One Last German Weekend

I was the last one to leave the office on Friday, it's difficult to stay when there is absolutely no one else there, so I left around 2pm. I took the bus into the center of town in Donaueschingen, the place I'm working, and went to the Furstenberg brewery to buy a beer glass as a souvenir and a stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a couple magnets and a shot glass as it was probably the last chance to do so. I've come to realize that nearly all the souvenirs I've bought are beverage related: countless shot glasses, beer glasses, a small beer stein, coffee mugs, beer coasters, actual booze, and a few magnets, which go on fridges to hold drinks. These things are also quite breakable, I really hope I can make it back with all things intact.

After posting my Switzerland blog Friday evening, I downloaded 3 episodes of Breaking Bad and had a relaxing night watching that, something I haven't done all summer. I was able to sleep in until about 7:45am Saturday morning, I just can't sleep later, it's terrible. Although if I can keep getting up early when I'm back at school I might be able to get to the gym before class, something I desperately need to do. This beer, bread, and bratwurst diet, combined with copious amounts of ice cream, gelato, and starchy German delicacies, has really taken its toll. I might have to try to go back and do the gluten free thing again!

I caught the train around 9:30am, switched trains in Neustadt, and arrived at my destination, Seebrugg, around 11:30am. Seebrugg is a 'town' on the end of the Schluchsee, the largest lake in the Black Forrest and the highest lake in Germany with an elevation of 930m above sea level. I had originally tried to stay in the town of Schluchsee, but the hostel there was fully booked. Seebrugg ended up consisting of a hotel, the train station, a beach, and the hostel. It was a tiny place, perfect for a relaxing day in the Black Forest.  I was too early to check into the hostel, so a walked along the lake for about a kilometer until I reached the dam that was built to create the lake in the 1930's. I had a very German lunch of a beer and 'grillwurst mit pommes' at a beer garden next to the dam. I headed back to the hostel and was able to check in when I arrived around 1:00pm. I ended up getting a lot more than I thought I would at this hostel. For 27.50 Euro I got a bed in a 6 bed dorm that I ended up having all to myself, supper, breakfast, and a pass that allowed me to take the trains in the Black Forest for free on Saturday and Sunday, it also gives you discounts at many places in the region. I didn't have to buy a ticket home because my town is included, that would have been another 10-15 Euro alone!

 I spent the afternoon at the beach, got mildly burnt, but not as near as bad as I thought. I did manage to bring, and apply, sunscreen and it actually worked. The water was extremely refreshing due to the altitude, but it was scorching hot out, it had to be in the mid to high 30's. I saw a sign on the way there at 10:30am that said it was 30 degrees already. After I determined I was sufficiently cooked, I headed back to the hostel, a 2 minute walk next door, grabbed a beer and relaxed on the patio. I had supper at 6, all great German food, I ate way too much as usual, the cheese spetzle is just so good. After dinner I went for a walk in woods, having no idea where the trail headed so I turned around before I got lost as the sun was going down. I grabbed my pass from the hostel and took the train over to the town of Schluchsee, walked around the town a bit and grabbed an ice cream before heading back to the hostel. I was tired enough to go to bed at 9 o'clock, but the hostel room was like an oven, I laid there for an hour with this knot looking like a face staring down at me. I went back outside an walked along the lake for a while trying to cool down. I ended up throwing a mattress on the floor and sleeping under the window, the beds were too short anyways. I woke up around 3am freezing, but at least I had lots of blankets. 

I got up around 7:45am again since breakfast was only served from 7:30-9am and check out was at 9am. Sounds like a really early check out but this hostel was full of youth groups and families with young children, such a change from the typical party hostel full of English-speaking people. There was only the owner and one family that could speak English at this place, I tried to ask the other staff a question and they couldn't answer at all, and they were about my age, it was even a change from here in Schwenningen. I checked out of the hostel and caught the train at 8:40am. I wasn't sure where I'd go since I had this pass but I ended up going all the way to Freiburg, I slept most of the way. Since it was Sunday everything was closed so I went for a bit of hike in the hills looking for the observation tower. It was getting very hot, Freiburg is the sunniest city in the country, and having my backpack on wasn't helping. I was going to give up but I saw this tower so I headed towards it.

This bridge had a sign on it but I couldn't read it, and the barricades were a little off-putting, but it wasn't that far of a fall if I did fall though. I ventured across and survived. 

