I e-mailed this in daily installments to my friends, and this is just a compilation of those e-mails. I have corrected some bits of misinformation, and added some other corrections in square brackets [ like this ].
Day One May 2-3 The start of another adventureI got to the airport 2 hours early, which was one too many. The security check had a long line, but the line moved well enough. I had time to finish my newspaper before they let us board. Better yet, we left on time. Winifred would not have liked the flight. We had a couple of rough patches, the first of which was rather prolonged. I tried napping, but I didn't feel tired enough – when we landed, it was just midnight, body-time.
Tegel Airport in Berlin is the most passenger-friendly airport I've ever seen. They had the long tunnel thing hooked onto the plane, and we disembarked. And the line slowed down. This seemed bad, but as soon as we got out of the tunnel thing and turned the corner, we saw the passport control booth. And right next to that was our luggage carousel, and just beyond that was customs, which waived everyone through. Amazingly fast!
Then I had to find the bus to get into town. I got some money from an ATM, and looked for a tourist board. I found it but it was still only 8:45 local time, and they didn't open until 9. Buy I saw a symbol for bus on a direction sign, and followed the arrow. Eventually I found where the buses were, and the bus ticket office, which didn't sell tickets – get them from the machine, or the roving ticket sellers. I used one of those, and promptly lost my ticket, so I had to use the machine after all. I later found the ticket in my wallet, where I must have stuffed it with my change.
Take the bus to subway 41. Take that to subway 1, direction Wannsee. I was going to the Oranienberger Strasse stop, so I got on a subway going to Oranienberger Strasse. Except it wasn't – it went the other way. Got off at the next stop, climbed the stairs to go the the opposite track, and saw Oranienberge on the platform I just left. So I went back down, and got on the train. And went the wrong way again. Fortunately, at the next stop, there was a sign that said Subway 1, direction Wannsee. Finally right. Half a block from the subway stop was the street for the hotel, and there it was, another half block on.
I had planned on dropping off my luggage in a storage room and going to visit a museum while they got the rooms ready for the day. But I got my room right away, and by 10 AM I was taking a nap. I slept for about 4 hours, then got up to take in the museum. Everything I want to see in Berlin is within walking distance from the hotel, which is really convenient. Of course, I did plan it that way.
The Bode Museum is an elaborate fin-de-last-siecle building, with a rather complex layout. There are two halves, but only occasional connections between them. Some paintings, nothing great. Lots of wood and stone sculpture, and some bronzes. There's a sandstone portal carved to look like it was made of rough-hewn wood logs. The best pieces are wood. Three long choral benches with all inlaid decoration. A three-sided lectern also decorated entirely in inlaid wood. And some very nice altar pieces and tryptichs with three dimensional carving.
Breakfast at the hotel is 12.50 euros, but I've found a couple of other places near here that are cheaper. One starts breakfast at 9 AM, and the museums don't open until 10, and it's on the way, so that's perfect. There are at least two, maybe three synagogues in the neighborhood, all of them with permanent police guards.
I had planned 3 hours for the museum, but I only spent about 2 hours there, skimming whole rooms. That meant that I had time to kill before dinner, so I came back to my room to write this. After the first page, hunger started getting the best of me. I hadn't eaten since the airline breakfast some 12 hours earlier. So I went to a place I had checked out on the way back from the museum. A very nice wiener schnitzel in two pieces – if it had been one piece, it would have been meisterschnitzel. They had a whole bunch of bad beers, and one reasonably good one – Konig Ludwig Dunkel. I wanted the house specialty cheesecake for dessert, but they were out and I had to settle for chocolate-ginger cake.
Day 2 May 4 Lost and Found.
I stayed up somewhat later than I had planned last night, writing up yesterday's adventures. But I didn't have to get up early since the restaurant I had picked for breakfast didn't open until 9. I slept like a log, until about 4 AM. Then I kind of tossed and turned and half dozed for a while before finally falling asleep again. Still, I got a good night's sleep and felt properly rested for another day of hiking through museums.
This morning I was reminded of what I had forgotten. I was putting in my contact lenses and dropped one. I couldn't find it anywhere. It wasn't in the sink, and couldn't have gone down the drain if it was there. It wasn't on the floor – it was bare and plain and I searched it all over. That's when I realized I hadn't packed my spare contact lenses. This could be a real problem, going around Germany half blind. Then I looked at the floor one more time, and there it was. All is well.
I went to the Pergamon Museum today, ancient Mesopotamia and Islamic stuff. On the way I wandered through a street fair, two or three blocks long, of people selling books, music, DVDs, trinkets, beer steins, etc. Interesting, but nothing caught my eye. The museum itself is hard to get to just now. They are remodeling a large part of Museum Island (because it is full of museums, of course) and the normal entrance is blocked off. You have to go three-quarters of the way around it to get in.
It was worth it, even though half of it is closed off for the remodeling. Fortunately, the really good stuff was still on display. First is the Pergamon temple, a semi-reconstruction from available parts of the temple, and a large part of the frieze that went around it. Parts are missing or broken, but it is still very impressive. If you've seen the Elgin marbles, you have some idea of what it's like.
Then there was the market gate from Miletus, probably 30 feet tall, maybe 100 feet wide, all marble with columns and porticos. It's spectacular and would be the crown jewel of any other museum. But then you go through the gate.
On the other side of it, back to back, is the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. Oh, my!. I've seen pictures of it, which is why I wanted to come here. But to see it in person is amazing. It's big, it's blue, it's decorated with bulls and dragons (so called) and lions. And just beyond it is the royal procession way from Babylon, in a matching style, with winged lions for decoration.
As part of their “ordinary” collection, they had a very nice gold headdress for a servant from the royal burial at Ur. And some nice Assyrian sculptures and winged lions with human heads. I wasn't really interested in the Islamic stuff, so I left early and went for lunch. I haven't seen a bockwurst yet, but everybody sells curry wurst. I'm told it is the most popular snack in Berlin, or maybe Germany. It just doesn't seem right to me, so I had a bratwurst, very mild. And a Berliner Kindl beer from a brewery started in 1872 – not a good sign. But they say they work to the reinheitsgebot, and it was decent, for a pilsner. After lunch I went to the Altes Museum. That's the Old museum, to mark it off from the Neues (new) Museum across the street.
It had a lot of Greek, Etruscan and Roman stuff. Lots of vases and drinking bowls in the Greek section, and a stele of two warriors from the Pelopennesian war shaking hands. Now you know how old the custom is. Unless it's older. They have a shield from an Etruscan tomb, and you can see the back of it. I tried to get a picture, but it was standing at a steep angle, and the glass case caused a lot of glare. I did get a little shot of the key part – there are four thin wires attached to the back of the shield , evenly spaced, and each has a few links of chain attached. I don't know what sort of strapping went with this, or how it worked, but I've never seen anything like it before. There was another Etruscan shield on display; I couldn't get a good look at the back, but it seemed to have a more standard cross-arm strap and maybe a center grip.
I was getting a bit tired by now, so I sat down for a break. Off in the distance I could see the spires of St. Nicholas church, which was supposed to be pretty nice. I still wanted to see the New museum, but it was supposed to be open until 8 tonight, and it was only the middle of the afternoon. So I went over to the church first.
It was a little disappointing, because it was badly damaged at the end of the war, and then collapsed totally in 1949. So what we have now is a reconstruction. It looks good, but a lot of the original sculpture is gone or damaged. The interesting feature is the way they do family burials. In Catholic churches, you often see small chapels founded by some prominent family, with their remains tucked away under the floor. Here, they have somewhat smaller chapel areas, but the floor with it's decorative monuments is about waist high. Below that, in the wall, is a double door to the family vault.
So it was time to go back to the New museum. And I had seen that I had come the long way to St. Nicholas church. It would be shorter to complete the circuit than to backtrack. Well, it would have been it they hadn't been digging up so much of Museum Island. But what's another couple of blocks to walk when you're already footsore. And thirsty. Fortunately my detour brought me to the east end of the street fair. These things attract a lot of people, and a lot of people attract food vendors. So I got a beer, found a bench, lit my pipe, and had a nice rest.
It was still early enough to visit the New Museum, and I was up to another educational hike. But, no. The tourist guidebook from my hotel said the museum as open until 8 on Saturday. The museum guard said it closed at 5. Guess who was right. So I'll go there tomorrow.
The weather has been very nice so far (touch wood), warm and sunny. I've taken my jacket with me both days, and could have probably left it behind both days. Certainly today. Actually, last night I ate in the sidewalk seating area of the restaurant. By the time I had finished, almost all the other outside people had left or gone inside. It was chilly, even with the jacket.
The area I'm staying in is called the Mitte, very close to all the museums and only about a mile or two from Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. There are lots of pedestrian zones, though you do have to watch out for the bicyclists. They're everywhere, and some of them don't have any qualms about riding through a throng of pedestrians. There are bike rental places, bike pizza delivery men, pedicabs, even a beer-bike. It's a wagon of sorts, with seats for about ten people who get to drink beer as long as they pedal the thing.
It was almost 8 PM when I wrote those last lines, and time to go to dinner. It is now almost 10PM and I have just gotten back. The place I was at last night was good, but I like to try more than one restaurant if I can. The one in the hotel a little pricey, and the one on the corner looked more like a bar than a restaurant (though I may try them tomorrow night). So I went up the cross street a block where there are two restaurants on facing corners. One offered asparagus and schnitzel. The other offered asparagus, asparagus, and schnitzel. Apparently it is now asparagus season in Germany, and if we don't eat it as fast as we can, the country will disappear under a forest of asparagus stalks. But one had good prices and one dish that didn't have too much asparagus. Still, there was another restaurant up the street, so I went there.
They, too, were offering asparagus, but not with everything. They seemed full, and were. I was offered a seat at the bar. Others, including a family of four, were offered the bar or the outside seating. I guess they liked me. They had menus in English and other languages, which is good because my German has not improved with age, and my dictionaries were written by anorexics, who couldn't use words about food.
I had a beef roulade, which was tasty, but the beef was a bit overcooked. The strudel for dessert was huge, but mainly because their pastry cook used to work in a pizzeria. I almost asked for a knife to cut it. Still, the dinner wasn't bad, just not great. The beer was good – Markischer Landmann, by the same brewery that made the Berliner Kindl.
Day 3 May 5 Walking around Berlin.
Another beautiful day in Berlin. I haven't seen any temperature numbers anywhere, but it is comfortably warm. On Friday, the hotel had a sign up with the expected temperatures, but they haven't repeated the info. Friday was advertised to be about 63 F all day, which is probably right. Yesterday was somewhat warmer, and today more so. I left without a jacket at 9:30, and never missed it. The sun is shining so much, I'm in danger of sunburn, almost.
I went to the New Museum today, and it was open. I wanted to see it because they had all this great Egyptian stuff, including Nefertiti's bust, and Schliemann's Trojan finds. And they do. Nefertiti is in a room by herself, no photography please, and you can walk around the bust and see it up very close. It is quite amazing – some minor damage, but almost perfect. They had an exhibit about the bust elsewhere in the museum, with a letter from the man who discovered it. He said, “Words can't describe it, you'll have to see it.” It is much more beautiful in person than in any picture.
Schliemann's Trojan discoveries were disappointing, but it's not their fault. They had a couple of nice pieces of jewelry, but mostly ordinary things. The real “treasure of Priam” was hauled off to Moscow by the Soviets, and the Russians still refuse to return it.
And that's the thing about all these museums. They have some really impressive blockbuster pieces like the Pergamon temple, the Ishtar Gate, and Nefertiti. But, other than the big name stuff, a lot of it is a shrug. Aside from the Ishtar Gate, I think the Oriental Institute in Chicago has a better Mesopotamian collection. The New museum's Egyptian collection may be larger than the Field museum's, but aside from the one piece, I don't think it's more impressive. It's like going to a big Hollywood party with all the stars, and there's Brad Pitt, and dozens of bit players. Maybe Leipzig will be better.
Anyway, after that I started off to the Gemaldegalerie ( that's Painting Gallery to you). I thought about walking there, but realized I hadn't brought a map with me. Then I found a bus stop. The people at the hotel had told me to take bus 85 from the New museum to the Gemaldegalerie. The sign at the bus stop told me that was wrong. The bus went there, but not from where I was, or anywhere near. But bus 200 did go there, and from that stop.
They really should have a special bus for this route, because Museum Island is full of museums, and so is the campus where the Gemaldegalerie is. It would make sense to have a bus that went between the two areas. There are actually 4 museums in the building with the Gemaldegalerie, and a couple of others nearby. And the Berlin Philharmonic.
The Gemaldegalerie is what I had been hoping for all along. Lots of good quality paintings from all over Europe. They have Cranachs, Rubenses, Botticellis, Rembrandts, and lots more. And many of them are well known. Even the unknown are well known. They have a Botticelli's Venus, but not on the half shell. Same pose, but a plain background. It was very nice, but I had been walking too much already, and it was a big collection. By the end, I was just scanning each room for something that really stood out. Which was a shame, because they had so many good paintings. Lots of portraits of “man” or “lady”, sometimes with an adjective to tell you the subject was young or old or noble, which you could pretty well figure out by yourself.
By now it was after 3 and I was tired and thirsty and hungry, in that order. And lo and behold, there was an open air cafe to serve all those museums. I had a nice mild brat, with some so-so German potato salad, and a very nice beer, Duckstein Rotbraun. And it had a nice red-brown color and a good taste.
Fortified by my break, I decided to walk back to the hotel – how hard could it be? The museum was right by the Tiergarten, a big zoo and park in the heart of Berlin, and I thought I could just follow it up the Brandenburg Gate. From there a walk up Unter den Linden would bring me back to the Museum Island area. A British couple at the next table let me look at their guidebook to verify my idea, and I was off.
The path along the Tiergarten was wide and had benches, which made for some nice little breaks in my journey. Soon I was at the Brandenburg Gate, and the Reichstag nearby. Another brief pause, and I started up Unter den Linden, the stylish center of pre-war Berlin. Post-war, of course, it was on the wrong side of the Wall, but it is coming back with a roar. Like the Mercedes dealership – I think you can buy a car there, and drive it out the front door onto the street.
