Day 6 - Home Alone

On my own for the first time. Think McCauley Culkin in Heidelberg.

Jane got up early for work. I had had a pretty lousy night’s sleep so I slept in, got up and had some joghurt & muesli mit kaffe and wrote yesterday’s travelogue. Thought I would soak my sore shoulder in the tub. Jane has a nice long big tub. Above it there is a hot water heater. When you want hot water, you dial it up, hit the button and wait about 10 minutes or so for it to heat up. It took me 2 full cycles to get about a third of a tub of water, but it seemed to help.

I left the Gulag and climbed down that awful steep hill (you walk down it like you are constipated because you’re so worried that the momentum is going to get you going so fast you can’t put on the brakes) and actually got onto the right bus. I couldn’t make the driver understand me, though, and had to pull out the map and point.

Once on the main shopping drag in Heidelberg (the Hauptstrasse) I started moseying. The Hauptstrasse is the main drag in Old Heidelberg - it's a long, wide cobbled pedestrian-only boulevard with restaurants and shops on each side. To one side, about two blocks away, is the Neckar River. To the other side, high on the hill, is the castle ruin. By the time I started walking it had rained and stopped raining twice already. (The entire rest of the day was like that – soft shower, then sun, then shower, then sun. It never rained hard or for long, but I my umbrella got a workout.) As soon as I set foot in the Marktplatz I saw two cops walking the beat. It was a man and a woman, and they looked like they came out of “Reno 911.” My first thought was, “Jane would want to change his diaper.”

I stopped at a costume jewelry store I had read about on VirtualTourist.com. It’s called Andrea, and the owner represents about 80 jewelry artists. The jewelry was interesting and the owner and I had a nice conversation.

About halfway down the Hauptstrasse, a young man, an escapee from the Von Trapp family, ran up to me and started yapping in German. I said, “I understood ‘Save the Children’” (there was a group of young men and women collecting for the charity.) He said, “Are you in Heidelberg on holiday?” And I said, “I am visiting my Schwester.” He said, “Your sister or your daughter?” So I said, “SCHWESTER! The one word I know in German and you didn’t understand me!” He thought that was hilarious.

Farther down there is a store with a little stuffed bear above the door. He blows bubbles!

I continued to go in and out of stores until I’d gotten nearly to the other end of the Hauptstrasse, and I was getting a little peckish. There was a guy standing inside a doorway eating this great oval pizza-looking thing out of a cardboard envelope. I went back 3 times before I caved. It was pizza, just individual oval shaped pizza, and it was served in a cardboard envelope (think McDonald’s apple pie container, only bigger.) Drove the pizza on a stick guy right outta business. I walked over to the Bismarckplatz and sat down to eat my P.I.E. when I felt something wet on my pants. No biggie – it had been raining off and on all afternoon – but no, it was a strawberry. A big, fat juicy strawberry.

Next I went into Woolies (Woolworth’s.) It was ok. I decided to head to the train station (about another mile) to see about getting a Heidelberg Card. We read on the internet that it gets you in free to a lot of attractions and gives you free use of public transportation. That would be a great savings to me in taking the bus – one way is 2.10e. On the way to the train station, I got lost a little bit but found a 2^nd hand store and a gnome store. Made notes to return with Jane. There was a tiny pond and a park down some steps so I went to check it out and found a great blue heron sitting on top of the gazebo. He let me take his picture. Unfortunately, a camera glitch caused the picture to become corrupted, but I still have the picture of the fountain.

Across from the train station is a shopping center which contains a very cool British food store. It's called Piccadilly, and it had everything from Spotted Dick to teapots.

Finally made it to the train station only to find out that the Heidelberg card does not include public transportation, and rather than waste it, I want to get one when Mike gets here and we can do some touristy stuff together. Hung around the station for a short while talking to Jane on the phone to decide where to meet and stuff. The station is across from the Print Media Academy. There is a HUGE and very cool sculpture of a horse made out of metal. I got a good picture of it. Had a $3.00 diet coke while I waited. God, I miss the Big Gulp.

I decided to walk toward the Neckar (the river that runs through Heidelberg) and just make my way up some side streets. I found a pretty café (Merlin Cafebar) with outside tables, and it had, once again, stopped raining and was nice out. So I took a seat, called Jane (she knew the café) and drank coffee and read my book while I waited. While I was waiting, two little girls (around 2-3 yrs) were having a blast taking their napkins and going around wiping the tables off. If one was wiping a table off and the other came to the same table, the first one would have a cow. They were charming.

Jane got there and as we sat, 2 policemen came over and asked us if it was our car parked illegally along the curb (it was not.) Jane decided instead of diapering them, she would be willing to breastfeed. We started walking up to the Hauptstrasse to have dinner together.

First we hit a natural food store where we got to try out several different foods from cheese to cookies. (Later on the Hauptstrasse we got to taste test peach liquor. We may do a book on eating and drinking for free in Germany.) At the Bismarckplatz we took the escalators up to the top of the Kaufhaus Gallerie and took the glass elevator down. I got some good pictures from there, which you can see above. Not bad for being taken through glass, with the elevator moving! You can see the reflection of Jane & me in one of them if you look closely.

