Since it’s been a while since I’ve written here, I’m superblogging now and what follows is an abridged version of our adventures in Germany. If you feel cheated check our Kevin’s blog.
After touring around Poland for ten days, Kevin and I met up with Ola (my host sister from last summer) and Marta and Justyna (two of my students) at Warszawa Centralna, where all five of us caught a train to Berlin for a week. We were in Berlin for a whole week, which was awesome because there is so much to do and see and learn in Berlin. My favorite activities were the tour we did on the first day, which gave a great overview of the sights and history, and climbing the Reichstag dome. Going into the dome was free, since it’s a government building, and the last entry is at 10:00 pm. We got in line at around 9:15 even though it didn’t look promising. At around 9:45 we were at the sign that says “From here it will take you about 30 minutes.” But we just made it in the last round, and it was awesome. The last light died when we were up there, so we got to see everything by night. We spent nearly two hours taking tons and tons of pictures, which are really the only way to explain how cool it was.
From Berlin, Ola and Marta and Justyna headed home and Kevin and I moved onto Munich for a few days. Munich is a cool city, but I wasn’t as taken with it as I was with Berlin. But the Glockenspiel was about the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. Just kidding. Apparently it’s been voted one of the 10 most underwhelming sights in Europe, and for good reason. It did provide lots of good jokes though.
We made some Swiss friends one night, and what started as them trying to convince us that Swiss beer is the best in the world (ironic that they were doing this in Munich) ended up with Kevin and I waking up the next morning with considerably less zeal than usual. This was the beginning of the most bizarre day of the trip.
It was Munich’s 800th or 850th anniversary or something that weekend, so the city was putting on a little celebration. We walked out of our hostel to find that tons of people were dressed in traditional Bavarian garb: lederhosen for the men and those milkmaid dresses over white blouses for the women. Strange. I didn’t know that they still dressed like that. We went in search of food and couldn’t take ten stapes without running into a polka-playing quartet and people doing elaborate choreographed dances (still in the traditional garb). There was one performance of two guys with long whips who were cracking them in time and creating an impressive but scary kind of music. As we munched on some stellar bratwurst, we were pushed off the road by a procession of two knights on horseback surrounded by a marching band. I hope that Munich is like this every Sunday. The final straw in bizarre wanderings came as we wandered into a little square. Wandering in opposite us was an absurdly tall man (on stilts), wearing a purple silk outfit whistling and strolling along like this was normal. When he noticed us taking pictures I got to hold his hand. Then he whistled himself away. Weird.
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