29 December 2015

Why I Love Paris and You Should, Too

Reasons I love Paris:

1. It's pretty. The mix of old and new makes it look like buildings have popped up looking like that for hundreds of years.

2. The history. Oh, that building? That's where we kept our queen before killing her. That one? That's where a famous thing was made. This old thing? Oh, we used it 300 years ago to symbolize the relationship with so-and-so. No big deal, you guys.

3. The people. Yes, you read that right. Imagine living in one of the most touristy areas on the planet. How would you treat idiot tourists who ruin all the fun things you like to do? I'm actually impressed with Parisians for not being rude. They almost all speak English and one or two other languages, and they're willing to help you figure out where to eat and what to see. What they don't like is when they do something nice for you and you either ignore it or don't say thank you.

4. Pastries.

5. 4€ bottles of wine that taste like heaven.

6. How everyone essentially wears the same outfit every day (especially the women) and no one seems to notice or care. It's so easy to get dressed in the morning. Black skinny jeans, long, black coat, black ankle boots, purse? Check and done.

7. When a guy in France checks you out, if you don't acknowledge him or don't respond when he says something, he doesn't cuss you out or tell you to smile at him (which is what happens in the States). He just shrugs and goes about his business.

8. All the things.

27 December 2015

Paris.

I kept trying to write my Paris post while we were actually *in* Paris, but writing a blog about it felt too much like saying goodbye. So I waited until we were leaving Paris (about an hour from now; we're  at the airport as I type). That way I can say goodbye while trying to impart my feelings about this city.

Paris is... well, a friend once told me that the entire point of life is to get to Paris, and I absolutely agree with him. 100%.

I grew up in the suburbs and haven't ever really thought of myself as a "city girl". For me, a city girl and a suburbs girl and a country girl are all totally different things. Throw into the mix the fact that I'm ALSO a Colorado girl, which is a crazy, convoluted thing in and of itself...and you may see why enjoying a city, for me, can be kind of a big deal. Denver isn't  a city like New York, and New York is nothing like Paris. They all have different heartbeats and different ways of breathing.

I know that all sounds really floofy, like I'm trying to make it sound like this huge thing, but it's  honestly the only way I can think of to describe it. Paris can be just like any other city. There's graffiti, dirty sidewalks, confusing roads, millions of hair salons, poor sections, and rich sections. But there's something about Paris...I don't even know. It's  Paris. It's beautiful and exciting, and I just want to sit and watch the people walk by. I don't  even care that so many of them are tourists.

We arrived in Paris on Monday afternoon. Our hostess was thrilled to find out I understand french, and I was thrilled that she wanted to speak it to me. I've been a little paranoid that in the years since teaching, I've lost it. Luckily, that wasn't the case. Eve left us to the apartment, an itsy bitsy teeny tiny one-bedroom-one-bathroom-half-of-a-kitchen little thing.

I had planned to go walk around and see a few of the closest sites (our apartment was just inside the 10th quarter, at Porte Saint Martin). But I'd  forgotten that people who've  never traveled abroad before often experience culture shock. Steph has been out and about for several months, but Bri's travel has been confined to the States and a short middle school mission trip to El Salvador. If you've never experienced culture shock, know that it's awful. Everything feels like an emotional, physical, and mental overload.

So while Steph and I were happy to be in Paris, Bri needed to shut down. We let her nap while we walked down to the Seine and did some errand things like groceries and a post office stop. After being in Germany, it was refreshing to understand what was going on around us.

Walking in Paris feels like walking home.

25 December 2015

"_______, it's What's for Dinner"

This post begins with a mystery. Let's call that mystery "What did we have for dinner in Stuttgart?"

We got on the train leaving Füssen just fine, if you don't count the part where the train wasn't labeled and we spent about ten minutes thinking that maybe, possibly, probably it was the right train, but our paranoia said BUT WHAT IF IT'S NOT, a feeling that should be familiar to anyone who has traveled on European trains. Steph declared it was right, so we stayed.

Everything was going great until our final connection between Buchloe and Stuttgart just....sort of...stopped. This would've been just fine if we'd had any idea why the train was stopped, but all we understood was that there was a delay, they were very sorry, and there was free coffee and tea in the cafe car.

We were supposed to arrive in Stuttgart at 19:56, but we were well past 20:00 when Steph went to the cafe to try to find out what was going on. The two people she talked to couldn't remember the right vocabulary to describe what was going on, so all we found out was that it wasn't an emergency with the train. (It was very reassuring. Ha.) When the train finally started moving, we'd been stopped almost an hour and a half.

About 20 minutes later we passed a massive fire and a half dozen fire trucks on the side of the tracks--obviously the emergency that wasn't as emergency. I had a funny moment when I said, "Weird. It smells like smoke, but not normal smoke. What is it?" Well, duh. Burning German trees would smell different from burning Colorado trees. It smelled nice, which is probably a bad thing to say. True, though.

By the time we got to Stuttgart, it was almost 21:00. We had a bag of soup for an easy dinner, so we bought bread at a bakery in the train station and then headed out. We stood waiting for the bus for five minutes before I realized we were supposed to be getting on the U bahn...which was under us.

The hostel was a chain business, and we'd gotten their cheapest room: a mixed dorm. This is where the amusing part started. So. If you ever want to get the best, travel with my sisters. Apparently everyone just wants to make them happy.

We walked into the dorm room (three bunk beds and two regular twin beds side-by-side) and immediately, Bri and Steph were offered the best beds from the guys inside. Seriously, I've never seen guys move so fast. The guy who was on one of the regular twin beds leapt off it to give it to Bri, and one guy gave me his comforter (not sure where mine had gone...). We struggled through putting sheets on the beds (I'd like to talk to the person who dried those fitted sheets to the size of a baby crib. Jerk). At 22:00, we were so hungry we didn't even care that it was past dinner: Steph and I asked our dorm mates where the kitchen was.

