Ahhh, Prague

So for the long 4 day weekend, our group decided to go to Prague. Unfortunately, Eric did not join us as he was looking for an apartment in Berlin where he will be studying this fall. But on Wednesday night Kim, Michelle, Doug, Mike, and I headed out from the Frankfurt train station to Prague. We actually had started out the evening watching the Germany game, which they won, and it made the ride interesting because there were some Germans that didn't cease celebrating the entire 9 hour trip to Prague (they even were celebrating once we got off the train in Prague). But at around 8 AM we got into Prague and found our hostel after thankfully not too much wandering. We then found some much needed food at a creperie close to our hostel in a beautiful courtyard.
We then got on our walking shoes and started seeing the city. It didn't take long for us to realize that wherever you go in Prague, it is amazingly beautiful as each of the buildings is a work of art (Mike commented that if just one of these buildings was in Pittsburg, where he's from, it would be one of the main attractions of the city, and here, they're lined up one right after another). It was really tragic to think that had it not been for the WWII bombing raids that literally demolished every city in Germany save a couple due to odd exceptions (I've heard of one so far that was too close to Switzerland to risk bombing it), then the major German cities would probably look close to the same. But we marveled around and came across a building where they were advertising an amazing line-up of classic music that was being played that evening, and Doug and I got tickets for the show. We then headed towards Prague's town square and chilled at an Italian restaurant and enjoyed the view. Probably my favorite part of Prague square was this gigantic, dark statue in the middle to it. It was interesting because in the middle of all of its beauty, the statues on each of the buildings and the large statues found in some places had a very dark and sinister feeling which gave a somewhat sureal feeling as it was juxtaposed with the bright building colors and the busy crowds of tourists.
Here's another example of a dark statue, which I though looked like a Nazgul :)After Prague square, we headed around and saw some Jewish cathedrals (didn't go in as that cost quite a bit). We then made it over to a Bohemian restaurant. It's pretty sweet because in the Czech Republic, they list the weight of the food on the menu, so we decided to go for the biggest bang for your buck and ended up with a couple mounds of meat and veggies to share. Ended up that most everyone got full quick, so I enjoyed cleaning up everyone's plates. Yumm.
After that, we then headed to the Charles bridge. We found a cool palace on the way.
With a cool statue.And here's a pic of the Prague castle (on the hill) from the bridge.Doug and I then headed back to the orchestra place while the others went out with Mike's friend Jan, who interns with Mike, is from Prague, and was there for the weekend. It was interesting, because after going to the orchestra, I found out that if you really want to make a living (probably a small one) from playing an orchestra instrument but aren't good enough to make it into one of the respectable city orchestras back in the US, then come to Prague! While we had been walking around I noticed that there were actually many of these orchestra concerts featuring all of the most well know classical songs, which meant that none of them were probably that special (I'm sure the actual Prague Symphony Orchestra is good) and that Prague is actually a city full of orchestra scams (which seems really odd). But yeah, the concert I went to basically sucked. They played all songs that anyone who listens to classical music knows, and since I recongnized them all, I was also able to recognize how off they had played each of them. But we hadn't waisted too much money, and Doug and I chilled on our hostel room's balcony for the remainder of the evening.
The next day, we started out heading to Prague castle which is up on a hill across the river from the "downtown" of Prague. It was extremely beautiful, and had a sweet cathedral in the middle of it. Here's the entrance to the castle.
And here's the cathedral.
We also saw this eerie wall from on top of the hill.
We then headed down a beautiful path on the hill right beside a city wall that was ornamented with huge yellow umbrellas (which ended up being little touristy stands, but were really pretty from above!). We made it over to a little cafe which was below the palace gardens.And found a sweet tree that had huge leaves!I saw one leaf that was the biggest, and unfortunately when I jumped to grab it, the entire branch came off, so we quickly walked off with everyone's eyes at our backs :-/
We then met up with Jan and his about 10 other friends that had all come to visit for the weekend (I guess he was part of some study program and everyone had met up for a reunion) and had lunch at a restaurant. That night, we went out with Jan and the troops to a couple of bars. The first one was pretty boring, and we started to realize that some of Jan's company was pretty lame. Jan himself is awesome! He's about 6'8", can fit most normal people's heads in his hand, and is really fun. However, we started refering to some of his companions as the manatees as they just kinda just floated around never really doing anything special, and then also due to physical similarities. But then at the second bar, the manatees stayed away, and we enjoyed some absinthe and a bucket of mojito. Then at about 1, the bartender dimmed the lights, cranked the techno (good ol' DJ Tiesto), and then juggled flaming bottles and did a bunch of other sweet fire tricks. After awhile we wandered home in the rain and called it a night.
The next morning, we found a good Italian place for our breakfast, and were amazed at our first actually good service (compared to the annoying, what-the-hell-do-you-want? attitude that most servers had at all other places. We actually found out from Jan that it was because anyone who can't get a job anywhere else becomes a server (its normal not to tip much, otherwise it might be more desirable of a job) and they can have that attitude because of the massive numbers of tourists who only need to eat there once)! So we left a good tip and then did some shopping. Latter that day, we got some wine and watched the Czech game on the big screen on Prague square. After their unfortunate loss, we watched some Czechs sing with a random bum who started dancing for them and then headed to a bar with Jan and the manatees. We soon left to watch the American game on the square and laughed again at how terribly we played.
That night was open-museum night, so we headed to the museum of natural history. It was a nice museum, and it was funny because they actually had a manatee there! Then, that night we found a 80's/90's disco, and had a great time! We found out that Doug was quite a dancer and all enjoyed some classic American music.
The next day was finally Sunday, so we spent the day doing some shopping that everyone had been meaning to do (all I bought was more food, but I did think about getting stuff). We then watched the couple WM games, had more of the cheap but good Czech beer and then headed off that evening back on the train after getting some Indian food.
So I was going to try and get up to the present with this post, but last week, Kieler Woche (Kiel week which we checked out this last weekend) and this week will have to wait.
Hope you enjoyed the reading!

