The Schaff, so far

I left off with my arrival in Aschaffenburg on Sunday.

Since then, we've been having a great time visiting various friends around the country, checking out the Schaff (it has a castle!) and chilling out at Lena's house.

Aschaffenburg, on the river Main, has about 70,000 inhabitants and is near Frankfurt. It is more than 1000 years old. The best known sites include the castle, which was originally built in the 1600s but was completely restored after extensive damage during WW2, and the Pompejanum, a replica of a town house found in the ruins of Pompei, which was built by King Ludwig 1 of Bavaria in the mid 1800s.

We spent Monday checking out the sites of the Schaff. The castle and the Pompejanum are lovely, but the city itself is also very pretty with cobbled streets, streets of old buildings, parks everywhere and lots of charming cafes and restaurants. Our tour also took in some shops and cafes where I ogled over the delicious cakes and pastries on offer everywhere. Think I could really take to this coffee and cake (Kaffee mit Kuchen) business! We also enjoyed a delicious home cooked meal with Lena's parents, who are lovely and very hospitable.

Tuesday we decided to cycle to a nearby town for, I am told, one of the best ice creams in the world. Trouble is, we got on the bikes and it looked like rain. It was also very windy, so we cycled to a nearby park which looks just like a delicate English garden, complete with lake, rowboats, swans, a manor house, a maze and a bridge over the lake. The only difference is the large beer garden where we sampled Flammkuchen, a local specialty which is a bit like pizza on a very flat base. Yum! After a relaxing afternoon (with more Kaffee mit Kuchen) we went out for a glass of Apfelwein, a local specialty much like cider, in the pouring rain in the evening.

After an early start for an interview on Wednesday morning we headed off to Würzburg in the afternoon to check out the town and pay a visit to Julia, Lena's school friend who had previously come to visit her in Oslo earlier in the year. She's in the middle of studying for her state exam as a teacher. All students of the 'professions' (medicine, teaching etc) are required to do a huge examination set by the state during their course. Medicine actually has 2, at different stages in the course. These exams are massive and require months and months of just study (students might not even go to classes during this time). Lena tells me that for her state exam in a few years she will study stuff 6 months before the exam that she will not get a chance to review again before the exam is held. Julia's exam is in a few months and she is currently spending several weeks reviewing Botany for her Primary School Teacher exam!

So after a glass of juice at her house we left her to study whilst we wandered round Würzburg for the afternoon, looking at the castle, the many churches, the river and stopping to warm up with- you guessed it- Kaffee (but no Kuchen this time). It was a bit wet so we didn't get to see as much as we'd hoped but it is a lovely place and I have an excuse to return now!

In the evening we enjoyed dinner at Julia's with her flatmates (both medical students), some of her friends and some of the flatmate's friends who had come to visit to find out about studying Medicine. One of her flatmates had spent time in NZ so had a huge NZ flag on the wall and the other spent close to a year in Launceston whilst at high school, so had a big Aussie flag on the wall. He was apparently very excited to hear an Aussie was coming to visit and we spent time discussing Australianisms and all about Tassie.

Julia and a friend of hers are coming to Australia for six months in January so I hope to see them again in Melbourne. They were interested in where to go and what to see, and they showed me a picture a friend had sent of a huge spider, half the size of someone's back. I was able to calm them down by telling them I have never seen one that big!

We had to get the train back that night, as I had another interview the next day (rescheduled from the problems in Berlin). So we aimed for the 23:15 train (the earlier one was 3 hours earlier), which ended up leaving half an hour late. Weary, we arrived back to the rainy Schaff at 1am, delighted to find Lena's mum waiting on the platform to drive us home. She'd checked the train arrival time on the net and thought it was too wet and cold for us to walk home!

After an early morning interview (my last one, luckily!) and a few more hours sleep Lena and I loaded up the car, dropped by the post office to solve my excess baggage problems and headed on the road to Münster, for our highly anticipated visit to Jana, Lena's sister and fellow Hurtigruten traveller. Münster is known for two things: rain and church bells, and let's just say it didn't disappoint. The rain started the minute we got there and only stopped when we were halfway home. But we had fun nevertheless, eating dinner at Jana's place, watching a movie and then heading to her friend's house for some drinks and chatter. The next morning we joined Jana at her lecture (she's also a medical student, her lecture was on environmental medicine). I've now been to medical lectures in 3 different countries and think medical students are probably the same the world over!

Following the lecture, we joined her friends at Mensa. I got quite excited when I heard we were off to Mensa. I mean, I know they're smart, but wow! However, my excitement was short lived when I discovered that every student in Germany goes to Mensa- it's a nationwide cafeteria chain that provides cheap food for students and slightly more expensive food for others. It's quite cool actually: for 2 euro you get a meal (fish, schnitzel etc) with three extras: side dishes, yoghurt etc. You have a membership card which is loaded with money that you scan to pay for your food.

Following my inauguration at Mensa, we headed back to load up the car for our trip home. Jana has exams in a few weeks (just normal ones, not the state exam), so we had to say goodbye to her and head back to Aschaffenburg where we dined on frozen pizza and watched a movie, exhausted after our big few days.

This afternoon we're having a BBQ with one of Lena's friends who was on exchange elsewhere. She has a friend from her exchange visiting and so after dinner we're going to head into town I think. There's a series of cultural activities on here at the moment including opera and jazz in the castle, outdoor cinema shows and so on. Lena's father, who plays the saxophone, performed last weekend in a concert. Tonight is the one of the highlights of the culture program: Museumsnacht (museum night). So it should be a fun night!

Tomorrow we hope to visit Heidelberg to catch up with some of the exchange students from Oslo (Sundar, one of the other Melbourne students is visiting also). Then maybe a trip to Frankfurt and a visit to a local lake for a swim, assuming it warms up a bit!

Anneke