I had watched the movie "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg," 1927, with Ramon Navarro and Norma Shearer (free to view on Youtube - Click here to enjoy it.
So I knew exactly what to expect: Heidelberg students with dueling scars, full of love and joy, sporting silly little student caps and constantly singing jolly German drinking songs.
Well, not so much.
I walked up into the old city of Heidelberg. I expected quaint little shops with quaint little troll-like men in them, making Christmas decorations and fashioning cuckoo clocks and mechanical dolls. I had read that since Heidelberg hadn't been bombed, it has preserved its picturesque old-world character - a journey back in time!
Not on the Hauptstraße it's not. It's the touristiest place I've ever been in Germany. EVER! The main street of the "old town" is solid Gap, Gucci, NewYorker, Old Navy, Kaufhof, souvenirs and schlock jewelery, full of American tour groups with the guide holding up a stick. I love tourists, especially American ones. They're so endearingly clueless and confident. And they can't get enough of "Ausfahrt."
I was determined to have a dining experience at the inn where Mark Twain ate when he lived here for three months in 1878. His picture is on the wall there along with hundreds of others. I walked all the way to the end of the old-town Hauptstraße, past Michiganders and Hoosiers photographing the already-completely-photographed Heidelberg castle with their cell phones and tablets (wtf are they thinking? It's all on Google Images fer chrissake!), and at last I found it, "Zum roten Ochsen," The Red Ox (click it), unchanged since the 18th century. I was seeing what Mark Twain saw!
It' doesn't seem to be a student hangout anymore. Since (unlike the organized groups from Ohio) I didn't have a reservation, they seated me next to the lavatories, with a nice, shy Japanese youth who was admirably determined to experience the local culture despite a seemingly total, complete ignorance of the German or the English languages. He did it, and took cell phone pictures to prove it. He pointed to what I had, and said he wanted that.
I ordered what seemed to me to be the most iconic German dish: Zwei Bauernbratwürste mit Weinsauerkraut und Kartoffelpüree - farm sausage & sauerkraut with mashed potatoes. It came with a mustard pot. Also, their famous goulash soup. Washed down with a Heidelberger pilsner. It was really delicious. Not vegetarian or vegan or gluten-free, but what the hell.
The price you have to pay for having this kind of genuine old-time German food isn't just for the food (which was reasonable). It's for having to eat somewhere where NO Germans would EVER eat (Germans eat international food - Italian and French cuisine and sushi and Turkish döner), and for having to listen to people across the room saying loudly how my daughter-in-law in Colorado was SO pleased with the Pack 'n Play I sent them. All I heard there was American English and a little bit of Japanese. Toward the end I thought I heard some snatches of actual German, but I think it was from an employee.
On Tuesday I went back to the old town and found the actual university, slightly removed from all the honky-tonkery. There were hundreds of bicycles and hundreds of youthful students milling around everywhere, but the funny little student caps seem to have gone out of style. Wie Schade!
I mingled with the students in the library - I let them think I must be a learned, doddering old professor, with the quirky habit of taking pictures in the library with a cell phone.
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