Woo-hoo Frankfurt (and the WM!)

Wow! So, I was wanting to do more posts here, but things have been getting really busy, so sorry for the long wait. But let's see, where to begin, since my last (first) post, quite a lot has been going on, so I guess I'll just start from where I left off. So two weeks ago Friday, I finished up with my last language course with my instructor Patricia and went out for some tea which was nice. And then went back to my brand new dorm room to try and move in. I found some people and started asking around as to how the whole frig system worked as that was on the top of my mind and not obvious. Amazingly, while I was asking where I could put my stuff, some other American guy named Nick overheard and came running as he had been at our dorms for a month and a half and had never figured out where he was supposed to put his food stuff. It was kinda sad, this guy had just ended up eating out for every meal instead of cooking and between that and enjoying the German culture at least every other night he was left with 500 Euro after he initially had taken out a $8,000 loan for the semester of study he was doing. Ouch! And he had another two months to live off that 500 Euro! I kinda felt bad for him and made a vow to limit myself to no more than 5 beers a night so I would not have the same fate. But we played some frisbee, he told me where to pick up some essential stuff like a blanket (so I wouldn't have to use my beach towel again) and a curtain (so I wouldn't have to feel awkward always allowing anyone to see into my room). Unfortunately when I first got a curtain, the picture on the package didn't quite look like the actual thing and I ended up having a one quarter blue and 3/4 some clear material curtain that actually made my room brighter instead of darker which I ended up not even putting up as it was counterproductive, so I continued lacking privacy until just a couple days back.
Then that night I met up with the other Frankfurt interns, which was great! So that night I met Eric from George Washington Univerity, Kim from University of Washington in St. Louis (who is amazingly like my Kim from Minneapolis!), and Doug from Carnegie Mellon. It was pretty amazing because all of these guys were kinda travel guru's. At least compared to me. Doug, for example, was enjoying his 5th time in Germany. And this has been awesome because these guys all have great ideas for stuff to do, where to go, and generally just like to have a good time. So, we enjoyed some Italian food that first night and started planning out other stuff to do. The next day, we started out watching X-Men 3 (very good!) and then headed up to Bergerstrasse where they were having a street festival. It was pretty good, we enjoyed some crepes and drinks and then met up with another intern Michelle (from Columbia) and one of her co-workers. Then that night, they were having a light show for the opening of the world cup. Kim's boss was going to meet up with us for this, so we met back at the Bergerstrasse festival and headed down to the river. Kim's boss was pretty impressive as he seemed to know just about every building in Frankfurt and told us a brief history of most of the buildings as we headed towards the river. Now Frankfurt city had spent 3.5 million Euro on this light show and the show was actually going to be projected onto 12 of the skysrcapers on the Frankfurt skyline. Amazingly, Kim's boss's girlfriend had a flat that overlooked the river and had a perfect view of downtown. So after picking up some drinks (and watching Doug be hoisted up and bounced around by some drunk German singing a soccer song), we went to her flat and watched the show from her balcony. Here's a couple pics...

