The flight to Europe was uneventful—the airline was helpful, the stewardesses were nice, there were no horrible delays—and I managed to sleep for a few hours (though the temptation to stay awake and make sarcastic remarks about the second in-flight movie [without benefit of sound] was too great and I succumbed). One thing: the stewardess who brought my dinner addressed me by name (I’d ordered a special meal) and called me “Frau Hagge,” pronouncing my last name in a completely German way. Oddly, that made me feel more grown up and Married than anything else anyone has called me.
Getting our rental car was also uneventful—we ended up with a cute little pale blue Opel Corso that (as we discovered over the course of two weeks) got fantastic gas mileage. It poured rain all the way to Heidelberg, but the precipitation had lessened to spitting by the time we got there. Our hotel room wasn’t quite ready (check-in was at noon and it was around 8:30) so we parked the car, left our bags therein and started wandering around the town.
We were very tired and didn’t really know where we were going (the only map we had was in our guidebook and we weren’t carrying it around with us), but the thing about Europe is that the middle of town is always marked by enormous spires. Just look up and that’s all the direction one needs. We found our way to the main square and the main church: the Heiligeistkirch. It was just opening, so we were the first people inside (this realization only came later—since we’d been awake for so many hours it didn’t seem like it could be that early in the morning). It was a very nice gothic church, but rather bare on the inside. Also, what few notes there were next to things of historical importance were, of course, in German, which I cannot read.
The church also has a spire that visitors are allowed to climb, and we paid our pittance to do so. The stairway was a spiral one and the narrowest that I’ve ever seen (probably about 3/4 the width of the one at the chapel where we got married) and it was dark and it went on FOREVER and I started getting dizzy and having vertigo and shortness of breath. Halfway up there was a little landing and I decided that I Just Couldn’t Take It Anymore. I sent James the rest of the way up while I stood there ignominiously, letting other climbers pass me by. James says that the top had great views, but was a little terrifying due to lack-of-railing.
By that time we got down from the tower it was only about 9:30, so we cast around trying to find all of the things I remembered from the guidebook. First we found the oldest hotel in town (insert name), which, of course, isn’t open for wandering around in, so we only took pictures from outside. Then we found the Jesuit church, which is very shiny and Baroque, and then we found Peterskirch, which is the oldest church in town and very grimy and medieval and lovely. (Nearly the entire outside wall of the church building is covered in big medieval gravestone slabs—unfortunately I couldn’t tell what they said, because not only were they worn down and in strange archaic type, but they were, of course, in German). We also saw, but didn’t go into, many many beautiful old buildings that are now just houses or schools or pizza joints (really—there are so many gorgeous old buildings that they’re not even considered special).
Heidelberg is also known for its university, which has a library and several museums and nice buildings, but almost all of these things are closed on Mondays. The only thing not closed is the university library, which is right across the street from Peterskirch. On the second floor of the library is their manuscript collection, which is really cool. Right out for everyone to look at is a world-famous and completely unique codex of minnesinger songs more extensive than anywhere else in the world.
By this time it was noon and we were COMPLETELY exhausted, but I wouldn’t hear of going to sleep, convinced that we’d never get acclimatized to the right time-zone if we didn’t. Unfortunately I’d forgotten everything else that the guidebook had to recommend (except the castle, which we decided was something that we really needed to be fully awake for), so we went over to the Rathaus (town hall), which in Heidelberg is also the tourist information center. We learned about two interesting things: 1. boat tours up and down the river and 2. that the summer Schlossfestspeil performance the next night up in a courtyard at the castle was a full production of the Barber of Seville. We immediately went off to try to take advantage of both of these things. We really wanted to take a boat trip, but in spite of all of the signs proclaiming what hours the boats left, we couldn’t find any boats actually doing so, and after 45 minutes of scouring the waterfront we gave up. Instead, we went to the Schlossfestspeil box office and bought tickets for the Barber of Seville. James did the talking at the box office and I sat on a sofa, and halfway through the transaction I realized that I had actually fallen asleep and slithered off the side of the sofa halfway onto the floor. No more protests against naps.
