return to germany

Friday I left early in the morning to set out on my loong train ride to Bavaria. I don't know how far the trip is, but I would guess somewhere around 700 miles, and I had to change trains twice. The tickets had been a whole issue in themselves the week before: I booked them online a week and a half before I left, and the ones to get there should have come in the mail days before the trip but they didn't. So much for German efficiency. I wound up having to buy another ticket there and currently am in the process of getting a reimbursement from the German line...we'll see how that goes.

So I left at 7 in the morning and got there around 3:45pm. The first leg of the trip, to Frankfurt, had a pretty empty train so I got to stretch out and relax a bit. The conductors thought I was French :)

For the last part I got to look at this gorgeous scenery of the Bavarian countryside (I took a bunch of pics just like these):



Immediately after getting to Amberg, the small town where I stayed with my cousin (once removed...? something like that) we left for Regensberg, a larger town where there is an Ikea. He hasn't been in his apartment that long and needed furniture so we took a little side-trip. Regensberg is a pretty nice town; it's not very large, but big enough to have several interesting things. Unfortunately, we only got to see one of those, the large cathedral, because we had limited time. I took pics but it was dark, so they ended up like this when Photoshopped:


I was quite hungry from the lack of good food in German train stations (that's how I knew I was no longer in France) so we looked for a place to eat and lo, fell on an outpost of Munich's most famous beer hall!


I had a traditional Bavarian meal - knudel - which turned out to be quite delicious, and of course the requisite beer. Now, I'm rather notorious in some circles for my distaste for beer so I was hesitant to order a real German one, thinking it would be significantly worse. The parents and such won't like this, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it wasn't bad. And hey, I was in Bavaria I'd probably be declared a witch or something if I didn't have any.

So then we went back to Amberg and visited the bar he lives above (he doesn't even have to walk outside! It's just below him!) where we ran into some of his colleagues from work. One of them is only known to me as "Pooo!!!"

They were German, of course, so I couldn't really speak to them, but their English was workable. When they found out I'm from New York they told us a club in Amberg was having a New Yorker DJ for the night and they wanted us to check it out with them.

We did, and it was interesting...apparently no one dances in German dance clubs, or does so awkwardly and with very small movements. I asked one of the Germans about it and he shrugged and said, "I guess it's not the German mindset." I talked to a bunch of people my cousin knows and they were invariably excited to find out I was from New York and most asked how I could possibly be interested in such a small town as Amberg when I'm from there. Silly Germans.