unforseen circumstances

I'm sitting at gate 17 at the newark NJ international airport. at this time yesterday I was, I think, on my Leipzig - Munich connection flight and everything was going smoothly. Figures shit would hit the fan as soon as I land back in America. You never know what's going to happen.

There was "bad weather" in DC so the plane stopped at Newark to refuel and wait for the storms to pass. However, because of some bullshit obnoxious laws, planes can only wait on a tarmac for so long before they have to get to a gate, and apparently pilots can only drive for a limited amount of time per day. So all these things added up somehow and it ended up that I had to spend the night in Jersey. The hotel was, of course, complimentary, and pretty good as it was an airport hotel. I've never slept in a king size bed alone before; it's a little excessive, especially juxtaposed to my last three weeks of hostel beds. I've never had a Bad Airport Experience, but I suppose it has to happen sometime. I was talking to Spencer about this and his BAE made mine feel like a luxury: he was trapped in the Amsterdam airport for 26 hours.

This whole pile of bullshit was made somewhat better by Albert, my 9 hour flight seat buddy. We talked for a few hours over the Atlantic ocean about spiritual stuff until a flight attendant told us we were being "too loud" and my sleepy pills kicked in. He and his mom (a NASA scientist!!!!) adopted me, which was pretty great because she could take along two people with her business class deal…score, better seats and shorter lines! That was the first time I've not been seated next to a boring person who doesn't want to talk.





Okay, so some culture shock is happening. Things that are weird:
- all the money looks the same
- the coins are really thin
- dollars in general
- ordering in English
- so many bare girl legs…or bare girls in general.
- CARS ROADS PARKING LOTS! SO MANY
- a large pitcher of water with ICE just put on our table at dinner last night
- fake joviality
- "how are you"
- overhearing/understanding conversations
- WHY everything is so INEFFICIENT
- and i kind of hate everyone.


Let's compare my German airport breakfast to my American airport breakfast…(the croissant is filled with nutella-esque chocolate; the muffin has some raisins)

However, this coffee is actually not bad…happy surprise.

This New Jersey experience has reinforced my grumpiness about being back in America. I really want to see my family and friends, and I'm pretty sad that a whole day of that was taken away from me. I think I've changed over the last two months. Traveling alone for three weeks out of my element, meeting all these new interesting people (I have a list of them and it takes some scrolling to get through) from all over the world -- I guess it would make sense that all that would grow into some kind of new confidence.

last day leipzig

My last day in Germany was spent mostly wandering around Leipzig, seeing things I wanted to see and turning down streets that looked interesting. After buying some more things (cute shoes! weird pants!) I took the tram to the Völkerschlactdenkmal, a war memorial. I found out later that there was some demonstration supposedly going on, which is why there was that ugly sign on the monument, the top part was closed, and there were bunches of Politzei vans everywhere. I just thought it was the status quo there, but I guess not.

Then I just wandered back around to the Zentrum, getting on trams that came by and going a few stops then getting off when things looked cool. I found some nice buildings and an old car show.

i don't even know what this was; there was no sign or anything, no one around it. just another pretty church, whatever.

I think this is the Alt Rathaus. Part of it looked like a castle!

I wanted to go Alone Dancing that night but it didn't happen -- the line at the only club that looked good was really long and boisterous and intimidating to stand in alone. So oh well. It didn't look like what I wanted anyway. Instead I drank a half-price cocktail with Maraika and Kristin, my roommates (things I have learned: cocktails are lame) and talked for a while. So a kind of quiet ending to this Europe trip, but I suppose it's okay when your train for the airport leaves at 6:50 AM.

I liked Leipzig, but it didn't really grab me or anything. Maybe if I'd gotten out more it would be better. So, since I'm sure this is a question that will be asked, my favorite to least favorite visits of the last three weeks (based on my experiences in each place, not necessarily the cities themselves!)