We walked the several blocks back to the hotel, checked in (to the most palatial room we had for the entire trip—the ceilings were incredibly high, there was an ornate sitting room area, two big free-standing wardrobes, a writing desk and a balcony with a little café table and chairs), and collapsed to sleep for 3 hours until it was time to get up to eat dinner.
We were ravenous, but didn’t know where to go for dinner. The hotel’s recommendations seemed awfully touristy, so we went back to the guidebooks. I’d read all three of them about 20 times each, but James had been busy with finals and things and hadn’t been able to, and thus didn’t have guidebook fatigue the way I did. He was able to scan through our favorite of the three and pick out a neat, little local pub called Schnitzelbank. We dragged ourselves down a few side-streets to get there (discovering on the way a tiny cross-street that had THREE organic earthy-crunchy stores on it selling the most beautiful fruit) and then ordered a sauerkraut platter for two that turned out to be absolutely enormous. There were two big caraway sausages (the menu called them Thuringers, but they weren’t anything like any Thuringers I’ve had or heard described), four thick slices of smoked ham (though the ham seemed to be made of the loin, not of the butt), four steamed potatoes, 3-4 cups of the divine, jupider-caraway-black pepper pork/ham sock infused sauerkraut, and one massive two-bone pork shank. James had a potato, I demolished the sauerkraut and we finished all the meat but one slice of ham. It was all so good that we barely needed the little pot of extremely good mustard.
It was a good, if exhausting day, but pretty frustrating to me for one reason: I do not speak German. In Germany, EVERYTHING is in German! (Yes, I know, this is not surprising). I can, with James’s help, puzzle out the meanings of street signs and (sometimes) menu items, but informational signs in museums and cathedrals are a completely mystery. And even if James could translate them all perfectly (which is hard to do on medieval tombs and things) it would still be frustrating because I wouldn’t be involved in parsing the information. Visually seeing and understanding words is very important to me and I was unable to do that. Grr. I am going to get an elementary German textbook and really learn something before we go to Europe again.
Photos: Heidelberg
Getting our rental car was also uneventful—we ended up with a cute little pale blue Opel Corso that (as we discovered over the course of two weeks) got fantastic gas mileage. It poured rain all the way to Heidelberg, but the precipitation had lessened to spitting by the time we got there. Our hotel room wasn’t quite ready (check-in was at noon and it was around 8:30) so we parked the car, left our bags therein and started wandering around the town.
We were very tired and didn’t really know where we were going (the only map we had was in our guidebook and we weren’t carrying it around with us), but the thing about Europe is that the middle of town is always marked by enormous spires. Just look up and that’s all the direction one needs. We found our way to the main square and the main church: the Heiligeistkirch. It was just opening, so we were the first people inside (this realization only came later—since we’d been awake for so many hours it didn’t seem like it could be that early in the morning). It was a very nice gothic church, but rather bare on the inside. Also, what few notes there were next to things of historical importance were, of course, in German, which I cannot read.
The church also has a spire that visitors are allowed to climb, and we paid our pittance to do so. The stairway was a spiral one and the narrowest that I’ve ever seen (probably about 3/4 the width of the one at the chapel where we got married) and it was dark and it went on FOREVER and I started getting dizzy and having vertigo and shortness of breath. Halfway up there was a little landing and I decided that I Just Couldn’t Take It Anymore. I sent James the rest of the way up while I stood there ignominiously, letting other climbers pass me by. James says that the top had great views, but was a little terrifying due to lack-of-railing.
By that time we got down from the tower it was only about 9:30, so we cast around trying to find all of the things I remembered from the guidebook. First we found the oldest hotel in town (insert name), which, of course, isn’t open for wandering around in, so we only took pictures from outside. Then we found the Jesuit church, which is very shiny and Baroque, and then we found Peterskirch, which is the oldest church in town and very grimy and medieval and lovely. (Nearly the entire outside wall of the church building is covered in big medieval gravestone slabs—unfortunately I couldn’t tell what they said, because not only were they worn down and in strange archaic type, but they were, of course, in German). We also saw, but didn’t go into, many many beautiful old buildings that are now just houses or schools or pizza joints (really—there are so many gorgeous old buildings that they’re not even considered special).
