Trier – Old Roman Home

Trier Altstadt

I do have to say that during this trip, I’ve seen many facets of my old home I wouldn’t have considered to be particularly exciting as they turned out to be. Aside from living close to Belgium and Luxembourg, we also live close to Treve or Trier: Officially the oldest city in Germany – built by Romans and severely influenced by the old Roman culture.

Trier has come into existence as early 2000 years ago – as a city NOT just a settlement. Its per capita rate has been up and down, but remains at a steady 100,000 citizen rate for the past decades.
Now, aside from Trier having some shopping opportunities, bars, and clubs, there is much more to see culturally speaking.

The most striking feature about it is the Porta Nigra, roughly translating to “Black Gate.” The Porta used to be light grey when it was built around 200 AC but over the years it has turned into its distinct black color. Built by the Romans, it has been modified over the years and been fully reconstructed by Napoleon in the 19th century. Since the medieval ages it is officially called “Black Gate” and it has gone through centuries of history one cannot fully comprehend. Among other landmarks of Trier, the Porta was designated a World Heritage Site.

Porta Nigra with a cute sightseeing car in front of it

The Amphitheater was built around 100 AD and used to host 18,000 crowd-hungry people in the past. It still stands nowadays and is a common place for the so-called Brot & Spiele (Bread & Circuses) during the summer. This is the biggest Roman-inspired festival in Germany, showing gladiator fights and showcasing old Roman stories. Sometimes well-known German actors and actresses participate in these shows, which makes for an even bigger audience.

The Imperial Roman baths were built around 400 AD and show the Roman bathing culture back in the days. Visitors are able to see the different pools, to learn more about its history and to walk around the grounds. It’s an interesting concept, albeit I dare say a bit overpriced (such as most cultural sights in Trier).

Bikes close to the Dom

Then you have the Dom of Trier, which is a beauty to look at once you stop by. During the winter months leading up to the holidays you will find a neat Holiday Market around it and the city’s market place. It’s pretty large and vendors come from as far as Luxembourg and Belgium.

During the summer, the city hosts its annual Altstadtfest (Old City fest), which starts at the Porta Nigra and goes all the way through the pedestrian zone until it ends at the Viehmarkt. It’s humongous and you can find many good vendors during the day as well as great wines in the evening. Since it’s usually in June, the weather is warm enough to be walking around outside and taking in the activities. There are bands, entertainers, an amusement park, and much more, meaning you can either go there by yourself or with the entire family.
In addition to this, you will also find many smaller wine fests in the town surrounding Trier, as it lies on the river Moselle, which is a well-known vine region throughout the world. The most striking feature (aside from the red wall when you enter the city) are the amount of vineyards you see once you walk along the Moselle river. Vine fests usually take place in July and August. Trier’s Weinfest is in the beginning of August and if you are really into vine, you should certainly check it out!

Among the Moselle River

Other than the cultural sights and annual events going on, I have to say that Trier is pretty boring. I am not a big fan of their night life, as I’ve already pointed out in Deutschland: The First Few Days back in 2011. True, you can walk past the Karl-Marx-House on your way to bars, but really, who wants that? Most of the time, the places are rather deserted (at least throughout fall to spring) or don’t host a quality audience I can connect to. And the clubs have rather crappy than great music. I guess I am simply over the fact of going out close to home but I also find this to be for a good reason. While I was there in April, I enjoyed taking some good shots and walking in and out of stores but at the same time, I was essentially bored in this city. Trier – worth the visit but move on after!

[For more pictures on Trier, go to Trier – Old Roman Home (I) and Trier – Old Roman Home (II).]

Traveling Through Europe: Die Bahn

As far as I remember, getting around Europe and especially Germany had never been as tedious and complicated as relying on public transport in the States. A trip to Paris in 2009 had only taken me 3 hours by train from Mannheim. Flying out to Austria that same year was accomplished by taking a cheap and fast shuttle to the airport Hahn. Easy.

