8 Juli-- Day 14

Woke up this morning, and I wasn’t dead tired. Maybe I’m finally coming up with some sort of schedule. That would be lovely—sometimes I wake up feeling just as tired as when I went to sleep. I assume that just means I’m overexerting myself. Whatever. Off to class.

In our “history” class, we’ve been talking about the history of Berlin (and the rest of Deutschland) mainly through an architectural lens. I’m a big fan of having the class (organically) go off topic, and talking about the historical inspiration for such and such architectural structure. (Some building in Acropolis with a name that sounds like Propylene -> Brandenburg Gate) I figure since I know nearly nothing about European history, architecture, art, etc, I might as well learn it here. I’m not sure if anybody else likes when that happens though. It’s actually embarrassing how little I know about European history…

Anyway, after class, some of us decided to go to the Türkischer Markt. It’s a Turkish open-air market, maybe 2 blocks long or so. Excellent food. I’ve decided here that all Turkish bread is excellent, and so are their weird fried “spinach + cheese” bread, Bürek, Döner, etc. And dirt cheap. It was pretty much like any open-air market though I suppose. There’s only so many types of stalls you can have. Let’s see….

Food stalls: Breads, Cheeses, Meats, Fishies, Fruits, Vegetables, Condiments

Stalls selling food to eat: Bread, Döner, these yummy fried things, people who made parfaits(!) with fruit(!) and Quark(!!!), fruit juice stalls, free fruit samples

Clothing stalls: Clothing, bags, jewelry, scarves, fabric, buttons + sewing materials.

Misc. stalls: Literally stalls with all the miscellaneous stuff you could ever need, kids toys, hand bound books…

And of course, as you walk by, there’s lots of sounds (or rather, aggressive sellers yelling out prices), lots of smells, lots of colors. The weird thing is, as you go further in, it seems like you’ve seen the same stalls 10x over. Maybe it’s a modern day labyrinth, and you can’t find your way out until you’ve spent €5 at least on delicious Turkish food.

Headed back to my house around 2 or so, and M and I left for Bavaria (Bayern). She wanted to go to her sister’s 70th birthday party, and was like “come along, we can go visit Nuremberg, drive around a bit, see the country.” So I’m in the beautiful south of Germany for the weekend. Got on the Autobahn (and spent a long stretch of time going 140 km or so on the “no speed limit” part)
The German word for speed limit is ridiculous though. Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung. (Geschwindigkeit=speed, begrenzung=limit)

Emmy, and Emma

These were our companions: Emmy and Emma. Emma is our actual dog. Emmy is a neighbor’s dog that we’re dog-sitting for the week. Not sure whether it’s just coincidence that they have almost the same names.

After driving for like 2 hours or so, we stopped in some section of woods or another, next to a german “spa” type thing. There’s a bunch of “Bad”s (Bad= bath), (fun fact, Gift= poison), where Germans like to go on as a health-retreat sort of thing--sit around in hot springs, do healthy stuff, and relax. We just stopped in the nearby woods, and took a short walk with the dogs. Saw some tiny wild blueberries, tiny wild raspberries, some nettles, and some tiny frogs. The dogs really liked the latter.

A half hour later, we were speeding down south (and west) to Erlagen, near Nuremberg. M’s family is very charming, I’ve met her sister (the birthday girl!) and her husband, as well as M’s nephew. Kind of awkward though, because they all speak very good English, but they’re supposed to only speak German around me. So our meal consisted of them speaking very quickly to each other in German, then realizing “oh… right she can’t understand anything we’re saying right now” and talking very very very slowly in German.

After a beautiful walk this evening with the dogs, and everybody but M’s brother-in-law, into the woods and into a farm field. Saw some cute ponies (and one pony with something on it’s face that seemed like a cross between a KKK hood and a Mexican wrestling mask. Not sure what exactly it’s for… enlighten me?

Not many pictures unfortunately… I figured I’d probably get mugged if I looked like a huge tourist in the market, hard to get good ones from inside the car, and I thought it would be kinda weird taking photos of someone else’s house for my travel blog haha. Here's some photos that I snapped at the gas station.

In case you can't read it... Everything is super. Super super super

Gloves, for when you fill up on diesel. (not "Super") I just love that it's called
tank-hand-shoe (tank glove)