Mainz

So far I've stuck to organising my blog-posts by place and for the next few posts I'll continue along that vein as I've done rather a bit of travelling recently! It's currently the Herbstferien in Rheinland-Pfalz which basically means I get two and a half weeks off school :) but when I'm back into my routine I'll post about different things aside from the places I visit!

Me at Mainz train station, one of the many I've visited on my travels! 

This post is then centred on the beautiful city of Mainz!

The cathedral

 Mainz is the Hauptstadt of Rheinland-Pfalz despite it's easterly location. It lies literally on the border with Hessen yet serves as the capitol for places as far West as Trier on the other side of the Bundesland!

Detailed metalwork fountain depicting images of soldiers 

It's history is a slightly sad one as it is a very old city but a lot of its historical buildings and monuments were destroyed in the second world war bomb attacks. The cathedral was hit but massive restoration works were undertaken and with a few newer additions such as the modernist stained glass windows, much of th original character and style has been preserved. The cathedral itself has an altar at both ends, both sitting at the bottom of towering hollowed out spires which accompany the ridiculously high vaulted ceiling, and one altar boasts a hanging cross which due to the thin wires looks like it's suspended in mid air, it's really beautiful!  Unlike Cologne's cathedral this one has a very different architecture with hardly any evidence of the Gothic which dominates in Cologne. The brick is a softer red and the turrets which enclose the cloisters are more rounded giving a softer and more open impression.

Aside from the cathedral another major attraction is the Gutenberg press museum which houses some of the very first presses used by Gutenberg when he invented printing. Alongside the presses there are several copies of the Gutenberg bible, many of them original making them nearly 500 years old! Gutenberg opened up the door for mass reading and brought the bible into the common sphere, available for all to read at a much more reasonable cost and at a much greater speed. Preservation was also a key motive to his work as with the printing press he could quickly copy important and sacred texts saving them from the danger of fire to which many historical documents were lost when the only way to create a copy of the text was the inscription of monks who would spend years copying the text by hand.

The old

and the new

Due to the damage done in Word War II there is an eclectic mix of old and new in the town with the old more traditional style standing right next to an extremely modern shopping centre and towering steel structures boasting modern design and architecture. It gives the city the feeling of being much smaller than it actually is and much more friendly and open as the decline which usually occurs with urbanisation appears to have stayed away from this centre.

I'm about 20 minutes away on the train and I've just enrolled at the university there as a guest/exchange student so I'll definitely be spending some more time there!

Idar-Oberstein

My parents wanted to do a bit of travelling and see some things in the local area and after a failed attempt at finding the Ruedesheim I remember from the German exchange 6 years ago we headed on over to Idar-Oberstein further into Rheinland-Pfalz. I'd been there with my exchange partner and it was so lovely to go back, the satnav took us exactly where I remembered being which helped when we were trying to find the sights! 

The main attraction in the town is the Felsenkirche which is this beautiful 15th century church carved into the rock face of the cliff which surrounds the city. It takes an awful lot of leg work to make it up to the church - hundreds and hundreds of steps! - but once you've made it the view is spectacular and the fact that men 500 years ago managed to not only ascend to this height but carve backwards into a rock face and create a beautiful and stable church which still stands today is incredible! 

The area is also known for its precious gems and the streets are lined with shops selling amethyst and all kinds of stones in both its natural and refined forms. I picked up some decorations for my room and my brother managed to find his birthstone which proved a challenging task! 

The town lies along a main connecting road which links west Rheinland-Pfalz to the east of the Bundesland and despite the concrete today, the road stood there many years ago meaning that many of the pubs and restaurants in Idar-Oberstein are former travelling and coach inns where to this day you can sample the delights of the local delicacy and have a good hearty meal before continuing your journey. The one we found was at the base of the steps to the church (convenient) and had an open fire grill which was left open so we could see our food being cooked before our very eyes! It's the best schnitzel I've had in Germany so far, definitely recommended! 

Arrival in Bad Kreuznach!

I finally made it! After a slightly problematic journey from Cologne, I arrived in Bad Kreuznach to meet my mentor teacher and settle into my new town. I was fortunate enough to have my parents with me which worked out really well in the end as my future flatmate was on holiday so didn't have a place to stay for the first night!

