Mainz again - my introduction to Spanish liqueur!

The train journey to Mainz was interesting, my train to Frankfurt was running really late so I missed my connection and had to wait half an hour for the next train to Mainz. While on the train, I got accosted by some young and very drunk German guys wearing lederhosen who were walking around trying to sell things from their tray of dodgy wears. It took me a long time to persuade them that I didn't want to buy their last candy g-string!

Hauke met me at the station and we went straight back to the currywurst stand, where I proceeded to eat the most spicy currywurst that they have, something that Hauke had said I couldn't do way back in December when I bragged about my ability to eat spicy food! I finished it, although it brought tears to my eyes and my mouth was in agony for a little while afterwards. This time he refused to video me, he doesn't like proof of him losing, so there's just a photo of the remnants!

We took the tram home. In most places here in Europe the transport ticketing system is really different to NZ and most people buy a longer-term pass. On trams, they normally just jump on without the driver checking tickets, and only occasionally do ticket controllers get on the trams or buses to check, so I've got quite blasé about buying a ticket myself, especially in Mainz where they cost about $5NZD. This time, we got caught out, as soon as we got on an authoritative guy said something to Hauke about his bike, we should have cottoned on then but didn't until three controllers started moving through the tram, so we stood up to get off at the next stop, which being only 50m away from where we had got on was really suspicious. They got to Hauke just as the tram stopped and he took his time getting his pass out, allowing me to jump out of the tram when it stopped, but even then the guy was asking me for mine, holding up the tram, and I slowly started trawling through my bag for my wallet, hoping that they wouldn't want to hold the tram up too long. Luckily they didn't, and another guy just asked Hauke if I lived here and then let us go. Phew! We had a really long walk home. So I might start buying tickets again now...

Feli, me and Hauke

Hauke had just finished his exams that morning, so we were heading out to celebrate. We had a few drinks at home, and then a few more at Feli's house before we went to Nora's birthday party. Because neither of us had drunk in the past month, we were a wee bit messy even by then, and there we finished a bottle of Cuarenta y Tres, a Spanish liqueur. After this introduction, I don't think Cuarenta y Tres and I will be the best of friends!

We headed with some of them to Schon Schön, where I've been a couple of times and danced for a little while, before we left them and went to Red Cat, where Hauke works (read: also gets extremely cheap, extremely strong drinks). As I've said before, Red Cat is synonymous with us drinking far, far too much and consequently suffering exceptionally the following morning, and this night was not an exception. We left after maybe a hour, with my lack of German I thought that the bouncer was actually kicking us out, which considering Hauke works there would be a good indication of the state we were in, but apparently he was just making sure we didn't fall down the stairs. We walked most of the way home, a long trip that only I can remember and is best forgotten anyway.

Hauke, Nora and I

So Saturday was a write-off. I was awake really early, and spent the day reading the news and cleaning Hauke's flat, but he was in worse shape than me for once and barely moved until the early evening. We didn't leave the house until after six, when we just went to eat at the asian place here that I think makes the best thai food in Europe (it's still nothing on Satay Kingdom) and then for a walk, before he went to work and I went for a run and then to bed early.

Yesterday morning I took the train to Frankfurt, to catch my pre-booked train from Frankfurt to Luxembourg. I should have looked more closely at my ticket though, because the train actually headed back through Mainz anyway, so I wasted several hours training into Frankfurt and waiting around.

Messy...thankyou Cuarenta y Tres for this stunning photo

I'm looking forward to getting into Luxembourg and settling down again. Part of me really loves traveling around and seeing new places, and doesn't want to be limited by working in one place, but the other part of me is ready to have somewhere to call home again, and to start putting down some real roots. The longer I am over here the harder it is to reconcile the over-achiever, involved in a million things and feeling like I was going somewhere in life old me, with the transient, involved in nothing, with no consistent support network and with no intellectual stimulation or sense of achievement new me. Hopefully I can make some friends and get involved in some projects in Luxembourg, and start learning German, to start to feel more like me again.

Mainz - Hauke's birthday

Chocolate Speculoos cake that I made

Early Friday morning I headed back to Mainz in Germany for Hauke's 22nd birthday. The trip over was pretty uneventful, although I left the house at 8.30am and realized once I got to the train station that I hadn't written down the connections and knew nothing more than my first train to Brussels. I texted Hauke asking him to google it for me and apologizing for my stupidity, then thought I figured it out myself anyway and texted again to inform him of my awesomeness. Of course, once I arrived at Frankfurt I got lost in the train station and missed my connection there and he had to ring me and sort it out, although I swear I was actually in the right place in the beginning because I remembered from last time I was there, but then the signage was really bad and I convinced myself I was wrong. Anyone who has been in Frankfurt station will agree its a complete mess there. In the end it took me 6 1/2 hours to get there, but an hour of that was just catching the bus to Antwerp and I lost about another hour messing around and then waiting in Frankfurt, so it wasn't so bad.

