I am a little tired, but I doubt that this post will be any shorter than usual. Almost every time I expect to watch a movie in the evening and unwind, something seems to come up. Today, I had seen so much of Bamberg by midafternoon that I had planned to even do a little work back in the hostel, but time flew, I came back home and had dinner, and, having relaxed at my computer for a few minutes, I suddenly found that it was 8:00 PM.
I forgot to mention a few things about Nuremberg in my last post. Firstly, I forgot its smell: for some reason or other, parts of the city smell like excrement, especially in the neighborhood of the old city wall. This might have to do with the Germans' having improperly disposed of waste until the invention of indoor plumbing, though that seems unlikely, as much of the city was raised in World War II, and all of its sewage should have gone the way of all of its old buildings. It is possible that I have had the misfortune of being too near to garbage trucks a couple of times, but it seems unlikely that that would have happened enough for an impression of the city's rank odor to stick with me. Perhaps I should attribute the smell to recent gardening projects involving large amounts of fertilizer.
Before I forget to do so, I should mention that Germans are, at least in big cities, very punctilious about recycling, of which Russia, for example, has never even heard. The issue of big cities is on my mind a bit: I am wondering, given that I have mostly seen big cities, if I am getting a bit of a skewed perspective of German society. One thing that has struck me is that Germany appears to discuss its past societal misdoings much more openly than, say, the United States or Canada, but I am probably wrong. While it seems to me that black and Middle Eastern German immigrants are not made to feel different from native German citizens, I bet that some people, when interacting with blacks in the United States, feel the weight of 200 years of systematic oppression in the eyes of their interlocutors. This is probably too strong and too general a statement, and it may have been much more true thirty or forty years ago than it is today, but one cannot help thinking, given the number of synagogues now in Germany (again, in the big cities) and the number of sculptures and memorials devoted to victims of the Holocaust, that Germans discuss their racist past more openly than Americans or Canadians. Again, this may be untrue, as Canadians learn a great deal in school about interactions between white pioneers and the indigenous peoples of North America in the 16th through the early-20th centuries, yet teachers of Canadian history do not seem to bluntly acknowledge that the native peoples were massacred and unsuccessfully forced to assimilate, and while there may be monuments here and there in celebration of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil Rights Movements in the United States, I wonder how much deeper appreciation for the wrongs committed against blacks in the United States goes than recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The reason for my making these generalizations is probably twofold: first, I have not seen too many historically-rich cities (Richmond, Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, &c.) in the United States, so I am mostly comparing the cream of the crop of German cities to the fairly average American cities that I have seen; secondly, I have not seen too many average German cities. In fact, not having been educated in the United States (for very long), I cannot say for sure what children learn in school or the types of views that they espouse about racism and racial equality. The only way to redress past wrongs is to ensure that they are not repeated, and the only way to do that involves studying them. It is clear that the German people do not live in guilt over what they did seventy years ago, and I am sure that no more than a few of them on any given day think of the fact that large parts of many of the cities that I have been seeing were destroyed, or at least attacked, in World War II, and yet I wonder if an appreciation of the atrocities committed in World War II is nonetheless interwoven into their overarching societal worldviews. I have not, in my memory, seen any memorials for the Civil Rights Movement or, for that matter, very many synagogues in the United States, yet I have seen a synagogue in most of the German cities that I have visited without even having to leave their historic centers, and I have seen multiple monuments honoring the Jews killed during World War II, including a very prominent one near the heart of Nuremberg's city center.
I got a little sidetracked in my comments, and I do not mean to make Germany seem like the center of the world and the greatest country ever created, yet it often seems to me more culturally advanced than any other place that I have seen. The train station at Nuremberg not only has little bumps and tracks allowing the blind to get around; it even has a whole map of the train station written in Braille at its very entrance! I am sure that Germany has political and social problems, like any country, but it appears, at least on the surface, to have very few of them.
My final point about Nuremberg is that there are tons of Russians here. Now that I have gotten my allergies more under control by using more and different antihistamines, I think that Nuremberg would be a city in which one could live.
