serious customs problems...oh shit!
After shopping (and not buying), I came back. The J-Dude (Who I thought had left) was reading his tour book and headed about 10 min. later. As I'm taking my shoes off and checking my tour books to figure out where to get dinner, two older (Upper 20's by my guess) strapping German folk came in and set up shop for themselves. 4 people tonight, mebbe 5 as there's an extra set of sheets sitting on the table that aren't on a bed (though only 4 lockers are in use.)
Dinner ended up being italian as I had a pasta craving. It wasn't bad, but not the hot and firey that it had been advertised as in the menu. Topped it off with a snowball from one of the not-best bakeries for dessert and here we are now. It's about 7:30PM and the Deutsch edition night watchman tour begins in 2 hrs, which gives me about 1.5 hours free to rest up.
i feel sorry for all crashing in this room tomorrow night - gotta go to bed early and get up at the ass.crack of dawn to get breakfast and check out to make the train on time to Dresden. I think I WILL pay the €11 and get UK Harry Potter 4, just to have something to read on the longer runs of the trains...(ED Note: Bookstore was closed when I went to get it, so I didn't) -
End Part One (cont.), Begin Part 2
2002-08-22 15:59:40
13.08.02
21.30
Called Mad and Xeno, all is good, we're meeting at Dresden Hauptbahnhof at 2PM friday. I can post this now because it's already happened so we're safe. unfortunately I had to use a €5 Deutsch Telekom card in order to make a €1 call. So it goes, I didn't think it would be over so fast. Then again I DID call right when they'd probably be sitting down to eat dinner. (ED Note: Having eaten with them now, it was actually a couple hours earlier than is normal)
Anyways, back to finishing time in München. There was some really damned loud tour group of German kids staying at the hostel last night. Aroun d9:30 they were being rambunctious and loud and all of a sudden their leader just flipped at them and started yelling in the middle of the hostel! wtf...
I also slept in my regular clothes last night. Digging for my grungy SAIS shirt and mesh shorts in a bag full of laundry (clean but nicely packed= didn't seem so fun or interesting or worth it, and I didn't want to have to get my towel wet again and risk not having it dry right before leaving. I packed what I could and half-slept until right before the alarm went off this morning.
The type of sleep I've been getting here is really weird. I fade in and out of real sleep and dream while awake, usually about tourism stuff. Experiences lately have been so high on the intake scale that processing all of it is just off the radar. WAY off the radar.
So I got up this morning, brushed my teeth, changed shirts, put on some deodorant, and headed down to breakfast. I got my Semmeln and tea and chocolate müsli (still without yoghurt but I dealt=, and sat down. I'm just starting when someone with an Austrian accent sits down near me and asks in English how I was doing.
For those who know me IRL, think of how I am at 7:30AM on a night of half sleep (ie Friday at a con).
For those who don't know me IRL, think of the name-face-location recognition abilities of a brick. That's me normally. Now take that times 10x and you get the idea...
It turned out to be Marianna. She had been staying with Jesse and Andrew at the Best Western and couldn't get home yeseterday because flooding in Österreich has gotten so bad that trains weren't running to Salzburg. Apparently the city, even as of today, is split in half with one part navigable and the other, well, not. What sucked for her was that to make room for the guys in her car she had to leave her luggage in a locker in Strobl, which is now blocked off (along with the rest of the Wolfgangsee).
After some calls on her Handy to figure out where she could go (one extra day in München was enough for her), we decided to go to the Hauptbahnhof together, as it would be something to do if nothing else - and we were both glad to see a friendly face.
Apparently all trains were running. Mine left 10 min. before hers and so I have no idea if she made it out safely or not. I sure as hell hope so. I also hope her car is OK - it was parked in an underground garage in Salzburg.
We also did the Schwarzfahrer (black rider) thing today. As mass transit here works on the "buy a card 'cuz if Mr. Conductor comes and you don't have one you're out €30 but otherwise you don't really NEED one" system, it's a gamble for if you get caught or not. We bought 2 stop tickets for a 3 stop journey and took the risk. (ED note: I never saw a conductor on a train I was on the entire time in Germany...)
This is a very small world with a lot of coincidences. In 5 days I have run into the same Japanese couple 3 times. First was on the Salzburg to München train, the second was the next day in the Hauptbahnhof on the way to EasyEverything, and the third was today on the train to Rothenburg.
