Christmastime in the City

Multiple cities, obviously.

Allerheiligen

Allerheiligen is All Saints' Day. I'd forgotten that was today—Facebook has updates about the word counts my friends have already reached for NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month, of course), or whether or not they are honoring No-Shave November—but not how All Hallows follows Halloween. I already forget what made me remember.

The only time I ever observed All Saints' Day was—naturally, I think—the fall of my year in Germany. The first month we were in Freiburg, we took intensive German classes at a language institute located by the university. At the end of October, when the Wintersemester began, we began an "Aufbau" course at the institute, in the evenings after our university and program courses were over, to help build up our writing skills and prepare us for those scourges of the German university system: Referate (presentations) and Hausarbeiten (term papers). We didn't get out of Aufbau until the dark of 8 o'clock, if I remember correctly.

The weekend of Halloween (it fell fortuitously on a Friday that year) I made into a long one. That Thursday, I lugged my suitcase to Aufbau, then rushed right to the train station after class to catch the first of several regional trains that would take me, cheaply and leisurely (slowly), to Aschaffenburg, my expatriate aunt, and her German wife. They visited our family in Michigan almost every year, sometimes with my cousins, sometimes without, but I'd never been to visit them. At the end of the weekend, I was happy I had gone because of all the good food (meat dishes! all my friends were vegetarian! also Kaffee und Kuchen in kleinen Cafés!) and the first cats I'd encountered in Germany (living in their lovely penthouse, only friendly on their enclosed balcony) and the fact that my aunt had made me speak German for a significant portion of the weekend.

On Halloween—which is an entirely American holiday—I missed a wild party back in Freiburg, which I hadn't really thought about beforehand, and didn't really care about once I did. My aunt, her wife and I celebrated in our own way, going on a walking tour about the witch-hunting history of their town. I remember the group was big, and it was hard to hear everything the tour guide said (of course in German). It was also very cold, and long. But that meant I got to see a lot of the city under cover of darkness. Sometimes my aunt or her wife would fill me in on what I had missed, or add another detail that hadn't been mentioned. Afterward we went to a bar. They had beers, I had an Apfelschorle. Wie immer.

The next day, I think, was the day we went in to Frankfurt to sightsee a little, eat some cake, have dinner, and see an English play, with one of their other Esel-friends and one of my German cousins. (Esel means donkey, but it stands for English-Speaking Ladies, which is a group of friends that meets every other week or so.) What I remember most clearly is visiting the cathedral (pictured above). The building is red stone, like Freiburg's Münster and so many other churches in southern Germany. I'm not particularly fond of the red, for whatever reason, but I liked this fairly plain cathedral, which was almost entirely destroyed in the war. Part of it was the iridescence in the plain, un-stained glass, which shone a grey-blue in the waning light. Part of it was that my aunt studied the Middle Ages (Middle English in particular), and both she and her wife were always telling me stories about the building of the church, or the tale of the saint in this fresco, and always, always searching for another depiction of the Death of Mary. It's my aunt's pet subject, part of the reason she might like to get a second PhD, I think, and her wife knew all about it too, after all those years.

As we were leaving, my aunt stopped to light a candle, or else stopped to say something about not lighting a candle. But I think she did, because that's the thing to do when you're in a church, to leave your little coin and light a candle for the dead. By then, my grandpa, her father, had been gone just over four years; her mother, just one year more than that. I think it was as she was getting her wallet out that she mentioned they had finally left the Catholic church when Ratzinger became pope because of his strong views on homosexuality, not to mention all the rest. They were married five or six years before, in a civil union recognized by the German state, but not the church they were both raised with, on either side of the Atlantic.

Before we drove out to Frankfurt that afternoon, we met her wife's parents at the cemetery where much of their family is buried. I don't think we stayed to hear the priest speak—over loudspeaker, they said is how it's done now—since I have no memory of this event, just that I was told it was always boring. Maybe I did, and it just wasn't memorable. I do know that I met her parents, she probably went to the graves quickly before everything started, and then we were off to pick up the Esel-lady and head into Frankfurt like the rest of the not-so-religious (across the border from Bavaria, in Protestant Hessen, where Frankfurt is, I think it was a big sale day).

That was already three years ago. I don't remember it so well. I do remember the dinner they cooked, maybe the next day, maybe the day before. Chicken roasted in Calvados (apple brandy from Normandy) and stuffed with apples, which came out of the chicken after cooking as the most delicious chickeny-applesauce, I don't care if you think that's gross, it was the best thing. I remember how, coming down from the loft that serves as the office, after checking my email, I slipped so quickly on the marbles steps in my socks and went boom boom boom the rest of the way down. It was high up, and it was so slippery and fast, and I was badly shaken. My aunt poured me a taste of the Calvados—had already poured it before I fell, really—and her wife rushed to get some little tube of something for me to smell ("Petra and her homeopathic remedies"). I held the railing tightly, scared, every time I went down stairs for probably two years.

