A few months remaining and festival fun
With a measly two months remaining, I am trying to cram in everything that I want to do before I go back to the US. A few weekends ago, I went to Baumblütenfest in Werder.
a ride at the festival
Baumblüte is a huge festival in Germany. It is the second largest in the country. Basically, it is the Oktoberfest of the north….except with wine instead of beer. The city that it is held in is about 30 minutes away by train from where I live. I left at about 2 PM with two friends. There were so many people on the train that we had to stand the entire time. When we finally got there, we had to walk about a half hour from the train station to get to the actual festival. I have never seen so much wine! Baumblüte is a celebration of the spring and the blooming of flowers, and ripening of fruit. The wines were all fruit wines…everything from strawberry to rhubarb to apple wine.
German police!
This is mainly in Berlin, but there are problems in other large cities too. There were police everywhere, in full-out knee pads, helmets, the whole she-bang. I heard a quote once that stated when Americans see police they feel safe…when Germans see police they wonder what is wrong.
It started out just me and two of my friends, but after an hour or so my friends’ boyfriend came with two of his friends. After another hour had passed, we had about 15 people in our group and someone had a brought a large boom-box.
the train station chaos on the way home
It was a really crazy atmosphere, but also a lot of fun. Getting home was pretty nuts too. There were hundreds of people at the train station, and somehow we ended up in front of them all. Ha, I wasn’t complaining.
Currently in my English class we are learning about India, and we might have the exchange student from India come speak to us. She is actually best friends with another exchange student who is from America. It’s great that they have formed such a tight friendship, but I also find it bad because they only speak English to one another. Due to this, neither of them have really learned German. To really improve, you HAVE to speak it with native speakers. There is another exchange student from China, and she spoke zero German before coming here. Now, her German is really good, but that’s because she made herself speak it. I was talking to one of my friends who is on exchange in Argentina, and she was saying how she heard that learning German in Germany is really difficult because so many can speak English. It is true that many can speak English, but most don’t want to. If you speak English, they will understand you, but more than likely, they won’t want to respond in English. I find speaking German is just all around a better decision. You get what you put into it, you know?