So that was a good night, and we then planned on meeting again at the Bergerstrasse festival the next day and then go to the Modern Art Museum. After meeting up and having lunch, we realized that we didn't have too much time for the museum, so decided instead to head out of Frankfurt. We picked some town called Hanau and bought some wine to keep us occupied during the train ride. The wine was terrible (we should have know at 1.5 Euro for 1.5 liters), but the town was pretty nice. It was the birthplace of the brothers Grimm, so we first found a statue so we had done the history part...

Then we found a nice park and chilled, played on the playground and eventually found a Vietnamese place and had some pho.
We still had one more day left before work started (Monday was a holiday), so we decided that we would try to meet some more of the interns from the area and planned to go to Weisbaden. We hoped on the train, again with our wine, and headed down to first check out the thermal baths they had in the town. After getting some terrible directions from multiple people, we wandered around half the town, saw the wonderful casino that was the main attraction of the town (which was amazingly on the same piece of land as the court house), went through a pretty park and eventually made it to the thermalbads. They were pretty nice! Basically a glorified swimming pool but very refreshing. Then we headed to find some food and happened upon a tapas bar that had 3.00 Euro cocktail drinks before 10. So we ate quick and then order a table full of drinks before the special ended and waited for Mike from Weisbaden (who went to Indiana Univeristy).
The next day we had to start up work. I headed in after thankfully figuring out where to go not from my boss, who was on vacation, but from some American that worked at the company and had contacted me months ago. So I met up with him, Nazim, at my new work, did some paperwork stuff and then we started thinking about what I could do before my boss came back from vacation. There were a couple forms I had to get from the German government for housing and working, so I suggested getting that taken care of right as he got a call from his wife, Sally Hally. While talking to her, they decided that it would be good for me if she helped me out with this stuff. Which seemed fine, but I soon figured out that it was more good for her to help me out with doing these things as then she actually had something to do for the day instead of sit at home and do her boringly part-time job of caring for their house. So it was pretty funny, she wasn't overly annoying, but you could definitely tell that she didn't get out of the house much and certainly didn't have much chance to talk to people in English. So she got her native tongue talking in for the month and we went around Frankfurt figuring out that none of the things I needed to take care of could be done that day, had coffee, and went shopping. So it was a pretty hard first day! Oh yeah, forgot though, one of the things we did get accomplished was getting myself a monthcard for the trains which I hadn't yet gotten. Unfortunately just that morning I didn't quite realize all of the train rules and had to pay 40 Euro for fare-dodging :(
The next day, went in for work and my boss was back, and she is quite a character! She's probably about 4'10" and since she goes through 5-7 cups of coffee a day, she has more energy than all the other people on our floor combined. But she's been giving me German geography lessons, wants to play tennis sometime, and has already once called me another one of her sons, so I guess she likes me. I started out my job looking into how PET plants work, which is the type of polymer plant that they design. So the way the company works is they design an entire plant for a big commodity chemical company like Dow, and then sell the plant for about $50 million. I learned a couple days into the job that so far this year, the company has zero revenue. The usually don't do any more than 6-8 of these $50 MM projects a year, but still it's already over halfway through the year and they've gotten 0 contracts. So it's kinda too bad because then, of course, people have a lot to bitch about as the company is being cut from 220 employees to 110. But thankfully at only 500 Euro a month, they still have money for me, so I don't really care and just try to not bring the subject up unless I'm looking to waist the rest of my day away listening to someone's woes.
So that night, me and the interns planned on doing a picnic in the park. Michelle also brought her housemate Gonzo. So we met up and had our fill (Doug had brought an entire chicken, yummm) and then started to play some frisbee. After tossing around for awhile we decided to try a game of ultimate and invited two random German people that were tossing beside us to join. After playing long enough that the smokers in the group needed a break we chilled and found out that the German frisbee players played on Frankfurt's university team. Since I spoke the international language of ultimate, they invited me to join them for practices. Which I will talk about soon.....