The walk was longer than I had expected, a little over 2 miles by the most direct route, probably two and a half the way I went. But I'm glad I did it, just to say I had. It was a pleasant day, and it was nice to see some of the historic sights along with the museums. There was construction along part of Unter den Linden, but it was a really beautiful boulevard. Better than the Champs Elysses, even.
I mentioned yesterday about the bicycles. I forgot to mention the Segways. I saw four of them yesterday, and a herd of about 8 or 10 today. They do make some sense as a way to visit a city, saving your feet for the museums and other stops. But I wonder what you do with them when you go inside. I never saw any parked anywhere.
Dinner was at one of the asparagus restaurants. I had veal ragout with sour cream and herb spatzle, all very good. The ragout was very nice, not too spicy, with or without the sour cream. The herb spatzle was great, like herb stuffing in a turkey. The beer was a hard choice. They had three different beers on tap that I knew nothing about. One was a pilsner, one was a lager, and one was something else. I went with the lager, Tegernseer, named after a large lake. Almost appropriate. It wasn't very strong, or colorful, but it did have a little bit of flavor.
I went to sit down at a table in the back by the window, and the waiter chased me away – reserved, Any other place was fine. This was strange, because the place was almost empty. I was going to take the next one by the window, but the windows were all open, and the window behind me would have been in my way. So I took another seat at a table for four, instead of the table for two I started with. Then a party of 6 came in and filled a big table at the back of the room. Later, at 9 PM, when I was almost done, a party of 9 came in, asked if were too late, and filled up the room.
Tomorrow I am off to Dresden, once I get my car. I am tiffed at Google maps because they don't show any public transport for Berlin except the subway lines. I plotted out the route from my hotel to the car rental place, and I wound up with a lengthy walk at the end. It turns out there's a bus that starts out a couple of blocks from the hotel and takes me almost to the rental company's door.
Day 4 May 6 Wherein I get lost very little.
I said the bus would take me almost to the rental lot, and it did. That is not to say that it was easy to get there. I had to walk a few blocks from the hotel to Invalidenstrasse to catch the bus. Imagine my surprise when I got to Invalidenstr. and found that it was all ripped up. The only traffic was going the wrong way. Unfortunately, I did not have a map of the bus system. I do have a map of the subway system, but the subways did not go where I wanted to go.
Some bus stops have a map of the bus system, but I didn't see any around like that. I decided to walk down Invalidenstr. in hopes the construction zone would end, or that I might find another bus. After a couple of long blocks, the construction didn't so much end as relent and allowed two-way traffic. Still no bus, or bus stops. Another block and I was looking both ways before crossing the street, and there was a bus stop, and for my bus! Now you know why your mothers always told you to look both ways before crossing a street – if you don't you'll never find a bus.
While I am at it, I would like to say a nice word about Berlin bus drivers. The bus taking me into town from the airport actually stopped and let a driver pull out of a parking lot. Today's driver stopped to let some pedestrians go by. How very extraordinary!
So I got to the rental lot an hour and a half late (but I was never going to make it on time anyway). I was given a Toyota Aveo. [ See the correction, later. ] It's got four doors, though 2 of them are just for looks, because no one who isn't anorexic is going to sit in the back. And the hatch is also decorative. The space under the hatch is just big enough for my suitcase, and nothing else.
I had brought all my jazz mp3s on a thumb drive, because all new car stereos have USB ports now. Well, almost all. There is a plug for auxiliary input, and if I can find the right cable, I can plug my Walkman in.
The car was parked right by the door of the rental company, so I had to drive off and try to find a place to pull over and set up the TomTom. I had driven randomly, and had no idea where in Berlin I was. But I told TomTom to take me to my hotel in Dresden, and it said, “OK, turn here”.
I was very impressed with the GPS. Even if I had known where I was, I would have spent some time figuring out the route out of Berlin and down to Dresden. But now all I had to do was follow the directions and there I was. Watching the arrow was better than listening for the voice. Getting to the autobahn, the voice said to turn toward someplace that wasn't listed on any of the signs. But the arrow was right. And in Dresden tonight, the voice said turn left when the arrow pointed right, and the arrow was right.
I may have missed a turn on the autobahn. I was expecting to turn off from one autobahn to another, but it was a ways down the road. Then I noticed the kilometer markers went from 62 to 0. I guessed the route number must have changed. Then TomTom told me to exit at a small local road, cross the highway and re-enter going back north. Then turn off and re-cross the highway, but now on the autobahn to Dresden. So I may have missed the turn off, and TomTom saved me, or it was a very odd way to change highways. My road atlas doesn't make it any easier to understand, either.
I got to my hotel a little before 3, and wanted to go see things. I wasn't sure where in Dresden I was in relation to the downtown area. I thought I'd check Google maps, but I couldn't get the wi-fi to hook up. It finally occurred to me to just use the GPS to take me downtown. Worked like a charm.
I didn't actually see a lot anyway. The warm weather stayed behind in Berlin, and it got a little cooler and drizzly as it got later. It was getting later in the afternoon, so the museums were out. That left the old fortifications and the Frauenkirche, the old cathedral destroyed in the Dresden bombing.
When I was here in 1999 the reconstruction was almost finished, but not quite, and they had it all wrapped up like a mummy until it was all done. Well, it's done, and it's fabulous. They used some of the remnants of the old church to build the new one, but it's mostly new stone. Any historic monuments and graves in the old one were destroyed in the bombing, so there are none of the normal trappings of a major cathedral.
But you wouldn't notice them anyway, because everything else is so beautiful. The church is round, and the pews curve around with the wall. Above the main floor are two or three curved balconies, with their fronts painted delicately. The sanctuary is Baroque and therefore gaudy, but softened by the use of pale blue marble. It is really wonderful to see.
After that, I wanted to check out the old fortifications that run under this nice riverfront terrace. One sign, in German, said they were open until 6. The other side of the sign was in English, and said it closed at 5. I went up to the door, about 5:15, and it was open. But there was a sign at the entrance saying the last visit with an audio guide was at 4:45, and the absolutely last, run like hell through the place, visit was at 5:15. Well, there are some places I can run through, but forts aren't on the list. So I'll do them tomorrow, and maybe a museum.
My hotel is nice, but in a mostly residential neighborhood, so I decided to have dinner downtown while I was there, I ate at a nice place across from the Frauenkirche, mainly because the menu listed Dresden style sauerbraten. Yum, very good, with red cabbage and potatoes done in some magic German way. I had them like this in Berlin once as well. It's a whole skinned potato cooked so it is soft all the way through. It's not boiled, because boiled potatoes are still a bit firm. This is like it was steamed, or something. Good. A different apple strudel for dessert. I have seen a proper strudel in a German restaurant, with the apples rolled up nicely in a thin pastry, But I had something else for dessert that night, and the strudels I've had have been different. The other night it had an armored crust. This one had a soft crust, though still a bit thick, and was shaped like a pocket pastry, filled with a huge portion of apples. Very tasty at least. And the beer, ah, Krusovice Schwarz Bier. Excellent, dark and wonderful. I considered seconds, but I was driving home.
Day 5 May 7 Photographer and photographee
It was a little cool and raining this morning in Dresden. Which was OK since I was going to see Festung Dresden, part of the old city fortifications which had been covered over by later additions. I parked in an underground garage nearby, near a car in a special parking space. The space was numbered 007, and the car was an Aston-Martin.
Festung Dresden was nice, in a slap-dash sort of way. The portcullis on the old gate was done with wide ribbons of cloth, and parts of the ceiling were large sheets of cloth painted to look like brick. The inner and outer gates were fine, though centuries of modifications had blocked up some of the outer gate. The audio guide was generally good, but it did refer to the musket ports facing the drawbridge as just a way for the guards to check on those trying to get into the city – no thieves allowed.
There were some pretty interesting bits, including a stretch of rampart with musket and gun ports. In one large room, they had marked on the edge of an archway how high the water had come in some of the Elbe floods. The highest, by a wide margin, was in 2002. And the Festung is no longer right beside the Elbe.
And then there were the three casemates, which they described as just protected underground storage areas. They said this despite their own logo, which shows the extent of their tour area, and definitely shows the casemates reaching the outer wall, with gun ports. We never saw any gun ports in the one on exhibit. But such a careless mistake. Still, it was worth going through it.
I skipped the museums – I had already seen the Zwinger, and wasn't that interested in the other. And I wanted to spend time in Bautzen and Gorlitz. Bautzen was nice, but I didn't stay all that long. It wasn't for lack of interest, but my camera battery died, and the only way to recharge it would be to get to my hotel in Gorlitz. Actually I spent a fair amount of time in Bautzen, just not sight-seeing. I wanted to get a cable with mini-stereo jacks on both ends to plug my Walkman into the car stereo. I figured Bautzen was a big enough town to have an electronics store.
Clothing stores, jewelry stores, shoe stores, the butcher, the baker, uh, no candlestick makers. Finally I found a shopping mall – perfect. Nothing on the main level. Nothing on the upper level. I checked a store map, just to see if I missed anything, and there was a lower level with two electronics stores. A huge one called MediMax, and a very small one called Bass. Bass sold cell phones. MediMax, which sounds like a medical supply firm, was a big medi-a store. CDs, DVDs, cell phones, video games, home appliances – you name it, they had it. Including my cable. So now I have music wherever I go.
I wanted to see two things in Bautzen, St. Peter's church and the Ortenburg castle. The Ortenburg was a big disappointment. There was a nice gateway, one big ordinary tower, and a few ramparts, but the main castle building was not even close to medieval and was now government offices.
St. Peter's church was interesting- the front end is Lutheran, and the back end it Catholic. The Catholic sanctuary is ornate, Baroque style. The Lutheran sanctuary is very plain. There is no wall between the two parts, just a low rail. And both congregations sit facing the same way, so the Lutherans can see the fancy Catholic sanctuary, as well as their own plain one. The Lutherans did have some nice woodwork on their side. I had just finished snapping some pictures of it, and was about to shoot the Lutheran sanctuary when the battery died. Well, if you've ever seen a plain Protestant sanctuary, you know what it looked like.
So off I went to Gorlitz, on the Polish border. And, no, I didn't go into Poland, though I could have. But it would have meant a block long walk across the bridge, and another one back, and there was nothing of interest near the bridge on the Polish side.
I got a place to park on the street right by my hotel. It's a pay per hour thing until evening, and I didn't have the right change to pay for just enough time. But the ticket dispenser was honest, and gave me credit for almost an hour in the morning. While I was waiting for the camera battery to recharge, I tried out the wi-fi at the hotel to see if it worked. It does, but it keeps dropping the connection. They have 4 different wi-fi connections, but they are all slow. I could get Google, but I couldn't get a search done. I just noticed that it's been connected for over an hour. Maybe this can go out tonight.
There's a block-sized platz by the hotel, and on the far end is a big tower. I had printed out maps for all my hotels, in case I needed help finding them, and to tell me where I was in relation to the sights I wanted to see. When I set off to see the town, I realized I had left the map in the room. And nothing in the Michelin guide map seemed to be around here. Except maybe the tower. Michelin mentions a famous tower called the Reichenbacher; maybe this was it. No. But a sign post near it pointed the way to the Reichenbacher, and it turned out to be just a couple of blocks away. I marked my hotel's site on the Michelin map so I could find my way back, and headed off.
And that's when I became a photographee. I was going down the street, when a young woman stopped me and asked to take my picture. She had noticed me on the corner, and thought I looked interesting. Well, there's no accounting for tastes. So I let her take my picture pretending to read my guidebook.
The Reichenbacher tower is pretty nice, part of the old defenses on the west side of Gorlitz. Across the street is a big, squat round tower, much older, and now turned into a history museum. Lots of nice buildings in Gorlitz, but only a few that are medieval. There are a couple of nice churches, but it was late in the afternoon, and they weren't open.
The Rathaus has a nice tower, and a very nice statue of Justice, but most of the building is plain. Nearby is the Bourse, or banking house for the market, but it's now a hotel. And next to it is the Waage, which means scale. It's where goods were weighed. It looks nice, but mostly because it's old. Like me. Michelin mentions both of them, but the nicest building in the platz is the Rathapotheke, the old apothecary shop. It's a restaurant now, but the building is 15th century and beautifully painted, with two sundials on the front.
After wandering down the border, I decided I needed dinner, so I went back to drop off my guidebook. I checked out the menu at my hotel, but didn't see anything I really wanted. I had been passing restaurants all afternoon, and some of them looked pretty good. But now I was going to have to go back and find one. And now it was too expensive, not interesting enough, no visible menu. I had worked my way back to the Rathaus, and the three restaurants near it were a shrug. So I was turning back and passed a big impressive building. I don't know what it was, but down the lane next to it I saw a big sidewalk cafe umbrella. I went to take a look, and the sidewalk part was across the street from the restaurant. The menu looked good, and I was tired of walking, so I went in.
Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy! I asked for an English menu, because lots of the restaurants here were offering Saxon and Silesian dishes I had never heard of, with ingredients whose German names I didn't recognize. And on the first page of the menu was deboned roast duck. Oh, was it good! I have had better duck, but this was extremely good. No bones, crispy skin, and tasty as all get-out. And a large dish of red cabbage. And those weird German potatoes. Which aren't exactly potatoes. I finally figured out that they were potato dumplings, shaped like potatoes. And a very nice beer, Eibauer Lausitzer Schwarzbier. Dark, but not heavy. It was good, better than average, but not a great beer. Still, if nothing better is available, I'll take it gladly.
I've been asking for smoking rooms in the hotels I booked, but tonight I found a No Smoking sign in my room. So I finished my post-dinner pipe in the platz outside. The day started out cool, but it warmed up nicely. There was a good crowd of people in the plazt. There were two women talking on the far side, three mid-teen boys practicing their bike and skateboard tricks (badly), three late teens drinking beer and talking quietly, and four college age people, also talking. So I had a nice floor show.
Day 6 May 8 The Saxon Grand Prix course.