On our way through the Hauptstrasse, we ran into my Von Trapp again. This time I got to say, “THIS is my Schwester,” and he remembered me and we had another laugh about it, but I still didn’t give him any money to save the children.

We found the Indian restaurant we were headed for, Indian Palace. We ordered naan, chicken tikka masala and chicken korma. It was all very very good, and the service was nice, too. On our way back down the Hauptstrasse to the car, I saw a store window with a mannequin wearing some beads. BIG beads. Took a picture to share with my bead buddies.

We walked back to the car, drove home to the ghetto. Jane had told me that when she went to her car in the morning, every car in the place was covered with thick blue powder. She had gone and gotten her car washed before she came to get me, but when we got back to the Bronx there was still one car in the garage covered with the stuff and a number of residents standing around discussing it. It appears that it was from a fire extinguisher (it really is like the Delta House.) Even in the hallways someone had gone to town with the extinguisher. We got to the dump and jumped into our jammies, watched most of Frankie and Johnny and went to bed.

Day 14 - Figgy Pudding

Took the bus (without paying!) to the Kongresshaus stop, which turned out to be the perfect stop to be nearest Mike’s crib. Too bad it took me all week to figure that one out. He was waiting for me with a pear. It was absolutely gorgeous out, sunny and with blue skies.

We went back to the funicular and took it all the way to the top again. This time we had a British girl as a companion. At the top, while we waited to come back down, we took some pictures, then had a wurst, and I had a coffee while Mike had beer. The weather was much clearer, so we got some better pictures of the view.

We took the funicular down to the castle stop. This time we wanted to find the mysterious footprint on the terrace. Local myth is that a knight was caught in the room of one of a nobleman’s wife, and to escape he jumped to the terrace below, leaving his footprint. It is red sandstone, and it truly looks like a bootprint. I also noticed an inscription on a fountain/horse trough - what intrigued me what that it was in Hebrew and in old German, and dated back to the 1700s. The inscription looks like it's Psalm CX:VIII, which should be Psalm 110, Verse 8, only there is no Verse 8 in Psalm 110! I tried variations (CXV:III) but the results didn't make sense. The only thing that made sense was Psalm 110, Verse 7, "He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head." So maybe it's from a bible version I don't know about, or the Germans count differently.

We then walked around the castle gardens, which are in the English garden style, and as it was a beautiful day, it was quite lovely. We got some very nice pictures of the gardens, and of the view from the gardens, which are quite high up. In other pictures in these entries you can see something that looks like a series of arches, like a Roman viaduct (there is a picture above of it). That is part of the garden, and should give you an idea of how high up the gardens are.

We returned to the town on the funicular and had lunch in a Persian fast food restaurant (Persepolis), where I dropped a bookcrossing book. We shared a lunch of saffron chicken and rice. Next we headed to an internet café for a few minutes. I finished first so I ran out to do a little shopping - I wanted to pick up a pretty tablecloth for my worker bee Barbara, had my eye on a scarf for Mutti, and I had been trying to find a Heidelberg charm for myself. I stepped into a jewelry store I'd passed every day Schmuck Paradies) and a very nice woman showed me their array of charms. I selected a beautiful charm of the Heidelberg castle ruins - it was the perfect size for my charm bracelet. We had a lovely conversation, too. I left very happy.

Jane met us and we drove over to the other side of town (near the large modern campus of the Heidelberg University) to see if we couldn’t find some books which had been released. Not only did we not find books, but we had one hell of a time finding the place at all! The place we found was a large modern cafe full of students watching a footie game. No books anywhere.

We came back to a restaurant called the Merlin Cafebar, where I had met Jane last week, and sat in the Biergarten enjoying the weather. We all had great salads. They were having a summer special, sort of an "early bird" special, any salad 6e. As it became dark, they lit heaters under the umbrellas. It is so nice to be able to sit outside even though it's chilly out.

We walked back to town and on the way we saw a homeless woman laying motionless in the window of a Laundromat. I got a picture, of course. We also so a sign for parking, which was misspelled "Barking," and another cool sign which had monkey baby faces on it.

We stopped at the Penny Markt and Jane picked up a ten-pack of fig liquor miniatures for $2.99. We met an American student outside and while we toasted each other with our little fig liquors, he informed us that if you don’t look at each other when you toast , you’ll have bad sex for 7 years. Fortunately, we have perfected the “evil monkey toast,” which means you point AND look in the other’s eyes, and we expect to see it in general use in about 3 years when we return. By the way, Jane and I continued to knock back those fig liqueurs the rest of the time I was there - they were really yummy. We started calling them "Figgy Puddings."

We went over to the Dubliner and sat in the pub, and while everyone else was completely engrossed in a rugby game, and later a footie (soccer) game between Ireland and Russia, we three nerds played the word game quiddler, and I had a great cider blackcurrent beer thingy. There were lots of Irish and Brits in the pub, and next to us was a group of young Russian men. It was easy to tell who was winning.

Jane and I finally left, and on the way back we discovered that the homeless woman is a homeless man. It's so odd - he looks as if he will be losing his feet at any moment, they looked positively gangrenous. Here he is in a country where the medical care is free for everyone. It just goes to show you that you can't help everyone. It's very sad.

We drove back to the ghetto and watched the rest of City Slickers before retiring.