The next night we met up again for some dinner at some hookah. The dinner was good but it ended up that the company was much better than the old flavored leaves they had for us.
Finally then, it was Friday! So we planned to watch the first WM game at a Brazillian bar recommended by Mario (Kim's boss) and had a great time watching Germany dominating Costa Rica (well, they did do respectibly I guess). We then headed to a different part of town and found a nice quiet bar where we got our own plasma screen (right across from an annoyingly crowded, not as nice bar where everyone packed in for the 20 cent cheaper beer) to watch the Poland-Ecuador game.
The next day we met up early (2) to get our game watching on. And when I say we, that means me, Kim, Eric, Doug, and Michelle. So anyways, we met up with Mike who brought along with him some other interns from his company, Opel, a division of GM. Two of the people he brought were Spainish girls who hadn't slept for 3 days which meant they were a little on edge. After ditching them we went to a park inbetween the England game and the later playing Argetina game and enjoyed some actually decent 2 Euro bottles of wine while playing ping-pong. It's pretty great, at 2 Euro a bottle, I've started to get quite a collection of wine bottles. After that we made it to a Thai bar and watched the Argetina game (who is now my team to cheer for compliments to Leo) and found the cheapest-so-far of our group's favorite beer here, Heferweizen.
So it's been kinda funny because I've figured out between all of the different restaurants there are here and all the people I've seen that this place is not too different from Minneapolis. Frankfurt it actually the most international city in Germany, so walking down the street, you'll see about 60% white people, 15% asian, 10% black, and then the rest just a mix of people from everywhere else. Then between that and there being just about every type of restaurant you could think of, basically Frankfurt looks a lot like Minneapolis, except everyone speaks German instead of English and the streets are a lot more confusing.
But then the next day was Sunday, and we all felt like relaxing, so we found a place in Frankfurt where they had imported a bunch of sand to make a "resort" beside the river (which you couldn't swim in, only look at). The place we really nice and we all worked on our tans (sorry, now the we includes Mike, too), drank a bucket of sangria, and played some ping-pong.
Then the week started again, and my new assignment at work was to read more about PET plants while my boss went out of the country. So this week of work was really boring. Basically I pretended to get through the 1000 page book they gave me while looking up things and talking on the internet.
But outside of work, the week was great! On Monday we had a banquet for all of the interns in the area as well as other Americans in Germany like the Fulbright students and other such people. We were treated to all you can eat burgers, hotdogs and pork steaks (I stopped after one of each and an additional burger) and to the pathetic domination of the US team by the Check Republic (did anyone else watch? we just didn't look good). It was pretty funny though because although our group of interns always would have drinks whenever we hung out, we never had anyone go over the top. However that night with the free bar, we ended up having a couple people go 10 sails to the east (or however that goes). So I ended up giving someone a piggy back ride for about 3 blocks to her train (which she ended up getting off of too early and found herself in some thorn bushes but eventually made it back and to work the next day), and definitely enjoyed myself.
Finally then, yesterday I met up with the frisbee players at one of their practices and had a great time with that! I guess this team needs more players for the tournaments they're planning on doing which are all over Europe. So... that'll be fun. And then also there's a separate team called mother tongue consisting of English speakers that I might join, too. So these guys practice 3 times a week, and I think I might have to be joining them fairly often. We then watched the Brazillian game and thought it was hillarious how the Croatians were partying in the streets afterwords since they only lost 1-0 to Brazil.
Well, now I have to go, which is good because I'm basically done, but where I'm going is to Prague for our 4 day weekend, so hopefully I'll have a good time there! And then next weekend we're planning to go to Kiel for the biggest sailing festival in the world, which should be a good time, too. Alright, so I have a lot more pics, but not much time, so sometime soon I'll make a post with more of those. And as I promised, here's my address so everyone can send me wonderful things,

