improvement II

The people who've been telling me that Frankfurt would be better once the weather improved? They were right. I've spent my weekend on the banks of the Main and lounging in Günthersburgpark, reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld and dozing in the sunlight. When the trees are green and the sky is blue, Frankfurt looks like a whole new city.

hunting for windmills + hansel & gretel's

This past weekend I visited Katherine in Freiburg for the last time before she goes back to Montana for the summer. We walked around in the hills all day Saturday, deciding on the spur of the moment to hike up to Rosskopf, which is where the four windmills are that you can see from almost anywhere in the city. I'd been once before, with Peter Dowdy and our IES history professor, and it had one of the best payoffs of any hike around Freiburg: panoramic view of the city and the hills, plus the golden checkerboard fields out past Littenweiler to the east . . . . This time it was hazy but still fantastic and totally worth it, though I was sore for days afterwards.

I met a boy in India who said to me, "No no, you are not too large. But when you come to visit me, I take you to the mountains, and we will go jogging." It was lost on him why I thought this was HYSTERICAL. Can you imagine anyone saying that in the States? There aren't too many countries where bluntness is less prized than in the good ol' U.S. of A.

Both pre- and post-Rosskopf, Katherine and I ate our way through Freiburg: Käsespätzle at the Gasthaus Lauren and Mandie long ago dubbed Hansel & Gretel's (in spite of having just eaten there, I continue not to know its actual name); phenomenal Turkish food at Harem on Gerberau; crusty bread with Frischkäse and fresh-pressed orange juice sitting in the sunlight on Augustinerplatz at Aran; and, last but certainly not least, big American breakfast at Sam Kullman's Diner way the heck out in industrial park land. It's a good thing Rosskopf totally kicked my butt -- otherwise I might need to take my Indian buddy up on that jogging offer after all.

improvement

Spring has been so unbelievably slow in arriving in Frankfurt. I looked up the other day and was a little shocked to realize everything is blooming -- from how gray the sky is most days, you'd never know winter had ended. Today, though, I sat outside with coffee and watched a fabulous dog beg for attention while the sun shone so brightly I wished I'd brought sunglasses. This is good.

currywurst and living rooms

Easter is a four-day weekend in Germany. Taking advantage of this magical fact, I went to Berlin for the fourth time in my life. The first time, on my high school exchange trip, I wasn't a huge fan (except for the döner kebab place where a bunch of us ate twice a day). The second and third times I visited, during the year I studied in Freiburg, I was pleasantly surprised by the city. This time, on my fourth visit, I knew enough about the city's layout and tourist attractions to be dangerous, and to lead us all on a nighttime venture up to Wohnzimmer, where I'd been with a bunch of IES-ers on Berlin Visit #2 (the accidental thirty hours in Berlin after Cheryl and I missed our flight to Munich due to spending too long trying (ultimately successfully) to find the Leaning Tower of Pisa). The verdict on Wohnzimmer, three and a half years later: still excellent.

We also went on a boat tour around Berlin Mitte, ate Currywurst at Metzer Eck and KuDamm 195 (which links to a page full of cult Currywurst stands -- it's a good thing we did not discover that website while we were in Berlin), discovered the joys of Georgian food at Genazvale thanks to Megan's Rick Steves guide (our BFF Rick Steves did not steer us wrong once!), and generally enjoyed the ambiance of Prenzlauer Berg and Hackescher Markt. There was plenty of sightseeing too, of course, but nicely broken up between coffee breaks and Easter brunch feasts -- we wouldn't have wanted to over-exert ourselves by going more than a couple hours without sustenance. All in all, an excellent prequel for Amanda's and my sure-to-be-epic Food Tour of Paris in May.

pink elephants on parade

I'm sure it's surprising to absolutely no one that the only people riding elephants up to Amber Fort were white tourists. I felt pretty guilty about doing it (the elephants are wildly dehydrated and suffer generally, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook and also our own eyes), but I did not feel quite guilty enough not to go for a ride when Lauren and Jess were both doing it.

Riding in the basket on the elephant's back was not particularly comfortable, and it's hard to look like much more of a doofus than I did when the mahout put his turban on my head.







We'd hired an auto-rickshaw for the trip to and from Amber Fort, the driver of which was a wizened old man who told us we were like his daughters. "You should watch out for the bad boys who will try to sell you things," he told us as we approached Amber Fort. "I protect you, because you are like my daughters."

As we piled back into the auto-rickshaw after visiting Amber Fort, he presented each of us with a set of stick-on bindis. "A present for you, because you are like my daughters," he said.

And then, because we must have been truly like his daughters, he took us to what we agreed was the biggest tourist trap in Jaipur: a "traditional handiwork emporium" with a row of auto-rickshaws parked out front and a bunch of confused-looking white tourists sitting on couches being shown piece after piece of "authentic traditional handiwork." We decided that the fact that we made it out of there rapidly and without buying a thing meant that we had become India shopping experts.

springtime in the pink city

The third and final city we visited in India was Jaipur. I hadn't, initially, been sure why Jaipur would be the third point of the Golden Triangle (the most popular route for tourists, particularly ones, like us, who are only in India for a week). Delhi, sure -- it's the capital. Agra, obviously -- it's got the Taj Mahal. What was Jaipur's claim to fame?

A beautiful pink-walled old city; a good dozen markets full of endearingly pushy salesmen hawking everything from saris to home repair supplies to milk; a cotton candy-puff of a movie theater called Raj Mandir where we watched Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge? and I sat in fascination at the way English gets mixed into the Hindi (and decided that I need to visit Mumbai); and, on the edge of the city, the Amber Fort, which was such an experience that it merits its own post.

Also, Jaipur was the home of one of the more wonderful hotels I've ever stayed in: the Hotel Sunder Palace. "You know it's gonna be palatial if it's got 'palace' in the name," we joked. But you know what? Hotel Sunder Palace pretty much was.

city of love

Though cute, I thought Agra was a pretty boring city, with one big exception: It's got the Taj freaking Mahal.





The Taj is the thing to see in Agra (and, you know, in the world in general), so I suppose I can forgive the city for not seeming to have a ton else to offer. The tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah (a.k.a. the Baby Taj) was cool-looking, and was an excellent place to take a nap, and of course we were delighted by the view of the Taj from the rooftop restaurant at Hotel Shanti Lodge, but we had plenty of time to visit both of those things and the Taj itself and walk into the Hotel Oberoi for a drink* in our sweat-stained salwar kameez and still had time left over for a nice long nap. At the end of the day we all looked at each other and said we were glad we'd been to Agra, but dude, if we'd been there more than one day, what would we have even done with ourselves?








* Strolling into hotels where we were not staying and that were far outside of our price range was a bit of a theme of this trip. We did this not just in Agra, but in Dhaka and Delhi, too. It was half-awesome (look at what you can get away with if you look like you know what you're doing!) and half-disconcerting (how much of the "getting away with it" was because we were all white? probably a whole lot.).