bats don't eat bacon

Ann and I spent about five seconds in the actual town of Prien am Chiemsee. I'm sure it was a lovely town, but we weren't interested in the "Prien" part so much as the "am Chiemsee" part: a lake so big that it's nicknamed the Bavarian Sea. (And everyone knows by now how I feel about lakes). So for the day and some change that we were there, we stuck to the lakeside area of town called Prien-Stock, using it as our jumping-off point for a boat trip to the islands of Herreninsel and Fraueninsel.

The main (only?) draw of Herreninsel is the palace Herrenchiemsee, which was commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, "the fairy tale king" -- the dude who also brought us Neuschwanstein Castle. Ludwig II was big on castles as homage: Neuschwanstein was his homage to Richard Wagner; Schloss Herreninsel was his homage to Louis XIV. We suspect Ludwig II had a little dude crush on Louis XIV. Maybe more than a little dude crush. You don't commission a replica of Versailles in honor of somebody you like just a little.

The castle remains incomplete, but the parts of it that are finished are pretty stellar. Having been to Real Versailles in May, I can say that Fake Versailles compares rather favorably, though the grounds are less extensive and there are no wings off the main castle area, seeing as how Ludwig II ran Bavaria bankrupt before he could get around to adding them on. Also, Fake Versailles sadly incorporates none of the magical weirdness of The Hamlet -- but then again, Ludwig II wasn't building a castle in honor of Marie Antoinette.

Unfortunately they don't allow pictures of the inside of Fake Versailles, so you'll have to go for yourself if you want to see things like the swimming-pool-sized bathtub, the dumb-waiter-table, and the many, many paintings of Louis XIV in Ludwig II's private bedroom.




Finally, in a particularly delightful case of "Germans can be really, really weird," we ended the tour of Fake Versailles and saw a sign (still inside the castle!) for an exhibition on bats. Bats! Why not? It turns out that there are bats living in the roof of Fake Versailles, which makes the whole thing slightly less random, but we've still got no explanation for this sign. I never would have guessed that "bats eat bacon" was one of the seven most common bat myths in Germany.

time of your life

   


Though I actually love train travel (and even, in certain instances, bus travel) and in fact once spent 24 hours on trains going from Freiburg, Germany to Sibiu, Romania, I tried to ensure that my friend Ann and I never spent too much time in transit each day while we were traveling around Germany and Austria. I decided we'd stop in Augsburg for an afternoon to break up the otherwise five-hour journey from Rothenburg ob der Tauber to Prien am Chiemsee, because it was more-or-less at the halfway point, but also because our guidebook made Augsburg sound awesome. I believe there was a sentence about how Augsburg was "definitely worth a stop on the Romantic Road." We're talking high praise here.

And, well. Augsburg was fine. The sun was shining and the sky was mostly brilliant blue, and we sat outside and enjoyed a lovely pasta with Pfifferlinge (delicious orangey-tan long-stemmed mushrooms) and wandered around town (this takes maybe twenty minutes total) and went into both of the town's massive and beautiful Catholic churches and enjoyed some Kaffee und Kuchen outdoors, and it was good, nothing to complain about, except that we weren't quite sure what we were doing there in the first place. I mean, the guidebook talked about this place like it was something really special, and as far as we could tell it was just okay, but certainly not anyplace we would have thought twice about passing right on by had we known what it was like beforehand. It wasn't particularly cute or particularly large or particularly much of anything other than a generic mid-sized German city (although, according to Wikipedia, Augsburg does have "more legal holidays than any other region or city in Germany." -- I suppose that's something!).

We decided that the guidebook author must have had the best evening of his life in Augsburg, culminating in meeting his future wife. And if his wife's from there, hey! He certainly couldn't diss his wife's hometown in his Germany guidebook. But from the rest of us, who did not meet our German future significant others in Augsburg, let's go ahead and be clear: it's a perfectly okay place, but forgettable. I might even go so far as to say that a straight-through train ride to the Chiemsee would have been just fine.

red roofs and chocolate pantaloons

The first time I went to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, it was on my high school German exchange trip -- my first trip to Germany, my first trip out of the U.S. During our two days in Rothenburg, my friends and I discovered fruit-flavored ice cream, checked out medieval torture devices, got terribly lost (in a town the size of a button, never mind), and discussed the fact that the town was clearly the inspiration for the Playmobil castle we'd grown up with, and that the surrounding countryside, with its rolling green hills and forests, was just the sort of place we imagined the heroes of our eighth-grade novels riding through on their white stallions while wearing their chocolate leather pantaloons.

As for the actual town, I remembered it as being pretty touristy, but also just plain pretty: the most true-to-stereotype vision of (medieval) Germany there could be, thanks to the fact that the town became essentially a ghost town after being captured during the Thirty Years War and modernization couldn't take place for centuries, full of red tiled roofs and Fachwerkhäuser (half-timbered houses).

