I’ve got a bunch of research to do for ECE 4000. Then I need to put together a 5 minute presentation on my work. I should also be getting a head start on my thermo homework, because it always takes 4-5 hours. Naturally, I’m blogging about my weekend instead.
The weekend started with some poker over at RESAM. I came in second this time, so I got my money back. I almost got knocked out. I was getting bad cards and was getting bored the game and so, as I usually do when I get bored, I started to bluff way too much. With a bit of luck and some discipline I dragged some the depths of my soul, I managed to hold on for second. It’s not that I was worried about the money; it just annoys me when I start playing so crappily. A bunch of French guys were watching us; they’d apparently never seen people playing Holdem before. We started chatting with one of them. He was a pretty cool idea. He’d taken classes in Scotland for a few months, which we think was the reason he said “fucking” so much. OK, pretty crappy story, but whatever.
The astronomical clock in Strasbourg’s cathedral.
On Saturday, I took the train to Strasbourg to meet my aunt Rosemary. I hadn’t seen her in eight years, so it was kind of cool catching up on a lot of the stuff in our lives, but at the same time it was a little bit weird because it felt like we were such strangers. She used to live in Strasbourg, and you could really tell that she loved the city as she gave me a tour. It was neat because she knew a lot of the history of place. Things like “This is the square that used to be packed with people listening to Hitler’s speeches although no one will admit to having attended them anymore” or things she remembered doing with my uncle (who died around a year ago) really made the place come alive.
Temple Neuf in Strasbourg.
Temple Neuf in Metz.
There was a bunch of neat stuff in Strasbourg. Their protestant cathedral is called Temple Neuf, just like Metz’s. They aren’t exactly the same, but they definitely have a lot of similarities, especially (to my eye anyway) the relative lack of ornamentation and the visible brickwork. I think Metz’s Temple Neuf is definitely the better of the two. Waaay better location, and a cooler building too. Strasbourg’s cathedral also has an astronomical clock. The clock is still on the time Strasbourg used before the introduction of standard time, so it’s a half hour off from the rest of the world. Anyway, at the top of the hour (bottom of the real hour) you can watch the clock do all sorts of things. Bells gong, saints go marching, the 4 different stages of man walk around, etc. It apparently shows all sorts of different things, but it was pretty hard to figure most of them out.
Like a lot of churches in the area, their was an inscription in the cathedral honoring the memory of the American GIs who died while liberating the area in WWII. It’s too bad a lot of Americans can’t understand the inscriptions, because you see them everywhere, and they’re pretty moving. I think most towns I’ve seen in this part of France have a street named after the XXth American Corps, the unit that did most of the fighting in this area.
I also learned a bunch about French food, which is definitely one of my weaker points. It turns out that choucroute is sauerkraut (good stuff). Crudités turn out out to be raw vegetables. Rognons, which sounded appealing, turn out to be kidneys. Note to self: Learn more about French food before I eat something truly nasty.
After an afternoon in Strasbourg, I hopped onto the train to Munich. I’m really not sure about this vaunted German efficiency and timeliness. My train was delayed over an hour getting into Munich. I talked to people who had delays on German trains and ended up getting back into Metz a day late. Shane and Kirsten apparently also had delays getting into Munich. At least the DB trains are much nicer than the SNCF ones.
One of the four gates into the old city of Munich.
Now that I’ve gotten to Munich, I can start to show pictures again, because I met up with Kirsten and Shane and so I have pictures from Kirsten again. We were staying at the Wombat hostel, which is an awesome hostel just across the street from the Munich hauptbanhoff (main train station). Since Kirsten and Shane weren’t there when I checked in, I went out and explored the city on my own. I headed along Bayerstrasse to the old city. The first view I got was of the gate shown to the right, except when I saw it it was night out. There were still just as many people there at 10:00 pm as there were when Shane and Kirsten saw it though. I walked around the still-bustling old city and checked out all of the sights. It was pretty cool touring a city at night, because we usually do it during the day. Of course, it also meant I couldn’t go into most of the sights.
King Ludwig II’s bed in Schloss Linderhof.
Outside view in Linderhof.
