Marshall in Strange Places: January 2016

Heidelberg: A Ruin Done Right

The French could not have realized what a favour they were doing for future generations of Germans when they blew up the castle at Heidelberg.

What some might consider a catastrophe, we can now consider a blessing because Heidelberg's romance comes largely from the castle ruins that rise above the town.

Imagine what could have happened if they left it there. Would a rich guy have bought it and renovated it into some aristocratic pleasure house?

Would someone might have stepped in and "updated" it? Like the medieval and Romanesque cathedral that had their beautiful frescoes and vaults covered with gaudy Baroque gild work.

What we have instead is a ruin done right. No ostentation. No schnick-schnack. Aside from a museum, it's something as close to the real thing as you could get without travelling back in time. Which, when I think of it, would not be a good idea for someone like me: a non-German, Bad French-speaking Anglo.

But, what a ruin it is. The castle sits majestically on a hill just above the old town of Heidelberg. An old town that is actually old because Heidelberg had so little strategic importance that was one of the few German cities spared from being bombed into bits and pieces. A calm river flows in the foreground of the pretty little scene, with an old bridge spanning it.

Still not swooning? Well, the limestone from the area has a pinkish red hue, so when a sunset hits it, like during a sunset, it appears bright red on the green forested hillside.

If you are unmoved by this, that's fine. The castle does not care about you and your stone heart. It had Victorian painters flocking to its battlements to make pretty landscapes. Poems have been lovingly composed on its mountains slopes. Even Mark Twain was moved enough to eschew his usual satirical tone and write about it sweepingly – he saved the his wit for another essay: The Damned German Language.

But if castle ruins are not your thing. Heidelberg has few more things for you:

Ominous-looking Baroque Churches

Or a Romanesque Church, if that's your thing

Cigar Store Africans:

An old timey Students' Prison

Fog

Happy People

If you go, I recommend dinner at Zum Roten Ochsen for decent wine, good food, and a lot of meat.

Omnibus Blog 2: Canada Stories

The Omnibus Blog is back! Filled with words you want and words you might not want. In this post, I share a few stories that I couldn't fit into my last post.

Calling it a night when it's still night

During one of my Canadian visits a couple of years ago, a few of us found ourselves in a Toronto bar at last call. Only it wasn't last call. It was the end of Daylight Savings Time, which meant the clocks would be set back an hour for more drinking time.

We found one such bar and ordered a round of pints. Then I remembered I had a bottle of Palinka in my knapsack. Why did I have a bottle of Palinka in my knapsack? I must have a vendetta against my liver.

So, I pulled the bottle out. I went to the bar and asked for half dozen empty shot glasses, which, inexplicably, the bartender handed to me without question. I returned to the table are begun pouring shots at 2:30am (our body's time).

No one felt well the next day. Except a Polish friend. He was fine and made it to a client meeting. They're made of different stuff in the East.

This year, a few of us, including a few survivors from the Palinka-After-Last-Call Incident gathered at a Toronto brewery. Shortly after midnight we paid our bills and lingered out front. Someone shrugged and halfheartedly suggested a nightcap.

Everyone grumbled: "It's a work night." "It's the holidays." "I'm tired." So we said our heartfelt goodbyes and called it a night.

Best Party Favour Ever

During my first Christmas away from home, my friends James and Robyn started a Christmas tradition, LudaCristmas.

This is the third year of a tried and true premise: Gather a small, tight group of friends together to drink, eat, drink, and hang out.

As we left in the early morning at this Christmas's edition, we were given a Christmas gift box. Inside we found a jar of Advil, a bottle of Gatorade, an instant coffee packet, and an organic energy bar.

There are hosts who look after you during their party, and there are those rare hosts who look after you the morning after.

The Quest for Mexican Food

Toronto has so many great Mexican restaurants that discussions about which one is the best, or the most authentic, can seem like the 30-year-old Torontonian's equivalent of the Israel-Palestine debate from our university days.

There are a lot of opinion. Everyone is certain their's is right. Then someone mentions an more obscure taqueria that's truly authentic. Someone else says those tacos are SoCal knock offs. Then it gets ugly.

Having never been to Mexico, I am blessed with a blissful ignorance over my tacos. I'm happy as long as they're good.

In passing, I told Kata of Toronto's great Mexican food. She was interested. This marked the beginning of a long quest for Mexican Food in Toronto.

On one of our Discovery Walks I managed to steer us to Kensington Market, thinking that we'd eat some tacos at one of the neighbourhood's little cantinas. It was Sunday night and everything was closed because, well, it's the Lord's day, I guess.

The Quest for Mexican Food was put on hold for a couple of days until my cousin, Yolanda, and Mike took us to their neighbourhood taco joint, Wilbur's. I didn't see Mexicans labouring over my fish tacos, so I'm certain purists will doubt its authenticity. But damn they were good.

