Dinosaurs and volcanos

The funny part about this is that I promised myself I wouldn't let moving take over my life. Haha. It did. But now I'm safely ensconced in my new apartment (and dwelling #10 for the last three months, counting the B&Bs in Europe) with a working internet connection and everything.

So, as a catch-up, I present a few more gems from my time in Colorado.

En route to dinosaur tracks

People actually lived here, and left an oven or sink or something.

Still trekking onwards...

Graves from a Spanish mission.

OBLITERATE!

5 miles later, look! A dinosaur track...maybe.

We waded across this river. It was an adventure.

My foot is so small.

Now that's a dinosaur track. A meat-eating dinosaur track.

In New Mexico, on top of an extinct volcano.

Ooooo!

Benches thoughtfully provided.

And mule deer.

I also floated down the Arkansas river, but for obvious reasons involving electronics and water, I don't have any pictures. It's very unfortunate, especially since half the pictures would be of me beached on a sandbar. There were many sandbars. And some of them would be of me covered in mud from our launching point under a bridge, which was very very muddy. Plus there would be the fact that we were using pool floaties rather than real inner tubes and so they didn't float quite so well. I was perpetually wet. It was hilarious. And then we walked a mile back to the car through some farmer's field. Actually next to the field - no need to trample the foodstuffs.

So now I'm starting - actually have already started - graduate school. And while that world is not nearly as exotic as Germany or Colorado, I already have a number of entertaining stories to tell. Next time: my battle with the parking people. And quite the battle it was.

Buffalo tongue and ruined candles

I've acquired quite the number of new skills in the past few days. A smattering thereof:

Skill number one: cooking over an open fire. I cooked buffalo tongue (which I'm informed was actually buffalo liver) and onions over an open fire. It smelled rather nice, but bled every time I pressed it until it was pretty well charred. I'm also not at all convinced that it was cooked in a way that is safe to eat. No matter, the point is simply to have something period going on for the visitors to see, smell, and ask questions about. The funny thing about food at the Fort is that we are not allowed to offer food to any of the visitors and if they ask for a sample, the answer is no. If, however, they just take some without asking, we won't argue. And that's the exact spiel that we give visitors when they ask if they can have a bite. Gets the point across without any legal liability.

Skill number two: lighting fires. Previously I'd lit fires with a lighter and a bunch of newspapers. Now, however, I can light them with flint and steel. And I learned a new way to do it that involves making a little wind tunnel with two logs, lighting the char-cloth and kindling and sticking it in the middle, and then putting a third log on top. Wind or human breath through the tunnel helps the fire to grow and it burns hot, so it catches the logs pretty easily. I built a fire with this method without a problem, when I'd previously struggled to get one lit.

Skill number three: making candles. This one didn't go so well. I started out attempting to make dip candles by heating up a mix of tallow and beeswax over the fire I built, then dipping a string in (as one does). The strings refused to stay straight and the candles grew very very slowly. Since I was working in the hot sun I decided to switch to candles in a mold. Under instructions from one of the Fort bosses, I sprayed the molds with PAM (secretly, of course), mixed the tallow and beeswax, forced strings through tiny holes in the bottoms of the molds, and poured in the hot wax. I also poured the wax all over the ground until I found the little dip-cup used to make pouring easier. Then I moved a bench over to shade the molds and waited for several hours. At the end of those hours, the candles resembled a funnel - wax had leaked out the bottom where the wicks were drawn through and given them a collapsed center. Plus, though I sprayed the living daylights out of the molds, they apparently weren't non-stick enough and I only succeeded in snapping off several wicks. As this was happening at the end of the day, I tucked them inside and plan to ask someone what to do tomorrow.

Skill number four: cat wrangling. The Fort has two cats, as well as four oxen, two horses, three peacocks, three peahens, a dozen or so peachicks, and ten chickens. The cats are allowed to roam freely but have to be put in every night to keep them from being eaten by coyotes. I don't have any keys and can't help lock up, so while everyone else is closing down the fort, my job is to find the cats. They don't particularly like being shut away, though they tolerate it because food is there. So they don't fight me too much when I pick them up but they do hide themselves in various places around the fort as a matter of course. Today I found one sprawled out in the sun by the blacksmith's workshop, while the other was stalking some sort of creature in the woodpile out back. Turns out the creature was a bat, so I took the cat away. He promptly jumped out the window I'd forgotten to close and went straight back to the woodpile.