The first thing I had to do this morning was get gas for the car. I asked TomTom to take me to the nearest station, and it told me to turn around. This was difficult, as I was parked on a one-way street, and could only go forward and immediately turn left. But the GPS was forgiving of my little idiosyncracies, and replotted a route. So I got gas for the car, and Germany now has enough money to bail out whoever is next. $7.764 per gallon.
The trip from Gorlitz began as pretty much the same as the trip to Gorlitz. All fast autobahn, the only difference was that there were fewer trucks going west than east, so I didn't have to dodge around so many today. Then, just beyond Dresden, I left the autobahn and went on secondary roads to Freiberg. It's nice country, lots of big hills and pine forests and open fields.
The cathedral in Freiberg is beautiful, with painted decoration on the ceiling among the vaulting, and a pair of opera style box seats for the Saxon dukes/electors, painted with their arms. Lots of wooden statuary, all painted, and two pulpits. One called the miner's pulpit – silver mining being big in this part of Saxony, the miner's guild even had their own section in the church. The other is the tulip pulpit, shaped like a fantasy tulip. Both are very nicely carved – I should put some pictures in this so you could see some of these things. But then the email would be too big to send.
This being a Lutheran church now, the sanctuary is restrained, a little bit. It was also a rich Lutheran church. Behind the altar is just a painting of the Last Supper, surrounded with gold. And behind the sanctuary, in what would normally be the choir, are the tombs of the Wettin electors of Saxony, very florid. But then, most of them were Catholic, so it's OK. I had to take pictures of their tombs through the grill, because it was apparently closed off.
There is a beautiful arched portal with lots of carving, off to one side of the church. It used to be a regular entrance, but it is now enclosed in a room, and the room isn't deep enough to get a full picture of the whole thing.
After that I went to Freiberg's obermarkt, several blocks away. Michelin says it was worth seeing. Well, it was all right, but I've seen better. Still, there were some nice doorways. There were also two sets of fountains in the square. These were not your normal round pool with a geyser in the middle. There were nine short geysers spouting up from the pavement. And there were two of them.
Anyway, time was getting on, and I wanted to get to Annaberg-Buchholz. Actually, the town is like Champaign-Urbana, so I'm just going to call it Annaberg from now on. And that's when I turned on to the Saxon Grand Prix course. The guy who surveyed this road couldn't find a straight edge, so he used a cork screw. There were curves going up, there were curves going down, there were curves just because. The speed limit was a lot faster than I would have tried driving it. Fortunately, I soon picked up a semi in front of me. I couldn't pass him, so I had to go his speed. Unfortunately, there were places he had to slow down because of his size and weight, where I could have gone a bit faster.
Finally, I got to Annaberg, and found the church right away (thank you TomTom). The church front is very plain, but the inside is wild with color. All along the sides, above the side arches, is a series of enamel paintings of the life of Christ. There's a huge three-dimensional triptych of the Pieta in enamel and gold. The ceiling is also painted with decorations. Behind the altar is a carving of the birth of Christ and some other stuff, all in marble.
I'm a little vague on the details, because I did not actually take the tour. The woman who sold the tickets was also the woman who gave the tours. And since she was giving a tour, she couldn't sell tickets or photo permits to me, or the other people who wanted to come in. So we came in anyway, and stayed out of the way, and took our pictures on the sly.
Now for the last stage of today's outing, getting to my hotel in Zwickau. I didn't know when the cathedral there closed, but I figured I had time to get to my hotel and then head into town for the cathedral. But, having taken the Saxon Grand Prix course up to the top of Annaberg, now I had to take it back down. Down being the operative word. If you slip and fall, you won't stop rolling for a mile. At last I got to level ground, and eventually an autobahn.
I got to my hotel, and the hotel on site parking was occupied by the builders doing some remodeling for them. But they pointed me to another private parking lot I could use, just up the hill. Good news and bad news. The bad news was that this was another no smoking room, which was strange because the bar downstairs was full of smokers. The good news is that the internet was free (I had been told I would have to pay), and it works.
I dropped off my bags and headed back downtown for the cathedral. TomTom failed this time. I saw the spire, but I never got close to it. In fact, TomTom brought me to an underground parking lot. But I knew I was close, so I drove on, and turned toward the center of town. I parked in a vacant spot, got out and checked the Michelin map. I found two streets on the map that intersected right where I was. How lucky is that!
Now that I knew where I was, I could figure out how to get to the cathedral. It didn't take too long, which was good, because they were closing. I had just decided to put off taking pictures of the outside until I knew if I could see the inside. Just as I got to the door, a couple came out with the guy who was in charge. The woman asked me if I wanted to take a look around, quickly. I said yes, and the guy in charge said sure. There were actually another 3 or 4 people in there, but I was the last one in.
The ceiling is beautifully groined vaulting, lots of nice wood and stone carving. This is St. Mary's church, so behind the altar is a large three-dimensional triptych of Mary and others, all painted and gilded. This would be fine in a Catholic church, but it's a bit odd in a Lutheran one. There's some stained glass, but the light was wrong to get a good picture. And I was too rushed with some of my pictures, and they came out blurred. Oh, well.
I wandered around taking pictures of anything of interest on the streets. Some nice buildings and doorways. Then I found a travel agency with ads in the window. They are offering a trip to Bali for 1054 euros. They are also offering a trip to the Dominican Republic for 922 euros. That just doesn't seem right.
Dinner tonight was at the Irish Harp Pub, lamb cutlets. They have a different way to specify rare, medium or well-done. Rare is “English”. Service was slow, unless you were drinking. I got to watch the bargirl fill a pitcher with Guinness, that was the main entertainment. A guy with a guitar from the Loud and Angry School of Music came on later, but the bargirl was better entertainment. The service in German restaurants is sometimes slow, especially after you've finished eating. You might want to talk to your friends, or digest your dinner, or something. So you might have to wait before they ask if you want dessert, and you might have to wait to get your bill. But once you place your order, the race is on – don't get wrapped up in something else, because your food will be there before you know it.
But not here. I waited and waited for my food. I think they had to send back to Ireland for the lamb. Their idea of lamb cutlets was actually oddly cut lamb chops. They didn't have a lot of taste, which is hard to do with lamb. And the pommes frites were just french fries. I should have known when the waiter called them just “pommes”. The mushrooms in the lamb sauce were very good, however. And the Guinness was perfect, of course.
It has been alternating all day between rain and sun. During dinner, the rain came down hard, but it stopped and I went for a stroll all dry. Then I came back to the hotel, tried out the internet, and it worked. So I began writing this up, and drinking a bottle of Breznak Schwarzbier I picked up in a grocery the other day. It's nice and dark, but not very exciting. It's not bad, just bland.
Day 7 May 9 Climbing the staircase to, well, almost everywhere.
It was raining lightly when I left Zwickau this morning, got really heavy for a brief spell, then slacked off again, and finally stopped by the time I got to Meissen. There were almost no trucks on the road today; it must be truck drivers sabbath. But that made for good traveling.
I said earlier that my car was a Toyota Aveo. This was wrong, it is a Toyota Aygo. It does go, but not so consistently as you would like. If I get stuck behind a truck, I'm doing 80 kph (50 mph), maybe a bit more. So I pull out to pass him, shift into 5th gear, and wait. If the road is level or downhill, I can get up to 120 or 130 kph (75-81) quickly enough. But if there's an uphill grade, it will take a while.
Yeah, 80 mph is fast, but that's the highest limit they post on the autobahns. TomTom reads the local speed limits, and adjusts as they change, and converts them into mph. But TomTom doesn't give a speed limit for the autobahn. Which is good, because I've gone 130 kph and been passed like I was standing still. Anyway, today the Aygo was feeling its oats. I was trying to get up to 130 going up a grade, and finally made the top of it. Then I glanced down at the TomTom, which also gives me my speed, and saw I was doing 89. I didn't think the car could go so fast. I immediately slowed down to a safe 80.
TomTom has lots of places to go to built in, you just have to figure out how to ask for them. It generally starts at the center of town and works out, and often stops after 5 or 10 miles. So you may not find a place you know is there. But if you ask for it specifically, there it is. Some of the churches I've gone to do not appear under “Places of Worship”; I guess because they are not in active use. Fortunately, the cathedral in Meissen is in use, as I found out. So TomTom was going to drive me right up the front door. This is possible, as local tour operators drive mini-buses up there. But I saw no public parking, so it was good that I ignored TomTom and followed the sign to the castle and cathedral parking.
I had some doubts about that, since it was downhill, but it turned out OK. Right across from the parking lot was a funicular rail up the side of the hill. I walked around, taking pictures, and then headed for the cathedral. It was closed for noon service. It was only 11:30, and I could have done my round inside in half an hour (and did later), but they wouldn't let me in until 1:00.
So I went next door to the Albrechtsburg, the castle of the Wettin dukes of Saxony. It began in the late 15th century (though there must have been something earlier) and looks like a big, rather plain mansion on the outside. But the inside is very nice and medieval. This is surprising, since it has burned a few times, and been used for a long while as the factory for Meissen porcelain. (The dukes were the money men behind its invention.)
Actually, what looks medieval is the layout, large halls, gothic arched ceilings, window seats. Most of the rest is faked. In the late 19th century, when the Saxon government through the porcelain makers out, they wanted to restore the castle as a museum. The guy in charge of design didn't want to use re-creations of medieval furnishings, or even real items. So he went ahead and decorated it with paintings of great moments in Saxon history, and whatever trimwork appealed to him. There are a whole bunch of statues of the dukes in one room, all modern. The physical structure is very nice, and the non-pictorial decoration is reasonable, but the paintings just don't belong. It's like Ludwig's art at Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein.
The castle is 3 stories tall, and you have to climb the stairs, no funicular here. A lot of space was devoted to the development of porcelain, with some very nice samples from the ducal collection. The dukes used to hold small dinner parties, just so everyone could dine off porcelain. It took a while to get production up to handle large amounts.
By now, it was 1:00, and I went to the cathedral. It had some nice vaulting, and an interesting pulpit. There were several ugly modern art tarps hanging on the walls, and any side chapels were curtained off. Right inside the front door, which wasn't in use anymore, were several graves of bishops. Around both sides of the sanctuary were arcades with paintings of coats of arms. And behind the sanctuary was the choir and another sanctuary. Behind that altar was a nice stained glass window, and I got a reasonably nice picture of it.
I was actually on schedule still. I could get to Colditz in time to take in the castle at leisure. I couldn't find the castle in TomTom's list of points of interest, so I settled for the center of town. I got there, but it wasn't close enough to the castle. I could occasionally see it above the houses, but I couldn't figure out how to get there. Then I saw a town map and made my way to the square just below the castle. There was a road that might have led up to it, but I wasn't sure, so I climbed the stairs. The road did go up, but there was no place to park.
Colditz castle, if you don't know, was the Nazis' most escape proof POW camp. If you tried escaping from some other camp, you'd probably get transferred here. Despite their best efforts, there were over 300 escape attempts, and 31 prisoners made it home. The museum part of the castle does a very good job of detailing life in the prison, and the various escape attempts, successful and otherwise. They have even preserved a painting on a wall, made by one of the prisoners.
I would have liked to see the whole thing, but I just missed the start of the guided tour in German (which I wouldn't have understood anyway). But I saw an awful lot of the place. The one thing I really wanted to see was the glider the prisoners built, but it was destroyed soon after the war.
Time to head to Leipzig, where my hotel was not visible from the road. I had printed off a map made by a former guest and posted online, showing where it was, and how to recognize the location. You turn in between a Smart car dealer and a gas station. TomTom took me right there and told me to turn in, but I didn't see the dealership, and thought I was supposed to turn at the traffic light just beyond. TomTom told me to turn around, so I did, and made the right turn. The problem was the dealership had no big sign out front, not so smart if you want to buy one of their cars.
The hotel looks awful, like a overgrown double-wide trailer. But the room is nice, and the wi-fi works. Just to make my climbing day complete, I had to climb up to my room. I went online to check out restaurants in Leipzig, and found a really nice one. It's in the basement of a shopping center, reasonably priced and very good. All of this comes from reviews on Trip Advisor. One guy said he paid 31 euros for two meals, another said he had venison. Oh, boy, count me in. TomTom didn't list the restaurant, but once I put in its name, it found it. It was apparently a bit too far out of the town center.
Anyway, TomTom navigated me pretty close to the place. It dropped me off at a pedestrian zone with no parking, but there was a parking garage just behind me. I parked and started looking around. I remembered the street it was on, and found I was only a block or so away. I went down the street and couldn't find it. Coming back up the street, I saw a small sign hanging from the side of a building – there it was. Only today it was closed to the public for a diabetics convention banquet.
Well, Leipzig is a big town, and there are other restaurants, many nearby. Some didn't list anything I wanted, some didn't list prices. One had a very loud musical performance going on outside. There was one that looked appealing, but when I first checked them out, they were turning away customers from the inside seating area. They had one big room full of a single group, and another room with a smaller, but still large, group. All they had available was outside, and it was a little chilly and had just started raining.
I found the dryest seat I could and waited for a waitress. I was under a big umbrella, and part of the arcade, but it was a bit misty. So when a party of four discovered they could get a table inside and decamped, I took over their table. It was worth it. I had Brewmaster's Pork Steak, which is a big portion of pork surloin filled with cheese and ham. Mmmm, very good. The beer was Ur-Krostitzer Schwarzbier, a sort of dark pilsner, and pretty good. Dessert was chocolate mousse with raspberry ice cream and whipped cream and orange slices. Except there was no mousse. I asked about it, and the waitress said, yes, that's chocolate mousse, but it's white chocolate. Well, the white stuff was the whipped cream. The only chocolate was a bit of sauce dribbled over the whipped cream. Still, it was pretty good.
And TomTom brought me home again, without any trouble this time. Even with a good map, I doubt I could have figured out the route I took to the restaurant, or the slightly different one back. I certainly could not have remembered every twist and turn of the way. TomTom is better than sliced bread, because sliced bread won't keep you from getting lost. Just ask Hansel and Gretel.
Day 8 May 10 It's there, but not THERE.