This year, they came the second half of August, so as not to miss the family reunion. My boyfriend and I were busy packing, and working, and moving, and seeing friends who were only in-state a little while. I only saw them that one afternoon in the park, with all the rest of my aunts and uncles.

And now this Allerheiligen, I'm remembering my aunt. Not my father's sister, but my aunt, Petra, who I never thought to label—she was always just Petra—until after she was gone, when I began to recite to myself, over and over, in case someone at work asked me why I looked unhappy, trying to figure out what would be best to say. My aunt in Germany died. The funeral was today. The funeral was yesterday. I couldn't be there. Most of our family couldn't be there for my aunt, who so suddenly was left alone.

I always thought of Petra with a smile on her face.

ÖÖÖsterreich Is a Great Name

So, this time last year I was 21. And instead of just getting back from Pittsburgh a few days before my birthday—which was weeks ago, but this post took me forever to write—my brother and I returned from Austria. Yes, lovely Austria. Three days later, we went to Paris, and as those links suggest, I actually wrote about Paris at the time. Austria only got one post, in which I did not even mention that the dogs who had inspired it were frolicking in front of the Hofburg, the palace that served as the Habsburgs' primary winter residence and now houses the President of Austria, let alone that they were Viennese.

Here are but a few of our favorite Wiener. Yes. People from Wien. Vienna. Sorry. I'm talking about the dogs. Dogs are people too!

Sidenote: Emma, who is, like me, actually a cat person, also wrote about dogs recently. If 'recently' means in her last post, which was posted weeks ago, that is.

Anyway, I'm trying to remember what I liked so much about Vienna, because it was certainly a good time. Part of it was the weather. Blue skies do a lot when it's been rainy for days, even if the clouds move at a rapid pace and it gets a little chilly when they're blocking the sun. The food was good.

John and I had Sachertorte with Melange, pictured above, because that's so typically Viennese. And Melange is a certain kind of coffee, not the drug also known as "spice" in Dune. In case you were confused? No, I know, this is stupid. Sachertorte is two layers of chocolate cake with some apricot jam in the middle and then a yummy, dark chocolate icing. It comes with cream. The cream is so good. Coffee, meh. Still not a fan. But with enough chocolate, it almost starts to make sense.

This cake was better, though. It was John's best cake of Europe. And he was there for five weeks, eating cake with me, our friends in Munich, and my aunt. Especially my aunt. She suggested or produced Kaffee und Kuchen like every afternoon I was with her in Europe. Kaffee und Kuchen is high on the list of Best Things About Europe. If I had more photos of Kuchen, I would have made a Kaffee-und-Kuchen post long ago. Anyway, this cake. It's called Pandatorte, I guess because it's dark and light, and as you can see, it was mainly creamy chocolately deliciousness. I think we may have had this, and not the Sachertorte, at the Hotel Sacher or whatever, but I'm not really sure anymore. We were definitely underdressed, wherever we were.

You know what, I just want to let that piece of cake tell you everything about Vienna. Vienna is great. Vienna is tasty. We had Schnitzel. Oh man, Schnitzel. I love meat that is breaded and fried.
Other things that are good about Vienna: I like the Hofburg. We hung out in the gardens and read books—John, something for fun, me, the Aeneid auf Deutsch for this Language and Culture of the Ancient World II course I took for some reason (oh right, because there was almost no work and I was compensating for usually only studying the Greeks, because fuck the Romans). I also read Dorothy Dunnett, of course.

We went to the Schmetterlinghaus ( = butterfly house) and saw the biggest butterfly species in the world. It's scary. Ugly and scary. And right below this paragraph.

We saw Gustav Klimt's The Kiss at the Belvedere museum, and other paintings by him, and other things that I don't remember, but Klimt was cool. Then, I think I got to have Grießnockerlsuppe at the Belvedere café!! Grieß is wheat semolina, and Grießnockerl are basically dumplings made of Grieß, and then you put them in a Suppe, or really a broth, and then you are eating this tasty but rather plain soup of broth and starch and I love it, even though there are little green things floating in it. Every time I try to type 'broth' I type 'brother.' Or maybe I had Frittatensuppe or whatever that's called, which is broth with shreds of pancake in it, but I think that this was a time I got to have Grießnockerl. John wasn't impressed by it, but that's okay with me.

If this is just going to devolve into inane discussions of food that display my unsophisticated palate, I guess I'll post the following photo.