This time I didn’t want to rely on my parents’ car during my stay, so I remembered the easy-going, well-working public infrastructure and confidently checked my options for getting from their place to Heidelberg, which is a two and a half hour drive by car – depending on speed and traffic, that is. The only way to comfortably travel would be through a railway company called “Die Deutsche Bahn” (DB), probably comparable to the National Rail in UK and not comparable to anything Americans have (Amtrak included). DB offers discounted tickets and packages to get from one European city to another, such as when taking a train from Cologne to Amsterdam or Paris, which can be as low as 60 Euro per ride but only takes two to three hours at the most. A trip from the Eifel, namely Bitburg to Heidelberg and back, was in about the same price range, which is really not that much considering the high amount of connecting trains you have to catch as the Eifel is very isolated. So when I booked my ticket I was glad that I had gotten a better deal than driving a car down there as dealing with the horrendous gas prices, which were around €1.50/l (roughly converts to $8.00/gal, compare the NYC average at $3.75/gal!), would have cost me way more than relying on the train system.

The entire ride to Heidelberg was supposed to take 4 hours, and perhaps half an hour more on the way back, a Sunday evening.

It already started pretty bad good: The train entering Bitburg was 2 minutes late. This might not seem like a big deal to Americans, as their trains are constantly late. But in Germany every connecting train has a tight schedule to follow. With a 2 minutes delay I only had 4 minutes to catch the train to Saarbrücken in Trier. I even almost made it to the right platform and was about to laugh out loud at how lucky I was when the ICE zoomed right past me towards the Southern tip of the rail. As I had been ignorant of North and South, I had stepped off the Northern end and there was no way I would make it to the South within one minute. Sure enough, just as I sprinted across the platform and arrived at the rear end of the last wagon, the train shut its doors (so much to waiting for paying customers!) and rode off – leaving me looking about as stupid as it gets at a train station in the middle of nowhere. This time I was rather lucky, though, as the person handling customer requests was having a good day and switched my ticket to a fast train going over Koblenz but directly into Heidelberg, meaning I would not have to switch at all anymore during the entire trip. So after about 5 hours I made it to my destination and thought it couldn’t get worse on my way back.

Boy was I wrong!

Sunday evening approached and 20 minutes before the train was scheduled to depart a thunderstorm set in, sending buckets of rain to the ground. Almost as bad as hurricane Irene. So before I had even started my trip my train back home was already delayed. This time I was supposed to switch two times during the trip but I had to stand in line at customer service again, because I would have surely missed the connecting train in Mannheim (since I had seven minutes of time). The train was 20 minutes late, the customer service agent was about as unfriendly as she could get and only grumpily stamped my ticket after I had pointed out to her that I would surely be kicked out of the train immediately without this form of approval. The best part was when she almost spat at me in her Eastern German accent and my friend standing next to me, a former Eastern European herself, looked as if she wanted to kill her for misrepresenting her part of the country so badly. I still laugh at this image in my head today.

The 20 mins delay in Heidelberg

Looong story told a teeny bit shorter: I took my delayed first train, which went straight through to Koblenz (up North, before going down South to Trier again – don’t ask me where the logic is). As it turns out, this particular train was experiencing a few difficulties along the way and had to be rerouted across a different bridge when passing through Mainz. Especially this last reroute caused a delay of one hour when arriving in Koblenz. Of course my connecting train to Trier was long gone by then. As I made it once again down to the customer service booth, I saw a pretty lost- and confused-looking American standing behind me, who was going the same direction (to Bitburg) and didn’t have a clue of how to communicate with these people (their English was rather moderate). Since we were going the same way, they told us to take the last ICE that evening, which would arrive in 20 minutes (this one was another 20 minutes too late, I really wonder what was going on that day). From Trier, though, there would be no connecting train to Bitburg considering the “late” hour of 11 PM, so they wrote us a coupon for a taxi. A TAXI! When all I wanted to take was the train. A cab ride from Trier to Bitburg is another 25 minutes, I assume. After seeing that our very last train was late, too, I gave up and called my mother. She said she could pick us up in Wittlich, which is only 40 minutes from their house. The American was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get a cab to his destination with his moderate skills in German and we gave him a ride to Bitburg. Both of us were simply glad when we made it back home and were able to escape the horrors of this adventurous, tedious, ridiculous trip!