They laughed at us.  "Do you have bowls?" No... "Do you have a pot?" No... "How are you going to make soup?" SHEER DETERMINATION, PEOPLE.

Turns out that sheer determination doesn't work if the kitchen is closed. And the bar wasn't making food. So we headed back up to the room with an even better plan for dinner.

Bread? Check.
Meat? You mean two bags of beef jerky? Oh, so many checks.

I think we worried the other people in the room with how eagerly we ate our awesome dinner.

A Crazy King's Castle

Füssen is a small, relatively unknown town so far south in Germany that it's practically in Austria. We got there by flying into itsy bitsy Friedrichshafen airport, then taking trains through Bavaria.

I wish we had known to stay longer in Füssen, or that area at the least. It was beautiful and quaint. Everything looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. The "downtown" area of Füssen looks like Belle's town in Beauty and the Beast. Every building is painted a different pastel color, the streets are well-worn cobblestones, and there are colorful shutters on every window.

My first visit to Germany (in 2008) was to Berlin. I thought I'd "been to Germany". Ha. Berlin has massive streets and felt like a generic city--I wasn't terribly impressed. But Füssen. Ermahgerd, Füssen! The people are generous and nice. If you un-focus your ears (kind of like letting your eyes fall out of focus), German totally sounds like sexy English gibberish. Or Sims-speak, but better.

The nearby castle that Füssen is famous for isn't actually in Füssen. It's in Hohenshwangau, about ten minutes toward the towering Alps if you grab a car or bus. We got packed into a bus with a heck ton of Asian tourists--you know you're going to a popular destination if there's a flood of Asians around you.

In Hohenshwangau, i learned that Germans are really nice about you appealing German to them. And if you happen to, say, form a somewhat logical sentence, they think you speak German. I asked the ticket lady for three tickets for three people, and she started giving all these instructions in German....I know my face looked awesome because once she looked at it, she stopped herself and asked what language I'd prefer. We skipped Schlöss Hohenshwangau and the kings museum, which ended up being a really good thing. You see....there's no supremely easy way to get up to the tour area for Neuschwanstein. Either you climb a mountain, pay 6€ for a horse-drawn carriage, or pay 1,80€ for a shuttle bus.

Our tour wasn't supposed to start for over an hour, so we wandered past the town center to the lake, took pictures, wandered some more, then headed back to the horse carriage line (because CASTLE, people)....and realized that with the line in front of us and the total of one carriage on it's way down the mountain, we were going to miss our tour.

Missing the tour meant buying tickets and waiting all over again, and we didn't really have time for that because we had a 16:06 train to Stuttgart to catch. We walked over to the shuttle bus line...which was packed with about three busloads' worth of tourists and no bus in sight. We had 40 minutes to get to the castle, but the bus would essentially get us there 5 minutes too late. So, we did what any sensible Colorado girl would do: hike the mile up the mountain.

Everyone we had talked to said it takes 30 minutes to hike just to where the horse carriage drops you off (although "hike" is generous...the path is a paved road, really is just that it's super steep). THEN, there's still a 15-minute hike to get to the courtyard where tours begin. With all that in mind, we essentially ran up the mountain.

We arrived in the courtyard with 7 minutes to spare. It almost killed Briele and Steph and I felt gross with sweat, but we made our tour. Of course, the first thing they had us do was walk up a few flights of staircases. It was a good day for exercise.

Neuschwanstein castle was the inspiration for Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle. It's tall and skinny, with all white and gray stone with huge turrets. Everything about the outside screams YOU ARE IN A FAIRY TALE. But what I loved about the inside was that it just felt like a big house. Wood and plush fabrics create a cozy, almost cabin-like feel. It's designed with hallways around the rooms in the center, so as you walk down the hall you can either look out over the valley (gorgeous) or into the rooms of the castle (homey).

King Ludwig, the guy who designed and built the castle, may or may not have been crazy. He actually built a bunch of castles--Neuschwanstein is simply the most famous. Just before he turned 40, the court declared him insane and arrested him. A little while later, he died in really mysterious circumstances.

If there's anything that helps prove he really had lost a few marbles, it's his bed chamber at the castle. Not gonna lie, it was pretty cool. Intense, but cool. Imagine every aspect of Gothic architecture and design shrunk down into a space about 20 feet square. I wish we'd been allowed to take pictures. He literally topped his bed with an itsy bitsy Gothic cathedral (or castle, it was kinda hard to tell). Towers, buttresses, pokey details...the whole thing. He was definitely a nerd. Gothic bed. Gothic chairs. Gothic carvings. Gothic ceiling. AND he had a grotto built just outside his bedroom. That's right. A GROTTO. As in, an actual cave with actual stone walls. Just so he could end a particularly stressful day by saying, "If anyone needs me, I'll be in my grotto."

He had to have been a little off. He wanted to live like "the kings of old", but it's almost like he went for the look of that kind of King and then forget about the rest of it. While visiting another castle, he saw a beautiful singing/performance room that he later replicated in Neuschwanstein. Except he didn't design the acoustics for performances. He just liked the look of the room. Kind of like buying a bottle of wine for the look of the label, but never actually drinking it.

So, that was the awesome castle. We rode the horse-drawn carriage back down the mountain because it was closer than the bus (Bri was nearly dead by then) and only 3€ to go down. We even had time to stop at a restaurant for lunch (mmm bratwurst and fries) before we caught a bus back to Füssen.