It's that time of the year again! I've been getting a lot of emails asking what Christmas is like in Germany. Well, it's nice!
The best part is the "Christmas Markets" which most decent sized towns have, usually held in the center or downtown area. (Although sometimes you will see shopping centers/areas having their own little christmas market too.) It's almost like a holiday craft fair, where people sell stuff in wooden booths. People tend to sell hand crafted items, like candle stuff, figurines, dolls, mostly novelty, knick knack stuff. Good gifts for grandma.
Then there are plenty of food booths, selling sausage sandwiches, crepes, chocolate covered marzipan, eggnog, and on. Everyone has at least one cup of Glühwein, which is hot wine with sugar and rum. It really warms you up when you're standing out in the freezing cold (and trust me, it is FREEZING cold). It's the hang out place for college kids on Friday or Saturday night, so it can get crowded, including plenty of families too.
Then you got the kiddie entertainment. The one in Rosenheim, which is the next town over where I take my German language class (I can see the Christmas Market out the window of the class), has a carousel, a small train, and a swing type carousel. The one at Münich airport has an ice skating rink! Yes, the airport has a Christmas Market! It has a large outdoor area between two terminals where they set the market up. Then you can take your picture with St. Nikolaus! No, not Santa Clause with the big white beard, glasses, red suit, and black boots. This is SAINT Nikolaus, so he has one of those bishop looking hats (red of course) with a big red cape.
So in the States, churches celebrate Advent, right? They do that here too, but people do it at home too (although I don't...). Then the kids have Advent calendars where it's a sort of a flat box, and there are panels for each day of December until Christmas. Behind each panel is a chocolate piece, so each day, you look forward to opening a new day to get a new angel shaped chocolate, or duck shape, or santa face, or bell, and so on. Ok, so it's not totally limited to adults because I have one, and a colleage of JP has one at work too :).
As for Christmas music, I hear plenty of American Christmas songs on the radio, which is nice for me. I just watched The Santa Clause with Tim Allen on TV tonight, dubbed over with German of course.
Speaking of TV, I've made more interesting observations I'd like to share. For one, there are a lot of commercials for cell phone ring tones. Like, A LOT. And they are the most annoying commercials ever to be shown in television history. I think it's because 4 or 5 of them will run in a row, and those 4-5 will run at every commercial break. They play clips of the songs (top40 songs)/ringtones, and what's worse, the volume gets louder during these commercials.
Then, in the mornings, there are a few channels that show webcam panning shots of mountain (ski) areas in Austria with Austrian music playing in the background (if you don't know what Austrian music sounds like, just imagine what you think the traditional German music sounds like, with the tuba and accordian, and that's Austrian music). You can see how nice the weather is and plan a day trip accordingly.
We get about 20 or so cable standard channels and about half of them are news channels. Two are in English, CNN and Bloomberg, so I watch CNN most of the time. There is MTV and MTV2, where they play American music videos as well as ones from German artists. And Dan Wyatt would be happy with this: primetime and late primetime are mostly movie slots. There are very few German dramas and reality shows (I've only seen Bachelorette and Big Brother, their version) and I haven't seen any German sitcoms (German don't laugh...ha ha, just kidding...).
JP mentioned that what Americans picture Germans to be like, with the lederhosens and Oktoberfest, come from Bavaria, which is just one state in Germany. But hey, it works in reverse where Germans imagine most Americans with cowboy hats and big pickup trucks, and that's coming from Texas. Apparently, Bavaria considers themselves to be totally different than the rest of the country and want to separate. (I don't know how Texas feels...)
Of course, a lot of Americans would say, oh no, America is so diverse! But Germany is really diverse too. America has a large population of Hispanics & Asians, and Germany has a large population of Turkish, Croatians, Italians, & Russians. My language class has a great mix! We cover all continents except Australia: 1 from US (me), Peru, Argentina, Indonesia, Taiwan, Rwanda, Albania, Maldovia, Turkey, 2 from Russia, and 3 from Romania.
So do I like it here? Yes! I can't understand what most people are saying, but everything else not having to know language is great! As you may or may not know, I'm a practical person. And I would say, Germans are a practical people. If you look at how they make or do every day life stuff, you can see they try to make life more efficient. Ok, this is our American stereotype of Germans (and is pretty true), and they stereotype Americans as wasters (generally true too). More later...