Above is Karlskirche, which is at the U-Bahn stop (Karlsplatz) John and I took, or at least switched lines at, every day as we came into the city from the hostel. It's obviously baroque and somewhat silly-looking, but unlike the Berliner Dom, which I find incredibly stupid, I kind of like it. The last evening we were in Vienna, John and I—here's the lame part—got McDonald's to go and ate along the reflecting pool. We weren't the only ones doing so, either. There were a ton of people there, and those chicken nuggets were good. Sometimes, you are tired, and hungry, and just want something easy. McDonald's is so easy.

Another thing I liked about Vienna was our hostel. We stayed at Hostel Hütteldorf, which I remember as being a Hostelling International hostel, but the website doesn't seem to say that. Either way, it was the cheapest I found, and for that, we were farther out from the city than Schloss Schönbrunn, which is the old summer palace, but not too far, and it was kind of nice to ride the U-Bahn into the city every morning. (Weirdly, the Untergrund-bahn is above ground for a while outside the city, which continues to confuse me.) The biggest downside about the hostel is that it's on a hill. That hill is horrible when you have luggage on your back, especially when you can't find the hostel, and it's still bad after long days of walking. But it is really nice to see all the green hills and the open sky when you get out of the U-Bahn station. And the view from our window was pretty. Sunset-light on churches is great.

Two more things, I think. One. Schloss Schönbrunn, Empress Maria Theresia's answer to Versailles, is lovely "Bavarian" yellow (that's how my mom identified her ideal color for our living room) and much cheerier than Versailles. The gardens are nice. The zoo is great. It's the oldest zoo in the world (having begun as the imperial menagerie!), and they have great polar bears and an awesome Rainforest House to boot. There's a lot more about the zoo in my Vienna Picasa album. And more photos in general.

Two. This is what I've been trying to verbalize for weeks, but I've failed to figure it out and so have babbled about food and nonsense for who knows how many paragraphs. I certainly can't be bothered to count them. I really liked how it felt to be in Wien—in my head, Vienna's almost always Wien. I can't quite explain how it felt anymore, but I liked it. I liked the avenues, and the smaller streets, and the sky. The buildings, of course. At the city center, there are horrible crowds sometimes, but there's still space. That's part of what I like about Berlin—after a lot of time spent in smaller places, it's nice to have a change—but the space in Wien isn't like Berlin's at all. But I like how it feels both places. When I applied to being an English teaching assistant in Austria for a year, I was excited that I would be in the vicinity of Vienna—oh, bad alliteration—and would be able to visit more than once. Alas, it was not to be.

Golden night city! It just feels so good. Yes, John's wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, but I blurred it...artfully.

After Vienna, John and I went to Salzburg, but let's just leave that story to my photo captions.

Zuhause = Home

One thing I had a lot of trouble with at the beginning in Germany was groceries. All the brands were new, the apple varieties were different to some extent, and I didn't know exactly what words were being used when I was asked if I wanted a receipt or not. Buying your food is such a basic part of life, but I didn't have a routine or the vocabulary for it in Freiburg.

We talked about reverse culture shock at the beginning of the year, and as the AYFers started disappearing from our lives in waves at the end of July, news of culture shock would filter through on Facebook. I don't think I experienced culture shock coming to Germany, really. Of course it was different, but it wasn't that different. I thought coming home would be the more earthshaking event of the two, because not instinctively knowing how basic things work in your own country, city, house would be so alienating.

But by the time I came home, we'd already spent a fair amount of time in Freiburg brainstorming the mundane things like light switches and doorknobs that are so different than in Germany. In Frankfurt, there were two men letting us onto the tunnel-hallway-thing to the plane and they both sounded like Detroit. Nine hours, two bad movies, and one good one and we were on solid ground again. Signs were in English. My family was with me. We got on the expressway.

My instinct was to order my lunch-dinner-post-plane-meal in German, so I tried to get my mom to order for me but ended up doing it myself. Sitting in the Secretary of State at Alter and Mack felt really exciting to me despite the long lines or maybe because of the crowd. The way the clouds are so fluffy and expansive in the wide Michigan sky continues to amaze me. Being able to drive is so convenient, and being able to buy alcohol legally in America feels cooler than I ever would have expected, considering I don't really like it and could buy it legally all year in Europe. The sentimentality for farmland and the history of immigration and the frontier and proper (Great) lakes and so many things American that grew while I was away hasn't died down since my return, although it does not extend to parts of Ann Arbor like the masses of drunk football fans in awful yellow shirts or the unnecessary air conditioning in so many of my classrooms. I also feel a little out of things a lot of the time, like I'm in a fog and don't really connect to anyone or anything.