My parents were staying in a little village just outside Bad Kreuznach called Bosenheim which is surrounded by vineyards owned by local families who all make their own unique wine. It's called Weindorf Bosenheim - literally wine village! The place is lovely, a nice traditional aside to the more modernised town only a couple of minutes away.

Bad Kreuznach itself, whilst retaining the local wine growing flavour unique to this region, is a much more urban town centred on the main shopping street Mannheimer Strasse and the station which serves as the central point of the town. Like most German towns it has an altstadt (old town) and a neustadt (new town) and here the two are linked by a bridge which goes over the Nahe river and supports three Brueckenhaeuser  (bridge houses literally) which run along it. These three buildings are two story high structures which are built off the edge of the bridge and currently hold shops but would have served as the gateway to the town.The altstadt is then much more traditional and has a wide selection of traditional pubs as well as the original castle and many museums. 

The Brueckenhaeuser to the right

The Nahe

Some Kreuznacher humour 

Induction Course in Maria in der Aue

So after a non-stop tour of Cologne, I met the future Language assistants in three Bundesländer (roughly equivalent to counties in England but with a lot more independence and power), at Cologne Hauptbahnhof (station) ready to depart on our three day intensive training course. 

The first hurdle was discovering which group of randomly accumulating people was the right one as Cologne station is a busy one! Eventually we all found each other and headed to the buses for the hour long transfer to Maria in der Aue. Now we were pretty much all expecting this to be some kind of hostel where we would be staying for two nights, somewhere functional for the amount of people but we were pleasantly surprised to pull up to a hotel which offered en suite rooms based on two people sharing and there was even free wifi! 

Maria in der Aue

Chocolate mousse!

The location was amazing and having been paired up in our rooms according to who we were living closest to in Germany we started to get more of an idea about what this year would entail. The first day was a lot of absorption of information before we were tasked with planning a lesson ready to teach the following day. We'd been split into Ländergruppen and then divided into smaller groups of three or four in order to plan and teach a lesson where each member of the group had their own 10/15 minute slot. Each group within the larger group was assigned a teaching level to aim the lesson at ranging from total beginners to the top level in a secondary school. The final day was then basically a school day where each small group had to teach their 45 minute lesson to the rest of the group and receive feedback on their planning, technique and content. My group as aiming at 8-11 year olds so we looked at the Robin Hood myth and played around with vocab, story telling and songs which surrounded the legend. The planning was more work than we thought and actually standing up and teaching taught us a lot about how the classroom actually works both from the perspective of the students and the teacher! 

The view from the back of the hotel in the morning and evening

Arrival in Germany!

Wilkommen in Deutschland! 

It's been a bit of a whirlwind since I first landed here in Germany! I landed in Cologne on Sunday the 8th of September and had one night to relax in the city, see some sights and do some shopping before heading off to the PAD led induction course in Maria in der Aue. 

I'd been to Cologne twice before this visit so had a degree of familiarity with the city which helps when you've just left home for 9 months! It is a beautiful city: its medieval origins shine through a wonderfully modernised shopping centre laid out on cobbled streets which are really hard to pull a suitcase over let me tell you! The railway station opens up into a piazza which houses the biggest structure I've ever seen:the cathedral. It's immense and nothing I've seen can even remotely compare to it! The stunning Gothic architecture reaches dizzying heights and stands as a navigation mark for anywhere in the city. It's almost impossible to get the whole thing in the picture but I tried! 

Behind the cathedral is the river Rhein and you can take boat trips up and down the river which showcase the size if the city (it's one of Germany's smallest considering the size of the cathedral) and allow a glimpse into the wine regions which lie just a little but further down the bank. On the riverfront there's a Lindt chocolate museum which has the most amazing shop selling premium Lindt choccies at a discount price. Needless to say I stocked up! Next door to the chocolate museum is a sports museum which focuses in the Olympics and traces its history from the Greeks up to the present showcasing German talent in every era. It's great fun to try out the old sports too, particularly the standing long jump - much harder than you think!

Lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe came with little surprise!

 I wish I could have stayed longer but no doubt I'll be back later in the year to sample the delights of the world famous Christmas market!