Before I forget to do so, I should mention that Germans are, at least in big cities, very punctilious about recycling, of which Russia, for example, has never even heard. The issue of big cities is on my mind a bit: I am wondering, given that I have mostly seen big cities, if I am getting a bit of a skewed perspective of German society. One thing that has struck me is that Germany appears to discuss its past societal misdoings much more openly than, say, the United States or Canada, but I am probably wrong. While it seems to me that black and Middle Eastern German immigrants are not made to feel different from native German citizens, I bet that some people, when interacting with blacks in the United States, feel the weight of 200 years of systematic oppression in the eyes of their interlocutors. This is probably too strong and too general a statement, and it may have been much more true thirty or forty years ago than it is today, but one cannot help thinking, given the number of synagogues now in Germany (again, in the big cities) and the number of sculptures and memorials devoted to victims of the Holocaust, that Germans discuss their racist past more openly than Americans or Canadians. Again, this may be untrue, as Canadians learn a great deal in school about interactions between white pioneers and the indigenous peoples of North America in the 16th through the early-20th centuries, yet teachers of Canadian history do not seem to bluntly acknowledge that the native peoples were massacred and unsuccessfully forced to assimilate, and while there may be monuments here and there in celebration of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil Rights Movements in the United States, I wonder how much deeper appreciation for the wrongs committed against blacks in the United States goes than recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The reason for my making these generalizations is probably twofold: first, I have not seen too many historically-rich cities (Richmond, Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, &c.) in the United States, so I am mostly comparing the cream of the crop of German cities to the fairly average American cities that I have seen; secondly, I have not seen too many average German cities. In fact, not having been educated in the United States (for very long), I cannot say for sure what children learn in school or the types of views that they espouse about racism and racial equality. The only way to redress past wrongs is to ensure that they are not repeated, and the only way to do that involves studying them. It is clear that the German people do not live in guilt over what they did seventy years ago, and I am sure that no more than a few of them on any given day think of the fact that large parts of many of the cities that I have been seeing were destroyed, or at least attacked, in World War II, and yet I wonder if an appreciation of the atrocities committed in World War II is nonetheless interwoven into their overarching societal worldviews. I have not, in my memory, seen any memorials for the Civil Rights Movement or, for that matter, very many synagogues in the United States, yet I have seen a synagogue in most of the German cities that I have visited without even having to leave their historic centers, and I have seen multiple monuments honoring the Jews killed during World War II, including a very prominent one near the heart of Nuremberg's city center.
I got a little sidetracked in my comments, and I do not mean to make Germany seem like the center of the world and the greatest country ever created, yet it often seems to me more culturally advanced than any other place that I have seen. The train station at Nuremberg not only has little bumps and tracks allowing the blind to get around; it even has a whole map of the train station written in Braille at its very entrance! I am sure that Germany has political and social problems, like any country, but it appears, at least on the surface, to have very few of them.
My final point about Nuremberg is that there are tons of Russians here. Now that I have gotten my allergies more under control by using more and different antihistamines, I think that Nuremberg would be a city in which one could live.
My trip to Bamberg was notable for two key events, but I refuse to divulge them just yet. I have not written many anecdotes of late, and this seemed like an opportune time for one. While my German skills are improving day-by-day, they still leave a lot to be desired, and my linguistic failings came in to play both today and yesterday. When I was on the train going from Stuttgart to Nuremberg, a woman said a whole lot of words at once on the intercom partway through the train ride. Usually, when one hears a torrent of words, it means that it is time to get off. Unfortunately, we were at a tiny stop that could not possibly be Nuremberg. As we approached our destination, I tried to ask one of the so-called "controllers," or people who go up and down the aisles to check one's ticket, if the train was going all of the way to Nuremberg, but I could not understand her reply, as she probably tried to explain what was going to happen (that there would be a short break in this other city). When I should have checked the section of my phrasebook headed "transportation" and tried to find the ready phrase asking if I had to transfer trains, I instead scrambled to find useful words at the back of my phrasebook, which is a little dictionary. I tried saying such things as "I go?" and "Can I sit here?", but I could not successfully get my point across. I asked multiple times if the train was going to Nuremberg, and the controller was able to sufficiently reassure me that I stopped asking her questions.
Today my experience was a little different, as my problems started right from the get-go. At this point I need to interrupt my narration: whenever you want to buy rail tickets in Germany, do it in the ticket office, with a human being, as often as possible. I was told in Cologne that it was cheaper to buy them from the machines than from people, as a result of which I probably saved a Euro once or twice but then bought an over-priced two-way ticket that did not actually include my fare back (to Frankfurt). Today, when I tried to buy a ticket to Bamberg, I discovered that the machine was only offering one-way tickets for 10 Euros and change. When I went to the ticket booth (after a short wait; I read a book), I was given a two-way ticket for only 16 Euros and some number of cents. I resent that I was given such bad advice in Cologne, but I am happy that I only followed it for a few days.
