I guess I haven’t reporting much of what I’ve actually been lately, but rather just sharing funny stories and current events. I actually have been quite busy, and now will do my best to fill you in! (Note: there are lots of photo links on this page, and I also added more pictures to the original photo album - here's that link again)
Goethe Institut puts on several after-hours activities for the students to show us around, get us acquainted to the city, and give us a cultural education. TUESDAY we went to the university here in Frankfurt (ironically also the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University) and toured the campus. It was pretty cool, not much to report because the campus doesn’t have a central location like we’re used to at UGA, and it’s still summer break for the students so nothing was going on.
WEDNESDAY we went to the Museum of Modern Art. Visual art is something I think I would really like if I knew what I was looking at, especially as much as I love analyzing music and music history, but I don’t know the first thing about the genre and don’t know how to digest or interpret what I look at. Luckily we had a tour guide, even though I had to process an art lecture in German as I was trying to digest the art too, and one of the other Rotary scholars is actually an art student! She and I had some good discussions about some of the works we saw and I learned a lot too.
FRIDAY, not on a Goethe excursion, a group of us found out about a salsa-dancing event through another international school in town. On our way to the school we stumbled upon a street festival. The Germans like their street festivals – it seems that every day of the week there is a different one in a different place in town, at different times of the day, and for no apparent reason. They serve wine and beer as much as you can drink, with picnic tables and stand-up tables, lots of wurst, and sometimes other novelty foods. They’re always busting at the seams with people, and they just eat and drink and be merry until late. Seriously – I’ve been to about 5-6 of these festivals in the 2.5 weeks I’ve been here. Picture link here!
Anyway, we stumbled upon a festival that seemed to be celebrating the French – they served French wine, French food, and French music (except they played “Rock Around the Clock” with French words). There was even a bona fide polka band. The we went “salsa dancing,” put in quotes because the teacher failed to show up so no one really knew how to salsa dance – it was a bunch of international students, mostly Americans, a few French, Italian, Finnish, and Asians. It was fun, but not much more interesting than that.
SATURDAY; Another Goethe excursion took us to the little town of Marburg, about an hour north of Frankfurt. It is a beautiful town, with buildings dating back to the 14th century! The inner city is all from the 14th-18th century. We also saw the oldest synagogue in Europe, uncovered from the old Jewish ghetto area in the 13th-14th century. We went on a city tour, and also enjoyed eating lunch and drinking cappuccinos at tables outside. There was also a castle from this same time period, so of course we climbed the mountain and saw the castle. What a view! Follow this link to pictures of Marburg. (Take note – most of my pictures have captions or explanations, so click on the individual ones to read what they are. I won’t take up space here!)
SUNDAY: Car aficionados beware, this next story will make you intensely jealous. Every two years Frankfurt hosts one of the largest auto shows in the world, and it just so happened that this famous show took place this weekend. The only bad part is it takes about three days to go through thoroughly, but we only had today, so it was a pretty quick trip. It has ten buildings’ worth of show rooms (several of them are multiple stories), test drives, go-carts, off-road tests, and an entire outside exhibit.
That being said, we saw every show room, but had to say no to all the test drives. I am in awe. I am by no means abundant with car knowledge, but I’m pretty sure I saw almost every car on the market these days, including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Maserati, Porsche, and dozens of others. The lengths these companies go through to put up displays were just as amazing as the cars themselves. The most extreme thing I saw was acrobats, yes, trapeze artists, actually, for the Volkswagen exhibit. Suddenly the lights dimmed, music started playing, and these people soared up in the air and started spinning and twirling in an effort to advertise for VW.
The bad news is, halfway through the afternoon I accidentally deleted all the pictures on my camera. I was deleting a few to open up space on my memory card and accidentally hit “delete all,” and almost pitched a temper tantrum in the middle of the show room. The good news is, Anna and Ashlee still had all their pictures, so I got all of theirs. We were able to backtrack a little bit to retake some of the really important ones. I didn’t get everything back, but I still ended up with almost 300 pictures at the end of the day.
I took pictures of and with all these fancy cars, and lots of pictures of anything that looked cool. I got to sit inside a Porsche racecar and a Smart Car, too. They had lots of concept cars and eco-friendly cars, too. I surprised myself by actually knowing more than I expected about what I was looking at – I guess that’s what comes with spending time with people who constantly talk about cars. This knowledge isn’t a bad thing!
Of course I didn't post all 300 pictures, but I did post a lot. I'm relying on Chris to go through and identify them all - I can tell you who made them, but not much more than that. Here's album 1 and album 2.
COMING UP this week Goethe events include a “Frankfurter Evening” where they show us all the good local places and local secrets of ways to spend time, and a tour of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe house. Goethe is Germany’s equivalent of Shakespeare, and he grew up here in Frankfurt. This weekend I will probably head to Würzburg to visit Chris McCain’s old stomping grounds.
Life’s busy, but good! I still hate not having consistent internet, but I love hearing from you guys! Thanks for keeping up this far!
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