Book of the yours

(Guest post by Simon. The writer of this blog likes anonymity -- yes, so much that she reserves it here only for herself. Her name has therefore been censored.)

Hello folks and world, slip into a pair of skin tight leather pants, slap on a wispily high Tcherman accent and clip a stainless steel mug full of Schwarzwalder kirschwasser (like vodka, but the lady on the front of the bottle has bowling-ball sized cherries covering her hat) onto your belt as I have done to hear exciting stories of wandermoglichkeiten! Freiburg is a smart little city covering an area of roughly one Guelph, which is defined as the area of land one man can plow with three drunk oxen on an overcast day. I have spent a lot of the past week on the floor of XXX's room, which is large for something hostelish although her residence doesn't have a big communal area. No lazy evenings together in front of the television for these students... The walls appear to be made of a mixture of plaster and Swiss meusli. We spent today in Basel, a charming quiet city frontin' the Rhine, and having had enough nutritious museums we decided to goof off a bit, going to see a huge collection of teddy bears and puppets and dolls and muppets. The model houses were astonishing, you could find just about any shop you could think of, except for possibly assorted small arms. We crossed two of the borders that wander through the city, the German/Swiss leaving the train station and the Swiss/French in town. We weren't stopped at all, there was just a police whare with a roof extending over the road, and suddenly all the signs and TV were in French. The people even looked more aloof! It was cool to be able to have the following exchange: "How about we buy some real swiss chocoloate from that shop?" "Nah, let's go to France first." For some reason XXX was mad keen on looking around a drug company, as Basel is full of them and is responsible for LSD and antidepressants (I suspect living in Basel in the winter would benefit from one of them), but they turned us away as comercially infeisable and containing insufficient quantities of tallow. But we did see a very impressive smokestack.

I had my first taste of the Black Forest the day before. Ah, you like the ambiguity there? You're thinking, "does that mean he went for a walk in the woods, or tasted some yummy cake, or perhaps even stepped in some cake or ate some pine scented air freshener?" Well, it was both! (The normal ones, I mean. XXX gave me rather a lot of Schwarzvodka kirschwald...) We went tramping with a friend of hers from Auckland, also called Simon, presumably so that if one of us got hurt or lost in the woods she would have one left. It was beautiful and dark and steep, with the trees enveloping the slopes like a spiny cloak, just like I had imagined from fairytales. We followed alongside deer and wildcat tracks, and even found snow in the higher reaches. We half walked, half ski'd going downhill, and came out where someone was logging and were greeted by a refreshing pine scent. I had to dig deep, getting by for five hours on a (solid, half oak, half bread) German sandwich, an apple and a few lesser breads, and by half past seven when dinner finally arrived at a cheap pasta restaurant I was undaunted by the sight of a bowl of bologhnese that could have filled a kid's bike helmet. The Schwarzenegger Kirschthingy happened in between, while we were showing Simon around Freiburg. It was surprisingly light, and I probably should have lingered over it a bit more but I was sooo hungry...

The two days before that were quite lazy, a rest after four days of travel finishing with new year's celebrations with friends of XXX in Freiburg. It was the new year's I've always wanted, spent with drunk people you can have fun with without knowing, learning dance steps and trying on each other's accents, and passing midnight just above roof level on a hillside packed with revellers while the city went nuts letting off fireworks. I've never seen a display covering such a huge area, it was like watching a sea under the moonlight except much, much sparklier. The feeling of wide-eyed togetherness with everyone there was lovely. Almost everyone, actually - I could have done without the people letting off bangers everywhere, especially right were you were going to walk. We started searching for a friend we had gone to the hill with at half past midnight, pushing our way through jubilant unaware crowds up and down the various levels while I got more and more anxious about finding him, and the bursting firecrackers and charred skyrockets littering the ground gave it a strange battleground feel.

And the rest of the travel? It was done near Koblenz, based in a little town on the Rhine called Boppard where we stayed with a genuine German metalworker called Axel with a old sportscar whose back seat wasn't designed for people with legs and his wife, Inne, who ran a tanning and nail salon. We know this because our guest room was also her workplace, and I did a quick double take when I saw the room for the first time with it's single bed and tanning bed and thinking "They're not expecting one of us to sleep in that thing, are they? They're not expecing BOTH of us to sleep on that thing, are they?" Every coloured accessory in the house was blue, apart from the glittery silver toilet seat, and while Christoph and Werner's bathroom had an anatomically correct sign indicating that men shoud sit while peeing, our hostess bought it up (not at all awkwardly) in conversation. We didn't do much in Boppard apart from go to their little christmas market, which gave me my fill of foliksh German music which people gently shifted their weight to. We had a kind of eggnog and lots of junk food and I sung along enthusiastically and grinned at the wooden stalls and pretty lights, and then we went for a walk along the Rhine (I climbed the fence and touched it, so there). The next morning we visited Marksburg castle, which was highly authentic and gave a very strong impression of how drab life was even for nobles 800 years ago. They were also very short - the four poster bed was roughly a metre and a half long.

Of course, Germany wouldn't be the same without it's food, designed to thicken the arteries aganst the winter cold. We've tried making spetzle and cooking sausages, but we weren't sure how successful we were - I felt like I was frying a salami. Chocolate, mulled wine (which can be bought from Ikea! Maybe they use it to stain furniture), a shop in town that sells nothing but gummi bears... the old American "dirt, sugar and palm oil" isn't going to be the same.

And I finally lived my dream and bought a fedora! My angular face finally has something to ballance it.