Well the weekend did indeed prove to be more exciting than the first week! Four of us made a fairly impromptu decision to go to Germany for three days for Oktoberfest, but when we discovered how expensive it was to get to and stay in Munich during the festival, we decided to go to the smaller, closer, cheaper version in Stuttgart instead! The Cannstatter Volksfest is held in what seems to be a giant car park outside Stuttgart every year and was started by Wilhelm the 1st as a harvest festival to celebrate the end of a severe famine in 1818. Now, though, it's just a giant beer festival, although there is a 24 foot tall totem pole made of fruit to remind everyone of the event's origins!
We had a meeting on Thursday afternoon with the head of the English department to help us organise our timetables, so we arranged to catch the train from Dijon to Strasbourg in the evening. The meeting, of course, lasted longer than we expected it to and we had to make a mad dash for the station, which is about half an hour away from campus - thankfully we had trundled our suitcases along to the meeting, which got us some extremely strange looks from the French students! The trip was fairly uneventful and we got to our hotel in Strasbourg with no problems and spent a rainy evening wandering around in search of a pub. There don't seem to be very many pubs in Strasbourg but we eventually found one called Marco's and had a good evening in the end. The next morning we had a 2 hour TGV trip to Stuttgart where we planned to wander the streets in search of a hotel, because we hadn't managed to find anything online before we went. French train stations are confusing places, but we found the board with our platform number on it and made our way onto the train in good time. We were a bit confused as to why our TGV train wasn't all new and shiny and sleek-looking like the one on the opposite platform, but we assumed that the regular trains would just go faster than usual on a TGV scheduled trip. Nevertheless, we watched the sleek-and-shiny version whip out of the station with some regret, knowing that those versions had buffet carts. We removed our shoes, got our MP3 players out and were settling down for the trip when the tannoy beeped and a tinny, electronic voice announced that were welcome on board this TER service to Bale, calling at pretty much every destination except Stuttgart. At this point, the other passangers were extremely amused to see four panicky, barefoot British girls sprinting off the train, trailing headphones and shoes in their wake, screaming and shrieking and wondering how on earth we could have made such a mistake! It turned out that we had indeed got the right platform when we had looked, a good 8 minutes before the TGV was due to depart, but the platform had been changed at the last minute. 'This is France you know' the man at the information desk told us sternly. In the end, he agreed to put us on the next train to Stuttgart without charging us any extra and, 4 different TER trains and 3.5 hours later, we were there!
In the end, we found a hotel without too much hassle, we simply presented ourselves at the tourist information desk outside the train station and announced that we needed a hotel. The woman on the desk made every effort to comply with all of our requirements (a youth-hostel, or a 1 star hotel in the center of Stuttgart and with easy access to the Ubahn so we could go to the beerfest) but in the end the best she could come up with was a 5 star hotel 40 minutes out of Stuttgart with easy access to the Ubahn. She assured us that we were very lucky to find anything at all because that weekend the city was playing host to the beerfest, an important tennis match and a Champions League football game.
Thanks to the mixup with the trains and the time spent at the tourist office, it was early evening by the time we arrived at the festival. My first impressions were of noise, food-y smells and lots and lots of neon light! The festival is set up a lot like a carnival, with lots of rides, food stalls and picnic benches. There were lots of families and young teenagers about and a really cheery, festive atmosphere. We headed over to smallish beer garden where we purchased our plastic cups of wine (which earned us a dirty look from the barmaid - who drinks wine at a beer festival?!) and sat at one of the picnic benches where we got chatting to some middle-aged German men who wanted to know all about life in the UK. We stayed for a few hours and then went of in search of the party. The Cannstatter Volksfest has seven massive beer tents - each holding around 5000 people, and filled with long wooden tables and benches. Each of them also had a massive queue of people desperate to get in. We merrily pushed our way to the front (surprisingly no one complained, and no one else tried to push in - everyone waited patiently in their place in the queue) and smiled winningly at the security men until they let us in. The tent was huge, noisy, smoky and grubby, there were Germans clad in lederhosen slipping about on the floor, which was covered in spilt beer and ketchup, but the party atmosphere was palpable. Our friends at the beer garden had told us that the Stuttgart beer fest was identical to its more famous twin in Munich, except that it was 'much more German'. This was extremely true. I didn't see anyone else there who wasn't German, but this made us something of a novelty. Everyone wanted to talk to us, to ask why we weren't in Munich, to teach us German words and dance to German folk music with us. After purchasing our Jaegermeister (more German than wine, but still not beer!) we once again defied the stereotype of the British love of queues and rampaged our way to the very front of the tent, next to the stage, where we clambered onto the nearest table and danced to the YMCA. I have to say, Germans have extremely good taste in cheesy English music! Every 15 minutes or so the band would hold up their drinks and sing a song and everyone in the tent would do the same and then toast each other and all drink out of someone else's glass. Unhygenic it may have been, but it was fantastic fun!
We spent two days in Germany, mainly at the festival although we did attempt to do a bit of city-centre sightseeing in the pouring rain. By the time we headed back to Dijon early on Sunday morning we were exhausted and smelling strongly of smoke. Germany hasn't yet adopted the smoking ban and we hadn't packed enough clothes! It was strange to have been away from Dijon, even for a few days, because I still hadn't completely adopted it as home. It felt as though we were coming back from a holiday, except the place we were returning to was just as unfamiliar as the holiday destination had been. A combination of this feeling, exhaustion and stress about not yet having my timetable organised when classes were starting the following day, sent me spiralling into a truly horrible bout of homesickness which lasted a couple of days. I spent my time in floods of tears in my room, frantically searching ryanair's website for the next flights back to Edinburgh and telling myself how much I hated France and what a mistake it had been to come. Then my amazingly amazing best friend made a timely entrance on msn and reminded me of the state she had been in a week or so earlier and of all the words of wisdom I had thrown her way. She came to Europe a week before I did, and told me that I was having the exact same experiences as her, only a week later and that everything would look much sunnier soon. As usual, she was right. I attended my first classes and found them, for the most part, perfectly manageable. I met lots of new people and made a real effort to spend as much time as possible doing new exciting things, or even mundane things, to keep my mind off home and give me other things to think about. And now, thankfully, I feel much better, and slightly guilty for saying mean things about my lovely new home, even if it was only to myself! I've enjoyed my first week of classes so far, although I'm taking quite a few translation classes, which are part of the English as a foreign language course, so I've spent quite a lot of time listening to tutors explain that, in English, you have to write the days of week with a capital letter, and that quotation marks look like this: " ". Some of the classes have been useful though, and I can feel my French, and most of all my confidence in speaking it, improving all the time.
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I must be making progress. Well, I am. Still not fluent though, but patience laddy!
