Skiing in the Alps

In the middle of December, we went to the Austrian Alps for a day ski trip :) It was a really spectacular deal. I bought one ticket for 30 euros and it covered everything for the day except my ski rental, which was only 12. I got up at an ungodly hour and went to the main bus station, where all the buses going up there for the day start leaving at 6:50. You just give them your gear, if you have any, and hop on the bus. Once a bus is full it leaves and the next one pulls in and starts loading. On the bus they gave us all a coffee and a pretzel with butter :) They also gave us our lift ticket, which was like a credit card. It was a fun bus ride, even though it was so early, since there were so many of us together and we had some very nice views. What was odd was that the base of the resort was literally in the middle of a town. The i-club tutor took us into a ski rental shop that I assumed was part of the resort (cuz that's how it works in California) but it was just a local business.

Since there were so many of us it took AGES to get our gear, and you had to pick out your own skis, so I finally got to the desk and the guy told me I had chosen children's skis :/ bahaha, thankfully he was nice enough to go get a new pair for me. The main lift is a full gondola, instead of just a chair lift, and you go through a turnstile that automatically senses your ticket and lets you through. You slide your skis into a slot on the door and hop in the gondola and off you go! This is from the top, right side:

We stayed on this side for the most part, and in the middle. These were the medium runs; the left side had the hard ones. 

About half way down:

Most of the mountain was in shade by the time we got up there, at least on the right. The bottom of the middle runs was still in the sun.

From the middle:

That building is the mid-point for the gondola, that's where we got off the first time, while we were still testing it out :)

And me!

Rocking the sunglasses. And bossing it with a backpack, which I just stuffed with food, naturally.

At one point I pulled a noob-move and dropped my pole off the chair lift cuz I was too busy lounging all by myself. I had to brave the tiny winding path through the trees underneath the lift TWICE, as the first time I basically ran over my pole and only spotted it when going back up the lift.

There was also an awkward time when I thought I had gone the wrong way and cut back under the chair lift, uphill :/, only to discover that that actually led nowhere, and I had indeed been going the correct way to begin with. What a workout. 

The bus ride back was also nice. I got to talk to everyone that I hadn't been skiing with, and got a "free" glühwein for turning in my lift ticket :)

And contrary to my family's apparent belief, glühwein is delicious.

Nürnberg

I actually went to this city twice, the weekend before going to Salzburg and again the day after :) The second time was supposed to be with the i-club but they cancelled it because they only had 9 people sign up. Since you can get a train ticket for you and four friends to go anywhere in Bavaria for only $5 each, we decided to go anyways. Honestly, if any more than 5 people went it would have been dreadful. There were so many people (the Nürnberg Christmas market is the most famous) that even with only five we kept losing each other in the aisles of the market. Right across the street from the train station is this tiny, walled-in block of workshops with a medieval type tower. We stopped in here to look around and try the famous "Nürnberger Rostbratwurst."

This was the street to the Christmas market. Straight madness.

It was this packed everywhere we went, but it was also really nice. No wind chill. And the aisles of the market were full of Lebkuchen and Glühwein and ornaments.

Explosion of Lebkuchen:

Glüwein:

They have essentially every flavor of glühwein imaginable, and "Eierpunsch" is eggnog, which I stayed far way from.

and explosion of ornaments:

They also had a children's section with rides and a men's choir singing in front (or behind?) this church.

Since I had been there before I was in charge of navigating us to the Christmas market, a.k.a. follow the giant throng of tourists, but with all the zig-zagging back and forth in the aisles I couldn't tell you the orientation of the market to the rest of the city.

Instead of getting glühwein from one of the several at the market, we opted to go in a nice, warm cafe and enjoy it there, while thawing out our fingers, and faces. While in the cafe we started playing a game on my friend's phone where you have to identify company logos, which I'm a little ashamed to say I was remarkably good at. Then we hurried back to the train station so we wouldn't have to take the three hour long train back to Munich, but we did have to stand the whole way :/ 

Our "hurrying" that week though was nothing compared to the almost full mile we had to run back to the train station the week before, and then sprint through the train station with two minutes to go, ending with us successfully hopping into the bike compartment :) at least we didn't run for days and THEN still miss the train. I might have cried. The week before we also walked up to the Nürnberg Castle (always on a hill) and got to look out over the city, which was a very nice view and also had a massive Christmas tree that looked like it came directly from the forest.

