Volleyball Heads to Berlin After Castle Tour
May 14, 2001 | Women's Volleyball
May 14, 2001
By Nancy Smith
..... As our travelogue continues, I have been alerted by email that there are typos in my copy. I would like to gently remind the reading public that I am typing under deadline on a German keyboard that has different letters and paying by the minute! I can only apologise in advance for my shortcomings!I have, however, not come under any further suspicion of the local polizei as I have been using the more conventional Internet Cafe. It is sort of like a strip club that makes you order drinks only with no nekkid women,just computer terminals. The cigar and cigarette smoke is thick and inexplicably there is a Michael Jackson CD on ....
As we last left the Cardinals, they were unable to play the Dresdner team again as the team was short of personnel. The Cards instead, had a long and rewarding practice with the available players of the Dresdener Club. Reinhart and his helpers, Frau Ernst and Dagmar Wegener grilled BBQ pork chops and bratwurst for the players of both teams as well as for the Under-16 team. Our cooks seemed oblivious to the fact that Americans do not like their pork cooked RARE!! The bratwursts were awesome though. The two teams mingled and the Germans did more than their share of translating as most of them spoke very passable English. The Cardinals are still speaking only money (shopping terms) and numbers.
With no match scheduled for Saturday, we returned to Reinhardt?s schedule. He had us up and going early as we packed into two vans and drove to the main train station. (Not to be confused with the strassebahn, which are the electric streetcars) There Frau Wegener had us train tickets to Konigstein. We took a doubledecker (doppel decker) bus halfway up the mountain. We then took a little ride on a wagon built to look like a train halfway up the mountain to Konigstein. It was not unlike those wagons they cart people around at the Kentucky State Fair. Konigstein (translated to King Rock) is a castle on a huge stone mountain right on the Elbe River. It is enormous and has never been conqueored. It is built right into the sandstone bluffs and has only one entrance which is a mile walk up a 25 degree tilt on a cobblestone road. I personally lost my desire to conqueor Konigstein about a third of the way up the mountain as I paused to cough up a lung.
The top of the mountain was so vast that there is a village up there beside the castle. Konigstein was a favorite hideout of Sachsen?s Kings during war. August the Strong hid there a few times and imprisoned some of his enemies there as well. Konigstein did not play any part in WWI but was used as a prison camp for Allied officers during WWII, including several French Generals.
Reinhardt had our merry band walk down the mountain all the way into the village. It was ... well... it was long. I stoppped counting at 457 steps. Many were muttering the words ?death march? under their breath, but once again cooler heads prevailed as Johannes, our youthful but wise translator, refused to translate that for us! After lunch at a tiny cafe near the village church (kirche), the Cardinals got on a boat (a dampfschiffe) a steamboat kind of like the Belle of Louisville except without the paddlewheel. It was more than 100 years old. As we sailed up the river, we saw beautiful villages, churches and other lesser castles. One of them was Sonnenstein (Sun Rock) a particularly beautiful one that turned out to have, as Johannes put it, "a cruel history". He proceeded to tell us that during WWII, Sonnenstein was used to warehouse retarded, handicapped and senile people and that countless such souls died in captivity.
We stopped at Pillnitz, at a pair of castles that August the Strong had built. You may remember August also built the huge Zwinger and the Castle of the Four Seasons. He should have been called August the Spender. At Pillnitz, he had twin castles built facing each other. One called the River Palace and one called the Mountain Palace and whatever mood hit him would be where he stayed. The group then took a ferry back to the edge of dresden and walked to the strassebahn and returned to the Sporthalle. On the walk back, Lesley Drury was subjected to an air attack by some birds who left a calling card on her shoulder. Our tourguides declared her "lucky" as, in their minds, it is so rare for that to happen. Lesley, who videotapes everything, including every meal and all the bathrooms, screeched and then said, "Get my camera!!" and taped her "good luck" before taking care of it. As we got onto the strassebahn, we didn?t realize we had to push a button to alert the driver that we needed off! So we sailed by the SportsHalle. The vocal trio of the Drury Sisters and Emily Roberson rattled the strassebahn windows with their protests, there is absolutely no stopping (halten) unless the BUTTON IS PUSHED!!!
Reinhardt let us sleep (after Der Death March) until 8:00 the next morning before checkout. After leaving our JugendGastehaus, we went to practice in a tiny gym at a vocational school. The school is ringed with old socialist propaganda that is etched in the cement walls. We jammed our eyepopping amount of luggage in to two vans and walked to the Festival. It was a Dixie Music Festival. New Orleans jazz and Bluegrass music was the theme. However, to the trained American ear, it still had a bit of the oompah band flavor. However, the festival was located near the McDonalds, so the girls indulged in some American junkfood.
We rendezvoused at Der Bierlantern, a restaurant where we had a German dish that even our translator, Johannes, said was a bit too German for him. It was sauerkraut, pork with some very ... vivid ... gravy on it. There were also two white orbs on the plate that Frau Wegener assured us was edible. They were made of mashed potatoes and gelatin and wiggled very suspiciously. After Chad Norton claimed them to be breast implants, not a soul touched them. Johannes saved the day by charming the waitress into serving ice cream (eis) for dessert. We bid Dresden farewell and headed out in three vans to Berlin.
During our time at the festival, Herr Wegener and Reinhardt had repacked the vans with such creativity and precision that even though we were stuffed like knackwurst into the van, not a single bag was crushed or even moved when we opened the back of the van.
With Reinhardt at the wheel heading the caravan, we were warned there would be NO STOPS for anything on the relatively short 2 hour drive. Despite our repeated warnings about this, about 30 minutes into the trip Anastasia "Puddles" Zaitseva began pleading for a potty stop. This fell on deaf ears as we had a schedule to keep. She survived and it was a character building experience for her!
We drove into Berlin and checked into Hotel Astrid which is about 50 yards off Berlin?s version of The Golden Mile in Chicago or Rodeo drive. The hotel was built in 1904 and is run by a Russian woman (do you note a theme forming here on our trip?) It was once a grand place. It still has beauty and charm but is furnished in Early Berlin Garage Sale style. It has mismatched furniture and bathrooms that are about 4 feet deep and six feet wide. this being said, the girls went wild as there was TELEVISION and phones in the room. Their enthusiasm was only slightly dampened when they realized there were rotary phones, but the MTV held them mesmerized for the rest of the evening. We bid a sad farewell to Herr Wegener and Reinhardt, both of whom we adored despite our teasing about his strict schedule! Lots of hugs and those double-sided European air kisses for our wonderful hosts.
A Russian, introduced only as Yuri to us, met us after breakfast at the hotel (note recurring theme arrising again). He put us on a half-day tour bus to tour Berlin. It was an open topped, doubledecker bus that took a three hour spin through Berlin, a city of 3.5 million people. We were able to see Checkpoint Charlie, and the Brandenburg Gate as well as many reconstructed landmarks that make this a unique city to say the least. Ancient palaces across the street from architecture that was built in the 1990?s.
Tonight we play a Berlin club coached by a (surprise) Russian coach and hope to meet up with President John Shumaker and his wife,Lucy. Late tomorrow we head to Russia and the girls are stockpiling snacks as they are convinced they will starve to death, despite our reassurances.