Thursday
Tuesday
Oberaudorf
Oberaudorf! Say that 10 times fast! Ha ha! So this cute little town at the foot of the mountains is about 15 minutes train ride from my town. During the summer, their part of the mountains is popular for hiking and family fun. You can take the ski lift to the top where you can go hiking, eat at the restaurant, play at the jungle gyms, say hi to the goats, and then finish the day by taking the slide down to the bottom.
Here's a panoramic view of Oberaudorf behind us while going up the ski lift. You can see the beautiful Autumn colored trees in the background. A cool feature of ski lifts in Germany is that there is a bar below you to rest your feet/skis/snowboard on. I know in the states you usually rest one foot on the other, but still a pain for that foot being rested on. :)
Here's the top of the ski lift, where you have the Kaiser mountains as the backdrop while you sit on one of the wooden benches watching kids play or feeding the goats.
Me failing to look cool in a pose.
Hiking around, I caught this great scene--green grass, fall colored trees, the magnificent Kaiser mountains in the backdrop. And if you have high speed internet, watch this.
If you would like this picture as your desktop wallpaper, use this image.
So after hiking around a bit, you can take this really big slide down.You ride on a little sled with wheels and a brake handle and let gravity take you for a ride.
One of the things you have to worry about is getting stuck behind a slow person if you like to go fast, so you have to space out the launches. I have to admit, I was somewhat slow, applying the brakes too often, but it was my first time and I was afraid of going over the edge if I went around a turn too fast! The next time I go, watch out! ;)
Here's the under view of the same above picture. The big slope thing on the right is for the long jump in skiing (I think that's what it's called), like those you see on TV.
Coming down the end of the slide, this is where you gain more speed through the straight part of the track.
So, it was a nice half day excursion. Relatively cheap and a close quick weekend activity. Train tickets were a few bucks and the ski lift & slide tickets were about 10 euros.
Here's a panoramic view of Oberaudorf behind us while going up the ski lift. You can see the beautiful Autumn colored trees in the background. A cool feature of ski lifts in Germany is that there is a bar below you to rest your feet/skis/snowboard on. I know in the states you usually rest one foot on the other, but still a pain for that foot being rested on. :)
Here's the top of the ski lift, where you have the Kaiser mountains as the backdrop while you sit on one of the wooden benches watching kids play or feeding the goats.
Me failing to look cool in a pose.
Hiking around, I caught this great scene--green grass, fall colored trees, the magnificent Kaiser mountains in the backdrop. And if you have high speed internet, watch this.
If you would like this picture as your desktop wallpaper, use this image.
So after hiking around a bit, you can take this really big slide down.You ride on a little sled with wheels and a brake handle and let gravity take you for a ride.
One of the things you have to worry about is getting stuck behind a slow person if you like to go fast, so you have to space out the launches. I have to admit, I was somewhat slow, applying the brakes too often, but it was my first time and I was afraid of going over the edge if I went around a turn too fast! The next time I go, watch out! ;)
Here's the under view of the same above picture. The big slope thing on the right is for the long jump in skiing (I think that's what it's called), like those you see on TV.
Coming down the end of the slide, this is where you gain more speed through the straight part of the track.
So, it was a nice half day excursion. Relatively cheap and a close quick weekend activity. Train tickets were a few bucks and the ski lift & slide tickets were about 10 euros.
germanized american entertainment
Like I've mentioned before, they show a lot of American tv shows and movies in Germany. But, as I've learned in international marketing, sometimes things have to be adjusted to fit the local culture. Therefore, they have modified "clever" "funny" "cute" or basically abstract American tv and movie titles to something more acceptable by the German society, something more...descriptive (a.k.a. no flair!) .
I will be constantly updating this list so check back later!
American. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Title translated to English
Spongebob Squarepants . . . . . . . . . . Spongebob Spongehead
The Apprentice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hire and Fire, Big Boss (they have their own)
Charlie's Angles . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Angels for Charlie
Grumpy Old Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Crazy Pair
Must Love Dogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Woman with Dog searches Man with Heart
Dukes of Hazzard . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Duke Comes Alone Seldomly
I will be constantly updating this list so check back later!
American. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Title translated to English
Spongebob Squarepants . . . . . . . . . . Spongebob Spongehead
The Apprentice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hire and Fire, Big Boss (they have their own)
Charlie's Angles . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Angels for Charlie
Grumpy Old Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Crazy Pair
Must Love Dogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Woman with Dog searches Man with Heart
Dukes of Hazzard . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Duke Comes Alone Seldomly
Monday
it's snowing!!!
