Ich liebe Deutschland

Temple in the British Museum

My friend Lindsey came to visit me the first week of May. Lindsey has been one of my best friends since high school so needless to say I was excited. Our first full day, I showed her around London. I’m still astonished at how much we managed to fit in—she got to see all the main sites, even if we couldn’t go into all of them: St. Paul’s, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Westminster, Shakespeare’s Globe. We walked across Millennium Bridge and Lindsey fought her way through a gang of French schoolchildren to get some roasted nuts a man was selling on the street. Good times. One of the best parts was the British Museum, which I still hadn’t visited yet so we had a fun time getting lost in the monstrous complex and getting excited every time we saw a hunk of rock that looked vaguely like the Rosetta Stone.

The next day we fully intended a trip to Hever Castle but couldn’t manage to get ourselves up in time. We ended up sleeping in very late, which turned out to be an excellent idea as we had to pull an all-nighter for our 6:30 a.m. plane ride to Berlin the next morning. That day I showed Lindsey around Hatfield a bit, even taking her to the ever-exciting Asda and to get kebabs, one of my favorite fast foods here even though it’s not actually British, it’s Turkish. Even though it wasn’t very thrilling, we had a lot of fun just relaxing and catching up. That night we caught the 3 a.m. bus to the airport.

We were wrecked by the time we got to the airport and even more wrecked when we made it to Berlin. I have to say I was lucky to travel with Lindsey, because few people would have managed to stay in as good a mood as she did after staying up all night and running around so much. We hopped on the train from the airport to Berlin and figured out the S-Bahn that would take us closest to our hostel. Much like the scene when we went to Kansas City for our senior trip and drove to the wrong La Quinta, we had somehow printed directions for a hostel that had the same name as ours but wasn’t the right one. So we trooped back out into the growing heat with our backpacks and attempted to find the correct Berlin Mitte hostel.

At last we found it. Luckily we picked great hostels the whole trip. This one was clean and colorful with very nice staff who spoke perfect English. We changed, collapsed in a couple of armchairs in the lounge and chugged bottles of Coke like they were going out of style. We probably could have gone to sleep then, but there was a one o’clock free tour we wanted to catch meeting at the Brandenburg Tor. So we dragged ourselves up, took the U-Bahn (the subway), then another S-Bahn. Transportation in Germany is much less regulated than in London, where you have to slide a ticket through a machine to get anywhere. In Berlin you can pretty much walk on any train or subway you want. We never saw anyone checking tickets. Also, the subway doors slam shut violently (once almost on Lindsey) and I swear the whole thing goes dangerously fast. We decided somewhere along the way the Germans had a meeting about public transport in which someone definitely said the words,
“Safety regulations...shmafety regulations.”

Lindsey with the Brandenburg Gate

Anyway, trying to find the Gate was where things got tricky. We couldn’t find the train we needed to get to the Brandenburg Gate, so we got on one we thought was correct. I asked a lady who worked on the train if this was going toward the Brandenburg Gate, but she told us we were wrong. Even though she spoke very little English she was extremely helpful. She would say a few English words and then go into German. I took two years of German in high school and two in college, so I understood enough to get by and I even spoke a little (terrible) German back. We took the train back to the spot we’d originally been, then had to go downstairs in the train station to find the train we needed; it was in a really weird, hidden spot that you needed to take an elevator to reach. By this point it was 12:55 or so and we were thinking there was no way we would make the free tour, which would’ve been annoying because that was our only day in Berlin and we wanted an overview of it. Luckily we ended up right in the square with the Brandenburg Gate and found our tour group right away. There are a lot of pictures of us posing stupidly in front of the Gate in celebration of actually having made the tour after all the hassle.

Church in Berlin

The Berlin tour was amazing. It was a beautiful day and everything was so much greener than it was in England (it takes longer for spring to take hold in England since it’s farther north). Our guide was British and took us to the spot where Hitler’s underground bunker used to be (now it’s a parking lot), the Holocaust memorial, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, Humboldt University (where Einstein and the Grimm brothers went), and plenty of churches and opera houses. Berlin is a very artsy city and everything is new since most of the old buildings were destroyed in WWII, which is kind of a shame. For only having a day there and being completely sleep-deprived we saw the highlights (must…see…Berlin. Must…experience…culture). After the tour we found a restaurant our guide had recommended. None of the waiters spoke any English, which means the place was nice and authentic. Lindsey had currywurst and I had schnitzel, which was probably the best I had the whole trip. You’d think we’d crawl back to our hostel for sleep, but all the excitement energized us so we ended up walking all the way back to Brandenburg Gate, behind which a massive concert/festival was now taking place. No idea why but it was great to hear a German band sing various 80’s songs in English. The Tiergarten, a park, was right next to it, so we explored that for a while and found various statues and memorials. Then we returned to our hostel and still managed to stay up until 10 talking, so it was a good but very long day.