All in all, it was very Christmas-y and very cute. It was also cold and a little bit snowy at one point, the way I've never experienced Christmas before :)

Salzburg (Part 2, with Hannah)

The second trip to Salzburg was much more enjoyable, albeit MUCH colder, on account of the fact that we weren't walking around in a massive group literally blocking all the sidewalks and stopping traffic. It was just Hannah and I strolling along, hopefully not drawing too much attention to ourselves. We walked through the Mirabell Gardens, which were only half open since all the flowers were gone and the fountains were off due to winter, then went to the city center where they had a cute little Christmas market, which I dare say was better than Munich's but only because it had all the same things minus the giant throngs of people. It was also snowing on us, so that might have deterred many visitors. They ALSO had reasonable sized trash cans, as seen here:

Those are the largest trash cans I've seen in all of Europe. We checked out all the kiosks of ornaments, then tested all the olive oils/dips at a stand that had bread out (their mistake) and got ourselves some glühwein :) For lunch, I actually had dessert, as I decided to get chocolate sauce on my kaiserschmarrn (pancakes). Best choice I ever made.

After that we went on the Sound of Music Tour, which was in a little van with two other Brits and also two Americans, so Hannah and I were equally represented, haha. It starts at the Mirabell Gardens, where they shot the "Do-Re-Mi" scene and some others, then they drive past the theater where they shot the Von Trapp Family Singers scene, and since it was the first week in December, a few of these were standing outside.

This picture is from google; the ones standing outside must have been on break, because they didn't have their faces on, but you get the idea. It's like evil santa, children can get punished or even kidnapped by "Krampus" if they're especially naughty. They have whole parades of them on December 5th, the day before Saint Nicholas Day, where they ring huge cowbells and cause a ruckus. That night kids put a boot out and hope that St. Nicholas leaves them some presents. I believe it's only a southern Germany thing, in Bavaria, and Austria. There are a bunch of weird Bavarian traditions that don't exist in northern Germany; I'm gonna have to sort all those out, haha but for the most part if you think of a well-know aspect of German culture, it's actually just Bavarian, like lederhosen.

After this we drove out to the castle they used for the Von Trapp family home, which you can't really get that close to. They use it for seminars now (boringgg) and it's all locked up. We stopped across the lake from it. 

On the right there, conveniently above my hand. Also some swans.

Near there was also the gazebo where the "16 going on 17" scene was shot. It used to be on the castle grounds but people kept breaking in to take pictures, so they moved it and closed it off when someone broke their hip trying to jump from bench to bench.

Across the street from this was the road where all the children were hanging out of the trees, which we walked down for a bit, but then there was essentially a wall of snow blowing right at us, so we quickly ran back to the van. 

They stopped for a quick second back in town so we could get a picture of the top of Nonnberg Abbey, where the real Maria lived and where her and the Baron got married. It's the red dome(spire?) on the right.

After this the tour goes into the Alps for the panorama shots and scenery of the film on the way to the church where they shot the wedding scene. They point out three different lakes, but since it was so snowy we could only barely see the biggest one. At one point our tour guide said there was a lake directly to our left and you could literally only see white, haha. The church where they shot the wedding scene is in the tiny town of Mondsee (literally: Moon Lake). It's reallyyy small and really cute. They had a tiny Christmas market outside the church and a man building a small fire, thank the good Lord. 

We had an hour here so we took a quick walk through the church and the Christmas market, then sat down in the cafe for some hot chocolate and apple strudel :) it was deliciouuus. 

The tour was only about the filming though, so the main thing I learned was that Hollywood is dumb and got kicked out of everywhere, hahaha. First they got kicked out of the castle, for what I do not remember, but were allowed to have sketch artists go back in and then just recreated the rooms they needed. They also got kicked out of the Abbey, which is why the wedding was filmed in a tiny town up in the Alps, and eventually out of the whole city for putting up Nazi flags without permission. Smart move Hollywood, smart move.

When the tour was over we walked up to a beer hall our tour guide suggested. It was behind this tower, and even though our tour guide explained pretty well how to get there, we would have never found it if a group of middle-aged gentlemen weren't walking up there the same time as us. 

The table we were sitting at was against the wall and had a GLORIOUS heating pipe right under the bench, which I very gratefully warmed my feet on. On the way back to the train station I took this picture of the outside of the city center and the castle.

This was a much more adventurous day than the first (we actually stayed till after dark! unheard of with the i-club) and we both fell asleep on the train ride home, haha.

Oh, and this goat was in a corner of the Christmas market.

