Despite the last post being somewhat somber, Germany had some amazing times filled with friends (or freunds), festivals, and fast cars, and fabulous architecture! Touring through Germany I realized that my German language skills were not all forgotten from learning it 18 years ago. As we were driving 160km/hr on the autobahn meine Deutsch was spitting out fire. Well, enough to order at restaurants and generally make myself understood anyway, if I didn’t think to hard about it. Sadlly, it came back easier than my French did in Paris, after trying to learn that non-immersively for 20 odd years, thanks a lot DuoLingo…my 600 day French streak let me down big time, but we will get to that in another post.
We visited the city of Leipzig where a friend of mine from my uni days, Michaela now lives. Leipzig is a bit unlike any other German city I have visited before; they have their own undeniable flair as the city is known for artists, an epic amount of grafitti, and the birthplace of the composers Bach, Wagner, and Mendelssohn. Known affectionately as ‘Hype-zig’ it is an up and comer with a bit of a rock and roll vibe to it. Here is a beautiful canal pic of the city, taken after an enormously delicious dinner of Kase Spatzle.
We toured a couple of different Zaha Hadid buildings in Germany, my first Hadid experiences, the Pheno Science Museum in Wolfburg, and the BMW factory tour in Leipzig. Hadid was a ‘starchitect’, one of the few namebrand female ones actually, who died in 2016. The science museum was pretty amazing, not only to play at as they had roughly 300 fun experiements to do, Laura’s favourite was laying on the bed of nails (which Mike couldn’t hack), but the architecture was amazing as well. The building’s structure is created from maybe 8-10 inverted concrete cone shapes supporting a steel lattice work that was supporting the roof, providing tons of free open space without the pesky business of columns.
The car factory tours and the eventual visit to the Porsche Museum were more of a ‘Mike’ thing, however, I enjoy watching some factory processes and it reminded me of this industrial project I was just finishing up at work before I left…except you know..the world class example of that with the infinite $$$ that BMW brings when they crank out a car every minute out of that factory (the car takes 10hrs to build).
We finished off Germany by heading to Munich for the opening day of Okoberfest and visiting Mike’s good friend Axel. Laura and I have never been to Oktoberfest before and I honestly didn’t realize it is just like Kdays, except everyone is completely wasted, dressed up in traditional dirndels and lederhosen, with tons of amazing rides and no lines for them, 2-3x the size, and much more delicious snacks. So basically our hometown fair…but way better. The police are there just to make sure everyone is safe and having a good time as there are always accidents and medical events that happen. The Germans know how to let loose, and loose they are over 2 weeks of frantic partying, Laura wanted to go back or spend tons of time on the Devil’s Wheel (seen in the video below) but we need to get our car back to Paris.
We are getting to the end of Western Europe with only Lichtenstein and France to go, before we head to Greece…stay tuned…
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