Various Happenings

Hello all, I'm back again, much to your amazement I'm sure. Let's see, I never update this thing enough so I guess that another way too long of a blog is on its way. I'm also trying to upload pictures on my fabulous photobucket, which I've decided is not the world's best program. Let's see, where did I leave off.....

Island and the A few weeks ago Tübingen had it's big annual boat races. You can actually watch some video at www.youtube.com if you don't believe me about how crazy they are. So with the boat races, the population of the town grows to about 5 times its normal size with people crowded on the NeckarNeckar wall. Val and I had a plan to secure the best spots on the Island, but being that we'd had our crazy Tübingen rain the day before, we decided to sit on the wall. This was a great idea in theory, that is until the Tübingen weather did the other thing it does so well, extreme heat, that and with my natural clumsiness, sitting on a high wall was not a good idea. Rachel apparently equals Humpty-Dumpfty. Anyway, so we get to the wall about two hours before the race is supposed to start and wait around for a few friends who wanted to get food for a picnic, in impossible task on a holiday in Germany. It gets super hot so I go home and change into my sundress, without thinking about the burning qualities of the sun and head back into town. Basically this sundress results in a pretty nasty sunburn on my shoulders. (I know mom, surprise!) The races where pretty neat to watch. Basically a bunch of boats float down the river at once and end up getting in one huge pile at the turn around point. Some people end of falling out of their boats and others just give up their German restraint for a day and jump into the river. I also managed to drop pretty much every thing that I brought to the wall with me. Including but not limited to both my shoe and my new water bottle. It was a bit embarrassing, however there was a kind, but creepy German man who returned them to me. Here are some pictures.


Thursday was an eventful day. After the boat races, Val and I tried to go to the Biergarten, but it was way too full so we ate at our favorite place in town. We them met up with my second mentor Barbara. We had an ice coffee together. (Ice coffee is pretty much what it means in Germany. Coffee with a hunk of ice cream in it. I muss say, I do miss Starbucks.) We also went to a movie, my second for the whole summer. It was called "Full Metal Village." It's about this super small town in Germany, full of a whole bunch of gamma Schlechtys that has an annual heavy metal festival. It was really funny. So that's Thursday in a nut shell.

Friday I headed over to Munich to pick up Ben, who came to visit for about a week. We actually stayed in the "international" part of Munich, if you know what I mean. We went to the big beer hall, where they hold Oktoberfest every year and got a big old liter of German beer. Ben got a dark Radler, which I decided was better than the regular Radler and we walked around for a while. We went back into the Frauenkirche and saw the whole thing this time. It's a lot better to see it after church is over for the day. We didn't spend a whole time of time in Munich, because it wasn't really our goal, just a stopping point along the way. We just walked around a little bit in the morning and then it was time to get on the train for Bad Gastein Austria.

Bad Gastein is a little ski/spa town in the middle of the Austrian Alps. Our hostel was really nice and at the top of town right next to the train station. There is a huge waterfall in the town which is basically one giant hill with a casino. We walked down to the town center and saw the giant waterfall. We even stopped for dinner and eat near the waterfall. Being that it was such a small town, everything was closed in the afternoon when we got there and of course everything was closed on Sunday. The next day we wanted to go Para sailing but the weather wasn't very cooperative, so we went up the tram to the top of the mountain and wandered around there for a little bit. The mountains are so cool, you would never believe how beautiful they are until you're actually there, and no photo can ever really capture them. There were also cows about half way up the mountain, which I thought was really cute. So yeah, other than that we just did a lot of looking at mountains and walking around the town. A very nice relaxing time.

Being that this blog is so long and I'm bored of writing it, I think I will continue another time. Until then.....

Vienna, Amsterdam, Internet outages and more...

I have to admit that it's been a while, but it's not completely my fault. First of all, I would like to remind you to look at my photo website. It's really hard to get pictures on here but if you go to the link below, you can click on a city name and see tons of pictures.

http://s172.photobucket.com/albums/w30/schlech1/

Shortly after my last post, we had another holiday and super long weekend. Hooray for being in a mostly Catholic part of Europe! Being that we had such a long vacation, Alison, Janelle and I decided to go to Vienna. We took a night train from Tübingen on Wednesday night, which Alison ended up missing. Oops! But don't worry, she caught up with us later. After a long cramped night on the train we made it to Vienna around 9am or so. We found our hostel and then headed into the city. We went into the main square where we immediately pounced on by people dressed like Mozart, selling tickets to the city's Mozart orchestra. (they're mostly for tourists) Anyway, in the end they sold us tickets to a concert. The music was actually very good and we all enjoyed the concert, except for the 20 minutes in the rain that we needed to find the concert hall. We visited Stephan's Dom, which is the biggest church in Vienna. We actually visited a ton of churches in Vienna. We walked around a lot and snuck into the Vienna Opera house and gave ourselves a self guided tour. It was very pretty, but no one was more excited than Janelle. Janelle and I walked around a lot of took the Tram to a lot of different places. We also got lost a lot. One train went to this place called Nussdorf in both directions, so on Sunday we had to check that out before we went home. It was actually a pretty cool little town. It had a park, a church, and an Andechs restaurant. All that a European city really needs. We didn't go to any of the Vienna museums, but we did of course go to a castle. There is an art museum inside of the castle we visited, but Janelle and I didn't really want to pay 8 euro to go in. We did go to the National Library in Vienna. It was Kaiser Wilhelm's private library and it was filled with thousands and thousands of beautiful old books as well as every present the guy had ever received. We also went to this restaurant called Centimeter. You can order sandwiches by the centimeter here, but we couldn't figure out how to do it, so we got other food. Janelle order a 2 meter long sausage and eventually ended up eating all of it. Alison and I had Schnitzel, which ended up providing about 3 meals for each of us. So, that's Vienna in brief.

