Heidelberg was nice. We trekked up a pretty big hill in the afternoon sun to see it's castle. That's the problem with castles! Ya, ya, ya, they're built in locations that strengthen defense, but is it really THAT important to see the enemy coming? I'd really appreciate at least one city deciding that they'll probably lose the battle anyway and just building their castle at normal ground level. Maybe not.
Our host was friendly and answered a lot of our questions about German culture, but he was also a self-proclaimed nerd. He has a ton of semi-hobbies, but the one that he is actually committed to is "live role playing". Basically it's like improv, but everyone wears a costume of some character they've pre-conceived. Most of them are more scary or creepy (e.g. a zombie or samauri), but my favorite one that he told us about was a folk singer who kills people with his singing. Not surprisingly, most of the people in the group aren't that into folk music and it would be "murder to listen to". In any case, he took us to meet up with some friends from this group at a bar. One of his friends had an extrememy bubbly and goofy personality and it was interesting to see that the same personality types exist in every culture... sometimes they are muted through the language barrier.
We visited a friend of mine from grad school who is from the 6,000-person town of Dettelbach, Germany. Her house was awesome--exactly how I might picture a rual/suburban German home to be. It had one of those narrow, winding staircases from the basement to main floor. It had an enclosed patio to relax on and another outdoor patio overlooking a vineyard that we had dinner on. Her family was very hospitable and it was great to see my friend, who is also Lisa.
The first day we went around Würzburg and saw it's castle (no surprise, it was up the hill at the top of the town.) It was about 95 degrees so after a bunch of walking, we went to an outdoor beer garden and relaxed in the shade with Radlers (a mixture of beer and Sprite or lemonade). She also took us to a local lake that was extremely crowded because of the heat. It was extremely refreshing though and fun to see everyone having fun and grilling sausages. The next day we saw her former school (ages 10-18)... we were hoping to visit her mom's English class or dad's PE class, but we messed up their schedules, so it didn't work out.
We wanted to travel Tuesday to be in Marseille for Bastille Day, the French independence day, on the 14th. A lot of the trains that require reservations were full when we checked the day before, so we ended up training through Switzerland and making six transfers to get to Marseille around midnight (because of some delayed trains). We found a hotel that was pretty crummy and overpriced, but it did the trick and we made our way the next morning to the house of the girl who we were supposed to be staying with. We were excited for all the celebrations for the holiday and were surprised to find out that most people just think of it as a day they get off work and the only real difference between it and a Saturday or Sunday is that the city shoots off fireworks at night. Our host, Diane, is actually half-American and one of the friendliest French people I have met. Not speaking any of the language, France is probably not my favorite destination on the trip, but she is really cool. When we got to her house, she had friends over to play guitar and it was fun to listen to them play and sing. One of the them was a girl from Wisconsin, here to take intensive French classes for a month. She is in the process of growing dreads and was a bit of a hippie, but she was friendly and ended up showing us around Marseille before the fireworks. Oh, before that though, Diane took us to a local little watering hole (literally, not a bar) in the middle of some trees. The water was run-off from somewhere and perfectly clear. It's just a small unknown place near her house, so we were the only ones there and it was very relaxing.
Other sidenotes:
Jeff can speak any language you want... just ask him to say the word chicken. It sounds shockingly similar in every language and prounced something to the effect of "bok bok." :)
We had handemade ice cream and their caramel flavor was spicy... and delicious.
It seems like everyone considers themself a nerd in some regard, so I have concluded that you can pretty much break society into two groups: nerds and people who aren't very smart.
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