I was going to write about school, but school is pretty much the same. Instead, I'm going to write about my mini-vacation! I've decided that to keep myself sane and entertained, I'm going to try to take at least one trip every month, either inside Germany or outside of it. Luckily, travel is fairly cheap. This weekend, I took advantage of 25 Euro tickets anywhere in Germany and went to Weimar and Erfurt, an extremely historical tour.
I made the extremely smart decision to night train it to Weimar, so that I wouldn't have to deal with two different hostels. I left Kiel at 11:21 at night, and got to Hamburg about an hour and twenty minutes later, where I had to wait until 3:30 am for my next train. Lesson: always always always check your layover times. I hung out in the McDonalds in the Hauptbahnhof for a while because it was the only thing open and offered an hour of free internet. I browsed facebook from my iPod and watched the people who come to the Hauptbahnhof McDonalds at 1:30 in the morning. These people included your usual crazies and homeless guys who get kicked out, but also a disproportionately large number of people in costume. It started with a pair of women, both wearing coats and mostly normal looking. Until I realized one was wearing fishnet stockings (and not much else) and a fake leather cowboy hat. But, really, it's Europe. That's not too weird.
Then the vampire walks in. Not like Edward Cullen sparkly vampire, or Buffy vampire, but Dracula: Dead and Loving It vampire. White face makeup, hair slicked back, cheap fake fancy clothes, a short cape.
And then Robin Hood.
But I digress. I finally caught my train, passed out in my window seat until Göttingen, where I had to transfer at about 6:30 am, then fell asleep again until Weimar. I stepped off the train, threw some extra things into a storage locker and walked into town. Unfortunately, at 8 am, most things were still closed. But I wandered around, grabbed some breakfast and took some pictures. Once the tourist info place opened, I bought a tourist card and a walking tour before wandering off to kill some more time at a castle. Well, just the museum. The palace itself is closed in the winter. As I walked back to the walking tour, it started raining. And the guide never checked our tickets. It was a neat little tour, though the guide spoke too fast for me to catch sometimes and we were battling intermittent gale force winds, rain and cold.
Highlights of Weimar (someday, I'll put up the pictures) include Schiller's grave, Goethe's house, the Bauhaus Museum, and all sorts of history.
I hopped a train (that was twenty minutes late) to Erfurt, found my hostel, texted a friend and made a new friend with the girl sharing my hostel room, who apparently spent two years in Salt Lake City as a teenager. So that was pretty cool. I met up with Katha, a friend in Kiel who's from Erfurt and was home for the weekend, and we went out to the Altstadt (the old, medieval part of the city), with some friends of hers. It was pretty fun and we ended up having a few drinks with a priest and running into some French men who only spoke French and very limited English. Though my "Je ne parle pas Francais" convinced one of them that I did and he insisted on continuing to talk to me even though I very obviously did not know what he was saying.
In the morning, I made a beeline for the Cathedral. And then got predictably side-tracked by the fact that Erfurt is very much a medieval city, full of winding pathways and narrow walks and tallish buildings. But! I found it eventually. I spent a good amount of time at both the Cathedral and the Severi Kirche (Severus Church!), and took a lot of pictures. The Severi Kirche had one of the most ornate and impressive organs I have ever seen, and I've been to a lot of European cathedrals at this point.
Afterward was a full half hour to 45 minutes of an increasingly harried adventure entitled "Why don't they tell you where to find bathrooms in guidebooks!?"
Eventually, I set off on the walking tour recommended by the guidebook, still a little bitter about its lack of bathroom advice. I will have to let the pictures explain, once I get them off my camera. For lunch, I had Thuringer Kloese, or Thuringen Dumplings. They are big old potato dumplings and they come in a gravy like soup. That, and the "selbstgebrautes Bier" (self-brewed beer), made for a very good and German lunch.
Unfortunately, the weather in Erfurt was much the same as it had been in Weimar, so I found myself ducking into buildings or churches, or even simply packing away my camera and wishing I had brought my umbrella. I ended up dodging the rain by going to the Anger Museum. Unfortunately, just an art museum, but worth it for the name. And it had some cool portraiture and furniture set-ups.
Overall, I'd say Weimar was charming, but for one day, it's not worth buying (three day) Tourist Card, though the Goethe Museum is worth every Euro penny. It's a nice little sleepy university town that just happens to have housed almost all German intellectuals ever.
Erfurt was great, but I probably could have spent more time and money there. I'll go back. It has one of the first medieval bridges built with houses on it! Tiny medieval pathways, old churches, one of the biggest Weihnachtsmarkts in Germany, it's a great place.
The train back to Kiel was the smoothest of all the transportation on the trip.
And now, I am drowning in graduate school applications. Argh.
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