If you've been following this blog, you know that I've been waiting all semester to get a chance to go back to Germany. I haven't been back since we moved to the States in 2001 and I've been relying on increasingly fuzzy -- but always incredibly positive -- memories to sustain me. Sure, I got a chance to spend a couple hours in the country when travelling through Frankfurt-Hahn in October, but I really wanted to go back for real.
So this weekend, during a several day trip to Strasbourg, my friend Allan and I made the two-hour bus trip from Strasbourg (on the very edge of the French-German border) to Heidelberg. Although not quite as personally significant as Stuttgart, Heidelberg is a beautiful city with a lot of historical buildings -- rather unique in Germany, where so many cities were destroyed in World War II -- and, of course, a fabulous Christmas market. We got off the bus, partially expecting to be immediately welcomed into the historic inviting streets of ancient Heidelberg... this is what greeted us instead.
Is it a horse? A dragon? A giraffe carrying a shield? We'll never know. (And I mean that, because if 10 minutes of intense Googling couldn't identify it, nothing could.) The statue was unexpected, but surprisingly pretty in its own little way. As we headed into the Altstadt ("Old City"), however, things started getting a little more ... well, German!
A more appropriate first sign of things to come was my interaction with the Tourism Office. As we waited in line to request a map, I was relieved to hear the employees speaking in English, French and German to the tourists ahead of us. Although I had been studying up on my German on the bus, I had a feeling that I wouldn't get much further than my original request ("Haben sie ein Stadtplan?"). Well ... maybe my German accent is better than I thought. Or maybe the guy was just tired of speaking in foreign languages. But whatever his reason, he explained the map and the layout of the city in rapid-fire German.
