The next day I had to get up at six. I got like no sleep because it was so hot, they don't have ac in most of the hotels, and the sun doesn't go down till around eleven pm and comes up around four. Our first adventure was on an excursion steamer for more than one hour along the Rhine River. After the trip, we drove through the ruins of a bridge in Remagen where American troops reached Hitler's West Wall. We went to Cologne to visit a very popular gothic cathedral. It just happened to be the same day the "love" parade was secheduled. You might have read about the one in Berlin, where the guys had shorter shorts on than the girls. I don't think there were quite as many people here as there were there, but I actually had some excitment on July fourth, even if it wasn't for the same reason! The hotel we stayed at the night was the only hotel with ac, of course, it was by far the nicest and I guess it would be if Madeline Albright stayed there!
Our first main stop on the fifth was to Bremen. Its main attraction is the statue of the donkey, dog, cat and the rooster. Have you ever read that story? It's about how all these animals were not wanted by their owners and ended up fionding this house, scaring away some robbers and living happily ever after, as all fairy tales usually end. The name of the story is The Animal Musicians of Bremen by the Grimm Brothers. I had my first taste of their so-called hot dogs. It's something I can live without.
That night we arrived in Hamburg and there as a park across the street that we went for a walk in. There were dogs everywhere, and right in the center of the park was this mini lake, no more than 2 feet deep that people were using as a beach. On our way back we found some people half dressed, which turned out to be a common site for the rest of the trip, and some rats. Needless to say, that was the end of that.
Our first real day in Hamburg, we had a local guide, and we stopped at Alster Lake, St Michael's Church, and Jungfernstieg, where we saw a chimmney in the shape of a swirl, and some guy comeout of a window with a bell, signifing ten am (they do this every morning, it's one of those anicent traditions). Then we went on a harbor cruise, stopped for lunch, and did an optional tour to Lubeck. It's an isle, a tourist trap. That's how their economy survives, we went to a hospital, cathedral, and something else that used to have some importance, well it still does, it's just now a restaurant, and let me tell you, people do not want you hovering over their food while someone explains what's so importantabout this place.
At seven, we met up with a these four people from our group. We had decided at the beinning we didn't like them because they were these very loud NY's, but little did we know we'd become the best of friends. We ended up going to the tv/restaurant tower, don't ask what happened there. We were going to eat there, and then decided the prices were outrageous, but we still wanted to see the top. There was a guy in the evelator collecting the tickets to go up for sightseeing, well our wonderful friends decided "we might want to eat up there so why should we have to pay" deal. They ended up going for free, two of them did, the other seven of us decided to be honest, buy the ticket, look around and then leave. We then had to travel back to the city and ended up eating in the beer and wine festival. I had a pretzel because I refused to have another hot dog. We ended up not getting back till eleven because we had lost three people on our way back to the city in the subway.
July seventh we drove through Luneburg, Wilseder Berg, and then had a break at Celle. We reached Hanover at lunchtime and stopped at Princess Sophia's 17-century Herrenhausen Gardens. What a waste of time. Nicole and I went through the maze of hedges they had, of course getting lost and cheating our way out of it. We stopped in Berlin that night where I attempted to call a foreign exchange student from school, but ended up getting what I soon found out to be an answering machine, of course not in English, and we left the strangest message because how did I know if I ogt the right number or not? Then the dinner. We had one waitress to serve 38 people. The soup was extremely salty and the dinner was to be pork, but we don't eat pork, we told our guide the first day. Well, we told it to him in German because he didn't understand the word pork, but all of a sudden that night he did. The word my mom told him was ham, not literally translated to pork and the guide said that pork and hamd weren't the same thing and he thought we couldn't eat ham, not pork. He got all pissed off about that, one of the many things during this trip. He was so rude to us, he insisted Americans were lazy, arrogant people, who didn't understand the troubles of the world. In the end, we ended up getting fried chicken for dinner. Again we had a local guide of Berlin as we saw the Ku-Damm with the bomb-damaged tower of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Reichstag, mnumental Brandenburg Gate, Charlottenburg Palace, and the 210 ft Victory Column in the Tiergarten Park. We passed the German State Opera House and went into the Pergamon Museum. Kind of like a flash back to Egypt, they had one of the six statues we had seen in the Museum of Cairo outside. At lunch I attempted to call Marian, the foreign exchange student again, and I actually figured I'd leave a full detailed message this time.
