Our first full day in Edinburgh was awesome! The hostel that we were staying at gives free walking tours everyday at eleven, so we decided to go on it. After traveling a while, you realize you should do all of the things that are free because a) they are fun and b) they’re FREE! This tour was not a normal tour, at least for us anyways. This tour was very laid back. We weren’t struggling to keep up with the tour guide and we had all the time in the world to do things (kinda). On this tour we went to the same cemetery that my friends and I had gone to the night before when we went on that grave tour. We learned some of the same stuff, but we also learned a little bit about J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling is known for having sat at a cafe near the cemetery while writing her first Harry Potter book. From some gravestones in the cemetery, she got the names McGonagall and Tom Riddle (he who must not be named!). Also, there’s a school named Harriet’s next to the cemetery where she got the idea of Hogwart’s from. It even looks castle like!

There were also so many pubs in Edinburgh, all named after people that had done something in the town. I don’t remember the name of one, but I do remember the story behind it. Apparently, this woman’s husband died and she started having a thing for another guy in the town. After she got pregnant, she was hung for adultery. On the way to the cemetery, the people traveling with the casket heard a knocking come from inside. The woman didn’t die! Because you could not be tried for the same thing she was allowed to walk. She got her own pub and gave the other prisoners who were to be hung their last whiskey (it’s a big deal in Edinburgh).

We went to the castle after the tour. This castle was HUGE! I’ve been to many castles—you, know studying in Germany and all—but this one was different. It was like one of the castles that we had learned about in social studies (yeah, like sixth grade). The castle was actually a building in the middle of this massive structure. The rest of it was like a church and land. When the castle was built, they were self sufficient because of the land they had. They grew their own crops and had farm animals, so starving them out would have been a no-go. It was basically a tiny community inside of the castle.

At the castle I got to see the crown jewels! Sadly, I could not take any pictures of them. I also got to see the sandstone. This may not sound exciting, but apparently this is the sandstone that the English kings and queens get coronated on. In the past the stone was taken from Scotland by the English. As an affront to the Scottish, the stone was put in the coronation chair in England so that the kings would be sitting on it. Queen Elizabeth II gave it back to Scotland, but if there’s a coronation the stone needs to travel back to England for the coronation.

So, again, sorry for posting soooo many blogs this week. Our Reutlingen group went to Berlin (as I’m sure most of you have read about!) and afterward we had five days to travel around on our own. The group that I went with flew to Edinburgh, Scotland and London, England.

After landing in Edinburgh we needed to find our hostel, which didn’t take long at all. The cool thing about our hostel was that it was really close to everything. We were only like two blocks from the castle. When we got settled into the hostel we started trying to plan when we were going to do the things we wanted to do. We noticed that there were a lot of tour companies that gave graveyard tours at night. We went out to go and find one of the meeting places so that we could buy tickets for the next day.

As we arrived at the meeting place we realized that we had arrived just in time to go on the tour. So we joined the graveyard tour! Our guide told us some stories about witchcraft and hangings that had taken place in the town. We slowly made our way toward the graveyard. At the graveyard we learned about Greyfriar’s Bobby, a dog that most believed had sat on his master’s grave for fourteen years. It turns out that he had sat on the wrong grave the entire time (sorry to ruin the story for you). We also learned that there are only a couple of hundred gravestones in the cemetery, but there are over 1200 bodies because during the time of the black plague the bodies were being dumped into the cemetery. There were so many bodies that where we stood was a hill but in earlier times it had been a valley!

The next part of the tour was probably the scariest bit. The company that we chose to go on the tour with is the only company in  Edinburgh that has a key to the blocked off part of the cemetery. The part that was blocked off was known as Covenanters’ prison and had been the sight of brutality. Here’s a little bit of the history—the Scottish had written a paper agains the King and the ones who signed it were known as covenanters. The Scotts and Brits had a war and when the Scotts lost, the covenanters were put into an outdoor prison during the winter months. The tops of the prisons were off and so they could get snowed and rained on. The prisoners had to lie down the entire time and if they moved they would be shot. The man that ran the prison was named “Bloody” Mackenzie.

