Trip to Bavaria

Hello and welcome back! I hope everyone had a great spring break. Mine was excellent. After a very nice trip to Bavaria in the first week, I spent the second week relaxing and hanging out with friends here.

Just a quick recap of my trip, centered around a select few of the pictures I took.

I started off the 350 mile trip at the train station in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, my host town. This is a view across the tracks of a train station in small town Germany. I've become very fond of traveling by train since I got here, and I'm especially fascinated by the high-speed trains in Europe. The German high-speed train is called the ICE, which stands for "Inter City Express". Deutsche Bahn, the German rail service, has this really terrible habit of naming things with English words.


Picture by Dennis Schollbach

On the route I took to Augsburg, the train reaches a top speed of 250 km/h (155 mi/h). If you're sitting in your seat looking forward, you barely notice anything. Once you look out the window, you realize how fast you're truly going.

The over 2000 year-old city of Augsburg, founded by the Roman emperor Augustus, has, like any other somewhat large German city, a beautiful, historical city center, good public transportation, like the streetcar below, and a huge church.



A streetcar in Augsburg


Downtown Augsburg

The next day, two other exchange students, their host families, and I went to visit a castle in Harburg. The castle is one of the oldest and best-preserved castles in the region, and we had a very interesting tour there.

A view of the Innenhof (courtyard) of the castle


The castle dragon guarding the valuables.


After one of the heartiest meals of my life at a restaurant in Oettingen, we went on to walk off all of the Spätzle, Weizen, and Schnitzel in the nearby town of Nördlingen. The town is one of the few towns in Germany with the historical wall still completely standing. This house is actually partially built into the wall.

The next day it was off to Munich, the 3rd biggest city in Germany and an incredibly popular tourist destination, best known for Oktoberfest, basically one of the biggest parties in the world.


The new city hall in Munich. I walked around a corner and this view just stunned me. So, I took a picture.


The German Museum, which is kind of like the Air and Space Museum, but it focuses on all kinds of science and technology. It does really come across in the picture, but this building is massive.


This is a sign I saw near the University of Munich (which is beautiful, by the way). It's basically advocating the abolishment of the Euro. As I wrote in a previous post, the introduction of the Euro was very controversial and led to a huge increase in the cost of living in Germany.

The text of the poster, loosely translated:
"Yes to a united Europe, but with national currencies!"
"The German mark stood by our sides."
(illegible)
"We demand a referendum for the re-introduction of the German mark!"
"Vote for List 18 at the European elections!"


Ben (one of my good friends here and another exchange student I was traveling with) at the monument dedicate to "die Weiße Rose" a resistance group in Munich during the days of Nazi rule. The leading members of the group were arrested and executed for their anti-Nazi political actions.


A demonstration in Munich against the oppression of Tibetans and the violence in Tibet right now.


A really strange basketball court. The surface is exactly like a normal basketball court, but the court itself is hilly. This was in front of a school in Munich. I wonder if kids actually play there and what kind of basketball results from a court like that.


Every trip to Munich has to stop by BMW Welt and the BMW Museum. OK, the museum doesn't open for another 2 months, so we just gaped in awe at the gorgeous cars in BMW world.


This pretty much sums up the biggest complaint I have about my year here in Germany: the weather isn't so fantastic. That's Ben making his way through wind and snow at the end of March.

All in all, I had a great trip to Bavaria. I got to hang out and travel some with my good friend Ben, meet his wonderful host family, and learn about a new region of Germany. Bavaria is a very charming place with strong traditions, beautiful landscape, friendly people, and great beer. The many different dialects and cultures add to the intrigue of Bavaria. I learned that it's a much more complicated picture than just Bavaria, that Bavaria actually consists of Swabians, Franconians, and Bavarians, all of whom speak different dialects and have some of their own traditions. Furthermore, larger cities like Munich have transcended regional cultures and developed personalities of their own. I would definitely recommend a visit to Bavaria to anyone traveling to Europe.

Regions

People I meet here often ask me things like:
-"Which cars do they drive in America?"
-"Do people in America like George Bush?"
-"What is school like in America?"
-"Which sports are popular in America?"

My response usually starts with, "Well, it depends where you live, but where I'm from..."

