A little while back we visited the city of Bonn, West Germany's capital before the end of the cold war linked the two halves of Germany. Bonn is quite close to the city of Koeln (Cologne) and we thought that since they were so close and have a good train connection, that it would be nice to ride between the two cities.
We started in Koeln and rode south, on the east side of the Rhein. The weather refused to cooperate the entire day and we ended up with 2 or 3 cloud bursts while we were riding. Not ideal, but better than pouring over the entire trip. The total ride was about 35 km (22 mi) based on the map, though we got a bit turned around just outside of Bonn when we couldn't find a way to cross a tributary of the Rhein, so it was probably closer to 40 km (25 km) total.
Jason makes (very cute!) friends
Once we arrived in Bonn, we didn't have to wait too long for a train--maybe 5 minutes after we bought our tickets. From there it was about a 25 minute ride to Koeln. We dropped our bikes at the car, then walked around a bit. Koeln is the 4th largest city in Germany, and, let me tell you, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-July its shopping district is *busy*. It was a little overwhelming, since we are used to much smaller cities, but after taking a short look at the city's famous cathedral, we found a seat at a cafe and enjoyed a meal outside.
Inside of Koeln's Cathedral
With more rain in the forecast, we forewent a trip to the World Ballooning Festival, which we had seen last year in Echternach, and decided instead to go for another castle. We headed to Bourscheid castle in Luxembourg. The castle looks quite impressive from a distance, though it in more or less a ruined state (and has no place to get Kaffee and Kuechen!), with some restoration work having been completed since the 1970s.
Jason, an umbrella and a castle
Though there were no snacks, we did get a free English-language audio tour that was hosted by Victor Hugo and a couple travelling companions, who had visited the castle in the late 1800s. They told us about how the castle looked at the time of their visit and what renovations had been completed on the castle since that time in surprisingly good British accents for Frenchmen.
Bourscheid's Main Tower
After touring the castle, we visited the town of Diekirch, Luxembourg, which is home to a military museum that we had heard was very good and intended to visit, but we spent more time at the castle than we had originally planned, and so just wandered through town, had a small, late lunch and a cup of coffee and listened in for a while on a small festival, whose theme was related to WWII. We also saw this odd little gem keeping an eye on the town square. I felt much safer under his watchful eye as I drank my coffee.
On the day of the summer solstice, yes, the longest day of the year, I was in the city of Vaasa, Finland for work. Vaase is located at about the same latitude as Reykjavík, Iceland. I should have known I would be in for a tough few days, when I landed at 11pm and it barely looked like twilight, despite the fact that the city was completely covered in clouds. The next day was surreal. It looked like mid-afternoon far into the night. I couldn't, for the the life of me keep the light out of my hotel room. My. I had never been so jetlegged when traveling only one time zone. And, the crazy thing about this place, was that people didn't have the rolling shutters on their windows like they do in Germany. I don't know how they sleep...maybe they do it all in the winter, when they have 20 hours of darkness.
Around 9pm in Vaasa
After I made it home and had a good night's sleep on Friday, Jason and I met up with the Luxembourg Ex-Pat group in the nearby city of Trier for the Altstadtfest (roughly: Old-Town Fest). It was the standard German festival, with plenty of food, beer, wine and various forms of entertainment. We watched a couple cover bands at one stage, then visited the cathedral with a few of the ex-pats. One of the cover bands called out Jason for rocking out and playing air guitar to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something. Jason *swears* he was doing it ironically and was composing a progressive interpretation of the song in his head. I'll leave it to you to decide if he was telling the truth.
This band liked Jason's air guitar
So, the next day it was raining. And, what better thing to do in the rain in Germany, than to go to Luxembourg and visit castles? So, we did just that. Our first castle was Beaufort Castle in eastern Luxembourg. We had been here before, about a year ago, but they were having a concert at the castle when we arrived, so we weren't able to to tour it. This time, no concert, so we took our umbrella and looked around.
Jason, an umbrella and a castle
There was nothing particularly remarkable about the castle, but it did have some nice tall towers to climb into and a number of passages to explore.