Church in Nuremberg

The next day it was time to take the train to Nuremberg. The train ride was four hours long but it was made up of gorgeous scenery—fields, hills, cute villages, meadows of bright yellow flowers, all of it growing steadily more mountainous the farther south we went. I didn’t know this about Nuremberg but it has a well-preserved old town since it wasn’t bombed in WWII. The architecture is really beautiful. We wandered through the city and found several churches, fountains, and markets. Just walking around was a cool experience. I kept getting excited to be able to read signs and understand snatches of conversation. Oddly enough Nuremberg was the city we got lost in most frequently, which was fun until we got very hungry and couldn’t find a good place to eat. At long last we found a sausage stand in one of the markets…delicious. They must have a big Italian population because gelato shops were everywhere in Nuremburg, so we bought some ice cream, sat in a quiet square, and had a deep discussion about growing up which was somewhat spoiled when I dribbled ice cream all over my pants like a kindergartener.

Nuremberg

Then we hiked up the hill to Nuremberg Castle. It was closed for touring but you can still walk around the courtyard and see the view of the whole city from there. They also have what I’m assuming used to be the moat filled in with gardens and tiny little houses where people actually live. That night we sat outside at a little restaurant and had sausages and pretzels. Naturally we got lost on the way back to our hostel and did some backtracking before finally finding our way. You win again, Nuremberg.

The Alps

We took the train to Munich the next day, but after dropping off our bags we set off for the famous castle, Neuschwanstein. It’s a major journey to get there…you have to take the train to Füssen, a town in the Alps, and from there a bus to a little town even farther in the mountains. From there you have to hike the forty minutes to Neuschwanstein or the twenty minutes to Hohenschwangau, the other castle in the mountains. Despite the hassle this was one of my favorite parts of the trip. The Alps were incredibly beautiful. We toured both castles. The best part is they give you live guides as opposed to audio guides. One castle was the childhood home of King Ludwig, the other, Neuschwanstein, was the one he bankrupted Bavaria to build. Hohenschwangau is this adorable yellow castle with scenes from German legends painted on every wall. Neuschwanstein is much larger and grander, even though the hike to it is tiring. Still, the views made it all worth it. We even took a horse-drawn carriage ride down the path from Hohenschwangau. It was very surreal.

Hohenschwangau

Horse-drawn carriage down the mountain

Neuschwanstein

Der Glockenspiel

Our last day we did a walking tour of Munich. Our guide was very strict and kept drilling us about Munich facts. I thought Munich was the most beautiful city we saw. Everything looks old and quaint and medieval but it was actually all destroyed in WWII; they just rebuilt it exactly the way it was, as opposed to Berlin where they rebuilt everything in a modern style. We saw the Glockenspiel, which chimes at noon and is one of the few things that actually is from the 1400s and doesn’t just look like it is. More markets, more biergartens. The Germans definitely like being outside better than the English do, but that’s probably because their weather is a bit nicer…at least it was while I was there. We toured the Hofbrauhaus, the famous beer hall which is crowded with locals and tourists alike. And we saw a ton of people dressed in lederhosen. We thought it was a tourist-attraction thing, but apparently it is very important culturally to Bavarians so they still wear lederhosen often.

Surfing in the Isar River

After the tour we toured Der Residenz, the palace of the royal family of Bavaria. Also largely destroyed in WWII, but Hitler loved old buildings and was so set on preserving Der Residenz he had people photograph every room so they could recreate it exactly as it was, which is what they did. Then Lindsey and I found the English Gardens, an enormous park in Munich and probably the prettiest park we saw in Germany. It’s more like a forest than a park, with the Isar River flowing through it. They also have a nude section; we tried to avoid it but still got a few unappetizing glimpses. The other interesting feature of the English Gardens is the surfers—there is a place in the river that forms a wave, which people in wet suits take turns surfing. That night we dressed up and went to the Hofbrauhaus for dinner. For a famous place it was disappointing. What I got tasted exactly like a microwaved hot dog. At least the rest of the German food I ate on the trip was good. The Hofbrauhaus did have a great atmosphere, at least, what with its mix of shouting Germans and tourists and its lederhosen-wearing band.

We flew back the next day and had a last night in Hatfield, where we ordered delivery kebab and reminisced about our adventures. The next day we went to London for Lindsey’s flight. We had so much fun and did a lot of bonding. Deuces, Germany.