Schloss Linderhof

The weekend that I went to the U.S.-Germany hockey game, I was also going to go on a trip to Linderhof Castle, but I didn't pay early enough to reserve a spot and it sold out. My New York friend who went to the game with us was luckier, and he said it was a good trip (and that there was a monastery on the way, monastery=beer) so Hannah and I decided to make our own little trip there. The train ride was a pleasant one, with the Alps in view. However, our itinerary gave us only three minutes to get from the train to the bus that left from the stop outside the train station. Being a small town that was a very small distance, but our train was late and, also because it was a small town, we had an hour to kill before the next bus came. Hooray!

We meandered around the tiny town, then walked up a snowy set of stairs on a hill to an equally tiny church. It was still sunny at this point, so very pretty :) but still very cold, as it had just snowed.

Look I'm in a picture! Happy days.

We caught our bus up to the next town where the Monastery was, on which there was a very friendly little boy who kept walking up and back between us and the bus driver chatting away. Luckily Hannah could understand him enough to ask him questions; I understood enough to know when he asked what my name was, but he looked very confused at what kind of name "Ashley" was (a VERY American one, that's what kind). We then had to wait for another bus to Linderhof. We were waiting on the correct side of the street (my directional skills are FAIRLY decent) when a bus pulled up on the other side of the street with "Linderhof" on the reader board, so we (read by motherly and aunt-types: very safely) ran across the highway to get on the bus. The bus then went up the street to its next stop, TURNED AROUND, and went back the way we had come to the stop we were waiting at originally, bahaha.

Since it had just snowed, the grounds to the castle were closed and the castle itself was pretty small (by castle standards) so it ended up being more of a nice stroll throw a snowy meadow. Here's Linderhof:

and supposedly a fountain:

my favorite view from the whole trip:

After traipsing around in the snow for a bit we went back down to the town to visit the Monastery, also covered in snow:

Another picture of me!

The inside. There was singing coming from under that archway, possible from angles.

And the beer! This is a Dunkel, or "dark beer." I've decided I like them better than the Helles, "light beer." We also had lunch here, and no blog post would be complete with me telling you about it :) SOMEHOW, I did not take a picture of it. Maybe because I ordered the dish I like the most, and I'm sure there's a picture of it in here already, I think when we went to the Alps. Anywhooo, this one came with blaukraut, which is made of red cabbage and it not sour but instead suuuper sweet and delicious, like candy. That is all. 

On the way home, our seriously transportation challenged minds continued to fail us. The train station in that tiny town had only TWO platforms and somehow we picked the wrong one to wait on. You think it would be logical that if the train goes on one track there it would return on the opposite track but nooo, it came back on the same one. No one waiting on the other platform bothered to tell us this, even though they were close enough that two 10-year-old boys thought it was a good idea to use us as snow ball target practice. Their aim was not very good. We saw the train approaching on the other track and took off running like total noobs, but since there was only one set of tracks there was no nice stairwell/underground tunnel to get to the opposite platform; we had to go running down the street half in the snow to the railroad crossing and were almost to the back of the train when it left. We celebrated our misfortune by walking back into "town" and sitting down to enjoy a nice hot chocolate...for another hour :)

Paulaner Brewery

Another weekend in the middle of November, on a foggy Saturday morning, I ventured over the Isar River to a part of the city I had never been to for a tour of the Paulaner Brewery. After waiting outside in the extreme cold (and extreme smell) for an hour :// (I hadn't yet bought my big furry jacket and the club tutor was late) we finally went inside to start our tour with a video of the brewing process, in which the guy had the strangest almost American?? accent I had ever heard. Then we were herded back outside to the well the brewery draws their water from. It was very new-agey and looked basically like that glass pyramid in front of the Louvre, except much smaller and had few intertwining pipes inside in it that went down into the ground. They showed us the giant silos where they store the malt and barley and then took us inside to the origin of the awful smell. The boiling room:
(disclaimer: I'm sure this isn't the actual name)

There were about eight of these contraptions. I think they were boiling hops? and it smelled dreadful. Inside there were also these giant mixer whisk things that went it a giant circle to mix it all up.

I had to climb up a step ladder to be able to see into this window, which was also massive. I probably could have curled up into a ball on top of it. It was also gloriously warm standing next to it.