Jason looks at a Beaufort Castle
Our next stop was the castle in Larochette. We had traveled through Larochette a couple months ago when we were hiking with the ex-pat group. We didn't have the time (or, frankly, the energy) to visit the castle as we walked through the town, so we returned on our own. It was very wet out at that point, so we didn't spend too much time exploring the the ruins, but inside one of the restored buildings were a series of exhibits by local artists--I was particularly found of Alice Niederkorn's work. There were a few pieces I might have been interested in taking home, but we can't hang things on our walls...
In searching through Atlas Obscura, Jason and I came across the Nerogergbahn a water-powered funicular, located a couple of hours away in the city of Wiesbaden. (As a quick note, Wiesbaden is the location of the US Army's European base of command.) We did it as a day trip, driving our around lunch time, stopping briefly at a rest stop for some food and running across an entire row of fantastic cars in the parking lot. It wasn't clear if they were on their way somewhere or were on display at the rest area for some reason or another.
Fantastic cars...and an 18+ store...
We were very excited to see the funicular, our second in a month or so (the last being the Montmartre funicular when we were last in Paris), since, first off, funiculars are pretty cool from an engineering perspective, as they reduce the needed energy to raise any single car up a slope by having an opposing car attached to the other end of a cable. With the power of mgh (potential energy, not the T-stop), the first car assists in raising the second car up the slope.
Most funiculars use a powered cable system to provide the extra energy needed that is not provided by the difference in potential. The interesting thing about the Nerogergbahn is that it uses only the difference in potential to move the cars, by filling the uphill car with water, making the uphill car heavy enough to pull the downhill car up. The resulting speed of both cars is controlled by the brakeman on the downhill car. Once the formerly uphill car reaches the bottom, it dumps its water and the cycle begins again with the uphill car taking on water.
Passengers Disembarking (de-funicularing?) from the Nerogergbahn
The other neat thing about the Nerogergbahn was the tracks. For most of the run, there are only three tracks for the wheels--each car has one at the edge and they share the one in the middle. A problem, of course, would occur with this layout when the cars need to pass each other. This is resolved by having a section of track where there are two complete sets of tracks, so two for each car. Since the distance of the run is fixed, the cars always pass at the same point, so bone crushing injuries are avoided. The video below shows this point on the track.
We enjoyed some coffee and cake at the top of the hill, then took a walk in a nearby park once we returned to the bottom. We then drove to the city center and walked around for a bit, before going over the river to the city of Mainz. The evening we were there was Germany's first game in the European Championship soccer tournament against the Netherlands. We found a restaurant with an outdoor Biergarten and a big TV to sit tight, eat, have a couple beers and see what it was all about. Germany won, with, what we were later told, was a not a very exciting game, though in finding our way out of Mainz, we saw a large number of happy Germans.
For Memorial Day Weekend, we headed north. Our first stop was in Brussels, Belgium. Brussels is the capital of Belgium and also home to much of the management of the European Union. We made only a short stop in Brussels, primarily to see the Grand Place, which is a large city square surrounded by the city hall and old guild halls.
The Town Hall from Brussels's Grand Place
From there, we drove toward the Belgian coast and Bruges. Bruges has a large number of canals and buildings that are 100s of years old--most of its medieval buildings are still intact. We spent the evening wandering around the city and found an Italian restaurant for dinner. One thing that was very interesting about Bruges, as opposed to other cities we have been to in Europe, was that the train station was located about a 15 minute walk from the downtown. The city encourages people to park at the train station and take the bus into the town, by giving you free bus fare with your parking ticket. Not bad at all, as it looked pretty impossible to park on the narrow, cobblestoned roads.
A canal in Bruge
Much like New Hampshire, Belgium is quite proud of its diminutive coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. It stretches about 42 miles between France and the Netherlands, with the coast of England only about 84 miles away. We quickly visited the cost north of Bruges, where a ferry brings over UK tourists for a trip to the beach. As you can see, the beach is pretty enormous. We were there at the start of the season, so while there were a number of people relaxing in beach chairs, there wasn't the dense crowds that would be likely later in the summer.
Beach in Belgium
From the Belgian coast, we drove up to The Netherlands, staying on the coast for a bit and even running into a jazz festival in one of the small towns we drove through, where we stopped to have fish, fries and ice cream. Belgium is where fries were invented. They do a sort of double-frying of the potatoes, which results in a fantastically crispy fry. Yum!
