Wittenberg and more...

A detailed account of my Wittenberg trip.

On Friday 31st, we got up at 5.45 to get ready and make some sandwiches for the train journey, and left nice and early to catch the tram to Hauptbanhof....but the tram never showed up, so we had to walk down briskly to reach the stn on time!!! We were a group of ard 55+ students. We met up at Hauptbanhof, Magdeburg at 8.45 am and caught the 9.14 train to Rosslau(Elbe)...the regional express, so it stops at every station. From Rosslau we took another tran to Wittenberg, Lutherstadt, which to me looked like they've stopped in the middle of nowhere....the platform was only on 1 side and where we got down was sand and then fields!!!

Anyways we crossed the tracks, India style without waiting for the signal LOL!!! After that we walked down to the market place and then seperated and did our roaming ard in smaller groups. Oh yeah, basically 31st Oct is Reformation Day, so there was a fair and big celebration thingie happening in Wittenberg...The 3 of us occassionally joint the others but mostly roamed ard by ourselves.....Here's what all we saw/did:

1. Schloss kirche(kirche in German means church) where Luther had pinned his 95 theses against the sale of indulgences on 31st oct,1517. We heard the choir sing there, which was quite beautiful....

2. Cranachhaus: Cranach was a painter, pharmicist and publisher and this house was given to him by the Elder of the monastery...in it was a mini fair...OK.

3.City Chruch(St.Mary) : this was where Luther preached regularly. Its quite a huge church and we had to go back twice to try and get in..there was always a stream of ppl coming out of the church!!!

4. Melanchton house: He was a humanist and a friend of Luther. The house has been converted into a museum, so we roamed ard and read the plaques and everything....

5. Luther House: This was where Luther lived from 1508 onwards. It's a huge house that has also been converted into a museum, and was filled with info, relics et al. It was nteresting, specially coz I've read the play Luther by Osborne and knew some of the stuff, but I has an overdose of Luther by the end of the whole affair. there too we heard a choir sing, which in my opinion was smoother and much better than the one in the church....Unluckily we weren't allowed to take any photos in there so I ended up buying postcards of the place...really absurd!

6. Market place: This was the most interesting part of the trip. It was Reformation Day so there was a fair in the market place...all the vendors were dressed in costumes of the 16th century, there were foodstalls selling these mouth watering things,bread and muffins being baked in wooden ovens, stalls selling jewellery, agarbattis(nagchampa for 6 eu..that was a scream!!), hocus-pocus and even fur!!! They even had this mini tavern....it was a sight to behold and everything deserved a look..I wanted to absorb every detail....the best part, for me, was the street performance by this Native American Band...the music was simply mindblowing. The rhythm and the way the unadultered sound of their instruments resonated in the streets was awesome!! It's also the first time that I threw caution to the winds and joined the group of people dancing...the music was simply irresistible!!! I obviously ended up buying their CD!!!

We finished all this by 4, so we just sat in the market place and ate some stuff while watching everything ard us, till 5 when we walked back to the station thinking we would be the first. Surprisingly others were already there..so we spent one hour talking to various people till the train arrived...I ended up talking to a large number of people that day..Itlainas, Polish, Ukranian, English, Russian and ofcourse German too!!! Quite nice....

Reached Magdeburg, caught the first tram to Universitat Platz and had a rushed dinner, before we left again for Halloween movie night at the IKT centre....that was fun, except for the Indian guys. I ended up giving one of them a piece of my mind...he said something really disgusting about a girl in Hindi forgetting that I could understand what he said...I was extremely revolted and couldn't stop myself from telling him what I thought of specimens like him...he hapnd to be the same guy I'd told off earlier, so later he tells Jigisha that 'your friend has very high standards no?'.....tickled me silly....we slept like dogs that night coz we'd been up sicne 5.30 and it was 1 am by the time we went to bed!!!!