Greuzi mitenand!
(Hi everyone!)
I finally got this whole email thing figured out so that I can use my account from home, (I don't have one here yet) so I thought this would be a perfect time to say hello to everyone and try to catch you up a bit on my life in the past 2 months! (That's a really long time, so I'll try to be brief!) :)
Fuer alle meine Freunden vom Goethe Institut, ich hoffe, dass euere Adressen geht- ich habe schon versucht, an Ariela zu schreiben, aber das Computer liess mich nicht! Und ich glaube, dass ihr alle auch Englisch versteht, oder? Wenn nicht, bitte schreibt mir, und ich kann naechsten Mal auch auf Deutsch schreiben! :)
Europe is absolutely incredible! I flew here with Allison, a friend of mine from school, who is also studying at the ETH this year.
We arrived in Zuerich with all our bags and a list of phone numbers of youth hostels to call. We felt kind of lost, and bugged the nice people at the baggage claim a bit too much with our questions of how to get the phone to work, why some of the phone numbers weren't working, etc. Pretty much stupid questions that just seemed really daunting in a new country in another language. So after about 45 minutes of figuring out how to get our money changed to buy a phone card to call various places, we realized that we still didn't really know what we were doing. So Allison pulled out a phone number of a friend of a colleague of hers from work this summer, and she called him to ask him to point us in the right direction. His response was not, "take this train, get off here, etc", rather "I'll be there in 15 minutes." ! Turns out this guy, Dr. Marc Steinfels, is the president of his company, and just left his office at a moments notice to help 2 American students he'd never met before! He met us at the airport, put all our bags in his trunk, and drove us to his office, in a kind of roundabout way, so that he could give us a quick tour of the city! We got to his office, and he made the rest of the phone calls for us, to find a youth hostel, and call Allison's landlord to see if we could leave luggage there for a few weeks while we travelled. And he was very particular to make sure we had good lodging- he wouldn't let us stay in one hostel that was in the midlle of the city, because it had mixed m/f rooms! Afterwards he took us out to lunch- we tried to pay, but he wouldn't let us- then drove us out to Dietikon (to Allison's apartment) to drop off our luggage, past where I would be living, and then to the youth hostel- he even walked into the lobby with us, to make sure we would be ok! So in the end he took 5 hours out of his Friday to help us! Wow! Welcome to Switzerland!!! :)
The next morning we found our way to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and left for a 10 hour journey to Dresden, with stops in Basel and Frankfurt am Main. I really enjoyed this day- European trains are very comfortable, and we got to see SO MUCH in one day! It's amazing to see how much the landscape changes between the two cities. Zuerich is not in the high Alps that you think of in Switzerland- it's in the middle plateau region, which means that it has large rolling hills-about the size of those along the Hudson near Albany, or near Cooperstown or Ithaca, but not really big mountains-those are further south. But when you travel to Basel (west and a bit north) the hills start growing, and the train winds through various valleys and little towns.
The colors here are fantastic! The fields and meadows are a brilliant green, the forests a very clear dark green, and all the houses have brown or red-orange tile roofs. I wish I could've taken a picture of it all, but the sun was in the wrong place, and it would've come out funny.
The train went north from Basel- which means we were in Germany at this point- and we went through more incredible landscapes- rolling hills of fields and vineyards, with big blue mountains in the background.
It started to flatten out we got closer to Frankfurt. Bren, I tried to look for names like Glashuetten, but we came in from the other direction. Frankfurt looks like a nice city, shiny and clean (at least as far as I could see from the train) and I could see the new "green skyscraper" (Norman Foster?) in the distance- pretty cool, I thought. From Frankfurt on things got flatter, and more like wheat and sunflower fields for the most part. (yeah! Fields and fields of sunflowers!)
But there were places where it was fairly mountainous again, and we went through a few cities whose names I remembered from the GAPP trip with Mrs. Mattiske- Fulda, Eisenach, Erfurt.
By the time we arrived in Dresden, it was dark and rainy. But when we crossed the Elbe river, we could see all the big famous buildings in the Altstadt(historic city center) all lit up, with their reflections sparkling in the water.
