What a great first weekend in Koblenz! It has finally reached very very cold temperatures here, which means that today we got our first snow since I arrived! I was so excited. It was just a bunch of flurries but really, that’s more than the average Texan sees in a year.
Saturday I went to dinner at the home of some people involved in the sister city partnership between Austin and Koblenz. It was very nice to have dinner in a nice warm house instead of the dorm or a restaurant. They were all older than the students I’ve met so far (in their 50’s I’d say) and I’ve noticed that the further a person is from being a student, the less likely they are to speak English with me. So naturally we all spoke German throughout dinner, which meant that I was very quiet but I listened quite well. Dinner was delicious too! Chicken with salad and bread (always so much bread here, what am I going to do being spoiled like this?) During dinner they kept refilling my glass with this wonderful wine, which I’ve noticed is also common in Koblenz: they really like wine, and all kinds of it. I’ve yet to drink beer here (I know! In Germany!) but wine or sparkling wine is everywhere. Then, after dinner, they served desert. Ice cream, cookies, chocolates, desert wine–everything kept coming out of the pantry periodically. I think maybe they were trying to show me some things that they eat traditionally at Weihnachtsmarkt since I mentioned that I was sad I missed that. It was all fantastic, of course, and they even sent me home with some cookies and chocolates! This is surely an extended Christmas for me. As an added kindness, they let me call my parents, which happens so rarely here. (I really do feel sorry for my parents; every time I try to Skype them it cuts out mid call.) All in all a beautiful night with wonderful people. What could make the weekend better?
A castle. That’s what, I got dinner and a castle. Sunday another family from the same partnership took me to Schloss Stolzenfels, a castle restored as gift for Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Rheinland-Pfalz and his queen from Bayern (Bavaria) in 1823. It is absolutely gorgeous. I was able to take pictures outside but they were not allowed indoors. Unfortunately the photos aren’t loading, but you can view some on the castle’s website.
Inside there were many beautiful rooms with intricate wood carvings, glass windows made by an artist from Munich, gorgeous and well preserved furniture, and wooden floors and ceilings. This was everything I thought castles were and more (and never have I wanted to live in a castle more than I did on Sunday!) It was like something out of a fairy tale or that I had seen in a book, but my mind had so sharply separated castles as what I knew was fake or legendary (castles at Disney World for instance) that I had forgotten that all those paintings and drawings and miniatures are constructed in the style of something real that very much exists in Germany. One very impressive room had been made in the style of the rooms during the times of the knights–a sort of romantic gesture from the 1800’s. There were suits of armor all along the walls with beautiful chandeliers that hung from dips in the ceiling lined with wood carved and painted gold. In the very back was a model of the Cologne Cathedral, about two feet tall and to scale. It was incredible detailed and matched the Cathedral in color and intricacy. Then I heard our guide talking about it and caught the words aus Zucker. The entire model was made of sugar. And I just couldn’t believe it; it was like the Cathedral was shrunken and its materials turned to sugar without anyone knowing any different. Like everything else in the castle, the attention to detail was unbelievable.
Today I worked my first full day at the International Office. It went really well, albeit slowly because I’m working on a presentation about St. Edward’s for the Hochschule students and it occurs to me that I have never presented over St. Edward’s before so this is difficult to construct. Also, they’ve given me a few tasks regarding St. Edward’s and it turns out calling them from Germany is a bit more difficult than I expected. Suddenly no one seems to know who I am…must be because Caitlin is not normally from Germany. So if you’re reading this and someone asks you why I’m not around anymore, tell them I’m not hiding in my room. Somewhere in Germany, I’m exploring a castle.