But the situation is often too complicated to be explained with one sentence. Obviously there are going to be many more hybrid cars on the environmentally friendly West Coast than in sparsely populated Montana. Of course the residents of liberal New England aren't going to be quite the fans of Bush that some in his home state of Texas are. Clearly the school system in Fairfax County isn't going to be exactly like the school system in Colorado or even that of neighboring Loudon County. Naturally there are more NASCAR fans than ice hockey fans in the South. But in America, in general? I have no idea.

A couple of weeks ago, this issue of Stern came out.

Picture from www.stern.de

The cover reads "California: the Better America". Of course I was immediately offended that a German magazine called the America I live in the worse America, but I thought I'd give it a read anyway. The article was actually pretty good; it focused on innovation in Silicon Valley and environmentalism all over California.

The article portrays a part of America with which many Europeans can more easily identify. Some Europeans might also find the health care system in Massachusetts or bans on the death penalty in more liberal states great.

These are more examples of the small differences that make it really difficult to describe "what it's like in America", and even more so difficult to give a concise answer to any such question. But in the Cultural Studies class that I helped teach in the first semester, we spent a fair amount of time on this topic, so I had the chance to try to develop some sort of general answer.



We divided the United States up into five regions loosely following the divisions of the US Census Bureau: the South, the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and the Pacific. Then, the class was divided into five groups, and each group made a presentation about the economic, social, and political characteristics of the region. Of course there are lots of differences within these regions: Northern Virginia, for example, could be considered an island of the Northeast at the edge of the South. But at some point you have to give up detail in order to keep the project doable.

One thing that occurred to me during the activity--apart from the diversity of the nation--is how little I know about how life in other parts of America really is. I've lived my whole live in Northern Virginia, and the only other place I know fairly well is the Midwest because I have so many relatives in Wisconsin. I don't think that life in Texas is really all that different, but I don't have much to judge that on.

The project turned out very well. One of the highlights was a group of German students' mock slang dialog(which actually wasn't all that appropriate for school, but hey, "it's all good").

I guess the most important point to this is to take the diversity that we can see in our own country and realize that this applies to other countries, as well. Of course the political views in Catholic Bavaria are going to differ from those of the industrial Ruhrgebiet in Nordrhein-Westfalen. So, the question, "What is it like in Germany?" is just as difficult.

What are the first things that come to mind when you think of the answer to that question? If the answer is a jovial man holding liter mugs of beer, wearing Lederhosen, and eating pretzels the size of a steering wheel, then you've got a stereotypical picture of a specific part of Germany called Bayern, or Bavaria in English. The truth is, I haven't seen a one pair of Lederhosen in my 8 months here. I suppose this stereotypical image comes from Oktoberfest, the most well-known festival in Germany, but it's not at all an accurate image of Germans in general.

Speaking of Bavaria, also known as the Texas of Germany, I'm taking a train there on Saturday for the first week of spring break. I'll be visiting a friend in Augsburg and then traveling with him to Munich. Hope you all have a relaxing week off! Comments, questions, and discussion are always welcome.

Cologne and Paris

So I've been back from Cologne (Köln) since Sunday but my regular posting schedule has been thrown off in the last couple of weeks. I usually find the time to post on weekends, but I was away last weekend and am going to be away this weekend as well.

Meeting the whole group of exchange students for the weekend in Cologne was great. It really is a fantastic group of kids. Although I've been able to meet with many of them during the year, a group of my friends live in Augsburg, Bavaria, and I hadn't seen them since the orientation. It was a blast.

But just because we had fun doesn't mean we didn't learn a lot as well. After comparing our experiences, we really did learn a lot about the diversity of Germany. Just being in one host family gives you the view of the country through that family's perspective. But talking to a friend who lives in a family with Polish heritage or someone who lives with a family who generates all of their own energy and produces all of their own automobile fuel will definitely show you different perspectives.

There's definitely a lot more to talk about as far as diversity inside a country goes, but I'd really like to get into it more in a more specific post. Just to start: how would you divide up the regions of the United States, taking into account social/cultural, political, and economic aspects of the regions?

When I talked about regions with the cultural studies class, I divided the United States up into 5 regions. I'll talk more about it later, but I'd like to hear your opinions.

This weekend I'm going to Paris with my host brother to visit my host sister who's studying abroad there. After we come back, I'll be celebrating Karneval (also called Fasching, a lot like Mardi Gras) in a nearby town with German friends. It's safe to say I'll have a lot to report.