Raubling's first snow of the season! Wooo hoo!!! Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus...
Here's the view out of the apartment (panaramic pic). Look, we have our own Christmas tree!!! :)
Here's the view out of the apartment (panaramic pic). Look, we have our own Christmas tree!!! :)
Wednesday
EVERYDAY LIFE IN RAUBLING, GERMANY
This is the bulding I live in! The apartment is 2 floors above the bakery, and boy is it convenient! The bakery not only has your donuts, crossiants, and bear claws, they also offer tiramisu, cakes, and torts. It's a good thing I left my Atkins diet in the US ;).
Looking across the street out the window is Trattoria Marsala Italian restaurant, which we go to quite often.
You might have guessed, sausages are big around here, figuratively and literally! Here is what we had for dinner one night. It tasted like a big hot dog.
Here's a map of the surrounding area. I'm in Raubling, which is at the bottom center. From my adventures I've written about, Wendelstein is on the right side and Kufstein is at the top center. The big mountains on the top left are the Kaisers. The border between Germany and Austria is basically between the green & brown colored mountains, and the bluish background mountains.
So, how is life different here?
Let's start at the grocery store:
1) Food is cheap. Pricing is almost equivalent to using douple coupons in the US.
2) All prices already include the tax. This is true for all shopping everywhere. It's soooo nice.
3) You have to bring your own bags or boxes to take your groceries out, or you can buy bags from the store. We usually bring our backpacks and it's amazing how much you can stuff in them!
4) You have to use a Euro to unlock your shopping cart, which you get back after you return it to the original spot, thus avoiding the runaway shopping carts across parking lots.
Dining out:
1) You have to order a drink!!! No free tap water here. Don't worry though. You'll get about 20 different beers to choose from.
2) You don't have to tip much. Just round up to the nearest whole dollar (or two). Apparently, servers get paid well.
3) Separating bills is NO PROBLEM and super quick (since they don't have to recalculate tax!). You don't get snickers from the waiters/waitresses like in the US! Actually, a lot of the time, you don't officially get a check. If you're in a big party, you just tell them what you had and they tell you the cost. German society is pretty honest.
4) A majority of the cuisine consist of German, Italian, and Turkish. Once in awhile, you'll see Chinese, Indian, Greek, etc.
Other things:
1) Everything is closed on Sundays, and restaurants don't open until around 5pm. So inconvenient for the American who is used to convenience.
2) Stores usually close around 6 or 7pm. That means you dash to the store from work, or try to do everything on Saturday. There is one grocery store open until 8pm down the street, which is very unusual, but we love it cuz we get to go at 7:30pm.
3) Bikes are a way of life for people of all ages. Actually, I see more old people on bikes than young. It's not like China though ;).
4) On television, they have a lot of American cartoons, sitcoms, and movies that are dubbed with German. Primetime mainly consists of the dubbed American movies. There is one theater in the next town that plays American movies in English once a week, which is nice to have. There is one channel in English, which is CNN International, so I've been really keeping up on world news!
I'm learning to speak German and I guess I'm doing fairly well, but the letter pronounciations are driving me crazy: the letter D sounds like t, S sounds like z, Z sounds like ts (as in tsunami), W sounds like v, V sounds like f, I sounds like e (most of the time), then you got the 3 additional umlaut vowels that I can't seem to pronounce right.
Well, hope you are all enjoying my blog. :) Just booked my plane ticket to the homeland for Thanksgiving to get my fill of turkey!
Looking across the street out the window is Trattoria Marsala Italian restaurant, which we go to quite often.
You might have guessed, sausages are big around here, figuratively and literally! Here is what we had for dinner one night. It tasted like a big hot dog.
Here's a map of the surrounding area. I'm in Raubling, which is at the bottom center. From my adventures I've written about, Wendelstein is on the right side and Kufstein is at the top center. The big mountains on the top left are the Kaisers. The border between Germany and Austria is basically between the green & brown colored mountains, and the bluish background mountains.
So, how is life different here?
Let's start at the grocery store:
1) Food is cheap. Pricing is almost equivalent to using douple coupons in the US.
2) All prices already include the tax. This is true for all shopping everywhere. It's soooo nice.