Today's schedule was going to be easy. I would visit the old town hall (where I had dinner last night), the Thomaskirche where Bach hung out, the Fine Arts Museum, and the Egyptian Museum. I decided to start with the Fine Arts Museum. There's a ring road around the old center of Leipzig, and the Fine Arts Museum was just south of the ring road. The Egyptian Museum was nearby, just north of the ring road.
That's what the Michelin guide map says, and they're never wrong. TomTom agreed with Michelin on the Egyptian Museum, but put the Fine Arts Museum a couple of blocks north of the old town hall. So I went with Michelin's map, told TomTom to take me to a parking lot near it and set off. The building very clearly marked on the Michelin map is actually the Administrative Court Building. It may once have been a museum, but it wasn't anymore.
That's OK, the Egyptian Museum isn't far away, and TomTom knows where it is. Of course, there was no parking near it, and all the lots were full. I finally found an underground parking lot that would do for reaching everything. I found my place and marked the Michelin map. (I had ripped the map out of the guide, since the guide is a pain to carry with me.) Then off to the Egyptian Museum,, or, rather, the offices of the antiquities faculty.
A block away, I found a map of Leipzig, with an inset for the inner city. It showed the Fine Arts Museum where TomTom said it was, and it showed the Egyptian Museum a couple of blocks from there. Since the Egyptian Museum was a bit closer, I walked up to it and found a couple of buildings torn down, some businesses, and some university offices. I was going to ask for help at a police station on the street, but the door was locked. Pretty untrusting of them.
One of the university offices was for the antiquties museum, so I went in and asked where the museum was. The guy told me to go out the back door, through another building, and turn right. Out on the street at last I saw a sort of outer lobby, a building wide entryway to accommodate three or four shops. And on one wall was painted an Egyptian tomb painting. It looked like it pointed down the stairs, so I went down to a dead end. Coming back up, I noticed one of the shops was really the entrance to the museum. And it didn't open until 1:00.
It was 12:15 and I decided to head off to the Fine Arts Museum first. I got to the area, and saw lots of big modern buildings, but no names on them. But right there was another town map, which showed the Fine Arts Museum right across the street. It also showed the Egyptian Museum in a third wrong location. I went up to the building across the street, still seeing no name on it. When I got to the door, I could see the name painted on the glass door, in a very modest font. It turned out this was the back door, being the exit from the museum cafe. But the ticket counter was just beyond, so everything was fine.
The museum has three floors of exhibits, with a lot of empty space. I took the elevator to the top, so I could walk down and save my knees. They have some 20th century and contemporary art, but I skipped that. There was enough earlier period stuff anyway. It was a nice collection with a few paintings I knew – Napoleon at Fontainbleu, just before abdicating; and Cranach's Adam and Eve. There were a few others that were almost the same as some I had seen in Berlin. I guess some artists did variations on a theme, and they wind up in different museums. I was expecting more, but it was enjoyable.
Now for the wonderful Egyptian Museum, which I have heard about for many years, and really wanted to see. It was now open, and I went in, down a flight of stairs to an inner lobby, then up some stairs to the museum. The ticket lady said something I didn't understand, until she decided the answer was probably “yes” and gave me a senior citizen's discount. (Most places don't offer one.)
I was now in the famous Egyptian Museum and it was extremely underwhelming. The interesting things were: a copy of a very nice diadem (the original was supposed to be in another room, but I never saw it), a stone copy of Nefertiti's bust (with half the face gone), a tubular clay coffin, and a model of a pyramid. Lots of clay figures from tombs, showing servants working; some figures representing the occupants of the tombs; a room full of items from one priest's tomb. But nothing really special. The Egyptian museum in Berlin that I complained about was much better. What a disappointment.
It was still just the middle of the afternoon, so I wandered around a bit. I wanted to get a picture of the old town hall, because it's rather nice. Last night when I had dinner there, I didn't have my camera along. Today I couldn't get a picture because it was market day in the square in front of it, and my view was blocked. I'm hoping when I go back downtown for dinner that all the merchants will be gone. But I did get some pictures of some nice old buildings with elaborate fronts.
I just got back from dinner. The restaurant is named Auerbachs Keller. Make a note of this name. If you are ever in Leipzig, or even close to it, go there for dinner. I arrived at about ten to 8:00, thinking the big evening crowd wouldn't be there yet. Boy was I wrong. The place was full and it looked hopeless to get a table for one. But the nice ladies at the front said they'd find a table if I wanted to wait. At one point they offered to squeeze me in on a table for ten with some other people, but I thought that would be awkward for all of us.
Despite everything, I only had to wait about 15 or 20 minutes to get a table. The system there is interesting. The women up front are not just reception/maitre de's, they take turns busing tables and setting them up for the next customers. At one point I saw a guy in a suit carrying a tray of desserts toward the back of the restaurant. Dishes and glasses from a table are set aside on a small stand, and then moved to a similar stand with a tray on it, and off they go to the kitchen.
The restaurant was a favorite of Goethe, who supposedly got his inspiration for Mephistofeles here. So outside they have a statue of Mephistofeles and Faust, and inside they have a guy in a red suit and horns do a spiel for several minutes.
No, that's not why you should come here. The food is superb. I had the roast leg of venison (they also had medallions of venison) with potato dumplings and red cabbage. Absolutely fantastic. The venison was tender, and the sauce it was in was wonderful. I used the dumplings to soak up as much of the sauce as I could. I had the same beer tonight as last night. I have to be careful, Saxons seem to have a fondness for weiss beers. Dessert was a Mephisto-torte, a tasty cake with vanilla ice cream and black cherries and 3 half kumquats. I'm not sure what they were there for. Everything else was sweet, and they were very tart.
I got scared coming back. For the second time today, the TomTom lost its GPS signal and I was literally flying blind. Both times it got re-connected, but it's hard to find a place to pull over and wait for that to happen. I hope that won't be a recurring problem.
Day 9 May 11 My first unplanned castle.
Today was going to be a busy day, and it could have been a lot busier. I had planned on 4 towns, 3 cathedrals, and possibly 3 castles. I got in all 4 towns, 2 cathedrals, and half of a castle. I would have made 3 cathedrals, but one was closed half the day for a funeral.
My first stop was Merseburg, which was convenient because my hotel last night was on Merseburgstrasse. Just go up the road and there you are. The cathedral is right next to the castle, which seems to be a custom in these parts. The castle didn't look all that interesting, so I just went to the cathedral.
In addition to the usual memorials to the dead hung on the walls, they also have a shield and a pair of crossed spears. Now there's a memorial for a warrior. They have a beautiful carved oak pulpit, and lots of other really good carved decoration, in both wood and stone. On the wall of the choir, they have portraits of some 40 bishops. They also have the tomb of Rudolf of Schwaben. In case his name doesn't ring a bell, he died in 1080, challenging Emperor Henry IV. This makes him a big Saxon hero.
They also have the Merseburg Spells. It's one side of one rather small parchment page. Actually, it's half of the page, the rest being something else added later. It was donated to the cathedral by Emperor Henry II with some other documents, and nobody noticed what it was. It was apparently copied from some earlier document we no longer have. What IS it, you say? It's a pagan remnant, a couple of scenes, or word-pictures, ending in magical spells to solve the problem in the scenes. The man who found it in the early 19th century took it to Jacob Grimm, who was working on a book on German mythology and said this was the greatest treasure in the cathedral. It's amazing that something like this could remain unnoticed for 800 years before some antiquarian paid attention to what he was looking at.
After Merseburg, I went to Quedlinburg and tried a new way to use TomTom. If you ask it to take you to a castle or cathedral, it will do so, even if there's no place to park there. So now I asked it to drive me to the nearest parking lot. Much less hassle. I didn't have a map of Quedlinburg, so I made a photo of a public street map. I was able to follow it all over town. There was a sign at the car park that said that all tourists had to pay a tourist tax to cover the cost of letting us come into their town and spend our money. Fat chance.
Once again, it's a castle and cathedral two-fer. It really is a two-fer, because you can buy a combi ticket at the cathedral or the castle which lets you see both. More confusingly, they each have options to choose, and the options don't match. But the castle looked boring, and the cathedral had a funeral going on, as I said above. I could wait an hour, but if I did I would have to miss the town.
The town is quite nice, the first “old town” that had lots of old buildings, most of them very attractive. I had to use my photo map a lot, because the streets twist and turn, but it worked out very well. Just below the castle is a large rock outcrop from the castle hill. Despite warnings not to climb on the rocks, it is the favorite playground for all the local kids.
I then went on to Halberstadt, and my new use of TomTom paid off. I parked in a lot behind some modern apartment buildings, and couldn't see the cathedral. I walked back to the main road, and there it was, across the street. It's a very nice semi-gothic cathedral. Not quite so much decoration on the outside, but what there was, was very lovely. The nave is perfect gothic, tall pillars and fine vaulting. The pulpit is painted and very handsome. You can easily date it by the costumes the people are wearing.
There's some nice stained glass in the ambulatory, and a big triptych over the altar in the sanctuary. The sanctuary is separated from the rest of the cathedral by a large, ornate carved stone rood screen. Rood screens used to be very common, but a lot of churches took them out long ago. This one is too good to remove.
The cathedral was the only thing on my plan for Halberstadt, so I headed off to Wernigerode, where my hotel was. Now the odd thing about my trip so far is that I have only seen castles I intended to see. This is unusual in Germany. You should see castles along the road, or peering down from some hilltop along the way, and I hadn't seen any. Even when I passed a sign announcing Saxon Castle Land, I couldn't find any castles laying about.
But today I saw something on top of a cliff that might have been a castle. It looked more like part of the rock, but it had a flag flying over it. When I got to my hotel, I had to pay the tourist tax (they've got you trapped at check in), but I got a coupon book for local businesses. And one of them was Burg and Festung Regenstein, and the picture on it was the same thing I saw.
Wernigerode had two things I wanted to see, the castle and the town. Both are very nice, but I only saw half the castle. I got into town a little later than I wanted and went straight to the castle. The nearest parking is a long block from the start of the walk up to the castle. And it's a long, steep walk up. The castle closes at 6, with the last entry into it at 5:30. Even if I made it up there in time, this was not going to be a castle to be seen in half an hour. I might have been in time, but I was too worn out from the climb to consider three floors of castle tour. So I only saw the outside, which was very good. Not really original, but nice. Over the years it had turned baroque, and then in the 19th century the then owner decided to “restore” it in the gothic style popular then. He did a good job, and it looks medieval, even if it's not original.
The walk back to my car was downhill, luckily. Again, I asked TomTom to take me to the nearest car park to my hotel. It was two tenths of a mile away, a little far, but not too bad. Except it closed at 6:00 PM. So I tried going to the hotel and seeing what might be available on the street. The square near the hotel was closed off, but I found a spot on the street close by, and didn't even have to buy a parking permit.
The square was blocked off because there was a country and western line dancing party going on. I travel 6000 miles to get away from this stuff (sorry Dolores) and it follows me here. There were dozens of Germans, many in cowboy hats, stepping around like they were in Nashville.
Other than that, the town was very nice. My hotel is a walk-up – you walk up one flight to get to the registration desk, and then another flight to get to my room. I didn't need the extra climbing after the castle, but it's a pleasant room. It's the first room I've had with a really comfortable chair in it.
But I didn't stay in long. There were pictures to be taken. Lots of old buildings, though some had been restored after the war. I walked around taking pictures until the light and my feet were about gone. I had already checked out the restaurants and knew which one I wanted. It was across the street from my hotel, and offered venison goulash, with potato dumplings and red cabbage. Very good, and washed down with a nice dark beer, Hasseroder Schwarzbier. And the first real apple strudel I've had so far. Finely diced apples in a paper thin pastry, rolled up properly. I don't know how many people they have in the kitchen, but there was just one woman up front. She tended the bar, took orders, served orders, and bussed the tables. She also took advantage of a slack period about 9 to eat her own supper at the bar. Oh, I saw my first asparagus eaters at dinner. I've been seeing so many places offering asparagus, but I haven't seen anyone eating it. But tonight I did, and so I can tell you definitely, German asparagus is white.
You are going to get this late, because this hotel does not have internet access. That's life.
Day 10 May 12 Ooops!
Today began cold and wet. For the first time, I had to put on a sweater, and it was still chill. And the constant drizzle didn't make things any nicer. By mid-afternoon, the sky cleared enough to get the sun out and it got a little warmer, but just a little.
My first town today was Goslar, with lots of old buildings, a nice Romanesque church, and a palace of the early German emperors. The church was at one end of town, the palace at the other, and all the nice old buildings were in the middle. So I had TomTom take me to the nearest car park to the church, and it did. I got out of the car and looked around – no church. But I knew from comparing the GPS map and the guide book map that I should be just north of the church. I was on top of a hill, and the church was at the bottom, just around the corner. And today is Sunday, and the church was having a service.
So I wandered through town, taking pictures and trying not to get too wet. There are a lot of really nice 15th and 16th century houses here, with some really fine decorations. I finally got to the other end of town and the Domvorhall. Don't let a little German throw you, it's all very easy. Dom = cathedral, vor = in front of, hall = hall. So Domvorhall means front hall of the cathedral, or as we would say, the front lobby. It's all that's left from the early 11th century cathedral, just from the front door to the start of the nave. It was a ruin for a long time, but it was finally torn down in the 19th century. I guess the town needed the land to build on. But it does have the imperial throne from the palace, in stone with the back and armrests in bronze.
Across the street, and a large expanse of lawn, is the imperial palace, also dating back to the early 11th century. It was restored in the latter half of the 19th century, which made me wonder about its historical accuracy. But there's a model on display inside of the palace as it was before the restoration, and they really didn't change anything. Of course, what the model shows may not be entirely original, either. The model shows a roof, and I don't know any roofers offering an 800 year guarantee.
It's a very impressive building, three stories tall, a block long, and looking more sophisticated than you'd expect from 11th century Germans. A lot of the modernizing is on the inside, especially in the grand hall. The large size of the hall is probably original, but the paintings on the walls are the usual 19th century exaggeration of everything Germanic. Here's Frederic Barbarossa waking from his sleep under the mountain to greet Kaiser Wilhelm I, founder of the new German Empire.