The door to the tower was open, I expected to come across a homeless person at this point, but I didn't, so I kept going.

There was a ladder to climb the tower, so up I went.

It was about 3/4 of the way up the ladder that the though crossed my mind that no one in the world knows where I am at the moment, I hope this ladder is sturdy.  I was treated to this great view once I climbed through the hatch at the top.

I made my way down without falling, and I discovered that the tower was accessible without having to cross the derelict bridge. I also passed by the little cave under the tower where the homeless likely sleep. Glad I didn't run into any, there is a particularly crazy one in Freiburg we came across on our last visit.

On my way back down the hill I took a few more pictures and stopped at an awesome beer garden on the side of the hill for lunch. My lunch consisted of a beer and a pretzel, not much of a meal, but it was delicious after walking up and down the hill. I took the elevator from the beer garden the rest of the way down and headed back into the city center. I stopped at the tourist bureau where I got a 5 Euro city guide for free because of that pass. It was nearly 1pm at this point so I headed to the Munster, the biggest church in Freiburg, where the tower was open at 1pm. I paid 1.50 Euro to climb to the top and got another great view of the city. It was one of the narrowest stairways I've encountered to climb a tower, passing people on the way down was really fun.

 The terrible bar we got dragged into on a previous visit

 Not sure what happened on the second line

After climbing the tower I headed back to the train station where I caught the train heading back to Neustadt. I got off the train at Titisee, where I decided to go for another swim. It was the most packed I've ever seen the place, and this was my third time there. I went to the place we had been to twice before, getting a discount because of the card which was nice, but it was so packed. The great thing is the most Germans, in my experience, prefer to lay on the grass than the beach so I was able to put my stuff on the beach and be able to keep an eye on it while in the water. Always a plus when travelling with your phone, camera, passport, and all access to your money, but I've found  this part of Germany very safe, similar to the Maritimes in that sense.

I got back to Schwenningen shortly after 6:30pm and immediately did the laundry that desperately needed to be done. I have to work on the production line this week for three days, and didn't know that you can wear shorts when it's ridiculously hot, so I wore black jeans and thought I was going to die. Monday was one of the most difficult days so far, and doing the exact same thing for nearly 9 hours doesn't help. Thankfully they gave us ice cream bars in the middle of the afternoon so I got a bit of a break then. Because I follow the same hours as when I work in the office which are really flex hours, I overlap two of the shifts in the factory so I get to meet lots of people who don't speak English, it's great haha! But the woman in charge of the second shift made my day when she told me she was very glad to see me back in the factory because she loves the opportunity to speak English and hasn't been able to since she was an au pair in the states for a year. She was still confused as to why I would come to Germany because 'there are so many much nicer places to go.' I think Germany is pretty nice though. Today I worked with a woman who spoke no English at all, but she was probably one of the friendliest people I've met since getting here. She gave me Russian candy on the break, and kept giving me other candy during the day, she realized my back was killing me from being hunched over so she told me to go outside a couple of times to stretch, it was a life saver. I could understand a bit of the German she spoke to me and she knew Canada better than most, she knew of a few "lesser known" cities including Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Halifax.

Less than two weeks to go, and only 7 work days left!

I think all this writing is due to the fact that the only conversation I've had with a native English speaker in the last week was with my mom on Skype. Hard to believe I've now written over 25,000 words this summer, I really thought this wouldn't survive a month. 

Switzerland!

I'm being slow at writing these again, not sure how I managed to do a better job of keeping on top of these when I actually knew people living in Schwenningen and had roommates. I suppose I didn't spend so much time buying groceries and cooking. I really do miss my roommates awesome cooking, I've been eating variations of the same 4 things for the last two weeks: chicken, peppers, potatoes, and rice. It gets tiring after awhile. There is also some renovations going on in my flat, so it's a bit of a mess, at least they're done when I get home so I don't have to listen to power saws. On to the weekend that just passed, in Switzerland!

Back in April I think, Greg, who I hadn't met at that time, mentioned on our Facebook group visiting CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland while we were all here in Europe. I agreed to go, and we were able to get a tour booked for about 4 months later, August 11th. Since it happened to fall on my birthday weekend, and because Switzerland has been one of the countries I've really wanted to see since doing a project on it in grade 4 or 5, I decided to make a weekend out of it.

