Tu hija tiene una barba.

Hey gang, so let me tell you about my weekend. First off, it was Halloween. Which was great fun. I spent the day making pumpkin, pineapple, and barbecue chili. It turned out shockingly well, which is great, because I spent the entire day making it. Then it was getting close to party time, so I donned my Flash costume from last year (cop out I know, but it's far harder finding costumes in Germany) and had Julius, Theodor, and Tobias over for some pumpkin chili dinner and guac-making. So that was all very lovely. 

Afterwards, we headed over to Marlena's Wohnung for the Deutsch Kompakt/START Kurs/Austauchstudenten/random German kids party. And that was awesome. Everyone looked awesome in there costumes, and it was great to see all the Deutsch Kompakt Kinder, because now that classes have started, we haven't gotten to see each other as much. So long story short, Halloween was awesome, and it seems that, at least in Tübingen (probably due to the fact that there are so many students), there's some celebration of Halloween on this continent. 

Then there was yesterday. Yesterday was a rather Spanish day (hence the title of this blog post being in Spanish). I went with part of Spanischer Mannschaft/Team Spain (Gonzalo, Nagele, Chinchi, and Julius, the non-Spaniard within Team Spain) to a town in the Baden part of Baden-Württemberg and very close to the French border called Karlsruhe. The city itself is historic by American standards, but in Europe, being founded in 1715 is nothing to bat an eye at. It was founded by a man named Karl Wilhelm, whose title was Markgraf von Baden-Durlach, which is just a fancy title for a ruler and translates to English as margrave (I didn't know what that was either). According to the legend, this dude fell asleep on some hunting ride through the Hardtwald and dreamed of this super magnificent castle, which kind of resembles the sun. In his dream, the palace was situated at the center and the streets came off like rays of sunlights. Which, in reality, is pretty much what it looks like. Gigantic palace in the center of this circle with rays coming off it. Starting with this castle and moving onto the rest of the city, Karl-Wilhelm wanted to make this his model city. Yada yada yada. 

So yeah, however, since the Allies bombed the shit out of it during World War II, I didn't get to see the model city that Karl Wilhelm intentioned. Instead the architecture was rather similar to that in München. By that I mean that the buildings are pretty flat without much detail. Due to this, the streets feel very open, and there are trams running everywhere. It was pretty cool. 

In any case, we arrived around 2PM, after an hour layover in Stuttgart (wherein I bought my one pumpkin spice latte of the season...I payed out the ass for it, but it was awesome and I regret nothing). Instead of heading straight to the palace, we wandered around and eventually settled upon eating lunch in an Italian restaurant that advertised 5€ pizza and pasta specials outside. We all ordered pizza, and it was super delicious. 

Afterwards, we made our way through the main downtown part of the city (or at least what I assume is the main downtown part) and got to the palace. As I knew nothing about this castle and town before yesterday, I was amazed at the size of it. It was somewhat comparable to Versailles (or at least I'm assuming from the pictures I have seen--never actually been to Versailles). In any case, it was grand and huge and had lovely gardens out front. 

The first thing we did after paying the entrance fee was make our way to the top of the tower. It was 4PM by this point, and the tower closed at 5, while the rest of the museum part of it closed at 6. The tower was super, super neat. While I did have a few flashbacks to climbing the Ulmer Münster (rather unpleasant flashbacks), the view from the top was pretty sick. I dunno how much more I can tell you about it, so here's a picture: 

The rest of the museum was pretty cool as well. It's a Weltkulturmuseum, so there's all sorts of stuff from all sorts of different places. The level that we spent the most time in seemed to comprise of 18th and 19th century German (or I should probably just say Badish, since Germany didn't really exist at this point) royalty (which largely looked like French royalty because 1. Karlsruhe is so close to France and 2. the royalty of the Holy Roman Empire imitated French royalty and even spoke French) and Turkish stuff from the same time period. So that was pretty cool. It was also a little interactive. They had wooden royalty outfits and hats that you could put on and took pictures...which naturally we did. Because we are five year-olds. It was great. They also had a super lovely place to sit, that was quite reminiscent of the shisha bar. I sat there and read Aladin und die Wunderlampe for a while, while Nagele was learning about Badish history and everyone else was wandering. 

...your daughter has a beard

We eventually got kicked out of the museum while we were in the Egypt and Greece exhibit (because it was closing time not because we were being rowdy, don't worry). From there, we decided to make our way back to the Hauptbahnhof so that we could be back in Tübingen at a decent hour. We ate McDonalds at the train station (McNuggets for the win) and then got on a train at 7:19, which took us to a small town called Pfrozheim and from there we hopped on a small train bound for Tübingen. We ended up being pretty much the only ones on there for a while, which was Twilight Zone-esque. We got back to Tübingen at 10, which meant that we had very little time to go home, quick change and make it up to WHO for sangria, meeting Dani's little brother, and going to Kuckuck.

So yeah, that was about my Saturday. Beyond that and Halloween, nothing much has happened this week. I didn't have classes on Friday due to All Saints' Day, which, for me, didn't mean anything since I already have Friday off, but it did mean that stores were closed (which can always been frustrating). Southwestern Germany can be silly sometimes. Especially because I am fairly certain I didn't get off for All Saints' Day at my Catholic school. So yeah, that's about that. Bis später, Kinder.