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München onwards

23 November 2001

Last weekend, I went with my group of friends from the language course to München (Munich) to visit another guy from the course, who's doing a Praktikum there. We rode the train there on Friday night, and since we'd reserved seats, we had our own compartment from Stuttgart to München. We'd all come prepared with junk food and threw a whole party on the train. One girl had brought six little bottles of wine (there were six of us) and we had enough junk food for a small army. It was fun.

Once in München, we left our luggage in the train station and went to Hofbräuhaus, getting there a minute or so before they stopped serving, which is 11:25 pm, for reasons unbeknownst to me. I don't like beer, but I tried some anyway and it wasn't nearly as strong as a lot of the other beers I've tried. I didn't mind it, but I don't like it enough still to want to pay for it.

On Saturday, we wandered around München. We saw the Glockenspiel at the Rathaus. (A couple times a day there's this whole song with bells and moving figures in the city hall.) We wandered through the Englischer Garten, getting very cold. There's a place in the river/canal thing there where you can surf, and there was one guy there in an strange teeny kayak type thing and one guy actually surfing. It was around freezing outside. The surfer had a hat with a note up on the bridge over the river, asking for donations so he could buy a warmer wet suit. In the afternoon, a few people went shopping, and I went with two others to the Deutsches Museum, which is quite impressive. We had less than two hours, so we only saw a couple sections, but it is massive. We went through the parts on bridges, tunnels, and musical instruments and glanced at a bunch of the other sections. There's a whole room of keyboard instruments, all various kinds of harpsichord- and piano-like instruments. There were also displays of the evolution of various modern instruments, so they had flutes from various time periods. You could see how the key mechanisms and fingering were developed. (I wrote a paper about the history of the flute in middle school. It's quite interesting.)

We got up really early on Sunday to take the train to Füssen to go to Neuschwanstein. I was talking to my sister on the phone last night, and she didn't know I'd gone there, but asked me about "that castle up on a hill, that's in photos everywhere". Neuschwanstein is a big tourist destination. The Disney castle is modeled after it. I was deeply unimpressed by the castle itself. (It was half covered in scaffolding, too. The percentage of interesting scaffolding-less buildings here is low, since there's a big restoration kick right now.) The area around it is quite pretty, though. It had snowed the day before, so most of the fields still had a layer of snow and as we got further and further south, closer the Alps, it was really gorgeous. I enjoy riding trains and the combination of the train and scenery made it my favorite two hours of the trip. Our "tour" of the castle was pathetic and over-priced, and because of how you get herded through, you don't really get to see much or learn much. We didn't have time to watch the cheesy movie at the end, either. Shucks. We played in the snow and then had a pleasant trip back to München.

The words for "wake up" and "grow up" are really similar in German, and one of my friends had accidentally said that morning, that we'd grown up really early instead of we'd woken up really early. After all the snowball fights, she said she decided that we actually hadn't grown up in the morning, after all. On Saturday night, we had fun talking about language and playing with dictionaries. At the beginning, we couldn't agree about what the gender of a word was, so we took sides and then raced to find it in the dictionary. (I was right, too!) We sat around after dinner, talking about German stuff we don't understand completely. We made quite a long list. It's kind of like we're scientists studying some alien race. "When I say X, what exactly does it imply? Do Germans then think Y?" ... "I'm not sure. A German guy I talked to last week told me Z, but I'm not sure if it applies everywhere." ... "Well, the German guy I talked to said..."

One of the things we have trouble with is stating that we're hot or cold, if it's too warm in the train or too cold outside. If you literally say "I'm hot" or "I'm cold", the meaning is sexual. There's no equivalent of "frigid". And to top if all off, if you literally say "I'm warm", it means "I'm gay". (I guess it makes about as much sense to say "warm" as it does to say "gay", but it still seems odd to me.) Instead, you have to literally say "It is warm to me" or "It is cold to me". I learned this in the first semester, but I still forget. Other people I know were never taught this, maybe because their teachers didn't want to explain it. I don't know. I also learned from my French friend, that the lyric "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" (which I hope I've spelled right) is extremely blatant in French. My friend said she'd never ever say that. She also pointed out that it's also in the polite form "vous" instead of the familiar form "tu", which is rather odd, considering what she's asking. It's funny how the degree of blatantness gets reduced when phrases get used in other languages. I see the adjective "sexy" here used as an adjective in ways I'd only associate with pornography, but I think it's just supposed to mean "attractive" or "pretty". I'm in a tandem program, where native German speakers who want to talk to native other-language speakers are paired with foreign students. My partner and I then spend half our time talking in German and half our time talking in English. My poor partner is going to get bombarded with questions the next time I see him. Then I can report back to my friends and we can compare more notes some more...

So, I spent a total of nine hours on the train last Sunday, two hours each way between München and Füssen, and then five hours home. We made all our connections (a few of them with 3 and 4 minute "layovers") and the only train which was late was the one from Stuttgart to Heidelberg, our last train, so it didn't matter. I think it was very successful trip.

I ended up spending this week recovering from the craziness of previous week. Between Köln, the movie-going, and München, I'm ready to spend a weekend at home. If the weather's good tomorrow, I might go on a bike ride with a local group, but I'm pretty sure it's going to rain. I barely have a cold right now and I wouldn't want to spend the day riding in the rain. If I don't go, I think I'll go to Mannheim (for the first time) in search of a winter coat.

I'll try to get pictures up soon.

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