3) You have to bring your own bags or boxes to take your groceries out, or you can buy bags from the store. We usually bring our backpacks and it's amazing how much you can stuff in them!
4) You have to use a Euro to unlock your shopping cart, which you get back after you return it to the original spot, thus avoiding the runaway shopping carts across parking lots.
Dining out:
1) You have to order a drink!!! No free tap water here. Don't worry though. You'll get about 20 different beers to choose from.
2) You don't have to tip much. Just round up to the nearest whole dollar (or two). Apparently, servers get paid well.
3) Separating bills is NO PROBLEM and super quick (since they don't have to recalculate tax!). You don't get snickers from the waiters/waitresses like in the US! Actually, a lot of the time, you don't officially get a check. If you're in a big party, you just tell them what you had and they tell you the cost. German society is pretty honest.
4) A majority of the cuisine consist of German, Italian, and Turkish. Once in awhile, you'll see Chinese, Indian, Greek, etc.
Other things:
1) Everything is closed on Sundays, and restaurants don't open until around 5pm. So inconvenient for the American who is used to convenience.
2) Stores usually close around 6 or 7pm. That means you dash to the store from work, or try to do everything on Saturday. There is one grocery store open until 8pm down the street, which is very unusual, but we love it cuz we get to go at 7:30pm.
3) Bikes are a way of life for people of all ages. Actually, I see more old people on bikes than young. It's not like China though ;).
4) On television, they have a lot of American cartoons, sitcoms, and movies that are dubbed with German. Primetime mainly consists of the dubbed American movies. There is one theater in the next town that plays American movies in English once a week, which is nice to have. There is one channel in English, which is CNN International, so I've been really keeping up on world news!
I'm learning to speak German and I guess I'm doing fairly well, but the letter pronounciations are driving me crazy: the letter D sounds like t, S sounds like z, Z sounds like ts (as in tsunami), W sounds like v, V sounds like f, I sounds like e (most of the time), then you got the 3 additional umlaut vowels that I can't seem to pronounce right.
Well, hope you are all enjoying my blog. :) Just booked my plane ticket to the homeland for Thanksgiving to get my fill of turkey!
Sunday
call centers in india
have you ever called tech support for your computer or other high techy item and got a help desk guy/girl with a foreign accent? If your answer is yes, watch this. If not, watch it anyway!
http://www.chintan.net/conan.wmv
http://www.chintan.net/conan.wmv
Saturday
do try this at home
Left brain, right brain.
While sitting, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.
Got this as a forward, so instead of sending it to everyone's inbox, I'll just leave it here for those who want to read it.... :)
While sitting, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.
Got this as a forward, so instead of sending it to everyone's inbox, I'll just leave it here for those who want to read it.... :)
Sunday
VENICE
The real Venice that is! We took the Nachtzug ("night train") which departed on Friday night around 11pm. We slept in bunk beds that were shared with 4 other strangers (6 bed compartment), but that's because that's what we paid for.
The more private you want, the more it costs. For our set up, we paid only 39 euros each one way (not "based on round trip" like airlines do), so it was a total of 156 euros for both of us. Not bad when you consider it's transportation and motel in one. Also, this was a discounted rate (for only 6 seats) so the price is normally over twice as much.
The beds are not the most comfortable thing, but at least you get clean sheets and a blankie! The compartments have only beds so there's not much room for anything else. You definitely don't want to bring your children unless you want to pay for a private 2 bed compartments (89 euros per person each way, discounted rate) but even those you don't have that much room, but you do get a private toilette and shower.
The train guy woke us up about 30 minutes before arrival, for teeth brushing and peeing time. There's only 2 sinks and 1 toilette in each caboose so you inevitably wait in line, or option 2: stand in front of your compartment, look out the window at the scenery of ghetto Italy passing by, take quick glances over at the line every so often, and then when the line is gone, make a mad dash, which is what I did. We arrived in Venice about 6am so we had the whole Saturday, got a hotel room for Saturday night, spent all Sunday in Venice also, and then took the night train back at 11pm. We arrived back at home around 7:30am (our train was 40 minutes late), showered, and started our Monday. Now that's a full weekend!
Here are some highlights of our Venice visit. I've started to put the pictures small on the blog page (to speed up loading) so if you want to see it bigger, just click on it.