Rainbow Over Netherlands
From the coast, we worked our way inland to Grave, Netherlands. We discovered that this area was the focus of Operation Market Garden, during World War II and the bridge featured in A Bridge Too Far, was located only a few miles from where we stayed. We stayed on the edge of Grave and spent the next day and a half riding our bikes around the wonderfully flat Netherlands.
Hey! We found a castle!
The weather was fantastic, so we did a multi-hour ride each on Sunday and Monday. On each day, we spent some time riding along canals and, also, on each day, took a ferry across so we could do a nice loop. We had plenty of company, including roving bands of bikers with matching bikes and uniforms speeding along with skinny tires and tight spandex.
Bike Ferry Across a Canal
Unfortunately, all vacations, and especially short ones, come to an end. On our way home, though, we hit another triple point. Our last triple point was between Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium. This time, it was between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. This site was a bit more developed than the first and included a number of playgrounds, amusement rides, places to drink coffee and towers to climb to the top of. Part of the attraction was that this spot is not only a triple point, but is also the highest spot in The Netherlands. This point is at 322 meters, just over 100 meters higher than the highest point in Rhode Island.
I was back in Munich for work a few weeks ago and Jason took the opportunity to fly down and meet up with me. We again rented a place through AirBnB, but this time it was not above a yoga studio. Jason arrived on Friday evening, in the rain. Luckily it let up a bit and we walked out that evening to an Italian-style place with pretty good pizza and had a nice, long European style dinner--in at 8:30pm, out at 11:30pm.
The next day was perfect. One of the best days we had seen so far this spring. We took advantage of it and walked through Munich's Englisher Garten and did some chatting, wandering and people watching. In the middle of one area of the Garten is the Chinesischer Turm (Chinese Tower), which is the in picture below. (Check out the blue sky and puffy clouds! Such a perfect day!) Like much of Munich, the tower was originally built a few hundred years ago, but burned down during bombing during the Second World War. It was, though, rebuilt to the original plans in the early 1950s.
Chinesischer Turm
At the Chinesischer Turm, as should be expected at any tourist sight in Germany, there was a Beergarten, as well as a selection of places to get coffee, pretzels and other delicious food. We had a snack before continuing our walk into another area of the Garten. As one would probably guess, there were bikes everywhere, as you see in any European city. Jason saw a quick reminder that yes, we were indeed in Europe, from looking at the bicycle below. See if you can find it yourself. Hint: there is something in place of a water bottle.
Despite appearances, biking while drunk is a crime...
One thing we like to do when we go to bigger cities, that I may have mentioned in an earlier post, is to eat non-German cuisine. The non-German food in our area is limited and leaves a lot to be desired, so when we travel, we eat "ethnically" as much as we can. For our second dinner in Munich, we found a TexMex place, but when we arrived, then had a 10 Euro cover, as they were showing a Real Madrid or some other important soccer game. Oddly enough, there was a second TexMex eatery right across the street, so we went there instead. The food wasn't bad--much better than the TexMex we get in the Eifel. And, we still got to watch a soccer game--it turns out that Germans dump beer on each other instead of Gatorade after a winning game. And they drink and dump it out of enormous glasses.
On our last trip to Munich, we spent some time at the Deutsches Museum. That admission included a ticket for a later trip to one of the other museums administered by the same group. So, on this trip we used that ticket to go to the Verkehrs Museum (Transportation Museum), which focused primarily on cars and other ground-level items that move us around--trains, trucks, bikes, etc. It was mostly a look-and-see museum, and didn't have too many interactive exhibits, but they did have a large number of cars of all sorts of different shapes.
Verkahrs Museum
Jason even found a stainless steel Porsche. Nice.
The Heaviest Porsche
Outside the museum, there were a few other exhibits, including a few additional locomotives and buses. I also made a new friend! A 15 foot tall snail! At least he was smiling. I, for one. welcome our new gastropod overlords.
We were on the hunt for more castles and were planning on touring two on the Rhine, but didn't get out of the house early enough in the day, so we toured one castle and had coffee at the other. The first castle we stopped at was Lahneck. The castle had a few notable stories regarding it.
Burg Lahneck
One was regarding its dungeon, which was on ground level at the base of the tower, instead of built like a basement. The really weird thing was that there was no way to access the dungeon from the ground. The victims had to be lowered down by rope. It wasn't clear to me how the torturers made it down there. Perhaps they had a ladder.
