Well, this is exciting.
I have a blog! Now, I don't know whether it's going to be a success but I thought I would write down my experiences in Marburg somewhere on the web (apart from on Facebook and Twitter) because my mum doesn't have either of those...
I'M IN MARBURG and I think the best way to describe this week is to do a break down of the week, so here goes...
Monday a.k.a nightmare day.
So I arrived in Marburg late (quel surprise) AND turned up at the wrong place despite it clearly stating on the sheet that I should have met someone at the train station after 2pm. My incompetence didn't stop there though because I managed to drop my suitcase pretty much every 5 meters due to the sheer weight of them and also because MARBURG IS SO HILLY, which lead to two very scraped ankles. Not fun.
Anyway when I eventually got to the Hauptbahnhof (main station) I was picked up by a lovely lady, who's name I can't remember so we shall just call her "ginger girl" or "GG" for short, who took me to the Notunterkunft (emergency accommodation). And yes, it was emergency. There was literally a bed and a bin. No shower either and the toilet and sink were comparable to that of which you would find in a petrol station...in Slough.
I didn't even bother to unpack, I didn't want my clothes to touch the floor of the room and I guessed I would only be there for one night as GG said that she would be able to give me my actual room keys the next day. So I sat with my Czech friend (again I didn't know her name) and we drank some god knows how old honey flavoured vodka that apparently "her grandad makes". It was actually quite nice for the first sip but then it just felt like I was swallowing fire so I quickly made an excuse and stopped drinking it.
To let off some steam though, the 4 other "Notunterkunft" gals and I went to this abandoned-warehouse-turned-cool-alternative-pub with the rest of the ERASMUS peeps and had a lovely evening! Met some great people and drank 4 bottles of Lichers which is a really tasty local beer. We also played human bingo, which just consisted of asking people random questions about their life and getting them to sign their name next to ones they had done until you had all the questions covered. Sounds tenuous but it was actually quite fun. Overall, it was a really nice end to what had been a hot, sweaty and frustrating first day in Marburg. But my week did get a lot better.
Tuesday-Thursday a.k.a the form-filling-out days.
So as you can probably guess from the title to this section, I filled out a lot of forms this week. I got a German bank account, a German SIM card, health insurance and became a Marburgian citizen! Hurrah! This was all really well done by the ERASMUS team and our tutors Lena and Kristin are the best, so thanks girls!
Wednesday was a particularly good day because I discovered AUFLAUF. Now AUFLAUF (I feel it needs to always be capitalised because of how frigging amazing it is) is a traditional Marburgian dish which is a bit like a pasta bake. BUT BETTER. You can choose what kind of pasta/potato you would like as a base and then choose a sauce and then choose the toppings. I had a lush "Nudeln-Curry" (curry pasta) with broccoli and onions and it was bloody incredible! AUFLAUF is the best thing I have ever eaten, yep bold statement but I don't care. Anyone that comes here is going to get personally escorted to Paprika (the best AUFLAUF place) by me and I will sit there and watch you eat it. Not in a creepy way, I just feel everyone needs to experience this at least once in their life.
Went on a tour on Thursday (I think) and that was cool, there's a lot of history in Marburg and the views are so stunning. It's like a fairy tale town with all the rolling valleys and the forests however I cannot and will not walk up to the castle because it is so high up and I am lazy. Trust me, the hour tour that we did was enough walking to last me a good few months. To top it all off, it was also 30 degrees C and I was wearing my thickest jeans and boots so I was sweating, a lot. But at least I learnt how Marburgian houses were built. FUN FACT*: the beams which support the houses in the Oberstadt (old town) cannot be cleaned because it ruins the quality of the wood. So there are just a lot of dirty houses.
*this fact is in no way fun.
Friday & Saturday a.k.a the party days.
Friday was the day of the international dinner and I had to make a "traditional" dish from my country. Almost instantly I thought of Scones (pronounced with an 'oh' sound, thank you)
Now those of you that know me well will know that I can't cook, at all. And so even the prospect of baking something as simple as scones scared me.
Main problem with making this bland dish in Germany is that they don't have one of the most vital ingredients. SELF RAISING FLOUR. Nope that's right. They have Flour (Mehl) and self-raising (Backpulver) and you just have to put them together and hope that whatever you are making, rises. So once I have made a dough, I needed a cutter. The girl (who's house we were cooking in) didn't have one, so I used a glass. And it worked quite well actually. After having put them in the the oven for 20 mins, I had what resembled 10 measley-biscuit-like ovals. Then I had to sort out the filling. For this I whisked some cream (too much) so that it curdled and I felt like things couldn't get much worse in the sauna of a kitchen right then. But never fear, because I had strawberry jam, which didn't really save the situation but at least it added some moisture to the dryish texture of the scones, if you could call them that.
BUT THEY ALL WENT when we took them to the international dinner, so take that Delia Smith. I can cook. Ish.
Yesterday (Saturday) I went to a Jaegermeister party. Which involved, yep you guessed it, a lot of jaeger. But being an awkward international ERASMUS student that doesn't really know the "going out norms" in Marburg just yet, I went along to the party a tad too early. And me plus a few others were the only ones in there for a good hour. Which was fine, I just drank and drank and drank. And then danced a bit. Also FUN FACT*: they had a smoking room right next to the bar inside the club which you as a smoker or maybe ever a passive smoker/recently quit smoker could sit in and inhale the sweet fumes of death.
But apart from one of my group getting really drunk (you know who you are) all of us coped with the copious amounts of Jaeger pretty well and I woke up this morning with only a mild hangover! But we had AUFLAUF again just now so I am happy.
*this fact is not fun either really, sorry.
All in all this week has been tiring but at the same time really bloody funny and I think I have fallen for Marburg already.
Tomorrow I start an intensive 3 week language course, so let's hope that is fun and doesn't involve much German grammar because that shit is hard. Oktober Fest is also fast approaching but more details of plans to do with that will follow soon. For now sleep well everyone and thanks for reading this post (even if you just liked it on FB, thanks)
XXX
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