06 Aug 2012: Adieu to Europe

06 Aug 2012:

Adieu to Europe

Freiburg am Breisgau, Baden-Württemburg, Germany/Saint-Louis, Alsace, France/Amsterdam, North Holland, the Netherlands/Detroit, Michigan, USA/Lansing, Michigan, USA

H: 19/20/19/27/29 L: 16/16/16/14/12 Weather: Showers/Showers/Rain/Clear/Clear

I couldn't believe that I was leaving Europe already, but, unfortunately, it was the case.  Chris and I set off fairly early in the morning so I could see more of Freiburg than I had already.  We tried to budget ourselves some time, but, of course, given that it was a morning, both of us were moving pretty slowly.  We were also stymied by the ridiculous hours kept by some of the stores of Freiburg.  I wanted to get my brother an official U. Freiburg t-shirt, and their official store was open for about three hours in the early afternoon of Tuesdays and Thursdays...?!  I did get to see the city center in the day, though, which was nice.  What a lovely town.

Chris looking super sexy.  I have no idea why I'm so shiny.

Chris is pretty much the best tour guide in the whole world, besides being a fantastic person in general.  Hooray and schwa for Chris!

By this time, it was time for us to head back to his dorm to pick up my stuff.  Once we got there, though, I realized how close I was cutting it.  It would not be good for me to start my trip back to the US by missing the bus that would get me to my plane to get to my plane to get to my plane to get to Lansing.  No sirree.  We ended up sprinting through Freiburg, and I felt so rushed that I ended up having him take my money and run to the bus stop ahead of me and my luggage to pay for my ticket.  Luckily, desperate measures were not needed, and I made it on the bus with just about exactly a minute to spare.  Whew!  I said my goodbyes to Chris, then headed to the EuroAirport.

The EuroAirport, despite being, officially, the "EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg", is actually a ways outside Freiburg, 70km away.  So I had about an hour bus ride to get there.  After a bit of a struggle to actually get my tickets, I passed through security fine. (I did almost lose half of my identification documents in the scanner, but luckily some unknown force made me look back and see that they had fallen out of my travel belt.)  Then I had an agenda: I needed an Orangina.

Orangina is one of my fondest memories from my first trip to Europe.  Every restaurant we went to, it seemed, offered the deliciousness that is Orangina.  (For those who don't know, Orangina is an orange pop that has 1) real orange juice, 2) some pulp, and 3) probably crack or something in it.  Seriously, give it a try.)  And I hadn't seen it at all on my second trip to Europe.  If I had seen it, I would've had one, trust me.

But, finally, in EuroAirport, I sighted my prey in a vending machine.  I paid however much it cost, then quaffed it almost immediately.

Sweet orangey goodness.  The only drawback was the plastic bottle that it came in, rather than the original funny-shaped glass one :(

My flight from EuroAirport to Amsterdam was uneventful, besides learning that I could apparently gate-check my carry-on that was too large for European standards.  In Schiphol, I realized I had only gotten my first ticket in EuroAirport, not my other two, so I had to print off my next two tickets at a KLM counter.  This probably makes me one of the few people in the world to have a KLM-branded Detroit to Lansing ticket.  Once more, I went through the at-gate security too early and ended up waiting around to no good end, though at least this time my layover was shorter than my previous one to Glasgow.  (I'm not sure why everyone is so obsessed with Schiphol.  Maybe others have longer layovers that make it seem like they don't have to get to the gate so early.)

My flight from Amsterdam to Detroit was fairly similar to mine in the reverse direction. My seatmate was not as awesome as mine on the way over, but he was still pretty cool; he was a professor of marketing from Wayne State returning from a conference in India.  He said he had taken an extra day in Amsterdam on the way back just because he could, and was as disappointed as I was by the prices of Amsterdam museums. (He seemed to like the Van Gogh one better than me, though.)  We had a friendly chat for a while, then I turned my attentions to the entertainment console, identical to the one on the flight over.

Going east to west, you're supposed to stay up rather than sleeping.  Thus, in quick succession, I watched the Hunger Games (good!  followed the book very closely, which I was impressed with), The Ides of March (good, if depressing), and Captain America (alright, but by this time I probably would've thought that YouTube video of the panda cub sneezing looped a bunch of times would've been quality entertainment).  And finished it up with an episode of Parks and Recreation for good measure.  Alright.