Mainly, though, I feel like I came back to the same place I had left (except with Obama stickers on basically every car in this city now), nothing really has changed (even though plenty has), and Germany was probably a dream that never happened. Most things seem normal. But the grocery stores here are a problem now. I can't handle this Kroger which is not organized like the one I grew up going to and does not sell the food I ate in Germany. It feels so foreign and yet not, and I hate it.

1. Double rainbow to the east of the city, viewed from my street. Our German friends got great pictures of it over Conner, on their way from I-94 to our house.
2. Huron with a heavy blanket of clouds.

Morgen = Tomorrow

Morgen also means 'morning.' My morning starts so soon, because I have to be on a train at 5:52 am.This photo is from my last late afternoon train ride for who knows how long. I was in Aschaffenburg and then Berlin and I saw great movies and ate delicious things and saw the gates of Babylon.

Now I'm in Freiburg and tomorrow I'm in Michigan.

Roh-Rohrzucker = Never What I WantBecause raw cane sugar is not brown sugar.

This is what life is like right now.

You decide to make cookies, because you want something to eat while you work on your paper, and why buy them when they're only going to sell you six in a package? That's ridiculous. So you will make 60 cookies with your almost-exactly-the-right-amount of flour. And you will do it right, which means buying new brown sugar even though you can't possibly use that much sugar in the next 3 weeks. But the store is out of brown sugar, not that brown sugar in Germany is actually proper brown sugar. So you buy the fair trade brown sugar cubes with "typical caramel note" and figure, typische karamelle Note, maybe these are actually brown sugar!

You leave the butter out when you get home, because, again, you're doing this right for once. You let it get soft. You make dinner. You enjoy your bacon, even if the mashed potatoes seem a little too milky and you are sick of eggs. You think about how you will miss the Danish bacon but not the stupid, ridiculously thin other bacon. Then you start the cookies.

And you learn that brown sugar cubes are very difficult to crush. Very, very difficult. And the sugar is still harder than brown sugar at home. Packed. Ha. Impossible.


The cookies take so much longer than anticipated. The day is gone. And you're out of foil, and baking paper, and the overdone cookies stick to the baking pan you used as a cookie sheet.

So much for good planning. This is what life is like right now.

I was hoping German had a crazy word for 'entropy.' I was disappointed.

My room is impossible. No, that's not true. I've cleaned it two or three times in the past month and every time it is, to me if to no one else, the pinnacle of organization and neatness, even if there are little fly corpses hidden at the corners of my desk and the dust bunnies under the bed have gone rabid. But I tidy it: my papers become two or three manageable piles, the clothes return to the closet, rugs and blankets become flat. For a few days everything goes back exactly where it belongs, but soon I just have to leave my sweater out on the chair because I'll wear it again tomorrow and then there are bags on the floor and dishes on the desk and my adorable stuffed guinea pig from IKEA is dangerously close to falling prey to those dust bunnies.

I'm not going to eradicate the dust bunnies (or Wollmäuser = wool mice I think) because in just twelve short days I move out of this room, so I might as well wait till all the junk's out of the way. I cannot wait for all the junk to be out of the way. I look around the room and immediately start cataloging: this goes home, this was sold to a next-year-student, this isn't worth my precious transatlantic weight allowance, this book should probably be shipped, and these papers. These papers. They have to be sorted and recycled or else packed away and there are library books in stacks that I need to read, or reread, or not read. I have to finish this schoolwork, but the walls are starting to close in and seeing all my things safely in bags and boxes would leave more room for me to breathe.

Somewhere along the way, the way the sun works has changed and the sunlight never really spills in my solitary floor-length window all the way to my kitty-corner bed anymore. My desk is stuck in the relative dark and my room never feels warm but when I run to catch the Straßenbahn I realize it's summer, even if it rains every other day and even if my eyes are chained to an increasingly misbehaving computer. I think it needs a break from the Lower East Side, from German spell check, from lolcats and Wikipedia and taking me to so many websites while simultaneously fighting with Microsoft Word to keep its consciousness. It's really acting out: if I want to work on my desk (and I do!) the only way it holds onto the internet is at a neck-stiffening angle.

I ran out of peanut butter this week and have been debating whether or not to buy another. There's not that much time left—but in that time I will eat many more apples that would benefit from some protein. I will miss these tiny peanut butter containers decorated in American stars and stripes that are so easy to bring when you travel, even for just one person. I think life is easier for just one person in Germany, or at least groceries are. Living alone is harder here for those of us who are appalled or frightened by bugs. You have to open your windows and there aren't any screens. There's no one here to capture or kill for me so I have to mount a solo attack on the bigger flies every night. They've got nothing on the bugs I faced last summer. Those were too big for squishing.
Meerschweinchen = little sea pig
(And if Russia is Egypt, America's the Promised Land, and the Lower East Side is the desert between, World of Our Fathers is something like the Torah of secular American Judaism. Or maybe that's going too far.)

eine Theorie = A Theory

Over the last year (though this problem has also plagued me in the past) I have become convinced that

computer screens

keep you

awake.

