...But, Baby, It's Cold Outside

Hey guys. So as I said before, I went over to the East for this past week, which in this case means: Jena, Leipzig, Weimar, and various other places. Which I am about to tell you all about in this monster of a post. Viel Spaß. :)

Sunday: Traveling und Schtuff
So on Saturday night, we stayed at Elizabeth's boyfriend, Joab's, house out in Deckenpfronn (read: the middle of nowhere). It was a joint birthday party for the both of them, so we hung out, drank, and then slept over, as that was easier in making it to Stuttgart the next day to begin our journey out East. Surprising, the entire thing went off without a hitch. We met up with Ute, took a train to Nürnberg, which was miraculously on time. (The belief that German trains run on-time is largely incredibly false.) And then from Nürnberg to Jena. 

Yup, that's Jena.

To start, Jena is a university city in the deutsche Bundesland Thüringen, which seems to me to be one of the lesser-known Bundesländer. It's cutesy, old (but not that old for Germany, only founded in the 1300 or 1400s), and whatever. And everyone tells you it's horribly boring, which I guess is at least half-true. While it is a student city, it seems to be significantly less hopping that Tübingen. But I digress. Upon our arrival in Jena, we met up with our host families. Our entire group was spread out across four families across Jena. Yasmine and I at one place, Theron and Julius at another, Elizabeth and Marlena at another, and then Ute stayed with our tour guide, a sassy little German man named Wolfgang. Now for mine and Yasmine's host family. They are perfect. Literally, they have no flaws. There are four of them. Father, mother, and two daughters, who are 18 and 20. The parents sing in a semi-professional gospel choir and go dancing on Tuesday nights. The 18 year-old daughter is in a different choir, and their 20 year-old daughter goes to school in Jena and plays the piano. They all sit in the living room, and either work on homework or sing Christmas carols together. It was just so much perfect-ness. 

That night, we went to dinner at a restaurant called Zur Noll, which served us some pretty delicious food, and the chef was a sassy tall man. Instead of even contemplating the idea of going on in Jena, we decided to go home with our host family promptly after dinner. (They live in Jena Ost, which is very far from being in the center of the city, so a car ride home was pretty appealing.) We turned in somewhere around 10PM. I guess there's some merit to Julius calling me Oma. 

Monday: Ostschule und Jena

One for the Tufts-in-Tübingen brochure

Montag was a mildly early wake up call. We were supposed to meet at one of the local Gymnasiums (read: high school, or at least close enough to a high school, I'll explain the German education system later) at 9:30AM or some nonsense. But our host family made us a lovely German breakfast of breads, jams, meats, and cheeses (and for which we naturally had to be punktlich). We spent the morning and part of the afternoon being shuffled from room to room to speak English with the kids. It was hectic, but fun. We went to three classrooms, two with 12 year-olds and one with 18 year-olds. I had a group of 18 year-olds interrogate me as to why I didn't tell the teacher that German bier was my favourite part of Germany. ("Wait, so you're twenty, right? So why didn't you say that bier was your favourite part of Germany?!") Afterwards, when they heard we were going to the cafeteria for lunch, one of them told me that the lunch ladies "cook with evilness." They were pretty hilarious. 

Then naturally, after the high school, we stadtführunged, which didn't take terribly long as Jena isn't very big. But it was also horribly cold. Somewhat of a theme for the rest of this week. We eventually ended up at the Weihnachtsmarkt, drank some Glühwein, and then went with Ute to a student restaurant for dinner. Afterwards, we met up with Julius and Theron's host mom at the Weihnachtsmarkt again. (We had wanted Eierpunsch.) This lovely lady showed Yasmine and I where the Straßebahn stop was and then took us to an Irish pub. It was all rather lovely.

Tuesday: Buchenwald und Erfurt
I thought that Buchenwald deserved it's own post. So it has one. Which you can find below. Cool? Cool. 

Which leads us up to the middle of Tuesday. We got to Erfurt around 1:30 or so, and made immediately for the Weihnachtsmarkt there to eat a quick lunch. And that was the fateful day. The day that I first tried a Thüringer bratwurst. To sum things up rather quickly: it was beautiful. This would also begin another theme of the week: eating bratwurst for every meal ever. After lunch, Wolfgang showed us Erfurt, which meant one of the two big churches in the city, the old synagogue, the Krämerbrücke (and the wonderful homemade chocolate shop on said bridge) and then the Rathaus. Then we had time to bum around, which meant "Russian Hot Chocolate" in a café to get warm (we were freezing during the entire tour), buying homemade chocolate, and going to the Weihnachtsmarkt. 

When we got back to Jena, while the boys hung out with their host mom, Ute took the girls to an Italian restaurant with the sassiest little Italian waiter/comedian I have ever met. He would talk to us in a mixture of German, English, Italian, Spanish, and French and would just give us a hard time. It was pretty hysterical. 

Wednesday: Weimar

Goethe's office

Weimar was also bloody cold. We walked around the city for two hours or so. Which admittedly was very cool. It's a very pretty old city. But it was freezing nonetheless. Also, Goethe (who was a wicked famous German writer and politician) lived there. Which is you go to Weimar for any amount of time, you will know because the entire city is Goethe everything. (Come to Goethe's house! Goethestraße, Goethe's grave, statues of Goethe, statues of Schiller and Goethe--it got a little out of hand.) We ended our tour at the Weihnachtsmarkt again, but we decided to try a café for lunch instead. I had a salmon salad, which was probably closer to soup--Germans love them some salad dressing. Afterwards, we chilled in Goethe's house (which is currently a museum) for a while, which was cool. If not a wee bit excessive. Then we went back to the same café and ate cake, because why the hell not. (And my God, was that cake delicious.)

