Belgium

Last weekend the program took an excursion to Brussels to visit the European Union. At the same time as a million world leaders were also visiting Brussels for the G7 Summit. Unfortunately, we didn’t see anyone famous. Also unfortunately, the only ones I could recognize if I saw them were Obama, Putin, Merkel, and Queen Elizabeth. (But I REALLY wanted to see Queen Elizabeth strolling down the street. 🙂  (Also, one of the Russian girls in Alex’s program told us that Putin totally gets plastic surgery…)

The tours of the EU stuff were interesting, but on the whole we were not impressed with Brussels. It is a very large international bustling city, but the theme of our trip is small local extremely touristy places. I don’t want power suits….I want wooden shoes and Belgian waffles! So we ate waffles and scurried on our way to the Netherlands, which I’ll talk about in the next post. (SPOILER ALERT: the Netherlands is AWESOME.)

European Parliament – we took a picture like all the famous people do in front of the flags. But perhaps famous people don’t look as happy as us!

European Parliament

We talked to our tour guide a long time about the interpreter service at the European Parliament. It’s so crazy! There are 24 official languages of the EU (from 28 member countries – some double up like Austria and Luxembourg and stuff). Each delegate is allowed to speak in their own language so there is a fleet of translators and interpreters and is translated through an English relay system. So if the German delegate speaks German, it will be translated into English, and then translated into the other 23 languages. The guide said this is the easiest way because it’s very hard to find someone who knows, for example, both Swedish and Croatian.

Also, surprisingly, neither Norway nor Switzerland are part of the EU because they just don’t want to be.

Big building! the old town Brussels was fancy-ish.

 

And then we went to a church! (Of course…) The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. It was really lovely.

However, we nicknamed it “the most well-armed cathedral in Europe” because EVERY statue had a really obvious weapon.

Like this golden ax…

Then we wandered around a lot and looked at random things that were vaguely interesting.

Like this indoor mall.

And this cute restaurant street.

And this duck in a park – who we named “Red Eye Magoo.”

AND THEN WE ATE SOME MORE BELGIAN WAFFLES!!!!!!!!!! The waffles are just normal waffles, but they have some kind of amazing caramelized sugar coating on them. They are already baked, but when you buy them they warm them in the waffle maker again and it make the sugar a little crunchy. Mmmm.

Action shot!

Creamy chocolatey delicious waffles!

So Belgium is cool and stuff….but we should all just look forward to the Netherlands!

Cheers World Cup!

 

Speyer by Bike

The weekend we went to the Playmobil museum we also rented bikes and explored the area around Speyer. I had a dream of biking up and down the Rhine (there are bike paths the whole way from Switzerland to the Netherlands!) so we started from there. Turns out that the path right by the Rhine is very gravelly and you mostly just see trees and water, so we went back and followed the masses of other cyclists who seemed to know that it was better to bike through the little towns. And yes! We went through countryside and farms and small lakeside villages and found an adorable small town (I think it was called Otterstadt). A terrifically lovely area.

The view of Speyer from down river. You can see the spire of the cathedral on the left and the other churches toward the right.

The public garden outside Otterstadt church. SO PLEASANT.

Back in Speyer – Feuerbach Park trees loveliness.

The random unicorn statue outside an official looking building in downtown Speyer. ?!?! In other news, did you know that the unicorn is the official animal of Scotland?

And then I celebrated the use of our bicycles by going to every thrift store in Speyer I could find. Guess what? They look exactly like American thrift stores!!! And were just as fun. (I tried to sneak a picture here….)

Home sweet home!

 

I was pretty proud of how far we had biked that day, until I found out Otterstadt was only 7km away. Guess that nips my other dream of biking for 7 days from Vienna to Prague in the bud! Gotta start training for some long bike rides!

 

We are officially leaving Speyer today – taking the train to Zurich! Can’t believe it is that time already. We had the going away barbeque last night and are trying to separate the treasures from the junk in our dorm room. It has been a terrific trip…and we’re not quite done yet!

Also, we finally settled on a one-word description of our time in Europe.  PLEASANT. I think because we came at this time, everything is green and flowers are blooming and it’s pretty cool weather-wise. So it looks pleasant and Europeans know how to take a chill pill, so there are so many places to sit around and eat something pleasant and look at pleasant things. Just so dang pleasant!

