So I'm waiting for 4 am so I can get on my subway to get to my train to get to the airport to fly back to St. Louis for Christmas. (well, hopefully this is all happening... the snow storms in Chicago are a little worrying since I'm flying through Chicago...)
Anyway... the last two weeks.
Salzburg was a lot of fun. We were a group of four. We got there around noon and wandered around the city and the Christkindlmarkt. Definitely smaller than Nuremberg and Munich, but it was nice. Also a lot less food at this one. But did they make up for it with their glühwein choices! Munich and Nuremberg basically just had glühwein or (Kinder)punsch (non-alcoholic). Nuremberg had blueberry glühwein as well. Salzburg had peach, wildberry, apple, orange, chocolate, etc. We kept stopping for a different flavor every time we got cold. Also went up to the castle. Then took the 5:00 train back to Munich and decided to go see "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (in English). This time we bought the tickets together so we could officially sit together.
Monday's Christmas party was also a lot of fun. Typical Christmas party. Every brings food. Everyone eats and talks. I enjoyed it a lot though. They all were extremely schocked when I started explaining that no, we didn't have Christkindlmarkt. And no, we didn't have glühwein. And no, we didn't have Lebkuchen (I explained gingerbread...). Someone suggested that it wasn't really Christmas without glühwein.
Tuesday, Rob (Georgia Tech) and I met up with a guy trying to get into Georgia Tech next year. I'm not sure why I was there. I'm a chemE at U of IL. Rob is a chem major at Georgia Tech. This guy was a chem major at Georgia Tech. Rob had it covered. Then I met up with Erika to go watch the Christmas film. Feuerzangenbowle is actually a drink they make by soaking a cone of sugar in rum and setting in on fire over a pot of glühwein so that it carmalizes into the wine. Interesting concept. Tasty. (sweet!) The movie has nothing to do with that (except they are drinking it in the first and last scenes). It also has nothing to do with Christmas. A bunch of men are talking about childhood memories and find out one of them never went to school. He was homeschooled. So they fix him up to look like a student and send him to school to get the experience. It was good... but hard to understand since the sound quality is not so great. The movie is from the 1943 or so.
Thursday I went to Hall. That was a lot of fun. The Christkindlmarkt there is gorgeous. The city is an Advent calendar with numbers lit up on the buildings (colored for those that have passed, and white for those yet to come). I got to meet up with a friend in Innsbruck and see that market too, as well as Andrea's in Hall. And I got to taste her homemade glühwein and orange punsch. Yummy! Met up with two friends from school one night and we went to a cafe that night where 5 other people from the class came! So I got to see 7 of the 11! That was really neat. Several of them didn't recognizes me. (didn't you used to have glasses?) Obviously that was my key identification factor two years ago. The irony is that one of my classmates, Michael, didn't have a clue who I was, even though I was sitting next to Vera and Manu, my two best friends from the class. They had to tell him. He spent 5 hours a day with me the entire semester. When I was on the bus coming back from Innsbruck, I got approached by a girl who asked if my name was Kelsey. Turns out she was from the parallel class I was in. (same grade, different class... if you remember, each "class" is a group of 15-20 students who are together in their lessons for all 8 years.) I was in 6B, she had been in 6A. She recognized me even though she saw me completely out of place (why would she expect me to be sitting on a bus coming from Innsbruck. She had no idea I would be anywhere but the US right now) and we'd probably seen each other once a week for an hour in gym class, since that was mixed. I was really impressed with her though.
Back in Munich now. Monday was my last day of class. Today was my last day of Christmas shopping. My bag is packed. My plane leaves in 7 hours. I leave in 4. Hoping the journey is no longer than it's already scheduled to be and that I'm safe at home in St. Louis 24 hours from now.
I'll be back in Munich the morning of January 6th. Write more then!
Pictures:
Hall- the city as an Advent calendar
Innsbruck- The Golden Roof and the Christkindlmarkt
Andrea and Lisa in their Christkindlmarkt booth
Munich- the main Christkindlmarkt
Christkindlmarkt and the Rathaus at night
The subway ticket machines... this one's there for mom and grandmother. After all the trouble they had trying to figure out tickets, they replaced all the machines several days after they left... as you can see, the machines now give a very detailed explanation in both German and English of exactly which ticket does what and which ticket you should buy in which situation and which ticket will get you where.
1 comment:
you can actually find glühwein in America, but the stuff I found was called glögg (Nordic name) and it's made by a company in Elgin. But most of the time people just make it by putting mulling spices in sweet red wine and heating it on the stove. Ben has some that I use usually for apple cider, but it can be used for both.
Post a Comment