My mom also caught wind of Kata's Quest for Mexican and, upon our return from Toronto, cooked up one of our childhood favourites: Make-Your-Own Tacos. Again, they're not authentically Mexican, but they are delicious, and authentically Bellamy.

16 Days of Christmas in Canada

Sixteen days works out to 384 hours or 23,040 minutes. It seems like a lot on paper or a computer screen, but the time ticks by quickly – especially when it's the time you have for a homecoming Christmas vacation.

A New Years Eve wedding, the family time, the friend time, the jet lag recovery, the eight hours of daily sleep (not including the extra hours of recovery time after any debaucherous friend time) would all take their chunks from those 23,040 precious minutes.

This trip was also completely different than previous homecomings because Kata was joining me for her first visit to the Great White North. Along with the introductions during the family and friend time, we were fitting in plenty of sightseeing for my Hungarian tourist.

So it would be a crunch. There would be a lot to see, a lot to do, and a lot of people to meet, but I was convinced we had the fortitude to get it all done.

Jet Lagged in London

After our arrival in Pearson, we met my parents and continued to London, where we slept and recovered for a few days.

Other than a few hellos over Skype, this was Kata's first time meeting my parents. For most of us, meeting a significant other's parents is a brief affair. Maybe dinner and then a brisk goodbye. Enough time to make a decent first impression before any Ben Stiller-esque awkwardness happens.

Kata's 'Meet the Parents' Test would last a little longer. We had the car ride from the airport, then dinner, then breakfast the next morning... And on it would go. And it went smoothly. No 'Meet the Parents' awkwardness.

This being London, there are some places to escape to. As we recovered from the time change,we took a walk through downtown Byron one day and discovered downtown London the next day.

We experienced the mighty Forks of the Thames, passed a few pubs I used to frequent, and ate Shawarma. Then it was time to move on.

Playing Tourist in Toronto

I had a few ideas about the Toronto program but I didn't want to be the Dictator of Toronto Sightseeing, so I gave Kata a Toronto guide book before we left for Canada in the hopes that she would flip through it and think about what she wanted to see and do.

You can see the Toronto essentials in a few days, but I was going to be dragging her around to meet friends as well. Efficient planning – something I might have picked up living in Germany – would be crucial to getting her Toronto experience just right.

We caught an early train into Toronto and hit the Ridley's Aquarium right off the bat (something on the top of Kata's list) then went off to a friend's place to drop our bags and visit before the epic Christmas party known as Ludacristmas.

And on it went. There were discovery walks in Cabbagetown and Kensington. Porkbone Soup. Lunch atop the CN Tower. Then we moved to the Cousin Condo downtown, which made a brunch, a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, an excursion to Mississauga, and a walk down Queen West all easy to achieve.

Our last night came around and we were preparing to meet friends for drinks in the Distillery District with a genuine sense of accomplishment at what we have seen and done.

Of course, as the night ended – and it ended early since it was a work night and we're all old people with jobs now – I had the nagging sense that a bit more time would have allowed us really enjoy and savour the time with friends and family.

But we had no time for that! The next day we were on a train back to London, where three glorious days of family Christmas-ing awaited.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day and the gatherings and dinners came and went. Once again, I wished there was just a little more time to spend with everyone. And once again, there was no time for any of that, because we were on the road again to the Niagara Falls.

In much the same way that people who live in Cologne walk past the Dom without looking up, I take growing up close to Niagara Falls for granted. It's different for Kata, and some of her first-time-seeing-the-Falls enthusiasm rubbed off on me.

We had dinner above the Falls, saw them lit up at night (my first time seeing them lit up) and the next day stopped in Niagara-on-the-Lake to look at pretty old houses, the lake, and the crowds of Americans taking advantage of the low Canadian dollar.

Foiled by the Flu

We returned to London and the next day I awoke with an upset stomach. No big deal, I thought, I'll just have a normal breakfast. Which I saw again as the upset stomach turned into something far more violent and foul. I had caught the flu.

And now a real dilemma. Our date of departure was Jan. 1 and our New Years Eve was to be spent attending a friend's wedding in Hamilton. I only had two days to recover enough to attend the wedding, sleep in a strange hotel, and then endure an eight-hour flight – without barfing or spreading my virus.

So we stayed in London instead, and I tried to recover enough for the possibly arduous flight back to Germany. I was left feeling certain that 16 days was not enough time to see everyone and do everything properly after all.

And yet, writing this a few days after the fact, I feel that we did and saw a lot of cool things. We had a great time with friends and family, which felt short at the time but now feels, in that nostalgic glow of hindsight, like time truly well spent. It turns out 16 days might have been enough time after all.