Easter Sunday Thoughts

It's Easter. I meant to go to a mass in the Freiburg Muenster because when else am I going to have the opportunity to go to Easter mass in a Medieval catherdral in Europe but...I was out late last night, daylight savings time happened, and I needed to catch up on sleep for my trip to Switzerland tomorrow. Maybe next Easter.

I just looked up and was greeted with a wonderful gift: some hints of blue sky peeking out from behind the clouds. This is the so-called "Sunniest City in Germany" on climate change. I've heard a little bit of buzz about this has been the longest winter in some time. It's so gray and has either been raining or snowing almost every day. I walked the hour or so from Stusie back to Vauban last night in the snow. I'm from New England and don't mind cold or weird weather, I just somehow expected it to be more spring-like here.

Lots of things happened. Blogging isn't always at the front of my mind, especially between uploading pictures to Facebook and then uploading them all onto a separate Shutterfly site so my parents can see them.

My European life so far is unreal. Every week my Environmental Studies class has gone on a field trip somewhere. Two weeks ago we went up to Feldberg, the highest mountain in the Black Forest and the highest non-Alps point in Germany, and snowshoed to the summit. There was almost 2 meters of snow there and we were more or less hiking in a blizzard. It was honestly kind of hard to pay attention to what our professor was saying, which made writing my field trip report a bit difficult. Snowshoeing itself was super fun and also a great workout. I'd never done it before! I can check another new life experience off my list.

I really enjoy learning about the local environment here, because it is so drastically different from America. There have been people intensely managing, farming, and settling the land here for thousands of years. Yes we have the Native Americans in America, but that was fewer people spread out over a giant continent. Discrediting the Native Americans goes against my minor and a lot of my education, and I don't mean to belittle them or anything, but in Europe it's just different. You can see the culture and the history carved into the landscape a lot clearer than you can in America. To learn that the beautiful Black Forest was all intensely cut and grazed by humans and their cattle for thousands of years is mindblowing. All of the beautiful spruce trees that make up the forest today were plantations planted by humans. Even aged monocultures. How tragic, how sad. A lot of the forests around are about as old as World War II, because Germany had to give a lot of wood to France as reparations. There is no "wilderness" here, and there hasn't been since before Roman influence. My professor was throwing out some random forest facts in class the other day, such as the fact that before Roman influence, the Mediterranean area was roughly 90% forested, and after the Romans, it was only about 10% forested. So when the Romans came to Southeast Germany and saw the intense forests there, they named them "Silva Nigra" (Black Forest) and set to work settling.

This past Tuesday our class took a trip to Kaiserstuhl, a low volcanic mountain range in the Upper Rhine Valley. Germany has volcanoes? Mind continually blown. Kaiserstuhl was all of these beautiful connected hills with forests on top, grasslands on the hillsides, terraced vineyards on the gentle slopes, and fruit orchards on the valley floor. Without human influence it would be almost completely forested, but humans have created such a diverse mosaic of ecosystems there that they now manage it to keep the grasslands, even though they don't need them for hay anymore. I can't wait to go back in warmer weather and have a picnic and watch the bee eaters and Peregrine falcons hunt.

Last Saturday I took a trip to Basel with the Sprachlerninstitut where I take German language classes. It was under an hour by train, and free because it's part of the regional transportation area covered by my RegioKarte! And of course, like most trips I've taken since coming to Europe, it was cold and rainy. After a cold walking tour of the old city (in German, the only common language of my group of international students), my friends and I took refuge in a Museum cafe. I was glad I packed myself a sandwich, because Switzerland is expensive. My friends got bowls of soup for the equivalent of 10,5 Euro. I got myself a cup of Swiss hot chocolate, which was definitely worth it. We did some shopping around, including an inevitable visit to a Swiss chocolatier where I bought some divinely good truffles. Afterward we met up with our tour group again to climb the spires of Basel's Muenster.

I feel like a lot of European tourism is more or less climbing a dark, scary Medieval structure and seeing amazing views of city skylines and the surrounding landscapes. That's what the Muenster was, but it was AWESOME. It made the whole trip worth it for me. Seeing "Big Basel" and "Little Basel," the two parts of the city separated by the River Rhine, cobblestone squares, markets, and the wonderful red roofs of Europe everywhere. Somehow some of my friends ended up on one of the church towers, and the rest of us ended up on the other tower, and so we were having a great time shouting to each other and taking pictures of each other in the middle of the sky.