I was shattered by the time we got home, its been a really long month and I hadn't had a night of uninterrupted sleep all week, so I took a nap while Hauke went to a lecture, and then we biked around doing some errands. It's funny how biking still has such novelty value for me, like for Hauke (and most Europeans) its just an everyday means of transport, but for me it's really entertaining. Also scary, I'm still not used to the no-helmet thing, it feels like being in a car with no seatbelt on, just not right, but at least they have cycle lanes everywhere here. Riding around in them made me realize how annoying I am, because I am always the dumb pedestrian that stands in the cycle lanes in Antwerp! I apologise Belgium, we don't have them in NZ and I don't realise, I swear I will try to do better in the future!

Going out on Friday, also a good 'before haircut' photo

Back in Rauris in January I had bragged about my ability to eat spicy food and Hauke had challenged me to eat some famously spicy currywurst (sliced sausage in curry sauce) in Mainz. Apparently they have five levels of spiciness and the fifth is so hot that you have to eat the fourth just to prove you're even capable of trying the fifth, and that people who eat the fifth puke from the spiciness of it. I'd never gotten around to trying it because I've always been so hungover busy whenever I visit, so this time we stopped and grabbed some of the second-spiciest. Hauke eagerly declared that I was going to suffer and started videoing me but turned it off halfway through, I was eating it without any trouble and I guess he didn't want proof that I beat him. Anyone who thinks that is spicy should come live with Koi for awhile! We didn't come back for the fifth level stuff, so that will have to be on the cards for the next visit! We also sat outside the huge cathedral in the centre for awhile drinking some beer and finished the night off out clubbing, back at Red Cat and another club I hadn't been to before where we entertained ourselves in typical juvenile fashion, sticking animal stickers on unsuspecting people and watching them dance around us. We met heaps of spanish speakers, it was good to get some practice, and also some German guys that taught me how to call Hauke some bad names.

Haircut

We didn't go to sleep until 7am and I definitely regretted it waking up at 11am the next day and knowing that Saturday night would be even bigger. The night before we were talking about haircuts and decided it would be fun to go to the hairdresser and let Hauke pick a cut and colour for me and tell the girl in German so I'd have no idea what was happening and would just have to sit and wait, so we spent the afternoon at the hairdressers where the poor girl shook her head at the mess that my hair had become while I've been traveling around. Hauke and I must have a weird concept of what 'fun' is, we always end up doing such random stuff rather than just going out for coffee or to the movies or whatever normal people do! I left with dark hair that is the shortest it's been in at least ten years, a pretty big change but I love it.

the new hair!

We stopped in at the gallery/studio of Hauke's flatmates, they are really cool people and put up with me being a pain in the ass in their flat all the time, and I loved some of the stuff there. Biking home was interesting, I was riding Hauke's flatmate's bike that was way to big for me, so I couldn't touch the ground. At one point I actually fell sideways onto a parked car when I couldn't get going fast enough, it was pretty funny but then he led us the wrong way down a bike lane, and when some bikers came the other way and I couldn't stop I ended up in the path of an oncoming car and it didn't seem so funny anymore, I was not really impressed!

Some of Hauke's friends from Mainz

Saturday night we had drinks back at the house with a bunch of Hauke's friends from Gottingen who came down for the night and joined those from Mainz. Hauke's cocktails are now pretty awesome, and everyone had a really good time and was really friendly. The chocolate speculoos cake that the kids 'helped' me to make turned out well, recipe is here. I didn't have so many "Hi, I'm Claire" "yes, I met you last time you were in Mainz/Gottingen" moments this time, I'm finally starting to remember who everyone is! We went back to Red Cat for awhile, and then to another club that I had been to before. It was cool to meet a lot of Hauke's Mainz friends that I didn't know before, they speak pretty good english and the Gottingen boys got around the language barrier by teaching me stuff in German that I don't think the teacher will be explaining in my german language courses! We weren't out quite so late this night, I think we got to bed at around 5am, although we were up again at 9 when Hauke's phone started going crazy with people calling him to say happy birthday. Once everyone else was up and moving we headed to the Rhine and sat on the banks having a picnic brunch but the weather was pretty dodgy and we ended up in Vapiano for coffee after an hour or so.