This is on the island of Murano, off of Venice island. They're famous for glass making so the tourist shops are full of glass items, from jewelry, to picture frames, to sculptures, to chandeliers. On these islands, there are no roads, cars or motorcycles. Since the streets are made of water, everything is by boat, and to cross the street, you are limited to bridges (no jay walking here!) You can see here an old man's vegetable & fruit stand on his boat. I thought this was a cute scene :).
This inside the glass museum on Murano, a glass chandelier hanging from your stereotypical, yet still pretty, painted ceiling.
On the island of Venice, typical apartment homes with colorful underoos hanging about.
Public transportation use boat "buses." These are the floating "bus stops" and you can see part of St. Marks Sqaure in the background (the famous part of Venice, that I didn't know about until I got there!)
What's a trip to Italy without a gondola ride? Check out these tourists undocking. Meanwhile, JP and I are on a bus, trying to pull into the bus stop, so the bus drivers are frequently honking their horns at the gondolas for being in the way.
A quartet of gondolas ridden by a group of Asian tourists! They had a singer, but you can't really see him. If you look closely, you can see his arms sticking out on either side of the standing paddling guy on the very right (bald guy with black & white horizontal stripe shirt).
Along the Grand Canal, a cool looking building.
Walking through Venice is a rat maze. The map wasn't much help so we got lost a lot.
Let me give you an idea of what most of Venice look's like. When people decided to build on this place a long time ago, there was no thought of backyards, neighbor cushion or grid patterns. Someone built an apartment building. Then the next guy built another apartment building about 5 feet away, but made the building an L shape. Then the next guy built another different shaped building. If you look from an arial view, it's almost like tetris. There are some open squares where there's room for gatherings, and some wide walkways where there are shops, but not many!
On Sunday, it was raining. But like many tourists from faraway lands, we had to put up with it and still do our touristy things outside. No, I wasn't code in a skirt. The temperature was still warm, so mix that with rain and you got humid conditions, perfect for creating sticky feeling skin and plenty of mosquito bites.
Yes, people were on Gondolas even when it was raining. People traveled thousands of miles to visit Italy, so a little rain was not going to stop them!
Here's a cool looking church.
This is on the back side of a hospital. These boats are the ambulances.
A picturesque scene along the Grand Canal.
A closer look of the church from the previous picture. We skipped going into a different church in order to visit this one, but there was no entrance here! That really sucked because it took about 30-45 minutes to get anywhere due to the buses having to stop a lot, and the other church was probably almost closing, so we couldn't go back.
So instead, we just took a picture of ourselves.
And the sun coming out, looking towards St. Marks Square from this church's steps.
A nice sunset.
Another shot of the Grand Canal, with a big bridge in the background. The bridge is another major tourist attraction and has shops on it. The area in front of it is crowded with retaurants serving over priced food, which we ate at! (doh!)
The night scene of the Grand Canal, from the big bridge, facing towards the over priced restaurants. Most of the restaurants' seating is outside along the canal so at least we get a nice "romantic" view. :)
Along the boardwalks of Venice are street entertainers (what else is new). Here we have some South American looking people playing native sounding music (sorry, no sound clip available).
And yes, we did see one metal looking guy moving like a robot.
Those street vendors....look closely at this picture and you can see this is a fountain...
This is at St. Mark's Square. Plenty of Bert's (of Bert and Ernie) friends around.
Yeah, I want pigeons swarming around and eating off of me too....
St. Mark's Square, a big square.
On the side of the square, there are little orchestra bands playing classical music. Their goal is to get you to sit in the chairs in front of them and pay a lot of money for a small tiny glass of water. Of course, there were plenty of people content to stand and listen. There were 3 bands playing, 2 next to each other and one on the other side of the square. So as soon as one takes a break, you just move on to the next one! Actually, around the corner was another one of these playing jazz, but I don't like jazz, so we didn't listen to that one. This is high class street entertainment!
This is a church in the sqare. You can see that the ground is slowly flooding because of high tide! The polar ice caps are melting!!! The greenhouse effect is not just a figment of the scientists' imagination! (or maybe it is and we're in their dreams...)
I found this on the internet that shows pictures of when it's really flooded, although it wasn't this much when we were there. http://www.veniceonline.it/HighTides/HighTides.asp
And if you're really interested, Nova has more information about it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venice/
Ciao!
