Pied Piper of Hameln
Monday, October 13th, 2008So after a week of food poisoning, I jumped at the chance of getting out of town this weekend. Keri and I chose on Hameln, the home to the story of the Pied Piper. We’ve always liked the story, so we assumed it would be interesting. For any of you that haven’t heard of the story….
In 1284, Hameln was infested with rats. A man dressed in pied, claiming to be a rat catcher, offered to get rid of the rats for a price. After the Pied Piper used his musical pipe to lead the rats into the Weser River, the towns people refused to pay him. The man returned to the town later, on St. John’s Day, while all the adults were in church, lured all the children of the town into a cave, never to be seen from again.
Anyways, we arrived around 1pm, and headed to the old town. After checking out the Rat-Catcher fountain on the outshirts, we followed the rat trail to several of the major Pied Piper sights. While there was a lot of Pied Piper sights, the city was a lot less Disney-like with the connection than what I expected. Unfortunately, it was also a much busier and consumer oriented that I thought as well. Sights were seperated by lines of well known shops likePeek Cloppenburg, H&M, etc. I imagined it being like Luneburg, but with Pied Piper stuff. Didn’t exactly turn out that way. At least we were able to find a Mexican Restaurant. Didn’t know how much I’d miss Mexican food until I didn’t have access to any. After dinner, we headed back to Hannover to catch our train to Luneburg.
Since we had some time before our train, we headed to Miles, a bar just a couple blocks away from the Hauptbahnhof. After Keri’s 3 glasses of wine, and my 4 Beck’s, we headed back to the station. Unfortuantely for us, we just missed the train. Our student passes give us unlimited train access in Lower Saxony, but it only applies to certain trains, and of course I forgot my Eurail pass. The next train wasn’t until 6:40, the next morning. So, we weighed the choice of spending 30 Euros each on ICE train tickets back, or just spending that money on drinks and drinking until our free train left. We opted for the drinking. We walked for 30 minutes til we found a bar that was open til the early morning. Because of Keri’s smoking, and Germany’s smoking ban, we sat outside for several hours throwing back drinks. After freezing our ass off for those several hours, thewaitress finally decided to tell us that she could smoke inside. Thanks for waiting 3 hours to tell us. Anyways, we threw back several more and headed for the station around 3:30am. We ended up finding the train station in about 5 minutes, so we had walked for an unnecessary 25 minutes before. I found it discouraging that we walked for a half an hour to end up 5 minutes away from the starting location.
Anyways, despite our best efforts, we couldn’t stay awake any longer, so we decided to hop on the next ICE train, and hope we didn’t get caught without a ticket. We just had to stay awake until 4:30. At 3:50 we were both asleep on the stairs going up to the platform. At 4:27 I woke up in a panic woke up Keri, and ran up to the platform, just to stand there for 30 minutes before we realized that it was Sunday morning, and the trains we looked at weren’t running on Sundays. So, despite our best efforts to illegally train hop, we had to wait for our original 6:40 train.
We found a nice quiet place near the back of the station to fall asleep. I had the problem of occasionally waking up thinking we overslept. One time I awoke to a guy standing over me asking if I wanted change. He was obviously drunk. Actually, I don’t know if it was just that. I’m growing my beard out, and I was wearing a crappy hat and jacket, so maybe I did look homeless. Anyways, he noticed my reply was in English and asked me where I was from. If I was awake, I would have realized I should have said Idaho or something boring like that, but I responded with Las Vegas. The guy was from California, so apparently that gave him the ok to talk me to death for about 15 minutes. All I kept hearing was “I run Basketball up in dis villiage, dawg!” “Ya feel me?”, and shit like that. I guess when he first got to Germany he didn’t have any money, so he gives change away now to people he thinks need it. Then he told me that if I knew one name in Hannover, it should be Jumping John Asbury. Yeah, filed that one away for later use. I’m sure I’ll need that again.
Anyways, that traumatized me to the point that I couldn’t fall asleep after that. Just watched the minute hand slowly tick away until 6:40. We got back to Luneburg ok and spent the rest of the day sleeping. That’s the one good thing about Sundays in Luneburg, you can rest all day without any guilt, cause nothing is open or going on.
mrnational