Goslar was a popular place for the Salian emperors of Germany - they visited it as much as Mainz and Spier. Thinking of the Carolingians ruling from the Rhine valley, this doesn't make much sense. But Goslar was in silver country, and the emperors wanted to make sure that the land, and the silver, stayed in their hands.
Then I went back to the Romanesque church. Services are indeed over, and the church is locked. OK, I can take a hint. It was getting late, anyway, and I wanted to have lunch and head out for Einbeck. And that's where I made my mistake. The parking lot I was in was on top of a hill, but it extended down to the bottom of the hill. And that's where the automated cashier machines were. I put in my money, got my ticket stamped, and climbed up to the fourth floor, where my car was. And I had lunch. And then I tried to get out, and couldn't – my stamped ticket had gotten old very fast.
The ticket taker machine to get out, wouldn't open the gate for an ticket past a certain time limit. I knew this; in fact yesterday I had waited to pay for parking until after I had eaten. But yesterday I didn't have 4 floors between me and the cashier. Anyway, I was trapped, and while I thought of what to do, I figured I should get out of the way of any other customers who might come by. I backed up, and did not see the pole behind me. Crash! No really serious damage – one of the plastic bumper bits is a little bent, and there are a couple of thumb-sized scrapes in the paint. Ooops!
Einbeck is also very nice, as befits the place where bock beer was born. I seem to remember seeing something about a beer museum here, but I forgot to look for it. There was plenty to see without it. The rathaus is very impressive, with three steeples and gorgeous decoration. While some of the buildings use carving, most are decorated in paint. Patterns, pictures, mottos, all sorts of things to attract the eye.
After a busy afternoon photographing the town, I say down with a glass of the original bock, Einbecker Ur-Bock. It's not dark like Huber, but a strong gold color. It's not too heavy, either, and has a good taste. I had it at home once long ago. I don't know if anyone in DeKalb still carries it. Oh, and that reminds me of the bad news. The owner of DeKalb Liquor Mart says that Huber is going to stop making Bock at the end of summer. I haven't had a chance to check this out, but maybe you can Google it.
On to Gottingen, which is not an old town. It was just a small village until George II, king of England, and Elector of Hanover, decided to found a university here in 1734. But there are some nice old buildings from before that. A lot of the buildings are both carved and painted, including one dating back to about 1450 that is amazingly beautiful. And it's a restaurant. And I ate there, of course.
I had jagerschnitzel, with small whole mushrooms and a double order of french fries. The schnitzel was very good, as were the mushrooms. And the fries were almost pommes frites. I was in good beer hands in Einbeck, but in Gottingen I was caught between the weiss beer crowd and the alcohol-free beer crowd. Luckily, there were two pilsners on the menu, and I went with Konig Pilsner, King of Beer.
No internet tonight, again. I can get started in the login process, but I can't get to the login page. I can reach the hotel's web page, but nothing else. Firefox says it can't find the server for the login page. I don't know what the problem is, but it is frustrating.
Day 11 May 13 Sorry, the city walls are closed today.
It was cold and windy this morning, with occasional drizzles of rain. The rain didn't last too long, the wind died down after a while, and the sun came out once or twice and made the day a little bit warmer. It should be warmer tomorrow. I certainly hope so.
I went to Hannoversch Munden today. It's called that to distinguish it from the other Mundens, like Hedemunden, just down the road. It's usually abbreviated to Hann. Munden. Tom kept calling it Hannover Schmunden. That's OK, it took me to a good, cheap parking lot right on the edge of the old town.
There are hundreds of old half-timbered buildings here – don't worry, I didn't take pictures of all of them. But there are an awful lot of beautiful ones. Many of them share an interesting decorative detail. All across the front, at the dividing line between the first and second floors, is a band of twisted colors. It's like you took ropes colored green, red and gold and twisted them together lightly. You'll have to see the pictures to see what I mean.
The rathaus is big, rather plain, except for the Baroque gables and a gorgeous doorway, and a clock with only one hand. It was built in 1607, which explains the baroque gables. Most of the buildings in town are 16th and 17th century. There was one that goes back further, to the 13th century, but it's been rebuilt, expanded and restored, and it's still just a plain stucco facade. Much too drab for so much life.
I took pictures of some streets as streets – nice old houses all the way down. And the little odd things, like Rosel's shoe stores, one on each side of the street. I guess they sell the right shoes in one, and the left shoes in the other. There's even a couple of nice little towers at one end of the town.
On to Muhlhausen, where I was going to see the Marienkirche and walk around on the town walls. It is Monday, so I didn't have to worry about church services. Not that that made any difference, the church is closed on Monday. It's a shame, because it's supposed to be very beautiful inside. The outside is certainly beautiful, and all cleaned up, nice and shiny.
Well, that just gave me more time to walk the ramparts. I picked a starting point at the main gate, and went to climb up. There was a locked gate and a sign, “Ramparts are open Tuesday through Sunday”. Today is still Monday. Why would you close off the town walls one day a week? It actually wasn't all that bad. You can't walk all the way around easily because there are some breaks in the walls. And you can't see the walls if you're walking on them. So I walked part way around the outside, and saw most of the towers. The main gate is very nice and practical. There are two arches, one for inbound traffic, and one for outbound.
Then I walked around the streets a bit. Still more half-timbered buildings, and some nice doors. And a joker – someone attached waist-up figures in medieval garb at the second floor windows, as if they were interacting with the people on the street.
My last stop was Erfurt, and I wanted to see the cathedral and the Kramer bridge, completely covered in houses. I found a car park right around the corner from my hotel, which is good because there's not really any on street parking nearby. I got my room and asked if there was a bus or tram that went to the cathedral. The nice lady at the registration desk said I didn't need them, as it was only a ten minute walk, and gave me a map. I started out in the right direction, then looked at the map and misread it. I turned around and went the wrong way. It wasn't entirely wrong, since when I found I had gone wrong I was still fairly near the cathedral.
My luck with church services is still holding out, though. It's a Catholic cathedral, and they have mass every weekday evening at 6. I got there at 5:40, and the door's were closed. This is the second time I've been to Erfurt, and the second time I've been too late. This time, however, I've got a trick up my sleeve. I'm staying the night, and will be able to see it in the morning. That will give me a late start, but I really want to see this cathedral.
Fortunately, they don't close the bridges, so I was able to see the Kramer bridge. Walking on a bridge covered in houses is like walking down any other street, or like walking on the city walls. You know you're doing it, but there's no real evidence of it. So I went to the bridge next door, about 30 or 40 yards away, and took pictures of the backs of houses supported above the river. It's a nice old street, full of shops, including Ned Flanders' favorite – a shop for left-handed people.
There are some big hotels near mine, and we're close to the old town, but there aren't a lot of restaurants nearby. Very odd, most of the old town centers I've been in are full or restaurants. Anyway, I found a nice one at the little market (Weniger Markt). It had de-boned duck, so I couldn't pass up a second helping. It was good, but not as good as the one in Gorlitz. So, Winifred, now you don't have to go all the way to Gorlitz to get it. I had a Staropramen Schwarz beer. It wasn't really black, just dark brown, and it tasted fine, but not great.
The owner of DeKalb Liquor Mart asked me to bring back a bottle of beer, full or empty, so he could display it in his store. I stopped at a little market near the hotel and found a four pack of the Duckstein beer I had in Berlin. He'll get a nice (empty) bottle of something he's never seen, and I'll get four nice drinks.
This is a nice hotel, and well located in town. It tries, successfully, to attract business people, and yet they charge for internet access. I was willing to pay just to send out this drivel, uh, wonderful story, and to do some surfing of my own. But it is a bit cheap of them. They also charge to park in their own lot. And I think the city lot I'm in is cheaper.
Tomorrow is Coburg, which Tim reminded me of, and Fritzlar, another cathedral and old walls. I can't possibly miss two days running, can I?
Day 12 May 14 The walls are open, but the streets are closed.
The nicest day for a while now. A little cool, but I didn't need a sweater. It was sunny most of the day, but pretty windy, which made it exciting crossing some of the longer, more elevated bridges. And I did a lot of that today, because this was one of my busiest driving days of the trip.
I started off by getting up a little earlier, checking out of the hotel, and driving to the cathedral. This would save me 20 to 30 minutes walking there and back. Now the cathedral was open, and it is a wonder. The front half is spacious, three big aisles separated by tall gothic columns. I finally caught on to why it was so spacious – there are no side chapels. In most gothic cathedrals, half of each side aisle is taken up by small chapels, and there aren't any here.
There also isn't a transept. In fact, where the transept should be, the walls close in a bit, making an anti-transept. There is a huge painting of St. Christopher covering one wall from head height to the ceiling. It was actually too big to photograph. The baptistry is a beautiful bit of gothic frills with a tall steeple.
Aside from one very small rose window over a side door to the nave, all the stained glass is in the sanctuary. I got a picture of a couple of the windows, but most were too far back. The altar is ornate with lots of baroque effects. The choir seats are elaborately carved wood, just fantastic. I was surprised that it's still a Catholic cathedral, along with the parish church right next to it. It's far enough north in Germany that I assumed it must have gone Lutheran during the religious wars. But Erfurt belonged to the Archbishop of Mainz, and the rule was “Whose region, his religion.” It's taken me 14 years to see it, but it was worth the wait.
And worth the delay in setting out for Coburg, where I was going to see the big castle, Veste Coburg. There are also three other castles in Coburg, but I was going to skip the others. The drive to Coburg wasn't too bad. There were some trucks, but not much car traffic, so it was easy to pass the trucks. There's a parking lot by the castle. When I say “by” I mean on the next hill over. You walk down that hill and then up the one with the castle, and in reverse going back to your car.
Veste Coburg is very impressive, with big walls, and covering a large area. I think you can walk around all the walls, but I didn't have time after visiting the inside. At least part of the walls are open, as are the little guard towers. A nice entry way, covered over, with an internal portcullis, and no murder holes. I got confused at the end, and went out the wrong covered passage because I saw a portcullis at the end.
The inside is beautiful, with very nice wood floors and furniture from the ducal collections. It is, however, restored. The designer, to his credit, used medieval patterns and ideas as much as possible. Some of it is more 19th century than 15th, but he was working for a 19th century duke, and had to make some accommodations for style. The dining room is made to look medieval, but the smoking room next to it looks like a London club.
The signs tell what the rooms were originally used for, as well as what is in them now. The tour goes through two buildings, connected by a short corridor. The first building is very nice, with some nice paintings by Cranach the elder, who worked for one of the dukes. But the second one has some of the most impressive stuff. There's more art, medieval and renaissance, mostly religious subjects, and a large room devoted to works in glass.
Then there's the room that is all carved and inlaid wood. It is incredible. The doors, the ceiling, the walls, everything is exquisite. I've seen nice rooms before, but this one stopped me in my tracks. I won't say I've never seen anything like it, but nothing comes to mind.
Then there's the two toy rooms. One has a bunch of weapons and armor, the other is full of hunting equipment, mostly pistols and rifles. The armory isn't much, but there were a few nice pieces. One is a calendar sword – the blade is engraved with a year-long calendar. There's also a nice knight in armor on his horse, and a glaive-pistol combination. In another room, there's a two tone set of armor - the right half is polished steel, the left half is black.
The hunting weapons include a lot of wheelocks. Some of them have two wheels but only one barrel. Then there's the 4 barreled pistol with only two flintlocks. There's a nice pair of pistols with ivory instead of wood for the stock. And a rifle with 7 barrels. There were a couple of breech-loading flintlocks, and leather armor for hunting dogs, to help protect them from boars.
The carriage collection is large, with one early one where you either sat on the floor, or brought some sort of portable seat with you. They also have a large number of sleighs. They are all for only one person, and the runners come up and join to form a head of some beast or god. And they all have lances as part of the gear. Apparently, ladies used them to “joust” at hanging balls.
I wish I had had more time to look over the rest of the castle, but I had a long trip to get to Fritzlar, which has a nice market square. TomTom took me by a different route than I had figured out, but the time was about the same. There was somewhat more traffic, but also a lot of road construction. I was lucky going the way I was, because in some places the people going the other way were totally stopped. We went slowly sometimes, but we never stopped.
The trip took about 3 hours, or should have if there wasn't also road construction at my destination. I was running late, so I had TomTom take me to my hotel first. It was in the next town to Fritzlar, Bad Wildungen. None of the hotels in Fritzlar allowed smoking, and this one did, so I chose it. Bad choice. There were two detours before I could get into Bad Wildungen, and another in town. TomTom was having fits trying to figure out new routes when I couldn't go where it told me to.
I finally got to the hotel, checked in, dropped off my bags, and headed off to Fritzlar. I figured I had just enough time to get some picture taking done, then have dinner and back to the hotel. I hadn't figured on more road work. The road I needed to take was closed, as of yesterday. I took a look at my map, and saw that I only needed the road for a mile or less, but closed is closed. And because of the hilly nature of the area, any other route would take too long to get to Fritzlar. So I had to give it up.
Back to the hotel, and a walk down the street looking for a restaurant. The first one was closed, and had been for some time. The next one looked pretty good, so I went in. Wiener schnitzel was only 7.80 euros, which was pretty cheap. But they also had schnitzel Wildunger style, so I ordered that. It's like a schnitzel pizza. The schnitzel is topped with a large slice of ham, sheep's cheese, and tomato sauce. It sounds odd, but it tasted pretty good. The beer was Bitburger Dunkel. The waiter tried to talk me out of it – I think he thought I didn't know what Dunkel meant. It was pretty good, dark and flavorful.
This is not going out tonight, because I've got another internet connection that requires responding to an email. This outfit was clever enough to give me 20 minutes of free time to get the email and respond. But they have an exaggerated idea of how fast their service is. I tried to get my email, and was told I had 5 messages. I could only get 2 of them. My email program kept timing out with Comcast. The backup plan is to create a new account with a different username, but that's not true. They want you to use a different email account. Alternatively, you go to some other internet hotspot and login there to get your email and respond. But if you can do that, why do you need them? This isn't really all that hard. Some of the hotels I've been at have a nice, simple method of providing access to their customers. And some have these awkward systems that are simply frustrating.
Day 13 May 15 A great day and no rushing, how unusual.
