actually, it wasn't so much jesus who was disturbed by my current
liebesarbeit, which of course is blindingly brilliant but also generally about drugs and incest—to the contrary, jesus can't get enough—but my poor little laptop, who conked out saturday. it was very, very sad. i tried to start it up about two dozen times, and to various degrees of success—sometimes i'd get the gray screen, sometimes the fan would turn on but then not stop, sometimes i'd just get this neuotic, unending "burmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm"—because inevitably the computer would search through its memory to make sure everything was okay, and then it would reach The Bathroom Scene, or The Passage With The Demon Gerbil, or whatever, and bam.
now it is in a repair shop. pray for it. meanwhile, girlfriend is in town, and i am writing on her laptop instead. it is already sending me mild but increasingly frequent electric shocks, which is a shame, because we're just getting to the part where the cannibals OW FUCKING CHILL OUT.
yesterday, in an ersatz-rw role, i researched two towns for let's go: wittenberg and meissen. in the absence of anything interesting for you to read, here are my auxiliary notes. this is a style i like to call: found-blog-entry.
WITTENBERG. 8/14 8:30am-10:30am. I’ll point out that both of these town intros have been in the book since the beginning of time (slash at least 2001), but there’s more important shit to take care of here. LG alumni are really the only people who care about that anyway.
COLLEGIENSTR. Because all but one of the places here are not on Collegienstr. but on its creepy extension Schlossstr., I thought I’d make some note of its existence.
LUTHERHAUS. 10am. Uh, alles in ordnung except that the name is wrong. I have no idea how that happened. it appears everywhere as the lutherhaus. also: so many goddamned elderly Midwestern tourists here. I was more in awe than anything else. I had to use the bathroom and it was a
mob scene. Also very chatty.
SCHLOSSKIRCHE. 9:15am. The tower is being renovated, so I got all this info from the guy at the hostel next door. He says the hours are mad flexible but 10-12, 14-16 ausser montags is what his conjecture is. “certainly not more than 2 euros,” he said also, so I’ll just leave the prices as is. kirche hours I got from a little sign, and those never lie.
I remember the view being sumptuous. FROM SIX MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO. HOW DID I GET SO OLD.
JUGENDHERBERGE. 9:20am. It actually makes sense that this info is wrong, as the hostel used to be located in the schloss. no more, alas. now they have this big white building, and it’s definitely not as street. had a nice long chat with the harried youngish dude behind the desk about the tower (I forgot the word for “tower,” embarrassingly, and was like, “what are the opening hours for… uh, the biggest part… of the church… you go up the steps of it.” he gazed at me. “turm,” he said slowly, uncertainly. “turm”), opening hours, etc. prices changed, the key thing doesn’t really happen, reception hours are also different.
KARTOFFEL HAUS. 9:45am. they weren’t open, but the info from the menu and little sign confirmed everything here. except for the ceiling. this has actually been added since I rwed for lg, so I can’t say anything else about it. there are plenty of imbisse along collegienstr. if people need a cheaper choice, so this probably is fine to keep.
TRAINS. 10:30am. Leipzig is actually two trains every two hours, but both of those trains come at the same time. like, a train at 16.02, a train at 16.06, and then nothing until 18.02. that makes a whole fuckload of sense. anyway, every 2hr. should cover it. berlin is 21 euros with EC, 27 with ICE, but what budget traveler takes ICE? I DO. BECAUSE THEY’RE SO FAST. vroom!
TOURIST OFFICE. 9:30am. This is a very good tourist office, and most tourists who come to Wittenberg probably want to stop by—they definitely have the resources to direct you to whatever it is you’re interested in. 28 different walking tours (!!?!?), plus the audio tours, info on religious services in English, etc. I added the last one because I think the crowd that comes here generally would be intrigued be that, but take it out if you must. Note the change in hours. Also, the map comes in a pamphlet that is really donation-optional, but it’s fifty cents. I mean, come on. well, you can add “optional donation” if you want, but when it fucks up your line edit, don’t come crying to me.
8/14 2:30-4:30pm. Well, I sort of booked it through Meissen, the reason being, the Bahn failed me. I was in shock. I had a ten-minute layover in Leipzig, and in pretty much any other country I would have stopped the woman at the ticket counter and said, “Um, let’s give me at least a twenty-minute layover, because your weak-ass train system is not going to get me there on time. Holy shit, never mind, you’re Italian. Make that three hours. Actually, fuck it, I’ll walk.” But yeah, we pulled in right as my connection was leaving. So then I was all proud of myself because I had bought a Sachsen-Anhalt ticket for the day and was able to hop on this RE which was actually going to Meissen. But it was one of those dinky little guys that stops in every inbred-ass town in Eastern Germany, and then when we were three stops away, the driver got on the loudspeaker and was like, “Fuck it—it’s Ersatzverkehr time,” and everyone around me was like “HELL YEAHHHH.” So then we got on a bus, which dropped me off at the ass-end of Meissen and I had to run around and I got all sweaty.
PORZELLAN MANUFAKTUR. 2:45pm. This has a billion fake entrances, but they will only fool you if you are coming from the wrong direction, which no one will be. I didn’t take a look at anything, but I did verify that the Schauhall is misspelled (halle, bitches, it’s halle) and that the Schauwerkstatt needs a better translation. It said “demonstration workshop,” which you could call it, but I think it’s probably more like a show room. that said, I didn’t actually go inside. whatever you like, really. also the prices went up. and I added the area code to the phone number (which formerly appeared in the tourist office thingy, where it was wrong anyway).
ALBRECHTSBURG. 3:45pm. this is at the top of the city, and it is very picturesque and shit when beheld from below, but the walk up is through this obscene money-dripping typical german altstadtkapitalistic mayhem—definitely not narrow or romantic. they are cobblestoned, so maybe that’s what was meant. but after eighteen successive windows of cutesy-ass porcelain plates with fish on them, I want to kill myself. plus tapestries that no one would ever fucking need, the occasional generic Gaststaette, etc. the kind of thing your Midwestern aunt who has never been anywhere would really love. not that there's anything wrong with that.
once you get to the top, it’s actually more of the same—the top of the hill has a palace and a cathedral, yeah, but then they are surrounded by this district of more ridiculous money-fattened shops crammed with knick-knacks and fripperies, plus more Gaststaette where everyone is paying 8-12 euros for some generic schnitzel that tastes pretty good but not fucking 12 euros worth of good plus you can get it fucking anywhere.
I didn’t have time to go in either thing—this will become a theme for today--but the cathedral had this interesting little garden in what I guess you would call the ante-Hof. Overall I’m sure it’s worth the thumb. Why not? I used to be the germany editor. I know everything. Oh, but let’s definitely not give it the arbitrary proper noun “Albrechtsburg Castle and Cathedral.” Albrechtsburg refers either to the castle itself or to the general area. also everywhere I looked the cathedral was called the “Dom zu Meissen” and not the “Meissner Dom,” so I changed that.
TRAINS. 3:15pm. First, due to the surprise Ersatzverkehr, I was like, “so is there still service to Dresden? Becau” and then she was like, “NO THEY CLOSED THE LINE DOWN HA HA HA HA” and I was like “what” and she was like, “I’M JOKING, HA HA HA HA” and I was like “woman, I swear to god I will come over there and sweat on you if you do not answer my questions.”
TOURIST OFFICE. 3:30pm. Ran in there, spoke to no one, copied some stuff down. good to go.
Labels: jesus, laptop malfunction, let's go travel guides, novels