Mainz, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Trier, Berlin, Hamburg. ...yeah, I surprise myself. This whole trip (besides Wien of course) I've enjoyed the smaller cities more. In America I always like the big cities, so I have no idea why it's suddenly inverted in Europe. 

finishing

Have I mentioned that my wisdom teeth have been slowly surfacing this entire time? Immediately after my family left me in Vienna I noticed it. It usually doesn't hurt, but it's kind of weird to have two more teeth in the right-back of my mouth than there were two months ago. A souvenir from Europe? Okay.

Yesterday I printed my books! I barely finished before the museum closed, and the prints are definitely far from perfect, but it's fine because I think it will make it more obvious that I did the WHOLE THING BY HAND. I'm pretty proud that I managed to get the whole thing done, especially only being able to communicate in German with the staff. I'm going to add illuminations and the binding later, but all the text stuff is finished. yaaaay

 Just putting the letters into the blocks ("textcolumnen") took about 8 hours, and I only have 11 pages with a few lines of text on them each. It really puts printing stuff like bibles into perspective, which was the point of this whole trip!!!

soooo many hours standing in front of this thing... Interestingly, I ran out of Ys and As in my chosen typeface (Garamond 10) since the ratios of letters in German and English are different. Where the letters were located in the shelf was also sometimes counter-intuitive.

And all the spacing characters. After you make a line of text you have to fill in the extra space as tight as you can by finding the right size (width and length)! Sometimes fun, sometimes terrible.

The German word for "to print" (Drucken) extremely similar as "to push" (Drücken), and the word for letters (Buchstaben) is Buch (book) + Stab (rod or bar), maybe like the movable-type characters???


ANyway. Leipzig is nice, but I haven't gotten the chance to see a lot of it because I've been at the museum from 9:30 - 5:00 for the last three days. Today is my last day here AND IN EUROPE and I am going to go see a few things, buy a few things, and hopefully go out later tonight. My hostel is adjacent to a road with a tram line, so starting at 6:30 AM they come THUNDERING down the road and wake everyone up. It's so loud it feels like they are driving through my room! On another side, it's also adjacent to a head shop.

Last night I went out for a beer with three of my roommates -- three girls from France, Germany, and Spain, respectively. We talked for a really long time about language, especially German. An Important Thing that I've learned in these last three weeks is how crazy different German dialects are from each other, which is why I couldn't understand anything people were saying in Hamburg (since they speak Hochdeutsch, the "proper German", such as British is supposedly the "proper" English). The difference in accents is significantly more than, say, an American to Scottish. So when you only know a bit of the language and it's suddenly extremely different it's almost impossible to follow. I've finally gotten used to the change, and because I'm much more south the dialect is more similar to Wien-Deutsch. Germany is smaller than California, so in comparison, it's like someone from LA barely being able to understand someone from San Francisco. Also, since my German is really basic, I actually can't tell the difference in accents except that I can't understand them.  From another perspective, obviously I can immediately tell which English speakers are American because of the accent, but people who aren't fluent have no idea (a lot assume Americans are actually Australian for some reason). Language is definitely something I've taken for granted up until now, and I wonder how it'll be to be back in America (TOMORROW???) now that I think about verbal communication so differently.

I could go on and on about how these last two months have Changed Me, but maybe later, since my last European day is slipping away and the internet is not.

ach

I'm starting my third day in Leipzig. I really have a lot to do and I slightly regret not making more time to come here. The printing museum is quite amazing -- I'm using legit movable type to print the book I'm going to present as my research. They let me do it for free (I'm providing the nicer paper and stuff) too. The people there are very accommodating, but I learned something interesting: English wasn't taught in former East Germany until after the wall fell. This means that to almost everyone older than 30 here I have to speak completely in German. It's been interesting. If I hadn't done that month in Wien before this I would probably be screwed!