Another notable story was from the mid-1800s. There was a British family with a 17-year-old daughter vacationing in the area. The daughter went out with her sketchbook to do some landscape drawings and made her way up to the castle, which at that time was mostly a ruin. In an attempt to climb to the top of the tower, the stairs collapsed and she fell. When she didn't return that evening, search parties were sent out. Unfortunately, her body (or, rather, skeleton) wasn't found until 9 years later, when some work was being done to clean up the castle. Her diary with a few entries was found near her body, showing she was alive after her fall, but was unable to attract any attention to her plight. A very chilling story.
We found the tour, though in German, to be very good. They did give us a translation of tour on paper and the guide was nice enough to translate some of the stories he told that were not on the sheet. They also did a couple of really interesting things that we had not seen at the other castles we have visited. First, the tour guide demonstrated a number of the items he discussed, including an unique fold-out card table and a lock-box (cue 2000 election campaign joke about Social Security here--the Guild Chest on this page shows a good example) with 11 locking points. This is very notable, as generally you only get to see these items from a bit of a distance as displays and don't get to see how they work.
The other tidbit on the tour was regarding the older wooden floors that were still in some areas of the castle. In most castles we have visited, they lay down some modern carpets or otherwise cover the area to protect the floor from the tread of visitors. Here they instead had us all put on slippers over our shoes. They had a big bin sitting outside of one of the rooms and we all then slid around on the floor once we made our way inside. It was an interesting way to do it and gave us an interesting story to tell.
Our next stop was at Marksburg Castle, where we arrived just after the last English tour set out, so we sat instead and had a coffee and enjoyed the sun.
As a real goal for the day was to get a bike ride in, we took a drive from Marksburg into Koblenz and had a nice ride along the Rhine. The picture below was taken at the spot we turned around, just a little ways outside the city. Pretty cool abandoned factory, huh?
Hulk along the Rhine in Koblenz
On biking back to Koblenz, we stopped for some food at a cafe near the river. Though it was a little chilly, we took the chance to sit outside. I had a really great (though a bit salty...) Spaezle dish shown in the photo below--with a class of halbtrocken (have dry) wine.
As the weather improves, we are getting more excited about getting out and about. With all the castles we have seen in the past year, one may think that we are running low on options--you would be wrong! We decided to take a drive out to the Rhine, and check out some of the castles in the vicinity.
One of the great things about driving on the back roads here in Germany is that we'll be driving along and one of us will go "Woh! Look at that castle!" And on this trip out, we had just such an experience in Kastellaun. Jason, who was driving, was the one who noticed the ruined castle up on the hillside. We stopped, parked and then walked up the hill to the castle.
As with many of the castles in Germany, this one was a ruin and had only a couple walls and a turret remaining. While we were up on the hill admiring the castle remains, we ran into a wedding that was happening in the restaurant near the castle. We even got to see a Champagne cork fly and shared a smile with the opener of the bottle. Unfortunately, we were not invited to the festivities (nor were we really dressed for them), so we walked back into town and enjoyed some Kaffee und Kuechen (coffee and cake) before heading back out on the road.
Kastellaun Castle Ruin
Wedding Party
Our ultimate destination was St. Goar and Burg Rheinfels, the largest castle overlooking the Rhine. The castle was also a ruin, but still had many of its walls and a substantial number of buildings left. It was very cool, with lots of rooms and areas to walk through and even some tunnels that we got to explore with a candle. It would be a great place to go back to in the summer with a picnic.
Jason and Burg Rheinfels
Instead of heading straight home from Burg Rheinfels, we drove up to Koblenz. I have spent a lot of time at the Koblenz Hauptbahnhof (main train station), as the train line I take to get to other parts of Germany for work generally requires that I change there. But, I have not seen anything else of Koblenz. Jason suggested the stop, thinking there would be a park/monument or something else interesting at the intersection of the Rhein and Mosel rivers in Koblenz. And boy, was he right.
The intersection of these rivers is known as the Deutsches Eck (German corner). Located there is an enormous statue. ENORMOUS. The statue is of German Emperor William I. I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia page I linked to above, as it gives the history of the statue and the monument. The statue that is there now is a replacement of the version that was destroyed during WWII and the Wikipedia page includes some photos of the statue that was there before and what it looked like after being destroyed.
