Unity Day!

The weekend of October 1st I was actually in Quedlinburg, for once! Seems like I'm always traveling...probably because I always am ;) . But this particular was chock full of stuff to do in town, so I stuck around! On Friday some of the other students, one of our teachers, and I went to visit Falkenstein, which is an honest-to-goodness medieval castle about 45 minutes away from Quedlinburg. Again- an actual medieval castle. Not a palace, not a 18th-century version of what a palace/castle might have been like (ahem, Neuschwanstein), a city walls, castle keep,holes-to-shoot-arrows-and-pour-hot-oil-from castle. Of course there was museum, and of course I thoroughly enjoyed it :)! There were the obligatory cool weapons, suits of armor, treasure, and ornate paintings, but the really REALLY cool part was the letter on display from Queen Elizabeth I of England...just sitting there behind a glass case on the side of the room like it was no big deal! I think I stood there for a good 5 minutes just staring...she is my favorite monarch, after all! (Yes, I have a favorite monarch. Don't judge.) The really cool part of the trip was the Medieval Festival they had going on. Apparently Germany's so lousy with history they skip right past the Renaissance Fairs and go on back a couple hundred years, because, y'know, why not? There were people dressed up, stands with all sorts of interesting foods (I got roasted walnuts and some sort of Hungarian garlic-flatbread-thingy), dudes with bows and arrows, and all sorts of hand-carved nonsense. There was a guy selling woodcut printings of illustrations from old Saxon (Sachsen, for you Germans out there) poetry; of course I bought one! Tristian and Isolde :). More pretty things for my apartment! But the best part about the whole festival; they sold mead. I got to drink hot mead at a medieval castle. (The italics are just there to emphasize how incredibly awesome I feel being able to say that!) Mead is basically hot honey wine, and was pretty much the beverage of choice back in the day. I know it was very silly and touristy of me, but it was just so cool! The whole castle visit experience was just really cool; definitely the most awesome German medieval festival at a medieval castle I've ever been to ;).

On Saturday a bunch of the other students, their host families and I went hiking. We climbed the "Brokenberg", which pretty much means "boulder mountain". I'm used to hiking with my family in Rocky Mountain National Park, so I was pretty sure I knew what to expect; rocks, mountains, streams, small animals, and a great view at the peak that you start at for about 10 minutes before going back down because there's not exactly a lot to do up there. Turns out German mountains are utilized for their tourism factor to the fullest extent possible! About three quarters of the way up the mountain the trail turned in to....a highway. You could drive up there. There were people jogging, biking, driving, etc all around us. Don't get me wrong, it was a steep highway, and I still got my workout going up it, but it was just so...paved. And at the top, there was a gift shop and cafeteria! Completely not what I was expecting. Still really fun though!

Sunday was the main event of the weekend. October 3rd is a geman holiday, celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany and called, appropriately, the German Unity Day. I'm not exactly sure what 'real' Germans do to celebrate, but my school program took all the students and host parents bowling! I proved, once again, how decidedly lackluster my bowling skills are, but I still had a blast! In the afternoon, my school put on an Opera concert as a thank-you to Quedlinburg for hosting us. There were some pretty awesome Mozart pieces! Sunday was also the day a video of me and my roommate came out of us doing tourist-y things around Quedlinburg aired. It made us out to be pretty ditzy, but oh well. Quedlinburg got some good exposure! All in all it was a really awesome, though really tiring, weekend.

I feel like as I'm writing I'm getting more and more boring, so Copenhagen (and if I'm feeling ambitious, Italy) will have to be next post!

Prague!

