Time out from the World

One of the things Tübingen is famous for (which also means Tübingen is also the only place where this happens) is punting. Tourists do it in big groups, wedding receptions do it, families do it, everyone is doing it. Apart from me. The closest I had come to one of these boats was at the race where I had left my camera's memory card in my laptop. That was fun as each boat was dressed up in fancy dress, The royal wedding, Guantamo Bay, Aliens, you get the picture. Last week I was invited to go on one, and I did not say no. It was someone's leaving party which meant there were two boat-loads of us.Also it made a change to not be sat in the beergarden watching the people in the little boats go by. Having said that, no one in this photo is paying us any attention. How rude.

It may look very relaxing but it was almost stressful at times, as it is one of the most unstable things I have ever been in, we were constantly having to change our posture to keep everything balanced so we didn't fall in. Luckily I had a plastic bag with me for valuables, until I realised I can't take photos through a bag and I won't have time to put my camera in the bag and tie it up before we enter the water.

Luckily no one fell in and it was really nice.

Everyone on the river just likes to relax.Then we grilled on the island in the middle of the river- lovely. Unfortunately it got a bit stormy after that and I went home. I was quite please when I saw this from my window though.

Heidelberg

As I haven't really been that many places in Germany since I've been here, I decided to go to Heidelberg, as I've heard it's nice. Luckily 2 friends came with me which meant we could get a group ticket, which cut the cost down nicely.

Look who was waiting to greet us when we arrived:
It turns out everyone's (second/third) favourite catholic is visiting Germany, it's such a shame I won't be there.
This is the bridge. It is a very famous bridge, and I know that it was built as a replacement for all the other wooden ones which got swept away by very high water.
They've also dammed the river up a bit so it will probably never get that high again. Then we went inside the schloß, which was very pretty but a bit disapplointing. There was no information inside, so we didn't learn anything. I'm not someone to stand and read everything but, a little bit of information about what this room used to be and how so and so used to do this and that here and there. It is quite a rotten castle, only ruins and a big tower which is half collapsed.

The lighting was really bad so I only look one photo really. It is of a huge barrel of wine. When does a barrel become a vat? Maybe it is a vat. It was very large anyway, as this photo shows the size of the curves against humans.
Luckily there was some information about this (literally the only information there was I think...) and it was never completely full and leaked a lot of wine so they decided just to use it as decoration.

After that we decided to find a beergarden as it was so hot and we we're hungry and thirsty. Mmm. It turned out to be a beergarden which served Cuban food.

Where shall I do my next daytrip to? I probably shouldn't as I have exams until I leave, but they don't actually count at all, as long as I have learned the material for them. Hoorah!

...To Say I Love You

My second guest was Celia. One of the things we did was take a boat on the Neckar just like Laura and I did, but you can imagine the photos from the last post. (I didn't have my camera with me and I didn't get those ones off of Celia...)

Something else we did on the spur of the moment was go to Bebenhausen- the monastery. We were there just as the sun was going down.

We thought we were too late, as the sun was no longer shining in the cloister.
We were mistaken though. It turned out we had picked the perfect day to visit Bebenhausen. A door into the inner cloister was open (you normally need to pay) so we went in and found lots of people wearing fancy clothes and drinking sekt. Just as we were about to turn around and go, someone said to us, "Oh its an German American Institute event, but you're not disturbing anyone... You could even have a glass of wine and no one would know." How nice. We did this.

We also took her words to mean "you can help yourselves to the buffet as much as you like." I think we both had 4 sandwiches each, but I was very disappointed that there was no dessert- let alone multiple desserts in one bowl. We knew that we were not alone in our deceit as there was a family who live in my halls of east Asian decent, also helping themselves. They left at about the same time as us. On our way through the little village, before the long uphill climb back to where I live, we stopped for some fun on the big swing in the playground. The photo is blurry but it was fun.
We couldn't have an intensive sight-seeing programme, because most of the things to do round here involve walking to castles, and the weather forecast was bad the whole time. We did go to the castle in Tuebingen, which is an archaeology museum. Afterwards before we decided to go to the cinema, we went to the "Schloßcafe," a pub near the castle, where you can play games. We played scrabble- it is very difficult to play in a language if it is not your mother tongue. We could only use short words. Our scores are on this photo, but after a while it became too depressing and we started making words and phrases of our own.

For those of you for some reason not fluent in Dutch, this means "Oh how nice." The Dutch say it a lot. Wat leuk.
There was still time for some touristy photo taking and a last icecream. This photo, although not so flattering, shows two of my favourite things- the occasional icecream and sitting on the wall over the river.
Thank you to both of you for visiting me :) I will be seeing you soon!

I Just Called...

Here is another severely overdue post.

Recently (or not so recently in the first case) I had the pleasure of being visited by two of my best friends from Newcastle. The first was my farming friend Laura. The second will remain a mystery until I get round to that post, unless you know already.

One of the first things we did was a Tübingen must- Take a boat on the river!

The river Neckar flows up north and joins up with the Rhein at some point near Heidelberg or Mannheim I think. I'm not sure as we didn't go that far to check it out. We went around the long island in the river and had a picnic.

For long stretches no one was at the wheel (we were busy eating messy olives etc,) which explains our occasional crashes.
At one point we ran into a family of ducks, almost literally. We were going along leisurely and the ducklings floated off round the side of our boat, round the back to where the propellers were. We had to stop pedalling immediately to prevent any duck soup incidents.
Afterwards, or certainly at some point we went for ice cream at one of my favourite ice cream-eating-spots- The wall. Known to those who love it as the Neckarmauer, it is on one side of the river, and is brilliant for eating ice cream whilst watching the boats go pass by. This was also when I first tried out lemon and basil ice cream- interesting and very nice.

We also decided to go to Lichtenstein. Not the country of course, that would be silly. It probably wouldn't be that far to go, but knowing Deutsche Bahn, it would cost loads and the train would be late. Contrary to popular UK belief, German trains are not that much better than our own apart from the ice train (Inter City Express. It's a kind of high-speedish train.) I'm digressing. No, we went to Schloss Lichtenstein- a castle built by a (mad) man who was obsessed by the Novel Lichtenstein. It isn't large, but its appearance is striking. For poor students who don't own a car it also means about an hour on foot up hill in the sweltering heat before you reach the top. I think it was worth it though.As Laura has a nice DSLR camera we had a mini photoshoot.
And after all our hard work we needed a beer in the beergarden.

The next day we went to Bebenhausen, a monastry within walking distance of where I live.

An interesting door:
And the photoshoot continued.
And lots of silly behaviour.
It was really nice, because we hadn't seen each other for such a long time. I'm looking forward to more fun, although less in the sun as we will be in Newcastle, but it will be good all the same.