I have definitely never heard of a medieval Christmas market before, so this was quite an interesting experience. There was a normal German Christmas market, but the main attraction for most visitors is the medieval market. One could buy period clothing, handmade crafts and baskets, as well as make candles and throw knives or axes. If you ventured up a steep staircase to a great viewpoint over the town, you could also shoot a bow and arrow (which cost 8 Euro!), but the view was great.

Esslingen am Neckar!

Some people needed a little help...

As part of the medieval motif, there was food served on sticks, such as “Stockbrot”, which would be literally translated as “stick bread”…

"Stockbrot".

One of my favorite things at the Christmas market was a giant Christmas carousel…

Christmas carousel...

There were also people that dressed up to fit the period, as well as musicians and fire demonstrations for entertainment. Most importantly, though, there were stores that were open late, because it was only 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so although I enjoyed myself, at the end of the day I was definitely happy to be back on the warm train and heading home.

Tübingen hosted a chocolate market this past week from the 4th through the 9th of December, which was great! I am also a chocolate lover (it is practically part of my diet), so I especially loved it. There were vendors from all over the world, as well as items ranging from chocolate covered fruit on a stick to regular hot chocolate, chocolate salami, chocolate beer, and chocolate shots. Also, there were samples! In fact, I am going to go to a store here in Tübingen that I never went into before, just because I absolutely loved the sample that they offered.

A moderately busy day at the chocolate market.

The market was also a chocolART festival, so you could watch sculptures being made, or view some pieces on display that had chocolate painted on them. I am not sure if people bought any of the various art pieces, though.

Watching the chocolate artists at work!

During the night was the best time to go to the chocolate market (in my opinion). There were projections on the buildings in the main market areas, which were interesting to look at, and they added more of a Christmas flair to the whole market. Also, at night one can enjoy a hot chocolate, Glühwein (a mulled wine sold during the winter in Germany), or a chocolate shot, which is also sold in a chocolate shot glass.

One of the various projections...

Almost looks like a gingerbread house!

The chocolate market was also directly in front of my building…

They had a nice assortment...

Getting a creepy photo from my room...

I wish there was just something like this in the US. Nothing comes close.

So….where to begin?

First of all, trying to figure out which courses to take is no small task. There isn’t a course catalog that you can look at and read all about the courses and figure out which ones are really interesting. There isn’t even something similar that exists. All of the courses are online. They are organized according to the faculty or school, such as medicine, law, philosophy, Protestant theology, Catholic theology, et cetera, and then under each general category there are categories arranged to the difficulty/level/size of the class. Then under these categories you can find a class that you might want to take, except most of the courses have no descriptions, so you basically have to guess what the course is like. This means that you should pick a lot of classes, and then visit each one to figure out which ones you do and don’t want to take. This leads to our next interesting thing about German universities….the first lecture.

Before I move on to lectures, I have to mention that this year in Baden-Württemberg there is a so-called “Doppeljahrgang” taking place, because of changes in the educational system within the state. This means that the equivalent of two classes are being accepted  for one year. Basically, the state took all juniors and seniors (because one year of school was eliminated before college) and shoved them into one year. Two years ago (2010/2011 school year)  there were 25, 500 students enrolled. Now there are over 27,100 students. That’s a very big difference for any university to accommodate, not to mention that you have that much more people competing for apartments and dormitory spaces.

Since there are so many students, and since everyone wants to visit a lot of lectures in order to pick one that they want, maybe you can imagine what the first lecture will be like…or maybe I should just use a visual aid from a friend’s class (stole it from her Facebook profile)…

"8 a.m. lecture. I got a seat! Woohoo."

Now, I know what you might be saying…”This is a small room in the first place!”. However, even in one of the biggest lecture halls, with more than 100 seats, people were actually sitting on the floor and standing in the back of the classroom. I was fortunate to get a seat, though. Another thing about lecture that is different than Valpo is the length. Most classes at Valpo are either 1 hour and 15 minutes or shorter. Meanwhile, all of my lectures are 1 hour and 30 minutes. You are bound to be uncomfortable, especially if you show up 30 minutes early to get a good seat for the big lectures.

Let’s move on to the “campus” layout. Let’s take a look at the campus map…

"Campus" map.

There actually isn’t a real campus. The university buildings are spread all over the city of Tübingen, so when you get a map of the various university buildings, you literally get a map of the city. A large amount of the students are forced to take a bus to class, especially if they live in the southern part of the city. Now I don’t think anyone at Valpo can complain about walking across campus…ever. There are some students that actually leave lecture early just so they can get to their next class on time. I don’t take a bus, because I don’t mind walking across the city, but maybe that will change when it starts snowing. Speaking of which…we don’t have as many breaks as Valpo. We basically have Christmas break (no Thanksgiving here, of course), and one big semester break (about three months).

I suppose the last thing that I can quickly mention about university here, is that there basically isn’t homework (except for reading). Also, there is usually only one test at the end of the semester for each course, and (maybe) a huge writing assignment. I think that’s basically all of the differences.

One last thing about the structure of the classrooms….they are all really long and not very wide, but it’s the opposite in the US. I just find that a little weird, because some students are basically very far away from the board and professor.

Until next time…

I am rather behind on my blogging, but , as promised, I will talk about the great day-trip I had with the Deutsch-Kompakt course. I might as well talk about Stuttgart, too. We went to the Bodensee at the end of September, so it was sunny, and the Alps were clearly visible from where we were. Before we actually got to the waterfront, though, we visited a rococo church, which looked rather ordinary on the outside, but it was ridiculous (!) on the inside. I actually thought it was gaudy.

Birnau, the gaudy rococo church.

After the rococo church, we went to the “Pfahlbaumuseum”, which was a museum about houses that stood on pillars over the water. It is easiest to just show a picture…

Pfahlbaumuseum

Of course the museum wasn’t that interesting for everybody. What everyone did like was our penultimate destination, Meersburg. We had lunch together in front of palace, which was located on the waterfront (with a view of the Alps), before we had a tour of a castle, and some wandering-around time.

Lunch at Schloss Meersburg.

View of the Alps from Schloss Meersburg (where we ate lunch).

Then we got on a ferry and headed to Konstanz, where we spent the rest of the day. Unfortunately, at this point in the day it turned windy and cold, but we mostly just walked around the city for a while before the group had dinner together.

A week and a half later….Stuttgart. The first thing we did in Stuttgart was the Mercedes-Benz Museum, of course. I thought it was kind of interesting. I went through the whole museum in about an hour (including taking photos). It isn’t something I would necessarily do more than once.

Mercedes-Benz Museum

There were a lot of interesting cars of course…

One of the older models...

For you Jurassic Park lovers...

…and a lot of information about their vehicles…

I never really understood how someone is supposed to know which one is...

After the museum we arrived in the main part of the city. We went to the Markthalle and looked at all of the interesting foods that one can buy there. Then people went their separate ways for food or shopping. The main event of the day was going to the Stuttgart Ballet. We saw “Don Quijote”, which I never knew was a ballet, but apparently it is. That was how concluded our long day in Stuttgart before we boarded to bus to go home.

Opera and Ballet House in Stuttgart

Next time I will talk about how going to school in a German Uni is different than Valpo, and believe me…it is.