an hour in the eighth

   



Work ate me a little over the past week or so, and I've only just now gotten around to uploading the pictures from when I went on a one-day business trip to Paris two Wednesdays ago. My coworker Anna and I were lucky enough to sneak in an hour of wandering around the 8th arrondissment after we were done with meetings: down the Champs-Élysées and over to the Seine, with views of the Eiffel Tower. Not bad, not bad.

over the city

In spite of having worked here for almost a year, I'd never been to the observation deck on the top of the Main Tower until this week, when I met my old roommate Sandra for lunch. It was a bright sunny day and very windy fifty-four stories up. Afterwards we had focaccia from Strahmann on Kaiserstraße, which we enjoyed in the (much less windy) sunlight of Goetheplatz.

park

Sunday was exactly my idea of a perfect fall day: warm and sunny and shockingly blue-skied during the day and a bit cool at night -- sweater and jeans and scarf weather. There's a fall festival going on in town at Roßmarkt with amazing fresh-pressed apple juice and decorative gourds for sale and displays involving tractors and a mother and baby cow parked in a pen at Hauptwache. I'm a little in love with this kind of fall.

da liegt man nicht eng

I somehow did not expect visiting Dachau to be as emotional an experience as it was. In spite of having lived in Germany for a couple of years in all, I'd never been to a concentration camp before. I was glad we went.

The title of this post is from the Paul Celan poem Todesfugue (in English here), which has a refrain that was in my head the whole time we were at Dachau:

dein goldenes Haar Margarethe
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

ein prosit

   

One of the most remarkable things about Oktoberfest is how quickly it changes. One moment it's ten in the morning and the tent is almost completely empty, and you're eating your Weißwürste and Brezel and drinking your Frühstücksmaß and thinking that Oktoberfest is really much more low-key than it was four years ago; the next moment it's the middle of the afternoon and you're on your third Maß and your fourth beer tent and you can't find a table because it's a huge roiling party and your friend is being whisked away by a herd of Italians who want to take pictures with girls in Dirndls and you're befriending Australians and stealing their hats; and then suddenly it's three in the morning and you're waking up in the tent where you're spending the night and you're digging in your purse, where you discover a Burger King bacon cheeseburger you have no memory of purchasing for yourself. Which you then eat, delighted. Such is the way of Oktoberfest.

welcome to hostival hilton

   

This is where we spent two nights in Munich. I know what you're thinking: There is no way Kelly and Ann paid 44,- euro a night each to stay in a tent in a gravel parking lot out back of a clubbing area, particularly not with the added information that this was an establishment run by a bunch of drunken 25-year-old boys dressed in scrubs who would, without prompting, tell you that they'd drunk at least seven Maß (one-liter beers) at Oktoberfest during the day, and point to the seven hash marks on their wrist to prove it. "There were more," I was solemnly informed, "but the ink absorbed into my skin. That's what ink does." (Generally I thought that was only what ink did when a needle was also involved, but hey, who am I to argue with a drunken murse?)

I would never want to stay at Hostival again, but at the same time, after the initial first hour of "what in the world are we doing here?" and subsequent extreme lowering of expectations, we actually had a fabulous experience. Maybe I'm not getting too old for hostel culture after all?

the day of the historically troubling encounter

Katherine and I have had a joke for a long time:

Q: What do you find at the top of every German mountain?
A: A restaurant serving cake.

This has proved disturbingly accurate -- extra disturbing because it even holds true for the Kehlsteinhaus, a.k.a. the Eagle's Nest, a mountaintop residence gifted to Hitler by the Nazi party in honor of his fiftieth birthday. Hitler never actually lived in the Kehlsteinhaus, though his main residence, the Berghof, was also in the area (Obersalzberg, in the mountains above Berchtesgaden, at the absolute southeastern corner of Germany). The Berghof was destroyed, but the Kehlsteinhaus still stands, and has been converted into a restaurant. On the one hand, I'm glad that you can still visit the Kehlsteinhaus, because the view from the top looking out over the lush green valleys of the Bavarian Alps is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen; on the other hand, I'm not terribly okay with the fact that you can eat cake in a house where Hitler once used to impress diplomats, or the fact that you can buy Kehlsteinhaus fleeces. (Although, as one of my friends pointed out, at least they are not brown . . .) Our guidebook told us that if we were looking for a "less historically troubling encounter", we could take a cable car up to an also-beautiful overlook point, which might be the way I go next time*; I'm just not sure what exactly I was supporting with my 15,- euro bus + entry fee. The upkeep of Hitler's gilded elevator?

*I'm almost certainly going to head back to that area of the Alps -- I cannot say enough about how beautiful it was. I'd also like to check out the Königsee.

salzburg: details from a city

   

I've been to Salzburg twice before (1, 2), but seem to keep on going back -- this time because when I asked Ann what her hopes and dreams for the Grand European Adventure were, Salzburg was at the top of the list. We didn't get our acts together sufficiently to go on the Sound of Music tour (sorry, Ann!) but we did visit Mirabell Gardens and see the steps with the unicorns that the von Trapp children dance around in the movie at the end of "Do Re Mi", and went on an ultimately successful but roundabout search for the Sound of Music house that led us past the pond of the rare Austrian flamingos. We also acquired Dirndls -- Ann's first, my second. I sincerely hope to get to wear it in a Bavarian wedding sometime; as it is, I'm going to be alternating between my two Dirndls for every Halloween for the rest of my life . . .

island hopping on the ancient sea

After our visit to Herreninsel and Fake Versailles, Ann's and my boat ride on the Chiemsee continued on to Fraueninsel, a tiny and adorable island 1.5 kilometers in diameter that's home to a bunch of little hotels, waterfront restaurants, and small fisheries, along with the oldest convent in Germany, Frauenwörth, which was founded in 782. The step leading into the convent's chapel has a groove at least six inches deep from all those hundreds of years of feet wearing on it; I wish I'd gotten a picture of it. The chapel itself is small and dim and mysterious-feeling, and the wall of letters and embroidered notes giving thanks to the patron saint, Irmengard, who'd been an abbess there, is really something. Walking around the back of the convent by the lake, we saw a Bavarian wedding where everyone was in full Trachtenkleider (Dirndls & Lederhosen) and were utterly charmed.

One thing about Fraueninsel: as much as I loved it and wanted to claim one of the tiny houses for a summer vacation home of my own, it was overrun with tourists even on a rainy mid-September Friday. I think I'm going to have to go looking elsewhere for my waterside cottage retreat. Probably Sweden. I'm pretty sure the summer house of my dreams is around there somewhere. (Maybe I can just move into Hilda Grahnat's?)