Me and Hauke on Saturday night

Then everyone else headed home and we spent the rest of the day cleaning up, sleeping and lazing around the house. It's funny, I was really looking forward to four days of no housework, but I ended up spending a lot of the weekend doing laundry, unloading the dishwasher and taking out the trash! I was not in a really good way all day, the lack of sleep has really caught up to me, I don't think I've had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep since we got back from London and then this weekend was a little more than my body could handle. We slept through the alarm on Monday and I had to do a mad dash to get to to the station and just made it onto my first train. The trip up to Cologne was really nice, all the way up to Koblenz the tracks follow the Rhine and go past tiny old villages and castles perched up on the hills, it is one of the best train journey's I've taken. It was a funny feeling to arrive at Cologne and know my way around after being there in January, Europe is becoming home rather than the awe-inspiring adventure it once was. I had quite a while to wait there so I went and sat in the Cathedral. It's funny to think that my grandparents came all the way from New Zealand to see the Cathedral here, and now I go there just to kill time between trains!

Coffee on Sunday morning

So, an awesome weekend, although most of the awesomeness was those funny, random or meaningful moments that no one else will understand, or stuff that just shouldn't be recorded on the internet for eternity! Also an exhausting weekend, dealing with the kids tonight has been interesting, and I've only got a couple of days to recover and catch up on sleep before I go to another massive party with Lena in Liege this weekend! 

Photos are here, I'll try to get the currywurst video off Hauke too.

Mainz, Würzburg, and Mainz again - catching up with the AFS German Interns

Accordian bus!

I know Hauke and Emil as they lived in NZ for a year in 2008-2009 working as interns at the AFS National Office for their German Civilian Service. I landed back at Frankfurt Hann airport on Friday afternoon and caught the bus back to Mainz. Despite Haukes offer to come and meet me at the train station, and despite it being dark and me only having taken 
this tram to the house once during daylight, I had insisted I could catch the tram and find the way myself - luckily I could! We had dinner about 7pm (I wasnt hungry and couldnt eat much) and Hauke went to sleep around 9pm (I wasnt tired and couldnt sleep). 

Roman aquaduct ruins

Around 11pm I got really, really hungry at 2am still couldnt sleep - thanks Spain! Saturday was pretty cruisy, we went for coffee and lunch with some old friends of Hauke from Göttingen who were in town, and then checked out his university - I got to ride on an accordian bus for the first time! Even Haukes embarrassment couldnt dampen my excitement. Haukes university is probably the ugliest I have ever seen, but we made up for that by walking home past some ruins of a old roman aquaduct. 

Raclette

The rest of Saturday night has become a bit of a blur. Hauke works as a bartender and is currently learning cocktails, so we trotted off to the supermarket in search of spirits and fruitjuice that we could mix. Unfortunately, I think mixed far to many spirits and not enough juice! We had dinner with his flatmates, Raclette, which is a method using a electronic thing with a heated stone on top for cooking meat, and a grill directly underneath where you put the cooked meat with cheese and potato and other stuff to melt. Quite cool, and the drinking continued with the flatmates. We played the same game that got me into trouble in Austria, with the dice and the numbers and me not knowing the rules and therefore constantly losing and having to drink, and at some point tumbled out the door with them into a tram to town. Hauke and I headed to the bar he works in again, and from then onwards the night is a bit messy. I know we got home around 6am, so when I woke up four hours later to catch my train I was still in less than perfect condition. I will spare you all of the details, except to say that I missed my train, puked in places I shouldn't have, was miserable all day, and swear that I will never drink the night before I travel to a new location ever again!





I arrived at Würzburg late and still sick but happy to see Emil! We headed back to his and spent the rest of the evening recuperating, going for a really long walk along the riverside and catching up. Monday morning we headed up to the Festung (Fortress) Marienberg, built in the 700s AD, reconstructed in the 1600s and used as a castle for Prince-Bishops and as a fort. There is a really good view of Würzburg from up there. On the way back Emil introduced me to a kind of pancake (sorry I forgot the word!) for lunch at a cafe on the riverside, and then I headed out to a small town, Bad Kissingen, to catch up with Claire, a French girl who had been in NZ on an AFS 2-month exchange in 2009 and is now doing a full-year exchange in Germany. This was an interesting train trip, as I didn't really know where I had to 

Catching up with Claire Chervin

catch connections from and the local trains don't have english translations like the bigger ones do, and it freaked me out a little to arrive in this tiny station and find Claire wasn't already there, but luckily she was just running late! It was really cool to talk about Germany and Germans with someone else who has an outsiders perspective.