I'm hoping to churn butter tomorrow, and praying that turns out better than the candles.

Hello and welcome to 1846

I spent the past few days as a pioneer woman in Colorado. I am not a pioneer strictly speaking - they mostly went on the Oregon Trail, to the north - nor is my presence at Bent's Old Fort entirely historically accurate. The Fort was a major trading post on the Santa Fe Trail, bringing together native tribes, trappers, Mexican traders, and American businessmen out to make money. As may not surprise you, white women weren't particularly common in a place that was fifty days travel from the nearest city and swarming with rough characters. Many of the men who lived and worked here married Mexican and Cheyenne women, not white ones.

Despite my improbable presence, the Fort has given me a costume and allowed me to volunteer for a while. I portray a generic ransomed white woman, captured by one of the native tribes - probably the Pawnee - and rescued by the people in the Fort. The historical record does indeed give us one woman, a Mrs. Dale, whose husband was killed in a raid and who was taken captive, later coming to the Fort and working for her room and board. But there's already a white female employee who plays her, so mine is a general rather than specific role.

I fill my time hanging up laundry, fetching water, mending clothes, and embroidering. Let it be known that I have never before embroidered and have been feeling my way through like the novice I am, to varied result. I'm nearly finished with a tree, so I'll take a picture of that once it's done. The mending is functional rather than attractive, mostly repairing splits along the shoulder seams of shirts and chemises. Hanging up laundry is easy and it dries very quickly in the parched Colorado air, while fetching water is solely to keep the buckets from splitting and cracking. They are made of wood and look much like topless barrels. Wood shrinks in dry heat, so unless the buckets are kept reasonably full, the slats will pull away from one another and leave us with a particularly non-functional watering can.

I also greet the visitors and give them a brief overview of the Fort before handing them off to an employee, since I'm not allowed to handle the cash register. I also answer the shuttle phone and relay shuttle requests to an employee, since I'm not allowed to drive the golf cart. That is courtesy of a volunteer who crashed a cart into a car and knocked off the car's headlight the day before I arrived. My hints regarding a perfect driving record go unheeded in that respect.

My most recent accomplishment is starting a fire with a flint and steel. It's something of a laborious process - you strike the steel against the flint until sparks fly while holding a piece of char-cloth (partially burned cloth made of natural fibers) until it catches. You place the burning cloth in the middle of a big nest of straw and blow on it until the straw catches fire. Then you lay kindling sticks over the burning straw and hope that one of them catches fire before the straw burns itself out. If that step is successful, you attempt to light the rest of the kindling and then lay all that against some logs, with the hope that the flames will spread to the logs and make something of a more permanent blaze. Usually this area of Colorado is dry and this process isn't too difficult, but we had some rain yesterday that finally caused one of the employees to go find a lighter, since the flint and steel method was not catching on the damp wood.

Next week I hope to cook, make candles, and churn butter - all demonstrations that the visitors can ask about and sometimes join in on. The men do blacksmithing or carpentry, make moccasins, whittle, and work leather. These activities are the most interesting part of the fort in my mind, since they make the visit interactive and allow people a glimpse into 1846. I'll report back on any further skills I learn as I learn them.

Back in time

I'm traveling to Colorado for a friend's wedding this weekend, followed by two weeks volunteering at a national park that is also an old fort. Apparently I'm to be allowed to dress up and historically re-enact, something I haven't been able to do since the days of playing a Puritan in Salem, Massachusetts.

Goody Bishop, Faith Clark, Sarah Shattuck - how I miss you!

So I look forward to introducing you all to this world of the mid-1800s Wild Wild West. It'll be a world of trappers, traders, Native Americans, soldiers, and me. The presence of a white woman at the fort is period inaccurate, but I don't mind. I really want to learn to blacksmith, and I also don't mind the period inaccuracy of that. The park employees don't seem to share my lassiez-faire attitude towards accuracy. We'll just have to see how this goes.

I'm pretty sure there are everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

Visiting privileges

A dear friend of mine has been a second-grade teacher in Detroit for the past year. Her working life is far more difficult than mine ever was, for all the obvious reasons. But she's brilliant and talented, and she had a bunch of awesome ideas to expose her students to the wider world. One of these ideas was for her friends to send postcards from wherever-we-were to her class, allowing them to see and dream about far-away places they might visit one day. So I sent a bunch of postcards from Europe and on Friday went for a visit, bringing pictures along with.

