Weinprobe!

Happy weekend everyone!  I hope that you all survived the week, and to my friends from back home, steel yourselves to return back to school.  My heart goes out to you.  I should have written this last night, but I was pretty worn out from a long day, a longer walk, and maybe some other things.  Today I am well rested...theoretically... and am going to do absolutely nothing that involves too much effort.  Other than more laundry...I swear it breeds in my closet.  I had my first tangle with the German recycling system.  There's a ridiculous number of places to put your refuse, and I haven't quite figured it out yet.  I stood around looking dumb at these various bins, and finally just threw stuff where it looked like it could go.  Eh.  I through away some egg shells instead of putting them in the compost, and I felt kind of guilty, like somewhere in Germany an angel lost it's wings or something.  This stuff is serious business here!  : )

I think my German is a little off today...I haven't really had to use it at all, and i've been corresponding in english and listening to American music.  I had a couple run ins with some Germans, but most dorm interactions go like this, "Hallo" .... awkward silence in elevator.... "Tschuss."  That's about it.  Except for today, when I got into the elevator from the basement, and there were two people inside, which kind of confused me (why do people ride down to the basement if they're not getting out there?), so I naturally said, and faltered, "Nach unt... uh, nach oben?"  which translates into, "Going dow... uh, going up?"  Smart Jon.  You never know where else the elevator might be going when you got on from the very bottom...it's a crazy world here in Deutschland!

Oh shoot... I just realized that bakeries close in about 20 minutes... that's unfortunate.  I forgot I finished my bread with my lunch.  Oops, that was stream of thought in my blog.  Thanks for flying Air Jonathan.

So yesterday was intense....a morning of language intensive course which is making me perpetually more perturbed.  I think one of the reasons that it bothers me so much is that our professor treats more like 3rd grade Germans learning their mother tongue than university/college students who are trying to pick up a second language.  In that respect, she can be kind of condescending in her actions and behaviors.  Ehh, it frustrates me because I feel like I'm wasting my time, which I hate in the academic setting.  I have enough other stuff to do.

Fortunately it's now the weekend, and class was followed up with one of the most enjoyable excursions of my life.  

Yeah, I praise I know....what could be just that good?  There's a lot of things that worked together to make it a great night.  Part of it is that I really like Germany...I just think it's beautiful, and in a way that reminds of the parts of Wisconsin that I really like.  Maybe if northern Wisconsin had hills and castles and vineyards.  you know, something like that.  Everyone has a different sense of aesthetics, and the countryside of Germany just really appeals to mine.  

The adventure goes like this: the hundred or so students in the Ausland program gathered around 13:15 at a bus stop near the campus main building, which incidentally looks a little like this (it used to be the pimpin crib of a bishop): 

So we got in our coach buses, and started off on the hour and a half-ish drive down south towards Marksburg.  It's said that there's a castle about every two kilometers on the Rhein, and it's no exaggeration.  The way that cities splay out from the river up onto the sides of the hills is beautiful, and then here and there, there's a castle poking out from around the surrounding modern structures, or off by itself on the a hill-top.  It's ueber cool, especially considering we don't have anything like that back in the states.  Unless I've been missing out on something....

Marksburg itself was pretty neat.  It's the only Burg, the technical name for a castle built for defensive purposes, left intact on the Rhein.  The remainder of the Burgs were either destroyed in war, especially after the dawn of gunpowder warfare, or were demolished to be replaced by a Schloss, which is the kind of castle that's pretty and people lived in because they're cool.  Think Walt Disney style castle, which is actually based off of Germany style Schloss.  Bada bing.  We were divided into groups for tours, and were then shown the little features of the Burg.  

It's amazing to think that people actually lived in these things...they're so cold and so dark... the walls are unimaginable thick, I think about three meters is what the guide said, so about 10 feet.  They were already using some cool inventions back then, literally.  There was a stone refrigerator with two compartments, one on top and one on the bottom.  A block of ice could be placed in the top, and the descending coolness would refrigerate perishables in the bottom compartment.  Huge slabs of ice from the Rhein were stored under ground covered in straw and could last through out the summer!  Spiffy.  Another thing worth mentioning is the size of the doors....people back then were much, much smaller than they are now!  We went up a spiral staircase, and I had turn sideways to fit through the door (okay, part of that is for defense purposes), but then here's an example of a regular door and my friend Ian:

A little bit of a difference there, I'd say!

After the tour of the castle, we made our way back up northwards towards Mayschoss am Ahr, the vineyard that we were going to be checking out. For those of you who are not familiar, the best Rieslings in the world (only partially subjective) are made in the Rhein River valley.  We were given a brief tour of the wine cellar by a very animated and gregarious vintner, who informed us about how the vineyard was, if I understood correctly, the first coalition of multiple vineyards to produce and sell their wine in Germany.  So there was a lot of cool history, as well as some cool ornate kegs:

A regular new keg, not like this one, would cost about 5,100 Euro, which is about 7200 dollars, but at least lasts for decades and can contain thousands of liters of wine.  A reasonable trade off : )

And then there was the wine-tasting....our massive group had a large fest hall to ourselves.  It had great atmosphere, all wood and soft light, but totally open, too.  The vinter lead us all in the tasting...there were six rounds, each an entirely different wine, three whites and three reds.  One of my friends here is muslim and cannot drink alcohol, so she got grapejuice from the vineyard which was absolutely fantastic.  The best grape juice I've ever had.  We had a great time trying the wine, tasting the food, and have a general sense of harmony among a massive group of people from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Slovakia, Singapore, Germany, and all over the USA.  Each nationality had to get together and sing a song for the entire group in their language.  That was a blast, and everyone was getting pretty into it, especially because some people had really low tolerance...  The Americans, of course, could not agree on anything, so we ended up doing two songs, Row, Row, Row Your Boat as a round, and then because of popular demand Don't Stop Believing by Journey.  It was a good time : )

Freude beim Wein

Joy with Wine

I think I'm going to stop here....I have more I could say, but it seems fitting for me to end with the wine.  Our vintner spoke about something that really struck a chord with me.  He talked about the harmony that you can find in the room when people are singing, and the harmony that you can find in a shared glass of wine.  There were people together there from all over the world, a world that finds itself continuously enveloped in disharmony.  Last night, if only for a little bit, we found unity.  

Peace!

Nadine, falls du dieses Blog liest, you should have been there!