This was the control panel along the wall of the room. I had a major nerd out moment (perpetual? ...nobody answer that) and was following all the pipes and symbols and control switches. I think that was my favorite part, other than the food at the end (:

After this we went into a long tunnel that goes under the hill "Nockherberg" to the giant storage tanks they have and the bottling room. Background note: All the beer bottles at the store are glass, and I had noticed that most of them have rings worn into them on the bottom lip and where the neck starts to curve in. I never really thought about it, but alas, it's because they reuse the bottles. They get all banged up on the conveyor belt, so you can tell how old your bottle is by how worn the ring is. The tour guide said they can generally reuse them 12 or so times.

They use temperature controlled metal tanks to store the beer nowadays, but they have the old barrel lids on display:

The second one is for Hacker-Pschorr, another one of the famous six Munich breweries, which joined with Paulaner. None of the six breweries are privately owned anymore, but they still use the original brews.

And last but CERTAINLY not least, the lunch:

Special "Brew Master" Edition, pretty gooood.

That is the majority of a pretzel (Brezn), Leberkäse, and Kartoffelsalat. I guess it's kind of like Spam but is made of actual meat and tastes infinitely better. "Leberkäse" literally translates to "liver-cheese" but it is made of neither, thank goodness. It was a magical lunch, and it was freeee. Well sorta, it was included in the tour price :)

Deutschland Cup + Red Bull München Game

One weekend in November, the Olympia-Eisstadion hosted the Deutschland Cup, which apparently is an annual thing, but it's a three day tournament of semi-professional hockey teams from Slovakia, Switzerland, the U.S., and Germany. I was going to go to all three U.S. games but it was a bit expensive and I had other fun things to do with my Friday and Saturday afternoons :) so we just went Sunday afternoon for the U.S.-Germany game. "We" being me, another American friend from New York, and Hannah, who was cheering louder than either of us Americans, haha. 

The stadium is a little strange; the corners are actually right angles, as opposed to following the curve of the ice. They built it as a boxing stadium for the '72 Summer Olympics, then converted it after. There were some jolly drunk German men in front of us yelling at some other drunk U.S. fans across the corner, then they would turn around and fist bump us :)

This little guy is the hockey mascot they use for the Red Bull games, and he was at the Deutschland Cup game too. I'm not really sure why, seeing as he is neither a red bull or anything particularly German. Hannah and I decided he looked like a mouse/dinosaur, but he did a cartwheel on the ice so he got our approval.

It was weird (and cool) to hear all the announcing in German, and all the chanting and cheering, though there was more of that at the Red Bull game than the Deutschland Cup game. It was also interesting to hear the German national anthem and to hear a non-native speaker sing the U.S. national anthem. She was a pretty good singer and you could understand all the words she was saying, just a few times she used the wrong word, which caught us off guard. Some of them were entertaining, but I don't remember them anymore :/

Here's the stadium at the end of the game when they announced the results. We won the game and the tournament :) 'murica. 

Oh! One thing in this picture you can see, the face-off circles in the corners were filled in with ads, in addition to the middle one and all the other normal ones on the boards and such. At the Red Bull game that whole end section was filled with standing fans (including us) and what sounded like a full drumline. There might have only been two drummers, but they caused quite a ruckus and had a back-and-forth chant going for the majority of the third period.

I can't write a whole post and not mention food :) so here goes. At the U.S.-Germany game I had my first experience with Currywurst, which is delicious and VERY saucy. I'm surprised I didn't get any on me or spill it all over the place. I didn't take a picture, as my hands were a little full, but it basically just looks like a hot dog with spiced ketchup on it...which is exactly what it is.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Germany does this nifty thing where they charge you an extra deposit for the cup your drinks come in. That way you can use the same cup and get however many refills you want (are willing to pay for), then turn your cup in when you're done and get your money back. It would be like going to an amusement park and paying for one of those souvenir cups, then you could keep it forever or just give it back at the end of the day and get your money back. Magic.

Also off topic, but I'm doing my laundry so still related to life. It's a dark, scaryyy dungeon down there. The laundry machines are in the basement, which does have windows; HOWEVER daylight only lasts until about 4, so unless you get up at the ass-crack of dawn (which seems like kind of a popular time to do laundry a.k.a. it's impossible to get an open machine) chances are you will be in class or doing some other important thing during the non-terrifying hours of possible laundry doing time. Any other time you will have to brave the dark scary stone corridor where the lights are NEVER on (actually it might not even have lights) to make it to the laundry room with the automatic lights that are also NEVER on when you go down there, and only turn once you have practically run into the dryers.

Happy days!