I learned that second-graders are very wiggly, especially when they've already been in school for seven or eight hours. Like my German students, when reminded of what they were supposed to do, mostly they did it. Usually they then forgot, and I can understand. It's no fun to sit still and be quiet and attentive for hours when all you want is to be somewhere else.

I learned that second-graders are very curious in the best possible way. I brought a dozen or so pictures along to show them - cats in Corsica, the Porta Nigra in Trier, my school - and they had questions about every single one. They also had questions about the things that adults, recognizing the "main point" of a picture, never think to question. What's that fence doing to the side of this historical building? (Hiding construction equipment, it turns out.) Why did that man get banished into a clock that now sticks out its tongue at you every hour? (He stole things and played tricks, which led to several minutes of attempts by the students to catalog what exactly it was that he stole.) What is that statue standing on? (A pedestal.) Why? (I have no idea, because I'd always just accepted that statues stand on pedestals.) Maybe I shouldn't just accept such things. Why exactly is it that statues stand on pedestals? I'm sure it has something to do with a uniform base and such, but is that all?

I learned that second graders sometimes forget what you've told them as soon as the words are out of your mouth. Are there restaurants and zoos in New Jersey? (I don't know, I've never been to New Jersey.) In New Jersey, do people like to go to the zoo? (Uh...I don't know.)

Saturday morning we went to Eastern Market, an enormous farmer's market selling everything from produce to spices to bread to succulents. You could do your whole week's worth of grocery shopping there. It smells amazing, as farmer's markets always do.

I concluded the visit with the Detroit Institute of Art, which has an amazing collection of artwork including (in my friends' words) "that culmination of centuries of art and innovation: home decorations" . The DIA houses Van Gogh, Islamic calligraphy, African masks, and American (both North and South) carvings, among hundreds of other works. The masks were especially interesting, both in their size and their displays of community ideals.

Detroit on the whole may be going through a hard time, and I don't want to make light of that situation. But I was privileged enough to see some of its very bright spots: its art, its produce, and its future. And question the entire point of pedestals.

Finally home

July has been a busy month. Usually it's a supremely lazy month - day off from work for the Fourth, heat and humidity driving everyone indoors, no end-of-summer rush yet. The flurry of final summery activity belongs to August, with July kicking back in the shade.

I spent July moving. First I moved from interesting site to interesting site. Then I moved out of my apartment in Germany. At last I moved back to the States and am temporarily ensconced in my parents' house before moving to my new apartment in August, thence to begin grad school.

But more on that later. To the stories!

My family came for a vacation and to help me move. We saw my apartment and school, visited cousins, and then set off for some dedicated sightseeing. The town of Dinkelsbühl was probably our cutest stop. It's at least 1200 years old and was completely ignored by bombers in World War II, so its medieval buildings and cobbled streets are original, unlike the rest of Germany.

A look down the adorable street

All the buildings were titled with similar fonts...

...except this holdout at the edge of town.

And that holdout flower shop? Out of business. Serves it right for breaking the rules of cuteness and conformity.

Dinkelsbühl offered a few other memorable moments. In the evening we took the night watchman tour, which ended up resembling a pub crawl more than anything else. Interspersed with more educational stops to impart information about the town, we stopped at ten different guest houses where the night watchman sang a song, and each house brought out a glass of wine or beer for us to drink. In our group of eleven, five people refused anything more than the occasional sip and we weren't allowed to take the glass along. It became something of a chore to down a full glass every time we halted and at one point we poured a glass into a potted plant. The night watchman himself refused to drink anything and forbade us to give any to the patrons as well. Plus, he only spoke German, so I was the translator for my family and a Japanese couple who knew some English.

"Snails meeting for the first time, sniffing eyestalks"

 My brother titled this sculpture.

We got a parking ticket not because we were parked incorrectly, but because we'd parked in a one-hour zone without putting up the little "we'll be back at" clock that all German cars have. I'd forgotten to mention it to the family when we unloaded the luggage. Then it turned out that city hall closed at 4p, despite their door listing official hours as 8:00-17:00. We paid the next day before leaving the city.

Sad to leave though - it's really like a storybook city.

