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?)

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.