David's Visit, Pt. 2

As you read this, your peripheral vision is telling you that there's no video. Now, I know what you're thinking:

A video-only copy of that entry is currently sitting in my blog folder. It's been there for about a week now. But guess what? Recording audio and perfectly syncing requires effort! And with the end of the semester fast approaching, I'm really only inspired to procrastinate on a hitherto unknown scale finish my courses and relax in my free time.Also, the narration I wrote had no jokes. Here's something along the lines of my Bulgaria report. Click the pictures to embiggen.

The town of Hechingen is just south of Stuttgart. It’s home to Burg Hohenzollern, a neo-gothic castle that is the third iteration of the Prussian ancestral seat.

The exterior is exactly what you'd expect: the multiple levels of towers and walls were appropriately grand and in excellent condition. The interior didn't match the outside, though, and it certainly wasn't worth the guided tour, which featured such thrilling things as old furniture and thousands of portraits of bloated medieval royalty. Granted, there were the armory and treasure room, both of which had plenty of things to see, but the whole presentation was off, like they just threw some glass cases into a poorly-painted side room and called it an exhibit. It wasn't a terrible tour, it just didn't match the majesty implied by the castle's silhouette. At the very least, it gave us something to do until sunset. It’s a pity my pictures don’t capture the way the mist carried the sunlight all the way across the valley. Not just the sky, but the air between us and the hills took up the colors of sunset. That view alone justified the time required to get there.

By "the time required to get there," I mean "four hours of regional train lines that are much slower and less reliable than intercity routes." The way back was through direct intercity lines, but thanks to a ninety-minute wait in Offenburg, possibly the least exciting town in the country, the entire return trip lasted five and a half hours. While the transit there and back was admittedly miserable I think it was ultimately worth it since this castle is something an American tourist  normally wouldn't see.

The next day’s plan was a day trip to Strasbourg, France, just 20 minutes away from Freiburg. We had been told multiple times that Strasbourg isn’t really French, and that to experience France we should go somewhere else, like Paris; but when we stepped out of the bus and onto the city streets, the almost obscene abundance of dog feces on the sidewalks told us exactly where we were.



The centerpiece of the city isn't hard to find. I’ve seen a lot of baroque and gothic architecture, but this thing… The front door alone had more minute details than Freiburg’s entire cathedral. This jaded critic was impressed.

You may deduce from my photos of this and Freiburg's minster that the Gothic style is an architectural celebration of brown. You are absolutely correct. While there was more than enough brown on display, there were also some striking stained glass windows and an incredible astronomical clock of extremely complex design.

After checking out the shops around the cathedral, we went to a district called “little France.” Old-school quaintness is taken to the extreme here, and as pretty as it is in Winter, I think I’ll come back again in spring to really experience the beauty of it.

By this time, David had been here for over a week and it was time to go. He was going to fly out of Zurich in the morning, so we went there a day early to avoid any last-minute complications and to have some time to enjoy the city. I didn’t have any expectations going into Switzerland, but I was surprised by the fact that everything in Zurich is not only created according to ridiculously high standards but also extremely understated. None of the architecture was as intricate as the cathedrals in Strasbourg and Freibug, but it felt like nothing needed to be because it was all so tastefully designed. I could see a few office buildings on Zurich's far West side,  but other than one church, none of the buildings in the central district exceeded five or six stories.

We bought some chocolate for our parents at Sprüngli, one of Zurich's premier chocolate shops, which was much cheaper than I expected. Unable to pass up such great deals on Swiss chocolates, we bought a box for ourselves.

Zurich has an incredible art museum, and we checked it out despite the enormous price tag. I'm no art connoisseur, but the Picasso exhibit in their main gallery was fantastic. The rest of the museum was a maze of conventional and abstract art from the 1300s to the present day. A memorable abstract piece was the skin of a horse stretched over a legless but still vaguely horse-shaped object to which I felt an irrational, visceral repulsion.

Hostels in Europe generally cater to backpackers; that is, they're cheap – I know of places in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna that will give you a bed for less than 15 Euro a night. That rule does NOT apply to Zurich, where the cheapest hostel costs 50 Euro per person. We agreed that we'd be better off finding an alternative.

Travel Tip: while certain hostels can be expensive, the couches at an airport Starbucks will always be free. Turns out there was a little community of like-minded travelers waiting for their morning flights in one of the airport’s coffee shops, and we fit right in. I do wish the couches were longer, though. 

Then David left. 

David's Visit, Pt. 1