Statue of William I at the Deutsches Eck
To give you some idea of scale, the picture below shows Jason standing next to a carved eagle which takes up only the lower half of the lower wall between the stairs in the picture above. The only other thing I can think of that impressed me so much by its size might be the Lincoln Memorial, but this monument may be a bit more impressive, as there is nothing else even close to its size anywhere nearby.
Jason, providing scale
We walked around the park by the monument a bit before working our way back home along the Mosel. We stopped in Cochem (star of at least one previous blog post) for dinner, enjoyed a good German meal and went on our way.
We had a long weekend for President's Day and decided to spend it visiting some friends in Berlin. A good friend of mine from undergrad is currently in Berlin with her husband who is a visiting researcher at the Max Plank Institute. He is spending the time working on his book, while my friend is working on finishing up her PhD. Both are history of science people with science undergrad degrees, so it made for a nice weekend of low-key occasional nerding out.
Berlin is a bit of a trek from our location in Germany. We did some investigation into plane fares, flight times and other options and decided on taking the City Night Line to get to Berlin. We had, a number of years ago, done a trip on the West Coast of the US where we booked a sleeping compartment on Amtrak for our leg from Portland to Sacramento. It was reasonably comfortable, and we figured that if it was okay on the American rails, the German version would be quite nice.
We were not disappointed. The City Night Line had a similar layout as Amtrak, with a two-story car and bunk beds, with the rooms just big enough for the two beds. Frankly, that didn't matter so much, as we had a 6 hour ride, boarding the train at 1am and arriving in Berlin at 7:30am. We were only worried about sleeping, which, I am happy to report, we did quite well.
One thing about life in Europe, is that striking can occasionally interrupt, even in a very business friendly country as Germany. We arrived in Berlin and there was a transit strike on one of the main train lines. We had been warned ahead of time, so it wasn't a big deal and we were able to quickly find a cab to take us to our friends' apartment. They were just getting up as we arrived, so we joined them in some breakfast and coffee, chatted and caught up, before figuring out what we would do for the day.
After some investigation in the guidebook, we decided on a walk around the city and visit the Dali Museum. In our walk from our friends' apartment, we walked up past a Soviet War Memorial (that statue is just as huge as it seems) and to the Brandenburg Gate. This was our first trip to Berlin, so we didn't have a very good sense yet of the historic layout of the city, but, as we found out in later museums and from reading, the Brandenburg Gate was right on the edge of the Eastern and Western sections of the city.
Brandenburg Gate
After passing through the gate, Jason found a bit of Boston, right next to the Museum: The Kennedys.
Jason contemplates ordering a "Regulah"
From the Brandenburg Gate, we walked to Potsdamer Platz, which was, 22 years ago, a no-man's land between East and West Berlin. Now it is a rather open area, with a number of buildings and an underground train terminal. It was here we found the Dali Museum. The exhibits mostly contained collections of drawings with a few sculpture pieces and the experimental film Un Chien Andalou. You can click below to watch the film yourself--a couple notes, it is silent and does not have a plot as such. Oh, and there is an eye slicing scene. Not a movie for everyone, but I enjoyed it.
The next day we spent some time at the Berlin Wall Memorial. The subway station near the memorial had a great display on the way the subway worked in the divided city of Berlin, including the various escape attempts and "ghost" stations. From what we read, it was pretty amazing, with the subway being split into two and trains being operated by the East, but through the West. As soon as the East realized that people were escaping through the tunnels, they bricked them up, where possible, and put armed guards where it wasn't.
The memorial itself was very interesting. Our guide book noted that it was the longest length of the Berlin Wall that was still standing. They also had a section that recreated the wall and the no-man's land between the East and the West. From the top of a tower, you could look down into this area and see what it would have looked like 22 years ago. Man, what a crazy time.
Recreated Section of No-Man's Land Between East and West Berlin
In the evening we went with our friends to see a movie that was part of the Berlin Film Festival. They had a selection of movies that were representative of Soviet film making. We ended up deciding on Gibel Sensazii (Loss of Sensation), which is a bizarre movie about how engineers are doomed in the evil capitalist countries. It included robots that were controlled by a saxophone. Yes. You read that right. With a saxophone. Unfortunately, I cannot find any videos to link to that show that. You'll have to keep an eye out for yourself!