I had no problem getting a ticket to and from Bamberg, and I even managed to do it in German, but I got worried when I reached the platform from which my train would be departing; it said "zug [train] in Bamberg wird; geteilt," or something to that effect. "The train gets weird in Bamberg; get out" did not strike me as a welcoming invitation to the city, though one could interpret it to mean that getting out at Bamberg, which was scheduled as one of the stops, would be advantageous, a claim that would suit my needs just fine. I asked the woman sitting next to me, who was in her 60s, if the train was going to Bamberg, and she replied affirmatively. When I said, "What is 'wird'? What is 'geteilt," she told me that Bamberg was very beautiful. I replied, "Why is writes "in Bamerg wird; geteilt?", and she apologized, admitting that she did not know. I asked her once or twice more if it was going to Bamberg, as I have a phobia of getting on the wrong train, and was, like the previous time, assured that everything would be fine.
My visit to Bamberg was delightful: the weather was, for the first time in two weeks, tolerable; the city had an even more medieval feel to it than Nuremberg; and the historical parts of town were easy to navigate, although, like Nuremberg, Bamberg had a dearth of crosswalks. Unlike Nuremberg, which has so few cars in the city center that people manage by jaywalking, Bamberg also had fairly poor sidewalks in some areas - the roads were so narrow that cars sometimes drove onto the sidewalks, and the sidewalks themselves often trailed off into the road, as though they had dissolved. The city's churches were curious: several of them had no stained glass windows whatsoever. Their ceilings were different, too: some were unadorned, others decorated with the curved arches that I saw in Polish churches, and one or two constructed with a honeycomb crisscross of pieces of different arches, such as I saw in Strasbourg. The level of adornment of churches' interiors varied, as well: some were austere, while others were over-the-top sumptuous, with bulky statues containing gold and even marble abutting their supporting pillars. When I say "statues" here, I mean statues that, like bookcases, could be taken in and out of the church: separate pieces from the church itself. When statues are engraved in the church's columns or walls, I tend to see them as pious, while, when they are made separately and stuck on to the columns, walls, or altar, I see them as idolatrous of invidious wealth.
Bamberg attracted a lot of Russian tourists, including some who were part of a wedding party. The two important events of which I meant to write were, I think, that I got tired of eating pastries and that I went shopping. The first of these points deserves especial attention, as it has a detailed backstory. (The second event was that I bought more strawberries - oops.)
My history of eating German pastries goes back to my very first day in the country. Rather than cover it in detail, I will present you with a synopsis of it: pastries are cheap; pastries fill one up; pastries are delicious; pastries give one a taste of local cuisine; pastries can often be bought in conjunction with milk or, less commonly, high-quality juice; pastries can be eaten on the run; pastries take no time to prepare from the point of purchase. All of these factors combine to make them a very tempting food to eat during travel. During the middle of the day - that is, until I have already seen a whole city - I have next to no desire for a sit-down meal. The Russians have a proverb by which I abide during my travels (and should abide in day-to-day life): do your work and then relax. The work of travelling is to explore new cities; the relaxing part is to sit down to a meal. At least, that is how I see it. To sit down and have lunch at a café each day would not only be more expensive than eating at bakeries; it would also be more time-consuming, and one cannot very well enjoy one's meal when a new city is calling out to be explored. If I could make myself ordinary lunches and grab a pastry here or there as a treat, as I do with ice cream, then I would be content, but, alas, perishable foods are not convenient on the road (i.e., when one changes cities every day or two), and lunches made of non-perishable foods are non-trivial to make if one factors in the procurement of their base components. Buying and eating pastries, by contrast, takes no effort.
There is a problem with buying and eating pastries, though: it makes one fat and does not furnish one with a very wide range of vitamins, minerals, and proteins. I had, until yesterday, been eating well-balanced breakfasts at hostels, milk and pastries (or, if they looked any good, sandwiches, but those are often less attractive and more expensive than pastries) for lunch, and reasonably-healthy restaurant food for dinner. Yesterday, that trend ended, as I did not want to pay 4 Euros for breakfast and knew of a bakery around the corner. (I forgot to mention that I would often buy fresh fruit at local grocery stores and would occasionally buy ice cream in the afternoon.) The turning point in my habits might have been my accidentally buying a croissant-based sandwich that appeared to me to be made of regular bread. When I bought a couple of pastries of types that I had not tried before today, I decided that my spree of eating pastries had to end.