On Saturday, Shane and Kirsten’s friend Christoph and his fiancée Constanze took us on a highlight tour of Bavaria, which was super awesome because it meant we got to take a car. We started at Schloss Linderhof, one of three castles/palaces built by King Ludwig II. This one was apparently intended to be his private retreat. We walked in the front door for our tour and I thought to myself, “hmmm, that statue of Ludwig looks awfully like Louis XIV”. Turns out it was good old Louis. The entire palace is pretty much a giant temple to Louis XIV. It was incredibly incredibly gaudy (I think the picture of his bed pretty much says it all). You could tell that the staff really loved the place, but it was showing wear in a number of places. I thought it was kind of ironic that we sort of look down on Ludwig for living in the past and yet there we were, tramping through his hundred-plus year-old castles.
After Linderhof, we took a super scenic drive through Austria to Neueschwanstein. The drive was really beautiful and the scenery reminded me of the Canadian Rockies. I was explaining how the Rockies tend to be jammed with German and Japanese tourists and that I thought it was because the Rockies reminded Germans of Bavaria. Just as we were saying it, we passed a bunch of Japanese tourists taking pictures on the side of the rode. Apparently, Japanese tourists are a world-wide stereotype. Between Christoph being a crazy drivier and the windy mountain roads, I almost got carsick. I think if the trip had been five minutes longer it would have been all over. Europeans will apparently make out absolutely anywhere, because we saw a couple who were apparently so overcome by the beauty of a mountain lake (which was pretty beautiful) that they were going at it right at the side of the road.
The best view of Neueschwanstein is from an incredibly scary bridge.
Group shot! Shane, Constanze, Kristoph, me and Kirsten outside Neuswchanstein. Yes, I have my eyes closed again.
So we got to Neueschwanstein, cookies bar barely untossed. That is to say, we got to the base of the mountain Neueschwanstein sits on. The plan was to hike up to a lookout behind the castle, check out the view, hike down into a gorge, and then finally hike back up to the castle in time for our tour (you had to buy tickets for tours at a certain time). I was still feeling queasy, so I almost didn’t do the hike, but I decided to tough it out. I’m glad I did. The picture in the post below is from the halfway point of the hike. When we got to the top, we went and checked out Mary’s bridge, which crosses a really steep gorge. The bridge was scary as all hell. It was small, really crowded, and reminded me way too much of my own mortality. So I admired the view real quickly and then rushed back to solid ground. Next we hiked down to the bottom of the gorge the bridge crossed. There was a really tall waterfall feeding a stream with the clearest water I’ve seen in my life. I figured I wouldn’t have many opportunities to drink from a mountain stream, so we all drank a few handfuls of water. Yep, tasted just like water. Finally, we hiked up to the castle, waited a half hour for our tour time, managed not to kill the obnoxious Americans, and checked the place out. It was pretty neat. The view was awesome and it looked really good inside. It’s crazy to think it was built at the same time as sky-scrapers were starting to go up in New York and Confederation was happening in Canada.
A view of Hohenschwangau, this time without my head in the way.
Two castles was more than enough for one day, so we headed over to Andechs, a monastery cum beer hall. We were so incredibly tired that I actually managed to fall asleep in the middle of a conversation with Shane in the car. We skipped the monastery part and went straight to the beer hall. They had some good German beer and even better pork, both of which were pretty interesting. It’s apparently pretty common in Germany to mix beer with Sprite or Coke. There are rules for which types of beer you mix with which drink. I tried a little bit of a beer and Sprite, which didn’t taste half bad. The pork they had was more like a hunk of pig. It was pretty much part of a leg, roasted with the skin on. You could still see bristles on some parts of the skin. It was some of the tastiest pork I’ve had in a long time. The skin was really good, although I skipped the part with the hair on it.
After the beer hall, Christoph dropped us off at the train station so we could head back into Munich. I ran into some people with Canadian flags on their backpacks, so I grilled them to make sure they were really Canadian. We got back to Munich, walked around the old city a bit more, and then went back to the hostel. Sunday was pretty much just a travel day as we took most of the day to get back to Metz.