l'Allemagne

Finding my train I climbed aboard to find it completely deserted. It was one of the types where seats were arranged in cabins of six seats with an individual closing door. I walked up and down the length of the car, yet there was no one inside except myself. I was about to check that I was on the right train when it started moving. The conductor came on an made announcements in Italian and German. I understood very little of it, but caught the word München, the German name for Munich, my destination.

Having had a full night’s sleep the night before I was not tired enough to fall asleep for the journey so I decided to sink myself into the novel that I was working on reading, Les Miserables, a French classic by Victor Hugo. I was disturbed from reading only twice on the trip. The first time was by the ticket inspector and the second by the magnificent views that came to surround the railway right after we crossed the Italian border into Austria. The train wound along on the side of a hill by a river that cut a path through the mountain range. All around were green fields with old homes and farms whose occupants were busy attending to their chores. The fields quickly rose up steeply and turned into mountains, most of which were still snow capped despite the warm and humid day. We passed through whole villages that were built quite literally into the sides of mountains in about as little space as one could fit a cluster of buildings large enough to be called a town. Around the German border other passengers started filling the empty car. It was dark when we pulled into the station.

Stepping out of the train I was overwhelmed not only by the large train station, but by all of the signs and advertisement. In France I can read just about anything that’s written in public. In Spain and Italy we were able to use our limited knowledge of the languages and the similarities between English and the vernacular to distinguish what most everything meant. German would prove to have more differences. As soon as I stepped off the train I instantly aware that I was in another country.

German uses the same Latin alphabet as English, but with a few additions of accent marks such as the addition of an umlaut, two dots above a letter, and the conversion of two letter ‘s’ side-by-side into a ‘β’. It is an interesting written language in it that it combines nouns and their modifiers into one word, rather than adding space as we do in English or in French for that matter. This makes for words that can easily be thirty to forty letters in length.

I wanted to get to may hostel, but I was terribly hungry as my last meal had been breakfast in Italy. I ordered from a café just outside the train station getting the first chance to practice my spoken German. Satiated, I set off looking for my hostel, but the search did not take long. It was almost right next to the train station.

Our hostel was very lively as late arrivals such as myself were checking in and other groups were getting ready to head out for the night. The building was huge with several floors of dozens of rooms. It had its own computer lab, kitchen, bar, and a two story common room with a glass ceiling and live plants growing. It was hard to believe that we were getting such a place for only a few euros per night. In the room I met up with Sai, a fellow ENSEA student who had gotten in recently as well. After unloading my stuff we went to use the computers to tell our other ENSEA friend that we were here, but we ran into him and his high school friend on the way down the stairs. They told us they were about ready to head out for the night and we quickly joined them.

We headed to the beer garden that was associated with a major Munich brewery Schneider-Weisse. The place was lively and large with tables and hanging lanterns strewn throughout an area at least the size of a football field. Here they served beer by the maβ, a large glass holding a liter of drink that was heavy even when empty. Throughout the garden were waitresses in traditional dress carrying up to eight glasses at a time, burly German men collecting empty glasses by the dozen, and workers rolling barrels of beer down the hill from the storehouse. The calm of the warm summer night was broken only by the excited chatter and occasional drinking song of the patrons.

We came to the conclusion that Munich was the best guy’s city in possibly the world. The city was known for its sausage and beer, and the favorite pastime seemed to be watching sports and drinking. The next day we opted for a nutritious breakfast of sausages and breads also taking the time to see the city itself. We ate dinner at one of the largest beer halls in the city complete with dozens and dozens of huge picnic tables and benches made out of old beer casks. I ordered a plate that contained more meats than I am proud to admit, but it was excellent.

Of course, the main reason that brought us to Munich at the time was the annual spring festival, Frühlingsfest! Like Oktoberfest held at the same location in the fall, the fair was a huge affair for the region and brought people from all over the country in traditional Bavarian dress to eat and drink with friends and random strangers alike. The festival was home to three different beer tents each filled to capacity with hundreds and hundreds of people from teenagers to the elderly. There were bands playing live music and waitresses delivering huge plates of food and large glasses of drink. As the night went on more and more of the people got up on the tables to dance, so we naturally joined in. We ended up meeting quite a few people that night as well, almost everyone our age spoke perfect English.

 The next day was significantly more relaxed. We had time to sleep in late, eat a breakfast that involved food groups other than meat, and tour around the city before Sai and I parted ways with our other two friends to head a bit further west to Stuttgart.

Stuttgart was another very cool city that mixed old and new architecture in a downtown space analogous to that of Buffalo. Despite being a smaller city, they had an excellent tourism office with interactive touch screens, destinations grouped by category, and an extremely helpful staff. I thought that an office like that would be especially useful in a city such as Buffalo since both cities have a lot of hidden treasures that the average tourist wouldn't know to go just having arrived. We checked out some of the small German villages nearby containing traditional wooden houses and a manor of one of the medieval ruling families. Of course, being a smaller city there was nearly no one outside of our hostel who spoke English so we were able to get some good practice our German.

Taking a hard look at Stuttgart, one would also notice the lack of buildings built before the 1950s. Like other small European cities such as Caen in Normandy, Stuttgart was nearly completely reduced to rubble over the course of the Second World War. There is a hill in the landscape of downtown of at least one hundred feet that is quite noticeable. We were told that that hill was formed just by pushing all the rubble from the center of downtown together which was eventually overgrown by grass. It was a startling reminder of the devastation that the continent had faced.

Of course, our decision to visit Stuttgart was not influenced solely by architecture and quaint German towns. Stuttgart was also holding a spring festival that week which was similar to Munich’s, but serving stronger beers brewed exclusively by smaller local breweries delivering their casks straight from the production line.

Another night of dancing on tables with German co-eds behind us we wandered around the city before getting on the night bus back to Paris that evening. I expected the ride to be long and not very comfortable from my experience with the train to Barcelona the previous week, but at one third of the flight or train price I couldn’t complain too much. The air conditioning wasn’t working well in the back so I woke up every few hours, but I slept a decent part of the time. I remember waking up at about 6am in Marne de la Valley the home of Paris Disneyland which was the penultimate stop of the route. Though we could have gotten off here and taken the RER straight to Cergy but we decided since the bus was due in Paris proper in a half hour we should just wait.

About two hours later when our huge bus was winding through the narrow streets of the French countryside outside of Reims, I decided that we had made the wrong choice. Our bus driver apparently had a tenuous grip on directions of the route and made several wrong turns that took us more than an hour outside of the city. With the help of some passengers he eventually found his way back about three hours later than expected. A train ride later we were back in Cergy. Though it was only afternoon I was exhausted and went to bed. Luckily I had another entire day to finish up work before school started up again.