Goodness, where to start?? There's so much that's been going on since my last post! Which is my not-so-veiled excuse for not posting more often (she says with chagrin). Well, two and a half weeks ago I went with my school group to Prague! I was really excited about going, because everyone always says what a beautiful city it is, aaaaand because a good chunk of my family heritage is centered around the Czech Republic/bohemian/slavic area. We took a chartered bus in to the country, and when we got in to Prague my first reaction was not what I had expected. While there were plenty of pretty, old, buildings, the city also looked run down, graffiti-filled, and, frankly, dirty. The contrast between the wonderful historic buildings and the buildings circa the Iron Curtain was astounding; needless to say, I was a bit disappointed with my first impression of the city. But within about 2 hours of arriving, we went in to the heart of the old city, and I VERY quickly realized what everyone had been talking about! The city was absolutely AMAZING. Amazingly wonderful architecture, wonderfully rich history, and amazing museums! We celebrated the first night of our first trip to a country outside of Germany by going on a ....get ready for it....Pub Crawl. I, of all people, voluntarily went on a Pub Crawl, and had a blast! Our second day there we took a guided tour of the city, which included (of course!) the Charles Bridge! If you're like me and had no idea what that was prior to setting foot on it, it's this incredibly INCREDIBLY beautiful, pretty darn old (1357. 1357!) bridge that connects the old city and the new city (ha! new. it was founded before the people living there knew my continent existed), and it's considered the most beautiful site in a city lousy with beautiful sites; and for good reason! I ended up buying an etching of the bridge to hang in my apartment when I get back to Texas, so I can look at its beautifulness when I walk in the door from the Lubbock dust and dirt! We also saw the 'new' town hall, a bunch of cathedrals, the palace, the president's house, the opera house where Mozart debuted Don Giovanni, and all sorts of other ridiculously amazing things! Prague actually has some pretty juicy history, too. See, there was this thing, called the Protestant Reformation, and some crazy stuff went down. Like in Prague, for instance. Where they threw people out of windows. Three times! Seriously, there was the first, second, and third Defenestration of Prague. All years apart. People apparently just thought it was a good idea. One night we went to the Prague State Opera, where I saw my first ever Opera, Tosca! I really REALLY enjoyed it, and now I'm afraid it's going to become a habit...I've been listening to random arias on YouTube (classy, I know) ever since. I got to go to some pretty darn awesome museums while I was there too, which always makes me happy! We went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, and though I've always been a modern art hater, the stuff is starting to grow on me! (Well, to a point. I still don't think a canvas with the top half painted gray and the bottom half painted yellow, entitled 'I don't know what to paint' is art. But that Picasso guy has some pretty awesome stuff!) Plus they had a bunch of Monets, which made me smile :) . We also went to a museum that housed medieval church art, which was amazingly beautiful. Think altars, saints, pietas, wooden painted statues, the works. Creepy and gruesome at times (they were really in to the whole suffering of Jesus and the Saints thing), but still incredibly beautiful. One day I got to go on my own (I know! so grown up!) to the Prague National Museum. The building alone was worth it! Quite possibly one of the most detailed, ornate, elaborate, beautiful interiors I've ever seen. The museum itself was really old school- I'm talking Hall of Mammals, Hall of Reptiles, Hall of Geology- they had this immensely huge paleontology collection too- and a really neat archaeology/anthropology exhibit on the prehistory of the people living in Bohemia! But like I said, the museum was really old school- mostly presentation, not a lot of interpretation. In the words of one of my professors, it was like a museum of a museum, which was really awesome to get to experience from a future museum-ist's point of view! There were tons of souvenir shops, and since the Euro to Krone exchange rate is really good (from the Euro end, at least) it was a pretty cheap city to experience. And it was really neat to visit the country/geographical area/ethnic community from which a large part of my heritage stems! Apparently I look Czech enough to pass for a local...and cause some confusion. At one of the souvenir shops, the man working the shop struck up a conversation with us (in English), asking where we were from, our names, etc. He was first confused because we were switching between German and English (it's become a habit none of us can break- automatically wanting to speak in German in a foreign country, regardless of whether or not anyone there actually speaks German); he was then confused because I apparently look very Czech, despite the fact that we come from Texas; and to top it off I have an Arabic name (Sarah). Poor guy stood there scratching his head for a good while before he just decided I was odd! All in all, I absolutely LOVED my time in Prague, and I'd recommend it to anyone traveling in Europe...as long as you take me with you, I want to go back!! 

Next blog, German Unity Day and Copenhagen!

Look, Mom, I'm on TV!...sort of.

A few weeks back my roommate here in Quedlinburg and I were filmed running around the city, doing tourist-y stuff, for a German travel show, and here's the result! We're the next-to-last group, about 19 minutes in. I can't quite figure out how to post the link to this blog, so here's the address:

http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_single_mediaplayer/0,,6071895_type_video_struct_4756_contentId_4471165,00.html

Enjoy!