Year Abroad - Heidelberg Part 3

A blog from Königstuhl

This morning I had a Czech exam, so to recover from the stress of learning pointless vocab (úroda means crop, in case you ever need to know...) and turning up to my exam to realise I'd forgotten my Deutsch-English dictionary, the obvious thing for me to do was jump on the Bergbahn to Königstuhl - free with my Semesterticket. So here I am now, chilling (literally, it's freezing up here!) with a warming hot chocolate about to fill you in on all the latest year abroad antics.

The view from Königstuhl 

Last weekend was a killer. Two nights in a row spent in Halle02 (where we saw Klingande!) staying out until 4am led to a weekend of lying in bed ignoring all my homework, followed by a huge pizza and ice cream pig out on Saturday to help us recover. (Massive, yummy take-away gluten-free pizza for under 8 euros? Yes please!). Sunday we were finally feeling a little better so jumped on an S-Bahn to Mannheim to see our local handball team play, the Rhein-Neckar Löwen.

Scoring their first goal!

If you've never seen a handball game then go!! They are so fun, with very attractive players (Uwe! <3) doing all sorts of crazy high-leg kick stunts, lots of goals and shouting!

I think we were probably the rowdiest there (aside from the keen-bean grannies in front of us who kept up a chant of "LÖWEN" *clapclapclap*) joining in with all the chanting and getting way too excited at each of the 32 goals! We came out on a handball high from all the excitement - to sum up the Rhein-Neckar Löwen do gefallen uns!

This last week has been a bit more relaxed, with a weekend of touristing with Rachel (who travelled for so long to see me!) and curry and roast... Rachel and I did all the standard tourist things Heidelberg has to offer, but also took a trip up Philosophen Weg, which I hadn't done before. It was well worth a visit, providing a spectacular view over Heidelberg and the castle, and has all sort of historical monuments along the walk - although we only managed to make it to Bismarcksäule before we decided it was getting too dark and headed back. You can read in detail about our touristing adventures in Rachel's blog here.

Heidelberg from Philosophen Weg

One thing which has become a regular occurrence over the last few weeks is trying to explain very British things to German people (and Alex J. suggested I blogged about it ;) ). A few examples have been trying to explain GCSE/A-levels, yorkshire puddings and food babies (which they loved and found hilarious!). And on top of that, the look you get when you add milk to your English tea along with "...Are you having milk with it?" is priceless. You become so used to something in your own country that you don't realise how weird it is until you try and explain it to someone else. So we have to make life changing decisions over what subjects to do, therefore whether we will go to uni, and then which career we want, at the age of 14. We then have to study 12 of them (a huuuuuuge number when you think about it!) for 2 years before randomly dropping a load of them to leave you with just 4. Um, what? Clearly teachers in Britain are very trusting of their teenage pupils in deciding their career path so young.

The beauty of a well made Yorkshire pudding

Then we eat a pastry covered/filled with sauce (gravy <3) with our roast dinner which is essentially a slightly smaller Christmas dinner, but we eat it every Sunday, sometimes even for lunch. And no it's not sweet, it's savoury. Oh and when you're making your first roast in Germany, go and bake a hilarious GF one which looks nothing like a Yorkshire pudding to confuse them even more! (Sorry Lukas, this is what they really look like...)

Finally making the classic English-person-abroad mistake of translating food-baby literally, so that they actually think you're pregnant (also do not translate "I am full" to "Ich bin voll", ditto "I am cold" to "Ich bin kalt" - it can lead to awkward misconceptions...) and you then have to backtrack crazily and explain that you only look pregnant because you ate 2 roast dinners and half a crumble... phew.

Next weekend I shall be jumping on a plane (Lufthansa no less - thank you Erasmus grant!) and heading home for a weekend, so will natürlich pick up some squash (you never EVER drink it straight) and mince pies (filled with fruit and not meat...), to blow their minds just a little bit more with our mad English ways.

Anyway I now can't feel my hands so I think it's time I got the rickety Bergbahn back down the mountain and headed home to the warmth of a cup of tea.

Bis bald xxx

Year Abroad - Heidelberg Part 2

So now I have finally settled in to my life at Heidelberg - this week I even managed to make it to all of my lessons! A few of the things I have done over the last couple of weeks :

- started lessons, eek!
-  have sort of figured out the system here and where everything is..
- got up at 7am to do a washing. Ah uni halls I didn't miss you.
- Fi came to stay!
- we stayed out until 4am (Fi fell asleep on the dance floor)
- did all the tourist things with Fi again: Schloss, Königstuhl, Altstadt etc
- went to the ZOO!!! (which is on my uni campus - so cool)
- went on a trip to Freiburg and the Schwarzwald (Black Forest)
- Sam came to visit
- did all the touristy things again!
- went to Frankfurt and did touristy things there
- finally made it to a whole weeks worth of lessons!
- borrowed a bike off of Melli (my flatmate) and accidentally went on a 17km bike ride

After much organisation and confusion I finally sorted out my timetable and what I am actually going to study in Heidelberg (just in time to send a form home and get my Erasmus grant - yippea!). I decided on: Czech, New High German, History of the English language, Introduction to German politics, Germany in Europe and Translation into English. So far they have all been OK and easy to understand (especially the English ones tehe) but the Germany in Europe generally consists of me sitting there being lost/confused and asking my friend what's going on.... hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon.