Tuesday morning we headed to the Würzburg Residenz, a palace from the 1700s that is now a UNESCO heritage site. I quite like the marble used in it, and the huge stone foyer with a vaulted ceiling, but it made the place really cold! Emil went off to uni and I wandered around exploring and shopping for awhile, I found a New Zealand shop run by a German woman who hasn't lived in NZ but reckons NZers are much sunnier, upbeat and happy than Germans, 

Würzburg Residenz

and is therefore trying to bring a little of NZ into Germany. I have been hanging out for marmite, so I admit to paying 10euro, or about $20 for a jar of vegemite, the closest she had. I also ordered lunch for the first time by myself, admittedly just by pointing at something on a menu and hoping for the best, but I am still quite impressed with myself! Hand gestures also go a long way!


Wednesday morning we woke up to a little bit of snow! I checked out the Kulturspeicher museum, only the art half was open but I really liked that, all artworks done by people who had come from or lived in Würzburg. The smaller works portraying Würzburg itself impressed me more than some of the big, more famous stuff Ive seen here recently. Würzburg 

houses on the riverside in Würzburg

really is quite pretty, the buildings are different to further north, no framework on the houses, but they are all different colours and I like how the line the river. There are also a huge number of churches here that survived or were rebuilt after the war.


After another successful attempt at ordering my own lunch I said goodbye to Emil and headed back to Mainz. My first train was late, so I missed my connection, and as I was standing there searching for the next one on the board some quite scary-looking Germans actually came up to me and asked if I needed help! Made my day! I headed back to Hauke's to dump my stuff and went out to enjoy the snow some more, walking back into town. Hauke is a big patron of the Irish Pub here, and I wanted to see what he is always talking about, so I killed time waiting for him to 

Apparently 1 doesn't mean first...

finish at uni by sitting there chatting away to the owner. I find it weird now to talk to someone who has English as a first language! We finished off the night by going bowling with some friends of his, again our identical shoe sizes caused much disbelief and later a few laughs. My attempt at bowling was no laughing matter! I can't believe how poorly I did, on our third game I actually sat on 1, i.e. 1 pin for three or four rounds. Hauke reckons my arm physically isn't straight!


Tomorrow I am off to Colonge, hopefully our sobriety tonight will mean I have a much mroe succesful departure from Mainz this time around, and can enjoy my night there before I head into Belgium on Friday.


Anyone who wants to check out the video we made of Hauke skiing, its on facebook here although you might have to be friends with him to see it due to his privacy settings.

Würzburg, Festung Marienberg on the hill

Mainz - cocktails and old buildings

The Mainzer Dom

I've come back to Mainz with Hauke for a couple of nights before I fly out from Frankfurt to Madrid on January 10th. Hauke goes to university here, and its an amazing old city of about 200 000 people on the Rhine. Its history is over 2000 years old and its always been quite important, as a trading centre, Roman fort city and now as the capital city of this state. Hauke's flat is awesome, its really old and three stories, with sloping floors and a tiny winding staircase that terrifies me!

Party time!

We got here on Saturday evening and after our first proper dinner in awhile we went out to the bar where Hauke works. With his new-found bartender knowledge, he has been introducing me to new spirits and between that, the bar staff giving us several shots and someones foolish decision to also introduce me to Long Island Ice Teas, we ended up having quite an awesome night and quite a tragic Sunday. We did manage to drag ourselves out of the house after a breakfast of good old Sanitarium wheatbix that I'd posted to Hauke at some point (as a side note I don't really recommend mixing wheatbix with hangovers) and wander around Mainz. The buildings are amazing, I know I keep saying

Old pharmacy

that but everywhere has a different style, and here there are really old and elaborate, I can't really explain so check out my photos on facebook. Hauke tells me that Mainz was really heavily bombed during the war, but there are some streets that escaped unharmed and amazingly the huge cathedral survived, it is an amazing building, photos can't show just how huge it is. Finally, we had the best asian food I've had so far in Germany (and we tried a lot in Berlin!), although best isn't saying too much. I would pay big money for a Satay Kingdom mee goereng, although I was overjoyed to find my favourite too minute noodles here! Anyone that knows me well can probably imagine my smile!

Tomorrow I am off to Spain, quite stressed about my dodgy Ryanair flight and getting my ridiculous luggage though. I have discovered I am not great at this nomadic thing, I am sick of packing and unpacking and I've only done it half a

Old buildings in Mainz

dozen times, I think in Spain I am going to reevaluate what I am lugging around with me! I am really looking forward to being somewhere where I speak the language. I have been so dependant on Hauke for the last three weeks, he has selected and ordered my food for me, sorted out all of the trains and buses and constantly nagged me about things like taking a coat and checking I've got my wallet, so it's going to be weird to be looking after myself again! Sad to be leaving Hauke, its been so amazing spending time with him and I am really grateful for everything he has done, but I am really excited to see Miguel again tomorrow afternoon! Guten nacht!