Two main considerations of logistics swayed my decision to change my eating habits for the rest of this trip. (Plus a third consideration: I have now tried most types of German pastries and am not dead-set on trying them all.) One consideration is that I will have access to a fridge for the next few days; the second consideration is that one can make decent lunches made of non-perishable foods if one can find, for example, decent canned meats or spreads that will more or less last. While I was not keen on the idea of carrying peanut butter and jam around with me across all of Europe, I have realized that I could buy something like cream or cream cheese and simply store it in successive hostels for the few days that it would take to consume it. Each hostel in which I have stayed (I think) has had a fridge; my reluctance to buy perishable goods was a product of my not wanting to have to take them on the train with me, as I was under the implicit impression that such goods could not leave the fridge once they had been in it - I was thinking in terms of finishing them over the course of a given hostel stay (and I also was not yet tired of eating pastries). The fact that cheese will not go bad if it is out of the refrigerator for a few hours, as long as one consumes it within a few days, opens up a whole range of opportunities to me, and the suggestion that I buy dried fruit will enable me both to always have a source of fruit at hand, and to eat boring foods, such as plain yogurt, with more alacrity.
My first shopping trip was probably a failure because I stepped into an organic foods store (it was the closest one on hand; I was lured in by its 99-cent, 500-ml bottles of fizzy apple juice), and because, in the interests of parsimony and maximum salubrity, I bought painfully-boring foods. This time around, I decided to buy a variety of non-disgusting yet healthy foods, and I ended up paying only 10.34 Euros, roughly the cost of one Euro, for enough food to last me for several days. I realized that one barrier to buying food at the grocery store was that one does not want to cook it, yet it takes just as much time for a chef to prepare one's food as it takes to cook it oneself. I had a dinner of strawberries, tortellini, and peas, and I even had the pleasure of watching a quartet of young Chinese women make the kitchen their own. By this I mean not that they hogged the kitchen, but that they started cooking - at least, as far as I could tell - as though they were back home; this interested me because I make no effort to replicate a home environment or home cooking when I am travelling. The women had gotten some rice noodles at an Asian market and were cooking something involving garlic, lettuce, red onions, multi-step preparation of the noodles that sloughed off their outer covering of starch, and other ingredients, I am sure, that I did not stick around to see. I was fascinated by their swooping into the kitchen as a team and immediately setting to work, each woman handling a different task, as though they worked at a restaurant.
I have two more points to cover, the first of which is that I bought more strawberries today despite yesterday's misadventure. I can justify my choice easily: the vendors were not like cormorants waiting to pick off unsuspecting tourists, and the strawberries were less than half of the cost of the ones that I got yesterday. It turned out that my mistake yesterday was, predictably, to consider buying anything at all at a market in the center of Nuremberg, as everything sold there is bound to be overpriced. The market in Bamberg was an honest market, by which I mean one at which ordinary, sane people - locals - would buy goods. I got some very good strawberries for only 2 Euros at the market (I am key on strawberries because they are high on antioxidants, and because one has to go to Richmond or the Okanagan to get good ones back home.) and had a very pleasant exchange with the vendor in which I explained that I was from Canada. I also bought four peaches at a local grocery store for just over a Euro and plan to finish them tomorrow; fruits, it turns out, are not so hard to come by when one is travelling as I expected. I should make them one of the centerpieces one my new healthy eating plan (and cannot believe that I did not think of this earlier), especially as they do not spoil too easily within a day or two of purchase.
I think that one source of resistance inside me to buying fruits was that I was having the worst allergies that I had had in recent memory until today, when I started to get them more under control (by switching from Claritin to Reactine in the mornings and taking two Benadryls twice per day, in the afternoons and evenings). The idea of worsening by allergies by eating raw fruits or vegetables did not appeal to me. I did not want things that I had to peel, as I saw that as too much trouble (as I am accustomed to peeling fruit with a knife; while not a necessary procedure, it is part of my subconscious); I was too fixated on maximal convenience. I wish that there were options other than donairs/shawarmas (Turkish wraps) for quick, handy meals in Germany, but, so far, I have not found any alternative between the extrema of eating at restaurants and eating at bakeries, not counting my new-found initiative to make my own lunches. (I am sure that my not having free breakfasts at the hostel, and therefore not seeing lunch as a mere stopgap between breakfast and dinner, has partly influenced my decision, as has the monotony of always eating the same basic things.)