I'm going to be spending almost all of my time working on that book for the next two days. It's like a preview of being art school stressed out for this semester (which starts in one week, oh god why). Using the movable type equipment is really awesome because it's such a unique experience, using the same technology people were using CENTURIES AGO as the norm. I'll probably never get to do this again, and so many people will never get to do it at all. However, it really takes forever, at least for me because I'm just starting. To write this post using the type would probably take me about three hours. Hah.

düsseldorf

although I couldn't get a hold of my 11th grade AP english teacher who lives in Düsseldorf in the summers (yeah, that's right, a native German teaching advanced high school english courses, what a COOL LADY), my one-day Düsseldorf visit was pretty fun! better than the Berlin day, I think because I relaxed about it more and didn't try to cram a ton of stuff in. okay, photos.....

Altstadt holds the "world's longest bar", actually a few blocks with nothing but pubs and bars and the occasional restaurant. I walked back her later when there was a Düsseldorf soccer match playing at it was pretty crazy.

lounging by the Rhine. There were tons of roller bladers in Düsseldorf.

pictures of buildings! This city was hit hard by WWII and as a result there are a lot of modern buildings mixed in with the old German style. However I think Düsseldorf does it the best out of any of these kinds of cities I've seen.

some Frank Gehry buildings, no big deal:

 

A weird one with giant figures with even more giant appendages running up a building, reminded me of Jonathan Tune ;) I don't remember what it was for though.

 

Got confused about the bus/U-bahn/tram system but eventually made it back to Altstadt for dinner. This is Alt Bier, Düsseldorf's specialty that I was told to try. It is the best beer I've had so far.

Then it was dark and I wandered some more. Night photography class flashbacks!...

A cool place to hang out, it seems. I bought some Eis and listened to some dudes play guitar and then some Russian girls play violin and lead some exciting songs and dance puppets.

I took the tram across the river just for funsies.

It was a good day!

lasts

I'm typing this over my one and only Free Hostel Frühstück (it's toast n' toaststuff) at my hostel in..........Düsseldorf! Took another spontaneous city visit, because the supposedly infallible Deutsches Bahn didn't actually ever check my Eurail ticket on the 2 hours from Mainz to Trier. A gift from Germany, how nice.

In an hour and 15 minutes I'll be on my final train trip to Leipzig. I'm increasingly excited to get there -- people keep telling me that it's actually a really cool city. It apparently started the movement against Communism in East Germany. Leipzig is my first eastern city I'll be visiting so it'll be really interesting to see the difference there. Cities like Hamburg and Stuttgart and Düsseldorf that got the shit bombed out of them in WWII are incredibly different from, say, Heidelberg and Vienna. The architecture makes so much difference in the feeling of each place.

Düsseldorf/Trier/Mainz photo posts are coming soon (probably will do that on the train today), but I want to record my feelings on Traveling Alone. It's pretty awesome. The times in Hamburg when I was really lonely weren't invalid, but I was also at a special unhappy place in my hormonal cycle and the first few days anywhere new are always uncomfortable. It's amazing to really be able to do WHATEVER I WANT. I had a large and un-ladylike meal at a restaurant last night, sitting at a table for six by myself, surrounded by boisterous Taiwanese tourists. Some people would hate that, but I thought it was kind of hilarious and awesome to be a young cute girl alone in a noisy restaurant, devouring a meat mountain and drinking beer (INCIDENTALLY, Düsseldorf's Alt Beer is the winner for Best Beer on this trip). This kind of freedom traveling is incredible, and sometimes it hits me when I'm walking around that I'm doing it alone in Germany, where no one in hundreds of kilometers gives a shit about me; I'm just another face in a crowd. I couldn't do this forever, but I'm not sick of it yet.

mainzer

A day and a half later in Mainz and I really like this place, although I've already basically exhausted the tourism possibilities. I'm here because it's where Gutenberg lived and worked and Mainz has embraced it with quiet pride. Mainz seems really at peace with itself, tastefully acknowledging Gutenberg as its one real tourist attraction (I think of the MASSIVE number of Klimt The Kiss merchandise in Vienna). It's comparable to Richmond: its geographic size; has no U-Bahn system, but a decent bus network; a university city. I only bought the bus pass on the first day and have been walking everywhere otherwise.

