Pub crawl, Opera, Lutheranism... oh my!

I am once again remiss in my posting duties... I've been back from Leipzig for several days now, but stuff keeps happening. For example, I was hijacked by my dorm-mates for an hour and a half last night during prime blogging time to test out Katha's new Karaoke system, which she got for her birthday yesterday. More on that later...

I suppose I should go all the way back to last Friday night... The Gö-team met up once again, plus Claire, for a nice sushi dinner in town. Somehow, a glass of wine or beer with the meal turned into a ginormous pub crawl, and we went to three other places for drinks afterwards. The triumph of my evening, though, was finally sampling the much-coveted Amaretto Sour at Villa Cuba, the one place in all of Germany that I've found the drink actually the menu. It didn't exactly match up with my expectations (the ones at the Grill basically taste like liquid Sweet Tarts candies, but this version must've had grapefruit juice in it or something) but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. And regardless of how I look in the photo, I wasn't drunk!

These guys, on the other hand, I can't exactly vouch for...

I eventually got home after 2am and still had to pack for my trip to Leipzig, and my train left the next morning before 9am. It was a great night, though. I met my first German trekkie as well! It was a surreal moment; folks exchanged contact information, I saw his email address... "Locutus. Like, Locutus of Borg??" and we spent the next five minutes quoting at each other and laughing hysterically. Nerd heaven! I'd say it was an all-around success!

Of course on Saturday morning I missed my original train and had to catch the next one, but I still rolled in a little after noon. A second umbrella had to be sacrificed to the gods of "Alaina can't possibly keep track of all her crap on the train," but otherwise it was uneventful (if a bit delayed.) Jen (from Kiel) and Elizabeth, a musicologist from Arkansas whom I met at the Berlin conference, were there at the station to meet me. I dropped my stuff off at Elizabeth's place and then got to see a little bit of the city. We met up with Jen again at the Thomaskirche, hoping to catch the usual Saturday afternoon Bach cantata (every Saturday afternoon! How cool is that!) but it turns out they had an organ vespers on schedule for this particular week.

We paid the €1 fee and were treated to an hour of fabulous music from Max Reger, good ol' JS himself, Franz Tunder, and Olivier Messiaen. I had to have my picture taken with the statue outside, as the man himself is buried at the front of the church (sorry that the photo is kind of upside-down!) I thought the Uni-chor in Göttingen was hot stuff with our twice-semesterly cantata schedule, but that's nothing compared to the Bach-lovin' that's all over Leipzig. Want to hear every single cantata and possibly most other pieces of music the man wrote over his whole lifetime? Simple, just live here for a couple of years!

We stopped for Kaffee und Kuchen, did a little shopping, and then Elizabeth and I went to see more of the city. The Nikolaikirche is most famous as the original site of weekly peaceful protests, or Montagdemos, at the end of the DDR era in 1989, since the church was the only place where the Stasi police didn't hold sway.

As awesome as it looks from the outside, the inside is truly stunning, with massive columns topped with green palm fronds. It was closed by the time we got there on Saturday, but I finally got some pictures of the inside on Sunday morning. But as for the rest of Saturday, Elizabeth and Jen and I made a lovely pasta dinner with snickerdoodles (gotta get the recipe!) for dessert, and hung out until Jen had to leave in order to rest up for the following day's performance. Elizabeth and I ended up chatting until the wee hours of the morning, which was great fun... well, until we realized that we'd have to get up early the next day!

Despite it all, we woke up on time and I was treated to a fabulous experience... we went to church at the Thomaskirche! I haven't been to a Lutheran service since high school (it was part of a "world religions" class project and the assignment was to sit in on another Christian denomination's worship.) Elizabeth's family had actually converted to Lutheranism from Baptist a while ago (fascinating story, and part of the reason we were up so late talking!) and I'm completely jealous that she gets to attend these services every week! For starters, the Thomanerchor, one of Europe's most famous male choirs, provided most of the music. These guys first got famous under JS Bach's direction between 1723 and 1750, and they were AMAZING.

A quick rundown: Introitus was Hugo Distler's "Gott ist unsere Zuversicht" from "Der Jahrkreis" op. 5; the Kyrie was a glorious (if anonymous) setting from the 10th century; after the first reading was a piece entitled "Wer sich nach seinem Namen nennt" by E Mauersberger, who was also Thomaskantor from 1961 to 1972; after the homily we heard "O Jesu, nomen dulce" from Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) with a glorious alto solo (I can see why this boy-choir thing was so popular); the service was concluded with a JS Bach organ piece, I. Allegro "aus dem Concerto a-Moll nach Antonio Vivaldi BWV 593." Of course we stayed for communion and heard yet another organ piece, "Jésus console les filles d'Israel qui le suivent" from Dupré's Stations of the Cross. It was completely beautiful, and it totally didn't matter that I hadn't even heard of any of this stuff beforehand... Good thing I'm not living in Leipzig, though, because if I could hear music like that every week I might just go Lutheran! (Kidding mom...)

It was a royal Luther-fest of a morning, though. Our next stop was Wittenberg, as the Mitteldeutsche Kammeroper presentation of "Hänsel und Gretel" was put on at the Wittenberg opera house. It's officially known as "Lutherstadt Wittenberg," since it was here that he taught, preached, raised his family, and on October 31, 1517 nailed a certain famous piece of paper to the door of the city's Schloßkirche. Of course they have all 95 theses on display at the side door... click here for a hopefully readable (English) image of the accompanying plaque.

