Back to the Bodensee... Twice
Trip Start
May 25, 2008
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10
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Trip End
Jul 30, 2008
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Meersburg,
Baden-Württemberg,
Germany
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Anyway, last weekend was a soccer tournament for the Heuberg (the region I'm living in). As it turns out, Böttingen won. Clearly, I'm living in the right place. My host-cousin took me to a street festival in Aldingen, a town not too far away, and my host father took me to Stuttgart to see the Mercedes-Benz Museum. That was really cool. Very interesting building, too.
In the evenings over the past week (or two), I've been reading a lot in German, recording lo-fi demos using my headset mic and my host-sisters acoustic guitar, and trying to plan my time in Switzerland. (I've got most of it figured out by now. Still researching record stores and museums.)
This weekend was awesome. Friday night I caught a train in Tuttlingen to Überlingen, where I met Thomas, the French exchange student who was with us in Lindau. He is living in Meersburg (on the Bodensee/Lake Constance), and he invited me and the other Americans to visit. Two others also came. The four us just spent Friday night hanging out in Meersburg, but Saturday we took a ferry across the lake to Konstanz, which we walked around all day. It was great. I went to a bakery and had a chocolaty pastry, and later I found a Turkish Imbiss and had my first falafel sandwich in 14 months. (I've made my own and had similar things in America in the meantime, but nothing is quite like the Turkish Imbiss variety.) It'd been a long time... and it was great. Then we rented a Tretboot, also known as a Pedalo, one of those little boats where the motor is your feet. That was also cool. It's just nice to be on the Bodensee, but apparently all of Germany, Switerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, and half of the rest of Europe also thinks so, because it seems constanty crowded in the summertime. Anyway, it's a really beautiful area to walk around in (while eating falafels).
We took the ferry back, dropped one friend off at the Friedrichshafen train station, and then got back to Überlingen so I could catch my train to Tuttlingen to meet my host-brother-in-law. I ate dinner with my host-sisters' families - fake Fleischküchle (meatball is the translation, but that's inexact), ratotouille, and rice. Kept up the tradition of all my meals here being awesome. Then my host-cousin met me again and we went out for a while and ended up at a street fest in Denkingen. I swear, every weekend there is at least one street fest within a 30-kilometer radius of anywhere in Germany.
Today my host parents took me to Reichenau (an island in the Bodensee) for lunch and vegetable/garden shopping. Apparently the goods there are high-quality and grown right there. We stopped by a hangout of the Böttingen Obst- und Gartenbauverein (Fruit and Gardening Club) for some cake and then went to a festival in Kolbingen. Good times.
So: Germany continues to rock, my language skills are ever-improving, and I keep realizing that the German you learn in school is really only a general guide for how anyone here will actually speak, and by that I mean that it's usually nothing like what you'd expect. It's a fun little challenge. I'm also trying to learn some of the sayings, but it can be hard or weird. One I like is "ich verstehe nur Bahnhof", which literally means "I only understand train station" but is more like our "it's all Greek to me" sort of thing. Anyway. I like it here.
Comments
sounds great, i'm jealous
patrick, all your trips and events sound wonderful... wish we could share them with you. what fun! hope your final couple of weeks goes well and see you soon.
dad
sounds great, i'm jealous
patrick, all your trips and events sound wonderful... wish we could share them with you. what fun! hope your final couple of weeks goes well and see you soon.
dad