The more private you want, the more it costs. For our set up, we paid only 39 euros each one way (not "based on round trip" like airlines do), so it was a total of 156 euros for both of us. Not bad when you consider it's transportation and motel in one. Also, this was a discounted rate (for only 6 seats) so the price is normally over twice as much.
The beds are not the most comfortable thing, but at least you get clean sheets and a blankie! The compartments have only beds so there's not much room for anything else. You definitely don't want to bring your children unless you want to pay for a private 2 bed compartments (89 euros per person each way, discounted rate) but even those you don't have that much room, but you do get a private toilette and shower.
The train guy woke us up about 30 minutes before arrival, for teeth brushing and peeing time. There's only 2 sinks and 1 toilette in each caboose so you inevitably wait in line, or option 2: stand in front of your compartment, look out the window at the scenery of ghetto Italy passing by, take quick glances over at the line every so often, and then when the line is gone, make a mad dash, which is what I did. We arrived in Venice about 6am so we had the whole Saturday, got a hotel room for Saturday night, spent all Sunday in Venice also, and then took the night train back at 11pm. We arrived back at home around 7:30am (our train was 40 minutes late), showered, and started our Monday. Now that's a full weekend!
Here are some highlights of our Venice visit. I've started to put the pictures small on the blog page (to speed up loading) so if you want to see it bigger, just click on it.
This is on the island of Murano, off of Venice island. They're famous for glass making so the tourist shops are full of glass items, from jewelry, to picture frames, to sculptures, to chandeliers. On these islands, there are no roads, cars or motorcycles. Since the streets are made of water, everything is by boat, and to cross the street, you are limited to bridges (no jay walking here!) You can see here an old man's vegetable & fruit stand on his boat. I thought this was a cute scene :).
This inside the glass museum on Murano, a glass chandelier hanging from your stereotypical, yet still pretty, painted ceiling.
On the island of Venice, typical apartment homes with colorful underoos hanging about.
Public transportation use boat "buses." These are the floating "bus stops" and you can see part of St. Marks Sqaure in the background (the famous part of Venice, that I didn't know about until I got there!)
What's a trip to Italy without a gondola ride? Check out these tourists undocking. Meanwhile, JP and I are on a bus, trying to pull into the bus stop, so the bus drivers are frequently honking their horns at the gondolas for being in the way.
A quartet of gondolas ridden by a group of Asian tourists! They had a singer, but you can't really see him. If you look closely, you can see his arms sticking out on either side of the standing paddling guy on the very right (bald guy with black & white horizontal stripe shirt).
Along the Grand Canal, a cool looking building.
Walking through Venice is a rat maze. The map wasn't much help so we got lost a lot.
Let me give you an idea of what most of Venice look's like. When people decided to build on this place a long time ago, there was no thought of backyards, neighbor cushion or grid patterns. Someone built an apartment building. Then the next guy built another apartment building about 5 feet away, but made the building an L shape. Then the next guy built another different shaped building. If you look from an arial view, it's almost like tetris. There are some open squares where there's room for gatherings, and some wide walkways where there are shops, but not many!
On Sunday, it was raining. But like many tourists from faraway lands, we had to put up with it and still do our touristy things outside. No, I wasn't code in a skirt. The temperature was still warm, so mix that with rain and you got humid conditions, perfect for creating sticky feeling skin and plenty of mosquito bites.
Yes, people were on Gondolas even when it was raining. People traveled thousands of miles to visit Italy, so a little rain was not going to stop them!
Here's a cool looking church.
This is on the back side of a hospital. These boats are the ambulances.
A picturesque scene along the Grand Canal.
A closer look of the church from the previous picture. We skipped going into a different church in order to visit this one, but there was no entrance here! That really sucked because it took about 30-45 minutes to get anywhere due to the buses having to stop a lot, and the other church was probably almost closing, so we couldn't go back.
So instead, we just took a picture of ourselves.
And the sun coming out, looking towards St. Marks Square from this church's steps.
A nice sunset.
Another shot of the Grand Canal, with a big bridge in the background. The bridge is another major tourist attraction and has shops on it. The area in front of it is crowded with retaurants serving over priced food, which we ate at! (doh!)
The night scene of the Grand Canal, from the big bridge, facing towards the over priced restaurants. Most of the restaurants' seating is outside along the canal so at least we get a nice "romantic" view. :)
Along the boardwalks of Venice are street entertainers (what else is new). Here we have some South American looking people playing native sounding music (sorry, no sound clip available).
