(no subject)

[sanura]

Our first day adventuring south from Ramstein, where we finally rented a car (German ideas of customer service suffer from a cultural difference -- socialism gives no incentive for competition, therefore who cares if the customer is satisfied?), I bore merely a few moments' reacclimation to my role as navigator before the idiosyncracies of European road travel became the norm again. For the most part, the signs have no directions on them, one's own road is identified only as an option at intersections (roundabouts, for the most part, on the smaller roads, which are what we took). The majority of the road signs identify only the tiny little town that comes first if you choose that direction, so either your map had better be very detailed, or the gods of travel had better smile upon you. Fortunately, my map was decen and I have both road luck and a long attention span, so I can tell when we've picked the wrong spoke off the roundabout and retrace our path.

Nearly every little town of any respectable age (300 years or so) has a castle to its name, and we went through the backroads, over millions of tiny green and yellow rapeseed fields. There are fewer of the startlingly sunshine colored patches of hill left, so the end of May must be harvest seasons for makers of canola oil. The hills all seem to present the countryside valleys and roads and castles in the the best possible light. It's a very photogenic countryside.

Our first major destination (one must have a minor destination every four minutes if navigating German roads) was Heidelberg, famed university town and home of the impressive and metonymous schloss. It took us a couple hours to get into town, but apparently Saturday was some kind of festival holiday, be cause every parking garage was full and the streets were clogged with pedestrians on their way to the central Kornmarkt (wheat market of old, now town square). We ended up in line for a place in a parking garage up a rather steep hill, and it was about an hour before enough people left that it was our turn for a spot, but once we had it, it was apparent that it was a good one. The path up to the castle was very near the garage, but steep enough that mama hesitated and nearly stayed behind and told me to go up myself, but I convinced her it was what we were here for, and it'd be good for her anyway. It certainly was steep, but we made it up, paid the entrance fee, and gaped at the travesty of period consistency that was the inside of Schloss Heidelberg.

There were Gothic remnants with Renaissance turrets off of them, a lamentably Baroque English-style front and gate that one Graf Karl Theodor had built overnight as a birthday present for his English bride, a clock tower with beautiful golden celestial bodies on its hands, and a rather awkward courtyard with cobbly ramps up to every gate and door, making its elevation rather haphazard and uncomfortable.

There were some vestiges of grace inherent in the strangenesses of anachronistic juxtaposition, though. One set of Renaissance courtyard arches had an Oriental-looking flowering tree bending handsomely across them, reminding me forcefully of my favorite Alan Lee pencil sketch, a similar (though whiter) courtyard in Minas Tirith. The guided tour through the inside of most of the buildings pointed out which additions were from what time, and explained the changing functions. Heidelberg, it seems, used to be the seat of the counts Palatine, and there was a gigantic library there before the Catholic opposition in the Thirty Years' War stole it and gave it to Rome as a present.

The biggest building underwent monstrous redecoration and restoration in the 1920's, and a long line of (heavily disproportionate, because they used to be high up and outside) statues across from intricately inlaid wooden doors, with racks of antlers and stained glass windows with the arms of every major town in the Rhineland-Palatinate were all that remained. The sitting and drawing roms behind the doors boasted some of the original Baroque furniture and some amazingly large and brightly-colored ceramic stoves, but, as usual, my favorite part was the spiral staircase. The little chapel to whihc they led was another monument to Baroque taste, but at the end of the tour one could appreciate the courtyard's charm better. Though not its elevation.

Still, it's amazing to consider the reason for the castle's cute architectural inconsistency. It's been there long enough to go from arrow slits to a new wall for cannon, to a roundel cracked and fallen from an explosion of its gunpowder store, to the elaborate and pointless, indefensible decoration of Baroque peacetime, to a 20's attempt at refurbishment and slight modernization. It has the standard medieval dents in the stone stair treads from centuries of constant wear, and the ruts in the cobbled courtyard more telling of age than he crumbling walls inside and out.

The restaurant's attitude, however, was decidedly modern in regards to caring whether we wanted, or ought to be allowed, to eat. The kitchen, we were informed at 3:45, closes at 4:00 every day, despite this information's lack of prevalence anywhere, so we zipped through the basement (now a fascinating museum on the history of German apohecaries, with awesome raw materials and hanging crocodiles and lovely little phials and distillation glassware and officina furniture) and down the hill to see the gardens. Unfortunately, since we'd been walking mostly uphill all day and the restaurant wouldn't serve us, we were tired and hungry. The several-mile path to the gardens was seriously daunting. So we sat under a crumbling tower in the sprinkly wet looking at the view of the Neckar valley the mountain affords for an indecisive half-hour before trekking back down the path to the parking garage and heading out.

Before too long, hunger overcame us and we stopped at a gas statioin for whatever food they'd have. I suffered a relapse of second-language timidity and made mama address the rather gawky clerk in English to buy the exotic little German packaged food. We ended up with a can of peanuts, two little Fleischsalaten (what amounts to a baloney, mayonnaise and onion goop in a sealed bowl), a quart of unhomogenized milk, a weird little bottle of raspberry yoghurt drink, and an exceedingly good bottle of lemon-lychee fruit drink. That sustained us the rest of the day, and we had enough for some the next day as well.

Having only recently added music to my navigational duties in the car, the tuner on the little FM-broadcast for my mp3 player gave mesome difficulty on the way to Goeppingen, where we decided to try for a night a Virgilio's instead of finding a hotel on the road. I was juggling the camera, too, trying to get a shot of all the little castles on the pleasant backroads. Soon enough the wider hills gave way to wooded switchbacks, and with the rental we couldn't figure out how to turn on the headlights. Our ventre into a quasi rest stop revealed another feature of the manual-transmission rental with which we weren't familiar: revers. There, and in every situation then on, I had to get out and push the nose in order to make the car go backwards, because we couldn't make the stick hit the reverse gear.

After a tangly arrival in Goeppingen, which included an accidental venture down a pedestrians-only street where a band with a bad chick singer were doing "I Will Survive" on a heavily-lit disco temp stage (I had to push pretty hard to get us off the curb there), we finally found the train station from which our adventures had departed on our previous trip there. However, we couldn't figure out which way to go to get to Virgilio's house, and the combination of standard German punks walking by, the bad neighborhood Virgilio told us the train station was in, our regrettably illegal parking job, an ever-increasing nag from my bladder, and the revelation that we had only enough change for one call at the payphone was overbalancing my usual equilibrium, and I was getting a little stressed before I realized there was a bank across the street for change, and punks are generall the same everywhere (thank you, PVA for this knowledge).

The first phone call Kristina answered a bit frantically and said Virgilio wasn't there, call back in ten minutes, she'd just had the baby this morning. With assured contact in the city I was reassured (though I don't know why, since we've traveled without contacts and been fine, even sleeping on the floor, for how long before this?). Rearranging the car for less-illegal parking took most of the ten minutes, and then Virgilio was on his way in his little red car to lead us back to his apartment complex.