Home

Sorry I didn't post in Frankfurt, not much happened there. Kathleen, Clara, and I met up with Chris for supper and visited the church and the Roman ruins one more time and just walked around the park path back to our car.

The next morning I was out of the hotel by 5:30am and caught a train from the main train station across from our hotel and took it to the train station at the airport.  I was there by 6:15 and that was good because it took a long time to figure out where I had to go.

The plane ride was pleasant, just long.  I thought I would be able to use it as re-english-assimilation-time, but I sat next to a lady from Watertown, and on the other side of me was a German school teacher.  She saw me reading a German book and asked if I was German (in German) so I responded no but that I had been studying in Germany for two months.  We talked much of the way back about school and teaching and my travels to Germany and her travels to the US.  She meets one of her best friends every summer in the US for two weeks and they travel to different states together with her friend's husband.  We talked about the people on the plane and previous plane rides we had.  She was really nice but it did complicate trying to speak to the hostess in English... oops.

Landed safely in Chicago and will finally be returning home to my parents tonight after two days in Milwaukee.  Excited for Mom's corn on the cob.  Some things from home just can never be replaced. :)

Thanks for following.
Signing off with much love,
Eileen

Würzburg and Bamburg

Yesterday I got back from my weekend in Würzburg with Rose.  Rose is a year younger than me at WLC and is another German major.  She has her study abroad this semester too and is going through a program in her town.  It was great to catch up with her and trade stories and pictures of our times in Germany so far.  She gave me a Stadtführung (city tour), naturally in German, and we saw lots of churches as Würzburg has many. We even got to see Walther from the Vogelweide's grave! He was tiny!

Saturday we traveled with her friend Anna to Bamburg which is just a little bit north of Würzburg by a regional train.  We bummed around town as we found out some of the things Anna planned to see were closed, but we did see a beautiful garden that was part of a Residenz there and got to pick up on some southern German dialect.  These were the biggest differences we found:

Jungs = Junge (boys)

Mädels = Mädchen (girls)

and what sounded like Dooda = Tute (plastic shopping bag)

Yesterday we we spent some more time in Würzburg and climbed two mountains.  The first was to see a catholic chapel at the top of one, there was also a restaurant a little ways from there, a little more up and then a little more back down the other side of the mountain where we got something to eat.  We went back down the mountain and climbed the neighboring mountain to see a Festung which is like a fortress.  It even had a bath for horses! It had a garden too, and a really beautiful view of Würzburg.  Here's some pics of the whole weekend:

Rose and I!

We climbed up the mountain through the vineyards!

That was about all for my weekend. I had an ICE back in the afternoon but it got delayed by another train on the tracks and we got about an hour behind which was really annoying.  I still comforted myself with an ice cream cone on my walk home from the Bahnhof. Things weren't so bad then. :)

My oral exam was this morning and I got perfect scores on fluency of speech, vocabulary, interaction with other speaker/s, and had pretty good scores on grammar which is always my trouble spot. Written testing tomorrow and last day of class! It's so exciting to think about seeing everyone again and talk to them in person.  Skype hasn't been very cooperative most of the time so I've limited my calls quite a bit since I had so many issues.

Wednesday I will have some relax time in Frankfurt with Christian again, and then getting up early Thursday to catch my flight.  So excited! I'll probably update about two more times, once in Frankfurt and once when I get home to let you know about my complete trip. Thanks for following!

Dachau Konzentrationslager (Concentration Camp)

We saw Dachau yesterday.  The Dachau concentration camp was the first regular concentration camp under the Nazi Party. It was supposed to be started as a camp for political prisoners.  It became the prototype for many other camps in the Reich.  It was also the first to perform experiments on prisoners.  It was even shut down from fall until spring one year and prisoners were sent to other camps for this time while the camp grounds were used for Nazi training.


I wasn't sure what to expect before I got to Dachau. The still overcast sky somewhat set the mood.  Before you go in you pick up an audio guide if you want one, so you don't see any of Dachau at that point yet so you can't still really believe you're there.  We got our audio guides and walked up the path and all of a sudden on your right behind the trees is the main entrance to the camp.  There was a lot of listening to do here on the audio guide which I appreciated because I wanted time to really think about what I was seeing before I went in.

