ain't he cute? into the black forest today to hunt down some castles.
armed with a pretty ancient map, which has little green circles around ‘towns of interest’ and little backwards ‘L’ symbols for castles/ruins, we took the car into the mountains to see what we could see.
about 20 minutes out of Freiburg and KAPOW! sitting up on a hill, perched like a giant’s discarded lego experiment was schloss (ie – castle) nummer 1.
Kent on the Indiana Jones Bridge of DOOM.
It is a funny thing, ruins-hunting. I think we gave ourselves some pretty serious neck trauma (with the help of shitty European pillows) craning to look through the windshield up at mountains, in the hope of one magically appearing. However you're really not prepared when one actually DOES magically appear, and it is ginormous, and the ruinsy-est ruin you ever saw. Tres cool.
p.s. I am aware that I am TOTALLY changing the style as I go here, I know Kent has this central text and lower case thing going on - I just can't abide by it. From now on, I am going traditional. I think it's because I know Jane Angus might be reading it. You truly are the Formatting-Jedi-Jane.
p.p.s - I tried right-aligning the text Jane, and I couldn't do it. It just looked bad! I had to follow Kent's text style dammit! Shame.
the weather was not really on our side today, much drizzle, in fact, constant, non-stop all day drizzle. the sort of drizzle where you can’t ever get your windscreens wipers to go at the perfect speed (particularly as a passenger when you want to take dorky photos out the front windshield and you keep getting 'schloss with windscreenwiper' as your arty shot), so you are continually having to switch between intermittent and constant. it’s a small inconvenience, but anyone on familiar terms with road trip idiosyncrasies will know, it’s a pain in the arse.
anyway, aside from that, twas a day of merry castle hunting, quaint deutschland country-town viewing, and occasional forest ambling.
Don't you love that the most annoying thing Kent found about the drizzle was the issue with the windscreen wipers? Not about getting wet, being cold, constantly standing in schloops of mud and getting spittles of rain on your camera lens, no, it's the damn wipers.
the first castle was probably the best and they kinda petered out after that, but nonetheless, we got to see quite a lot of this part of the world. (Polite way of saying that the next one was pretty awesome, the third one was slightly disappointing and then we couldn't find any after that, and that was shite.)
this was the second schloss and it was pretty sweet too.
you could get a great view way up at the top,
plus a small touch of vertigo for your troubles.
And it was the soggyiest and freezingest of all don't forget. I am actually astounded at the quality of shots here - much more spittley in realtime.
This is the view from schloss zwei. I know it is a completely poncy thing to say, but photos really do not capture it - I don't think I have ever been this exposed to such vast views, heights and death-weather! Merely by standing in some ancient dude's canon-balled bedroom (e.g. rather exploded piece of stone wall). Utterly breathtaking - quite bizarre to stand on a rock and see clouds eye to eye. Magic.
i think i mentioned the flag thing in all the towns before, and we keep seeing it everywhere still. today we saw one town that, rather than using strips of discarded cloth, or pre-made shop purchased flags, like most of the other towns, they simply hung out all their old and used clothing. socks, jocks, bras, stockings, shorts, shirts, aprons. everything in every colour. quirky and totally hilarious.
(We also came accross a bra tree [a tree simply covered
with bras ... I suppose that was quite evident huh.] on
our way into Munich - winter really does make people crazy here.)
and we’re slowly trying to improve our german, ordering almost all of our food now in german. sometimes we stumble up, but we’re doing ok. there’s other non-language issues with food though, that’s gonna take some getting used to, like, today i ordered a baguette with salami and cheese, expecting something along the lines of a roll. instead i got basically two long pieces of oval bread, each about a foot long, with maybe 100g of salami covered in, seriously, about 200g of melted cheese which hung out over the sides of the bread. kinda like a pizza made by a cheese fetsishist on the bladder of a sherrin football. (mmm, nummy.) plus a side serve of potato salad, and pasta salad, and saurkraut.
you can’t say you don’t get value for your money with your food here though. it cost less than $6 australian.
MOSSSSS!! and other twirly wirly plant life - very oceanic.
we climbed up and down many mountains, slipping in and out of fogs, up above the snow line (around 1100m above sea level) and deep into valleys that all have streams running through the middle.
all crystal clear, babbling brooks, with water gushing very quickly along into each town, where it is often syphoned off into canals that run along the backyards of the houses. so damned civilised.
Speaking of civilised? Jesus Kent, what a way to wreck the flow 'oh I know, I'll put up that freaky-arse
old lady witch mannequin!'
except maybe that’s where the clowns dispose of their murdered victims. i dunno, but those things are fully creeping me out. we occasionally see effigies of them strung up from poles, hanging from stretched rope across the roads or dangling from balconies. freaky shit.
And by occasionally, kent means all the fricken time! These fuckers are everywhere in many forms – for example the life sized micky-mouse hanging from his neck from the telephone wires in one town (he was most definitely not there the day before when we drove through) and midgetty hags with massive face warts and make-up explosions perched in people’s windows. Clearly, winter really does make Germans crazy.
P.S. WE FOUND BABY GOATS!!! AAAAAAAAAAH! THIS ONE WAS ONLY THIIIIS BIIIIGG!! Unfortunately I think we have on film me saying to baby goat "wait don't run away, we can be friends" before mama goat bleats aggressively at me. We are in an amazing land, where we can walk out the schloss-driveway and bump into some goats.
And another face-picture. This dude has a gimp eye, poor bastard. Either that or a regular eye with another creepy mini-eye inside, like something out of the Labyrinth might have. Maybe we need a separate blog for all of our building pictures with faces?
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