The plane landed in Detroit, and then the wonderful process that is "US Customs" began.  I think I was there for about an hour and a quarter, or something like that, which was not fun.  In line, I chatted with my seatmate and a woman returning to the US from a week in Vienna, where her son and his girlfriend were staying.  One of the wonderful things about not having a checked bag was how much easier it was to stroll through security after the initial check, but, of course, I had to wait in line behind everyone who had like five checked bags.

Oddly, though, after going through customs, I had to leave security entirely and then go back in again.  To make matters worse, I thought I had misplaced my Detroit to Lansing ticket.  (At this point, I was having a very hard time braining.)  So, I went and printed a ticket at one of the check-in booths, only to find that it was proudly branded "DTW-->LAN".  So, obviously, the security guards would conclude that I was flying just from Detroit to Lansing!  How embarrassing!  (Like I said, I was having problems braining.)  Luckily, though, I somehow re-found my KLM-branded ticket to Lansing, and proudly showed it off at security.  They seemed unimpressed by my awesomeness.

My first dinner back on US soil was a cheeseburger at Fuddrucker's, because, for serious, Fuddrucker's.  Then I got on board the flight to Lansing.  I was picked up there by my soul sister, Jessica, and my friend Jaya, who I'm quite grateful to for doing that for me, because I'm not exactly sure what happened the rest of the night except for realizing when I got to my apartment that the trash can had disappeared from my kitchen.

As it should be clear—at the very least, from my going back to complete this even more than a month after I actually got back—I had a fantastic time in Europe.  Thanks to everyone who made it possible, from the funding for the travel to the people who made staying in hostels and seeing the sites wonderful!  Lessons learned:

• No matter how well-planned your itinerary is, things will still fail.
• That said, a well-planned itinerary can still be a wonderful thing.
• Make sure to have a cell phone that works in the countries you're visiting.
• Trust the sites that have crowdsourced reviews—they know what they're talking about.
• Muesli is delicious in yogurt.
• Croissants are a wonderful breakfast food.
• The best way to make friends is to mention food.
• Europeans don't believe in "fast casual" dining, so, either get take-out or realize you'll be there forever.
• When in doubt, public transit workers are often kind or helpful if you're lost.  Sometimes even both!
• Minnesotans sound like gay Germans to Europeans.  (Possibly even gay Jewish Germans.)

Thanks for sticking through with my blog.  I loved writing it!  As should be clear from my Facebook status updates, I'm having a fantastic time at grad school.  I hope your fall is off to a great start!  Thanks for helping make my life absolutely wonderful!  :)

Flails,

Chris

05 Aug 2012: Catwoman and Friends

05 Aug 2012:

Catwoman and Friends

Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemburg, Germany

H: 26 L: 16 Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Rain Late

On my penultimate day in Europe, I got to sleep in.  In a real bed.  And it felt good.  It was a lazy day, mostly because Chris, who I was staying with, and his BFF, who slept over in his room, slept in.  A lot.  After they woke up, I got the story from them: Chris's BFF had been hoping to seduce a lady the day before.  But then he ended up having an utterly wretched night that involved him being accused of theft, among other things.  So he ended up having an awful night, and Chris, being the wonderful person that he is, stayed up for him and talked to him some before they went to bed, thus meaning they were both up till like 5am.  I, meanwhile, got to read another couple of chapters of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" while waiting for them to wake up.

After everyone was awake, I demanded food.  ("Demand" is not much of an exaggeration.  Breakfast is srs bsnss for me.)  We journeyed to get a croissant from one of the stores by the railroad station, which was one of the few places that was actually open on a Sunday early afternoon.  I got a plum croissant, which was delicious.  One of the many things I'll credit to Europe was the deep love of European breakfast pastries it imbued in me.

After getting food, I wandered around Freiburg with Chris.  Freiburg is an adorable little down.  One of its cutest features are the Bächle, the tiny canals on the side of the street that used to be used to fight fires in Medieval times.  Nowadays, they are mostly used for the entertainment of tourists.   And they are, indeed, adorable.  My favorite kind of water source is the river, and so with bächle everywhere I felt like the whole town was full of little rivers.

