Luisengarten, Schwarzwald, und Giverny

This last week school has taken up even more time than usual. On Monday we were divided into groups that would present a topic together...auf Deutsch. My group included three other people from my class, including my roommate. We decided to do our presentation on the Mannheim Palace. It has been in Mannheim for over three hundred years so there is a lot of information on it. The truly difficult part is not finding the information, but putting it into German. The worst is that the website we found is also in German so one must resist the pressure to cheat and look up how to phrase something exactly right. In general, our sentences are short with a few compound sentences thrown in.

We have been in class for a full two weeks, but I don't know if I have learned anything concrete. In general I feel that my listening comprehension and speaking skills are better, but I don't know if that is due to the class or daily interaction with the people of Mannheim. I think that our teacher often becomes frustrated with our level of listening comprehension. She has not quite mastered the trick of saying something in a simple way that we will understand. For instance, instead of asking us to read a passage about Nadia X and write a fifteen to twenty of our own sentences about Nadia, she would ask us to illustrate who Nadia is as a person in fifteen to twenty sentences. It sounds like a slight distinction, but throw a few high-level vocabulary words into a sentence and you have eleven very confused college students. The other question in my mind is how hard is the test. Our book is geared towards the Zertifikat Deutsch, but how much are our book tests like the actual test? The tests in our book are pretty easy, but I don't want to expect to ace the test and then have my you-know-what handed to me.

We went to the Luisenpark twice this week. The gardens are so beautiful right now, and there are a lot of large grassy areas to sit on chairs and chaises. There is also a Chinese Tea House and a small zoo. The weirdest thing about the zoo is that there are animals in it that are only found in the United States.

We went to the Schwarzwald on Saturday and I'm pretty sure the bus driver was trying to kill us. First we are driving through mountains so it's all up and down and tight turns. Needless to say, there were many students who were complaining of nausea. To make matters worse she was speeding. Eventually I just had to stop looking at the tiny railing protecting us from plummeting to a death far, far, far down the mountain side, and pass out. We visited several towns - Baden-Baden, Titisee, Mummelsee, and Freiburg.

At Baden-Baden, Dr. Hasty was determined to discover the Roman springs. Baden in German means to bathe. The problem was that the springs are now part of spas that allow their guests to experience the springs sans clothing. This does not make for an amiable touring environment. Dr. Hasty was insistent on finding these springs. We went upstairs, downstairs, to building number 1, to building number 2, to building number 1 again, etc. until he realized we were forty minutes late to meet the bus driver. On the whole Baden-Baden was cute, but I could have skipped it on the tour.

Mummelsee was over 1000 m above sea level and home to a lake with the Nix. The Nix is the Schwarzwald's version of the Lochness Monster. The area where we stopped to view the lake even had a man dressed up as the Nix. There was a gift shop and, at that point, the most important thing - food! Brotwurst and Schwardswald Kirsche Torte for lunch. Black Forest Cake in Germany is less sweet than the American version, but has a stronger rum flavor.

Titisee had a cute town, which we hardly had time to explore. The town also had a lake and it was bigger than the Mummelsee lake. We strolled around, grateful to stretch our legs. The rest of the journey was a blur of driving and I'm not really sure what happened in Freiburg. The whole day ended up taking twelve hours. By the time we got home there was only enough time to eat dinner, shower, and grab our stuff.

That night Jenna and I took a seven hour "City Night Line" bus to Paris. Upon entering our compartment there were four people of various levels of rankness and snoring ability. We were surprisingly never asked to present our Eurorail, and managed to sleep through the whole trip. We then caught another train to Vernon, and then a shuttle to Giverny. We got to Giverny right as they were opening up. This was the best time to go because we were able to see the major sights, such as the water lily pond, without huge tour groups being there. The gardens were absolutely amazing and I spent the morning in a picture taking frenzy.

For four euro - I'm a student and therefore receive priledges - I was able to see the house and the gardens. The house was painted in fun shades on the inside - light blue with turquoise trim, bright yellow living room, light green with eggplant, etc. Monet also had an extensive collection of Japenese woodblock prints and sketches. I did not know this about him, but I was very excited to see certain pictures that I recognized. There were several original pieces of his artwork on display. Most of it was on loan from other museums and we weren't allowed to take pictures. Still it was amazing to see the original of a poster I have hanging on my wall; let alone where it was painted.

After viewing the gardens and house, we walked down to view his grave, which was not very exciting. Then we went to a creperie for lunch. We both ordered raspberry crepes with whipped cream. It was amazing!!! The whipped cream was fresh. The raspberries had been soaked in a sugar until they started to come apart. The whole thing was an open crepe too so I was able to combine raspberry, cream, and crepe at will. After being throughly stuffed, we caught the shuttle, and then the train, back to Paris. We viewed the Tuileries gardens. I could have missed them. There was not much there except for tourists. Then we ate dinner at a small bistro. It was relatively cheap (Paris is sooo much more expensive than anywhere else). I had two open-faced sandwiches with goat cheese, herbs, chive cream, and tomatoes. I could only eat one sandwich because all of the cheese was too rich for me. It also came with a small salad of which I ate everything.

Our meal also came with free tap water. This was nirvana after Germany where water is treated like gold. It is hard to find anything but spring water. When you order tap water in a restaurant there is much confusion until they convince themselves that you really wanted spring and bring that out to you...then charge you two euros for it. It is funny that the Germans have such an aversion to tap water since there tap water tastes so much better than anything you could find coming out of a sink in the United States.

That was my week. I'm sorry for all my devoted blog readers who were left out in the dark. Next will be better.