After Vienna, we were actually home for a little while. Val's boyfriend Thomas was here and we discovered that the bar down the street from us has 2 euro pasta night. This is always fun to go to, because it's after a class that we all have together and that we all hate. Pasta's a good pick me up. While I was home, I visited a school in a town near Tübingen called Rottenburg. I visited a Realschule, which is a school for kids that are going to be going into industry rather than college. I gave a little presentation about what my life at home is like and what I like to do. I showed them a bunch of pictures and things that I'd brought with me, and then they asked me questions. Some of the questions were hard hitting like "What do you think about the war/death penalty/Bush" and some were just curious "what are parties like in America" or "do you like Germany". It was a really good experience. The teachers even invited Val and I back to the school, as well as to the Rottenburg festival in a few weeks. I imagine this to be something like Duvall days, but in Germany. I'm really excited to go and see all of them again.

Around the time of this presentation/being home our Internet went out, which is why I'm doing such a horribly long post at the moment.

Last week was another Catholic holiday and we had the whole week off. Wooo. Alison, Janelle and I went up to Amsterdam and then we met up with Val in Berlin. We stayed three nights and Amsterdam, which was a bit too much for me. It poured down rain practically the entire time we were in Amsterdam, and let's just say that our hostel has less than we expected. They didn't seem to use heat and my blanket was very small and cold. The lights also didn't exactly go out all the way, not to mention that they were on/off at random times. We visited the Anne Frank house, which is pretty small but not really small based on Dutch standards. It's pretty amazing that they managed to hide in their for so long. Dutch stairs are pretty crazy. They're super skinny and super steep, so you have to walk up them sideways, which is a pain. We saw all the "coffee shops" and prostitutes, but we weren't really too interested in them. Amsterdam is a rather small city. We took the city tour and saw a bunch of things that we saw the first day we were there but it was interesting and free. Our tour guide was nice but certainly not the best. She told us that WWII ended in 1944, which would have certainly made Anne Frank a little happier. We didn't see very many hot dutch men, so I don't believe what they say about the Dutch being the most beautiful people in the world. however, the Dutch do make the Germans look efficient, which is very scary in itself. Let's just say that buying train tickets to Berlin ended up being way more of an ordeal than it ever should have been. I must admit, I found it hilarious when the train lady said she'd give me change (coins) for about 120 Euros to use in the machines, so I wouldn't get a service charge. If you know me well, you can guess what my reaction was to that one..... Anyway, we finally with the Netherlands, with a few more H &M shirts (in smaller sizes) and without wooden shoes and head on our way to Berlin.

On the way to Berlin they brought in a drug sniffing dog, who seemed to be more interested in the guy that was sitting next to us than anything else. I guess sausage is more important than drugs. They train ride was long and full of sit switching and a surprising lack of windmills in Holland. To say the least, we were glad to be back in Germany. In fact, we took pictures at the border. So Berlin. Berlin is the coolest city that I've ever been in. I'd really like to go back, but I know that I'm not going to have time. We met of with Sandra and our old hot TA Anselm. It was good to get to see them again, and to ask some Berliners were we should go. We hit up all of the regular tourist sights.We went to the Reichstag, check point charlie, museum island, the Berliner Dom and such. We also went to the Altes Museum. This is currently where all the Egyptian things are on display. I also found out the they had actually split of the Museums during the cold war between America and the USSR. Berlin has such an interesting history. It would be so cool to study there. Our hostel was super nice. It was in old east Berlin right by a lot of ethnic food and outdoor wars, but not really like beer gardens. Berlin is very cool but there are some things that I like better about southern Germany. They make Radler incorrectly in Berlin. They make it with either Sprite or Fanta, which is totally nasty. Radler comes from Southern Germany and is properly made with a Pils beer and lemonade. They're really good when made correctly. We did a lot of stuff in Berlin and if you look at my pictures, you can get more details.

That's about all that I really want to write at the moment, so that's about all that you get. Ben is coming on Friday so I'm meeting him in Munich and we're going to a small town in Austria called Bad Gastein. It's in the middle of the Austrian Alps. The next weekend we're going to Switzerland to Rick Steve's favorite town Gimmelwald. We may even go paragliding. FUN!

Anyway, the boot races are in Tübingen tomorrow and I'll have to let you know how those go.

Until the next time,

Rachel