Wartburg Schloss

Today we went to the Wartburg Castle.  For those of you who do not know, this is where Martin Luther hid during the time of the Reformation and translated the New Testament from Latin to German - this translation became the basis for the rules of the German language spoken today.  Besides Luther, the castle also has a history involving such significant German figures as Walther von der Vogelweide, as well as St. Elizabeth.  For more information of the history of the castle, see these sites:

English: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/germany/wartburg-castle
German: http://www.wartburg-eisenach.de/frame_sn.htm

We used the Schoenes Wochenende ticket, which lets up to five people travel in the surrounding region for 37 Euros and you can split that between all of the travelers, which is pretty nice.  This can be found through Deutsche Bahn and be bought right from a machine at the station.  I highly recommend looking into it if any of you are thinking about traveling Germany, check to see if it is available in your region.  REMEMBER: it is only available on weekends.

Once in Eisenach, we walked around and followed signs for about 30 min (not including a lunch break) and thought we were lost (we weren't) and ran into a lady to ask directions from.  She ended up telling us that she was going there anyway and we could follow her, which was great.  She took us all the way up the 500 foot mountain. My facebook pictures Elizabeth tagged me in are very deceiving. I was extremely sore, sweaty, and starting to cry inside after walking all the way from the station up a mountain, which was often a steep trek.  You'll see how far away the city was in some of my pics from the castle.

Speaking of which, here they are!

The whole Wartburg

The main central courtyard

A tower in the courtyard

A tapestry

A room where the ceiling was made out of mosaic-ed glass and gold-plated squares

This was on a staircase

This was once a dance hall, a place to hold political events, and lastly a church

Thuringer Wald and Eisenach... where we came from... so far away

I don't remember exactly what this was, but it was very pretty and in the museum

Luther's room

The donkeys (Esel) waiting to give people rides up the mountain

Spazieren

Hi, not much knew going on, but I don't want everyone at home to be missing out on the beauty that I'm finding here everyday.  I went for a walk the other day and took some nice pictures of school and a few of the park right across the street.  Apparently there are wild boars in a pen further into the park or in the area of there, but I've yet to see them.  I think I did hear them my first morning at school though, there were squeals early in the morning coming from the woods.  So for right now, here's just a little beauty for your day. :)

Here is the front of school.  My room is the third window from the ground on the tower part.

This is the backside of school.  There's a tennis table, picnic table, volleyball court, and pretty porch.

The porch part.

The children's play area in the park across the street. I like that it's all natural and not like a lot of ours.

There's a brook that runs through the park along the walking path.

This is the sunrise over the mountains out my window at 4:00am. :)

Next to come: The Wartburg Castle on Saturday!

Fussball + other stories

Those of your in the states actually watching the Fussball games would know that there were several beginning games this weekend and Fussball is extremely important to Germans.  Life practically stops to revolve around the games.  People tell you they will be unavailable certain days at certain times because they have to watch the games.  This weekend  I watched the England vs. US game... which ended 1:1 with some very painful looking accidents and quite a number of poor plays on our part, but apparently England is a fantastic team so we were lucky to tie.

I missed the game with Germany vs. Australia yesterday, which is sad, because this is what the Germans are all about, but I plan to catch more.  Germany won 4:0 I heard.  For the last few days there have been innumerable youths walking the streets tooting extremely loud plastic trumpets and clothed in German flags.  I caught a quick picture of some blaring by my window right before the game:

There is almost constantly a tooting of one of those horns somewhere in the distance, if not directly in your own block at almost all times.  I was walking back from the grocery store about an hour ago and people were blowing these horns just walking down the street.  I think it's kind of annoying, but then I think.... I want one. :)

I tried some very good meat at breakfast for my sandwich (a common breakfast food is a roll, sliced deli meat and cheese, with an egg and juice or coffee on the side) this morning and it was very tasty.  I went to the grocery store after class and found what looked similar and bought it.  I didn't know the word on it (Lachs) but looked it up when I got home and found out it's salmon! I didn't expect it because it is in smallish thin slices like salami or so, but is a light reddish/pink/peach color.  It's smoked I think, although I didn't see that on the package, but I didn't look too hard.  I bought some big pre-made doughy pretzels for a little treat too. They probably won't be as good as the ones you can buy on the street, but I thought I'd try it, plus they were on sale.  I also bought a Hawaiian style pizza here (which has been growing on me a lot) it seems even more readily available to the Germans than it is for us.  I also found an instant soup called "Pirate Soup" that looks promising:

Class has been really cool lately.  The teacher (Frau Schumacher) is very good at using the multiple intelligences that we're taught to use at WLC.  She has group and single projects, she had us write a poem today about anything in the city with a partner.  (My friend Sam and I wrote about Kaufland, it turned out being the funniest poem in the class).  She has us go outside to get information occasionally, employing naturalistic intelligence.  She does a lot of word play things with us too, which is fun and helpful to have a language class taught through linguistic intelligence, but not in a traditional way.  She also works hard to create a lot of visuals for us, or projects that need us to make our own visuals, which is very helpful.

Elizabeth has said she's ready for me to start trying to speak German with her, so we have been yesterday and today.  She's coming along well!  It helps her a lot to have me there to ask questions to or to get corrected on her pronunciation of a word (her Italian keeps peeking through her German).  But we work hard to try to make connections between words to find easy ways to remember them.

I am planning to see Wartburg this weekend (where Luther translated the New Testament during the Reformation).  I'm going to be traveling with a classmate (Kathleen) who is very Catholic so may have not been interested in seeing the castle since it's really mostly relevant to Lutherans, but she is a European History major, so she said she would like to come with.  Don't worry, I'll be sure to have pictures up!

Sorry that my blogs are slowing down a little bit, there's less to say now that I'm not traveling so much.  Hopefully I can start employing more of my train tickets and get some weekend travel in though!

Bis spaeter!