Love,

the utterly pleasantified, Kate

Random Germany

It’s comforting to know that there are weird things everywhere in the world. I have collected here a few of our random observations.

1. Germans (also Czechs) LOVE sparkling water. It’s very difficult to find still water. And sparkling water is really not the same as still water. And it is REALLY not the same when you drink sparkling water and think it is still water.  Dad, Nate S., and Cara, you would love it here.

2. Capri Sun is also confusingly popular. It is sold in bakeries, tourist kiosks, and vending machines and I see adults walking around all the time drinking them.

3. Other things Germans like – bright red hair dye, Nordic walking sticks, dogs, RVs (there are soooo many around), eating ice cream cones at 10 in the morning, and red roofs.

Here is a picture of a local Speyer Pharmacy. It is one of the top 10 oldest pharmacies in Germany. Because Germany keeps a list of its top 10 oldest pharmacies.

Germany is also amazing at playgrounds – way better than America. The play equipment is super interesting and random. One playground just had a giant rubberized hill, on which a group of 3-4 yr old boys were running up and down wildly. Isn’t that the most perfect playground thing? Just a giant hill.

And then we found a playground that is Ron Weasley worst nightmare. Yeah, that is a giant spider climbing frame.

Not to be outdone, we also found a climbing wall shaped like a giant ear. Seriously.

We also ate some ice cream that looks like spaghetti. It’s a thing here.

Also, while Europe may be good at many things, there is one thing it is terrible at – drinking fountains. America is light years beyond the rest of the world when it comes to drinking fountains. I really didn’t appreciate them until I came here and it is sooooo hard to get a drink of water. Even though you can drink the tap water in Germany, restaurants really don’t want to give it to you for free. Also, you have to pay to use the bathrooms in the train stations in Germany. I am so fundamentally opposed to that I cannot even tell you. In my own American way, I really feel like tap water and restrooms are essential human rights.

Anyway…

There’s been some radio silence from me recently while we’ve been in Belgium and the Netherlands. My friend Katie flew over from the States to meet us in Amsterdam and we’ve been bumming around Europe this week. I will be posting a bit randomly from now on, but hope to get a few out in quick succession.

Happy Thursday!

Kate

 

Cathedrals!

I promised myself I would only have one super nerdy post this trip – and here it is.

So there are a lot of cathedrals in Europe. Back in the day building cathedrals was a very popular pastime. People here don’t seem to realize how unusual this is. IT’S SO WEIRD HOW THERE ARE SO MANY GINORMOUS AND BEAUTIFUL  AND OLD CHURCHES EVERYWHERE. They are so big and so old and so interesting and EVERYWHERE.

After a very confusing first visit to a cathedral in Cologne, Alex and I watched this awesome NOVA documentary about cathedrals and learned stuff. If you want to spend a nerdy hour, here it is – NOVA Building Gothic Cathedrals. Armed with a tiny bit more knowledge we are avidly consuming European cathedrals right and left.

Introductory cathedral trivia –

1) A church is designated to be a cathedral because it serves as the seat of the bishop. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the building itself. That’s why there are three churches in Speyer that look just like cathedrals (to me), but only one of them technically is.

2) Almost everything in a cathedral is symbolic, even the shape of the building itself, which is usually a cross.

But the big question that I didn’t even know I had until I watched that documentary was about how people learned to make cathedrals in the first place. For a really long time if architects, engineers, and builders wanted to make a really big building they had to make the walls super duper thick in order to hold up the weight of the enormous building. Hence, the images of medieval castles with tiny windows and draw bridges and clunky towers. But then, all of a sudden, people suddenly started building REALLY big buildings with soaring parapets and extremely skinny walls that were filled with stained glass. Apparently, it took modern day people a while to figure out how ancient architects could have made this extreme jump in engineering knowledge.

Turns out it’s all about the arches. A rounded arch can hold a lot of weight, but an arch with a pointy top can hold A LOT OF WEIGHT due to the angle of gravity or something. Once they figured this out they started making pointy arches right and left and were able to build churches so, so tall.

This was pretty fascinating for me to learn, because the cathedrals I’ve seen so far totally illustrate this.

Here is the Speyer Cathedral. It is a Romanesque design, which means it was pre-Gothic, and they started building it in 1053 (which was before the Great Schism when the Orthodox church broke off from the Roman Catholic church – also, fyi, the Pope and the Orthodox leader are planning an official get-together for 2025…that’s crazy! and unprecedented!). You can see how the windows are quite small and all the arches are rounded. It’s very square and solid and robust.