Bächle!

Chris, being the good ex-linguist he is, was sure to give me a crash course in Alemannic German, which refers to the variety of German spoken in southwest Germany.  Many German dialects are on the brink of extinction due to encroachment from the standard dialect, but not Alemannic, which Chris claims is at least not completely dying.  In fact, you've seen some Alemannic already in this post; "-le" is a diminutive suffix in Alemannic (like "-y" in English used to be and still kind of is; "dog"-->"doggie", "Tom"-->"Tommy", etc.).

Eventually, we made our way to a part of town and ate at an Italian restaurant called "Bella Italia".  It was delicious.  I had some sort of wonderful salmon pasta (another theme!), and all things told, when I paid the tab for the both of us, the total was about €16, which is exceptionally cheap for Europe and includes service charge.

After Bella Italia, we headed to see The Dark Knight Rises (in English) with some of his German friends.  They were all pretty awesome—I can see why Chris has essentially converted into being a German national now!  The movie was absolutely fantastic.  I particularly enjoyed Anne Hathaway's portrayal of Catwoman, which was spot on in combining ridiculousness with badassery.  It was pretty fantastic to actually see a female on screen actually demonstrating competence and agency, unlike a lot of media.  However, I practically started screaming at the TV when there was NO TSUNAMI AT ALL after a bomb was detonated offshore just over water.  wtf.

After the movie, we all headed back to our respective domiciles; it had started to rain, and I don't think anyone was eager to loiter around.  Chris, his friend, and I stayed up chatting for a while longer, then I went to sleep for the last time in Europe.

(Well, last time this year!)

04 Aug 2012: The Twilight Zone

04 Aug 2012:

The Twilight Zone

Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany/Freiburg, Baden-Württemburg, Germany

H: 27/28 L: 13/15 Weather: Clear/Light Showers

He was just a normal, American twenty-one year old on a normal trip to Europe.  He woke up.  He headed to breakfast.  He was told by the hostel staff that he had to pay for a breakfast pass to eat in the hostel dining room.  But little did he know that, when he stepped downstairs to pay for the pass, he would be leaving Frankfurt, and entering... THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

The conversation went a little something like this.

• Me: Hi, I want to buy a breakfast voucher.
• Her: What room number are you?
• Me: 25.
• Her: What's your name?
• Me: Chris Heffner.
• Her: ...Chris Heffner checked out already.

I wasn't quite sure what to say to this.

• Me: ...no I didn't?
• Her: Yeah, it says here that Chris Heffner checked out already.
• Me: I don't think so.
• Her: Uh.
• Me: Hrm.

At this point, we're clearly both extremely confused.

• Her: Yeah, someone came down, and said they were Chris Heffner and that they were checking out.
• Me: Well, it wasn't me. (takes out ID) I mean, I'm Chris Heffner...
• Her: Yeah, I believe you.  I just... I don't know how this happened.
• Me: Me neither.
• Her: Is there anyone else under your reservation?
• Me: No...
• Her: So no reason for someone to have the same name as you here?
• Me: No... not unless there's a big coincidence...
• Her: Er, yeah.  Let me just... sell you a breakfast voucher.
• Me: Oh, okay.

So, yeah, I have no idea what happened.  Nor did she.  ... yeah.

I went up and had breakfast, then came down again, prepared for the receptionist to declare me Wilhelm X, Margrave of Hesse-Kassel.  Instead, she informed me that I had bought the towel that I had paid for the night before.  Uh, oops?  Apparently, when I thought I had been borrowing a towel (which is a thing that often costs money in hostels), I had actually been purchasing one.  For what it's worth, it was a nice and fluffy white one, much better than I would've expected out a hostel.  However, it also made my carry-on bag improbably large.

I met up with Martin again, and we decided to go off to see Frankfurt's cemetery.  At first, I was a bit worried about whether this was a sensible place to go touristing in, but I found myself much more interested than I thought I would be at first.  European cemeteries (I can generalize from an n of 1) are quite different from American ones.  They're not wastelands of perfectly-manicured green lawns.  They actually, like, have trees.  Trees everywhere.  And nature and shade and light and flowers and plants.  And tombstones that are individualized and have every member of the family who's died since like 1850 all on one tombstone because they're all buried next to each other.  It was actually quite nice!  Martin and I's favorite game was to try to determine who was married to who and who was who's child, because in-laws often shared the same tombstone.

