Carnival / Fasching

It's like Halloween except instead of kids in costumes going door to door in the rain to get candy, kids and adults in costumes stand in the freezing, winter cold on the side of the road waiting for candy to get tossed to them from the parade. The biggest Carnival, or "Fasching" in German, event is in Mainz, which is where Marie and I were. There are other cities that have the celebration too, but Mainz is known to have the biggest one.

If you don't have a costume, then the next best thing is to wear a funny hat or wig. See the rastafarian by the pandas?

Here's a game for you. It's kind of like where's waldo except you have to find certain hats from the pictures below:
Santa, jailberg, soccor ball, viking

This costume was a little freaky looking.


Marie and I were party poopers and didn't do either but we still got plenty of candy!


There's all sorts of floats in the parade. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of political ones.


These characters are called Mainzelmännchen which are the mascots of Fasching.


This mouse man was funny. He must have grown up in the area because he was dancing to the parade music the whole time we were there.


Can you say, "packed like sardines"?


As the parade comes by, you're supposed to shout out, "hela!" and wave at the parade people while they do likewise. Marie (on the left with the red jacket) was into it, since she's gone a few times.

Marcus, her husband, grew up in the area and so grew up with Fasching. Apparently, it's not just a parade. It's another holiday (where only that German state gets a day off) to celebrate life and drink a lot of beer.

One of the floats had "The Macarena" song playing, so this playgirl bunny danced along.


Some funny colored marching band.

The music was great from every float/band.

Don't these look like big bobble-heads?


The parade lasted for like 5 hours! If you ever visit, make sure you're securely bundled and bring a lot of hot chocolate!

Budapest, Hungary

March 12-13

There's a travel agency in Germany called L'Tur that specializes in last minute vacation packages and JP & I had found a terrific deal on a hotel & air trip to Budapest. Most trips on L'Tur are on pre-selected hotel dates and set airplane takeoff times and this particular one was perfect: the plane left Munich on Friday evening and returned on Sunday evening, so no need to take any vacation days and was only 160€ pp. that included a nice 3* hotel.

Our first morning walking down the street, everything looks pretty average European. Small cars and buildings that needed to be cleaned. (Notice the "black" buildings to the right of me in the pic.)


And then suddenly.....a building with bright green roof tiles! Ahh, this must be Hungarian.


This mailbox looks just like the ones in Germany, except Germany's are yellow.


This was a cool sight, looking down the road to a bridge, but unfortunately the buildings were so darn dirty! Do you see a pattern?


This is at Hösök tere, translated to Hero's Square. The statues behind us are leaders of old Hungarian tribes.


More cool statues at Hero's Square.


A replica of the castle in Transylvania, home of Count Dracula. (mwah ah ah ah ah)


It was freezing cold outside, but who can resist the hot springs of Budapest. This is one of the city's more popular, bigger and fancy bath houses.

People believe that the natural minerals in the water can have healing powers.

"Don't cry for me Argentiiiina...." This is the opera house were Evita's song was filmed.


This Jewish Synagogue in Budapest is Europe's largest, & the world's 2nd largest.


The Parliament building.

This is one of the coolest ones I've seen.

Here's a church with the fancy Hungarian roof tiles. I like the statue on the right because of the sculpture's great detailed work, especially the saddle decor hanging on the sides of the horse (or whatever that thing is called).


We bought the "Budapest Card" which gives you unlimited riding privileges on the subway system, free entrance to certain attractions, and a discount to many more attractions. One of the free places was the zoo, so we went there and saw many interesting animals...

What is this???

Remember that game, Hungry Hungry Hippo? It was quite amusing to watch these hippos just open their mouth, waiting for a person to throw anything edible in there.


More city touring. Although we couldn't go inside this church, the outside was cool enough to get a picture.


This was in front of a church cave overlooking one of the many bridges in Budapest. Clicking on the thumbnail will give you the pic large enough to cover your desktop as wallpaper.


Did you know Budapest is actually two cities? On one side of the river is the city of Buda and on the other side is Pest. The cave church is in Buda, so the picture is looking towards Pest. Pest is flat and has the main city life with all the hotels, apartments, government buildings, etc. Buda is directly on the other side of the river which is mostly hills and contains more of the natural attractions of Budapest, although there are plenty of buildings such as museums and residental housing.

And yes, a church housed by a cave! This is the "lobby" area and between the white columns is the door to the sanctuary. I couldn't go in because there was a service going on.


This is looking at the cave from a distance. You can see the statue on the left that was in the previous picture and the opening of the cave is in the middle.


I'm not sure what this building was but it looked really cool and you can see it had the colored roof tiles too. Our walking tour guide told us the colored roof tiles are a Hungarian specialty.


If you visit a city in Europe, I highly recommend going on a walking tour. This was my third one and I always enjoy them because they show you the highlights of the city and tell you about the history and culture of the people. They give me a better feel and insight of the place I'm visiting. It sure beats just walking up to a landmark, saying, "oohh pretty" and then walking on. The guides are also usually natives to the country or city or have lived there for quite some time. After the tour ends, you can get good recommendations from them of where to eat, other points of interest, nightlife, directions to the train station, etc. I would also recommend a walking tour over a bus tour. From my experience, bus guides feel so impersonal and their information seems to lack depth.

Hope you enjoyed your little tour of Budapest :).

Kaiser Mountains

So all winter long, it's mostly cold and cloudy/rainy/snowy. Then when there's a forecast for sunshine, people come out of their caves and go for a hike! During this one particular week, it had been snowing during the weekdays, then was sunny for the weekend. JP, Ralf, and I decided to go for a hike in the Kaiser mountains around Kuftstein.

We hiked in the valley between the "Wild" Kaisers and the "Mild" Kaisers.


The city of Kufstein behind Ralf and I.


The city of Kufstein and its burg (castle). Cross reference to my previous adventure in Kufstein to see the inside of the castle :).


Someone decided to decorate this Charlie Brown tree on their hike!

When we came back down, all the ornaments were gone, so maybe these people used them to mark their way back... ;)

Another view of the city and castle.


The first restaurant along the hike.

These are basically the mountain people's houses that convert their first floor to restaurants and often rent out some rooms in the above floors. (I've mentioned these in my summer hiking adventures). If anyone ever wants to visit (hint hint), I would recommend staying in one of these. They're relatively cheap and usually includes a full breakfast.

The cool "Wild" Kaisers in the backdrop while Ralf and JP try to decipher the signs


A cute little church in the mountains. It was pretty small-- maybe 20 people could fit in there.


And for those with broadband....kaiser_pan.wmv

christmas in germany

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...

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.