The word for cathedral in German is Dom. You can see on the sign – Dom zu Speyer.

But then, they figured out the pointed arches thing…..

And you get this! The Gothic Cathedral in Strasbourg, France. Very tall, elegant, and detailed.

You can get a really good feel here – see the pointy arches and the walls almost entirely made up of glass?

Also, contrary to my belief that flying buttresses were a made up thing said by Cogsworth the clock in the Disney Beauty and the Beast, a flying buttress is actually a very important arch that was put on the outside of cathedrals to help support the other arches. In this way they could just build up and up and up!

You can see the flying buttress arches over the green roof area on the side here.

There is a very interesting part of the documentary where they talk about cathedrals that are falling down and why and how people are trying to fix them. They do a lot of futuristic things with lasers.

Okay, so Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals….but mostly Gothic. Blowing my mind since 2014. As much as I am nerdily obsessed with churches, these cathedrals (while impressive and awe-inspiring) were not wholly unfamiliar to me. I mean, I’ve seen the Hunchback of Notre Dame and everything.

But then we went to St. Ignatius Church in Prague and….well….you’ll just have to take a look for yourself.

Here is the outside – pretty innocuous.

And then the inside…BAM. It’s like a little girl’s princess tea party threw up in the church. Twice!

Pink and frilly, anyone?

I couldn’t stop laughing when I first saw this. It was just SO unexpected and SO different from all the Gothic churches we’d been looking at. Our friends didn’t really understand what was so funny, they had just tried to take me to see a church, which is what I had asked for. But holy garlands and gold, Batman!

And that, my friends, is what you get with the Baroque style. Gothic just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Also, when I just tried to google this church to find the name I got off track for a minute because there is another more famous Baroque style church with a pink interior in Prague. Seriously.

Oh man, I just love this so much.

Okay enough churchiness for today. I leave you with this one last random cathedral related thought from the documentary. Apparently William Randolph Hearst once bought an old cathedral from Spain and had it shipped (stone by stone) to California where it hung out in a pile in a barn for 50 years. Ten years or so ago, some people started trying to put it together again, but no one really knows how the cathedral was originally built so it’s taking a long time. And a lot of science.

Cheers!

Kate

Frankfurt…and Toys

Our official program “excursion” this week was to Frankfurt to visit the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Frankfurt is not super interesting, and I am not super interested in finance, so it wasn’t my favorite excursion ever. But they did give us cookies and fancy bottle water at the ECB! But I think it was to buy our loyalty before they talked for 1.5 hours…. In all fairness, though, I did actually understand most of what she was saying, minus all the key vocabulary words. The only time I almost gave up was when she stopped to explain what “collateral” meant. Collateral was literally the only vocab word I DID understand in the presentation!!! I did have to give up at the stock exchange though – that was totally impenetrable.

However, Alex asked a lot of intelligent sounding questions that they seemed to understand and answer interestingly back…so I was very impressed. I was also very impressed with the whole environment. It was kind of like the adults in Charlie Brown who just say waaa waa waaaaaa wa wa, except they were saying THIS IS IMPORTANT. WE ARE IMPORTANT. IMPORTANT THINGS HAPPEN HERE. They do set the monetary policy for all of the EU countries. That DOES sound pretty important!

I was afraid to take pictures of the bank….I thought I might get tackled by Interpol or something.

But they took us to the 36th floor to feed us the cookies, so got a cool view of Frankfurt.

The Frankfurt Stock Exchange. All the trading is actually done online now…so it was a pretty quiet place.

But the best part of Frankfurt was that our friend Hanna came to see us! We know her from China too – if you remember she and her boyfriend Asong took us to the jungles in the middle of Hainan (that I was REALLY excited about), but now she is back at her normal job as a forester near Berlin. She came down for a bit to visit with us. Really fun to see her!

We also went to a church where they first signed the German Declaration of Independence in the late 1880s. It didn’t really stick and they went back to being a monarchy for a while, but it was a good start!

And that was that. Friday accomplished!

We decided to just hang around Speyer this weekend and catch up on all the things we’ve been meaning to do. So Saturday, we went to the 40th Anniversary Playmobil exhibit at the local history museum.