After a week of being confused and stressed my Zwillingschwester (Fi) came to visit and we did all the fab tourist things Heidelberg has to offer. Including 2 visits to the cake shop, amazing chocolate from the chocolate shop and a very large dinner in the Mensa... Sunny Saturday afternoon was dedicated to a visit to Heidelberg Zoo, which is about a 5 minute walk across campus from my halls. As it's only €6 entry for students it was definitely worth visiting, and so much fun seeing all the cute animals - baby meerkats!!!! We also luckily managed to time walking past the seals to see the seal show, which was fab! They could balance a ball or a tray on their noses and one of them clapped after the other seals had finished! So to sum up, I love the zoo and will definitely be going back...

Getting drenched at the open air museum

Sunday was another excursion day, with a trip to an open air museum in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) and to the city of Freiburg. Now, I know we are English so should be able to deal with the vast quantities of rain which descended upon Baden-Wüttemberg that day, but we really couldn't at all and got absolutely soaked! The museum had traditional houses from the Black Forest, with old stoves and cattle sheds and tiny huts for baking bread and brewing beer. Some of the houses were so dark and smelt so strongly of smoke, so it was pretty surprising that people had lived in these places up until the 1920s. They also showed us some typical Schwarzwalde Tracht, which is the Black Forest equivalent to Dirndls and Lederhosen. Basically the men wore suits and the women wore nice dresses but with these weird hats covered in pompoms or huge hats covered in glass gems. Personally I think I prefer the Bavarian style but I wont say that too loudly... 

After the open air museum we drove through the Black Forest to the city of Freiburg. Freiburg has an old town very similar to Heidelberg, and is very pretty in places with the little canal running through it. Sadly the centre was bombed a lot during the war so has been replaced by lots of slightly less attractive buildings... When we arrived in Freiburg we were dropped off and told to go and find some lunch before meeting back for the walking tour. After checking out some restaurants on the main square and realising just how extortionately expensive they were, we decided the best bet would be to go off the beaten track a bit. Eventually we found a moderately priced restaurant which offered Bratwurst (which was all we wanted....) so we thought we'd try it out. Unfortunately the entire restaurant experience went from bad to worse! On the way in I managed to fall down some concrete steps, bruising my arm pretty badly, then we sat down and ordered our food which turned out to be completely not what we were expecting - Tilly and I ordered Wurstsalat, which we assumed would be hot Wurst with salad... how wrong we were! Google it, it's gross. So we finished our plate of shredded cold Wurst and decided to pay, which consisted of the waiter throwing the receipt in Alex's face and shouting at us to just give him the money and we could sort it out among ourselves later! Needless to say we didn't tip... 

Don't worry guys, I just had ice cream... 

After a slightly more brief than expected walking tour - the cathedral was closed... - we went on a hunt to found ourselves some Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte - Black Forest Gateau. You may think you have tried this already in the UK and that it can't possibly be any different, but it was HUGE. A slice could feed a small family easily, and the amount of Kirsch schnapps they put in it could make a small person a little tipsy. It does look amazing though with all that cream and chocolate, I definitely need to try and come up with a GF version!

A week of hard core German uni work and lessons followed, before Sam arrived on the Thursday night :)

(Sam's photo) at the top of Königstuhl

Despite the fact I had been up there twice already, we decided to do the Schloss on Friday, but this time we walked up instead of going with the funicular, which was a really nice way to do it as you get to slowly see more and more of Heidelberg as you go up. Saturday we did the long bus trip up to Königstuhl (Sam slept the whole way) and had a picnic at the top looking out over the view, which was a fab idea because then you really get to take everything in! It was such a sunny day that we could even see the Pfalz forest and mountains in the distance, so it was a pretty spectacular view. 

This picture lies about the weather... it rained a LOT

On Sunday Sam was flying back to the UK (booo) from Frankfurt so we decided to make the day into a tourist trip around the city. Not really knowing how much Frankfurt had to offer in terms of touristing, we arrived there at about 11am, with Sam's train to the airport leaving at 3:30pm. Fi was our tour guide for the day, so we started our tour with a slight (45 min - sorry Fi ;) ) detour around a random suburb of Frankfurt before arriving in a pretty old bit called Sandhausen. We then zipped up to the main square for some Currywurst mit Pommes and to admire the old looking buildings - think chocolate box and you'll have the image right there. Other sights we visited in Frankfurt were: the Dom (cathedral), the Zeil (a big shopping centre with the longest escalator in the world!), the old opera house and Goethe's House (every city has to have one ;) ). The only problem was that the Frankfurt marathon was on, so it took us aaaaaaaages to cross any road because of all the running people!

So at 3:30 I said bye to Sam, watched a film and ate my weight in biccies with Fi, and then bussed back to Heidelberg (an hour late, thanks Mr Bus).

Finally this week! I'm sure you'll all be very glad to know that I actually made it to all my lessons successfully this week!! Yippea! Sadly it now means I can no longer use the "ohhh but I'm an Erasmus student" excuse, which had been so handy up until now...

My last adventure of the last couple of weeks was on Thursday. My flatmate Melli kindly lent me her bike for the weekend as she was at home and I was craving going cycling because EVERYONE in Heidelberg cycles and I was getting jealous... So I got back from my lesson on Thursday, had my lunch and had planned to go swimming which went out the window, so instead I thought I'd go for a little bike ride, maybe to the old town. 3 1/2 hours later I finally arrived back at the flat having (accidentally) cycled 17km to a cute little village called Neckargemund. It was so sunny and there were very beautiful views on the way, but I hadn't realised just how far away it was! Walking the next day wasn't exactly einfach... but it was worth it for the views of the river and mountains in the sun.

Neckargemund :)

Now you are completely up to date on my life from the last couple of weeks!

I shall update again soon when more has happened :)

Bis bald!