General Update

Before I go into all the trips I haven't written about, I wanted to get a general thoughts and feelings update type of deal down on paper (figuratively). The posts show up newest first so this might not be in order anyways, but here you go :)

First for all of you Californians complaining about how cold it is there, you shut your mouths! hahaha. Someone on Facebook a few days ago posted a screen shot of the iPhone weather that said it was 39 degrees, and I almost felt bad for them UNTIL I saw that it was 9 IN THE AM. Not sorry, the high at 2 pm was still 57! Yes I went back and found the post to check, I also switched my phone to Fahrenheit so I can accurately tell you how cold it has been here. This week has been 45 degrees during the day (7 Celsius for my non-American friends) and yesterday I used the phrase "it's been warmer this week." I can actually walk around without zipping up my jacket! Last week it was 30 degrees. APPARENTLY in January and February it's know to be 0 degrees Fahrenheit on a regular basis, so that should be a fun time.

I'm actually really enjoying the cold right now, besides the fact that leaving my room is a full five minute ordeal. You can't just "run out of the house", you have to put on a million layers first. I LITERALLY factored in extra dressing time when setting my alarm clock for morning class on Tuesday. It's serious. Anyways, once I get all the extra layers on it's really great. I wear my high-er top TOMS with the fabric (almost spelled that with a k, thanks German) inside every day without my feet getting all hot and sweaty and gross. Sorry SLO, but you fail in that respect. Also in the whole "white Christmas" thing, although I guess it doesn't really snow on Christmas here, but it has snowed a few times so far and when it does it makes the Christmas markets all cute and magical.

Now sort of switching to school but still on the cold weather topic, I'm convinced that they have 15 minutes between each class because of the whole dressing-undressing ordeal, haha. It's like shedding every time you go into class, and each of the classrooms have a row of coat hangars next to the door, which about two people per room use. Everyone else just piles all their crap on their chair. Most restaurants have coat racks too, lined up on the wall and sometimes on the pillars next to tables, AND the long-distance trains have hooks next to the windows. Everyone dies of heat in the subway cuz there's always a billion people, and the heating in class is hit or miss. Either the professor likes it warm and it's stuffy, or they like fresh air and have flung all the windows open, making it freezing cold. German windows also have this nifty movement where you can crack them open a bit at the top, which makes the temperature of the room deceiving. You think it's fine until you're suddenly freezing again half-way through class.

So to speak about actual class, I have three engineering courses and three general studies courses, which make a whopping 14 hours of class a week. It's been a little like being on a 3 month vacation, since there are no homework assignments or projects or midterms or anything. We did have our first lab for my controls class on Monday, but when we got there the lab tech said that it wasn't mandatory and that we didn't have to stay. What. We did anyways, and I got to use electrical equipment that wasn't from the stone age! There were different colored lines on the display and everything, such a novelty.

There are lots of little things that are different about German classrooms (at least at my university, can't say anything about the others). First, the chalkboards are actually green, thank the Lord, not that awful orange-brown color that you can't see squat on. The chalkboards fold open, instead of those slidy ones they always show in movies about Ivy League schools or whatever, AND they move up and down, which I'm guessing is an ergonomic measure for the professors, since it really doesn't help out slow writers like yours-truly. Whenever they get to the bottom of the board and move it down to write up at the top again I have to stand up to see the notes.

They are also big fans of colored chalk/pens. Each classroom has a box with white, red, blue, yellow, and green chalk all neatly organized, and most students I've seen have a set of colored pens. Also, instead of the projector screens that you pull down and then roll back up when you're done, they have a solid square board that swings out to the angle you need. Certain professors are better at aligning it to the projector than others, haha. One of my professors is also really fond of using the pointer stick thing and the first time he used it it made such a solid scratching noise it kind of startled me, just one of those things that you're not used to. The students also do this thing where they knock on the desks at the end of lecture, it's just a respectful gesture to the teacher I think, like clapping. We've started to do it in classes where there's only international students, but it just doesn't sound the same with only 6 people, haha which is in two of my classes.

That's all my brain can remember at the moment, I'm sure other things will come up as I write about the various trips.

Oh! There is one thing. It may be because of the whole immersion thing, but I think the stereotype that German is an ugly language is silly. I find it to be rather pretty, call me crazy. It's grammar could be a little simpler, but it definitely doesn't sound as harsh as everyone seems to think/how it's portrayed in movies. At least for the Munich dialect, no guarantees about anywhere else!