Deutschland, Part 4 (Weimar and Auf Wiedersehen)

The traffic on the way from Munich to Weimar, our final stop before heading back to Berlin, was the worst yet. There really didn't seem to be a single part of Germany that was not being reconstructed. David and his high school exchange student, Lucas, had made plans to meet up in Weimar, and David had to call him several times to push back our arrival time. When we finally pulled into our hotel two hours late, Lucas joked that the Autobahn has no speed limits, but you can never really go very fast, so it doesn't matter. Oh well, the long drive gave me the chance to finish my second book and take lots of drive-by pictures of hops growing in the fields that lined the road.

David was able to identify these strange vines as hops. Who knew?  (David, apparently.)

Weimar is a lovely place. It is very well preserved because both Goethe and Schiller lived here, and so it is viewed as a sort of cultural hub for the arts in Germany. It's a great place to stroll around.  

We spent our first evening wandering around Weimar looking for a restaurant, finally settling on one in a lovely garden. There was a covered area set up nearby, but no one was sitting in it because the evening was too nice. All that changed very quickly, however, and we ended up seizing our plates and glasses and dashing into the tent moments before a downpour started drenching the outdoor tables in earnest. The poor waiters had quite a time trying to figure out who had moved where and ferrying trays from the kitchen and the bar through the garden to the tent with one hand while holding up umbrellas with the other.

Pre-dinner/pre-downpour beers with Lucas

The next morning, however, was lovely, and I finally got shot of the solar panels we saw everywhere in Germany. Remote farms would have whole roofs covered with the things, which was pretty striking, because the few houses that have them in the States have only about a quarter as many. Apparently there was some kind of government grant a few years ago. I read on the balcony before breakfast, savoring one of the only nice days we had while in Germany.

Solar panels, taken from the balcony of my room

We spent our last morning in Weimar walking around the town, looking into shops and exploring the marketplace in the central square. I bought chocolates to bring back to the office and a necklace with a silver ginkgo leaf hanging from it; Goethe wrote a poem about ginkgo trees and now the town has latched onto the leaf as its symbol. Once we reconvened, we headed to a nearby park which led us to a view of Goethe's garden house where he used to write and, according to Lucas, entertain lots of comely local lasses. "I think," Lucas commented, "he was a bit of a bad boy."

The marketplace in the center of Weimar

Goethe's garden cottage

Finally, it was time to bid Lucas goodbye and load up the van one last time so that we could return it in Berlin by the time we'd promised. In keeping with tradition, we got pretty lost coming into the city, though Jane and Anthony made the experience instructional by pointing out neighborhoods to which they'd traveled to visit friends we'd never met or restaurants we'd never heard of. Our final meal together in Germany was at an Indian restaurant, our third Indian meal while there. (German food is pretty heavy, and we could only handle so much of it. Our favorite spots were a Pakistani restaurant in Berlin and a Greek place in Munich. Go figure.) David headed back to Oregon very early the next morning, I left a few hours later, and my parents hung around for another week to see more of Berlin and spend more time with Anthony and Jane.

It was a whirlwind trip, but we had some great bonding time (well, bonding time anyway) in the van, and I discovered that, from the East Coast, the trans-Atlantic trip to Germany is pretty manageable. I can go directly to Berlin from JFK. So in a few months, I plan to determine whether Anthony and Jane were just being nice when they told me that I should come back.