On our third day in Berlin, our friends had to go into the office, as they work German schedules and did not get President's Day off. Jason and I went and did a bit of exploring, stopping by first Alexanderplatz, which was firmly in the East before reunification. Alexanderplatz was to some extent a Soviet show case, so there is some of that fantastic 1960s looking futuristic architecture that you see in Tomorrowland at Disney World. Except here, people lived and worked in it.
The iconic item in Alexanderplatz is the Fersehturm (television tower). We didn't get a chance to go up for a view, but did get a good look at it against the (mostly) blue winter sky. It is quite a sight.
Me and the Fernsehturm
Our last sight to see in Berlin was the Neues Museum. The museum was heavily damaged during the Second World War and was generally left to decay by the East until the mid-60s, when they started some restoration. The restoration stopped at reunification, but was started again a while after, with the museum finally reopening in 2009. The most notable display there is the bust of Nefertiti, which was pretty amazing to see in person. This, like the Elgin Marbles I discussed in my last post, has controversy surrounding its presence in Germany. The Egyptians would like it back and have been asking for a number of years for it. The Germans like it and want to keep it. Much like the case with the Elgin Marbles and Greece, it is unlikely it will happen any time soon, if only due to other pressing matters that are occupying the leaders of Egypt.
We had decided a month or so ago to take a trip to London for Jason's birthday. This idea was precipitated by hearing that one of the comics on a podcast we listen to regularly, was doing a set of shows in London which overlapped with Jason's 34th birthday. We decided to make it a long weekend and flew into London from Luxembourg on Friday.
After finding our apartment--booked through AirBandB, though this time not over a yoga studio--we dropped our stuff and went out for a walk around the city. Our first stop was at the Handle House Museum, as it was in the general direction of our evening activities and was open a bit later than some of the other museums. Handle was born in Germany, but lived for about 30 years in London, where he did a fair amount of composing. The museum was small, but had a number of nice touches, including a actual harpsichordist practicing in Handle's practice room. We were informed by the docent that she would be playing in Bucharest the following weekend. Ah, the life of an international harpsichordist!
That evening, after a fantastic dinner at a Malaysian restaurant, we saw the comic who spurred our trip: Andy Zaltzman. And I even got in a heckle (frankly, he should have known better, he asked how much we paid for the tickets and I yelled out "too much"), which resulted in a short conversation with him from our seat during the show. After the show, he hung around and we shook his hand and chatted a bit...no hard feelings that we could tell!
On Saturday morning, we spent some time walking around the city, following a walk suggested in our Lonely Planet guide through the "Square Mile"--the oldest part of London, which was the location of the first Roman settlement. The walk started near St. Paul's Cathedral, who's font yard is the location of an Occupy encampment. An interesting item regarding this encampment: the cannon chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral had resigned late last fall because he refused to be involved in any actions to remove the protesters, saying that to evict protesters would lead to "violence in the name of the Church".
Occupy London encampment in front of St. Paul's
We did take a step inside the cathedral, but the admission price was a bit steep, so we decided to enjoy the view from the outside. Our walk continued to the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which you can climb to the top of and see some great views of the city, including St. Paul's. The fire had started in a bakery--a royal bakery, nonetheless--close by to the location of the Monument. The view from the top was quite good--we had clear weather as you can see--though hazy.
The Monument to the Great Fire of London
View of London toward St.Paul's from the top of the Monument
The remainder of the walk took us through a number of market areas (unfortunately, not open at the time of our walk) and at the end we found ourselves in Whitechapel, home to Jack the Ripper's murders. For the afternoon, we headed over to the British Museum. When we were last in London a few years ago, we had really wanted to see the Lindow Man, a body found in a bog in England back in the mid-80s. Unfortunately at the time, his area of the museum was under renovations, so we were unable to see it. This time we were more fortunate, and made our way straight to the exhibit. And it was pretty cool--the body is about 2000 years.
Bog Man!