Today I was off to Alsfeld and Marburg, if the roads were open. They were, and the only delays came from some slow trucks. Most the today's driving was on back roads, with few long straight stretches, which makes passing trucks difficult. But the weather was nice, sunny and warm, though it cooled off a little in the afternoon. The forecast had been for warm and sunny east of were I was, and cold and rainy where I was going. Thank goodness German weathermen are no better than ours.
Alsfeld is a nice little old town. Lots of half-timbered buildings, and beautiful ones, too. I got to the market square and didn't know what to photograph first. The rathaus is fabulous, with twin spires, and an arcade on ground level that used to be a covered market. Next to it is a big stone building with a stepped gable that used to be the wine storage and distribution center.
The one problem with taking pictures of these old houses is that the streets are too narrow. You can't just stand in front of the building and take a picture. You have to go down the street a bit, or take the picture in bits. Neither one does much justice to the subject. But some streets are just wide enough, and that makes for better pictures. I've got one of a shoe store, with three levels of pictures of shoe styles, dating back to 1680, which is when the store was founded.
And wandering around, I came upon Walpurgis church. I had no idea why they called it that, and they didn't bother explaining. But, since I now have the internet again, I know why. It is named after Saint Walpurga, the companion of St. Boniface, which makes it, or rather its predecessor, very old.
It's early gothic, with thick columns holding up the arches. There's a bit of old painting still left on one wall, and lots of portait paintings all around the nave – saints on one side, prominent locals on the other. And more, from the New Testament, I think, around the sanctuary. It's not the most attractive church I've ever seen, but it was a nice surprise.
Then I drove to Marburg, and picked a parking garage halfway between the church I wanted to see and the rest of the town. The Elizabethkirche is one of the first purely gothic churches in Germany, built by the Teutonic Knights. This particular is St. Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, though born in Thuringia. She was married at 14, widowed at 20, and dead at 24. Those last four years she spent building a hospital and tending the sick in it.
There is a shrine to her like a big reliquary, and her grave, very gothic. But at the Reformation, the landgraves tossed her out to keep Catholic pilgrims from coming. They even put a big hammer like thing on top of the tomb, to make sure it stayed shut. But there are still a lot of reminders of who the church was named for.
There are several wall paintings, and even some on the columns for the arches. There's a statue of Mary and the baby Jesus attached to one of the columns, and painted on the column on either side of it are two female saints, looking on.
The pulpit is a piece of very nice stone work. And the rood screen is gorgeous; and on the sanctuary side there's a staircase up to a little platform, looking out over the nave. I've never seen anything like that before. There's no stained glass in the nave, unless you count an ugly modern rose window over the door. Fortunately, most of it is hidden by the organ. But in the rear of the church, behind the rood screen, are some very nice windows.
Elizabeth's (former) tomb is in what would normally be the north transept, which should be in front of the rood screen, not behind it. The south transept contains the tombs of a great number of landgraves of Marburg. You can't go walking around among them, but you can see several up fairly closely. They are all in good repair, and very well carved.
So then I went back down to find the town. I stopped at the tourist information office, and it's a good thing. Not only did I get a map, but I found out how to get to the town. The alt stadt (old town) is also called the oberstadt (upper town). How much upper? There's an elevator in the parking garage I was using that goes up for 12 levels of parking, one level of offices, and the level for the oberstadt. But, wait, there's more. You still need to cross a bridge and take another elevator up another 30 or 40 feet. Or you can walk. Your choice.
There are very few level streets in the oberstadt, most go up and down. There are some very beautiful half timbered buildings here. I wish I could describe them adequately, but you'll have to wait for the pictures. There is one shop that sells tea (in packages, not a tea shop) that has a 3 dimensional carving of a man holding or carrying or maybe fighting a flying dragon over his head.
The rathaus is big and rather business-like, but even it has some nice details, including a relief of Elizabeth donating her church. Next to it are a couple of very nice buildings, one of which is one the highest rated restaurants in Marburg, according to Trip Advisor. Unfortunately, it's closed on Wednesday.
The next stop was the castle of the landgraves, up above the town. I climbed up a long way and came to the university church, and the castle was still further up. I kept climbing, passing exhausted sherpas by the dozen. I had to duck once to let the moon go by. When I finally got up to the castle, I was above the top of the steeple of the church. The only good thing was that the way back was all downhill.
The castle as is, is not very defensive, at least not the parts I saw. There is a series of models of the castle in its various stages over the centuries, and defense was definitely on their minds. I was too tired after the climb up to check out the whole top of the hill.
Part of the castle is used by the university as a museum, and other parts seem to be used for social functions. There are only a few parts that still look medieval, but those are nice. There's a small gothic chapel with some nice original wall paintings. And most of a painting of a knight on horseback in a corridor.
It was a long day, but I wasn't rushed, and would have been much less tired if I had known you could drive almost all the way up to the castle, and park. Ah, well, it was still a good day. Going to the hotel, I put TomTom through its paces by missing a turnoff. It said turn left, so I went to the corner, and found I was too far forward to make a left turn. It's a sharp turn, and they set the left turn lane back just a little to make it less sharp. I missed that and couldn't force a turn without risking an accident. But TomTom slogged on, took me out of town, and then back in to the hotel.
I got the internet going to check out restaurants in Marburg. I decided to go the Restaurant Ratschanke, next to the Rathaus. But it was closed today, so I looked for something else. There was one at the top of the market square with a decent menu, but they didn't list their beers. I was about to pass it by when I saw a drinks menu on one the outside tables. I looked over the beer list and found Duckstein, which I already knew was a good beer. So I turned around and went in. Pork wiener schnitzel, with decent french fries. The schnitzel was good, almost a meister schnitzel.
On the way back to the hotel, I made sure I made the left turn properly, and had a much less adventurous drive. Tomorrow I'm off to Limburg an der Lahn, which Tim and I visited, and Cochem, which we looked at and drove on.
Day 14 May 16 I break the curse of getting to a castle too late.
This morning's forecast was the same as yesterday's – warm and sunny to the east, cold and wet where I was going. And once again, the weatherman was wrong, for an hour or two. The day started out nice and comfortable, but before too long it clouded over. It started to rain just after noon, but not too hard. But on my way from Limburg to Cochem it rained hard enough to keep me mostly in the slow lane. There were moments when it was coming down so hard it was difficult to see. Late in the afternoon the rain slacked off and the sun came out again. By evening, it was quite nice again.
The cathedral at Limburg is different – the front facade looks romanesque, but the inside is definitely gothic. And the front is two-toned, red sandstone outlining stark white walls, with multi-colored decoration in the arches. Rather impressive. I could only get pictures of the front, I couldn't get a good spot to photograph the sides. I did later find the right spot to get a perfect picture of the whole cathedral – the middle of the bridge I was driving over.
The inside is all white, with paintings over some of the arches. It makes everything look crisp and clean. There's a big painting on one wall of what I think is Mary's family tree. Sorry, there weren't any guide books being handed out. The only good stained glass was over the front entrance, and was slightly blocked by the organ, but I got a good picture of it anyway. And on the first try. This was impressive, considering it took me 5 tries to get an easy picture, and I gave up on one after 3 or 4 tries.
There is an impressive funeral monument in the north transept. It's a figure of a lady in the usual death pose, on a slab with a short fence (3 or 4 inches tall) around it, which is held up by 6 men, or creatures of some sort. At least one doesn't look quite human. I don't know who, and I don't know why. I looked it up, and it's Konrad Kurzbold, founder of the church, 910.
After the cathedral, I roamed around the town. More nice half-timbered buildings, with interesting decorations. Aside from the usual mottoes or signs telling the age of the building, there was one with a man's head, sticking out his tongue. And another with what looks like a demon orchestra. I'm not really sure what they are, or what they're doing, but they are amazing. I think they're modern, but I'm not positive.
Then on to Cochem. When the rain wasn't making driving slow, the roads were. The Rhenish Palatinate just passed Saxony for the best Grand Prix course. There was one curve posted at 30 kpm, or about 19 mph. And they meant it.
Tim and I drove through Cochem almost 30 years ago. We looked up at the castle, said “That's impressive”, thought about the walk up, and drove on. That was a mistake. I got to town a little later than I had planned because the rain slowed me down a bit, but it wasn't too late. I got my hotel, and asked the landlady if one could drive up to the castle. “Kann man fahren zum schloss?” After two weeks, some of my German is coming back, finally. Tim could probably have said that better, but for me, it was OK. And it got a useful answer – No, you have to take the shuttlebus from the markt square.
That was only 2 blocks away, and the bus was just pulling into the markt when I got there. Not the right bus. Same driver, actually, but wrong number. The bus to the castle goes up every 20 minutes, except just after lunch, and between 3:40 and 4:40. I got there at 3:50. So I had to wait 50 minutes for the bus. I wandered around, found a nice present for Marty, and had time to take it back to my car. When I first got to the markt, there were several people waiting around, and I thought they were waiting for the bus, same as me. But at 4:00 the church bell tolled the hour, and then some lighter bell or bells started playing a tune. Once that was over, the crowd evaporated.
You have an option of buying a one-way ticket to the castle, or roundtrip. Only masochists with a good sense of direction buy one-way tickets. I think this is higher than the schloss at Marburg, and steeper. I certainly did not want to walk it, even downhill. There is a small car park at the top, just outside of the castle, and I didn't see any signs saying it was private, so I guess you could drive up. You have to be sure you pick the right spot. On the return, some ladies were sitting on the bench in what looked like the waiting area for the bus. It was, but it was also where the bus backed up to turn around.
From the bus stop, it's still 150 meters uphill to get to the castle. It was steep, but not too long, not as bad as all the way up at Marburg. I got to the ticket counter just before 5:00. The sign said “Tours - 9:00-5:00”. So I asked if it was too late to go in, and the lady at the counter told me the last tour was just about to begin. Finally, a castle that will let me in late!
There were some other people who came up with me, wandering around, but not asking about the tour. I guess they came up to go the cafe up there. So when the tour started, I was the group. This was good, because if most of the people had been German, I wouldn't have understood much. As it was, the guide gave me the English tour, so I understood everything.
The castle is almost 1000 years old, and has been modified and enlarged over time. It has also changed hands several times. Louis XIV destroyed it along with most of the rest of the Rhineland castles, except for one tower that still has some of the original plaster on it. It's called the “witch tower” because only magic could have caused it to survive.
In the late 19th century, some Berlin steel tycoon named Louis Ravené bought the ruin and rebuilt it. A lot of the structure was still there, just damaged. The big keep had lost the top half, for instance. Ravené used some imagination, but he had a pretty good feel for how it should look. There are lots of nice details, some of them almost casually tossed in. One is in the dining room, all wood panel and renaissance style. So everything should be balanced and symmetrical, including the doors. At one end of the room are two doors, and they both open. The door on the left goes into the next room, the door on the right shows a blank wall when you open it.
There's a lot of nice furniture, all from someplace else, of course. But a lot of it is very nice, and fits in well with a renaissance, late medieval theme. Some of the rooms are more medieval in design, some more renaissance. Each room has its own style of ceiling, none are duplicated. Renaissance, gothic, romanesque, whatever he felt belonged.
There's not a lot of armor, but he had a couple of unusual pieces. One is a smallish suit of armor that would probably be tight on Tim. Next to it is a suit for Goliath, something like 2.38 meters tall – almost 8 feet. This is a copy, the original is about 8 feet tall.
All in all, it was a good visit. Something that imposing should be restored, so it can be seen and appreciated. If it was just a ruin, it would not attract anywhere near as many tourists. And the view of the Moselle from the castle is wonderful. You can look down at the town and think you can drop a rock through someone's roof. The hill is steep, but it's not vertical, so you could only bounce a rock through the roof.
Just as we started the tour, a black and white cat appeared, ignoring us. I tried to get her picture, but she moved off too quickly. On my way out of the castle, I saw her again, and got a couple of pictures before she ran off. A little later, while waiting for the bus, she came down to the bus stop and posed for pictures. One lady actually got the cat to come up to her, but the cat did not like being petted.
One of the restaurants in town has a computerized menu board. It does a slide show of the various menu options. It's kind of cool, but also irritating. If you don't read fast enough, you have to wait quite a while before that screen comes back.
My room is smallish, but it faces the Moselle, and I have a great view. Most of the hotels along the river advertise rooms with a river view. And most of the restaurants have an upstairs deck, often open air, so you can eat and enjoy the view. My room shows one of the tricks of hidden modernizing. Old style windows should have several small panes. New style windows should be double glazed. Mine is both. The window itself is a modern double glazed window, but there's a glass-less frame work made to look like the small panes of the old style. From the street, you can't tell the difference.
Dinner was just down the street at the toy store. The walls and ceiling were decorated with swords, shields, axes, all sorts of pole weapons, and a few old firearms. There was a nice greatsword with a large ricasso, and a rapier whose blade was about 4 feet long. There was another weapon I can't quite place - it seemed to have two hand grips with a small space between them. On one end was a 2 and a half foot sword blade, and on the other end was a 2 and a half foot butt spike. If it wasn't for the butt spike, I'd call it a glaive, but it doesn't look like a glaive with the big butt spike. It's possible it's a mashup of two distinct weapons with no relation to each other. It is, after all, just decoration in a restaurant.
The food was less interesting. Not bad, just less interesting. I had liver dumpling soup, with the dumpling already cut up. It was OK, but I can name several restaurants in Illinois that do a better liver dumpling soup. One restaurant on the street offered 2 or 3 dozen different schnitzels for Schnitzel Week. But I had a taste for sauerbraten again. This place offered it, which is why I went there. It was fine, but Berghof does a better one. The beer was Bitburger pilsner. I'm not big on pilsners, but this is a good one, with a nice taste.
Day 15 May 17 Eau de Cologne = water of Cologne = rain.
When I left Cochem this morning, the landlady said it would be cool today, but dry. She promised me. Maybe it is dry in Cochem, but I'm in Cologne. It was cool enough for a sweater today, and it was dry when I started out. But a light drizzle began on the road, and rarely let up. Mostly it drizzled, rained, drizzled some more – well, you get the idea.