Kris Erickson, B10
F. W. von Steuben Strasse 90
60488 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Take care all and thanks for reading!
(oh yeah, here's a pic of Alte Oper, the opera place)

Here in Germany!

So finally I have a place with a constant and free internet connection, so I'm starting up my blog! I've been here in Germany for about a week now, and so far it's been slow but good. My trip started out interestingly as my program director, Tamsin, sent me an e-mail telling me where the hostel was that I had a reservation for which somehow took 4 days to get to me, meaning that when I was leaving for Germany, I had no clue where I was supposed to be staying once I got there. Thankfully, my parents lined me up with a hotel for the first night and then I figured I could find a place after that first night. So my first night in Germany was rather simple, collapsing on my bed from jet lag and then trying to get further along in my "German for Dummies" book.
I then found a hostel 5 minutes from downtown, right in the middle of the red light district of Frankfurt, full of shops and ladies standing on the street corners (as well as full of families with their kids), and checked in there for the next night. As this is the only hostel I could find using all English sites, I shouldn't have been surprised that most of the people at this place were Americans. So it was pretty fun, met a couple cool people, had kebobs with Annabel from Washington State and then ran into a brother and sister from North Dakota. The sister, Sarah, went to the U of M and actually recognized me from coming into The Tea Garden where she worked. Imagine that! So we had a good time, found some other people from California and a guy from Finland, Anti, and went out for a some beers. We also tried out Frankfurt's specialty, apfelwien (apple wine), which was, well, pretty bland.
The next day I had finally gotten the e-mail from Tamsin and then checked into the place she had set up for me at the Haus der Jugend. Once I checked into this place and had another hostel to compare it to, I realized that the Stay and Learn hostel from before was actually just about as sketchy as the area where it was located. But this new place was nice! Basically like a nice hotel room (since Tamsin got me a single), and, best of all, 3 all you can eat meals a day! That was definitely really nice. The worst part was that since none of the English hostel search sites found this place, there weren't really any Americans but instead just a whole bunch of high school age tours groups constantly playing soccer in the halls. I started to wish that I hadn't given up soccer when I was, hmmm, about 13, but then I figured that it was a little too late for wishing and instead started doing things I would always think about doing "if I just had some free time." So I did quite a bit of reading, my German book and then a translated German book (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), did some running, and some drawing, and whatever else I felt like doing. Oh yeah, and I also had started doing some language courses which have been fun, but I think it's going to be awhile before I can speak any decent German with anyone. So far I'm working on signs. I've gotten pretty good at the simple ones, like V. M. von Steuben Strasse. That means V. M. of Steuben Street. Pretty good, huh?
But things are looking up, I'm meeting up with the other interns here in Frankfurt tomorrow, having coffee with my language instructor, and will hopefully meet a couple more people at my new place in the Catholic dorms in north-west Frankfurt. Then I start up work on Monday ANNDD now I have internet so I can search around for the other places I want to go to while I'm here in Germany :)
So, congrats to all, or maybe the one, that actually made it to the end of this post, and I will be inserting some pictures from my wonderful Tour von Deutschland as soon as I find a USB chord for my camera which I forgot back in the States (doh!).

Tschüss!