However, all of this food meant that we didn't really have room for our early dinner at a Greek and Italian restaurant. Which was unfortunate, because the little food I did eat there was super delicious. We ended our night at the Jena Planetarium, where we watched Queen Heaven, a light show set to the music of Queen. SO FUCKING GOOD. Ute was shocked that all of us were Queen fans. ("You guys are so young!") But I guess that's what you get for having parents that play that kind of music in the car all the time.

After the planetarium, the six of us hung out in the city for a while, drinking wine, but I decided it'd probably be better to catch a tram back (which meant that Yasmine and I had a midnight curfew) instead of trying to figure out the whole bus/taxi nonsense.

Thursday: Small-Town Sachsen-Anhalt und Thanksgiving 

Thursday was a less early day, which was lovely. It was also a lot of time in the car, which meant sleep. Yay! We went around some small towns in Sachsen-Anhalt, namely Bad Kösen and Freyburg. And after a super large and delicious lunch at an adorable hotel in the middle of nowhere, we eventually ended up in a Sektkellerei called Rottkäppchen, which is the biggest producer of Sekt (champagne) in Germany. Our tour guide was an adorable little German woman, who didn't speak much English, I'm pretty sure was a little drunk, and enjoyed having fun with the Americans. She taught us a drinking song that went like this:

Alle meine Freunde trinken so wie ich

Alle meine Freunde trinken so wie ich

Legen sich besoffen nieder

Stehen auf und trinken wieder

Alle meine Freunde trinken so wie ich

So that was pretty hysterical. She also had us all get stuck inside a Fass (one of those big Sekt barrels), although I guess we really weren't stuck... 

So yeah, after the Sektkellerei, we returned to Jena early, which meant that we had time to nap! Yay, sleeping! I am fairly certain my host family thought that all Yasmine and I did was sleep, eat their breakfast, and travel places. But at 7PM that night, we had Thanksgiving. Now Yasmine and I thought that it probably wouldn't be like a "normal" American Thanksgiving, because, you know, people eat healthy portions over here. WRONG. We had the biggest damned turkey I have ever seen (it could have been an ostrich) and so, so much food. It was absolutely delicious. The chef at Zur Noll is a god amongst men. Afterwards, I promptly went into a food coma for roughly ten hours.

All the nomz

Friday: Max, Leipzig, und Borna
But that was good, because then I had plenty of energy for Leipzig. After an hour and a half-long car ride, we finally got there. So a few things: it was really apparent while we were driving that we were in East Germany, it was so industrial looking and the tiny towns that we passed through all 1. seemed dead and 2. had really Soviet-looking architecture. Second, Leipzig is a wicked cool and interesting city. During the days of the DDR, Leipzig, in addition to East Berlin, seemed to be the hot beds of anti-Communist activity. And when the DDR was finally disintegrating in October and November of 1989, one of the biggest demonstrations (if not the biggest) was in Leipzig. So yeah, Wolfgang showed us around and then left us to our own devices. 

This kid.

Then shortly after one, I got to meet up with Max again! Which was just so crazy cool. I hadn't seen this kid since I was a freshman in college, when he came to visit USM. It was awesome being able to see him in person again. We hung out for a while during his lunch break, got some lunch at the Weihnachtsmarkt, and then he showed me around the parts of Leipzig that I hadn't already been to, which was awesome. He did have to leave for work again, so I met up with my friends and we hung out until 5:30 when they left to go to dinner in a castle and I stayed and waited for Max to pick me up. We had made plans the night before for me to stay over at his place and then go back to Jena in the morning to catch the train back to Tübingen. He picked me up at the Hauptbahnhof. We then went to where his girlfriend works and had a bier. Well I had a bier; he had an alkoholfrei bier because he had to drive. He then took me to Connewitz, which seems to be a very hipster, left-wing, and young part of Leipzig. We ate both döner and burgers, because he wanted to show me both of his favourite fastfood places around there. And then we went to one of his friend's houses where they kicked my butt in a bunch of different Wii games. But it was still super fun and they are really cool.

However, we went back to Borna, where Max lives with his family, relatively early because we both had to wake up at the ass crack of dawn. Me to get to my train and him for orientation in Ravensburg, where he is going to be going to school in January. So about Borna. Borna used to be a relatively hopping place during the DDR times, because it had a ton of coal-mining around it. So all the coal-miners and their families lived there. After the fall of the wall, however, all the coal mines closed and the families left. Now you just have a declining town with very, very little to do. As we drove past the Hauptbahnhof, Max said, "and here is the best part of Borna...because you can leave." Which is fairly true. It was probably the first time that I truly realized that I was in the former DDR. Despite the fact that it was Saturday night, it was empty, eerily so. It was really weird. I had challenged him if it was more depressing that my home town. His won by a mile. But we drank biers in his family's kitchen and talked until 2AM or so, and that was great. 

Saturday: zu Hause!
Then this morning, I got to meet Max's family, who are some of the nicest people in the world. Not only did they invite me into their home, despite the fact that they had never met me, his grandfather offered to drive me an hour to Jena for my train because Max couldn't. They are just so sweet and wonderful. So I had a lovely conversation with his grandfather in the car, who is a quiet, sweet German man who hardly speaks a lick of English. And then took a train back to Tübingen (or well Nürnberg, then Stuttgart, then Tübingen). Once we got home, we promptly went to Kaufland--I had literally no food, and then crashed, because, you know, long week. 

And with that, that seems to be about it. I am leaving for Sweden on Thursday. Which is so crazy. I can't believe it's already here. I also maybe getting sick, which is less than ideal. But hopefully that won't be the case. And with that, I say thank you to the folks that actually read to the end of this long and rambling nonsense. Bis später, dudes.