After a while, we tired of that, and we stopped at a coffee shop to get some food.  I got a bagel with some random toppings on it—I don't remember what they were, but I do remember the bagel dripping orange something all over the place.  I also had a smoothie.  Martin complained about the encroachment of American food on European cuisine, but I munched away happily.

He headed back to his apartment, while I looked for something to keep me occupied for an hour or so before I left for Freiburg.  Martin had mentioned that one of the best international bookstores was across the street from my trippy hostel, so I headed there to see whether I could replicate my Amsterdam bookstore experience.  I was sorely disappointed.  None of the books were old, for one, and there were no maps at all.  wtf?

I made my way to the train station.  There, unfortunately, one of my least favorite things about European trains showed up: a passenger alert not in English.

I can't even attempt to break this apart into morphemes.  Linguist fail!

The white bar indicates the passenger warning, "umgekehrte Wagenreinhung".  Sometimes you can get cognates.  Dutch sometimes looks surprisingly like English.  French looks like English or Spanish but very rarely neither.  German... look like "umgekehrte Wagenreinhung".  I think "Wagen" is the start of the word for "train car" in German.  Or it is the word for the car of a train.  Or something.  But I really had no idea what it was saying.

Whatever it did say, it didn't affect my commute, as I made it to Freiburg without incident but with another fantastic German train ride.  There I met up with my very good friend who is also named Chris.  Chris and I share a long history of being mostly functionally equivalent.  So it was wonderful being able to see him again—by this point he had been in Freiburg for A WHOLE YEAR and it was aaaaagonyyyyy :( :( :(—and to meet his awesome Freiburg friends, who are pretty amazing.

We stopped for döner on the way to the train station.  Unfortunately, I didn't have much of a chance to try out my Turkish skills, as Chris had warned me beforehand that one of his favorite workers at the döner place was Kurdish and hated using Turkish.  After dropping off my stuff at his dorm, we made our way to a biergarten and had a bier or two with some of his friends.  (The stuff was good!)  It started to rain, but it was such a lovely evening that it hardly fazed us; the rain was pretty slow, anyway!

Chris was nice enough to let me use his bed for the night, which also felt pretty darn good.  I went right to sleep once we got back.

03 Aug 2012: Frankfurters

03 Aug 2012:

Frankfurters

Brussels, Brussels-Capital, Belgium/Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany

H: 23/27 L: 13/16 Weather: Partly Cloudy/Clear 

Karel, the dude at the Stayhere hostel in Belgium, is the nicest guy ever.  Have I mentioned that?  He was actually off for a vacation in Italy with his family, starting on the morning of August 3rd.  But, before he left, he made sure I knew how to get to the Brussels train station and set me on my way.  Hooray for Stayhere!

I made it fine to the train station, in the end.  The German train experience absolutely lived up to the hype.  The train was clean, spacious, and almost rumble-free.  Each seat came equipped with an in-flight magazine, like those on planes, except for being like five times bigger.  I couldn't decipher any of it, of course, so it wasn't at all useful to me, but I was still shocked at the size.  The worst thing about it was the fact that there were no plugs on the train, which was pretty much the number one way that the British trains were better than their Continental equivalents.  If you're going to be as awesome as the German trains were, you should really have places for customers to plug in their electronics!

When I arrived in Frankfurt, I had a place picked right out for lunch.  But I decided to be lazy.  Rather than, you know, walking to the place, and ordering food, I decided to get lunch from one of the many restaurants scattered around Frankfurt's truly massive train station.  And, trying to stick to local delicacies, I decided to get some schnitzel.  Oh goodness.  This was a good plan.  I didn't care that it was clearly crappy generic mystery meat, the German equivalent of getting a McDonald's hamburger.  It was still absolutely delicious!

Almost immediately after stepping outside the train station, I nearly had a heart attack.  Of joy.

STREET SIGNS.