Today my experience was a little different, as my problems started right from the get-go. At this point I need to interrupt my narration: whenever you want to buy rail tickets in Germany, do it in the ticket office, with a human being, as often as possible. I was told in Cologne that it was cheaper to buy them from the machines than from people, as a result of which I probably saved a Euro once or twice but then bought an over-priced two-way ticket that did not actually include my fare back (to Frankfurt). Today, when I tried to buy a ticket to Bamberg, I discovered that the machine was only offering one-way tickets for 10 Euros and change. When I went to the ticket booth (after a short wait; I read a book), I was given a two-way ticket for only 16 Euros and some number of cents. I resent that I was given such bad advice in Cologne, but I am happy that I only followed it for a few days.
I had no problem getting a ticket to and from Bamberg, and I even managed to do it in German, but I got worried when I reached the platform from which my train would be departing; it said "zug [train] in Bamberg wird; geteilt," or something to that effect. "The train gets weird in Bamberg; get out" did not strike me as a welcoming invitation to the city, though one could interpret it to mean that getting out at Bamberg, which was scheduled as one of the stops, would be advantageous, a claim that would suit my needs just fine. I asked the woman sitting next to me, who was in her 60s, if the train was going to Bamberg, and she replied affirmatively. When I said, "What is 'wird'? What is 'geteilt," she told me that Bamberg was very beautiful. I replied, "Why is writes "in Bamerg wird; geteilt?", and she apologized, admitting that she did not know. I asked her once or twice more if it was going to Bamberg, as I have a phobia of getting on the wrong train, and was, like the previous time, assured that everything would be fine.
My visit to Bamberg was delightful: the weather was, for the first time in two weeks, tolerable; the city had an even more medieval feel to it than Nuremberg; and the historical parts of town were easy to navigate, although, like Nuremberg, Bamberg had a dearth of crosswalks. Unlike Nuremberg, which has so few cars in the city center that people manage by jaywalking, Bamberg also had fairly poor sidewalks in some areas - the roads were so narrow that cars sometimes drove onto the sidewalks, and the sidewalks themselves often trailed off into the road, as though they had dissolved. The city's churches were curious: several of them had no stained glass windows whatsoever. Their ceilings were different, too: some were unadorned, others decorated with the curved arches that I saw in Polish churches, and one or two constructed with a honeycomb crisscross of pieces of different arches, such as I saw in Strasbourg. The level of adornment of churches' interiors varied, as well: some were austere, while others were over-the-top sumptuous, with bulky statues containing gold and even marble abutting their supporting pillars. When I say "statues" here, I mean statues that, like bookcases, could be taken in and out of the church: separate pieces from the church itself. When statues are engraved in the church's columns or walls, I tend to see them as pious, while, when they are made separately and stuck on to the columns, walls, or altar, I see them as idolatrous of invidious wealth.
Bamberg attracted a lot of Russian tourists, including some who were part of a wedding party. The two important events of which I meant to write were, I think, that I got tired of eating pastries and that I went shopping. The first of these points deserves especial attention, as it has a detailed backstory. (The second event was that I bought more strawberries - oops.)
My history of eating German pastries goes back to my very first day in the country. Rather than cover it in detail, I will present you with a synopsis of it: pastries are cheap; pastries fill one up; pastries are delicious; pastries give one a taste of local cuisine; pastries can often be bought in conjunction with milk or, less commonly, high-quality juice; pastries can be eaten on the run; pastries take no time to prepare from the point of purchase. All of these factors combine to make them a very tempting food to eat during travel. During the middle of the day - that is, until I have already seen a whole city - I have next to no desire for a sit-down meal. The Russians have a proverb by which I abide during my travels (and should abide in day-to-day life): do your work and then relax. The work of travelling is to explore new cities; the relaxing part is to sit down to a meal. At least, that is how I see it. To sit down and have lunch at a café each day would not only be more expensive than eating at bakeries; it would also be more time-consuming, and one cannot very well enjoy one's meal when a new city is calling out to be explored. If I could make myself ordinary lunches and grab a pastry here or there as a treat, as I do with ice cream, then I would be content, but, alas, perishable foods are not convenient on the road (i.e., when one changes cities every day or two), and lunches made of non-perishable foods are non-trivial to make if one factors in the procurement of their base components. Buying and eating pastries, by contrast, takes no effort.