And yes, we did see one metal looking guy moving like a robot.
Those street vendors....look closely at this picture and you can see this is a fountain...
This is at St. Mark's Square. Plenty of Bert's (of Bert and Ernie) friends around.
Yeah, I want pigeons swarming around and eating off of me too....
St. Mark's Square, a big square.
On the side of the square, there are little orchestra bands playing classical music. Their goal is to get you to sit in the chairs in front of them and pay a lot of money for a small tiny glass of water. Of course, there were plenty of people content to stand and listen. There were 3 bands playing, 2 next to each other and one on the other side of the square. So as soon as one takes a break, you just move on to the next one! Actually, around the corner was another one of these playing jazz, but I don't like jazz, so we didn't listen to that one. This is high class street entertainment!
This is a church in the sqare. You can see that the ground is slowly flooding because of high tide! The polar ice caps are melting!!! The greenhouse effect is not just a figment of the scientists' imagination! (or maybe it is and we're in their dreams...)
I found this on the internet that shows pictures of when it's really flooded, although it wasn't this much when we were there. http://www.veniceonline.it/HighTides/HighTides.asp
And if you're really interested, Nova has more information about it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venice/
Ciao!
Friday
money money money
I just ran into something cool....this web page shows you images of money bills from all over the world. Click on the "my travel wallet" link below, pick the country, and click on the "view currency" button to see the pictures.
An interesting note: while most countries use people faces on the front of their bills, I found a few that use animals. Check out South Africa's! It's cute :).
Seems like the US is the only country in the world that doesn't use a lot of color. How boring are we??? (oh, I would barely call that color on the new bills!) Even the poor small countries have cooler looking money than us! I-M-H-O!!!
My Travel Wallet
An interesting note: while most countries use people faces on the front of their bills, I found a few that use animals. Check out South Africa's! It's cute :).
Seems like the US is the only country in the world that doesn't use a lot of color. How boring are we??? (oh, I would barely call that color on the new bills!) Even the poor small countries have cooler looking money than us! I-M-H-O!!!
My Travel Wallet
Thursday
the terminal
I recently found out that the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal is based on a true story (with some Hollywood flare of course). The real guy is from Iran and has been stuck in the Paris airport for 10 years! The short story is that he was kicked out of Iran for his political views and received refugee status in Belgium but lost his documentation. His ultimate destination is England, and finally got the papers to allow him to move there recently, but mentally, the airport has been his world, and won't leave it right away, so he'll be going through some therapy.
Read the details to this story here! It's worth it! http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm
Read the details to this story here! It's worth it! http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm
Monday
WENDELSTEIN
Wendelstein is our local peak at 5,600 ft. JP, Ralf and I took a hike up, while many lazy people took the tram or gondola to the top. Ok, I admit, I took the tram up one time, but it was just for the experience ;).
From where we started, we ascended about 3,000 ft (equivalent to a hike a little longer than to the top of Yosemite Falls), so we were dead tired when we finally reached the top! A great benefit of German hiking is that there is always food on the way (because some mountains will have several farm houses that serve food), and/or at the top. Food is always a great motivator, and you know how German like to eat. If not, you do now!
Here's a brief pictoral of our hike. You can click on any picture to see a bigger version.
JP and Ralf putting on the sunscreen
On the way up...
I got pricked by this stupid flower! At first glance, it looked cool because there was no stem! It's just a flower stump! The petals looked silverish, like metal so I decided to see what it felt like and found out that the petal ends were sharp! Then JP started laughing and pointing at me, "Ha ha! I was waiting for you to do that!!!"
We were tired at this point but only a third of the way up. We could finally see the goal and it looked really really far.
A pretty flower along the hike
This is at the top of Wendelstein. There is, you guessed it, food! And you can see all the little people having lunch. There's also a radio broadcasting station which is the building and dishes on the top left part of the picture.
Sitting at a table with a nice view, JP was definitely ready for lunch too.
To the right side of the eating area is a cool small church. Imagine having to hike up here every Sunday morning!
On the way down...
A view of the great Kaiser Mountains along the hike.
You can probably see a running theme of activity here. Mountains mountains mountains, which I love anyway so I don't mind. Do I miss the ocean? Sorta, but not that much. Probably because I never spent much time by the water, despite living minutes away from ocean! I was just your semi-typical 9-5 LA transplant...