I MISSED YOU SO MUCH

STREET SIGNS STREET SIGNS STREET SIGNS

Gone were the days of roads changing every five seconds without any warning at all.  Gone were the days of signs being in tiny font on the top of a single corner on the block without any other hint to where they were.  Instead, real, actual, street signs adorned almost every corner.  Or, if they weren't right on the corner, they were actually in places where real, actual humans would think to look for the name(s) of the street(s) that one would want to walk down.  It felt good.

Empowered by the ability to actually navigate around a city, I made my way to my hostel, which ended up having weird, multicolored, color-changing LED lights all over the lobby.  To make matters weirder, even though I had signed up for a four-bed dorm room, said room was only separated by a partial wall from a 10-bed room just next door.  Well, nice way to false advertise, hostel.  After dumping off my clothes and such at the hostel, I decided to see the city.

Frankfurt isn't a city that has many attractions in it.  It's basically a city made for commerce, not for museums or interesting historical sights.  That said, I had read online that the German Film Museum was a wonderful museum.  I crossed the Main to get there and wandered inside.  It turned out that they infamous "they" had not been lying in this case.  Artifacts were found all around: old school projectors from the very beginning of cinema, these weird optical illusion things that displayed imagines only when put around pyramidal mirrors.  There was even a little theater that showed films from the oldest days of silent movies.

But then, as I was watching one of said movies, I unfortunately noticed a small stream of adults leaving the museum in an apparently orderly manner.  It was about 16:00, and I knew the museum closed at an even-numbered time.  (Does anyone else have that problem?  Whenever I am trying to remember a number, I frequently remember whether it's even or odd but easily mix up near-contiguous numbers that are either even or odd; say, 2/4, or 7/9)  Rather than, say, looking at the documentation I had in my hands, or asking someone, I immediately assumed the museum was closing and walked calmly out of the museum.  Naturally, on the door outside, I saw the place closed at 18:00.  Whoopsies.

Well, so much for that.  I wandered up to the "historical section" of town, such as it were.  The problem with basically the entirety of Germany is that the historical sections are lies, because the Allies bombed basically everywhere in Germany during World War II.  Instead, more precisely, they're models of the original structures that existed in each location.  Frankfurt's was kind of charming, I suppose, but it was no Bruges.  I did, however, go to the best tourist shop that I saw on the trip (called Kulturothek) that had things with the name of the city I visited but that real people would actually wear.  I got my dad a shirt, which led the store owner to unleash a stream of German on me, as, just like everyone on this trip, she assumed I was German by my appearance.  As I left, she tried to tell me that I should bring it back if it doesn't fit my dad, then realized she was talking to an American.  We just kind of shrugged at each other.

After shopping, I stayed around the trippily-lit hostel a bit to catch up on emails.  After a short bit, in walked my friend Martin, also from the political forum I've been a member of since forever.  We had decided to meet up for dinner, and so off we went.  Martin is an old-school leftist, and much of our ~4km walk to Bornheim was filled with entertaining anecdotes about the rise of gentrification in the city (and, in his eyes, the sad demise of the old working-class neighborhoods of the city).  By the time we were at Bornheim, I had worked up quite an appetite.  In line with my desires to have local food, I had some sort of pork (I think?) with a green sauce Martin claimed was the local specialty, along with some apfelwein.

Drinking apfelwein in the bierhaus gave me a weird feeling, a sort of odd kinship with the people around me. (...this feeling may or may not have been influenced by the apfelwein)  Here I was in Frankfurt, drinking the traditional drink of Frankfurt, eating the traditional food of Frankfurt, while the people all around me were speaking in German.  And some of my ancestors—my Y chromosome, even, a thing that helped (just helped, mind!  gender isn't genes!) make me a Christopher and not a Christina—came from a town not too far from Frankfurt, a place close enough that for all I knew some of my cousins were sitting somewhere in the restaurant with me, enjoying their evening and drinking their apfelwein and eating their food.  It was odd.  But kind of great.

Martin was a lot of fun to talk to.  We ended up staying fairly late, and tried to take the subway back, but, oops!  We were there past when the subway shut down.  Instead, we walked the 4km back to my hostel, and I went to sleep.  I guess I had forgotten to ask for sheets or something, so I just slept under my comforter.