germany is cool. i LOVE good public transport. they can manage it so why cant the rest of the world just get it together? especially in these days of climate change. and dont give me any crap about germans being inherently organised, they've just got their priorities right. you can get around the country so easily and if youve got a travel buddy quite cheaply, and i mean tiny towns no ones heard of and stuff - like quedlinburg.
my munchener relatives hadnt heard of it. its a pretty little town a couple hundred k's west of berlin, with beautiful little cobbled streets and half-timbered houses. the whole towns unesco world heritage listed, i guess cos its so damn cute, so we were surprised to be the only foriegn tourists there. there were plenty of other germans on the weekend doing tours led by lantern carrying, leather-panted old dudes, but troy and i were happy just wandering aimlessly. it was small enough that you take it easy and slow, which made it more enjoyable. there was this monastery place on a hill, and a big bell tower, ah its all just so hard to describe, even if i was a great writer. it was just peaceful and smile-inspiring and cute and warm and you would walk around a corner and go oh! and oh! again cos it was pretty. and i took a million photos but none of them are good enough either. but i added them to the happy snaps link to the right there if you wanna check it out.
we also did lots of historical stuff. we went to a great museum in nuremberg where the massive nazi rallies had been held. we went to dachau concentration camp, which was apparantly the first one to be set up, and thus held heaps of the nazis political opponents. at first we went through the museum bit and read stories and it didnt feel like you were actually there. you'd look at pictures of these eighteen year old communists with this defiant look in their eyes and it didnt seem real, more like reading a book about it. then we saw a film, and walked through the crematorium. the nazis didnt actually gas people at this camp, it being in the middle of germany. they preffered to do the dirty work in poland, but they had the 'showers' all ready to go just in case. no, here they just left people - communists, gays, jews, the mentally ill - to starve slowly, overcrowd them and let them die of disease at such a rate that they couldnt keep up with the cramations, so then stacked up the bodies ten high. in that crematorium it finally hit me where i was, and it was horrible. even writing about it makes me choke up. again, it indescrib-able though not in a nice way like quedlinburg. germany: land of contradictions.
troy ate a bratwurst for every day we were in germany. (sorry, there was just no seamless way to go from the holocaust back to the adventures of erin and troy there) . troy wanted to try pigs knuckles the whole time, and in each new town would say "this is it, erin, im getting pigs knuckles" but when it came time to order, sticking with good old reliable bratwurst. in the end i went and got him some pigs knuckles in the augustiner beer hall in salzburg, austria, on one of the last days of our trip. i personally was more partial to a pretzel, which went well with the much beer on our journey through germany, the czeck republic and austria.
but im not really one for churches and architecture i must say. its all very nice, and fairly impressive, but somehow prague and vienna left me kind of un-moved. like there were just too many sculptures and fountains and stuff. i dont know, i'd say i'm a philistine, if i knew what that meant. despite the church-fatigue prague did grow on me over the three days we were there, despite the hoardes of tourists. it was good going to the museum of communism, which while mostly taking the piss out of soviet schoolbooks and posters, did provide a good history of prague spring and the soviet occupation. plus i got a candle shaped like lenins head.
no, more moving were the quiet train rides through snowy forests, the view of the alps from the castle at salzburg, walking around dresden at night, and the lovely bamberg with its town hall sitting on a bridge over the river.
the whole trip was fun and nice and interesting, and being back in london sucks. the life out of me, at times. but dont feel too sorry for me, the next trips coming up in spring, visiting maureen in spain - woohoo! arriba! so to fund it this wage slave will dutifully trot off on the tube every day to some dodgy NHS hospital to save lives and stamp out disease til the next installment of the adventures of erin and troy.
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