Small Trip: Weisbaden

So, thanks to Eat Pray Love the movie, after watching it I got self-actualized. Unlike after reading the book, I got nothing!

My self-actualization resulted that I had to kick my own lazy ass and start writing about a little trip I made around Europe.

It was a fairly small trip, considering I only spent a month in the continent and only went to 4 countries. So I thought, since I was only traveling to 4 countries, I should just write something based on the different countries I went. I tried doing it that way. It just doesn't work.

So, bear with me. I'm writing it based on different cities that I visited.

My first stop (well, aside from the mighty-because it was HUGE-Frankfurt Airport) was a small city called Weisbaden.

You might wonder why I went to such small city like Weisbaden.

Well, in this city lives my hostsister, Lisa.

Below is the building where Lisa and her boyfriend, Peter, is now living.

Although you can't really see both Lisa's or Peter's face, you can clearly see their building. It's a nice old building with big windows, which can bring in enough warmth when the sun shines. Their room's windows are the ones exactly above their heads.

I think it is very interesting they way they live.

They are renting this huge apartment (it has 7 rooms with kitchen, two bathrooms, and a balcony) with eight or nine other people. It is actually a custom for German students to get together and rent a big apartment and share the rent. The concept is almost like Indonesian's 'kostan' but in this 'WG' (that's how they call the shared-apartment), you know who you're gonna be living with, while in 'kostan' mostly you didn't plan to live in the same 'kostan' with your friend(s).

One of the coolest things that we did was the 'WG Party'.

One of Lisa's flatmates was going away for a year Erasmus in Turkey, so they decided to throw a little going away party.

The party was nice. The food was good, it was vegan and good! and the people were very friendly. They were very kind to me as many people were making effort to talk to me in English. And some of them were actually very interested in all sorts of things about me, my origin, my religion, my degree, and a bunch of other stuff.

It was also nice because people were respectfully smoking in the balcony. and though there were lots of alcohol and several glasses were broken, nothing crazy happened.

My first European party and I like it.

When I was still planning my trip, Lisa asked me a question, "what would I like to see in Germany?"

That was a pretty easy question.

Of course I wanna do some touristic stuff: visiting historical sites, taking pictures, etc, etc.

But the main thing that I wanted to do was to know about her life.

I always think it is interesting to see how the local live. and because Lisa is considered to be my family, it is extra interesting to see the way she now lives.

So I stayed with her in her WG, experienced the WG party, and I went to her work place.

Lisa works voluntarily in a garden. It is a pretty big garden with a castle that is now turn into a some kind of science center. The garden is pretty big and it has various kind of plant that I have never seen before.

One of the weirdest things that I found was shown in this picture below.

On the picture, you can see that I was holding one kind of flower. Surprisingly, you can eat the flower! Some people in Germany actually eat the flower, they usually put them in their salad.

Lisa was very insisting that I had to try the flower. I thought, and still think, it was too weird to eat flower, just like that. It took me sometime to finally put the flower in my mouth and eat it.

The Germans who eat it consider the flower to be spicy. Although it was nothing like chili, I could remember the little bite of spiciness when I chew the flower.

Peter actually took a video of me eating the flower, but watching it back now, it is just too weird to put it up here. I decided to put on a picture instead of the video.

As I said, Lisa works in a garden with a castle that is now turned into some kind of science center. The science center has some of the coolest things that can blow your mind. Some of the things works on very simple science, it blew my mind.

But, one of the coolest things was in this picture below: a wind harp.

It is a harp that make a sound when there's wind blowing.

Lisa said, in a very windy day, the harp can play beautiful tunes, it sounds almost like a song.

They should have put a lot of wind harps in Regina, the wind was unbelievably strong, when I was there.

So besides staying at Lisa's WG and went to her work place, I also went around the city of Weisbaden.

I was very surprised when I was taken to see this thing, below.

It is actually a volcanic hot spring source.

It turned out that Weisbaden is a city that was built in the volcanic region. The volcanic hot spring is now used as a spa and sauna. There is also a spot of the hot spring source with a list of different kind of minerals that were contained in the hot spring. Plus there is a suggestion to drink the hot spring one glass per day because the water is actually nutritious if consumed properly.

I mean, I come from a country with the most volcanos in the whole wide world, but I never knew that it is okay to drink the volcanic hot spring.

Despite all the chart of minerals and the suggestion of how good the effect of drinking a cup of the volcanic hot spring, I decided to not risk it. I just thought it is TOO WEIRD to drink the volcanic hot spring. and even if I would drink the hot spring, maybe I should try the Indonesian's one first.

Speaking of volcanic region, Lisa told me that they actually got earthquake in the city a while back. She said the quake was extremely tiny, no one felt it, but the news blew it up.

and I could imagine how panic people were. They live in Germany, a country in the middle of the continent, earthquake was one of the least concerned catastrophe that they would expect.

Although we, in Indonesia, are still freaking out everytime we feel the earth's movement, I think we would handle it better than they do. We just get so used to it.

So, in my opinion, Weisbaden turned out to be a lovely city to live.

It's not that big, so you don't get all the big city stress and all that, but it's that small either.

The thing that made Lisa decided to stay in Weisbaden was the nice architecture all around the city. There are still a lot of old buildings. While they're not necessarily historic, they were very lovely to look at.

The picture below is one of the very first old houses that I saw in Germany.

It didn't look like a real house or building to me, it was more like a Barbie house or something.

Below is a picture of one of the main squares.

The tall-red building is one of the famous church in the city. Besides that is one of the government's buildings.

And the last picture of this entry is the city's theatre.

Very nice and very European.

I didn't spend that much time in Weisbaden, but I totally understand why Lisa would choose to live in the city.

Weisbaden is very european, indeed.

*well. d'oh!*