Apparently, there is now the Mackenzie poltergeist and he is in the part of the cemetery that is blocked to the public. This area was only blocked off recently when people started coming out of there with bruises and scratches that were unexplainable. There have also been people who on tours have fainted in the area. The guide told us that she had a person in one of her groups who had kind of walked away from the group and when the guide turned and looked at her, the lady looked like she had been pushed. When they checked on the woman, she had a bruise on her stomache and a slap mark on her face. The lady described it as having been attacked! You can bet that I was a little frightened before walking into the closed off area. In the end, nothing really happened to me, but the tour was really fun and educational at the same time. Who doesn’t like that?

Last Monday we went to check out Checkpoint Charlie 😉 For those of you who don’t know what Checkpoint Charlie was, during the war it was the crossing point between East and West Germany for the allies. This was the only way they could move between the two sides. The name Charlie comes from the NATO phonetic alphabet (Alpha for A, Bravo for B…). Anyways, there’s not much to Checkpoint Charlie now. There is, though, a pretty awesome museum there.

I really enjoyed this museum because it taught me things that I had not already learned from our history classes here and all the other tours of Germany that we had received as a class. For example (and this shocked me) if families tried escaping to the West and they were caught, the parents were forced to put their children up for adoption. How horrendous would it be to get taken away from your parents for trying to get a better life for yourselves? The sad part was that the people that were adopting them didn’t even know where the children had come from. They were only given to them so that they would learn the communist ideals and grow up with them so they could be outstanding citizens.

There was a section of the museum that had nothing to do with World War II. It was a section that focused more on political activism from around the world. This part of the museum was very interesting because it told stories of people who had stood up for what they believed in, no matter the consequences.

There was another museum that I went to that day that I really enjoyed as well. It was the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Ok, so I know that museums can get pretty boring. Believe me, just in the past couple of weeks I have seen my fair share of museums. Our group has started using the term ‘museumed out’ to refer to the fact that we can’t go to anymore museums because we’ve already been to so many. But let me tell you. This museum was fun because it was interactive. Call me a kid, but sometimes I like a museum to have a little more than just facts on a wall to read. Another cool thing about the museum was that it didn’t just talk about the Jewish community during WWII. It talked about their entire history, as well as their religion, which was also really neat to learn about.

The next day we went to multiple museums again (there really is more to do in Berlin, but you can find a museum for everything in Berlin). We went to the Eastside Wall Gallery. This is the part of the Berlin Wall that was not torn down after the war. Instead, they invited artists and other people to come and paint on the side that faced the east, because they had not been allowed to draw on the wall, unlike the west. The artwork on the wall was amazing! It ranged from really serious pieces to very abstract ones. Afterward, we went to a nature museum that is basically like the Field Museum in Chicago, but it was still really neat to go to.

We then went to an area in Berlin called Museum Island. This is where most museums are. There we saw the Pergamon museum, which is one of those museums where you go in take pictures and leave. It’s not really one where I would spend too much time in. The place is really  big in order to fit larger sculptures such as a large set of stairs.

That night we were all really tired (as you would assume after all of the time we spent in museums over the past two days!) so we had group movie night. It was actually really fun. Somehow, and I wouldn’t be able to explain how anymore, all eleven of us fit on two small couches, a small bed, and two chairs. It sounds like a lot but all together it was not a whole lot of space. I guess you could say the movie really brought us closer together 😉

Now, we went on a tour of the city but that only lasted until around lunch time so afterward some of us went to the DDR Museum. The DDR, known as the GDR in English, was the east side when Germany was divided. This museum was awesome! It was probably one of the top museums that I went to in Berlin. The entire museum was very interactive. There were drawers that you could pull out and play with whatever was inside of them. Sometimes they also had just information in them.

They even had the cars that were only produced in the East, the Trabant. The cool part was that you could pretend to drive in one and see what the inside looked like. These cars took so long to manufacture that as soon as you had a child you would have to put your name on the list in order to make sure that it was done by the time your child of 16 needed it. That is a really long time to spend building one car!