We also visited the Elgin Marbles, which are part of a set of marbles that were formerly part of the Parthenon in Greece. They were taken (with permission of the Ottomans) from Athens by the British ambassador around the year 1800 and given to the British Museum for display. There has been an on-going debate between the UK and Greece on where these sculptures should be, with each side saying, "we deserve to have them". The British Museum has a little pamphlet describing their position, which is available for reading in the gallery where the marbles are displayed--I personally think their claims of displaying them in context with the history (supported by other plundered artifacts) of the rest of the world are a bit dubious, but due to Greece's current financial status, the return of the marbles does not seem likely in the near future.
Elgin Marbles
We needed to kill a bit of time before our evening activity and dinner, so we stopped by the National Gallery, and looked through their collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. Highlights include the forth version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Manet's Execution of Maximilian, which had been cut up into pieces (partially by Manet, for unexplained reasons) and then reassembled later by Degas. For you Bostonians, I just found in searching for the link above, that another version of this painting is on display at the MFA.
For our evening entertainment, we saw Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest running stage play, with over 24,500 performances. It was a good show--and a thing to see when in London. Due to tradition, I can't tell you who-done-it, but it is in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, so, for those of you who wish not to know--Spoiler Alert!
Jason was headed out on Sunday, while I was headed north in England for work. We decided to get dim sum for brunch in London's Chinatown--and it was rather fantastic. I had not eaten such good Chinese since I was last in Boston.
We spent the last weekend in January in Munich. I was in the area for work for the end of the week, then headed out to Austria on Sunday late in the day, so it was a convenient trip. Jason flew down from the Luxembourg airport (he, like me, is now converted to flying Luxair--you get a sandwich, a real, good, sandwich, and a drink on a one hour flight in economy--the only way to fly!) and we met up at the apartment that we rented through AirBnB (if you aren't familiar with AirBnB, it is a site where people can put their extra rooms or even their whole apartment up for rent for a day or a month--we've used it a number of times here in Europe and it is pretty great). The apartment happened to be over a yoga studio. This was our second apartment rented through AirBnB that was over a yoga studio...the lasts one being in France. I wonder if that is a hint from the universe...
For our first evening, we walked around Munich near the Marienplatz and came across a rather good group of street musicians. More of a street quintet. It is hard to see in the video but the flute player appeared to have a broken finger. Talk about suffering for art. After we watched the group for a bit, we found some food that is hard for us to find in our hinterland: Japanese noodle soup. It was good and hit the spot on the chilly night.
The next day we walked over to the Bavarian National Museum, which is one of my favorite types of museums: those with rambling halls and a wide variety of a stuff that is well curated. We spent about 3 hours checking our the wide variety of stuff: from a Tiffany lamp to the statue of Death shown in the photo below. Death, here, is from a clock tower and the bone in his right hand rang the bell. I kinda want this in my living room.
Death Rings for his Supper
We took a walk from the museum to the downtown area, passing by one of Munich's larger parks. I had remembered reading briefly in our guidebook about the fact that you could go surfing at one of the parks. They have an artificial wave built up on one of the streams, and people grab their little surfboards and go at it. I was not expecting, though, for anyone to be out this time of year, especially in the 20-25 degree F weather that Munich was seeing that weekend. Well, as you can see in the video below, my expectations were wrong. These guys were out in their full-body wet suits, many with hoods, to surf in weather that was only borderline-good for being outdoors.
We spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Deutsches Museum, which is another museum of my ilk, with a huge amount of exhibit space and well curated collections. I was reminded of the Henry Ford Museum, which Jason and I had visited about a year ago in Dearborn, MI, but the Deutsches Museum was organized far better than the Henry Ford and did not have a vague smell of hot dogs from the Wienermobile permeating all the exhibits.
For those of you who are a fan of the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science in Boston, the Deutsches Museum had a bit of a smaller venue, but a similar show. We walked in in the middle, just as the host was getting his last shock in his Faraday cage (the ball on the left in the linked photo). Don't worry folks! He was fine--the Faraday cage protects you from the shocks. Once the host climbed out of the cage, there were a series of high voltage demos, that went as follows:
Host: "Achtung!"
Crowd: (Covers ears)
Electricity: "ZAP! POP!"