There is a problem with buying and eating pastries, though: it makes one fat and does not furnish one with a very wide range of vitamins, minerals, and proteins. I had, until yesterday, been eating well-balanced breakfasts at hostels, milk and pastries (or, if they looked any good, sandwiches, but those are often less attractive and more expensive than pastries) for lunch, and reasonably-healthy restaurant food for dinner. Yesterday, that trend ended, as I did not want to pay 4 Euros for breakfast and knew of a bakery around the corner. (I forgot to mention that I would often buy fresh fruit at local grocery stores and would occasionally buy ice cream in the afternoon.) The turning point in my habits might have been my accidentally buying a croissant-based sandwich that appeared to me to be made of regular bread. When I bought a couple of pastries of types that I had not tried before today, I decided that my spree of eating pastries had to end.
Two main considerations of logistics swayed my decision to change my eating habits for the rest of this trip. (Plus a third consideration: I have now tried most types of German pastries and am not dead-set on trying them all.) One consideration is that I will have access to a fridge for the next few days; the second consideration is that one can make decent lunches made of non-perishable foods if one can find, for example, decent canned meats or spreads that will more or less last. While I was not keen on the idea of carrying peanut butter and jam around with me across all of Europe, I have realized that I could buy something like cream or cream cheese and simply store it in successive hostels for the few days that it would take to consume it. Each hostel in which I have stayed (I think) has had a fridge; my reluctance to buy perishable goods was a product of my not wanting to have to take them on the train with me, as I was under the implicit impression that such goods could not leave the fridge once they had been in it - I was thinking in terms of finishing them over the course of a given hostel stay (and I also was not yet tired of eating pastries). The fact that cheese will not go bad if it is out of the refrigerator for a few hours, as long as one consumes it within a few days, opens up a whole range of opportunities to me, and the suggestion that I buy dried fruit will enable me both to always have a source of fruit at hand, and to eat boring foods, such as plain yogurt, with more alacrity.
My first shopping trip was probably a failure because I stepped into an organic foods store (it was the closest one on hand; I was lured in by its 99-cent, 500-ml bottles of fizzy apple juice), and because, in the interests of parsimony and maximum salubrity, I bought painfully-boring foods. This time around, I decided to buy a variety of non-disgusting yet healthy foods, and I ended up paying only 10.34 Euros, roughly the cost of one Euro, for enough food to last me for several days. I realized that one barrier to buying food at the grocery store was that one does not want to cook it, yet it takes just as much time for a chef to prepare one's food as it takes to cook it oneself. I had a dinner of strawberries, tortellini, and peas, and I even had the pleasure of watching a quartet of young Chinese women make the kitchen their own. By this I mean not that they hogged the kitchen, but that they started cooking - at least, as far as I could tell - as though they were back home; this interested me because I make no effort to replicate a home environment or home cooking when I am travelling. The women had gotten some rice noodles at an Asian market and were cooking something involving garlic, lettuce, red onions, multi-step preparation of the noodles that sloughed off their outer covering of starch, and other ingredients, I am sure, that I did not stick around to see. I was fascinated by their swooping into the kitchen as a team and immediately setting to work, each woman handling a different task, as though they worked at a restaurant.
I have two more points to cover, the first of which is that I bought more strawberries today despite yesterday's misadventure. I can justify my choice easily: the vendors were not like cormorants waiting to pick off unsuspecting tourists, and the strawberries were less than half of the cost of the ones that I got yesterday. It turned out that my mistake yesterday was, predictably, to consider buying anything at all at a market in the center of Nuremberg, as everything sold there is bound to be overpriced. The market in Bamberg was an honest market, by which I mean one at which ordinary, sane people - locals - would buy goods. I got some very good strawberries for only 2 Euros at the market (I am key on strawberries because they are high on antioxidants, and because one has to go to Richmond or the Okanagan to get good ones back home.) and had a very pleasant exchange with the vendor in which I explained that I was from Canada. I also bought four peaches at a local grocery store for just over a Euro and plan to finish them tomorrow; fruits, it turns out, are not so hard to come by when one is travelling as I expected. I should make them one of the centerpieces one my new healthy eating plan (and cannot believe that I did not think of this earlier), especially as they do not spoil too easily within a day or two of purchase.
