land of knights and dragons

For Amanda's last full day in Germany, we went to the Rhine. I'd been to Burg Rheinfels, in St. Goar, with my high school German exchange group when I was sixteen, and I remembered it as being well worth visiting. It's always interesting to see how places differ from my memories of them. I wasn't a huge fan of Berlin in high school, but it grew on me in subsequent visits. I used to think Heidelberg was the most wonderful city known to man; it's too small for me now by far, and I think Freiburg is more charming. (Of course, after having lived there for a year, I'm biased.)

Burg Rheinfels held up quite well. We got some of the best weather we'd seen in Germany (which is really not saying much, but there were a few minutes of sun!), some excellent views of the Rhine, and the very end of a wedding. Burg Rheinfels seems to be a popular wedding spot, which I guess makes sense -- it's right in the heart of the Romantic Rhine.

There are all kinds of tunnels that are still open to the public, and we saw a good dozen kids with flashlights having an absolute blast exploring them. Katherine and I talked a while back about how Playmobil had always seemed very fake to us, very make-believe, but the Playmobil castle looks exactly like the town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (tourist central, but charming, at least at age sixteen), and the Playmobil gas stations look very much like gas stations we saw in Freiburg -- and we pondered the following: Does Playmobil just seem like a plasticized version of real life to German children?

For most American kids, castles and dark, ancient forests are things that exist in the imagination or so far away that they might as well be unreal. For many German kids, the crumbling ruins of stone castles and the Black Forest, the land of Hansel and Gretel and all the dark Grimm Brothers tales, are places you go visit on the weekends with your parents, places you can grow up exploring. Watching the kids run around with their flashlights on Saturday, I was unbelievably jealous.