There was also an interrogation room that I actually sat in and it felt as though I was really being interrogated by someone. The neat thing about the room was that on the table there were two black spots. In order to hear the real answers to some of the questions from the interrogator, you had to put your elbows on the black spots and put your hands over your ears.

This next part may sound strange but the museum had a section on nudists. Apparently, it was the only freedom that people actually thought they had in the East so they decided to use their lack of clothing to make a statement. I mean, clothing was optional but most chose the option of none.

That night, a couple of us went to a club. I mean, it is Europe so we thought we should at least try to go out once. The place we went to was called Qdorf. It was awesome! There were two floors and each floor had multiple rooms, with each room being a different genre of music. They had rooms that included a karaoke room and a salsa room. They even had country, as well as hip hop and R&B room. I had never been to  a club like that before and I can assure you that we had fun. The cool thing about it was that if you got bored in one room, you could just walk to another and start dancing. I strongly advise that if anyone ever goes to Berlin, Qdorf is the club to go to.

This past week has been full of excitement. Our class traveled to Berlin to not only learn about the capital of Germany but to also experience a different side to Germany; the more modern side. The first day in Berlin we arrived in the evening, so a couple of us went to the opera house to see The Wizard of Oz ballet. This was the first ballet I have ever been to and it was just so amazing. My favorite part would have had to have been the scarecrow dance. The scarecrow is a limp character (for lack of a better term) and so his dance was kind of all over the place and very funny.

The lion had a very funny walk that brought the crowd to laughter everytime he walked somewhere. The best part would have had to have been when the clan has to get ready to meet the wizard and must therefore wash up. The production used clear balloons to represent the bubbles in a bath and the dancers on stage used them as props to dance with.
At one point a white screen was on stage in order to give them time to change the set behind it, and during this time leaf blowers were brought out and they blew the balloons forward to make it look like the characters were actually taking a bath with soap bubbles floating everywhere. The cool thing happened at the end when after the curtain call, the cast kicked the balloons into the audience. You can bet the kids in the audience had a blast with that.

The neat thing about the ballet was that it had its own original music. There may have been parts where the orchestra would play certain parts from the songs in the movie, but all in all everything was an original, which was really amazing.

The next day my class had a tour of Berlin, mainly the east side. There were some things that I had already known about from taking some of my German classes at Valpo, but there were some things that I learned that were very interesting. Apparently in order to escape east Berlin, a man took his son and wife to an office building and then placed a sign on the bathroom door indicating it was out of order and they hid in there until nightfall. At nightfall they climbed out onto the roof and threw a rope to the other side where the man’s brother was waiting for it. This family slid across to the other side without anyone noticing until the next morning when everyone saw the rope leading from the east to the west. Or so they thought no one had noticed anything the night before. It turns out that the guards on duty that night had seen them but had thought they were spies being sent to the west. That just goes to show how professional the family looked and just how difficult it must have been to have made it look like they were spies.

This all is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. There will be more to come this week, including Checkpoint Charlie and the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, as well as multiple museums that are definitely worth going to if you ever visit Berlin (which, by the way, is well worth it!).

It’s a crazy time of year here in Germany: the time of Fasching. Fasching is known by other names such as Fastnacht and Karneval. A name that we would understand it as is Mardi Gras. On Sunday I had the opportunity to go to the town square and watch the parade. I would like to say that the parade was advertised to begin at the odd time of 1:01 in order to keep with the whole craziness of Fasching. There were soooo many people there. Vendors were also there trying to sell food to those that were standing out in the cold. I would have to say that this was the best parade I have ever been to in my life. Normally, a person in a parade walks by you, throws out some candy, and waves. At a Fasching parade, the people in the parade were walking through the crowds and scaring people from behind. They would come up and draw on people’s faces with washable face paint. I myself got my face marked on as well. The characters would even play with your hair and mess it up. I even saw some people being picked up and thrown over a character’s shoulder and taken away. There was one girl that had a fishnet thrown over her and they took her away. There were so many people in the parade that really went all out for it. There were people in witch costumes and some dressed up as wolves. There were many bands that played a variety of music, all with their own group colors that were painted on their faces. This parade was also enjoyable in the fact that each group had their own chant. Sometimes the chants were just random noises that you would yell back at the group. The chants were written on the cards that were given to us when we got to the town center. Not only was this parade very interactive, the thing lasted almost three hours!!! It was well worth it, though. The parade was a nice getaway from the dorms, even for a couple hours.