IT WAS AWESOME. Both Alex and I played with Playmobil (a German company) as kids so we were excited. It was an incredibly fun exhibit with huge dioramas and stop-motion videos and giant play-places for kids and almost-life-size Playmobil characters. And we got to see how they are made and got to keep a Playmobil mouse as a souvenir. However, the whole tour was a chorus of Alex saying “We had that horse!” “We had that Sheriff’s Office!” “We had that revolver holder!” “We had that dog!” It was pretty funny.

Also….they have a lot more Playmobils now then they did when we were kids!

Fairy castle!

Old West!

But my favorite by far was the dinosaur park. It was basically a re-creation of Jurassic Park, with tons of dinosaurs and tons of researchers hiding in the bushes taking pictures of them.

And Alex’s favorite was the pirates!

And then there was the group of nuns taking a tour of Sea World! Not even kidding.

PLAYMOBIL SELFIE!!!!!!!!

We finally had to stop playing around…but it was awesome!

Happy Sunday!

Kate

These Pretzels are Making Me Thirsty!!

It took us four whole days in Germany to remember this classic Seinfeld episode – where Kramer gets a single line in a movie and all the characters try to help Kramer decide how to say the line by repeating it ad nauseam throughout the episode. But since then we have made gooooooood use of the quote. Germany and Seinfeld – a match made in heaven.

(Also, we made the joke around a German guy once and he started laughing and was like, yeahhhhh! Seinfeld!)

 

We haven’t been super impressed with German food so far. It’s pretty much as I expected – a lot of meats, potatoes, and beer – none of which I really like. However, there are two German food pastimes that I can seriously get behind – pretzels…and gummy bears. Mmm, classic.

Preview: Totally going to a 40th Anniversary Playmobil exhibit at a local museum this weekend. Score!

Strasbourg, France

Despite my best efforts to be disdainful of visiting France and my deep loathing of learning the French language (sorry Burches!), I really loved visiting France. I still can’t understand their pronunciation, but I think they are nice and friendly and have amazing food. Of course, it’s not Paris, or the Riviera – just a small town on the Rhine. Which is probably why I loved it.

Seriously, can the Rhineland get any cooler? #charmingalert #GermanyANDFrance #isthisreallyDisneyland?

Also, the one thing I thought we were doing (touring a bank) was wrong (we are doing that this coming weekend in Frankfurt). Instead, Alex’s program took us on a tour of the Council of Europe. Having approximately zero knowledge of what this was, I found it to be quite enjoyable.

Also, I tried to guess some of the flags….but was disheartened after being TOTALLY SURE Iceland’s flag was Ireland’s. But seriously, their names are basically the same.

The Council of Europe is NOT the same thing as the EU (surprise to me – if I had ever thought about the Council of Europe before I would have definitely said it was part of the EU). It is actually a body that focuses on human rights issues – creating resolutions (like the European Convention of Human Rights) and monitoring human rights violations. The only prerequisite to be part of the council is to be a European country and to be a democracy. That means every country (except Belarus…poor Belarus) is a part of it – which is about twice as many countries as the EU. They meet 4 times a year here…

Each country is allowed a certain number of delegates based on size, with the smallest countries (Monaco, Lichtenstein) bringing 2 and the largest (Russia, Germany) bringing 18. When in this chamber all members are seated in English alphabetical order of their last name (interestingly, not by country). English and French are the official languages, with German, Russian, and Italian being working languages.

Then a guy told us some stuff in here.

I show you these pictures so you all can verify Professor Resh’s comment that the Council of Europe looks like the setting to a 1960s Bond film.  Yeah, you know that’s right.

But the social politics in the Council of Europe was very hard for this American to grasp. For example, due to their questionable acts towards Ukraine, Russia has to sit in the naughty chair now at the Council (no voting for the rest of the year). Which everyone decided/argued about while Russia was still in the room. Awkward much? The Council of Europe also wields an interesting balance of peer pressure, bad publicity, and humiliation. If you are a country in Europe and you don’t belong to the Council of Europe it pretty much means you don’t care about human rights – AT ALL. So there’s a lot of pressure to not get kicked out. It’s kind of like kindergarten and kind of like the aforementioned Bond movie??

And then Alex found a fork head guy.

The rest of the time we wandered about the old city, which is full of canals and German and French buildings all squished together. We took a boat ride through the canals, ate the best Indian food I’ve ever had (sorry Btown Bombay Cafe!), rode bikes to a park full of storks, went to Notre Dame (the other one), and saw an astronomical clock chime the mid-day!