So, in conclusion: A four and a half hour train ride ended up taking me six (!) hours on the road. I wouldn’t have made it to my destination by train but would have had to rely on means of taxi and the help of others. Only because I was able to understand what customer service told me I understood the concept of adjusting to new connecting trains (imagine foreigners trying to understand the chaos going on that day! Awful!).

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such an epic fail in public transportation in Germany. And I don’t think I ever want to do so, either. So the next time I’m planning on getting around to places which are less than 3 hours away, I will TAKE A CAR AND GLADLY PAY THOSE 8 Dollars per gallon! It’s better than having my time wasted and my nerves strained than having to go through something like this ever again!

Zänk juh for träwelling wis Deutsche Bahn.

Pictures I took on the way to and fro (since I had plenty of time):

Didn't even know they still had these!

Village on the river Moselle on my way to Koblenz

A train station I never wanted to see

Deutschland: The First Few Days

After this tremendously stress-free flight I jumped off the plane in FRA International Airport – well-rested and ready for the culture shock I thought I would experience after one and a half years of abstinence from Europe. Wrong! It never hit me, I have to admit. I thought it would take me at least a few days to adjust to the small roads, small cars, small everything in Germany but I guess I had already prepared myself mentally towards this or perhaps New York is not too different from Europe after all. The first thing I got was a cheese/egg/lettuce/cucumber/ and tomato sandwich from a German bakery at the airport. So good! That was truly the one thing I missed the most: The healthy food you can find practically everywhere without even having to look very hard. Freshly baked pastries, tasty delights. Oh how hard it is to get this quality in flavor over here!

My mother picked me up on that day and we both voted for stopping in Koblenz on our two-and-a-half hour drive home. Even though the first of September usually means fall in Germany, the sun was shining quite warm on this day and the following days so I didn’t mind soaking up its last rays before I would be left in the cold, which I knew was coming. Now Koblenz is a city whose history reaches way back into the early 800 BC (and, believe it or not, this is not that old in terms of Europe). You can look up all the facts on wiki here, but what I want to tell you is that is about the only city that has two major rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle, flowing through it which both unite at a point or rather a “corner” in town called the Deutsches Eck. This spot along with its medieval Castle Burg Eltz has made this city so popular for school trips and educational excursions, as I recall my childhood time when our teachers wanted to drag us to Koblenz for an extended weekend.

Well, the city surely revealed its glamorous side when I stopped by as the Bundesgartenschau (in short: BUGA) was going on: The national flower show held once every two years from April to October. Supposedly Koblenz was hosting it in 2011 and we strolled past many colorful flower fields and creative designs laid out on the ways along the river Rhine. We hesitated to buy a ticket as we only had three hours before it closed for the day and I eventually decided against this but I am sure it must have been a great event to witness if you were to have at least half a day of time. If you are into these things, you should make a trip out there before it ends in October… Or come back next year!
Koblenz has many more things to offer, of course, and here are some great shots of random lovelies I’ve stumbled across on our walk:

Reflections

Inside the church

Random wine cellars we walked by

Wine cellar

People of Koblenz enjoying the day along the rhine

We ended our “short” trip with an Italian meal at a random café laid out on the river and I really enjoyed my quattro-formaggio-pizza while Mom got an order of pasta flavored with a mushroom sauce. Both of us couldn’t eat up so we took our left-overs home.

The next day I was in for a night out in Trier with two of my close friends from high school. Trier is really nothing special to me anymore, as I’ve grown up in the area and had to endure long shopping trips, a few party nights and other random events you get to do between child- and adulthood. I know it well and that is probably why I fail to see and appreciate its beauty sometimes.