It was really beautiful, I thought. We had a little bit of trouble finding our youth hostel, which is not so cool in the pouring rain, but once we found it it was very nice, with big windows that open out to the little terrace below. We could see over all the rooftops of the neighboring buildings, and I thought that if it was light out it would look kind of like European rooftop scenes that you see, even in movies like Mary Poppins! :) At some point we were sitting in the room and started hearing booms outside, and realized that there were fireworks somewher in the city, and that we had a great view of them from our windows! So we opened the windows (they're the cool kind that tilt in when you turn the handle one way, and open like doors when you turn the handle the other way) and sat on the window ledges and watched the fireworks from our room! Not too bad, I thought! :)
It turns out the fireworks were a part of a "Stadtfest" or city festival that took place that weekend, and Allison and I had a chance to walk around and see some of it the next day.
So for the next two weeks we took a German course at the Goethe Institut in Dresden. I really had a lot of fun with it. I met some wonderful people there, from so many different countries, and even from that respect it was great, that we HAD to speak in German if we wanted to talk to each other! We saw a lot of the city, which was absolutely beautiful.
Dresden's kind of a museum city, where there is definitely a part that has all the famous sights, and several things that every good tourist should see.
I took lots of pictures, including some at night, which actually came out quite well! It's more on the scale of Boston, or maybe smaller(?) where you feel you can get a fairly good grasp of the city in a day or two, as opposed to NYC or Rome, where everything is so overwhelming and huge that you need much longer to just get a basic understanding of it!
We took a tour with a tour guide, who unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble understanding, due to the wind, the number of people in the group, and my lack of German comprehension. But I did get to see a lot that day, and later, in our own excursions.
The entire historic center of the city was bombed on Feb 13, 1945, and has been/is being restored since then.
It's amazing to see all the churches, city hall, museums, opera house, etc, that look like they've been like that for over a hundred years (more in many cases), and then see the plaque on the side and realize they were entirely rebuilt in the last 50!
I bought 2 postcards for myself, one in b/w, with a view from next to a statue on top of a building (the Kreuzkirche, I think) looking down at the rubble that is the remains of the city after the war,
and one in color, taken a few years ago, from the same statue, looking down on what is there taking its place.
It's really quite profound- I guess that's the right word for it. The b>/w one really hit me. I can't imagine being there in 1945 and looking around to see my city looking more like a pile of ruins than Pompei does today! But from that picture, that's what it looked like. No life anywhere, just ruins.
One day I went to a little outdoor cafe with a few of my friends, and a retired man sat down with us and we started talking. He was very friendly, and he had so many things to say about the world, and about life and how beautiful it is. It was clear that he had lived through a lot in his life. At one point Stefano asked him about the war, why exactly Dresden was bombed. He explained that it was purely out of revenge, because the city had no strategic military purpose for the Allies. The Germans had bombed London- the historic, cultural part- during the war, and thus deprived them of so much. The Allies were so angry at all that Germany had done, that they wanted to do something in retribution, so they destroyed the city of Dresden, a beautiful Baroque city known as the "Florence on the Elbe." As he spoke, tears suddenly welled up in his eyes, and then burst. "Can you imagine," he asked us "being 3 years old and walking through the city with your mother and pulling an empty pair of boots out from under the rubble, and seeing the feet still lying there?" To this day it was such a sharp image drilled into his mind that it took him several minutes before he could stop crying.
This conversation made the whole thing so much more real to me than any photographs, any plaques, any cranes I could see still working to reconstruct what was there before that night.
ok, I've been writing for a bit longer than I'd planned, and I should probably get going so that someone else can use this computer. I will catch you up on my adventures soon- I hope this isn't too long-winded!
Taryn, if you have Jared's new email address, could you send it to me? And Nana and Pappap, could you send me Bud's again? (Also what I have to write in the subject line) Is he in the Mediterranean yet? I saw all the Navy ships in Naples, and I thought of him!
Thank you!
I hope everything is going well for all of you! I miss you!
Oh, and before I go, everything here in Zuerich is absolutely wonderful, but I'll have to tell you all about it in the next letter!
Bis dann!
Mit liebe,
Cory :)
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