Walpurgisnacht, Hexennacht, Maifest and Beltane

I have finally gotten around to writing this post, which has been rattling around in my brain for a few days. One of the reasons why I am finally getting around to posting it is because I am procrastinating studying for Español and Flugmedizin. But, since I have had a four day weekend, which continues tomorrow, I am not too worried about having time in which to study.

Reason for the four day weekend: Today is 30 April, which means tomorrow is 1 May, which means that tonight is Walpurgisnacht (the Night of the Witches) and tomorrow is Maifest. This also means that tomorrow is German Labour Day, which means NO WORK. And since no one goes to work tomorrow, no one goes into work today. Which, unfortunately for hungry students short on time, also included the main Mensa (cafeteria). There is a decent history of Hexennacht here, but, in summary, the witches are supposed to be meeting on the Brocken (the highest mountain in the Harz) and do whatever it is that they do. The most notable thing about this is that the Brocken is not very far from here and Braunschweig is the closest larger city. So this is a fairly big deal here. My student residence has a huge Maifest party, so I am probably not going to get too much sleep tonight (whether I go to the party, or not).

Of course, if you had not made the connection, Walpurgisnacht is named after the saint Walpurga (there is a good Anglo-Saxon name for you) and it is, incidently, also the name for the first section of Goethe’s Faust. Which (the saint, not Faust) also leads to the fact that it is a catholicised version of a old pagan festival, known as Beltane in the Celtic world (and lot of other things elsewhere) and symbolises the final coming of spring and the triumphing of light over dark (as opposed to Samhain (Hallowe’en) which is the beginning of winter, where darkness over comes the light).

But, what is really comes down to, is a built-in excuse for the Germans to have a huge party and not go to work for a couple days to recover from said party.

In other news, as there always seems to be some: everything is coming along smoothly, class is class and work is work and crew is crew. One thing of note is that I have decided to expand my blogging, and, once I am back in the States, I hope to continue this blogging thing. So, in preparation for that, I have made another blog by the name of Fifth Dimension Tesseract, which you can find a link to here. The first entry at that site explains a little bit of my goals for that blog, so you can go there and read it, if you would like. If you have any other ideas for topics on the blog or anything else, let me know.

In sporting news: After having a terrible week last week, the Twin’s bats came alive and they took two games out of three in Detroit. Hopefully they will keep up the good work after their off day today.

And you are lucky, oder? I managed to keep today’s post to just over five hundred words, instead of over one thousand as I have been recently.