Ah the past week or so...

There was a Rotary meeting, a festival, and a holiday.

At the Rotary meeting, I went with Kurt (the club President) in his Mercedes to Speyer. In Speyer we saw the Dom, a huge cathedral, one of the biggest in Europe. We went inside and saw its huge cavernous spaces. It was getting late and they were about to close so we had to leave. But, the cathedral was not the reason why we traveled to Speyer. The event for the night was to privately view a art show. The featured artist was Hundertwasser. For anybody who doesn't know who that is or what he does, go a head and look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser
His very independent style was portrayed beautifully in the selection we saw. Strong colors and weird angles and lines. Very cool artwork. I enjoyed it very much. Afterwards, in true Rotary style, our large group tromped off to the nicest restaurant in town, next to the fish market, and literally shut the place down. Mind you it's like 9:30 at night. Germans love to eat late.

For food I had a rump steak mit zweibel und kartoffel. Which was very good except they had some flavors confused. (We discussed this at length with the other Rotarians) The most interesting part was that for the bread (which you pay for by piece), instead of butter they had pure pork fat with little pieces of the nasty bits floating it it. Think crisco with chopped bacon, but hurts your heart more. Excellent flavor.

The festival! Ah! Fannntastic. This weekend was a festival called Heiselsher (spelled phonetically for AMURIKANS) in Neustadt, which celebrated the harvest of the wine grapes from the vineyards.

The proceedings had taken a very long time. Every day I had to ride through them on my bike on my way to class. My German course, not normal school. My INTENSIVE German course is everyday for 4 hours. Putting up stalls, rides, and stands. All of this was happening in the large open space infront of the train station called the Parkplatz.

On Friday, after class mind you, I went with my friends down to the Bahnhof (train station) and did the festivus. What I didn't know tough, is that a bunch of my Rotary buddies were going to be there. Nick, Pete, and Pedro were there with a bunch of people they knew from their own respective towns. We had a blast. Speaking German, meeting friends, getting numbers from very pretty girls, and going on the bumper cars! What really capped the night off was that at about 1 or 2 it started to pour down rain like it was going out of style. Nobody was prepared for this since it was a warm Indian Summer night! Scrambling for cover, we ducked into the Deutschpost (post office) building which was magically open. After the rain subsided, we bit each other tschus and headed on home.

Saturday night was much the same, except subtract the Rotary friends, and add Freddy's friends. And also instead of going to the festival in the pouring rain we just stayed at Caro's house and hung out.

So, Oktember the third in Germany, is like our 4th of July. Everything is SHUT DOWN. No school, no classes, no stores are open at all (required by law), and pretty much everyone does practically nothing. Just a nice lazy Tuesday of all things. Gave me a chance to catch up on sleep and homework. Also gave me a chance to study for my ENGLISH TEST tomorrow. I'm pretty sure this holiday is for the reuniting of East and West Germany, but feel free to fact check me on that.

I think thats about all for now.

Oh yeah, COMMENT! Either on the blog or on my Flickr photos, it makes me at least feel that somebody is reading this. Lol.