Then it was on to Salzburg, Austria, where we retraced Sound of Music sites and I picked up a little Jägermeister bottle full of holy water (no really!) at the church where the wedding scene was filmed. Several visits to the oldest bakery in town and a trip to the cathedral completed our time there.

The Untersberg, one of the famous mountain sites of Salzburg

I officially checked out of my apartment, though not before breaking the toilet seat when I stood on it to clean the shelves in the bathroom. Oops.

The penultimate stop was Bruges, Belgium. There we ate chocolate, climbed a clock tower, took a canal tour, and wandered around happily.

Typical Belgian architecture

Swans in the canal

 The story goes that the citizens of Bruges once killed a tax collector called "Long Neck" and as punishment were ordered to keep sixty swans alive to forever remind them of their crime. They now have two hundred.

Bruges clock tower, 82 meters high. We climbed it.

Isn't he cute just before he bites your finger off?

It's a trap!

View of the city from the clock tower

 And finally we found ourselves in Cologne for a day before flying out of the Cologne Airport.

Naturally we saw the cathedral

The official seal of Cologne

 The commas stand for St. Ursula and the ten virgins who where martyred in Cologne.

At least, on our way home

Twenty hours of travel, with flights from Cologne to Munich to Toronto to the States, and we were home. I went straight to bed, and spent the last four days sleeping, making and attending appointments, and generally trying to get my head screwed back on straight. It's good to be home.

How to succeed in a foreign country without missing home too much

I really like Germany. I've enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to live and work here for the past nine months; the idea that it will come to an end in three weeks is both hard to believe and sad. I am fortunate enough to live in a time when world travel is both possible and easy (if rather pricey and stressful sometimes), so I can say with some certainty that this will not be my last time in Germany. Despite that, I will miss my colleagues, my job, my friends, the language, döner kebabs, and the place I've called home.

That does not mean, however, that my time here has been all sunshine and roses.

The entire winter, for example, was cloudy. And grey.

Sometimes you really just want to have a normal conversation in English, without having to coach a reluctant student through unknown vocabulary. My colleagues are fluent and friendly, but there's something different about talking with a native speaker, especially one with whom you have inside jokes.

A couple things have allowed me to read and hear English on a regular basis. I highly recommend them to anyone who is traveling in a foreign country, has access to the internet, and just wants a taste of home.

Thing 1: The Daily Show. John Stewart is hilarious and the studio audience laughs along with me, unlike Germans. Germans aren't big into displays of humor.

Thing 2: The Colbert Report. Ditto. As an added bonus, you can watch both shows from anywhere in the world (or at least in Europe). For reasons unknown to me, they are not part of the "if you don't live in the country where this was produced, that's too bad for you, nya-nya-nya" rules that accompany pretty much every other thing on television.

Thing 3: My home library. In addition to its collection of real books - and I will be reveling in that collection soon enough - it has a number of electronic resources. I have downloaded audiobooks and ebooks all year with great joy and had a grand old time not working so hard to understand every single page. Don't ask me about reading children's books in German. No fun. I think many libraries have a partnership with a company called Overdrive, which provides these electronic resources. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Thing 4: Skype. Seriously, how did the world survive before video calling? I've had my bouts of homesickness both in Germany and while at college, and Skype has been a lifeline. I talk with family and friends regularly. It's nice to feel like I'm still somehow part of these important people's lives even though I'm across an ocean.

Thing 5: Chocolate. Sometimes you just need it. Chocolate is delicious.

So there you go. Along with actually liking the place where you live, making friends, and having a purpose for being wherever-you-are, this is my formula for living abroad. Feel free to add any other stress-relievers or tricks that you know.

Public transportation

Normally I'm a big fan of European public transportation. It's (mostly) non-sketchy, fairly cost-effective over distances under four hours, it runs regularly, and it saves me from the expense and stress of actually having a car.

I wish the States had a similar system. Seriously, I'm headed to Colorado this summer for a friend's wedding and my choices for transport are a) rent a car or b) rent a car. Or c) ride the Greyhound at 2am by myself from the sketchy bus station in an unknown city. So really, just a) and b).

But I digress.

Last Thursday was the Feast of Corpus Christi, called Fronleichnam in Germany. Don't ask me what that means. As is often the case, largely-secular Germany has a tradition of religious holidays and no one is willing to give that up because of silly things like not actually following the religion in question, so we had a four-day weekend. I headed to England to visit some friends who are studying there. As a cost-conscious person, I flew Ryanair, Europe's budget airline. They manage to be cheap because they fly out of the most inconvenient, non-central airports possible. In Germany it's not an issues - there's a bus that goes straight from my city to Frankfurt Hahn (the budget airport): eleven euros, one hour, badabing, badaboom.