My hotel is on the Rhine, though my room faces the other direction. It is very close to all the places I wanted to see, and TomTom showed me a parking garage about 2 blocks away. All about as convenient as I could want.
When I've traveled to Europe in the past, I've generally jumped out of bed at 7, and been on my way by 9. Now I'm getting up at 8, and setting out by 10. This has not had a beneficial effect on my sight-seeing, since the places I want to go do not stay open an extra hour on my account. I got to the hotel about 12:10. My reservation from Booking.com said that check-in was at 1:00, but I didn't think it would matter. It did. They let me store my bags, but I couldn't check in until 1:00.
Let me skip the tour, and fast forward to check in time. I had to wait while the clerk helped a woman who spoke English with an accent, I think Scandinavian. There was some problem with her credit card that took two people to figure out. It was good, but not registering on their card reader.
Finally, she was checked in, and then I was, with less hassle. My room was number 44, on the 4th floor, and no elevator. The hotel is above a restaurant, and in European style, the ground floor doesn't count in numbering. The reception is, therefore, on floor 1. The rooms start on floor 2. So up I climbed and climbed, until I reached the top of the stairs. I opened the fire door and saw a sign saying rooms 44 and 45 were up another flight of stairs. I am literally in the garret.
I opened the door to my room and saw the toilet. Yes, the bathroom is the entry way to the room. The sink faces the shower, and you have to stand in the shower if you want to use the mirror over the sink. There is also no soap. Fortunately, I brought a small bar from home, just in case. There is also no real table – I am using the TV stand to write this up. At least they allow smoking in the room. I have had a couple of other hotels that put the smokers on the top floor, assuming the smoke would rise and not bother anyone else. It's not the best accommodation, but I can live with it.
Now, back to the story. While waiting for check-in time, I went off in search of a church the Michelin guide recommended, St. Maria im Capitol. It was founded by Plectruda, wife of Pippin II, great-grandfather of Charlemagne. She made use of a ready-made foundation, the remains of a Roman temple in the former Roman capitol area.
This, of course, is not that original church. It's been enlarged and modified, and bombed during WWII. After that, there wasn't a whole lot left. But they rebuilt it again, and parts did survive. The structure looks mostly romanesque, but I think the helper at the door said the ceiling used to be gothic. Anyway, it is now coffered wood, and very nice looking, if out of place. There's a nice mosaic of two deer in the entrance, probably modern.
There's not so much a rood screen as a sculpted panel supported by four columns in front of the sanctuary. The organ sits up on top of it, and there's a spiral staircase at each end to get up to it. The ambulatory is nice and open, reminding me of one I saw in France last trip. There's a nice gothic wall around the choir area, and a few other gothic bits of decoration, but mostly it's romanesque.
I went back to the hotel then, by way of the rathaus. It's a lovely gothic building, but they are doing a lot of construction around it, and I couldn't get all the pictures I would have liked. But what I did get shows it off well. It's a big building, with a large, tall tower to one side, and a double arcade in front. The back and sides are full of gothic arched windows and five levels of statues.
After getting settled in the hotel, I went off to the cathedral. Winifred and I saw it on our first trip to Europe, but I had forgotten how beautiful it is. Now, as then, the outside is grimy from soot. It will take a fortune to clean it up, but it is still impressive. It is so big that it is hard to get a picture of all of any one side. The steeples go up forever, to these bitty little finials. They had a full sized copy of the finial in front of the cathedral, and it is about 10 feet tall.
The cathedral is long, and wide, and tall. Some of the columns in the front of the nave are gigantic, but they are supporting the steeple towers. The side aisles are as wide as the nave, but not quite so tall. In fact, they have double side aisles. I took some good pictures of stained glass, though I couldn't always tell the older glass from some of the more recent pieces. I got a photo of the window over the north portal, and it came out perfect first time. The window over the main entry, from down by the sanctuary, took 3 tries.
Going to the first church and back to the hotel, it had been drizzling on and off. It was a raining when I went to the cathedral, and still raining when I came out. Rainy, and cold, and windy. I had two museums that I had planned on seeing, but it was almost 4, and I could only see one. With the weather the way it was, all I really wanted to do was go somewhere warm and dry and comfy. So I went back to the hotel to get an early start on this journal.
For all its other faults, the hotel did give a 10% discount on food and drink at the restaurant. I had checked out several restaurants in the area, and this one seemed good. So I just walked downstairs to dinner. 75 stairs; I counted. I had a table between two other groups. On my right were three people, and I thought I heard English. But as I listened, I realized they were speaking German. But when they ordered dinner, the woman and one of the men spoke English to the waiter. I don't know how they could be carrying on a fluent conversation in German with the other guy, and have to ask the waiter questions in English.
On my left were two definite Americans, one was even eating spare ribs. By their appearance, I would have guessed American military, but they talked about business dealings, so they may have been retired.
I had grilled chicken breast (from a big chicken) with mushroom sauce and potatoes au gratin. Very good. One of the reasons I decided on this restaurant, aside from its convenient location, was a sign they had outside advertising maibock. I asked, and they still had it. Like the ur-bock I had in Einbeck, it is not dark. The ur-bock was a strong yellow gold color, this was a deeper golden color. And good tasting, too. I'm not sure who makes it. The ad outside listed Lowenbrau, and the restaurant featured Lowenbrau beers, so maybe it is Lowenbrau.
Day 16 May 18 I see 5 churches in one day without rushing.
Plus the outsides of two more that weren't open, and I made it to my hotel by 5:00 pm, after the last one. It helped that three of the 5 were in Dortmund, as was one of the closed churches.
It was dry today, but still cool. It's supposed to be warmer the next few days, so maybe I can retire the sweater. It got a little warmer during the afternoon, and at 8:30 tonight it was almost 60. The temperatures should be in the 63-68 degree range through Tuesday. Wednesday I don't care about, because I'm coming home then.
Dolores can now be happy. She was disappointed not to be reading about my being lost. Today I got lost even before I got into my car. I had parked in an underground garage not far from my hotel. I knew how to recognize the way I had come out of it, and thought I knew where it was. In fact, yesterday I had found it without trying. Today, I couldn't find it. Actually I did find a couple of entrances, but they weren't to my level, and the car exit was somehow even lower. I tried retracing my steps from yesterday, and had no luck. I finally found some city workers and asked them where the pay station for the garage was. They told me to go down to the third level, and pay there. So I went down the stairs, and walked down the auto ramps to the third level. There was the pay station, and there was my car.
I was off to Essen to see the cathedral today, and the roads were packed with cars. There weren't many trucks, but everyone in Germany who had a car was out driving today. There were a few construction zones, but they didn't interfere too much with traffic flow. The paucity of big trucks made a difference. Even slow car drivers usually drive faster than the trucks, so we flowed through the construction areas faster. There was an odd construction zone yesterday. It started just before a freeway exit, and the exit was blocked off. But the entry to the freeway was left open, with a stop sign. They didn't seem to be working on the exit, so why block it off? It would maybe have siphoned off some of the traffic.
Anyway, I got to Essen, and TomTom took me right to the parking garage, and I helped myself to street parking right next to it. And probably saved myself a couple of euros. I went around the corner and there was the oldest synagogue in Essen; it's pretty big. And just down the street was the cathedral.
The cathedral is somewhat odd. It looks like there are two parts, and there are. There's a large chapel like structure on one end, and a full church on the other, connected by walls and arches that are not roofed. The outside is romanesque, the inside partly gothic. There are a couple of nice touches, but not much.
So off I went to Dortmund, where I had 4 churches lined up. Two are next to each other on Osthellwegstrasse, and the other two are about a half mile away on Westhellwegstrasse and close to each other. St. Reinold is nice, a standard semi-gothic church, but it has some nice details. There's a pair of statues framing the sanctuary. Normally, these would be some prominent saints, or Christ or Mary. One is St. Reinold, the patron and a local hero for some reason. The other is Charlemagne. The stained glass is all new, I think, but a couple of windows were really nice anyway.
The Marienkirche next door was closed, which is a shame, because it is supposed to have a really beautiful alterpiece. St. Peter's, down the street, was open, but it looked like they had just had a really successful fire sale. It is the emptiest, plainest church you ever saw. Only one or two small hangings on the walls, plain columns, no pews, just conference style chairs. And yet it was worth seeing. The only thing of interest in the whole building is the carved reredos, or altarpiece. It is huge, something like 20 by 25 feet, completely covered in gilded carvings, and paintings. It is fantastically gorgeous. It is protected by a large sheet of plate glass, which perfectly reflects the light from the windows. So I took a couple of pictures, to shift the glare around, but I couldn't get rid of it.
Propsteikirche, nearby, was restored after the war, and it shows. Wherever they could re-use a salvaged piece, they did, but the stand out against the plain repairs. Altarpieces must have a been a big attraction in Dortmund in the old days, because this church has a very nice one, too. It's a big triptych dating back to 1490, and very nice, too.
I stopped in a store, looking for something for lunches (they didn't have anything), and saw a display of Heinz mustard, labeled “American Sauce”, and that's what the bottles said, too.
On to my last stop, Soest. I had never heard of it before, but it is a nice little town. I got to the cathedral about 4, just as a wedding was getting over. But there was another church across the street, so I went over to look at it. But it is closed for renovation. I took a couple of pictures of the outside, mainly because of its onion steeple.
By then, the wedding guests had all gone, so I went into the cathedral. It's a large church, with a romanesque double arcade in front, and a huge tower that would do justice to any castle. I wasn't sure it was open; they might have closed for the day after the wedding. Then I saw a couple of women coming out, and I went in. I still wasn't sure it hadn't shut down. There were no lights on anywhere, and almost no one around. In fact, I thought the first person I saw was the priest coming to throw me out, but it was just another visitor.
Despite the lack of light, I got some very good pictures of the inside. Even the dark wood of the pulpit came out visible. Behind the sanctuary is a romanesque mural filling the whole back bay of the church. It's a restoration, after the war, but done very well. The mural in the north transept is still the original painting. The stained glass behind the altar looks old, but all the rest is obviously new.
And they have a statue inside, over the entrance, of their patron saint, Patroclus. Now, you are going to argue that Achilles had a goddess for a mother, and was therefore unlikely to be a Christian. But that's him; it doesn't imply anything about any of his friends.
After getting my hotel room, I decided to see the town, and the town walls. By luck, there was a stairway up to the wall half a block from the hotel. Talk about convenient. As I have mentioned before, there's not much to see when you're walking on the wall. Unless you like peeking into strangers' second floor rooms. The wall is not complete; they tore down parts to put modern roads through, and other, non-road, areas are also gone. So whenever I had to come down to the road, I checked out what the wall looked like there. The first time, I had just passed a nice half-round tower, and I wanted to shoot the outside of it. I stopped later to take a picture of the wall because I noticed that it was higher there than when I first climbed up. And most of the wall was covered in trees, vines and assorted greenery. There's one tower so overgrown, you can't tell what it's supposed to look like.
But at the end of the line, when the wall disappears for a long stretch, is a really fine tower. It has a large arched gateway, and two large oriel windows on the front corners. There's also a garde-robe hanging on one side. It is now the wall museum, but it was closed by the time I got there.
I had already checked out the restaurants in town on the internet, and had two choices. I skipped the nearest for the best – Brauhaus Zwiebel. You can't do better than a medieval brewpub. It's so good, that they didn't have a table for me. So I went to my second choice, which meant walking back downtown. This was probably two, maybe three, blocks. Ratskeller St. George is at No. 1 Rathaus strasse. I was going down that street, and not seeing it; and then I passed the Rathaus, and still didn't see it. Then I saw No. 3 Rathaus strasse, and realized the street started on the far side of the Rathaus.
The Ratskeller is misnamed, because it is not beneath the Rathaus, but it is beneath some other official building, so I guess that's OK. Lots of schnitzel on the menu, though not as many kinds as the place in Cologne celebrating Schnitzel Week. They had 2 or 3 dozen different types of schnitzel.
There were some other choices, but I had the Allgauer style schnitzel, made with peaches, and hash brown potatoes. The schnitzel was good (how can it not be?) and the peaches melted in your mouth. An interesting combination. I didn't recognize any of the beers on the menu, so I ordered the only one that was not a pils or a weiss beer. Alt Pott's Landbier is a rather nice dark beer. Just the right amount of hops to give it flavor, and not too heavy.
Something happened there that I have never seen before in Germany, and never expected to see. There were a man and a woman, both German, at the next table. He had eaten all of his food, but she had only eaten about half of hers, the uneaten part being all of her asparagus. And she asked for a doggie bag. It took a little explaining on her part, but she got it. Not only have I never seen this, I have trouble imagining a German, man or woman, who could not or would not eat everything put in front of him/her. I have seen people order small meals, and some menus offer choices for the less hungry. I'm still amazed.
Day 17 May 19 Hermann the German Day.
It finally turned nice today. The sun was mostly shining, and temperature was almost warm. I was too cool with the jacket off, and too warm with it on. But definitely pleasant weather.
I was off the Detmold to see the Westphalian Open-air Museum of old farmhouses. (I had planned the vacation before seeing all the old houses I have seen the last two weeks.) TomTom, for once, was stumped – no mention of it under any heading, even by name. So I pointed myself to the only other thing in Detmold I had even the slightest interest in – the Hermannsdenkmal, a monument to Arminius, the germanic leader who slaughtered the legions at Teutoburgerwald, as I'm sure you all remember.
I really didn't want to see the monument, but it was in TomTom's index, and I figured I'd see a sign to the open-air museum sooner or later. But I managed to get almost all the way up to the monument without seeing any signs for the museum. I say “almost all the way up” because some very friendly policemen were explaining to everyone that the parking area on top was full, and would you please park down the hill somewhere, and here's a map to help you out. Of course, he said it in German, so I could be wrong, but it makes sense that way.
Still no sign of the museum, even on the map the cop had given me. So I told TomTom to take me to my next stop, Minden, where I had a cathedral waiting for me. And on the way out of Detmold, I passed another crowded place. It was on a small bluff above the road, but I could see the parking lot was full, and people were parking on both sides of the road to get in. And I caught a glimpse of the name as I went past – it's the open air museum, with a slightly different name than I had been told.