Lately, awake forever. Even after the computer's off. I can lie for hours in the dark and become more and more awake. Maybe it's not just the computer. Probably it's something to do with 33 pages of papers to go, 20 days till I'm out of this room forever, 5 weeks and 1 day till I reenter the US of A, 1 more year of college and then everything's real.

But computers. Overstimulation by the LCD. The dangerous paradox of trying to make time stand still and also speed to the end of the countdown. A combination of the two.

I'm exhausted.

P.S. I posted my photos from Spain! They're on my Picasa site. I love Spain. Time for bed.

P.P.S. And then the guy in the next WG started playing his electric guitar.

There are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!

A friend of mine is worried that next year back in Ann Arbor is going to be a lot more boring than this year in Deutschland. I think everyone is. But let's look on the bright side:

My current sleep schedule will have me going to bed at 9 pm and getting up at 6 am. Imagine the possibilities!

Gas stoves! Being able to turn down the heat and have it mean something instantly!

We won't have to measure butter in measuring cups and get our hands all greasy or use complicated fraction methods involving grams to sticks and then ending up just eyeballing it—because butter is marked! With tablespoons!

There are so many cats in America!
(Sorry Fievel, it was a lie. Thank God. And thanks, Mommy, for making that song stuck in my head whenever I think about Jewish immigration.)

Unfortunately, the cheese is much better here, the parmesan is cheaper, and the only problem cheese-wise is that cheddar isn't ubiquitous.

BUT THE EASE OF BAKING. Real brown sugar. Not having vanilla brought across the ocean.

Come on, guys, it'll be all right. And maybe in a few years Ryanair will finally work out the £6 transatlantic flights, which will make Greece or any other place serviced by a budget airline only like £36 away on a good day. Plus getting to New York City first.

Paris At Night

= a poem by Jacques Prévert, who is a French poet that I like. And took a whole class on. And some of whose poetry I performed on stage.

Paris At Night
Trois allumettes une à une allumées dans la nuit
La premiére pour voir ton visage tout entier
La seconde pour voir tes yeux
La dernière pour voir ta bouche
Et l'obscuritè tout entière pour me rappeler tout cela
En te serrant dans mes bras.

=

Three matches one by one struck in the night
The first to see your face in its entirety
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me of all these
As I hold you in my arms.

For the record, this trip to Paris was less romantic than last time around, although that doesn't say much (see said goodbye to my boyfriend of 5 days, slight pining was involved). But this poem has an appropriate title, if not appropriate content, and night! pictures!

1. Le Louvre, mon préféré.

2. La Seine from a bridge.
3. La Seine from la Tour Eiffel, Sacré Coeur in the distance.
4. Requisite shot up the towers' legs, with twinkly lights (seizure-inducing when on the tower as they go off).

I love Paris (in the rain)

Four years ago today, I got four stitches in my finger, said goodbye to my boyfriend of five days, and left for France for two weeks. It was my first time in Europe and the most expensive thing I'd ever bought (with money I didn't have yet). Most of the numbers have gotten much bigger since then.

Four years ago, grey skies couldn't take the sparkle away from Europe. This may sound rather spoiled of me, but grey skies and constant rain ruined Prague—and the stupid, creepy man in the hostel, but that's another story. Looking at my old Paris pictures, I realized that the first day was cloudy. My pictures of the Louvre had terrible lighting. And yet the Louvre was my favorite building in Paris and I would have happily spent hours in its courtyard.

I don't remember if I decided Paris was my favorite city while I was there or after I came home. I do remember deciding with my friend Kitty that we should come back in two years (with our boyfriends) and enjoy Paris all over again. It never once occurred to me—nor has it yet—that I wouldn't go back. Because I would come back somday, there was no rush to experience everything. Napoleon's Tomb and the Musée Rodin? How about a picnic and a nap in front of the Eiffel Tower instead. Versailles? Next time!

I loved the fancy metalwork outside the windows (I always want to say 'balconies' but that is clearly wrong), and the trees against the buildings, and the history. The way so many buildings were lit up gold at night. The convenience of the Métro. I still love subways, although Paris' is more complicated and older than others I've been in since. The buildings are still lovely, even if after so much time in the stucco of southern Germany, the grey and tan stone seems rather cold.

It's funny to think how much I loved the view out my hotel window—mainly because it was my view onto a Parisian street and how exciting is that! Watching this video I took as it rained on my last full day in Paris, I love the view all over again.

