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. 

She smells like rotting meat.

Hey gang, so yesterday was the perfect fall day. I'm not quite sure if it could have been more beautiful. At 70F, sunny, fall-a-rific, and perfect, nature was calling, so Lisa, Louise, Lasse, Hannah, and I went for a 5 hour or so hike. We had intended upon walking to Bebenhausen, a tiny town north of Tübingen known for its castle, from Fichtenweg and then finding a trail head for a 5km hike, which probably would have made the entire trip somewhere around 10-ish km. However, upon reaching Bebenhausen, we decided to just travel along a random trail. But Bebenhausen is in the middle of Schönbuch Nature Park, so there were plenty of places for our Wanderung. We set out, and it was quite the lovely time. Plenty of beautiful leaves all over the ground, which were quite fun to jump in. Although we wished we had had a rake so that we could have made piles. All in all, our hike ended up being probably close 20km or so, but that's OK, because the sun was shining, it was warm, and the leaves were perfect.


To continue our perfect fall day, we decided upon returning to Tübingen that we were going to carve pumpkins, eat pumpkin things and candy, and watch scary movies. It was a wonderful Saturday night. We arrived back in Tübingen around 6:30, when I promptly went to Rewe, found a pumpkin, went home and showered, went to Kaufland to buy pumpkin stew ingredients, and quickly made my way over to Lisa's WG. When I got there, everyone was showering, and the candy was in a bucket (which was awesome). So I started cutting up vegetables for pumpkin stew.  Also they don't have canned pumpkin on this continent, so that made things slightly more difficult. But between Louise and myself, we cut up all of the pumpkin and mashed it into a stew kind of thing. Her housemates were particularly nice about letting me take over their kitchen, as well, which is always a good thing. All in all, for my first foray into the world of fall vegetable stew without a recipe, I'd say it turned out pretty well. 

Then came the pumpkin carving, which was lovely as well. We had four pumpkins for the six of us (Anna came over as well). So Lasse and Lisa worked together on one, while Anna and I carved the pumpkin I bought. It was also the first time Anna or Lasse had carved a pumpkin, and Louise said she had carved one only once before when she was really little. So it was great to bring a good part of America to Europe. Seeing them both dig into a pumpkin for the first time was also pretty funny. We ended up carving an owl (Hannah), a fox, as in the Ylvis fox (Anna and I), Jack Skellington (Louise), and Eric Cartman (Lisa and Lasse). And my God, did they all turn out so well! Lisa's German roommates were quite impressed, in addition to being amused by our American antics, and I would say it's definitely the highlight of my pumpkin-carving career. 

After the pumpkin extravaganza and eating LOTS of frozen pizza (yes, in addition to the stew, we ate no fewer than 5 frozen pizzas), we decided to watch a scary movie. Lisa, our scary movie connoisseur decided to have us watch The Conjuring, which is a shitty movie set in the 1970s about a house in Rhode Island haunted by multiple demonic spirits, which a nice family of 7 decided to buy. It was pretty bad, but also ridiculously terrifying. I maybe watched 1/3 of it, and the rest of the time my face was behind my sweatshirt or the duvet cover. The walk home was also mildly terrifying. 

So yup, that's about what I got for you. There are sure to be more Halloween-related shenanigans, as the Tufts Kinder are throwing a Halloween party at Marlena's on Thursday for a combination of Deutsch Kompakt Kinder, START Kurs Kinder, and random German folks that we know. It promises to be a regular old riot. So bis später, Kinder.