From where we started, we ascended about 3,000 ft (equivalent to a hike a little longer than to the top of Yosemite Falls), so we were dead tired when we finally reached the top! A great benefit of German hiking is that there is always food on the way (because some mountains will have several farm houses that serve food), and/or at the top. Food is always a great motivator, and you know how German like to eat. If not, you do now!
Here's a brief pictoral of our hike. You can click on any picture to see a bigger version.
JP and Ralf putting on the sunscreen
On the way up...
I got pricked by this stupid flower! At first glance, it looked cool because there was no stem! It's just a flower stump! The petals looked silverish, like metal so I decided to see what it felt like and found out that the petal ends were sharp! Then JP started laughing and pointing at me, "Ha ha! I was waiting for you to do that!!!"
We were tired at this point but only a third of the way up. We could finally see the goal and it looked really really far.
A pretty flower along the hike
This is at the top of Wendelstein. There is, you guessed it, food! And you can see all the little people having lunch. There's also a radio broadcasting station which is the building and dishes on the top left part of the picture.
Sitting at a table with a nice view, JP was definitely ready for lunch too.
To the right side of the eating area is a cool small church. Imagine having to hike up here every Sunday morning!
On the way down...
A view of the great Kaiser Mountains along the hike.
You can probably see a running theme of activity here. Mountains mountains mountains, which I love anyway so I don't mind. Do I miss the ocean? Sorta, but not that much. Probably because I never spent much time by the water, despite living minutes away from ocean! I was just your semi-typical 9-5 LA transplant...
Sunday
KUFSTEIN
Kufstein is an Austrian city right on the border, that is only a 20 minute train ride from our little town of Raubling.
If I look like I'm cold, it's because I am! It was windy, but also pretty. Behind me is Kufstein's castle along the Inn river.
I've been finding that just about every town that has a hill has a castle on it.
The touristy shopping walkway. Very cute.
There was a little shop that had jerky, but they were not ordinary strips of jerky. They had a pork leg jerky!
We decided to explore the castle (for a fee of course!), but instead of taking the tram up, we walked up the stair path to be as authentic of the time as possible. :) So on the way up, here is a view out of one of the windows.
A view of the Inn River from the top of the castle.
There was a museum in one of the castle halls, and this particular exhibit was cool. Under the glass floor is a geographic model of Bavaria. It was a little freaky standing on the glass because I was expecting the glass to break at any moment. Glass just doesn't feel as solid as an opaque floor, you know what I mean? (jelly bean?)
Walking down one of the narrow, steep stair corridors in the castle
After the castle, we decided to hike on the foothills of the Kaiser Mountains. We first rode up on a one person ski lift. I had never seen one before (do they exist in the US??) and it was a little scarier than a 2-4 person lift. I don't know why, but it was.
The view behind me on the lift.
We'll probably head back sometime during Christmas. We've seen pictures of how pretty the castle gets when dressed for the holidays surrounded by snow. Can't wait!
Bis später!
("see you later", pronounced bees-shpate-er)
If I look like I'm cold, it's because I am! It was windy, but also pretty. Behind me is Kufstein's castle along the Inn river.
I've been finding that just about every town that has a hill has a castle on it.
The touristy shopping walkway. Very cute.
There was a little shop that had jerky, but they were not ordinary strips of jerky. They had a pork leg jerky!
We decided to explore the castle (for a fee of course!), but instead of taking the tram up, we walked up the stair path to be as authentic of the time as possible. :) So on the way up, here is a view out of one of the windows.
A view of the Inn River from the top of the castle.
There was a museum in one of the castle halls, and this particular exhibit was cool. Under the glass floor is a geographic model of Bavaria. It was a little freaky standing on the glass because I was expecting the glass to break at any moment. Glass just doesn't feel as solid as an opaque floor, you know what I mean? (jelly bean?)
Walking down one of the narrow, steep stair corridors in the castle
After the castle, we decided to hike on the foothills of the Kaiser Mountains. We first rode up on a one person ski lift. I had never seen one before (do they exist in the US??) and it was a little scarier than a 2-4 person lift. I don't know why, but it was.
The view behind me on the lift.
We'll probably head back sometime during Christmas. We've seen pictures of how pretty the castle gets when dressed for the holidays surrounded by snow. Can't wait!
Bis später!
("see you later", pronounced bees-shpate-er)
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