Castles and Cultural Differences

Thankfully, (besides the freakishly-hellish week of daily sleet storms) the Fall here has been glorious! The leaves are still gorgeous shades of red and yellow and most days, the sun has been coming out to play:

Englischer Garten
(Take One)


Englischer Garten
(Take Two)

To take advantage of Fall and do something on Halloween (because Germans don't really celebrate the holiday), a big group of us from my sprachschule and Steve's environmental studies center ventured to Neuschwanstein this past weekend. Neuschwanstein is the castle Walt Disney used to design the outside of the Magic Kingdom:

Neuschwanstein
(Need I say more?)

Built by Konig Ludwig (King of Bavaria) in the late 1800's, this castle did not serve a purpose at the time of its construction. Because of its extravaganze and because it was the third of three extremely expensive castles commissioned by King Ludwig, his kingdom became bankrupt and therefore very upset. In the middle Neuschwanstein's construction, King Ludwig was declared mentally ill (without a proper medical examination) and hence, not fit to rule his kingdom. One day later, King Ludwig and his psychologist were found dead in a lake under mysterious circumstances.

Six weeks after Konig Ludwig's death, Neuschwanstein (still unfinished - to this day) was opened as a tourist attraction.

Our trip to Neuschwanstein ended up being quite the challenge: six Americans, two Italians, and two Spaniards - all with different travel and life philosophies.

Seven of the Ten of Us
(Back Row: Steve, James, Jamie, Alessia, Marta, Angelo; Front Row: Guillermo)

The Americans of our group (including me) were very worried about time. (Shocking!) See, at Neuschwanstein you buy your tickets at the bottom of a big foothill. When you buy your tickets you are given a tour time. To get from the ticket office to Neuschwanstein, you have to ride a bus or horse-and-buggy or walk up the mountain:

Guillermo and Horse-and-Buggy
(We decided to be hard core instead of lazy.)

The time was 12:25pm and our castle tour commenced at 1:40pm. Just enough time to grab a bratwurst and hike uphill 40 minutes to the castle entrance. However, at 12:50pm the Spaniards and Italians were just wandering over to the brat-stand as we Americans were downing the last of our french fries.

"We'll meet you at the top," we said.

Lo and behold! Just as we started admiring the view over the edge of the mountain just outside the castle gates, Guillermo and then Marta, our Spanish buddies, came bounding up behind us, "Hi guys!" And, I soon found out that the Spanish mentality is: hurry-up and stop...and then hurry up some more. (Which, you will understand very shortly.)

About 10 minutes later and approximately 30 seconds before the start of our tour, Angelo and Alessia joined us. Demonstrating the Italian mentality(ies): all is good/everything will workout how it's supposed to/slow and steady wins the race. Or in the wise words of Angelo, "if you miss one train, you can always take the next one."

However, Angelo and Guillermo decided that 30 seconds was enough time to smoke before going inside for the tour....AND, they almost missed the tour. We had to ask the tour guide to grab them from outside. They're lucky that we had a nice tour guide!

So, besides being a beautiful day, going to Neuschwanstein was a bit stressful and the experience provided a little culture schock. It was definitely a learning experience in more than the historical sense; yet, I can only hope that I absorb some of each of the cultural philosophies of my new friends.