Yes, I did go to the trouble of holding my iPod headphones up to the camera speaker to get Regina Spektor's song in the video.

I really didn't mind that rain, despite my lack of attractive rain jacket (17-year-old self, why have we not remedied that?), because it meant I could now sing along and mean it. My brother John was actually disappointed for the same reason when none of the rain forecast for our weekend showed up.

I wasn't. Loving Paris in the sun is nice too.

1. Me, age 17, from a video taken in the courtyard of the Louvre.
2. Les Champs-Elysées from atop the Arc de Triomphe.
3. Paris in the rain, July 4, 2005.
4. The café from Amélie, June 14, 2009.

Overbooked

Yup, that's me. Overbooked and overwhelmed and overworked—maybe overworked is stretching it. Maybe underworked would be more accurate. I am exhausted because I've been traveling and I am overwhelmed because I haven't worked enough and too many things are due on Wednesday, the day after my birthday, and then on Thursday I catch a train before 7 am to Paris.

Paris! Of all the cities I've been to, it's still my favorite. Maybe that's because it was my first trip to Europe and everything was amazing and I was sixteen and ready to fall in love with things. Hopefully I still think it's great, because if I get up at 6 am on my post-birthday weekend and I am not blown away by the beauty of everything, I'm going to be disappointed.

My brother John is still here. He spent a week in Freiburg and then accompanied me to Munich, Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and all 7.5 hours back to Freiburg. He is sick, and he is tired, and lately we are only in Freiburg in between the long weekends and the breaks. Only in Freiburg for my classes and my homework and my presentations and essays.

I'm really thrilled with Freiburg right now, as I'm sure you can imagine. (No! Get me away from all this responnsibility!) At the same time, I don't want to go anywhere else for a while, unless it involves staying in one place and doing next to nothing. At least I still like trains. I really like trains. And Paris! Plus, after Paris, I have no hostel reservations and no train tickets (except for the accidental SECOND Freiburg to Frankfurt Flughafen ticket I bought for John...anyone need to get to Frankfurt Flughafen from Freiburg between June 16th and July 15th??? Only thirty Euro!). I have nothing set in stone until I get on a plane on August 17th and fly home.

Plenty of time to relax. Or, uh, write 30 more pages auf Deutsch.

Hund = dog

= please can I have one right now?
I am 100% devoted to cats. Seriously. But in Europe, there are dogs everywhere: on the streets, in the parks, along the rivers, and in the restaurants. (Usually on the street, but still.) They're well-behaved, they don't need leashes, and they accompany their owners so many places.
Most importantly, dogs are basically always happy! Look at him:
So cheerful. Even though he's ugly, he's adorable. I want one. Not this one. But come on, life would be so happy.
Eleven weeks from now I'll be at home with my dog. Or at the Secretary of State, getting a new driver's license. Or at the dentist. Hey Mommy, did you ever make me an appointment?
Point being: Dogs!

Schönes Wochenende

Ein Schönes Wochenende is a great weekend. Also a type of train ticket you can buy on weekends good for up to 5 people for one day of the weekend and until 3 am or 6 am or something the following morning. The catch is that you can only use regional trains—no ICEs (InterCity Express).

My brother John and I had ein ganz (= totally) schönes Wochenende, though we took ICEs (and a TGV from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart!*) on the way to lovely München on Wednesday morning, where we spent our time with family friends who live there. We drove down toward the Austrian border near Salzburg and spent two days near Königssee and Berchtesgaden (hey! I read about that when I was writing a term paper on the Anschluss of Austria!). AKA Alps! I have no time for being awake right now. So, pictures!

*I was excited because we always learned about trains de grand vitesse ( = high speed trains) in French class but ours was switched to regional on my France trip after 11th grade to save money when the dollar took a dive and our trip got more expensive. It was not very exciting, though.

1. The Jugendstil (= Art Nouveau) Münchner Volksbad on the River Isar, and bathers along the shore.
2. View out of my room at the bed and breakfast in Schönau am Königssee, complete with Watzmann mountain.
3. Post breakfast on the sunshone terrace—a birthday concert.
4. Yellow!
Edit: The full photo album is available here.

die Grüne = the Greens

I live in Vauban, an area south of Freiburg's city center. Out my window, I can see a parking lot between two buildings that I've been told are a "hippie commune." I figure that's a little judgmental, but it's probably close to the truth. The parking lot is full of large vans that people live in.

Last week, Maraia, Ali, and I accidentally walked down the other side of the hill/mountain we were "hiking" on and into another valley. On our walk back to my apartment we ended up walking alongside a protest on Merzhauserstraße, the main street in Vauban. It was a parade of large vans and old delivery trucks moving slowly down the street, blasting music, and stinking up the air with exhaust. The endpoint was the other parking lot between my building and the Straßenbahn track.