Not that that mattered, it was as crowded as Hermann's party. At this point I still didn't know why so many people had gone up the the monument today. Then I passed a sign with a picture of a guy in a Roman helmet, and the word “Hermannstag”. The next time I saw the sign, I read the date – today. For a country that has as many pizza parlors and Italian restaurants as this, it's a bit much to be celebrating someone who “liberated” you from Rome. (As a side note, I actually saw a restaurant offering Indian-Italian cooking.)
Anyway, I just saved you from a boring description of a lot of old farmhouses by giving you a slightly less boring tale of local festivities. So I zipped on to Minden a few hours earlier than planned. This was a problem. Today is Sunday, and the cathedral was almost certainly doing something this morning. By spending a couple of hours looking at old houses, I would have arrived after services were over. As it was, I arrived at 12:30, and high mass was still going on.
There are lots of places to park near the cathedral, but none of them were vacant. Not only that, but the two parking garages I found were both closed for Sunday. I finally found a place to park several blocks away, near the Prussian Museum. It didn't say you could park there, and it didn't say you couldn't, but some other cars were there, so I joined them. I had followed a simple route to get there, and was able to find my way through the pedestrian zone to the cathedral.
It's another very plain romanesque exterior, with some very nice early gothic vaulting inside. Like a lot of other churches in Germany, it was considerably damaged in the war, but they managed to save a number of really nice pieces, like the painting on one column, and an altarpiece that looks like all ivory. [ I checked later, and Wikipedia says it's sandstone. ] Unfortunately all the glass is modern, but tasteful. That cannot be said of some of the replacement windows. A nice church, but not really exquisite. I must start reading between the lines in the Michelin guide.
My last stop of the day was Celle, just to look at the town. I was planning on getting here late in the day, and didn't have to worry about closing times to look at the houses. But I was early, so I went to the schloss. It's a big 13th century castle that the 16th century duke of Brunswick-Luneburg turned Baroque. You can still see the underlying castle structure behind the trim. Eventually they knocked down the outer walls and used the debris to fill in the moat, turning it into a park.
The inside was kind of disappointing. Some rooms were for modern purposes. The great hall was a nice big room with an oak beamed ceiling, but it was full of chairs facing a podium. The chapel had no religious signs, and was used as a multimedia room. There were a couple of suites of rooms set up in the style of the later dukes, around 1700. They say the rooms are physically as they were then, but all the furnishings were brought in from other places. It was OK but not very exciting.
I went up to the military collection, hoping to see something worthwhile. There were several dozen uniforms of the Hanoverian army from the mid-19th century, when Hanover picked the wrong side in the war between Prussia and Austria. They actually won a battle against the Prussians, but couldn't follow up on it. The King of Hanover (who had taken over the duchy when the line died out) went into exile in Austria.
There were portraits of some of the earlier dukes in a group, and they were the ugliest bunch you would ever want to meet. But if you're a powerful enough prince, looks aren't all that important.
I went to my hotel then and logged in the see what restaurants were available in Celle. I found four that seemed nice in the old town, and headed back there to take pictures, and then have dinner. It is a beautiful old town. There are lots of houses dating back to the 16th and early 17th centuries. Two houses side by side were both built in 1629, and a few are almost a century older. The first third of the 17th century saw a regular building boom in town, and most of them are very impressive. After the disappointments of the rest of the day, this made it all worth while.
I ended up my walk at the rathaus (not very interesting) and the Ratskeller restaurant, one on my list. But it was closed tonight. So was another one. One was supposed to be hard to find, and it was on another street. But the fourth was on the street I was already on, so I went to look for it. It was way down on the far end of the street. I didn't know if it would be open, but as I got closer, I saw a guy in a white jacket and apron standing in front of it, wondering where all the customers were.
There were already several customers inside, and more came in after me. As well they should have, because it was very good. I had the wild mountain sheep ragout with mushrooms, cranberries and a potato dumpling. The cranberries were just a spoonful, really, but tasty. The ragout was very good, and a lot of it. Goose is also on the menu, but only from August to December.
I hadn't yet seen the beer list when the waitress asked what I wanted to drink, so I just said, “Dunkel bier, bitte”. And she brought me a big bottle of Celler Dunkel, a very nice dark beer made locally. That's the nice thing about Germany – there are still tons of local beers brewed all over the country. The down side of this is that if you find a beer you really like, it may not be available at your next stop.
Day 18 May 20 I'm sorry, Germany is closed today.
It was cool this morning, cool enough for the sweater again. There was a brief bit of rain early, but mostly just overcast. By mid-afternoon it had warmed up a bit, and the sun peeked out a little. But it's not a comfy day. It's supposed to be cooler here tomorrow, but by traveling toward Berlin, it will get warmer, going from the low 60's to almost 70.
I went to Hildesheim to see the cathedral, which stands on the site of a church founded by Louis the Pious in 815. It's a huge romanesque structure, with a nice entrance, but I can't tell you much more. They are doing lots of construction work around the cathedral, and every approach to it is closed off. I don't think they're doing anything with the cathedral itself, but the walkways around it are all torn up. Yesterday was Pentecost, and I don't know what the bishop did.
I know yesterday was Pentecost, because today is Whit Monday. I know that because I looked up what holiday Germany had on May 20. Everything is closed. Offices, schools, shops, lots of cafes, and no one is out walking around, because there is no place to go. I'm hoping I can find a restaurant open tonight. It's kind of weird seeing all the stores closed and the streets fairly empty. Of course, it wasn't a really nice day out.
Anyway, there are other churches, like St. Michael's, which is very symmetrical, with a big rectangular structure and a tower at each end. There may be two sanctuaries, one at each end, but I'm not sure. The definite one is having some work done, and the other may be a temporary substitute, or it may just be something that looks sanctuary-ish.
You enter through a side door, and the first thing you see is a row of columns with nice capitals, and on each capital is a saint's painted statue. And the underside of the romanesque arch is done in low relief of vines, each arch different. Very lovely.
The ceiling is painted, Michelin says 13th century, with the Tree of Jesse, Jesus' family tree. It is beautiful. It's like looking at a Persian rug in the air. There's a nice blind arcade on one side of the sanctuary with some well-worn relief carvings above it. On the other side is a line of angels.
There's a nice mosaic in the crypt, and I thought I had a good picture of it. It's sharp enough, but not as well lit as I thought it was. I may be able to correct that with software. There's also the grave of St. Bernward – a stone coffin with a big rectangular gravestone above it supported by eight posts. Unusual. Oh, who was he? One of the early bishops, who built the church.
Out of the church and into the town. More half-timbered houses, but some are really fabulous. The rathaus is nice, but the building across the square is amazingly beautiful. Each floor is stepped out over the one below, and they are all lavishly decorated.
Because the cathedral was closed, I left Hildesheim and got to Wolfenbuttel early. My hotel is an easy walk to the old town, so I checked in first. I browsed the web a bit to find out what restaurants were available in town. I made a short list, crossed one off, because it was not walkable, and set off to view the town.
Michelin said that the best houses were around the market squares, because that was where the ducal officials lived. And some of them were nice, but so were some in the “ordinary persons” part of town. I started out down one of the ordinary streets and there were lots of old half-timbered houses, some quite nice. There's a big gothic church with a baroque front. I didn't go in, but I took a few pictures of the outside. The sides are standard gothic, with baroque gables stuck on top above the arches. The front is also a little weird. The stones at the corners of the front porch are carved like animals. And the entry itself is all baroque. There's a statue of Christ on top, and below him are statues of two 17th century noblemen.
Lots and lots of nice houses. There's a whole row of houses with stone columns where their fronts should be. The entrances are set back 12 or 15 feet, and the second floors are supported by the columns. This makes a block-long covered walkway, or more probably for the time, a covered market. There's another with an enclosed bridge crossing over the street to another house.
So then I came back to the hotel to rest and start writing this. There were two restaurants on my way. One said it was closed until 5:30, and the other said it opened at 5:00. So, about 7:00 I went out to get dinner. The first restaurant, supposedly opening at 5:00, was dark – taking the holiday off. So I was worried about the other restaurant. If it was closed, by choice might have had to be Subway.
But I could see the open door from half a block away, and all was right. I ordered the Ambosspolka which is a pork schnitzel stuffed with ham and cheese. In Leipzig I had pork surloin stuffed with ham and cheese, and they called it Brewmaster's Pork Steak. If there was such a thing, it should be called Pork Cordon Bleu. But it was good, and came with itty-bitty potato croquettes. The beer was Crailsheimer Dunkel, good, smooth, but just a little short on flavor. I wouldn't turn one down, but I wouldn't go looking for it, either.
I am starting to work out how to get from my hotel in Berlin to the airport on Wednesday morning. It's been a long time since I haven't just dropped off a car at the airport rental place and gotten on a plane. The flight leaves at 10 am, so I'm planning on getting there by 8:30. I have to leave the hotel by 7:50 to catch a bus to the airport. That means getting up at arrrgggghhh, way too early. I can save some time by getting breakfast at the airport.
Day 19 May 21 I get gouged, and shot, again.
It was beautiful out this morning, sunny and starting to get warm. Then the clouds came to visit, not quite chasing the sun away, but they played tag for a long while. The warmth also settled into a not quite warm, not quite cool mode. Still it was pleasant out.
I was going to go the Braunschweig to see the cathedral, and it had one or two interesting points. But I read the Michelin guide more closely, and decided it wasn't worth the time. I had to be in Berlin at my hotel by 5 to drop off my bags, so I could get to the car rental place before they closed at 6. And Braunschweig was going to make that hard to do.
So I went to my next stop, Magdeburg, which also had a cathedral. Braunschweig's cathedral only got one star from Michelin, but Magdeburg's has three. And it deserves them. I couldn't get a good picture of the front of the cathedral because of trees, buildings and construction on the street I would have had to stand in. But they have a model inside, and I took pictures of that to stand in for the original.
This is a big cathedral, long and tall, reminding me of Salisbury. It has lots of delightful touches, like the vault groins in a chapel attached to the south transept, they're free-standing, with circles of stone connecting them to the walls. There is a lot of wonderful stone carving, including several statues high up around the back of the sanctuary.
There's a marvelous stone pulpit covered in carving, and a carved stone rood screen that is amazing. The north transept has an enclosed portal with the 5 wise virgins and the 5 foolish ones, very nicely done. In a small, hut-like shell is a pair of small statues. It's a man and a woman seated on thrones, which may be Otto the Great and his wife, Edith, grand-daughter of Alfred the Great. He built the cathedral for her.
Otto is buried in a stone tomb on the sanctuary floor. I knew he was buried here, but I didn't realize just where. I have a picture of his tomb, accidentally. But I also have a couple of pictures of a really nice tomb behind the sanctuary. Looking at it again, it looks like a woman (not Edith, she's buried elsewhere), but I don't know who. [ Wrong again. She was discovered elsewhere, and reburied here. ] It's an elegant tomb, and someone was giving a long talk about it while I was there, but searching the internet just now gave me no information about it.
The cathedral had one other thing of interest, a temporary display set up in the nave about the murders and medical experiments by the Nazis on children regarded as too stupid or handicapped to be useful. It was rather grisly, but a useful reminder of the things people can convince themselves are good, even when they are inherently evil. It also gave a name to something I had seen while walking around all these towns. I sometimes saw a small, 3 inch square, golden plaque set in the sidewalk in front of a house. Sometimes there were several of them. Each one named an individual Jew, or other person, who had lived there until being sent to the death camps, and the date of death. The display called these stolpersteine, stumbling blocks.
I went to the nearby cloisters of a former abbey, supposedly the best preserved in Germany. They're preserved well enough, but I've seen lots of better cloisters. Fooled by Michelin again.
Back on the road to get to Berlin. Traffic wasn't too bad, but then I was going east. The world's biggest truck convoy was heading west, and not moving much at all. We were on a stretch of the autobahn that was 3 lanes wide each side, and the trucks were often in two of the lanes. And the third lane, for fast cars, wasn't moving much either.
I got to my hotel, checked in, and back on the road to return my car. And that's when things got nasty. Back on May 12, day 10 if you're following along at home, I mentioned backing into a pole and doing some minor damage to the rear bumper. The clerks at the car rental place demanded I pay for the damage. I said the credit card insurance would cover it. They insisted I give them 1,000 euros and they would send me back any amount they didn't need. They had already hit me for a 250 euro deposit when I picked up the car. I felt they were taking advantage of me, and walked out. We'll see what happens next. I'm writing to Capital One to get their help. I don't have the car rental insurance terms handy, but I think my interpretation is right.
Anyway, I walked out, and walked back to the hotel. I was following the map from the rental office to my hotel that I had printed off in advance. It didn't have a lot of street names on it. I needed to make a turn, and thought I was at the right spot, but I wasn't sure. While I was standing there, a young guy comes up and asks to take my picture. He said I looked interesting. It sure doesn't take much to impress young Germans these days.
On the way back, I passed the place where I catch the bus tomorrow morning. It's only a five minute walk (I timed it later). And I timed myself getting ready this morning. I can get up at 7 am and still catch a bus about 8, and get to the airport around 8:30.
Dinner was going to be a challenge tonight, because I looked up restaurants near my hotel here last night. Two that were expensive and required reservations, lots of east and south Asian, and not much nearby. I asked at the hotel, and the guy at the desk pointed me to three or four. I checked them out and went for the Italian one. Half the menu was actually German, and I tried a dish I had seen before with a German name. The Germans called it Schnitzel Gorgonzola, the Italians called it Scallopine Gorgonzola. It's not schnitzel or scallopine, it's slices of pork loin covered in sauce. The sauce is supposed to be Gorgonzola, but I don't think so. It was tasty enough, but not as good as I had hoped for. At least the beer was good – my old favorite, Duckstein.
So that's Germany from my point of view. It's been fun, a lot of fun. But it's getting a bit long in the tooth already. I could use someone to talk to, or even listen to and understand everything said. By now, it's been too many half-timbered houses and too few decent castles. I can't complain about that, though; I'm the one who planned the trip. Certainly too much walking and climbing. My feet are about to go on strike. I will have to give more thought to how to do my next vacation.