Playing catch-up: Hannover

At the bottom of this post is a slideshow of pictures that I took in Hannover. It was a pretty city and I had a nice time taking a look around - but what I thought was memorable is not necessarily what's on the photos:

I decided to hop on a train and ride an hour to go to Hannover for the day, just to take advantage of the fact that my student ID is my ticket to anywhere in Lower Saxony. One stop on the hour-long trip sounded all the world to me like "Friede" or "Peace". When I looked out the window I saw a green meadow running up to a hill, with a small farm at its foot, and a horse rolling in the grass in front of the river that the train was following. Sounded like peace to me! (the town is actually called Frede - but I like my version better).

I went to Hamburg convinced by the weather report predicting showers all day, armed with a rain jacket and umbrella, planning on spending the afternoon in a museum just to get out of the rain. It turns out we had sunshine the whole day, with temperatures above 70 for most of it - a real treat. The city was full of people enjoying the weather and the open air jazz festival. The combination of good weather and music in the air led to more public displays of affection that I've ever seen in Germany, including New Year's Eve. It was impressive.

I got to Hannover with about 20 minutes to get to the tourist information and get a seat on the 2 and a half hour bus tour of the city (bus tour, because that is not in the rain, either). I'm glad I took the bus because we went all the way to the summer palace of the Hannover royal family (a few generations before the elector of Hannover became the king George of England). The bus ride was made less pleasant by the man who seemed to not realize that in a bus tour you drive past everything, and when he rudely said to the bus driver "This time you're going to drive slower, right?" he was shocked that the driver wasn't friendly, and complained about that, too. The tour was in German and English - and it only came out that I wasn't German when I knew what the word for Pentecost was in Germany, America, and England.

I had a free day to travel because it was Ascension Day - Christihimmelfahrt - or Vatertag/Männertag/Herrentag (men's day). Typically men take the day to ride bikes decorated with lilac branches and a case of beer through the country side. In the city though, men were just pulling little red wagons with the necessary beverages with them - Some groups had matching T-shirts. Naturally the complaining man in the bus loudly explained that they're all on Harz-vier, welfare for unemployment. Greeat.

After the tour was over I wanted to get back into the old city. There's a red stripe painted on the sidewalk that leads you on a walking tour of the city, and I figured that that would be a sure way to see anything the bus hadn't seen, or to take another look at a few places up close. Of course - the red line went right through the most crowded parts of the jazz festival... but I managed to find my way, even though I lost my city map somewhere along the walk. I had a really nice lunch at an Italian restaurant, sitting outside. I got to hear all about the daughter-in-law of the woman at the next table. The mother-in-law alternated between saying disparaging things about the d-i-l not speaking German and coming from Thailand, and asserting that she liked and accepted her anyway. They were greeted by a friend who was walking by, sporting a really serious waxed handlebar mustache.

Once the table was clear, another couple sat down. Well first, just the female half of the pair sat down, leafed through the menu, and ordered for two people, explaining that something needed to be on the table quickly, because the man that was coming was "unterzuckert" (had low blood sugar) and could easily get aggressive. She had dressed for the warm weather in a very small top and very short shorts, and had caught the attention of all the men celebrating their day by drinking beer on the street. While ordering, she looked over the waiter's shoulder, jumped to her feet, and yelled "DIRK! Dirk! He didn't see me!" and went running down the street to find potentially aggressive Dirk. We were all pretty relieved when Dirk had had some bread and didn't get aggressive that his companion ordered wine, and not a wine spritzer.

When I passed the opera, I saw that Carmen was playing, and decided to stay long enough in Hannover to see the performance. I spent the extra time I had drinking something like "bitter lime" and listening to a group of street musicians play "In the Mood" on accordion. The opera was well performed, and I'm not totally sure what I think about the modern staging of it, but I had plenty of time to get to my train that left 20 minutes after the opera ended. The rest of the trip home I heard another group of passengers talk about the opera, about whether it was really in French, and that there were naked people on the stage.

Overall it was a really nice day, but after spending so much time outside after a full week, I managed to catch a cold that lasted for the rest of the next week. Still, when I left for Storkow on Friday morning, it had cleared up. More about the 800th Anniversary of Storkow in the next blog!