Elizabeth told me it's a hoot and a half to see the city during the annual "Reformationstag" celebration, with folks dressing up like Luther, his family members, and his compatriots and generally having a fine old time. I missed this year's celebration, but it probably wouldn't have been in the best of form to heckle at the burning of the papal bull which threatened his excommunication in 1520. Hmmm... I'll still be around for the next annual reenactment of his wedding in June...

Oh, and here's the man himself, entombed since his death in 1546 at the Schloßkirche where it all started. Across the way is his good buddy and supporter Philipp Melanchthon (not pictured). Sorry about the fuzziness, I guess I'll just have to go back some time to get a clearer picture! We also had time to check out the Marienkirche, with another famous altar from Cranach (the elder). Elizabeth was a great source of Luther-lore and info, and apparently at this church he converted the entire congregation with a single sermon.

We had lunch in town and then headed off to find the opera house for Jen's performance. She filled a dual role as the Sandmännchen/Taumännchen (Sandman/Dewdrop fairy?) who puts the kids to sleep out in the woods and then wakes them up again only for them to stumble upon the evil Witch's tempting abode. The Witch was one of my favorite characters in the end... not a sympathetic role, of course, but the actress was just so deliciously evil. Jen told us on the train ride back to Leipzig about the performances they had done for schoolchildren, and how the most vociferous (and charming) audience response was always enthusiastic boo-ing for the böse Hexe.

We got back and cooked a fabulous dinner for six (myself, Elizabeth, Jen, another Kiel friend Andrew, James who studies Oboe in Leipzig, and a visiting friend of his from the U.S.) consisting of yummy homemade mac and cheese and salads (plus more snickerdoodles and of course homemade brownies for dessert!) and I made plans to run over to Dresden the next morning to see the Frauenkirche... but I ended up staying up too late once again and decided to spend another day in Leipzig. Elizabeth continued to play the role of the fabulous hostess, and showed me even more of the city. We met up with James and his visitor (her name is unfortunately escaping me at the moment) at a café, then made plans for additional sightseeing.

One of the big items I had read about is the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a memorial to slain German soliders in the 1813 Battle of Nations against Napoleon's forces. It's huge, imposing, bombastically nationalistic, and as Elizabeth so aptly put it, "a fabulous example of everything that was wrong about the 19th century in Europe." A huge basin in front of the ziggurat-like building is used as a skating rink during the winter.

The sandstone-colored figure on the front of the building is St. Michael, who is depicted glowering down over his slayed enemies and basically telling the world not to mess with his 'peeps. Of course Hitler and his ilk ate this kind of stuff up with a spoon and capitalized greatly on the sentiment.

Inside, if possible, is even creepier. Even on a warm spring day the stone walls shut out the heat completely so it felt like walking into a huge refrigerator. The main chamber, with the imposing arched windows, contains giant symbolic statuary, massive mercenary figures with gigantic muscles which are supposed to represent the inherent strength and power of the "Volk." Unfortunately the reconstructed panorama I put together rather fails to convey the scale of these herculean dudes (and at least one dude-ess, symbolically breastfeeding some monstrous babies) but the informational display panels under the windows were at least 10 feet tall, if that provides a sense of the size. I was about ankle-high to the statuary.

The view from the top, however, is pretty nifty. Also much warmer than inside. We paid the €1 fee for elevator service to the middle level (that's below the green-covered scaffolding) and then skipped the tip-top since we had arrived just before closing time (and it would have been quite a few stairs). Still, we could see basically all of Leipzig.

Elizabeth and I split up from James and his friend and headed back into town to see if the Mendelssohn-haus was still open. It was, luckily. Several of the rooms were restored to the period of his residence, and the others contained exhibits which included letters, the family silverware, and an actual lock of his hair. (I was probably a bit more excited than was warranted at the chance to use Mendelssohn's bathroom... unoriginal of course...)

We grabbed leftovers and headed over to James' apartment for dinner with the same crowd as the previous night, and as I had decided to take a train out the following morning I once again had a fabulous, if late, social evening with Elizabeth. I have to go back in May when Jen and James and some other folks have organized a Fulbright recital, so I already have plans to check out the Stasi museum in Leipzig, finally see Dresden, and maybe even make an excursion into the nearby Sächsische Schweiz if time allows... And Elizabeth needs to come to Göttingen to do some research, and we both seem to have the travel bug at the moment, so hopefully we'll get to do more adventuring together in the near future!

I got back to Göttingen uneventfully on Tuesday afternoon, and things have been relatively quiet. Well, except that Katha got that Karaoke machine for her birthday which had to be set up and tested last night, and of course I had to participate. I'm at a bit of an unfair advantage since all the songs are in English, although Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" was tricky enough even in my mother tongue! There's also some kind of party in the works for tomorrow night. You need a can of mace and a big stick to keep me from making a fool of myself when there are 80's pop tunes to be had, so I anticipate a fun night.

Oh, and I need to call Christina (my host mom) since I bumped into her at the bank yesterday but we were too busy to really catch up... Spring cleaning bug has hit as well, plus there's laundry to be done... I don't have any specific travel plans hanging over my head at the moment, but after the whirlwind last two weeks I hope to rectify that soon! I'm also still not sure what's up, if anything, with lab stuff for 2nd semester... but I find that I'm not particularly worried at the moment. Blame it on the sunshine, I guess, and the fact that I really do feel like I'm in the homestretch! Developments, as always, to be posted as they... um, develop! Also, this is the second post today AND I updated the Dortmund trip post with photos, so enjoy!