I think that one source of resistance inside me to buying fruits was that I was having the worst allergies that I had had in recent memory until today, when I started to get them more under control (by switching from Claritin to Reactine in the mornings and taking two Benadryls twice per day, in the afternoons and evenings). The idea of worsening by allergies by eating raw fruits or vegetables did not appeal to me. I did not want things that I had to peel, as I saw that as too much trouble (as I am accustomed to peeling fruit with a knife; while not a necessary procedure, it is part of my subconscious); I was too fixated on maximal convenience. I wish that there were options other than donairs/shawarmas (Turkish wraps) for quick, handy meals in Germany, but, so far, I have not found any alternative between the extrema of eating at restaurants and eating at bakeries, not counting my new-found initiative to make my own lunches. (I am sure that my not having free breakfasts at the hostel, and therefore not seeing lunch as a mere stopgap between breakfast and dinner, has partly influenced my decision, as has the monotony of always eating the same basic things.)
In short, I have a new food plan, and coming up with one is very difficult when one travels as I do (jumping from place to place, rather than staying in one city for days at a time).It is funny both that I came up with this soon before it would become temporarily irrelevant, as I am about to visit a friend's parents for several days, and that I was so shocked by everything's cheapness in the grocery store. In fact, paying around a dollar for a dollar for a small loaf of bread, 1 dollar (i.e., a Euro) for a liter of milk, and $1.39 (or thereabouts) for a largish can of peas is not even that good a deal, but the price of groceries is so negligible compared to the price of prepared food that even over-priced groceries can surprise one.
I am eager to end this post, take a shower, and go to bed, and I might need to shave (I have to look in the mirror.). Unfortunately, I have not yet told you a thing about the people whom I have met on this trip. In Heidelberg, I met a girl from Texas who admitted that Houston was too much of a metropolis to be part of the South, and who knew a great deal about African safaris. In Stuttgart, I met a man in his early 30s from Melbourne who, like me, made lists of places on earth to see and, having crossed them off, did not return to them. His having similar travelling habits to mine made me feel less insane for doing things this way (and for having such a long list). Finally, last night I shared a room with a young man from Taiwan who taught special education classes. While his English was far from fluent, it is a lot better than most people's second languages, I should think, and I enjoyed talking to him. It is notable that there were only two of us in the six-person room (and it appears that I will only have one roommate tonight): this place must not be that popular.
I am now off to perform my ablutions! I guess that I fell in love with high-falutin language in this post; the desire to use big words sometimes overtakes me. I would take advantage of being alone in the room to do some push-ups and other basic exercises, but I already did some this morning, and I am no longer feeling so energetic. I figure to lose a pound or two by switching to a no-bakery diet for the following week and restricting my intake of baked goods thereafter; and, while I do not know what kind of shopping options await me in the Czech Republic, I am sure that I will find a way to eat reasonably there.
Goodbye for now!
I am eager to end this post, take a shower, and go to bed, and I might need to shave (I have to look in the mirror.). Unfortunately, I have not yet told you a thing about the people whom I have met on this trip. In Heidelberg, I met a girl from Texas who admitted that Houston was too much of a metropolis to be part of the South, and who knew a great deal about African safaris. In Stuttgart, I met a man in his early 30s from Melbourne who, like me, made lists of places on earth to see and, having crossed them off, did not return to them. His having similar travelling habits to mine made me feel less insane for doing things this way (and for having such a long list). Finally, last night I shared a room with a young man from Taiwan who taught special education classes. While his English was far from fluent, it is a lot better than most people's second languages, I should think, and I enjoyed talking to him. It is notable that there were only two of us in the six-person room (and it appears that I will only have one roommate tonight): this place must not be that popular.
I am now off to perform my ablutions! I guess that I fell in love with high-falutin language in this post; the desire to use big words sometimes overtakes me. I would take advantage of being alone in the room to do some push-ups and other basic exercises, but I already did some this morning, and I am no longer feeling so energetic. I figure to lose a pound or two by switching to a no-bakery diet for the following week and restricting my intake of baked goods thereafter; and, while I do not know what kind of shopping options await me in the Czech Republic, I am sure that I will find a way to eat reasonably there.
Goodbye for now!
That is Bamberg's castle in the distance!
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