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