After my two week vacation, I had a hard time transitioning back into school and homework...but before I had much time to recover I was off again! This time, I spent the long weekend in Germany with my friend Kaellen from Marquette. She has a friend from home studying in Marburg (in western Germany) and spent the first part of the week visiting with her. Friday morning, I took the train out to Frankfurt and we met up at the train station there to take a train together for Erfurt, a quaint little (positively medieval!) town smack dab in the middle of Germany. We spent Friday night exploring Erfurt, seeing some of it's tourist sites and just absorbing the ambiance.
^ the Merchant's Bridge in Erfurt
Saturday, we took the train from Erfurt to Eisenach to see the Castle Wartburg, another charming location and something of a pilgrimage for Kaellen and I since it was the castle where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into the language of the people (well, the language of those people - aka German) while hiding from the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. All the tourists except us were German (or at least German-speaking), so we were given an English translation of the tour and got to follow the group around the castle reading our "subtitle" brochure while the guide talked in rapid-fire German.
Saturday night, we took a train from Erfurt to begin our Berlin adventure. Unfortunately, our train was 90 minutes late, and thus the second half of our weekend trip did not get off to a great start. Luckily, we arrived at our hostel just in the nick of time (the woman told us she was literally just picking up her purse to leave!) and didn't have to spend the night in the train station. On Sunday, we did our intense sight-seeing day, and took a 3-4 hour walking tour through a company called New Europe Tours recommended by a friend studying in Germany with an English college student studying in Berlin for the year, Simon. Simon was extremely knowledgeable and (I thought) very funny - so we learned a lot about the history of this city that has seen and lived through so much and had a good time too. In any case, we were exhausted by the time we got to the end, so we decided to see more of the Berlin Wall outdoor museum called the Topographie of Terror, and then find some dinner. We asked the young woman working the museum welcome desk, and she told us to try one of the train/tram stops, that there were a lot of reasonably priced places to eat nearby. So, Kaellen and I went there only to find a lot of closed-down store fronts and some to-go only kind of joints. So we ended up settling for this restaurant that actually served Middle-Eastern cuisine. No wurst for us, but it was still delicious! Monday we spent some time looking at the East Side Gallery - the other remaining section of the wall that is now covered in beautiful and haunting murals painted by various artists. Then we took a relaxing stroll through the Tiergarten - a garden stretching from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Statue, before heading back to the hostel, grabbing our bags, and heading to the airport to catch our flight back to Paris.
It was a wonderful trip, and we both had a lot of fun, but it's taken until now (a week later) for me to feel like I've fully recovered from all the vacationing! Now, I'm just focusing on catching up with friends I haven't seen since I left for my first vacations, and being productive in light of the final projects, exposés, and work for my classes. I can't believe I've been in Paris 3 whole months! What's crazier, is now I only really have one month left before my family comes and the Rooney Family European Tour commences. I'm trying my best to really enjoy and make the most of the time I have left - I'll report back on my adventures soon!
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