After finishing work Thursday I headed directly to the train station with all my stuff, and since I was no longer limited by RyanAir's baggage restrictions, I brought too much stuff, but now I know better. I caught a train to Singen, then another to Zurich, a third one to Bern, and finally my last train to Interlaken. The last train ride was amazing, riding towards the Alps just as the sun was going down was incredible, such a great view. After getting my bearings, I located the hostel, Balmer's Interlaken, around 9:15pm. I met up with Sara, the only other UNB student that decided to visit Interlaken, some of the others had already been in the area back in June. I checked in to the hostel, got some Swiss Francs, and we went to the bar beneath the hostel, actually underground, and had a beer. We had signed up to go canyoning in Grimsel Pass, up in the Alps, at 8am the next morning, so we didn't stay up too late. Despite feeling the bass from the club two floors below me, I was able to fall asleep pretty easily.

Once I got up at 6:30ish, I paid for the hostel and canyoning and we had our breakfast included with our stay. We met the other people joining us for the canyoning; two girls from Oklahoma, and a couple from Ohio, who all turned out to be awesome fellow canyoners (canyoneers?). I expected a bigger group, and so did the tour company I think, so they only needed to send one guide with us since it was a small group. It actually turned out well having a small group, we were able to do more things, there was lots of space in the van, and there was more food at the end! Instead of explaining the whole canyoning adventure, which was one of the most fun and exhilarating things I've done, I'll let you watch the video that I bought at the end (it wouldn't upload so I made it public and linked to Facebook). If you ever are in Interlaken, I highly recommend going! That being said, there are so many adventure sports to pick from, white water rafting, skydiving, bungee jumping, paragliding, and the list goes on!

Canyoning Grimsel Video

After we finished up and got all our gear back in the trailer, we had a lunch in a nearby field consisting of sandwiches and beer. Both were delicious, and the scenery was incredible. After lunch we drove the 40 minutes back to Interlaken and I think all 6 of us slept for at least part of it, 2 and a half hours of canyoning is tiring!

When we got back we ordered the videos and the hostel rooms were closed for cleaning so we hung out with the people from Ohio (Ohioans?) in the Biergarten at the hostel and were treated to a pretty cool air show by some Swiss fighter jets. The Ohians headed off to go bungee jumping from a gondola over a laken, while Sara and I wandered around the city/town of Interlaken for a while and had some delicious ice cream. We headed back to the hostel where Elise, someone I went to NSCC with and travelled to the Netherlands with last year and is also now studying engineering, met us. It was a strange coincidence that we ended up in Interlaken on the same weekend, she's travelling Europe for a month and was with her friend Allison who I also knew from NSCC. They were staying at the tent village run by the same hostel we were staying at just a few hundred meters up the road, so we joined them at their village for the even for a BBQ and a few beer. It was a great time and we had an awesome, nearly cloud-free, view of Jungfraujoch behind us. Sara and I headed back to the hostel with the intentions of going to the bar downstairs, but we were far too exhausted, so we headed to bed. We did have to get a train the next morning at 8:30am, so doing that hung-over would not have been too great.

We picked up our videos on USB sticks from Outdoor Interlaken and walked to the train station, picking up a few souvenirs on the way. We caught our train, switched in Bern and made it to Geneva around 11:15am. The last hour or so we were driving along the shore of Lake Geneva, a very impressive sight, it'd be a great place to rent a car and drive around stopping in the many towns that line the shores. We met up with the 7 other UNB students going to CERN at the train station: Carolann, Ed, Greg, Matt, Paul, Sean, and Scott K., and dropped off our stuff at the Geneva Youth Hostel, grabbed lunch and caught the tram out to Meyrin, the town just outside Geneva where the reception area of CERN is located. We had a three hour tour, where we got to see the control room for the ATLAS experiment and the magnet testing facility just across the border in France, literally a 5 minute drive away. We learned a lot about the LHC, the current objectives of CERN, and the Higgs Boson aka 'The God Particle.' Despite being quite exhausted and sore from the previous day, I was glad I was able to visit CERN, it's really a revolutionary place.