We did another opitonal tour to Potsdam. We had a walk through the gardens of Sans Souci Palace, well we were supposed to. I had to walk back and forth four times, not a short distance either because Nicole had to use the bathroom right then, which was back at the enterance, and she couldn't have gone before or waited so by the time we walked there and back, everyone had left. Then we visited the Ceclienhof Castle where Truman, Attlee, and Stalin signed the Potsdam agreement, and the Gilenicke Bridge, known for the spy exchange.
When we arrived back at the hotel, I had a message that Marian had called. I called him back and arranged for him to come over to the hotel and go from there. We ended up having dinner together at the Hard Rock Cafe, I think it seems to be quite a meeting place because that's where I met my pen pal Julie at in Washington. He had to leave early, but he wanted us (the family) to go with him to his school musical and the Berlin love parade, but we were leaving the next day.
The ninth we went through what used to be the "other" Germany to Leipzig, an important center since the Middle Ages. We saw the large monument commemorating the Battle of Nations of 1813, the Thomaskirche where J.S. Bach worked, and the Market Square. Then we spent an afternoon in Dresden, the former capital of Saxony on the Elbe River. We had a local guide talk about Friedrich Schiller (someone asked where his "list" where in his house...) and Richard Wagner, the architecture of the Semper Opera and Zwinger Palace. Our last stop was to see the Porcelain collection.
Around noon we arrived in Erfurt. We had lunch and then visited Schiller's House and Goethe's residence. Next we went to Herder Church and spent an extra hour there doing nothing. These shops closed at four, unlike everywhere else where it was seven, so there was nothing to do. By the time we got back to the hotel and ate dinner, everything was closed. At dinner, met this little kid, maybe twelve. There was a buffet behind us and we were trying to get his attention to bring us ice cream, but he didn't understand. After dinner we went out for a walk and he was in the lobby so I asked him in German if he spoke English and he said no so we left. On our way back, Nicole had dropped her key and she went by herself to get a new one. Well the kid was back and between the lady at the front desk translating back and forth, Nicole ended up getting the little kid's address to write to.
Our first visit the next day was to the Duke of Saxony's legendary 900-year-old Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther translated the New Testament, located in Wurzburg. Around two pm we arrived at the Dorint where we had a glass of wine to celebrate our first week together. At four we left for the Wurzburg castle owned by a bishop who had Tiepolo paint a bunch of frescoes, two in which were still in tact from the war. Then we walked into the gardens and out to find a synagogue which ended up looking like some apartment building. It had three pieces of brick from old temples that were destroyed, we don't know exactly how because no one was there to tell us, there was just alittle memorial to each under them.
After dinner we attempted to go for a walk, but it was raining so I went back upstairs (Alan was already there) and the others, without umbrellas attempted it. I don't know exactly how far they got, I just know we had to close our window because of all the water we had coming into the room. When they did come back, I had my dad taking the bags the hotel gives you from our room to put their clothes in. Aparently, Nicole had met another boy, their time a nineteen year old Italian, again didn't speak English, to write too.
Day eleven we went to Rothenburg. Nothing was open, it was only nine am, but we had two hours there. At eleven, we watched the tower as these two wooden figures came out of the doors, drinking beer. Around one pm we arrived in Nuremburg, the birthplace of the painter Albrecht Durer and poet Hans Sachs. Of course, we didn't have enough time there, we were supposed to go see a church, but we had the option of staying and meeting him somewhere for an additional twenty mintues. I counted between 22-28 people who didn't go. We arrived in Munich around five pm and met two people around seven thirty pm to go walking through the city. We had quite a long subway ride to get to the city and we had pin-pointed quite a few places we wanted to go to the next day. We also stopped at the Hofbrauhaus, which was an optional tour that we didn't go on. You could get a stein of beer where there were Bavarian musicians and folk dancers playing.