As we walked through the main gate, the sun came out a little bit, which almost made it even more saddening to think about.  The air was cool, the sun was out... even places as sad and dark as this received beautiful sunshine and light breezes sometimes, just like the rest of us. I guess in my head it's always been overcast looking, I never considered the sun shining somewhere like this.  The main front part was the roll call yard.

After that we walked over to the prisoner barracks.  Political and religious prisoners were kept here. This is a cell.

This was a interrogation and torture room. (below)

Showers and more punishment

The beds, about midway through the war

Imagine that room with beds, times about 12 of those rooms per building... times this many foundations of the buildings... times two because there's another side of the path with just as many empty remaining foundations. This is from the back of the camp facing back towards the central square.

This is the crematory.

This was a gas chamber where they could gas 150 people at a time every 15-20 min

 This is where they fumigated the clothing that could have been infected with disease at the end of the building.  You could have walked through it to get to the next part, but no one did, including myself, we all walked back to the outside and around to the next door.

The audio guide was really good and had a lot of information.  I felt like the whole exhibit was very well laid out and was very respectful to the whole event.  I don't want you to think I didn't have much to say about a these pictures, but there wasn't much I am really happy to share with you in this entry.

One might expect the camp to really be depressing.  I wouldn't say that entirely, it's more just respectful and solemn - almost cemetery like but slightly less restful since there were a good number of people moving about the entire site.  Most people walked around fairly quietly, listening to their audio guides or just looking and reading exhibits.  I half expected to feel creeped out being in some of these buildings or walking on the grounds, like you sometimes do when you walk into a house with a bad history.  I didn't have that feeling at all.  Maybe it would have been different if I was there alone, but I felt like if the place would talk, it would just say, "It's over."

I'm sorry to leave you with a bit of a depressing entry.  I'm not sure if I'll get anywhere else during the week until this weekend, so I might have to leave it at this for a while.  This is the last full week of school and I need to get in some more work on my paper for German that's coming along good so far, I just want to make the most of my sources while I have them.  I'll be leaving for Würzburg Friday after class to visit Rose for the weekend.  Rose is a year younger than me at WLC and is doing her study abroad in Germany this summer too.  She has a friend who's letting me use her bed and bus fare for the weekend so I have no expenses except food!  It'll be nice to have a semi-relaxing weekend where I can just enjoy myself with no rush of anything in particular that I have to see or spending much. I'll let you know!

München

This weekend Elizabeth and I were in Munich!  And yes, there was air conditioning on the trains! Amazing!  We took the train there at 7:00am and arrived around 11:00 by ICE.  Munich is in very southern Germany. I was hoping I would see some Alps as they are supposed to be nearby, but it was so overcast we didn't see a thing.

It was completely good weather until we got there, in which case it down poured probably the worst I've ever stood in.  Luckily, we had checked the weather ahead of time and brought our umbrellas.  We were disappointed to see that there was a large congregation in the middle square and someone up on a stage yelling about homosexual rights. (I'm not sure why, because homosexuality is allowed in Germany). It seemed to be somewhat of a "gay pride" day.  There was also a large parade that was blocking us from getting to one of our stops and we had to wait because we didn't feel comfortable running through the middle of their parade.

In the center square they did break their music and talking long enough for people to watch the famous glockenspiel on the Rathaus at noon.  There's little figures that dance around and even two knights that joust! (Video will be uploaded to facebook shortly). 

We saw St. Michael's church, but only momentarily, I snuck just one picture because they were having a service when we came in.  St. Michael's is the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps.  It's style greatly influenced the buildings built in early German baroque architecture.  It was made in 1583.

We also saw the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) where we heard a MARVELOUS women's choir practicing (video currently loading to facebook).  The church was built in 1468 but was severely damaged during WWII along with much of Munich as the town was very much a "seat" of the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron).  The whole roof had fallen in and one of the two towers had been destroyed and it wasn't fully restored until 1994. Make sure you click them all so you can see them bigger!

We had a traditional lunch of Wiessbraten (whitish brats) on the little rolls.

After lunch, we got out to the Residenz.  It's not quite a palace... but it's much more than just a fancy house too.  This was Elizabeth's pick for a stop, and I was really happy we chose to go here. Not only was it right in the middle of everything we saw, but it was really really gorgeous.  Munich also has a palace, but we didn't get to see it.  I'm really happy with this one though.  I took many many pictures.  Here are just a few:

^Elizabeth was really amazed... and always in front of the camera. :) ^

They even had relic room full of shriveled body parts in fancy boxes... creepy!!!