Speaking of Japanese tourists, holy shit there's a lot here. Most signs and things are bilingual German and English, but many are trilingual with Japanese! My hostel roommate is Japanese (6 person room, only two of us here and as of 10PM no one else has checked in.) While he's got a friend over, it's empty. We did have a fast discussion about anime and manga, as I caught the word "Evangelion" coming up a lot. Apparently they're surprised that gaijin do anime and manga. I also think that he whispered to the other "oh shit, i'm with an otaku."
So how do I like Rothenburg?
It's a medieval city where every day is Christmas Eve. This fucking rocks! I got in about noon, found the hostel and checked in about 1, and was on the street by 1:30. Walked around, did a lot of window shopping, and tried to ignore increasing foot pains. The Christmas museum is very cool, well worth the €2,50. It's also owned by and attached to a hugeass Christmas store with thousands of decorations and is incredible in size and everything to the point of being a turnoff, and that was also not aided by foot problems. Fortunately about only 2 blocks and €0,50 later was St. Jacob's, which had gorgeous stained glass windows and comfortable pews to rest in.
After a brief rest it was back to the tourist info place to find a phone card and check the train schedules. Did both (and found a pair of Turkish Imbißes) and returned to the hostel to make prior entry and rest up as well as dump the increasingly heavy feeling messenger bag.
After the writing and the phone call, I came back to check on the still majorly hurting foot, and it's a good thing I did - it had bled through all but the last layer of the gauze. Not just the inner bandage, but all the wrappings. I really wonder by now if it's really infected or just massively inflamed from the ingrowths. Anyways, I took an early shower and cleaned it off, then came back to the room to do a fresh change of antibiotic and bandages.
Speaking of painful nails, I also had the misfortune last night of shoving the nail of my left index finger under the door knob - OUCH! It's bruised under the living area, it did bleed externally, and biting off the dead part of the nail DID make it feel better. But it still hurts and will for a while...
Right now it's time to make the initial youth hostel ratings. Staff is damn cool, being greeted by a young and sarcasm appreciative guy up front, rooms are clean, and lockers are big enough to fit a full backpack into. Toilets are passably clean and not too smelly, but showers are a bit slow to warm up and are limited in spray range, but pressure is good and they get the floor out to the clothing and towel store area wet. Both of these are in one lockable compartment which is nice. The only sucky thing here is security - rooms have no or few keys given out, and not everyone gets one so the room is always unlocked. Lockers are on the coin deposit system - deposit a 2 euro coin to get the door to lock, get your coin back when you open the door. No coin, no lock. Good enough, I guess. I'm not going to risk leaving more than a wet towel out, though. Breakfast rating comes tomorrow.
Tehre's another noisy group of German kids here, this one from Bremen. I got the fun of teaching this girl who was being teased by the guys (who were saying that she looked like a cleaning lady) how to say "fuck off" in English. I think I created a monster because she ran off screaming it at everyone she could find.
Dinner was around 6:30 at one of the Imbißes and was cheap - €4,70 for a spicy vegetarian döner and a 1/2L Weißbier, tho the beer kept giving my lower jaw/lymph nodes pain. Weird as hell. Had a chocolate covered Marzipan Snowball for dessert too about 20 min. later, after a brief walk around the street with the Imbiß. The street has a pair of book stores, one historical, the other regular with a discount section, and has a stairway up to get to the walls.
Snowballs. Not the crap made by hostess, but fried sweet dough traditionally covered in powdered sugar and big. The dough is crumbly, not like a funnel cake, and they're great. I also don't want to know what goes into making them, so if you know don't tell me.
Met some German/Turkish tourists at the Imbiss and ended up seeing them again at the town hall. Unfortunatley there were some other young drunken German tourists there. Fratboys may have met their match in this crowd which had a wheelbarrow full of beer bottles, all emptied, probably in the last couple hours, and all broken when the barrow lost balance on the stairs.
What was I waiting for at the town hall? The tour by the night watchman, of course! Even though the books lied about the cost (it was €1 more expensive than listed), this one hour tour is well worth the cost. It's led in German or English (depending on when you go) by a guy in period dress who carries a Halberd and a candle lantern. It's very entertaining, a bit educational, and totally the great kind of medieval kitsch that I live for. I think I'll go tomorrow night for the German tour, as he said there were some differences. After the tour itw as back to the hostel to write down this behemoth and everything is now caught up to speed.
Tomorrow's plans barring serious foot problems (though I've found two Apothekes which is good for a town of 3000 people) are the crime museum, the art museum, and walking the city walls as well as maybe the other major church.
