My Life is Good.

Really, it is. If I can say, "Oh, I'm not doing much today. I'm just going to hop on a train to Bremen," then I can't justifiably say that life is anything but good.

Hey, look! I've been mentioned in my department's blog! Take a look here: UAH History News.

This is going to be another one of those sectioned off posts, seeing as I have much to talk about: my travels to Hannover and Bremen over the course of two days. I will save some reflections about my stay overall for a post later today. So, stay tuned.

This is going to be a very long post.


Hannover

So, I took a trip with Maryle and her university friend, Sarah, to Hannover Tuesday. To give a bit of background, Sarah is traveling through Europe at this very moment, and she stopped by Celle to visit Maryle. In addition to this, I have two (actually, three, but we'll get to that) friends from the Fulbright orientation who live in Hannover, and we had been planning for awhile to meet up. So, it naturally made sense to have all of us meet in Hannover for a free tour of the pretty parts of the city.

And this is how the day went. (I'm not going to leave you hanging; it went very well.)

I arrived at the (rather dingy) Celle Bahnhof rather early, since I'm entirely too punctual when planning trips and whatnot. I called Maryle to notify her of my arrival, and she informed me that she and Sarah were on their way and would be at the station in twenty-five minutes. So, I waited around for that allotted amount of time and started wondering why they were late. I got a call from Maryle...and the poor women missed their bus. So, they literally power-walked to the station, which takes about roughly forty minutes from Maryle's place to this particular destination. We missed our desired train, but, as there are many trains that go through Celle to Hannover, we managed to catch a train not long after their Power Walk 2009.

Upon our arrival at Hannover, we set about finding our way to Ernst Augustus Platz, which is where my friend, Bill, had said he would meet us "unter dem Schwanz," or under the tail, of the Ernst Augustus statue. Notice that I said "he," as in one solitary person. I suppose you can imagine my surprise when not one, but three, people were there (after I had, you know, looked right at Sara and passed them). That's right; Bill, Sara (my roommate in Altenberg), and Patrick (another Fulbrighter whom I had passingly known at orientation) were our tour guides for the afternoon. This is rife with awesome.

So, we six travelers traipsed about Hannover, viewing mostly the Altstadt of the city, which, along with almost everything else in Hannover, had been reconstructed after World War II because of the British bombings. We toured the Marktkirche, viewed in a professional manner some mildly suggestive statues in the park bordering the Altstadt, procured some lunch at the Markthalle (an American-type mall), and ended our six-person tour at the Neues Rathaus. I received a really neat history lesson of Hannover from Bill at the Rathaus, with the four large models of the city on the courthouse's ground floor. The difference between the 1939 and the 1945 models is striking.

As I desired to go to the Niedersaesisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Maryle and Sarah split off from the group to go a-wandering, and my Hannoverian comrades walked with me to the art museum. On the way, my tour guides showed me the St.-Aegidienkirche, which had also been obliterated by British bombing. However, as a memorial, the church was left in shambles, which provides a stark contrast to the rest of the city. This was one of my favorite landmarks that my tour guides showed me. After going to the wrong museum, we found our way to my desired destination, and I left my benevolent friends in pursuit of high Aht.

Now, I must make a digression here because I love art museums. During my trip to Germany last year, my main activity was literally perusing art museums. "Hey, let's do fun stuff!" "No, I'd rather fill my lungs with the dust of dead people's masterpieces." I was not disappointed with Hannover's collection, though I will say that when the museum proudly proclaims to house such works as Monet, Botticelli, Rembrandt, and Rubens (and Renoir! A lovely surprise), it usually means that there is one of each, and not famous ones, at that. But, hey, I'm not complaining. There was also an impressive collection of Caspar David Friedrich and Max Liebermann. That was really cool.

(We're almost done here, kids.) Upon meeting Maryle and Sarah, we three, two Cellers and a world traveler, jaunted down to the Hannover "Oktoberfest," otherwise known as the German State Fair. It was amusing to view the different attractions, though the two most interesting ones involved a horrid airbrushed illustration of Chuck "WTF" Norris and a mechanized contraption that I dubbed the Child Molester Crocodile With the Beer Gut and the Long "Tail." So, after snapping a few photos of the oddities of Oktoberfest, our weary souls and our weary...soles returned to Celle for the night.

Since Hannover is a short jog from Celle, my adventures in this city are far from over, I imagine. However, this trip was a nice introduction to the city of the Georges.


Bremen

Ah, Bremen! So many adventures and misadventures! Bremen, I love you. Thursday!

Oh, you'll get the reference when you read the story.

The send off to Bremen went a lot more smoothly than to Hannover, since buses weren't early and trains were on time. The two and a half hours of travel passed uneventfully, and we arrived in Bremen around 11:40, giving us much time to go a-wandering about the city on a Wednesday, a day all of us had assumed would be a grand time for tours and whatnot.

Have I mentioned that things like tours are not offered on Wednesday, but on Thursday? I didn't? Well, imagine that.

Maryle, Sarah, and I had planned on taking the Beck's brewery tour. That was closed until Thursday. Then Maryle noticed that there was also a Mercendes-Benz tour. Hey, guess what? That was also closed until Thursday. So, we three, standing in the rain and wondering what to do (and laughing pretty much the entire time), headed over to the Bremen Altstadt with no particular agenda. This actually turned out to be a very nice time, with our own improvised tour of the flashy things that Bremen has to offer its tourists.

Marktplatz is a rather impressive center of a German Altstadt. Despite the constant rain, the layout and the attractions of Marktplatz were admittedly quite beautiful. We strolled about the Altes Rathaus, viewed the Roland statue, walked around inside the St. Petri Dom (one of my favorite cathedrals of my stay so far), found the famous Bremer Stadtmusikanten statue (smaller than I had anticipated, but really cool nonetheless), and wandered inside the Unser Lieben Frauen Kirche. At this point, we had lunch at the German fast food place called Nordsee, where Maryle retold the story of the Bremer Stadtmusikanten in the vivid way that only Maryle can. This is a good thing, by the way.

During the events mentioned above, we three naturally took photos. While Maryle was taking a picture of us, she said "Thursday!" instead of the standard "Cheese!" that has become ingrained in American culture. So, that is how a new catchphrase has entered into my life. However, it must be uttered only on Wednesday.

After lunch, we set off to find the Kunsthalle, an art museum that both Maryle and I had dearly wanted to view. So, as is the norm with travelers, we three trekked through a very beautiful park, the Wallanlagen, and stumbled upon the Theatersgarten, which is a memorial for the Theater that once stood there before its destruction in World War II. Then, we made our way to the Kunsthalle.

It was closed. For renovations. For two years.

I think this is when we realized that, in a fit of laughter, that we just needed a beer and to sit down and chat. So, upon our tour through Schnoor, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art/blacksmith/shopping district of Bremen, we sat down at a restaurant (with a closed kitchen, by the way) and had our Beck's.

I believe that, during the rest of our trip, we realized just how cool it was that we three had been traveling together for two days. As Sarah and I had talked about before our train to Bremen, we had known that we are incredibly lucky to be making our way through Europe at such a young age. But, I think Sarah summed it up quite nicely when she said, "Guys, thanks so much for being awesome and traveling with me these two days" as we walked up to a random Bremen windmill...because, really, I had a great time traveling with Maryle and Sarah, particularly on our misadventures in Bremen. So, upon bidding farewell to Sarah at her hostel, Maryle and I returned to Celle.

Celle, a town that has the crappiest bus schedule in the history of mankind. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say, Maryle and I managed to return to our homes.

Hannover and Bremen in two days. Who would have thought?