Yesterday, Liverpool FC lost a big game, the FA Cup final, to Another Team. I watched it in a pub in Sevilla that had far too few fans in red and far too many fans of that other team. It wasn’t a good loss, either; LFC played well during the last 30 minutes but that wasn’t enough to save the results of the dire first 60. Then, as I was leaving for home, the stormclouds came and I walked home in the rain like every sad person cliché.
I recently read a list of tips for travel bloggers and some of them really stood out to me. I don’t mean tips like “take a lot of photos” (duh); I mean concepts like “don’t romanticize or idealize the culture you are visiting” and “remember that the city is not there for you.” I think it’s something a lot of us forget, that our vacation spots aren’t putting on a show for our benefit. We’re on vacation, but for most of the people we’re visiting, this is their daily life. At the same time, just because we’re viewing someone’s daily life doesn’t mean we are going to come back experts on whatever country we’ve visited. It’s definitely something I thought a lot about when I was writing my post on history in Germany and Prague, and it’s something I thought about more this past weekend, which I spent on a trip to Morocco.
Previous Posts: Berlin, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic, Munich, Germany and Salzburg, Austria; History
This’ll be my last post about spring break (are you bored yet?), and hopefully it’s a fun one: food! Food is something I didn’t really think about when I decided to go to Germany and the Czech Republic for spring break, and maybe I should have. As it was, I asked some people a few days before I left what people eat in Germany and all of the answers were the same: meat. Googling “traditional German foods” gave me the same answer. Perhaps I should have given this a bit more thought. Spain isn’t exactly a vegetarian-friendly country either, but at least in the south fish is a main staple of the diet, so once I decided to go pescatarian for the semester (and I’m probably going to stay this way when I go home; I like fish a lot) I was doing just fine. However, although I’m sure that the Germans eat fish, most of what I found about German cuisine went something along the lines of sausage, sausage, beer, sausage. Luckily, throughout the week I was pleasantly surprised to find delicious food that I could eat. Here are a few of my favourite meals:
Continue reading ““What do Germans eat?” “Sausage and beer.””
I decided to separate this post out from the city-specific posts because those were about having fun and this one has a more serious tone. Going to Berlin, Munich, and Prague was a fun experience, certainly, but it also was an educational one. Something that is different between Europe and America, or at least certain places in Europe, is that history is inescapable. Walking around Berlin, it seemed like every block had a memorial for some group of people persecuted or killed during the Third Reich, or a piece of the Berlin Wall still standing as a reminder of the Cold War. In Prague, even something as simple as a designer store in a certain area of town was significant (the Jewish quarter, now home to a fancy shopping district, had a Hugo Boss store; the designer apologized just a few years ago for having designed the Nazis’ uniforms).
Previous Posts: Berlin, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic
*More on that in my food post 🙂
Yesterday: Berlin, Germany
*”Good Day” in Czech
I didn’t know a lot about Prague before I visited. Most of my knowledge came from the multitudes of people who told me how beautiful it was, and the play Rock and Roll by Tom Stoppard, which I saw with my dad a few years ago. On Sunday evening, Stephanie and I took a train from Berlin through the German countryside (and past Dresden, which I enjoyed as I was reading a novel by Kurt Vonnegut at the time) and into the Czech Republic. As soon as we arrived, I understood why people think the city is so beautiful. Even at night, I could see so many different kinds of architecture, which I love. Also, like Germany, most people we encountered spoke some English which was good because, unlike Germany, I don’t know a single word of Czech. We met up with Liz and Rachelle, who were coming in from Sevilla, and Jovita, who had spent the weekend in Amsterdam, and had a quick dinner before turning in for the night.