Fast stats:
Rolls of finished film: 7
Euros spent Today: Under 20
Number of weapons stores found: 3
Number also selling armor: 3
Number also selling pornographic resin statues: 1
Number of times getting lost earlier trying to find hostel: 2
Number of train changes: 1 -
End Part One
2002-08-19 13:20:41
13.08.02
16.56
The last day in München was about 50/50 good and bad. It was good because I got a lot done in the afternoon - the Schatzkammer and the BMW museum.
The Schatzkammer has a lot of precious bejewelled things, ranging from crowns to tea sets, all behind pressure sensitive glarm glass (this fact is not hidden, there are tags and wires visible everywhere). These works of art are also old enough that they require dim lighting, making photos from a regular camera near impossible to take well. Guides with lots of pictures are available for €3, which I didn't feel like paying. I also didn't like the ticket seller who first rang me up at full price when I asked for student and then gave me a ticket for the Residenzmuseum which is in the same building, but does not share entry passes. As for the exhibits themselves, I realize that these are national treasures and great works of art and appreciate the craftsmanship and fiscal value of these pieces, but almost all of them were just way too damn ugly. Majorly ugly. Fugly. Damn fugly.
After the Schatzkammer, I walked a little around the Odeonzplatz, took photos of some statues, and gave my feet a break by ducking into a large yellow church which had about half of its interior under construction.
A short hop and slightly longer walk to the Olympiaplatz (yes, where the 1976 Olympics were) and there was a bigass BMW factory, the famous BMW office with suspended floors, and the asskicking BMW museum. All I can say is that if you're ever in München, GO!!!! Yes some (95%) of the videos are outdates. Yes, lots of obnoxious parents bring their bratty kids. Yes it has films showing with nothing to do with cars.
So fucking what? This place rocks too much to care. Over 5 floors show BMW history from their first motorcycles to Formul-1 racing (yes, they have a Formul-1 car. Yes it is sexy. Yes I took pictures.) Lots of fun and something in the museum will make you drool. I also got my first souvenier here - a sew-on BMW patch.
After that it was about 5PM: I went back to the hostel, searched the books, met the three new people for the night (2 loud italians, 1 spanish dude), and jotted a couple places down to go to dinner at. THe first was listed by LP as being near the hostel, and to the book's credit it was. The weather was also seeming to be in my favor, as by the time I'd left the BMW museum it was a bit cool, cloudy, and windy, but very comfortable and dry. As I got to 1-1.5 blocks from the restaurant, it began to rain. Not heavily but enough. I hurried over to where this cafe was to see a sign on the door: closed 4 August - 19 August. Yup, SOL. There was an arabic place nearby, but the only veggie thing I could easily recognize on the menu was humous - for €7,70. Screw that and onto the U-Bahn for take 2: A veggie place near the Jospehsplatz.
THis brings me to an important revelation: Whoever popularized the expression "The trains in Germany run on time" forgot to include the corrollary: "But when they're late, they're damn late!" The U2 line to the Josephsplatz was 20 min. late. It was worth it, though...mostly.
THe food was great. They had sort of a deep dish pizza without sauce and with a whole wheat not-quite-the-best-but-still-damn-good crust, and the price was very right (2 giant slices for €6,60) but they screwed me on my drink - €6,40 for a 1-L bottle of apple-mango juice which was thoroughly refreshing but mebbe not worth that much...and yes, you readit right. I made it three days in München without getting a beer. Tonight may be a different story, though...
Anyways, my hand is starting to hurt. Other than the two busted consoles here at the hostel in Rothenburg, there is only one terminal with limited access (read: broken javascript) in the city for public use at the tourist information center. At least it's free, even if it is slow, has loading errors, and resets every 5 minutes. TIme to call MaD and Xeno! -
A fast post from Berlin...
2002-08-18 11:04:57
Yes, Berlin. Things have changed a bit, but there won't be any new posts out of me until I get home - Rothenburg didn't have any net access and because of that I've been journalling by hand. I'll type everything (currently 21+ pages of hand written entry) when I get home in order to keep continuity. I am alive, doing well, and quite sunburned, and I will post again when getting home. In the meantime, keep reading and waiting...
I'll also be doing a quick journal primer soon after ending the European Adventures, since people from the Strobl program will be reading new as well as potential others...and it'll just help to clear everything up for everyone. Bye for now!
JOURNAL: iserlohn
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