Last Weekend

The title of this post actually has a double meaning: it's mostly going to be a summary of what I did last weekend (June 14-16) when my boyfriend came to visit, but this weekend right now is my last weekend in Leipzig!  Next Saturday I'll be headed off to Düsseldorf to visit my boyfriend, and then I'll be going with him and the other people from Eastern to Berlin on Monday to get to our two weeks there, where we will be doing a language program (second one for them, obviously the first one for me). I really like Leipzig, but I'm reeeally excited to be around people I know and to have people to hang out and go out with. It's kind of been a lonely two months.

But...on to what we did last weekend when Matt was here! To start off, he had class Friday until about 1 (or 13, if you're going by military time, which I've definitely gotten much better at since that's what they use over here!) and it takes about five or six hours to get to Leipzig from Düsseldorf.  He left around 2 or 3 and was supposed to get in a little after 9, but his second train had been canceled because of the flooding.  So he had to take a regional train that doesn't go as fast and stops at more cities and didn't get in till a little after 10.  I didn't mind - I was just happy to see him! :)

Waiting in the train station...this was definitely one of the times I've been most excited to see someone!

The first thing we did Saturday morning was head over to the Thomaskirche again and look around a bit inside. Pretty big church! I'm not sure I would call it "gorgeous" or anything, but it was definitely really cool to see!

The stairs leading up to the pulpit

Looking to the back of the church

Up at the front - the plot on the ground is J.S. Bach's grave!

Some old instruments!

(sorry, the lighting in here was really dark)

 Next, we headed back outside and decided to just wander around a little bit. Matt found a steeple in the distance and was like, "let's go there!" so we did. It ended up being a Lutheran church, St. Peterskirche.  We couldn't actually go in this one, but I got a bunch of pictures. The lighting is kind of weird since it was really sunny, but you get the idea.

Glamor shot!

I'm not entirely sure what this building was - I think it might have been the Neues Rathaus (new town hall) but don't quote me on that!

Next up was lunch - we had decided we were going to get Döner, which is a Turkish meal similar to gyros in a way - a wrap with lamb and veggies (though you can get it with chicken). No tzatziki sauce though, and wayyyy more vegetables! Basically, it's awesome. So we finally found a place that was open and got some Döner and Mezzo Mix, which is something I remember having the last time I was here and really liking it. Mezzo Mix is just coke mixed with orange Fanta, actually.

YUM! I may or may not have gotten food everywhere while eating this, a fact that Matt did not hesitate to make fun of me for for the rest of the day... :)

As a side note, the guy in the store asked us where we were from - he originally thought we were from the Czech republic. Matt commented that he wasn't sure if that was a good or bad reflection of our German. :D But the server was actually born in Iraq and moved to Germany when he was ten - I think he said he was in his 20s, but I don't really remember now. Matt asked him what he thought of everything going on there right now, and he said he didn't really know much about it but "people are dumb." That made us laugh.

After lunch, we went to Völkerschlachtdenkmal, which is a war memorial from the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 where Prussia, Austria, and Russia defeated Napolean.  It was built in 1913, so this year, there are apparently a ton of concerts and stuff there since it's kind of both the 100- and 200-year memorials.

Don't mind the crane...

There were four huge statues in the corners of the inside

If you want an idea of how big they were, here you go!

Like the little narrow twisty stairway with barely any handholds to get up and down? (There's a designated "up" and "down" staircase, for the record.) Matt and I took the elevator because I didn't wanna deal with a ton of stairs.

The view from the top!

That stupid crane again...ruining all my pictures...also, this was taken through a chain link fence, so please excuse the little blurry chain link at the bottom right corner!

It makes me laugh that you can see how much taller Matt is than I since the angle is different for the same view.

After going to the monument, we headed back to the city center to hear the Thomanerchor Motet concert. It was really cool hearing such great music in the church where Bach worked, but Matt and I were both kind of tired at this point in the afternoon (concert started at 3). Also, the concert was kind of a church service - they read from Luke, there was a homily, and we said the Lord's Prayer (I do have the text to it in German now, so that's cool). Matt joked that I was the first person to get him to go to church on a Saturday. Muahahaha. :)

That was pretty much all we did Saturday - we were both ready to just chill for the evening since we'd done so much walking! Actually, we did have to go to the store to get some food, so we schlepped over to Rewe. There is an apartment complex on the way that I finally decided to take a picture of.  I don't know if it's the color being so dated or if it's how simple it looks or what, but I can seriously picture this apartment building in particular being around during when Leipzig was part of East Germany.  One of those "if the walls could talk" kind of things that makes me wonder what sort of things might have happened in this building.

Sunday we had to go to the Hauptbahnhof to see if Matt's train was canceled again (it was) and then figure out a new way for him to get home, which actually worked out because he got a train that went straight to Düsseldorf without transferring at Hannover or Frankfurt.

We wandered around a little since I had been trying to find a store pretty much the whole time I'd been here without success (we ended up finding it). Saw two kinda cool things:

So colorful! It's the side of a building.

A memorial/statue for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - I think Matt said there are four in the world and three of them are in the USA. Don't quote me on that though. I'm kinda bad with facts sometimes.

So that was last weekend! It's weird to think I only have four days left at the hospital and then I'll be done...I'm working on my report that is basically what I've learned here and my impressions.  Friday I'll be packing/doing laundry and then Saturday it's off to Düsseldorf! Hopefully I'll be able to update maybe next Sunday or at some point in the near future! I should start having more interesting stories to tell you all as well, since I'll be around people and going out more and stuff. :)

Tschau!