When Thomas Jefferson was the ambassador to France, he traveled all the way to Strasbourg from Paris in order to visit the cathedral, which at that time was the tallest building in the world. (You can’t even see the spire in this picture because I was too close.)

Astronomical clock in the cathedral – bringing science into the church! Tells the time, the position of the planets, the month of year, the day of the week….even has a calculator! Every quarter hour a figurine (child, young man, old man) passes in front of the image of death. Every day at 12:30 a mechanical cock crows and flaps it’s wings, a baby angel turns over a sand timer and hits a bell, Death hits its bell, and the twelve apostles process in front of Jesus (you can see two levels of figures towards the top – they are both on revolving wheels). Oh yeah, and this was made in the 1500s. Soooo into this.

We took a boat ride down this river around the town, but all the pictures had window reflections in them. 😦 But we got to go through two locks! That was pretty nifty. Funny thing about locks though – cool as an idea, but kinda boring when you are actually in one.

A tiny stop sign for the bicyclists! Adorbs!

The camera battery decided to die right when we got to park – so no pictures of the hugely awesome stork nests we saw there. But I thought, no big deal, we are heading back to the train…what could possibly happen that I would need to take a picture of? Then we saw a parade for Jesus. Literally, a parade of people walking down the street holding signs that said JESUS. They were blasting praise music and just walking around smiling. It looked pretty official with a police escort and officers directing traffic. We were pretty confused, as Europe/France is not particularly religious, but decided to drown our confusion in an ice cream cone. Just as we were sitting down….ANOTHER parade goes by. This time, however, it was a parade protesting genetically modified foods and Monsanto. I guess it was parade day in Strasbourg??

But now Alex is back to classes – his cold is better, but I caught a milder version of it from him. So now the “can you bring me some water” tables have turned! Mwhahaha.

Happy Memorial Day!

Kate

Heidelberg… and then Prague

A bit of a whirlwind last weekend. Alex’s program took us on a day trip to Heidelberg and then the two of us hightailed it out on the night train to Prague!

First up – Heidelberg. A totally adorable city, where we saw a famous castle ruin, took a billion pictures of picturesque German stuff (although I totally missed getting a picture of the gummy bear store! what was I thinking???), and randomly arrived at a church just in time to see an organ concert!

 

Heidelberg Castle – This castle’s so old, the ruins are famous!

“The Ruined Tower of Heidelberg Castle” – Carl Blechen, 1830“The Ruined Tower of Heidelberg Castle” – Kate Netzler Burch, 2014

Apparently, the stone masons were so proud of their work and so confident that it would stand up against cannon fire that they would put little fake cannons in the stone work. A bit of thumbing their noses at the enemy. (You can see it in the top right corner of the picture.)

Back in the day it was really hip and trendy for men to have enormous thighs. So they wore thigh padding and then immortalized themselves in stone. (That’s a real thing the tour guide told us.)

And a super lovely flower. Because I am my father’s daughter.

Heidelberg yarn bombing!

Also, somewhere along the river edge lies Max Weber’s house. The American professor with us told me that. And I was like, how do you know about him? Turns out Weber is the grandfather of public administration or something. But he’s also the grandfather of religious studies…. Awkward.

And then we went to Prague!

If you look back in this blog 5 or 6 posts, you may remember that we had a Czech friend in China. Well, Michael is back in the Czech Republic and took time out from his exams to come meet us in Prague! We stayed with a friend of his and got a guided tour of all the stuff. We told them we wanted to see old things and they just laughed and then pointed to everything everywhere.

So I literally knew nothing about the Czech Republic before I went there. Turns out it is really really cool. In all senses of the word (it was raining all weekend). It’s hip and all bohemian and literary and stuff (Kafka! Faust!) and all these different historical eras are just piled on top of each other. We went to the Museum of Communism where I learned all about how the Cezch Republic just punched communism in the face, and then we went to a castle where people who used real swords and round tables used to live, and then we walked by all these Art Nouveau apartment buildings, and then we saw a super modern Frank Gehry creation. I don’t even get it…but it’s so cool!

Also, traditional Czech food is basically a series of Luthern potluck casseroles. Yum!

Alex and I with Michael and Maria (his gf) in Wenceslas Square – the location of the aforementioned punching of communism in the face.