First day, I just went out and explored. I went with the current of people getting on buses and got off at Gutenberg Universität, which was boring and empty (well it is the summer). Then, trying to get back to the main city, I got on a bus that went to the Rathaus (City Hall), because I knew where that was and could get home easier from there. HOWEVER, the Rathaus stop advertised was actually like 8 km away from everything else in some quiet neighborhood, and there was definitely no Rathaus there at all.

Yesterday my only goal was to get to the Gutenberg Museum. This is one of the apexes of this trip! I got very distracted by the street I decided to walk down (Neubrunnenstraße) because of all the cheap/awesome/Special European clothing stores and bought a bunch of things that may or may not fit in my suitcase, but it'll be okay (worst case, i'll just do what emily & leah did and wear all of my clothes onto the plane ahehehe). By the time I got to the museum it was closing in and hour and a half, but I went in anyway because it's Important (and cheap). I saw TWO of the ORIGINAL 41-Line Bibles and a bunch of more old books, but AAAAH 42LINEBIBLES!!!!! that is AMAZING. something a little sad was that only a few people were in that room and sometimes I was completely alone. These things are, to me, THE symbol of modernity; they changed the whole (western) world forever and led us to where we are now! compare that to paintings who have whole crowds around them, but are mostly famous for being famous. however, the doors guarding the bible room were about a foot thick and had some serious looking locks.
 

I walked around some more. One cool thing I found was a "beach":

Later that night I really felt like dancing, so I went and checked out a club called Schon Schön ("already nice"). It was really terrifying walking in alone and no one was dancing when I got up the nerve, so I made origami out of toilet paper in the bathroom for a while. Eventually I joined the four other people on the dance floor, and after that more and more people got up and it was so great! I danced alone for almost the whole time, definitely my favorite kind of dancing. That's actually the point of these places in Europe (based on my experiences) -- dancing and listening to music, not butt humping!!! I'm going to miss that. Also the lack of cover charge! Clubbing alone was definitely a breach of my comfort zone, but an awesome thing about is it that you can go wherever you want, go to the bathroom, move around, and leave exactly when you want to. I'm much more alone in Mainz than anywhere else (since I'm in a hotel, not a hostel, and know literally no one in the entire city) but it feels much better than it did in Hamburg.

berlintag

According to the screen on the wall of this train, I'm traveling 160 km/h right now. I just transferred trains at Leipzig en route to Mainz (third last stop of my journey, aaah). I had a delicious and healthy breakfast of scooping up pesto our of a jar with a baguette, courtesy of my Hamburg hostel. I decided that because of my food getting stolen on the first day, I deserved to have my food karma balaced out, so I fed myself almost exclusively from the "free food" shelves. It went actually really well, and I took some stuff from there with me before I left. No regrets.

My day in Berlin was a little lame, mostly because of the brevity of my visit, which I expected. The trip happened because I got tired of Hamburg and I had one extra train ride on my Eurail card. So why not? So I woke up really early and caught a train out of Hamburg, which was 10 minutes late! Quite uncharacteristic of the Deutsch Bahn. My hostel was pretty cool, and had a theme of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

I was a room with a bunch of beds (the hostel was basically converted offices/apartments), but the windows were huge and we had a roof balcony:

So, what I did in Berlin... I saw some art at the KulturForum, but I was really sleepy and there wasn't really anything there that was especially new or interesting to me. The fashion photography/illustration exhibit was probably the best part of that (greg would have liked it). Then I meandered through Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburger Tor and the Jewish Memorial and Museum, both Famous Things:

And went to the Tiergarten, where I saw no Tieren, just Garten. It's a huge park. I was in a b&w photography mood for most of the day. The weather was very bipolar.