Trier is the oldest city in Germany. It has many Roman sites such as the Amphitheater, the Porta Nigra, which used to be white but has turned black over the course of centuries, the Roman baths and and and… The list goes on! Aside from Roman architecture you can take a good look at Christian buildings in forms of churches, domes, and cathedrals. It is quite beautiful, I suppose. And for historians it is a true treasure for so many different eras are covered beneath those cobble stone ways.
So that particular night my friends and I walked past the Dome, which happened to be shining brightly in the moonlight and I took a picture of this. We ended up going to three different bars at first, then an underground club in a basement, another bar, and taking a random tour with drunken guys, past the Karl Marx house, into a laid-off bar where only drunks hang out and eventually driving back home, only a car ride away.

Dome of Trier highly illuminated by night

Paintings in the hallway to the restrooms at a random bar

Us enjoying cocktails

A random guy we walked past and who had obviously partied unitl he dropped...

The Karl Marx House in Trier

The evening was fun for I got to see my friends again but I have to say that Trier’s nightlife was disappointingly empty on that particular night. This fact might be the main reason why I consider this city to be boring, for if you cannot have fun in the evening then it’s hard to get a hold of its flair during the day.

But please do not get a wrong impression, as I failed to mention the most important asset of this region:

For those of you who like to drink, Trier lies next to the Moselle, which is known for its great wines, and the towns and villages around it host wine fests throughout the entire summer until early September. So if you ever make it into this area, be sure to get a box or two of finest Moselle wine, it really is a great treat!

Time to Say Good-bye

The time has come to conclude this week’s posts with a good-bye, see you soon writing.
Irene has flooded, hurdled, and winded New York a bit and even induced the temporary closing of JFK for an entire weekend ( I hope Irene is very proud of herself!) but she has not managed to delay my flight to FRA (Frankfurt International Airport) today. Therefore, I will be getting out of this despicable dirt hole whirling madhouse city called the Big Apple in less than 24 hours, which is this night, September 1st (I know, most ideal date to fly!). The plan is to come back on Sept 18 (There, I even gave you the EXACT date! Hah!), but who knows if I ever decide to take that plane back… Homesickness is still there. Well, until I made up my mind, I am nonetheless planning on rejoining my very different life in the city of New York on Sunday in two and a half weeks.

Since I am going on a vacation, I doubt I will be able to update you with new stuff from the continent of Europe. However, don’t hesitate do click on here once in a while, as there are many old posts that deserve some reading. For the ultimate list of highlights, check out this link.

And if you get bored with reading through the most recent posts and the top ten, how about you do some discovering on your own? Especially for those subscribers who have joined me pretty recently in the past few weeks, just go here to start from the beginning. 18 days is a nice time to read through one post after another, you could do it two posts a day, three posts a day, or no posts a day – however you want.

The plan is to go home for a week, then visit old friends at my former university town until I hit London up for a stay of four days (I know, waaay too short). Thus, I’ll be seeing at least one new exciting place, as I have never been to UK before, and I’m sure it will be an interesting adventure. I am actually itching to know how the Brit capital compares to the biggest metropolis of the US, but I have the feeling these two cities do not like to be compared to each other, after all…

See you soon, folks! Hope I’ll have some new pictures I’ll be able to show you soon and some funny stories I can share with you. Arrivederci, Au Revoir, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Bye and tune in for more news in September!
Winke Winke!

A Few Words on Heimweh

The first feeling of homesickness showed up unannounced on my doorstep on January 15, 2011. I remember this day so exactly because it was the day I thought I would turn crazy. All the ups and downs of emotions I was going through and all the things I was trying to do to prevent this feeling from slowly taking me over – oh how I still know it all too well. I posted a long status on homesickness on my Facebook page. I shot a video about homesickness with my cell phone camera. I wrote down a journal entry on homesickness. Nothing seemed to help. I went through weeks of sadness and pain, only increased by the bland, gray winter that had taken over New York.

My Austrian friend finally gave me a good tip. She said I should not dwell on this feeling but rather distract myself with other things to do. To emphasize her point, she wrote me a few nice lines and gave me some treasure hunts to accomplish. This finally gave me the idea of discovering new places and trying out new locations in New York and around, albeit it was in a hurtful manner I took these on, for my heart was still aching every time I thought about Germany.