Not so easy in England. London's budget airport is called Stansted and it is the spawn of the devil. Buses travel the two hours from Stansted to London with some frequency, but I was going to Oxford and I was on a pretty tight schedule to get there before my hosts left for an evening engagement. I wasn't keen on wandering the streets for several hours Friday night. I bought a ticket for one of the few buses that goes from Stansted to Oxford - as Oxford is a student town, you'd think there would be more buses, but no - and was three minutes late thanks to a combination of plane delays and England's obsessive, excessive border control. I missed the bus and discovered that the next direct one left in three hours, too late for my agreed-upon meeting time.

Thankfully I was able to work out an alternate route through London, switched buses, and made it with four minutes to spare.

On Monday, I again pre-booked my ticket on a bus direct to Stansted, waited at the nearest bus stop, and watched my bus drive right by without stopping. Again I found an alternate route through London, inquired at the main office as to the reason my bus had not stopped, and was told that I'd booked it for the wrong stop. That particular bus, uniquely of all the buses in Oxford, only stops at the places where you have pre-booked. I had accidentally chosen the city center rather than the stop closest to where I was staying when buying my ticket, and so the bus passed me by.

Equally thankfully, I was able to buy a ticket on another bus that got me to Stansted just in time for my flight back to Germany.

So this morning I was already feeling a little sour towards European public transportation. Just to tease me, my bus was late this morning, so I missed my usual train, and the second train was also late, though only by five minutes. I power-walked to school, arrived somewhat sweaty but (barely) on time, and promptly began to think longingly about my environmentally-unsound personal car waiting for me in the States. I know buses and trains are the way of the future and I'd really prefer that Colorado had some useful ones, but right now I'm not feeling kindly towards public transportation. Give me a car with automatic transmission over National Express or DeutscheBahn any day.

At least until tomorrow when I'd actually have to drive it. The Germans drive like crazy people.

Traveling hither and yon, part 3

The second week of my spring break, D and I made a four-day trip to Bavaria. We chose Munich as our home base and made a day trips to the cities of Augsburg and Triberg to get the complete Black Forest/Southern Germany experience. Also, because a friend was born in Augsburg and wanted some pictures.

Happy to oblige.

Odeonsplatz, Munich

There's a Jesuit church just to the right of this photo, and we stumbled upon a service inside. Naturally, we joined in and received a blessing (non-Catholics, both of us, so no Eucharist) from a very on-the-ball priest. Often when I attend Mass and go up for a blessing, the priests seem confused. I think mostly if you're not Catholic you don't go to Mass. I like to think I'm adding a little spark of interest to their days.

In this same Jesuit church we saw the schedule of which priests were available when for pre-Easter confession. Along with each priest's schedule was the languages he understood. Some were "just" German and English, but a number had four or five languages listed. Very impressive.

Schloss Nymphenburg, the palace of the kings of Bavaria

Inside the palace, very...frenetic.

Just one of the coronation carriages.

Baroque/rococo has never been my favorite architectural style. I find it very busy and rather overwhelming. The artists, architects, and rulers of Bavaria clearly disagreed with me based on the way they decorated their palaces and conveyances. It does make for a splendid museum, if a visually exhausting one.

The Munich Rathaus, or town hall/elector's palace

The clock tower here has a little tableau that plays at 11am every day. Regrettably, since the figures are protected from nesting pigeons by a net, it can be kind of difficult to see. But look, a pretty old German building!

A view from on high

The Chinese Tower, in the English Garden.

The permanent wave in the English Garden. Very dedicated surfers.

The English Garden is especially popular in the summer when all is warm, green, and sunny, but it was also pretty in the quasi-winter of our visit. Rather cold - I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours wandering around - but lovely nevertheless.

Augsburg's Golden Hall

We made a day trip to Augsburg, the third-oldest city in Germany and the site of the Treaty of Augsburg, which ended the Thirty Years' War. The Thirty Years' War was fought between Catholics and Protestants in Germany for (you guessed it) thirty years and was very destructive to both humans and buildings. Between that war and World War II, it can be difficult to find original buildings in a number of cities and Germany isn't known for it's towering old churches or palaces the way that France or Italy is because many were destroyed at least once, if not twice.

