The tradition belonged to a bigger one called Mailehenbrauch which dates back to the 17th century. The girls in the village would be auctioned off, each pair becoming a may couple, and whoever paid the highest price was the May King and Queen.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Maibaum
In Germany, the first of May is a holiday but something special happens the night of April 30. There's different versions around Germany, but where I live, guys put up a birch tree in front of their girlfriend's house and the tree is decorated with streamers and a huge red heart with the girls name on it. When I first heard it, I thought it was just a cute, little tree you buy....it's not. It's a whole tree and if you get a small one, it just looks sad and looks like the guy didn't try very hard. Usually, the guys actually steal a tree from the forest with the help of their friends, and of course all of this is accompanied by beer. The guys drink beer during it, and then the girlfriend usually gives them free beer after.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Berlin
A little late, but I went to Berlin from February 19 to 22 with 29 other students on the exchange program. I flew from Bonn/Koln Airport into Berlin then took the bus to the train station. I was terrified. I have never flown alone before, public transportation is not my thing to begin with, but I took a bus from Bonn to the airport but then didn't really know where to go after that. I asked someone, because I had an idea but everyone else was going to the parking lot, so I asked a business man where to go. Turns out he was going to the same airline, so he just walked with me and showed me exactly where to go which was really good! So I successfully flew alone for the first time! The next day, we had a city tour of Berlin starting at 11, and it was completely a walking tour...I kept seeing tour buses that say "hop on, hop off!" with the price (only 10) as we were walking all around the city for three whole hours! By the time we were done (at around 2:30), we were all starving and decided to go to a Brazilian restaurant so we took the tram 20 mins there...and it was closed. From there two of my friends and I went to White Trash Fast Food (it's not fast food, it's an actual restaurant that my host mom recommended) which has really really good American style burgers (if you're ever in berlin go there!) and a cool atmosphere too. Friday we has the morning off, so we went to checkpoint Charlie, saw a piece of the wall, made our own chocolate bar at Ritter sport (that was really cool too) and the friday afternoon went to the Bundestag for a tour! I really enjoyed that because it was a mix of history and politics, and one interesting thing was you can still see the writing on the walls from Russian soldiers. After the tour, we all had dinner in a middle eastern restaurant in Kreuzberg and then Saturday morning, everyone went home.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Typical sarah face isn't it?
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