Not to mention lots of gold fancy things in general.

I could show you pictures forever! Anyhow, we ran into the Munich Orchestra having an outdoor concert that we listened in on while we grabbed a coffee at a nearby shop.  We ran over to the Alte Pinakothek, which is an art museum.  I really loved it.  I could have spent hours and hours there, and I usually don't really spend more than minute in front of a picture at most.  They had the famous Albrecht Durer self-portrait. (Durer is a famous German painter).  I highly suggest the art museums in Munich, they all looked very promising and I really enjoyed the Alte.

Supper was some schnitzel, a bretzl (pretzel), and a bread dumpling in gravy but the gravy was really more like a broth.  It was delicious! Es schmekt ausgezeichnet!

Overall, it was a good day to stay inside.  Our walk back was very unpleasant because of still heavy rain, and after supper the winds picked up really bad.  Sunday we spent at Dachau's Concentration Camp.  I'm going to break it up and make that the next entry, as of course, there is much to say.

Hardenberg Ruins

Today I took a mini-trip with my roommate Elizabeth out to the Hardenberg ruins north of Göttingen about 1.5 hours by bike (in Nörten-Hardenberg).  We heard that some of her friends went there this weekend and got pictures from inside.  Sadly, the only reason they got in was because there was a wedding there.  For us, it was locked and said that it was too dangerous inside in some parts without a guide along.  So we just walked around the outside and took pictures and biked back, stopping to pick up an ice cream on the way.

Since there were no information packets and no tour, I don't have a lot of information on the castle and couldn't even find much online other than a lot of people ran into it when it was closed and just got outside pictures.  Nörten-Hardenberg's tourism part of their website says that it was built in the 11th century and is Baroque-style. The wavy looking rocks you see in some of the pictures are chalk.  The first picture I stole from Wikipedia in my search, but it gives a better overview of the castle than we could take up close.  The rest are mine!  More after Munich this weekend!

A wall lizard (common in Europe, but my first lizard in nature anywhere!) from the chalk rubble. They were everywhere!

Heiß!

The weather has been extremely hot lately. It's been 90's for the last week or so without much breeze or anything. I forgot to tell you that our ICE train from Berlin back to Göttingen had the air conditioning break down in our car.  They were handing us little wet napkins to wipe our sweat with.  Everyone was hot and smelly.  They told us after a good long while to move to other cars because the air conditioning was still functioning in those.  When I was in class yesterday, our teacher was talking about how the majority of ICE trains suffered this problem this weekend, sometimes the whole train, not just one car.  ICE trains are also unable to open windows due to them already being equipped with air conditioning and would have no need to.  Several other regional trains that have air conditioning suffered the same problems as well.

There has been many storms though, constantly changing our weather.  Monday after we got back from the train station a huge thunderstorm broke out and it began hailing slightly with the rain chunks of ice about the size of sea salt.  Last night it started storming around 11 and rained all night long. This morning it has finally been cooler and is again low- to mid-70's.

Classes are beginning to wrap up.  There's school tomorrow, all of next week, and then just Monday and Tuesday the week after that.  Wednesday I'll be on my way to Frankfurt and spending just a little more time in town, possibly with Christian again, and Thursday (exactly two weeks from today, to the hour), I'll be home by now. Everyone has been asking if the time is going fast or slow.  I can't really say it's been either.  It feels just like two months, although my birthday already feels like a very long time ago, and saying goodbye to my friends and family feels extremely long ago.  It will be good to be back home.  Germany is wonderful and beautiful, food is amazing, and the people are (for the most part) very friendly and happy to speak German with you; but I miss seeing the lake.  I haven't seen anything larger than a river since I left Chicago, and I guess that's the first time that's happened in my life.  In Mishicot and Manitowoc, even in Milwaukee, I'm next to the lake and can be there within minutes and at least pass it all the time.  I miss seeing it.

I also miss Wisconsin cheese.  I don't think that can be beat no matter what country you're in.  I'm biased, but still feel like a true Wisconsinite. :)

Attention!

Ok, I just recently figured out how to reduce the number of posts that show up so you don't have huge pages to load if you're using a slower browser. Yay!