Realizing my immense hunger, I U-Bahned to Kreuzberg (Turkish center of Berlin). Tessa, the girl I met in Hamburg, suggested I go to one of the two weirdly famous fast food places on a certain street: a vegetarian kebap stand called Mustafa's, or an Imbiss called Curry 36. On the way, I passed an accordion trio doing an amazing rendition of Vivaldi's Winter. So awesome.

I had a craving for curry, but it turned out Curry 36 does not actually sell curry, just currywurst and stuff like that. I went to a Indian/Nepali (hi june) place nearby instead. I would have liked to wander around more, but it was really cold! It is so weird to be uncomfortably cold in AUGUST.

At the hostel, I got to my room to find that all the beds were taken! While I was waiting around for the manager guy to sort it out, I met a German guy (Yanick) and a British guy (Jamie). The story was that they met in Prague at their hostel and became such instant BFFs that Yanick changed his plans to go to Berlin and hang out with Jamie (awww). I hung out downstairs in the lounge with them later and we eventually accumulated Kayla (Austrailian), Laura and Elise (Irish) at our table. Interestingly, the rules for Kings seem to be more or less international! Obviously everyone plays a little differently, even just in Richmond, but it's fun to pick up alternative rules. We tried to Go Out later but it didn't work out. The night ended with me and Yanick and Jamie eating Nutella on white bread at some tiny corner market at 3:30 AM.

An hour and a half of sleep later, I was awakened at 5:30 AM by my other really obnoxious scumbag roommates. I have no idea how you can be okay with talking SO LOUDLY at such a ridiculous hour in a room that other people are paying to sleep in. The worst.

My trip to the Hauptbahnhof was very smooth, thanks to Phil, a Canadian boy who talked to me in the elevator at the U-Bahn station (we both had suitcases and obviously going to the train station). Shame we were going to different places because he was reeeeally cute (and nice to talk with, etc). Schade, immer schade! Scheiße.

hamburg auf wiedersehen

My last day in Hamburg was mostly Business Related. Unsurprisingly, losing my US-Euro power outlet converter was a really bad thing to lose so I had to go find a new one in the Zentrum. I also visited the alledged Best Bookbinder in Hamburg, Zwang, which was pretty informative and awesome to see the space. Unfortunately I couldn't take photos, but seeing all the presses and stuff was really cool. People really do still use that stuff! Seeing stuff like the Zwang studio is why I'm here in the first place.

I walked around for a while around some random cool shopping streets, then went to look for the Saturn that supposedly carries the converters. Google maps lied to me about its location, but where it was supposed to be was very close to the St. Nikolai bell tower, so I went up because it was really cheap and good views are worth it to me. Turns out the rest of the church was demolished due to it getting bombed in WWII air raids, but the tower was the tallest building in the world for two years in the 1870s (!!)

 

I also went to the WWII memorial adjacent to the tower. Germany is pretty frank about what happened -- they don't beat around the bush with the actions of either side. It's really mindblowing to see where the bombings actually happened, walking along the streets that were completely destroyed by my country not so long ago. Completely different than reading about it or seeing photos in textbooks.

The power converter search ended successfully and I returned to the hostel. In the kitchen I met a girl named Tessa, who is from Auckland, New Zealand, and studies at Yale. She was kind of an awesome person, and not just because she basically told me what to do in Berlin (she lived there for two months, doing a German program similar to mine in Wien).

bike day 2

After a lame Hamburg Flohmarkt expedition, I rode the S-Bahn south to a semi-islandy bit of Hamburg. It's surrounded by water on all sides, but doesn't really act like an island. The ride was about 30 or 35 miles but took me all day because I stopped a lot (and my bike is slow!)

after i got to the "island", it all looked like this basically. not really the best scenery (esp. compared to the donau ride...epic), and a lot more houses that i would have liked. but it was open and the sky was pretty all day, so i'm not REALLY complaining.

my hair got stuck like this.

the last half was very nice. all of it was along this river, and really flat and open.