Heidelberg

(I wrote this right after the weekend but am just now getting around to posting it with pictures and everything so keep that in mind. This was the weekend of June 19th)
 


Wow. What a weekend. Last Thursday was yet another holiday so I took Friday off too. This is what the weekend looked like:
Heidelberg > Landau > Strasbourg > Wissembourg > Speyer > Munster
Since that's quite a lot, I've split up the weekend into two parts.  Stay posted for the next one soon!

Very early Thursday morning, I drove down to Heidelberg (Zimrides).  After dropping my stuff off where I was staying, I headed into town.  I took a tour of the Altstadt, the middle of the town, where the lady took us around some of the historically noteworthy things and explained a lot of the history of the town.  Heidelberg is home to the oldest university in Germany - it was founded in 1386! Some of the buildings are in the Altstadt while many of them have newer buildings on the outskirts. An interesting part of the University is the Karzer - the student prison.  They were thrown in here for various reasons. However this wasn't your normal prison.  They could basically choose when they stayed there. If that night didn't work, then they'd go the next night or maybe even the week after.  During the day they still went to all of their classes/lectures but during the night they went back up to the prison.  Their friends were allowed to visit them and bring food and drink so whenever someone of the friend group had to spend a night, they had a little party up there. Not too bad although the beds are of wire strips so rather uncomfortable to sleep on I'd imagine.  They also decorated it as you can see in the picture.

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Die Alte Aula - one of the old lecture halls

 After a delicious nutella crepe for lunch, I made my way up to the Schloss (castle) via bergbahn (funicular).   Since it's up on a hill, it gives a fantastic view of the town and the river.  The castle itself was built in a few different sections which is visible with the different style of architecture.  Inside the castle is the Apotheken Museum - Pharmacy Museum.  I found it very interesting :) There's also das Große Fass, a massive wine barrel that holds 219,000 liters of wine.

I also took a tour with a Waschweib, a washing lady of the castle.  She took us inside the castle and told us about the history and some stories of the people living there.  The wash ladies of the time would go from castle to castle and gossip with each other about all the rich people.  Heidelberg is in the south of Germany and they speak a very different dialect of German than I'm used to.  This lady had a very strong accent.  I had to concentrate so much to understand what she was saying but I got most of it.

On the tour was another girl traveling alone so we stuck together and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon together, walking around the castle grounds and then going into town for a piece of cake.  She's a study nurse traveling all around Germany collecting data on dialysis patients.  She'll be in a different town each week for a year and then return to those towns to follow up in a second year.  She also lived in the US for a year so we had a great time reminiscing about American things. That night I met up with the people I was staying with and we went to a little festival at the university. Lots of pallet benches, lights in trees, homemade jewelry, super cute decorations, and music provided by a girl who sang and played piano and percussion with a looping pedal.  I always love listening to those people. To get there, we biked but I obviously didn't have my bike with me down there so I sat on the back of one of the other ones. I've seen people be transported this way and had always wanted to try it and now I finally got to! It wasn't the most comfortable but it worked. Unfortunately I don't have a picture but maybe in the next few weeks I'll snag one.

The next morning I wandered to the other side of the river and walked up the Philosophenweg which gave a fantastic view of the town from the other side. This path is up a big hill, about 20 times worse than the Village Hill at JMU. At the top of this hill is also one of the physics buildings. I think the walk alone would deter me from studying physics, as if there wasn't enough already. After walking back down across die Alte Brücke (Old bridge), I caught a bus to the Carl Bosch Museum which is a little bit outside of Heidelberg, nestled in the hills.  Carl won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for chemistry.  Since that's what I'm studying, I figured it was worth a look.  A cute little museum and definitely worth it.  I learned a lot about his life, his studies, and of course his research. Fun fact: he liked to collect bugs.

Funky monkey statue

This is a bathtub.

For lunch I met up with Julia, the other girl that was staying with the people I was staying with.  We ate a Mexican place but the people that were working there looked Italian and I had a doener, a Turkish meal. Interesting mix but delicious.  Julia had spent a year in Russia so we spent the afternoon comparing the American, German, and Russian cultures.  In the US, people are generally very friendly and open, always smiling at strangers, while in Germany, people are lot more closed off and private.  It isn't that typical to smile at someone you don't know while walking down the street.  Russians are even less smiley.  To them, a smile is flirting. So Americans think Germans and Russians are rude because they don't smile while Russians think Germans and especially Americans are trying to manipulate them because they smile more.  There's a phrase in German that explains this perfectly: Andere Länder, andere Sitten - basically different country, different customs/habits.

That was all of Heidelberg! Friday afternoon I took the train to my cousin's in Landau, which is about an hour south of Heidelberg.  Those adventures will be in the next post!

I had posted another post two weeks ago but never linked it to Facebook. If you missed it, you can click here to read it.