Displayed Item that was Just Hit by the Electricity: (Catches on fire)
Our travels a couple weeks ago took us to Saarbruecken, Germany, about 90 minutes south of us. Our plan was to visit the Saarland museum, which our Lonely Planet guide told us has a nice collection of Modern and Contemporary art, but when we arrived, we found that it was under renovations and, as a result, closed. A sign at the door mentioned that the museums located here the castle were open, so we took a walk to the castle.
Saarbruecken was heavily bombed during WWII, so the castle was more a modern interpretation or rebuilding of a castle rather than others that we have shown. As you can see in the picture below, between the more classic castle shape on the edges, there is a more modern design of glass. It did look pretty cool, I have to say.
Saarbruecken Castle
By the castle, we found that there was an exhibit (link in German) of James Ensor's works. Our only knowledge of James Ensor comes from a song by They Might Be Giants, which, really only tell us that he is from Belgium and is a painter. The exhibit was free, so there was no hesitation on our part.
Meeting James Ensor
The exhibit focused on his pen and ink drawings, including those covering the life of Christ. Here is one representative example. Another, which both Jason and I really liked, was called "Mon Portrait en 1960" (My Portrait in 1960) and featured a drawing of a skeleton (Ensor was born in 1860). Artists are funny.
Coming away from the exhibit, we had expanded our knowledge of Mr. Ensor. We now know he did more than just paintings, had a bit of a humorous streak in him and we will be likely to recognize his work if we happen to come across it again. A nice accidental find.
Much like Dortmund and other mid-size European cities, Saarbruecken has a very nice shopping district. We spent some time walking through and stepping into stores here and there. We made one purchase: a ream A4 paper, which we should have purchased closer to the end of our shopping trip, but ended up carrying around with us for about an hour. Nothing like lugging around a pile of blank paper.
Saarbruecken is located in German state of Saarland. Saarland has been a bit of an industrial powerhouse for much of it's history, so following every war that Germany lost to France in the 20th century, France has taken the state as part of the spoils of war. On an equal number of occasions, the citizens of Saarland have later voted to rejoin Germany. Despite that, as you can see on the sign above for the Ensor exhibit, there is still a lot of French seen and heard as you walk through the streets. So, while no longer a part of France, the influence is still felt by the general proximity and the historical situation.
Last Friday I had a work trip that took me near Dortmund. Since the train ride wasn't very far, Jason took it up and met me on Friday evening. Since Jason didn't arrive until about 9pm, we only went out for a drink and a Salzkuchen. A Salzkuchen is like a very salty bagel, with a cured pork filling (so, like a cold sausage filling). We each got one, but neither of us were able to make it through ours. My, it was so salty. I would haven needed much more beer to make any further than I did. It was worth a try, but I am not sure if I would seek it out again.
On Saturday, we spent some time walk around the shopping district, which was rather full of people. We came across a small open air market, where Jason found some Syrian bread, something we would often get back in the States, but is not quite as easy to find here in Germany. We munched on that as we continued our walk around.
We spent some time looking through a used CD/DVD store. I've been looking for some more German language stuff to listen to and watch and made two purchases. The first was the movie Goodbye Lenin, which we had seen many years ago. It is about the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989 and how it impacted the life of one family. It is a comedy, in a sense, and very much worth seeing. The other was a kid's cartoon movie about Till Eulenspiegel, a German folk hero. Sort of like a Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. Neither of these have English subtitles, so we'll see how we do.
While we were looking through the store, we ran across the section shown in the picture below of "Black" music. If you take a close look at the album covers, you'll notice that it includes everything from hard-core rap to the Temptations and Ella Fitzgerald. Oh, and the Village People are in there too.
Way to illogically group musical stylings
It had been a while since we had walked around a shopping district while the stores were actually open and when so many people were out in the street, so we just spent a lot of time walking and checking out the various sights on the street. We saw a number of rhinos with wings, as shown in the picture below, which reminded me of the Mr Potatoheads you can find throughout Rhode Island. These rhinos (link in German) were painted by local artists and youth groups and are scattered about the city. They make for good photo ops.
Hier bleib ich! == Here I stay!
Another great find was the kid in the video below, who had wheeled a piano out into the street. He was pretty great, able to play so well in the cold with gloved hands. Don't worry, I gave him a good tip. He must have been asked to move along, though, as when we came back about an hour later, he was no where to be found. I hope he was able to keep his tip hat.
