Bloomin' Blumen in Koblenz

Special announcement:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, we're averaging about a million words per day. Unsurprisingly, we're taking so many pictures that it's becoming impossible to post them all, or even a small subgroup that illustrates fully what we're seeing out here. Since we want to share with all of you our travels and the things we're seeing, we've set up a super-duper Flickr account that allows us to keep all of our photos up for you to see. If you're interested, the URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/Meldrumhaus/. I'm not certain how Flickr's privacy settings work, so it may not work immediately. If you want to look at the photos and you can't get them to work, email us and we'll see what we can do. Now, on to the show!

Sara and I are in the middle of a five-day weekend between sessions of our German course. On Saturday, we took a day trip down to Koblenz, a city of about 100,000 people at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, about an hour's trip south of Bonn. Koblenz, like all the other cool cities (e.g., Aachen) that we've been in, has an assortment of odd sculptures, restaurants, and monuments. One example is Sara next to these marionette-statues that are part of a fountain; their joints actually move.



There is also this fountain that randomly spits water well over its bounds at unsuspecting passersby. (He's allegedly the town symbol for Koblenz.)



Also, this frightening shot of a massive sculpture for Kaiser Wilhelm. I can't really express how big this sculpture truly is. And scary.


Here is a creepy little goblin-man-gargoyle on the side of a church that sits atop an ancient Roman temple. Sara thinks it looks like the fluffy creature Fizzgig from "The Dark Crystal".



And what ancient German city is complete without a collection of eight-foot petunia tower? Or, as I like to say, Towers of Flowers. (Maybe not quite eight feet tall. Curses that my 5'8" frame is standing right there giving a scale reference. I mean, my 7'6" frame...)


The remaining photos are too numerous to explain individually, so here's the brief rundown. This year, the city of Koblenz is hosting the Bundesgartenschau (BUGA), Germany's federal, biannual garden and landscaping festival. One you pay the admission, you can enter the main gate near the Rhine river, where there are beds of gorgeous dahlias, dozens of varieties of fuchsia, and fountains for kids to play in. Then you can take the cable car (gondola) across the Rhine and up the cliffs to the Fortress Ehrenbreitstein, a defense site dating back to 1000 BC, with the current fortress built by Prussia in the early 19th century. For the BUGA, the fortress and the grounds (a huge park area) were covered in flowers. The Flickr site has many more views of the flowers, but they were truly stunning. Quite reminiscent of Berkeley flowers, actually. There were vegetable gardens, rose gardens, flower beds 100 feet long, and, oddly, a cemetery/memorial/gravestone flower show/competition. (Pardon the multiple slashes, but I don't know really how to summarize what it was. Other than odd. And cool.)

















In short, Koblenz was awesome. We had a fun time and decided that a cool city and a beautiful flower show is a good date for both of us--Sara had to ask me to stop taking so many close up shots of fuschias. They're my favorite!

Millstone

For those who are wondering, the Bible is taken very seriously here. This is not just a metaphorical millstone, this is the real deal. DON'T screw with the little ones.

A Few Things

We've been in Germany for just over 4 weeks now and there are a few things that we've done/noticed/thought of that don't fit nicely into a picture-perfect post, but are worth mentioning nonetheless.

1. It's been really cold here. Maybe it's just this particular "Sommer," but we're both freezing pretty much all the time. Perhaps Germany, like Berkeley, gets summer from August through September (or, perhaps, October).

2. Learning German is really fun and we're getting much better at it. Or, at least, the Missionaries at church said so today. Truthfully, we're understanding quite a lot now and we're deciphering street signs and advertisements and parsing new words frequently. We've also checked out some 4- and 5-year-old books from the library; the 4s are a little easy and the 5s are tough, so we're about four-and-a-half. With non-zero balances in our bank account. How sweet is that?
2a. Further evidence that we're doing well in our language learning--they skipped us both a grade ahead for the next session. Instead of A1.2 We're going to be in A2.1! Maybe we'll be seven or eight before we leave Bonn. 

3. The food is hit and miss. What we cook at home tends to be really good, even though the ingredients aren't quite as good as we're used to in Berkeley. (There is a seemingly eternal Pflaumenzeit--plum season--which we're enjoying quite a lot.) Also, the prices are comparable with what we were paying in Berkeley at grocery stores. Restaurants are pricey but generally good, so long as we think really hard about what we're ordering. Then, the typical lunchtime snack "Imbiss" is really cheap and can be really good. I'm loving the abundance of greasy Turkish food and Döner kebabs, Sara could deal without the grease.

4. Public transportation here rocks. We've rarely had to wait more than 5 minutes for a bus for wherever we're going. The regional trains are efficient and relatively cheap--our day trips so far have cost around 35 EUR for both of us for the whole day. (Excepting the gondola ride over the Rhine--more on that to come!) And the DB Navigator app for the iPhone is amazing--up to the minute departure times, arrival times, station locations, and more for *every bus stop in the country*. Not only is it free, it's priceless.

5. This is a civilized country. We can pay tithing (a donation to our church) online! We can even set it up to deduct automatically from our bank account on the first of the month. Two years without thinking about tithing? Yes, please!

6. We've been put to work just a little bit at the church in Bonn: I played piano today in our first meeting (that seems to be the first test for every new person in church: playing piano) and Sara said the closing prayer in Sacrament Meeting. I'm also playing piano for the next three Sundays in Sacrament Meeting. They're going to get something out of us before they send us off to Aachen. Of course, we're happy to help. We really like the ward in Bonn.

7. We're still excited at how old things are here. Seeing houses with 18th century dates and castles from the 8th century still makes us grin.

8. This is a completely uncivilized country. There are no drinking fountains*, and drinks are insanely expensive in restaurants. Of course, this isn't a surprise to us, but it still stings every time we think that getting two Coke Zeros while we're out will cost up to $7. How do these people stay hydrated? We've taken to carrying around our water bottles and, when necessary, using them even at restaurants. Hopefully it's not too rude. Certainly not as rude as demanding some tap water.

9. Sara really misses American pillows. Here, there are two sizes: long and skinny and huge and square. Neither fits her sleeping profile well. We contemplated buying a new pillow for her the first week we were here, but we still could only find European sizes and they were 60 or 70 EUR ($90-110). We've since seen ads for cheaper pillows, but how does a country function with $100 pillows? Do people not sleep?

10. We miss our friends at home. And an apartment, but mostly our friends. Hopefully both will be forthcoming soon.

*Unsurprisingly to those who know, the Mormon church in Aachen has a drinking fountain. We haven't found the one in the church in Bonn, but it has to be somewhere...