After the tour we headed back to the hostel, got our room, which looked brand new, it was very impressive, I've stayed in hotels that weren't as nice. After discovering that all the grocery stores had since closed, we bought beer and wine at a convenience store that actually stayed open, and headed down to the waterfront where the Fetes de Geneve festival (it's a French city) was taking place. Strangely, I found it odd going from German Switzerland to French Switzerland despite the fact I've gone from French Canada to English Canada many times without really thought about it. Must have something to do with the fact that Switzerland is such a tiny country and is influenced by the German, French, and even Italian languages and cultures. We had awesome hamburgers for supper on the waterfront, set up camp and waited for the fireworks. We were treated to an impressive and incredibly long fireworks show, it lasted just about an hour. After the fireworks, a few people went for a quick swim in the lake, all while being supervised by a fully trained and completely sober lifeguard I should add! At midnight everyone sang a great French version of Happy Birthday to me, if I didn't feel old before (which I did) I would now haha. I can't say I was too happy with turning 24, I'm officially in my mid-twenties. Makes me think I should get out of school soon, but these travelling opportunities are just so incredible. Some people headed to bed when we got back to the hostel but Matt, Greg, Paul, and I headed out to wander around Geneva. After learning that it would be 25-35CHF (about the same as Canadian dollars) just to get into a club, we decided to pass on that. We saw a few sights in Geneva and had the spiciest kebaps of life! I immediately bought a water for 4CHF but it wasn't enough. We tried to get ice cream at McDonlads but when we got to the front of the line they informed us they were out. How does McDonalds run out of ice cream! We found a convenience store and bought ice cream there before walking back to the hostel, incident free of course...

As much as a would have loved to sleep in on my birthday, we got up at 8am in order to get the breakfast included with our stay which only ran until 9am. It was a pretty decent breakfast so I was glad I got up for it. On the subject of sleeping in, I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times in the last 3 and a half months that I've slept past 9am. With the busy schedule I'm developing for the weekends in September and October I think I'm stuck being a morning person, and likely a coffee drinker. So after eating, we packed up our stuff and headed to the train station. I had booked an earlier train than many people so I was thinking of just staying and paying the fine so I could stay and see more of Geneva. Once I found out the fine was 90CHF in Switzerland and that those staying were going back to CERN to see an exhibit I decided to head back. We had a bit of time to kill before the train left, so we walked down to the waterfront where we could clearly see the giant stream of water shooting out of the lake (surely it has a proper name?) and visited a few souvenir shops. I bought the most expensive sushi of my life to take on the train for lunch, but hey, it was my birthday and I haven't had sushi all summer. The last sushi I did have was at UNB and it gave me the stomach flu, fortunately this sushi was very fresh and some of the best I've ever had, so it was worth it. I do want to go back to Toronto though, hard to beat all you can eat sushi for $20 or less. It took nearly 6 hours to get back to Schwenningen, with the last train not running and just barely making the substitute bus, I would have much rather stayed in Switzerland for my last 3 weeks, although I don't think I'd have enough money to make it to the airport in 3 weeks with the price of things there.

Work has been pretty uneventful this week, I was glad someone realized how monotonous the job they gave me for the previous two weeks was, so I got something new to do this week. It's way above my CAD ability but it's a good learning experience. A majority of the employees are on vacation this week, I think there are 9 or 10 of us in the engineering and development department this week, half of us are students.

I did get some great news on Tuesday morning I had eagerly been awaiting (I would say hoping for, but I guess I have high expectations), I got a scholarship from UNB! Being a transfer student I couldn't get one of those renewable entrance scholarships, so this will definitely help! I also got some great news after work when I was asked to stand for my childhood best friend, Ryan Pyke, at his wedding in October, so I'm really looking forward to that. And less than a month now until my sister's wedding, I'm sure that'll be a great event, it'll be great to see the whole extended family at that.

Only 16 more days until I arrive back in Halifax, and I think I'm just about ready to head home. This'll be my last weekend spent in Germany, as I'll be heading to Prague next weekend with an undetermined number (between 8 and 12) of other Canadians +friends?, and then the weekend after that I head to Zurich where I'll get my flight on Sunday the 2nd of September. No real plans for this weekend, just going to take it easy, maybe I'll finally get to sleep in. It's going to be quite hot here both Saturday and Sunday so I think I'll head to the other lake in the Black Forest, Schulchsee, for one of the days at least. It's about a 2 hour train ride each way, but it's less than 10 Euro each way so it'll hopefully be a cheap weekend...

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading!