Another end, another beginning

Annnd I'm back. Better than ever? I think so. It's still a shock to wake up in the morning and find that my so called adventure has come to an end. The last few weeks in Germany flew. Just flew. And I went through a lot of the same things I went through when I was getting ready to leave Canada for Germany.

I was in total, complete and utter denial that I was leaving. Or rather that I was coming back. And yet when I stepped through that door in the airport in Toronto with my overweight, duct taped luggage in tow and saw my family everything felt right. I guess home is always home, no matter how long you've been away.

I'd say packing was easier this time around, since everything I owned was in one small room and what simply wouldn't fit in my suitcases I had to leave behind forever. When I left Canada I said a lot of goodbyes, shed a lot of tears, and took off with both sadness and excitement. When I left Germany I said a lot of goodbyes, tried my hardest not to shed too many tears, and took off with both sadness and excitement. The main difference being that when I said goodbye in Germany, it wasn't an "I'll miss you so much, see you in 8 months" ..... it was a goodbye, I really hope I get to see you again sometime in this lifetime...

Last summer I worked at Open Text in Waterloo and became really tight with all the other co-ops there. We hung out pretty much every night after work and most weekends and at the end of the summer we all agreed that it was "The Best Summer Ever!"

And yet there is NO way it can even touch what this last summer has been like. So many BBQ's, happy hour at Enchilada's followed by gettin our groove on at Classic Rock... So many dinners, so many memories... So many new friends. England, France, America, Poland, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Austria ...... I'm a really lucky girl.

And my homecoming was exactly as I imagined it! I'd been daydreaming for 2 months about coming off the plane and hugging my family, then spending my single week off relaxing in my backyard by the lake with some of my best friends. My roommates and another good friend from first year res showed up early on Sunday morning with big smiles and bigger hugs. I couldn't have asked for anything else!

We swam, and waterskied and tubed and swam... We hiked back through my farm, saw the barn the tornado blew down earlier this summer, I showed them the maple sugar shack and we hiked back through the woods and across another field to see some of the lines. We ate, we laughed... and it was AWESOME!

To top it off, since I've been home I've eaten moose that my dad got himself, and pike that my dad caught himself... Cheesecake that my mom made.... I've chilled with my brother... That week at home was perfect.

Thinks I'll miss about Germany:

• The superb sausage
• The scrumptious snitzel
• The beer
• The trains always running on time
• The beer
• The beer
• My job... it was a good one!
• The travel -> never again will it be so easy to just hop over to another country for the weekend.
• And most of all, the people. Most of them weren't even German, so I suppose I can't really miss them 'about Germany'... but i'll miss them a lot!
• Oh, and the beer.
  

Salzburg, Austria

So Stuart proposed this trip to me awhile ago, said he'd been there a few times but wouldn't mind going again. My first question was 'What is there to do in Salzburg?' and his very unsatisfactory answer was 'It's just really nice'.

Wunderbar.... sounds boring.

WRONG!!

This trip was one of my best, one of my most fun, one of the most jaw dropping trips ever.

It turned out to be immensly cheaper to rent a car and drive there despite gas being around 1.30 euros a liter, so Stuart, Denis, Jarrett, Nina and I did just that. Cost us each just 35 euros INCLUDING gas each from Friday to Monday with 10-12 hours of driving. SU-WEET.

Bonus, they ran out of the cheapest little golf we booked online so we got a BEEE-UTIFUL black BMW with all the trimmings. The navigation system became our God. The speedometer went up to 260 kmph...although the computer topped it out at 210. And it had a sun roof :D I learned to drive stick in said gorgeous car, and I am so so proud of myself. It's something that's been on my list of things to do in life ever since I remember having such a list. Ok, so I just cruised around the various campus parking lots, and I burned the clutch a little BUT I picked it up in about 10 minutes, and I can shift pretty smoothly and I can park and even go backwards. YES, GO ME! Actually I had a really good teacher. Props to Denis!

Picking up said car didn't go so smoothly.. We left from work and our train just didn't come. Then there was a fire or something so the trains weren't running where they were supposed to. Then Denis got lost on the way back to Universitat to pick us all up. BUT, we made it.

The drive down was fun, we started with the wine and sangria drinking about an hour from our destination (again, this is allowed for the passenges here!) and sang some Tenacious D at the tops of our lungs. Ohhh Tenacious D. He got us in trouble later that night when we thought it'd be a good idea to sing some choice songs on the way home from checking out the nightlife. A man disguised as a pilon shhhhh'd us. I'm serious, everything from his pants to the straw cowboy hat was screaming orange.

Day ONE: We head to a town called Werfen about 50 km from Salzburg to go to the world's largest ice cave. The drive there was phenomenal. We were literally driving through the mountains and the view was the most breathtaking I've ever seen. We hiked 20 minutes up the mountain, took a cable car up some more, and then hiked another 20 minutes to the entrance to the cave.To the right of us is the mountain we climbed to get to the cave, and over our left shoulders you've got yourself a pretty little castle sitting on top of a shorter mountain. Phenomenal.

Let me just remind the audience that it's about 35 degrees outside, and -1 inside the cave. We came prepared and quickly bundled up. It was so surreal having cold fingers and toes...I'd almost forgotten what that felt like. And what ice looked like... They really don't believe in that here.

The tour was about 70 minutes and 1400 stairs long and really really cool. No really good pictures because it was so dark though.

Next we booked it to Hallstatt, another town another 60 km or so away and made it JUST in time for the last tour to the worlds oldest salt mine. This was also awesome, they gave us suits resembling prison wear and there were big wooden slides to race down and we got to take a little train back out of the mine.








We headed to the center to grab some dinner and my goodness was it not just the cutest little town I'd ever seen. It was cuteness overload, it was almost nauseating how cute every single thing in that town was. It was along the edge of a lake with mountains surrounding it, and all of the houses....SO cute. They were typical german style and all of them had flower boxes and were covered in flowers. Even the cemetary was adorable.









Then all of a sudden I turned around and got a big shocking jaw dropper. An old man with a long white skullet and a beer belly and his...girlfriend (?) got out of big white van. The girl's skirt..well...lets just say it was more of a glorified belt covering nothing at all really... She started posing with the view telescope thing and he was taking pictures, it was absolute trash and completely clashed with the surroundings. Wunderbar.

So we book it home, shower and change... oh no wait, we skipped those steps. We got into the wine and commenced story telling at the picnic table outside the hostel, molested a hedgehog,and headed downtown again.

We stood on a windy bridge overlooking the beautiful river for awhile. We called it the arguing bridge as 3 of our group members got into a spirited debate over who knows what for a good long time...I was busy not paying attention.

We hit up the strip of bars, and even though apparently nobody dances in Salzburg, well...we did anyways. No dance floor? No problem. We'll make our own. This sometimes proves problematic when we set up our booty shakin in the middle of the flow of traffic... whoops.

DAY TWO:
This is the castle day. We start off our day with a very sweaty hike to the top of a big mountain, or hill, whatever, in the middle of Salzburg to it's fort. Took a guided tour, saw an awesome view of the city, and moved on to the more exciting palace a little ways away.

The archbishop who lived here seemed to be a bit of an ass. A total jokester at heart, but used his power to force people to suffer through what he found to be entertaining. This guy loved water. There were trick fountains all through the gardens, and when you least expected it water would come shooting out of the wall of a grotto at you, or up from under your feet, or down from the roof.

The worst was a dinner table by an outdoor theater. There were all these rules, such as the guests couldn't stand until the archbishop was finished his meal, and there were little fountains all around the table, including in the seats of the chairs. So the dinner guests would essentially have water squirting up their derriers and there was nothing they could do about it.

All in all it was one of the most fun weekends I've ever had and one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen! I highly recommend Salzburg to anybody wishing to travel Europe!

The Zidane Game

Sort of funny, had to share.

Click here to play


And here's an MC Hammer spoof.


And here we have the Italian football team got on film at a practice. A dive practice. Yes, a degree in drama is mandatory to be on that team.

1 Month, 1 Week.

That's how much time left until I come home.

Whoa.

Does anybody else have a hard time believing I've been gone for 7 months already?

I know a month is still sort of a long time, but most of the international students are leaving starting next wednesday and will almost all be gone by the end of July.

It's going to be a quiet August.

I'm trying to understand that I'm coming home soon too. It's deja vu a little, the feeling isn't all that different from when I was trying to believe I was actually coming to Germany.

I almost think it's a good thing i'm coming home offstream... it'll be buffer time. I'm not going to have anything to talk about except my experiences in Europe which will shortly get my ass kicked, i'll have all these inside jokes to share with nobody but myself, and everybody else will have the same. Everybody will have stories that they all know and i don't, inside jokes that'll have to be explained to me... New life, take 4.

I can't wait to see where it goes...

I'll be arriving back in Toronto on Friday August 18th around dinner time, so anybody who wants to meet me at the airport, hug me like crazy, and go grab some food... well I'd love you for it :)

The WC Lifestyle

Two days ago I went grocery shopping and I realized that the World Cup was not just an enormous event, it was a lifestyle. Since the opening game about a month ago my world has revolved around the world cup.

Most nights of the week, and especially at the end, and every weekend so far I've been going downtown to watch games on the big screens set up all over the city. It's what we do. Suddenly I have all this extra time on my hands, there is no more soccer...I'm lost.

At Schlossplatz where the biggest screens and the biggest crowds gather the area is fenced in and security is pretty high. There are a lot of things you can't bring inside, including water bottles. Apparently we're capable of killing each other with water bottles.

So the only liquid allowed inside has to be in a box or a tetrapak. Doesn't matter what that liquid is, it can be juice, water, 79 cent wine...it must be in a box. This is why the grocery store brought about my realization. I was planning ahead...what do I need for the next world cup game? Is it a nighttime game, should I get wine? It's hot standing around inside for hours, I should get a box of juice to keep me hydrated.

Seriously, I'm lost. What did we do before the world cup madness started over here? Oh ya, Fruehlingsfest (Spring equivalent to Oktoberfest). What did we do before that? I travelled. Hmm...

I can't say I'm happy that Italy won, their team is a bunch of whining, dive taking, acting sissys who recently got caught for fixing a lot of matches in the Italian league. Cheating in sports is stuuupid. Monopoly I can understand, that's business and we all know that the words 'cheat' and 'lie' are in the definition of business.

All that garbage drives me crazy. Playing sports in general and soccer specifically has always been my outlet, my stress reliever - I like it to be pure and fun. If I were married to a soccer player who carried on like they do in the world cup, falling all over the ground and grabbing the wrong ankle I'd kick his ass when he came home after the game. You want something to cry about? I just hit you in the face, why are you grabbing your knee?

But, Stuttgart has a really large population of Italians so the party in the street afterwards was pretty amazing. Italians everywhere, flags, air horns, fireworks, people spraying champagne (I got sprayed), a coffin with the french flag on it being paraded around.

They were throwing pasta in the air. Broken spagetti. Way to dodge the stereotype there Italy fans. I loved it!

Lots of cheers swearing at Zidane too... What a way to go, what a way to be remembered after a brilliant career and in his last international game ever.... He could have helped France win, they needed him out there, they really needed him in penalty kicks. Smack talk is part of sports, I still can't believe he headbutted that guy in the chest... even if he did call his mother a terrorist whore. He flipped over a 'your mama' comment? Puh-LEASE!

And now the Italian guy who provoked him is trying to claim he doesn't know what the word 'terrorist' means, gimme a break.

Now that the WC is over I'm going to have to find something else to rant about.

I seriously feel so incredibly lucky to have been in Germany while it was hosting the world cup. I was never really that interested in it before, but it was impossible not to follow and get all caught up in the excitement, and now I've seen, heard, felt, experienced so much craziness. I'm a pretty lucky lady, and I know it.

Beautiful Violence

The other night I was planning to head to one of the campus pubs to watch the second half of the France/Portugal game, and being the practical person I am I decided to step out onto the balcony to see what the temperature was like.

I made it no further.

It wasn't yet dark and the sky was a bruised colour. Light purples, dark purples blacks, and the world within my view looked like some sort of natural disco hall. The sky was flickering incessantly with sheet lightning. Flashing again and again with no pause, different areas of the sky flashing milliseconds after other areas. It was beautiful.

Soon after my roommates came home and joined me, just watching the sky spaz out. Very suddenly the bruise darkened, everything went black and the wind was like nothing I've experienced before. It was like all the winds of the world met up over the field outside my balcony and decided to battle to the death. The wind was confused, couldn't decide which way it wanted to blow but figured, as long as I'm blowing in this direction I might as well do it with as much force as I can muster. That I can relate to. My hair was everywhere, I still don't know if was little bits of hail or just debris that was blowing into my eyes. The tall trees below my balcony were bending almost in half, yet everything was so graceful.

I've always loved storms. Well not always, I put in my time in my parent's bed until I figured out that thunder cannot hurt me. But since then whenever a storm is brewing I grab a sweater and head for a balcony, or a big window if one of those isn't available.

They're chaotic, they're destructive, dangerous, unpredictable. All of the things that I am not, all things I don't like, but watching something so big and out of my control happen around me leaves me feeling peaceful.

I saw the biggest, brightest, craziest, most beautiful lighting I have ever seen in my life that night. Some of it burned lines into my eyes, every time I blinked for a number of seconds after the flash I'd see the path the lightning had followed seconds before.

I always sleep best in the middle of a storm.

Triberg

This weekend was a lot of fun, we took a nice trip to a small place in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) called Triberg on sunday. Ever heard of Black Forest cake? Yep, it originated here. The black forest is pretty big, there are a lot of small towns in it. The worlds largest cuckoo clock is here too. Both of them. Yes there are two world's largest clocks. Didn't see them though, they were in another town not on the itinerary.

What was however, was Germany's largest waterfall, which wasn't really that big, or impressive. It was more like a series of small waterfalls or rapids, and the paths hiking to the top were all paved. So, you know what we all did instead? We climbed the waterfall. We went around the fence and climbed the rocks all the way up to the top! The german tourists were appalled... maybe they were afraid we were going to displace the fragile waterfall... They do like their rules here. But the nice thing about being a tourist is that you can get away with doing stuff like that.

It was a lot of fun, but rock climbing is really not my sport. My balance is soooo bad (I'm blaming it on the 5 operations I've had on my ears), so I came out with a lot of scratches, a little blood, some welts from encountering some stinging nettles, two soakers and drenched in sweat. I managed to scrape both elbows, both knees, my shins, a lot of places on my shoulder, and everywhere skin was bare was covered in nature of some sort. Mostly mud. I'm cool. Some of the people I was with (there were 8 of us) were just fearless.... I'm much more cautious when it comes to things like that.
Oh, right at the bottom my sunglasses fell off my head and down the waterfall. So now I can say I've lost my watch at the opening game for the world cup, and my sunglasses at Germany's largest waterfall. Now I should just take a trip to europe's largest mountain and throw my shoe off the top or something.

After that we took a 15 minute ride to a nearby town and swam in a man made lake. The thing had corners for goodness sakes... Well the German's do like things to be orderly. I'm noticing that at the lakes and pools here there are a lot of things that we will never ever see in Canada. There was this enormous inflatable climbing wall out in the middle. I'd say the top was a good 4 metres off the water, if not 5 and when you got to the top you could slide down the back side or jump off. At the pool nearby where I live there are these big round things that protrude just above the water and people are actually allowed to play push off on them. That is just asking for a split head... I think we coddle the kids too much in Canada.... And in the states these things would just be begging for a law suit. Anyways, the climbing wall was amazing, def wreaked havoc on my bathing suit bottoms, a lot of people have now seen my ass, but it was fun.

So that's about it, got home around 9:30, and I'm sunburnt, exausted, and happy.

Today was a day of physical activity. We ran to catch our train, we climbed a waterfall, we ran what I'm going to say was more than one kilometer, possibly 2 to catch the train to the lake, climbed the big wall a few times, swam. Man it felt good. I forgot how good intense physical activity makes you feel. Mmmm endorphins.

Here's a shot of the cast and crew for this adventure. It's blurry and we're missing some.... It was me, Denis, Nina and Petar from the IBM crew, Simon and Chris (a couple other Canadians), Stanis (from Bulgaria), and Stuart the American.