And on the return trip, Rothenburg certainly didn't disappoint. Except for the last morning we were there, our weather was yucky and gray, but the town itself looked just like I'd remembered it, in all its kitschy glory. A particular highlight, in spite of the fact that I'd done it before, was the Night Watchman tour, which was the very best kind of dramatic and hilarious historical kitsch. The dude's comedic timing and voice (the latter of which reminds me strongly of Brad Neely doing "Wizard People") absolutely made the performance.

up the river and through the woods

   


  
As the first part of my friend Ann's two-week visit from the U.S., she and Megan and I spent most of a weekend heading to Burg Eltz, a castle just off the Moselle River in Rhineland-Palatinate. We'd been drawn to Burg Eltz due to the fact that it's Rick Steves' self-proclaimed "favorite castle in all of Europe" (and you know what Megan's and my opinion is about Rick Steves' suggestions). It's especially hard to argue with Rick Steves when he gets all poetic. I mean, the man has serious feelings for this castle:

Lurking in a mysterious forest, it's been left intact for 700 years and is furnished throughout much as it was 500 years ago. Thanks to smart diplomacy and clever marriages, Burg Eltz was never destroyed. It's been in the Eltz family for 850 years.

So, understandably, our expectations were pretty high going in.

On a Friday we headed up to Koblenz, where we spent the (incredibly noisy and mostly sleepless) night before parking ourselves on a cruise boat with dozens of octogenarians and riding up the Moselle River in the glorious fall sunlight. We disembarked at Moselkern, where we paused for some fortifying Würste, fries, and beer before wandering through the town and into the forest, following the Elzach creek to Burg Eltz. I was a big fan of the walk, in spite of the mud and the fact that every guidebook and sign we ran across had a different estimate for how long the walk from Moselkern to the castle would take, ranging from 40-90 minutes (we came in right around the middle of the range: 70 going, 60 coming back). An important thing to know about getting to/from Burg Eltz is that you shouldn't let anyone fool you into thinking there's some kind of public transportation option if you get tired, because there is no such thing. You can get to Burg Eltz other ways (including within a kilometer of it by car), but I recommend the walk -- emerging from the trees and seeing the castle rise up in front of you is pretty excellent, even with cranes marring the view.

The castle itself was lovely but underwhelming. I was expecting some serious dazzle out of Rick Steves' favorite castle in all of Europe. And yet I kept thinking that there must be so many castles more excellent than this one -- maybe not so perfectly maintained, maybe not so immediately, obviously that American childhood vision of castle, but all the better for it. One of Rick Steves' other favorite castles, Burg Rheinfels, comes closer to this for me, but it's still not the absolute one for me. My favorite castle in all of Europe is still out there, lurking in the middle of some other mysterious forest. I'll keep on looking.

second summer in the unreal city

  
  

A couple months ago, my friend Cecilia visited me on her way to starting a months-long European adventure. Cecilia's one of my oldest Pomona friends -- we met on the first day of freshman year! -- and she was also my first independent travel buddy. For fall break our freshman year, we headed to Mexico, taking a Greyhound bus to San Diego, walking across the Mexican border, and standing in front of a Tijuana McDonald's, where a grizzled man told us in English, "If you're lookin' to have fun in Tijuana, this is not the place." (We were actually waiting for Cecilia's cousin Alejandro and then continuing on to Ensenada, but never mind.) Cecilia's relatives and family friends live in a pretty astonishing number of places, from California and Mexico to Italy and Spain and also, as it turns out, Zurich, Switzerland, where Cecilia's dad's cousin and her family kindly hosted us for the weekend and showed us around their beautiful city.

And oh lordy, is Zurich ever beautiful. Frankfurt's got a river; Zurich has a river and a lake, both of which you can swim in. (This is something I care about deeply, in case you hadn't noticed me harping on it all summer.) Not only can you swim in the lake -- we did, on Sunday! It was a little chilly, but a little hypothermia never hurt anybody. This nasty cough I've had all week is all Germany's fault. Swimming in a Swiss lake can only bring health!

Cecilia's relatives spent a whole day leading us all around the impossibly cute old city center, treating us to pizza, taking us on a boat ride* to the Chinese garden, and showing us the best museums in Zurich as part of Zurich's Night of the Museums, during which we went to two museums, ate curry, and watched a modern dance striptease so unfortunate that people left the room midway through. Art!

I think I can pretty well guarantee that I will never be able to repay Cecilia's relatives' hospitality, so I'll have to pay it forward instead -- once I live in a lovely house in a Swiss village just over the mountain from a beautiful city on a lake, that is.

*The boats that run on the river Limmat and on the lake are part of Zurich's public transportation network, and are included in the price of a day transportation ticket -- as are Zurich's two funiculars. How cool is that?!

Feierabend

One of the very best German words there is: Feierabend. It's the evening, specifically the evening after a day of work, but there's something really wonderful about it in that it has that bit of feiern in there, which means "to celebrate" -- celebrating the fact that now you can sit, guilt-free, by the side of the river and drink a small beer and write, because you've made it through another day, because the business part of the day is done.