I'm not sure what they were protesting, exactly. There were signs about how there should be more Wagenplätze (spaces for vehicles? a parking lot is a Parkplatz) in Freiburg, I guess so more people could park their large vehicles and live in them. That's what made sense to me. They were also against the Green Party, I think, which is odd because Vauban as a neighborhood supports the Green Party. They were looking for areas without laws, I think.

The reason I bring this up, in my convoluted way, is because it sort of relates to the real excitement: there's an article about Vauban and "suburbs without cars" on the front page of the New York Times today*! It's maybe embarrassing to admit this, but I never noticed that Vauban was an area without many cars, at least any more than other parts of Freiburg. I live in the vicinity of two parking lots (although they are mostly occupied by the large, inhabited vehicles that don't usually contribute to traffic) and my building is right off the main street, which is full of cars as well as the Straßenbahn that I love.

I was surprised when I clicked the link for this article and my home showed up. Especially two (?) days after the Style section featured an article on Grosse Pointe, where I grew up, and its 'blues.' I found that article irritating.

(Is it weird that I instinctively wrote "Grosse Pointe and her blues'? 'Pointe' is feminine en français.)

*I saw it online in the early hours of Tuesday in Germany, when it was still Monday at home...and it came up under science, so I figured it was from the science section, which is what I originally wrote here. Several people have told me otherwise. The front page is so exciting!

NYTimes Travel

I often wonder why I bother reading this section. I guess there are occasionally nice pictures and sometimes interesting perspectives on places. (I like this short blog post about traveling with an RV in the Southwest. Of course, I also desperately want to go to the desert, so maybe I'm biased.) But my god, New York Times. Europe for Every Budget my ass.

They have 10 cities with save or splurge options, and I noticed that I'll be going to two of them in the next few months (and have been to five of them already, great, now I feel like I need more of an imagination). So I clicked Paris, because I haven't booked a hostel yet, and it's my favorite so I thought I'd read it first.

The first section is On $250 A Day. So I scrolled down. The only other option is On $1000 A Day.

Ha. Every budget. How about under €50/day? Although I'm going the weekend after my birthday, so I might have to go shopping.

P.S. If you want to see what my duvet cover and pillowcase look like (if you are crazy like me), go to the save or splurge article on Madrid and click on the 4th picture!

Recap

You might be wondering—where have I been?
The answer—going crazy. In my room. With my computer. And the internet. If I were you, I would be unhappy with me for not utilizing my internet connection more productively. Actually, as me, I am unhappy with me. Are you starting to see the craziness? You probably aren't actually unhappy with me because whatever, blogs.
I haven't gotten much done, other than labeling all 8 million photos from the trip on iPhoto and actually weeding through the first two weeks' worth. Mostly I've been busy researching the percentage of times I can successfully log into Wolverine Access and attempt to register for classes for next fall—not that I know what I want to take. The result? I'd say about 90% of the time I cannot access my account from my own computer. The one time I did, I realized that the class I was going to register for required teacher approval, so I couldn't actually sign up for it yet.
I've also learned that my internet connection is total crap and that Facebook has a lot of trouble with its scripts, whatever that means. They stop responding about 50% of the time I am on my Facebook homepage.
Oh no! Now you think I'm lame, as well as insane. Since I wrote here last, I also:
Went to Inis Mór, largest of the Aran Islands!
Tried a Guinness (gross)!
Tried a Bulmers cider—much better!
Saw Ireland's only fjord!
Went to quiz night at one of the Irish pubs in Freiburg!
Watched 5 episodes of Battlestar Galactica! (Is that helping the not-lame? I vote yes.)
Ate at Kartoffelhaus ( = potato house ) for the first time!
Baked a soufflé with delicious Irish cheddar for the first time since I was in Michigan!
Watched the sun set on a hill above Freiburg and roasted marshmallows!
Rode a gondola thingy up a mountain and was above Freiburg again!
Cleaned my room!
Started Sommersemester classes.
This is what Ireland is like. Plus sheep.

In County Clare

I'm in western Ireland right now--the town of Lisdoonvarna, a spa town and home of the Matchmaking Festival in September, in the area known as 'the Burren,' which isn't far from the famous and beautiful Cliffs of Moher. Which I saw today!

Tomorrow Jeff and I return to Galway, which is good since we haven't really seen it yet, but sad because I'm really into the late afternoon view from my bed in the hostel here. I have a bottom bunk and I can sit at the foot of it with my book on the windowsill and the sunlight on my head and book and the heater against me and read for hours. The sun seemed to move so slowly across the sky as I read at least half of the romance novel set in Northern Ireland that I obtained at the hostel in Nice. The sky was blue and the grass really is so green here and there are dandelions and daisies sprinkled across the lawn outside the window as well as little birds. Somewhere not too far away there are bound to be horses and sheep and lambs! and cows and calves, and I don't think I want to leave the Irish countryside yet.