Triberg Waterfall

We ended our Bavarian trip in the town of Triberg (which isn't actually in Bavaria, but ssssh!), a quintessential Black Forest establishment that is home to Germany's highest waterfall and the original Black Forest Cake. We ate the cake (Schwarzwaldkirschtorte) at the cafe that claims to have come up with it. Yummy! Cake drenched in cherry schnapps was just the way to finish everything off.

Traveling hither and yon, part 2

Backtracking a bit - the day before I went to Aachen, I went to a city called Trier with my friend D. I'd been to Trier previously and seen the major sites like Porta Nigra and an absurd number of churches. This time, I got to experience the other part of Trier, namely, its wine culture.

Like everywhere else along the Rhine and Mosel rivers, Trier has the perfect climate and soil for growing grapes. Riesling is probably the best-known variety of German wine, and any Riesling you find in the States that is from Germany is probably made within an hour or so of where I live. Trier is one of the biggest cities in the area, therefore, it is something of a hub for wine growing and especially wine selling.

D and I picked out six wines to try - several Rieslings (of course), a champagne, a wine made from a very old variety of grape called Elbling, and a red. The wines were good, naturally, but my favorite part of the whole thing was the man in charge of the wine tastings. Among his proclamations:

About the champagne: "The members of the Swedish Royal Family bathe in this champagne every morning. If you drink it, you too can be a princess."

About the Elbling: "This grape has been grown here since the Romans. 2000 years of growing, just for you. Just for you."

(As part of this venture I learned that alcohols have three parts or stages: nose, palate, and finish. The nose is how it smells, the palate is how it tastes, and the finish is the lingering aftertaste when you've swallowed. The Elbling had no finish. It was very odd. I kept waiting for something to be there, but it was like the taste just cut off after I swallowed.)

About one Riesling, which he called "the sweet highlight": "It will make you even sweeter than you already are. A sweet princess."

("The sweet highlight" was unbelievably sweet. I like sweeter wines because I apparently still have the tastebuds of a teenager, and I was overwhelmed by the sugars. It tasted almost like grape juice. I can't imagine what you would do with it, except pour it over ice cream. It was suggested that it paired well with particularly strong cheeses, so the insane sweetness of the wine would be balanced by the saltiness and savoriness of the cheese. It was delicious, just not anything I expected from a winery.)

And then, randomly, about Obamacare - this part really went off the rails: "Your president is trying to introduce a new healthcare system. You know that when this happens, you will have a chip implanted in your forehead or your hand which will contain all your medical information, and you cannot participate in this healthcare without the chip. Then, in a little while, everything will be in this chip. Your name, your information, your bank account. Without this chip you cannot shop, cannot work, cannot go to the hospital. Without this chip you will not be a person anymore."

(This was all delivered in German, which D doesn't understand. In the interests of politeness I didn't inform the man that he was clearly insane and instead was left to nod seriously and say noncommittal things like "I hadn't heard that," while he told me very seriously that this was happening right now, "in your country." I kept a straight face and when we left was finally able to relay the story, which caused a reasonable amount of merriment for us both.)



Beyond dire Orwellian predictions of the American future, I learned some interesting facts about the way that grapes are grown along the Rhine and Mosel. D had previously commented that it was odd not to see any terracing - the vineyards were planted all up and down the steep hills on either side of the rivers, which often lead to erosion, and it seemed that problem could be solved by terracing the slopes. It turns out, however, that planting on such a steep grade is deliberate. In the early spring and late fall, when the sun spends more time lower in the sky, planting on a steep include ensures that the vines don't shadow one another, as they would if planted on flat ground. This extends the growing season by several weeks. Fascinating.

Traveling hither and yon, part 1

I've been on spring break the last two weeks, and what better way to spend a spring break than traveling? Unlike my fall break, when I fled to England and Wales, I spent my spring break seeing more of Germany.

First up, Aachen. Aachen is northwestish, near the borders of Belgium and the Netherlands. The Dutch influence is likely what gave the city its double-voweled beginning, but our tour guide joked that it was Aachen's attempt to show up first on any list of German cities. I rather like the idea of a name war between several cities that begin with the letter 'a' escalating until you have to stretch out the beginning to turn out on top. Aaaaaaaaaaaaachen. It's like a cross between a city and a throat checkup at the doctor's office.