Charles Bridge and Prague Castle. The President actually gets to live in the castle.

A cathedral near the apartment we stayed in. In the bottom left corner you can see what looks like a piano. Well, it is a piano. Prague is full of public pianos that can be played by anyone.

The inside of the cathedral inside the castle. Because all castles need cathedrals. (This is not the inside of the cathedral in the former picture. I just did this to confuse you.)

Another traditional Czech delicacy – the delicious pastry tube.

It looks extra foreboding because of the rain. But seriously…every spy thriller ever should be set here.

The Dancing House (nicknamed Fred and Ginger). Co-designed by Frank Gehry in the 1990s. It really does look like the two parts are dancing together!

After a week of classwork, dissertation writing, and Alex’s cold, the program is taking us to Strasbourg, France tomorrow. We will tour some kind of significant bank that is related to public administration in (I am sure) some interesting way and then we (Alex and I) will bike around and look at all the things (castles! fortresses! UNESCO world heritage site neighborhoods! Notre Dame (the other one)!) !

We will also stay a hotel called Hotel Du Dragon. Seriously, this can only end well.

-Kate

Speyer (pronounced Schpy-er) Tour

Last night we had a guided tour around the main sights of Speyer – the Cathedral, the city tower, and the Jewish ruins.  Apparently, Speyer is locally famous for all of its historical-ness and many Germans come here for weekend getaways. Our program coordinator said it is kind of like Williamsburg in the US – a historical thing everyone should do.

Haha…isn’t that cute, what I just said? It’s kind of like Williamsburg…. IN WILLIAMSBURG’S DREAMS. IT IS LIKE RIDICULOUSLY OLD OVER HERE. LIKE WILLIAMSBURG’S GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER OLD. Seriously. They think Speyer was started in like 10 BCE….THAT’S BEFORE JESUS WAS ALIVE, FOLKS. I’m so confused.

[So, I was pretty excited about the tour because there was a ton of religion facts and we got to go into places for free. I think other people were not as excited as me. 🙂 But due to previously stated over-excitement at getting free stuff, I only took pictures at the places that I couldn’t go back to without paying (like the top of the tower)…so this post very lopsidedly doesn’t have any pictures of the cathedral. You will all have to suffer through an independent post about the cathedral when I get back to take pictures (also by then I will have finished watching this NOVA documentary about how to build cathedrals….). ]

But here is the main street of Speyer looking down from the city entrance tower.

That’s the main cathedral at the end of the street. It was built in the 1000’s! And plenty of other spires too…there are no shortages of churches in Europe.

But let’s talk about Diets for a second, because that’s the other crazy thing I just learned about Speyer. Back in the day, the Catholic Church used to have these big all-empire Church meetings that were called Diets in which they decided Stuff That Should Happen About the Church. The meetings were very long and the people coming to the meetings tried to impress each other by showing off. So during one Diet in Speyer, a guy brought an entourage of 700 friends and 400 horses. You know…just for fun.

Anyway, in 1521, there was a very famous one, called the Diet of Worms (a city near here), where they wrote an Edict telling everyone to stay away from Martin Luther and not listen to anything he said because he was being a big fussypants and wanting to be all Protestant. Then, 8 years later there was another Diet in Speyer where everyone was like, yeah, that Edict is cool – Martin Luther is still a fussypants! But THEN, some of the local evangelical princes were all like, no way man! We really like Luther and want to be Protestants too! So they wrote an angry letter to their congresspeople and after a lot of hemming and hawing the Church agreed to officially recognize the fussypants Protestants. Yes, you heard that right – THIS IS THE BIRTHPLACE OF PROTESTANTISM. WHAT?!?! IT ALL WENT DOWN RIGHT HERE! (At this point in the tour everyone else was dozing off, and I was jumping up and down squealing….)

Then they built a church to commemorate this. (Of course they did…)

Here I am with the memorial Protestant-ing church on the left (the pointy one) and a competing Catholic church (the rounded one). RIGHT HERE! IT ALL WENT DOWN RIGHT HERE!

I know it’s hard to calm down after that ridiculous Protestant bombshell I just dropped, but I want to say one more thing about Jews. Or, if you are our tour guide – Yews. The ‘j’ is pronounced as a ‘y’ in German, and someone apparently never corrected him about this.