                It’s been over a week into my journey in Germany, and so much has happened! But of course I’ll start out with the beginning. When we were flying to Stuttgart from Copenhagen and we broke through the clouds, I was able to take my first look at Germany. It was so beautiful! It was after sundown and all the neighborhoods were lit up with lights, scattered across the Swabian Alb. I hadn’t fully felt the impact of my study abroad until that moment. I wish I had taken a picture so that I could post it here for you all to see!

The beautiful view from my room! It's hard to tell in this picture, but I do have a nice view of the moutains!

                After that it was a long night. Prof. Malchow and Zach Nelson picked us all up at the airport, which thankfully was a smooth transition. Our suitcases started to unload onto the conveyor belt as soon as we arrived to the baggage claim area. During our bus ride to Reutlingen, I couldn’t help notice how similar it was to home. I’m originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, which is in a valley of the Appalachian Mountains. The old Appalachian Mountain range are almost the same as the low Alps here in Baden-Württemberg. So it was strange to feel like I was still at home (only the road signs were different).

                Once we got settled I was able to organize and decorate my room! Kind of… I was so tired from my 24 hour long day that I gave up on putting stuff away… I figured I could just finish is later, but that later for me turned out to be days later.

My first day in Germany wasn’t as fun as my peers had. Prof. Malchow took us on a tour around Reutlingen, to show us Stadtmitte (literally the middle of town) in Reutlingen. The goal was not only get us use to town but to keep us busy to help with our jet lag. So I expected that I wasn’t going to feel good around the afternoon, but not like I did.

 I’m not sure how I got sick. However it started with my throat feeling a bit sore in the morning and slowly turned into a fever by lunch time. We were scheduled to have an official tour around noon, but an hour before then I knew I wasn’t going to make it. So I was able to ask Prof. Malchow to get me on a bus back home. And thus started my first two/three days of Germany… in my room. Sick. Feverish. Sleeping and watching magpies play outside my window. (I’ll have you all know, I only cried once because of it!)

Luckily, my fever went down in about two days! And I had enough ibuprofen to attend our tour around the neighboring town of Tübingen! It was very pretty there, despite gray weather. I was just so happy to get out of the room (which I had made little to no progress on organizing/cleaning, opps)!

I was also able to finally finish putting away my stuff! Here's the final form of my room. (it reminds me a lot of valpo dorms...)

Even then, I still wasn’t better, so during our first day of classes, Dr. Jennings helped me find the local doctor and set up a walk-in appointment for me. It was really nerve racking… but I learned a lot of interesting stuff about German doctors and doctor offices. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the waiting room was that the other people in the room said “good morning” to me. Which caught me off guard and I thought maybe they weren’t talking to me at first. So I awkwardly just smiled at them instead. Dr. Jennings told me later that it’s normal to acknowledge people when they enter or leave a room in Germany. The other thing that I’ve learned is that German doctors rarely prescribe medicines unless absolutely necessary and are still big on herbal remedies. Prof. Malchow explained this to me before I went, so I made sure that even if I wasn’t diagnosed with any sort of illness, I would still ask if he would recommend something for my sore throat! I was able to get a prescription for a cheap pain-killer and then he told me that I could drink (or gargle… I can’t remember) some sage tea. Though I hate tea, I stuck with the painkiller (and explains why I don’t remember what I was suppose to do with the tea).

I really didn’t think I would have to go to the doctor so soon into my stay here! Despite the fact that I did miss out on some orientation, I was able to experience some things my peers haven’t. I now know how to go to the doctor’s office and buy medicine at the Apotheke (Pharmacy)!  And don’t feel too bad for me though, I’m feeling a lot better now and I was recently able to go on a fun trip to Triberg with all of my peers. So while I had a tough beginning, I’ve been able to adjust well and get back into the flow of my new life in Germany!