Ahem.

Aachen has lots of underground springs. Lots of fountains, too.

This beast lives in the underground springs. Scary!

She's holding a Prinzen, a gingerbready cookie.

 Aachen is known for Prinzen, and very proud of them being unique from gingerbread. Our tour guide was unable to explain exactly how they are unique from gingerbread. He did emphasize that we should be aware of the fact, however.

City hall, with window boxes

Inside the cathedral. Mosaics are from the 19th century.

Even though Aachen is very old (it was a city of baths in the Roman period), a lot of it was destroyed in the 1500s by a fire, and also by the Thirty Years War, and also by World War II. Most of what's left is not particularly old, though the city plan is still plenty winding. It also has some impressive textile relics, including Christ's loincloth from when he hung on the cross. They might have to fight with the imperial treasury in Vienna over who has the correct loincloth, since I saw it there too.

Next up is Bavaria and the Black Forest - I'll likely have posts about those in a few days.

Spring break!

Nightly thirty degree temperatures nonwithstanding, it is now my spring break. The hardy crocuses (must be a special German variety) even popped back after a surprise snowfall and are busily heralding the return of the sun and warmth and happiness. There's a little path of them right along the Rhine that never fails to make me smile.

Germans really like taking walking vacations on their long breaks, where they pick a place and do lots of physical activity, especially day hikes on trails. I won't be quite so hardcore.

Instead, I'll be visiting around Germany, especially in Bavaria. Munich, Augsburg (site of a famous treaty and birthplace of a good friend), and the Black Forest are all destinations on my horizon, though I suspect I'll be doing far more munching of Black Forest Cake then hiking in the woods. Blame it on being American. Nevertheless, I expect a number of pictures and mishaps to share in a couple weeks.

Until then, happy first day of spring (March 21), happy Easter (March 31), and I'll join you on the other side of Germany's daylight savings time (March 31).

On Cors(ica)

Rather than becoming extremely stressed and claustrophobic in crowds of drunken German Karneval revelers, I took myself off to France last week to visit a friend teaching there. Specifically, I went to the French-ish island of Corsica, which is actually closer to Italy than France. Be it known: the island's residents are Corsican. Not French, not Italian. Corsican. They even have their own language, which is written like French but pronounced like Italian.

But enough with the chatter.

Lovely Mediterranean beach

Napeoleon was born in Ajaccio

And there are lot of statues of him all around.

 The funny thing is, Corsicans don't really like Napoleon, but he is their most famous former resident. They seem to compromise by putting up statues but also disparaging him. They do like his family, and many Corsican children are named after his siblings.

I don't think he was this tall in real life

A view from the top of the last Napoleon's pyramid thing

 Notice the group of men in the foreground? They're playing bocce ball, which is apparently a Corsican obsession. They were really intent on it too - each man would toss his bocce ball and they would all stand around with hands behind their backs, observing, then break out into chatter and gesturing once the ball landed.

Mountains and the harbor

A view from way up high on a hike

Hello Ajaccio!

Pretty snowcapped mountains and clouds, etc.

 The views here really are lovely, especially up high. We went on a little hike - which was described as a walk but definitely had some steep uphill parts - and the whole thing was well worth it just to have these views.

Napoleon's childhood home. It has a lot of furniture inside.

 The Maison Bonaparte isn't a very big museum, but it did boast a series of color-specific rooms. One room was all yellow, another all green, another all blue, and another all red. There were also Bonaparte family trees in tapestries to be seen. That was kind of it, but definitely worth a one-time visit (especially since it's free to under-25s).

The cemetery, which looks like a little village

 The cemetery was really interesting to me - rather than burying their dead underground, each family has a little house thing in this cemetery, and coffins/urns are placed in the little house thing. It's like a little city with winding streets. Simultaneously somewhat creepy and touching, since the idea is that you are interred with the rest of your family. I like the sense of history, but the idea that I was walking through a city of the dead freaked me out a bit. I also got Lord of the Rings lines stuck in my head - "The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it."

The Bloody Islands

Apparently at sunset these islands look red, like they're drenched in blood. As you can see from the bit of light at the horizon, it is indeed sunset (albeit cloudy) and they look rather dark. It's a pretty stretch of coastline to be sure, but I'm not convinced these rocks ever look very red.