Up until recently I didn’t notice that I had probably never overcame the feeling of homesickness after it took me over in January. When I booked my ticket en route home a few months ago I finally felt a relief of several sorts. First, I was happy to set foot back again in the country of honey and milk. Second, I couldn’t wait to see those few friends who hadn’t made it out to a visit during the past one and a half years. Third, I was desperate to travel to more locations in Europe to check out some other big cities.

I had felt so good in the beginning, because New York had kept me busy for the first 9 months of my voyage. Even though I had a return flight scheduled for August of 2010, I never took this opportunity to go back because I felt no need to fly home after five months already. I wanted to wait until I had achieved something I could tell my friends and family about. The airline set the ticket back and determined the latest date I could use it would be March of 2011. The closer this date drew, the more I knew I would not be able to afford to go back in spring by means of time and money. Maybe this is also when I realized that the date I would return home would be indefinite and it could have triggered some negative thoughts about being stuck in New York.
Indeed, a friend from France thought it not wise to stay away from home for so long. He makes the effort of going back to Bordeaux every now and then, in intervals of four to five months. I consider this not to be a bad idea, either, when looking at how many weeks I have felt miserable just because I couldn’t take my thoughts of the question of when would I be able to return home.

I had effectively managed to keep myself quite busy in the months before: There was so much to explore in this area that I felt satisfied just walking up and down the streets – watching the people, the buildings, and the surroundings. Truly, I felt quite the opposite way: Whenever I thought of having to return home, a feeling of pressure overcame me. I knew it was not yet my time, there were still so many things undone in the Big Apple, which had to be carried out first. I had German friends here, who brought with them the native language and the European mentality I was really not missing all too much in 2010.

On top of this all, I was distracted from the so-called family-oriented holidays because of my visitors during these crucial times: Two of my closest German friends paid me a visit during the two big holidays in fall. For Thanksgiving my friend from high school came to New York and stayed for one week straight. We had our own dinner-to-say-thanks and brushed off the chaos of Black Friday with a laugh. During the Christmas days, known as the ultimate family holiday, my friend of the past 15 years came to Brooklyn with her younger sister and I never thought about being home for a second. They also brought many German sweets which lasted a month and stilled my cravings for home-known food.

Thus, November and December were quite tolerable. January was different. January brought the cold and made me hate winter for the first time here. I couldn’t bear the thought of witnessing yet another snow fall. I was convinced I would never see the light of day, not to mention spring, in the City again. The summer seemed so far away and like another era long passed and certainly never to return. Everything appears to be more depressing during winter days over here, so it certainly did not do much in alleviating my sorrow.

After giving into my pain for a while, I jumped into the opposite direction and right onto the travel track: I made it to Boston, DC, and Las Vegas – three trips within one and a half months. I did help as I met many like-minded Europeans and other travelers from all over the world who could share my pain and distract me from my pitiful thoughts. They also showed me how to have a good time despite homesickness and opened my eyes to a world dedicated to discovering new continents, triggering dreams in me of traveling the globe one day.

Unfortunately, homesickness does not only happen to me (I am sorry to say). And New York has this thing of you being completely satisfied and occupied in the city of heaven and hell until well into 9 months of your stay. Then it slowly creeps up on you and hits you with such a force you have no choice but to fall down hard. Which makes it so much more difficult to get back onto your feet again. I heard from several other accounts that nine months is a good point in time to expect homesickness kicking in. So prepare yourself for this if you are thinking of moving to the Big Apple.

Now it is two more weeks until I will board my plane to FRA International Airport and spend 18 lovely days on the continent of Europe again. I combined a stay at home with a stay at my university town and even managed to shove in a visit to London (this has been on my list ever since I moved to New York as I am itching to compare these two cities).
Maybe when I come back I will be able to appreciate the beauty of New York once more in a way I have not been capable of since the beginning of this year. The wish of being home again has been just too deeply rooted in the back of my head.