I'm really getting quite behind, but luckily (aside from a presentation) nothing very important happened besides last weekend, so I can catch up. My photos do a good job recording most of the important things that I leave out of this blog.
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| Welcome to Weimar! (credit: Google Auto-Awesome) |
This past weekend I traveled to Weimar for the second weekend trip with the university. The same bus driver with the same bus came to pick us up at the same place, but he took us somewhere completely different than the previous weekend: the city at the center of German culture. The bus ride was very fun, because I found some people that I at least recognized from either lunches or the previous weekend, and we easily started talking. It took about 4 hours to reach Weimar from Berlin, but I remember it passing quite quickly.
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| Göthe's statue inside an outdoor stage |
Weimar is a small little town of 70,000 or so people. It is really quite amazing how small it is when you learn about how much German history has taken place in this town. We jumped off the bus and loaded our bags into the locker room of the hostel again (I had packed even less than last time, so I just kept my backpack) and then we headed off to the center of town, where we were going to meet our tour guides after a short break. 17 people who had bought tickets had decided not to show up, so we were a much smaller group. After a quick lunch at a restaurant on the central square (I didn't have the famous Thüringen Bratwurst, and I am going to be regretting that for a while), we met up with the tour guides.
Because the group was small enough, they were able to split the groups up into a German language group and an English language group. I happily chose the German side, and he immediately began telling us all about Göthe, the most famous of the people from Weimar. He then told us about Schiller, Beethoven, Nietzsche, and more while we walked through the city. It is a pretty beautiful city, and I enjoyed hearing all the tour in German (and understanding most of it), but the most obvious thing I noticed is that all of the most famous houses were yellow. I had a lot of fun, but that was the part that stuck out to me. We then had some ice cream (I had my first "Heiß und Eis" where they have ice cream with hot berries...it was great, but not as good as I remember. I'll keep trying) between the tour of the city and the tour of Göthe's house.
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| His house was FILLED with statues |
Our second tour of the day was through the famous house and collections of Göthe. This was fun, but not very interesting to me. After the tour we went back to the youth hostel and checked in. Then a bunch of us went across the street to try to get some dinner or drinks (water for me). The drinks were there, but it turned out to be only a tapas bar. Still, the chairs were really comfortable and we were sitting around a huge round table, so I enjoyed it. We talked a bunch and I tasted some cheese that literally tasted like the way a cave smells. One of the more surprising things about the trip. After the biergarten, we trecked back into town in search of food. We ended up spending some time at a good Turkish place. Tired, we tredged back home (after laughing and talking for hours) and went to sleep.
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| Perfect weather for a concentration camp |
The next day, we packed up and headed to the more depressing part of our trip: Buchenwald. The weather was perfect: drizzly and grey. I had been looking forward to getting the opportunity to visit a concentration camp. I have been very interesting in how all of this could possibly happen. This time I chose the English guide, in order to understand absolutely all of what was said. (Though I realized halfway through that I am about adept enough at German that I get about the same information: either the guide stumbles through English and I understand everything, although he can't convey everything perfectly; or I stumble through German, and I catch about the main points. It was a fun realization.)
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The US Army showed up at 3:15 on April 11, 1945. The clock at the
entrance to the camp is stopped to that time |
The guide was excellent. he made everything very real, and must have been an actor as well, because he was able to finish off his talks about different things very well. He even would re-enact some things regarding the camp, like calling the prisoners to the gate, which made a strong impression. He also imparted some special tidbits which were very interesting to know (for example: the name for a concentration camp in German is Konzentrationslage. Normally, when you abbreviate words in German, you take the two first letters of the word, so here K and L, and that is your abbreviation: Kl, and thus all of the official papers in the SS had Kl written on them. The Germans realized, however, that if they abbreviated it Kz for KonZentrationslage, it sounds much more evil. The way to say those two letters in German is "Ka-Tzet". Much more intimidating to the ear, and thus that was the abbreviation used for the populous.).
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| It looks creepy no matter how you see it |
During our tour, we saw the layout of the camp, the crematorium, and a recreation of a place set up to exterminate Soviet soldiers. Buchenwald was just a labor camp, so there were no big extermination centers like at Auschwitz. The area was much less developed though, giving it the impression of being more real. Very very intense. I found it all very interesting, but it did take me some time to cheer up after leaving the place.
All in all, a great tour and a great trip. Less than two weeks left until the end of this term! Man does the time fly by.