The next day we hd a quided tour of Germany's "secret capital" passing by the Olympic Stadium, 1,000-foot-high TV Tower, Nymphenburg Palace, Marienplatz with the Old and New Town Hall and the Gothic Frauenkirche. We also visited the Old Pinakothek with collections from Burer, Cranach, and Rubens. In the Marienplatz center we watched the Glockenspiel, which took forever so we didn't see the entire thing since we had to eat lunch and meet Andrew exactly on time to go to the final optional tour to the Linderhof Castle and Oberammergau. The last stop was pointless. It's where they perform Passion plays ever ten years, but it was completely covered with plastic, being worked on, and spending forty mintues in this city was dumb. Then we had an unexpected stop for dinner which would only take fifteen minutes so the nine of us who had already made plans would still have time in the city. It turned into more than an hour and by the time we got into the city, all the stores we wanted to go to were closed. We did manage to have our planned dinner at Planet Hollywood, which took two hours getting us back to the hotel around eleven again. I mena, the time we spent at the dinner place w asa total loss. There was this German shepard outside that we played with and fed some ducks, but I honestly could have lived without it.
Our second to last day we drove to Mad King Ludwig's castle of Neuschwanstein. We went up the German Alpine Road to the shore of Lake Constance, Europe's largest freshwater reservoir. We had a lunch break in Lindau, an island that had been flooded not too long ago. We went to this point where you could see Austria and Switzerland and then had lunch. I ended up buying this Diddl doll. All my pen pals use that stationary and I was bound and determine to get something with it so I got a mouse stuffed animal and some stationary. It's a good thing I got it there too because I didn't get a chance again to get it. (I had planned on using my extra marks in the airport to get something else but there was none to be found.) Plus I got some awesome shoes, not quite as high as I wanted them, but they were so cute. Course, I'm not allowed to drive with them so there is some height to them.
We continued onto Freiburg. We had made a stop at some church that was dedicated to Mary. I got some ice cream and I had like seven minutes to eat it. I didn't exactly manage to finish the last two bites of it and Andrew, the wonderful tour guide he was, made me throw it out or we might be late. In Freiburg we went to a 13-century Gothic cathedral and saw a unique system of open freshwater Bächle which he said was an air-cooling system, but we figured out it was really meant for flitering out the sweage. We made a stop to a synagogue, Andrew almost left the five of us, which again was closed, and we were late by thirty minutes. Andrew refused to do anything that wasn't in the program, if you haven't figured it out yet. And when it came to anything of another religion, he wanted no part. A group wanted to go to a concentration camp and he refused to stop us there so they made an hour subway trip to get there. We would have gone, but we had already signed up for an optional tour in its place.
Our final day we went in the lush valleys and pine-clad hills of the Black Forest, famous for its cuckoo clocks. We spent an hour at this store, we ended up getting some wine and my dad a harmonaca. I don't know why he had to have it, maybe he's reliving his childhood. He defenetly doesn't know how to play it. We arrived in Heidelberg, the city with Germany's oldest university (if I hear that one more time...), and went to the castle where the Great Vat, a 49,000-gallon 18th-century wine cask was. My mom had me pull on some box that had a bell come out. She said it's a tradition now. Her parents made her do it and it scared the living day lights out of her because a huge red cord came out. Course, nothing happened to me because a-I already heard someone do it b-there was no cord and c-I stood as far away from it because I had no clue why I was doing it. We had our fairwell dinner at the same Frankfurt hotel we were at the first night. We ended up singing all these songs I didn't know, and then I had to go up and lead "I'm signing in the rain" the Girl Scout version. Imagine a bunch of seventy-year-olds dancing. Why do I always seem to get myself involved in these things? Course, it wasn't nearly as embarassing as me belly dancing in Egypt! We left the sixteenth from Frankfurt airport. We had to run around the airport a couple of times to get the tax refund and then find something to spend with it in the airport. It's weird how people talk to you as if you understand them. Can't tell you how many one person conversations people had with me in German. Another thing I really don't understand is how they can watch a tv program, say the Simpsons, and all the voices have been changed so they are speaking in German, of course whenever there is a singing part, they leave it in English. I mean, Homer actually sounds inteligent. How can someone say they like a certain actor or actress if they're not really getting their voice or feelings out of it? Sure, you can have an expert person translating and trying to get the same emotions in the words, I just don't see how it's the same.