In romance novels women are always going to little towns in Ireland (or things like Ireland) on holiday on whims/to solve grave family mysteries and end up staying and staying--often without quite knowing why, just for a feeling. Or their detective work. Or, although they don't want to admit it, for the irritatingly captivating man down the way. You know.

Lisdoonvarna is the home of the Matchmaking Festival, although that would be a long stay (4+ months!) for just a feeling, waiting for the irritating man, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to be wedded to the land of western Ireland, even with all the adorable livestock. The afternoon view from my bed remains tempting, but sunlight isn't exactly something you can count on here.

Photos added after my return to a sedentary lifestyle.

la Méditerranée = the Mediterranean

( = das Mittelmeer, but I don't think Germany really has much to do with it.)On the beach in Nice.
Lately, I've felt like every post necessitates a picture, but one: I don't want to take up too much space on Picasa double-posting, two: my camera is downstairs and plugging it in is a lot of work, and three: constant pictures take away the excitement of pictures maybe?**

All I want to say is that I love large bodies of water, and walking on big rocks that head out into the sea, and getting wet and feeling the wind and the Mediterranean is my favorite part of this trip to France. Besides the bread. But good bread is old news, and the Mediterranean is not.

Marseille's harbor from the basilica Notre Dame de la Garde, which crowns the city.
Also, I've been reading the Niccolo Rising series by Dorothy Dunnett since I came to Germany in September and I just finished (and also basically started) the third one in Avignon last week. Even though it was set primarily on Cyprus (but also in Bruges! I've been there!), there was lots of voyaging across the Mediterranean and Genoese merchants (I was in Monaco yesterday! it was originally a colony of the Republic of Genoa) and Knights Hospitaller (there is a fortress of theirs on Marseille's harbor) and I'm ridiculous and found this all super exciting. The previous book took place in Trebizond, the last outpost of the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Constantinople... Unfortunately, I will not be making it to Istanbul this year, let alone farther east along the Black Sea. Or to Cyprus. Or Greece. Or any more Mediterranean after Monday, probably. Which means no swimming. Unless I swim in my underwear or clothes in the next three days. Sad sad sad.

**Edit: Nope. Pictures are good. I added them. Here's all of the South of France: Lyon, Avignon, Aix, Apt, Arles, Marseille, Cannes & Antibes, Monaco & Èze Village, Nice.

Un Longtemps = A Long Time

Hello, World. Sorry, I, uh, was (free)-internetless in several places, and apparently not inspired in others. Maybe I should admit that I forgot I had a blog for a fair amount of time. I did, however, take a lot of pictures! It will be a miracle if I don't run out of space on my 6 gigs of memory cards.Le Pont d'Avignon from atop le Palais des Papes.

I'm currently in Avignon, Provence, France, as I have been for almost a week, eating fresh French bread and butter and sleeping in. After Sevilla we were in Madrid (by way of all-too-sunny Cordoba), and it was really big. Before I got there and was then inspired to Wikipedia it, I had no idea it was the third biggest city in Europe! We spent exorbitant amounts of money on ice cream without batting an eye, saw a ton of art (also without batting an eye...no, no, a lot of it was really cool). There was just soooo much of it, and after three weeks of walking our feet didn't have a lot of patience.

Barcelona and the sea from Parc Güell; you can see the spires of Gaudí's temple la Sagrada Familia poking up on the left side.
Barcelona was beautiful. I was just as tired as I had been in Madrid, but Barcelona kept me excited and we saw a LOT the first two full days. And the first day, which was not full, saw a pretty thorough tour of Barcelona's hospitals. And the overzealous removal of Maraia's cast at the hands of a Catalan doctor. The last two days I was sick, sick enough that visiting Gaudi's Park Guell felt a lot like a chore, and sick enough that I went back to bed after breakfast the last day, which was sad, considering that Barcelona was the coolest place of the trip so far, and there were so many other things we could have done.
Then we flew to Lyon and COUCHSURFED for the first time! It was great, but now I'm getting bored. And this French keyboard is a bitch. Tomorrow we move on to Marseille. Also, it's raining and it's just so weird! I haven't been rained on since the day we went to the salt mines in Poland, and barely even then. Rain. Who knew it still existed.
**Photos added after my return to a sedentary lifestyle. The fuller Spain story, in photos: Sevilla, Córdoba, Madrid, Segovia, Barcelona.**