Also, I think I have changed it to hopefully allow ANYONE to post a comment, whether you are a Google member or not. So someone should do that and let me know if it didn't work.

Btw - To date, this blog has 81 profile views! Not bad for a month and a half! Thanks!

Post-Berlin

I got back from Berlin yesterday and needed about what felt like 5 hours to shower (it's been 90's here this weekend - the hottest it's been since I got to Germany), and posted my pictures to facebook since that didn't require much typing.

We got to see everything that we wanted to and made it to a couple extras but we only missed one thing we had wanted to see and thought we would have to skip because we forgot about it! Ugh!

Anyway, Saturday we got to see the odds-and-ends of Berlin so we did a lot of running around and using the S-Bahn which is extremely cheap.  A day pass was 6 Euro and three trips were 1.30 Euros.  We first went to see the Reichstag since it was almost immediately by our train station.  The line took about 45 min so we were happy that our train got in earlier than expected.  The Reichstag was opened in 1894 and was used until 1933 when it was set fire by a group of Dutch communists.  Hitler, for all of it's power, glory, and symbolism hardly used it and conducted his meetings at an Opera House.  It underwent some restoration in 1960, but was fully restored after the fall of the Wall and has been in use ever since.  It is the meeting place of the German parliament. 

You might notice that there is a glass dome on top.  This is the main reason anyone comes to see it.  Entrance is free, you just need to wait in line a long time, but then you get to take a giant elevator to the top and you can get an audio guide (free, but we didn't) and you walk the spiral ramp up to the top.  From there you get a lovely panorama of Berlin.  Down below the glass top is a glass window where you can see down into the meetings and watch people below.  It's a really nice way to show that in Germany now people can watch the happenings of their government instead of being secluded from their decisions.  Here are some pictures.

After that, outside of the Reichstag is a small memorial to the 96 politicians that stood up to Hitler and were killed.  It kind of looks like a stone age bike rack, but is very noticeable so it does achieve the attention it deserves.

We saw the Brandenburg Gate of course.

We also stopped by the Memorial to Murdered Jews in Europe.  It is meant for you to walk through and the columns get higher the deeper you go it, making it more disorienting.  It becomes extremely hard to not lose who you are with if they are not directly following you because if they go one row over, they're hard to find again because you only see right in front of you.

We saw the Bundesrat (another important government building) and we saw Checkpoint Charlie of course.

We saw the Topography of Terror which has lots of records of all the persecution of Jews and other groups that Hitler wanted to "cleanse" Germany of.  You could listen to announcements by him and some of the other commanders saying that they want to "cleanse" the German people and that it was for the good of everyone that "these kinds of people" wouldn't reproduce and weaken the population. It was scary to hear someone say all those kinds of horrible things and realize that these orders were carried out.  The Topography of Terror Museum is located on grounds that were once used by the SS and Stasi so it's held an important location for a long time.  Outside of it is a good sized section of the wall. 

The next day we went to Museum Island and saw a number of museums for just €7 for all of them at student pricing! YAY! We saw the National Gallery which had lots of paintings and sculptures. I was surprised to walk into a room and see the famous "The Thinker!" Sadly researching it, I don't think it was the original, it is just a caste. I must have been too excited at the moment to fully read the description.

We saw Pergamon Museum which has whole original sections of temples from all over the Middle east, Greece, and Asia. Beats me how they just walked away with the face of a temple...

We skipped the Bode Museum because it sounded like it had a lot of the same things we were seeing in other museums minus a large coin collection which I just didn't really care if I saw or not. We did get over to the New Museum and Old Museum.  The New Museum has a huge Egyptian display which I loved.  They even had the bust of Nefertiti but they didn't allow pictures of it, so here's one I stole from the internet! She really was gorgeous.

I saw lots of sarcophagi and Egyptian tools.  They had a whole floor to prehistoric man. My favorite part though was the moose skeleton.

There was lots of pottery, large ancient sculptures, beautiful tools and jewelry, but if our feet weren't falling off by then, we walked over to the Berlin Cathedral which was just stunning.  We climbed to the top of the dome to get another gorgeous view of Berlin.

We saw the zoo and aquarium yesterday, but I don't wanna bog you down with pictures! Your browsers might have taken forever to load this page as it was. I think I have like 177 pics on facebook and I also found a way to link my facebook to the blog on the left. Feel free to check it out as always!  Munich on Saturday with Elizabeth!