High School Reunions in Foreign Countries 2

The second weekend in April (after my Netherlands/Switzerland double whammy of a weekend) I made my way up to Tübingen, Germany to visit my friend Hillary who is studying there this semester, and who I also met up with in Amsterdam.

Tübingen is a small college town in the southwest of the country, which is said to have the best beer and best food in all of Germany. To get to Tübingen I took my first overnight train in Europe, leaving Milan at 11pm, switching trains in Munich around 6 am, grabbing a train to Stuttgart (the capital of the region Tübingen is in) and then finally getting a regional train in to Tübingen at 7 or 8, getting in to the city sometime before noon. When you pretty much don’t get any restful sleep for 9 hours on trains it gets hard to track the time, especially when you’re trying to remember it a month later because you’re horrible at actually sitting down and writing blogs. But you guys already know my problems with remembering times because I take too much time to write my blogs about my times in foreign cities. Time.

Anyway I got to Germany and pretty much immediately loved it because it was just a whole new world compared to Italy. While I loved traveling to Amsterdam and Switzerland, there was something that struck me about Tübingen that neither of them had. It might be the college town vibe, which, while Miami is in no way a college town, still excites me a little because college towns are the best little towns on the planet. Or maybe it was the amazing efficiency with which Germans accomplish everything, especially train rides (all of mine ended up arriving early, which is unheard of in Italy). Anyway I got off the train and met Hillary as she walked up the stairs of the station, so it was all perfect timing and stuff. We headed out and got breakfast in the form of German pretzels (along with Apfelschorle, a carbonated apple juice thing), which we enjoyed on the shore of the river running through the town.

Mmmm...pretzel (Hillary's gonna kill me if/when she sees this)

Afterwards we grabbed the bus and headed up to her apartment so I could drop off my bag, then we headed over to a very German little town nearby called Bebenhausen.

Perfectly German

Still perfectly German

American?

Pope Cane!

The town actually had a former royal residence so we took a tour of that (no pictures). Our guide was incredibly friendly, let us in some of the rooms we weren’t technically allowed in to and told hilariously inappropriate jokes in German that Hillary had a great time translating for me. After our tour we wandered around the town a little either looking for something to eat or just how to get home (I can’t remember which) but we ended up walking back, uphill the entire way. So that was awesome. It made me realize that while walking everywhere in Europe has made me good at walking everywhere, while walking everywhere in Europe has NOT made up for the fact that I have exercised maybe three times in the last three months. The walk was tiring, to say the least. But we made it up the hill and rewarded ourselves with some sustenance: Weissbier! Aka Wheat Beer. Everyone I know loves this beer, but I would rather have normal, non-wheat beer (especially after all the amazing beers I had in Germany. This was just the beginning).

We made it home and napped, then headed out to a Biergarten on the outskirts of Tübingen. It was awesome.

View from a Biergarten

We tried every kind of beer on the menu,

This is not all of them, but I only took pictures of these

Got some dinner to go with it,

Cheese

Bratwürst

Saw a peacock,

And saw an amazing sunset

We headed back to the bus stop to get back to Tübingen, but found out that we were supposed to call two hours in advance to alert the bus to come pick us up because 1) it was late and 2) we were kind of out of the way. Oops. So we decided to start walking back to the town (which really wasn’t that far) and Hillary got to show off some awesome navigational skills along the way. We made it back to town in a reasonable amount of time, actually, and we might have gone right to a bar but I can’t really remember. Anyway at the bar there was a picture of Karl Marx and there’s not much else to say:

KARL!

No crazy stories because we headed back to Hillary’s early to get some rest before our big trip to the Burg Hohenzollern the next day!

We got up nice and early (around 9. You can decide for yourself if that’s a joke) and grabbed the train to Hechingen. From the station we got a bus to Burg Hohenzollern itself and I got my first glimpse of a real German castle out the window of the bus!

From the bottom of the hill the castle is on we grabbed yet another bus (this weekend was all about the public transportation) and we either got kicked off of it or just got off too early and ended up walking up the last quarter of the hill. It was tougher than the hill the day before and I was once again reminded of how out of shape I am (but have still done little to nothing about it). We got up to the castle and it was awesome:

Drawbridge!

I feel like I'm in Harry Potter, except in Germany

And the view was fantastic:

But I forgot to charge my camera so I have no more pics of the castle. In other words, there’s nothing left to say about it because I remember my trips through my pictures now because I wait SO LONG to blog about them.

JK

Anyway we signed up for a tour at 1:30 pm and had a couple hours to kill before then. We wandered around the castle quite a bit and also got to see a huge group of Germans dressed in lederhosen. It was perfect. Pretty much the apotheosis of my time in Germany. Unfortunately we found out that they were just a theater group who dressed up because that’s what theater groups in Germany do: fake out American tourists with fake/authentic German outfits at authentic German castles. Anyway, after that enormous betrayal by Germany, we headed up to get our tour of the castle and hopefully have our faith restored by a tour hopefully half as good as the one the day before. Luckily it was up to snuff; we got a great history of the royal family(ies) of Germany and the complicated stuff surrounding the Burg Hohenzollern, and we got to see the INSIDE OF A CASTLE. So that was cool.

Afterwards we headed back to Tübingen, got some beer and drank it on the banks of the river, which was also fantastic. Unfortunately my camera was still dead, but I got awesome mind pictures. Later, we got some awesome German wine at an Enoteca (sorry Italian word I can’t remember the German…) in the main platz of the old town.

We then headed to a restaurant famous for its traditional Schwäbish menu (schwäbish being the food of the region in which Tübingen is located). I got something with mushrooms (BIG STEP FOR ME) and it was delicious, I even ate the mushrooms themselves because the sauce was soooo gooood.

Pasta with stuff (aka Spaetzle)

After we went out to the big bar/club by Hillary’s school (something I noticed in Germany, the bar/clubs are more bar than club while in Milan the club/bars are more club than bar. Same goes for Miami) and had a good time there before heading home to sleep after our exhaustingly fantastic German day.

The next day was my last in Tübingen (and I had to leave at 1) so we just went down to the Old Town and walked around a bit, got to see real Tübingen and also grabbed some ice cream masquerading as gelato from a place near the main platz. So I grabbed my train and bid a fond farewell to Tübingen, Germany. On my way home we passed a really picturesque lake:

Or maybe it was a river

And I grabbed my connection in Zurich:

I hopped on my train back to Milan and was sitting there comfortably until the conductor came over the loudspeaker and announced to the train that the end of the line was now Chiasso, or the very first stop in Italy, rather than the original destination of MILAN. So we were instructed to change trains when we arrived at the station to a train direct to Milan from Chiasso. I got to that train just fine. Unfortunately, after sitting on the train for 10 minutes (10 minutes after it was scheduled to leave) the AC and lights all went out, and we were informed that there was a mechanical malfunction with the train. We were advised to head to a different platform to grab a train to Milan from there that would be arriving in thirty minutes. Resigned to that fact, we all made our way over to the platform. As soon as we all got out on the platform however, we noticed that the train we had just disembarked from was now all nice and lit up (and probably air conditioned). So we rushed en masse to that platform and finally got on the almost-right train home. I find this story hilarious/perfectly appropriate because as soon as I left Switzerland and got in to Italy, everything that could have gone wrong did. All possible errors with scheduling, trains and just confusing directions in general were made. I don’t think it could get any more Italian. Welcome back, Chris!