So, Speyer also has one of the oldest Jewish communities in Germany. They think the first Jewish community and synagogue was established in the 1080’s or so (what?!?!). We got to see some of the ruins of the communities from the 1300’s that survived because they were hidden away in someone’s back garden. The coolest part was that the ritual baths is completely still intact. Our guide told us this really interesting (to me) story about how when the Jews came to town the locals thought they were very strange because the Jews really wanted to use water. Apparently the local water was pretty gross so everyone just drank beer and wine, but the Jews needed cold, moving water as part of their weekly cleansing rituals. So they tapped into the ground water, found a spring and made this underground bath that completely replenishes itself every 4 weeks. And it’s still going strong! Our tour guide also said that because of this (hygienic) spring, a lot of the Jews lived three times as long as the locals.

Also…brrr. People were hardcore back in the day.

Some of the original synagogue walls remained standing because they were just built into the surrounding houses.

Oh man…history. Stuff. Phew.

 

Heading to Prague this weekend!

-Kate

Back in Business

Starting up the old travel blog engines again!

Alex and I are at this very moment in Speyer, Germany, where Alex is taking a five week study abroad course with SPEA (his school at IU) to finish off his master’s in public administration. I got to come along and will spend a lovely five weeks working on my dissertation from the comfort of our dorm room. We are settling in smoothly so far and trying to get a feel for Germany. We’ve already located the German board game store (everyone knows all the best board games come from Germany), observed loads of people using nordic walking sticks, goggled at castle ruins, and been plied with beer and pretzels.  Alex had his first classes today (which include public administration students from Germany, Russia, and Georgia (the country) and I got to celebrate a whole day NOT answering emails from my students….ahhh dolce vita.

But before we got here yesterday, we took a long weekend and went to visit my very old and dear friend, Aya, whom I have not seen in A VERY LONG TIME. Conveniently, she and her husband, Kengo, now live in Edinburgh, which turns out to be even more charming and wonderful than I imagined!

Overlooking the city. We brought the sunny weather with us! Although Aya wore her skeptical rain hood anyway.

The Queen’s residence when she comes to Edinburgh.

The view from Aya and Kengo’s apartment. That hill is where we were standing in the first pic. Totally charming.

Unbelievably great to see Aya again. And awesome to meet Kengo for the first time. He is getting a Ph.D. in theology at Uni Edinburgh so we got to talk shop a bit. He also totally butted in on this picture. 🙂

Even though I put all those picturesque pictures first, the actual first thing we did in Edinburgh may or may not have been to go to a used book sale… But as a connoisseur of used book sales I was pretty excited so you’ll have to bear with me. It was run by Christian Aid and held in a very old church. It was incredibly well organized with loads of helpers, none of whom we could understand because Scottish English is fairly incomprehensible.

Inside and outside. Balcony, main floor, basement. There were old-timey pew boxes in the back and the book boxes were just sitting on top so you could go into a pew box and have a seat and just riffle through to your hearts content. There was also a section entitled “Ephemera.” Book sale heaven.

After an incredibly pleasant stay in Scotland we flew to Cologne, Germany before taking the train down to Speyer. We stayed in a hotel by the convention center, where they were hosting a Role Playing Expo. So my first impression of Germany is people dressed like elves and pirates and zombies wielding broadswords, capes, and steampunk garb. It was awesome!

While in Cologne we visited the cathedral – the most visited tourist spot in Germany! I took a ubiquitous picture by it. Also, it is apparently always being fixed so the locals call it the Cathedral of Eternal Construction. Although, someone told me today that it was made out of sandstone, so it really does always need to be fixed. It also holds the record for being the longest continuous construction project – over 600 years!

There is a bridge leading to the cathedral where couples hang locks and then throw the key into the river. (I am very concerned about the mineral content of that river…) There are thousands of locks but Alex was pretty convinced that there must be one on there with our names already on it.

AND THEN HE FOUND ONE! CONNECTEDNESS OVERLOAD!

I will leave you with a random story from a German guy that we met at the meet-and-greet this evening. His name is Dirk and he was a high school exchange student in Arizona back in the day. But through some weird mix-up that I couldn’t quite understand he ended up going to a charter school for high school juvenile delinquents. I said, “Oh no! I’m so sorry!” and he said, “No, it was actually very good for me. I was a very spoiled child back in Germany and it helped me grow up and develop character.”  Haha, what?!

Have a lovely evening!

Kate