Heidelberg is also known for its university, which has a library and several museums and nice buildings, but almost all of these things are closed on Mondays. The only thing not closed is the university library, which is right across the street from Peterskirch. On the second floor of the library is their manuscript collection, which is really cool. Right out for everyone to look at is a world-famous and completely unique codex of minnesinger songs more extensive than anywhere else in the world.
By this time it was noon and we were COMPLETELY exhausted, but I wouldn’t hear of going to sleep, convinced that we’d never get acclimatized to the right time-zone if we didn’t. Unfortunately I’d forgotten everything else that the guidebook had to recommend (except the castle, which we decided was something that we really needed to be fully awake for), so we went over to the Rathaus (town hall), which in Heidelberg is also the tourist information center. We learned about two interesting things: 1. boat tours up and down the river and 2. that the summer Schlossfestspeil performance the next night up in a courtyard at the castle was a full production of the Barber of Seville. We immediately went off to try to take advantage of both of these things. We really wanted to take a boat trip, but in spite of all of the signs proclaiming what hours the boats left, we couldn’t find any boats actually doing so, and after 45 minutes of scouring the waterfront we gave up. Instead, we went to the Schlossfestspeil box office and bought tickets for the Barber of Seville. James did the talking at the box office and I sat on a sofa, and halfway through the transaction I realized that I had actually fallen asleep and slithered off the side of the sofa halfway onto the floor. No more protests against naps.
We walked the several blocks back to the hotel, checked in (to the most palatial room we had for the entire trip—the ceilings were incredibly high, there was an ornate sitting room area, two big free-standing wardrobes, a writing desk and a balcony with a little café table and chairs), and collapsed to sleep for 3 hours until it was time to get up to eat dinner.
We were ravenous, but didn’t know where to go for dinner. The hotel’s recommendations seemed awfully touristy, so we went back to the guidebooks. I’d read all three of them about 20 times each, but James had been busy with finals and things and hadn’t been able to, and thus didn’t have guidebook fatigue the way I did. He was able to scan through our favorite of the three and pick out a neat, little local pub called Schnitzelbank. We dragged ourselves down a few side-streets to get there (discovering on the way a tiny cross-street that had THREE organic earthy-crunchy stores on it selling the most beautiful fruit) and then ordered a sauerkraut platter for two that turned out to be absolutely enormous. There were two big caraway sausages (the menu called them Thuringers, but they weren’t anything like any Thuringers I’ve had or heard described), four thick slices of smoked ham (though the ham seemed to be made of the loin, not of the butt), four steamed potatoes, 3-4 cups of the divine, jupider-caraway-black pepper pork/ham sock infused sauerkraut, and one massive two-bone pork shank. James had a potato, I demolished the sauerkraut and we finished all the meat but one slice of ham. It was all so good that we barely needed the little pot of extremely good mustard.
It was a good, if exhausting day, but pretty frustrating to me for one reason: I do not speak German. In Germany, EVERYTHING is in German! (Yes, I know, this is not surprising). I can, with James’s help, puzzle out the meanings of street signs and (sometimes) menu items, but informational signs in museums and cathedrals are a completely mystery. And even if James could translate them all perfectly (which is hard to do on medieval tombs and things) it would still be frustrating because I wouldn’t be involved in parsing the information. Visually seeing and understanding words is very important to me and I was unable to do that. Grr. I am going to get an elementary German textbook and really learn something before we go to Europe again.
Photos: Heidelberg
The typical German breakfast of cold cuts and cheese is one that I could be happy with for the rest of my life. One might wish that more accompanied them than bread, and that requests for water weren’t met with stunned shock, but one can’t have everything.
On Tuesday morning we went up to Heidelberg castle, taking the funicular railway from near the cathedral all the way to the top. The castle was beautiful, but it was about 40 degrees and raining. Also, my guidebooks are completely inaccurate about many things, including when the castle opens and how much of it one can see without a guided tour. I didn’t mind paying for a guided tour, but was annoyed to be told that I didn’t need one when I really did (without one we’d only have been able to see the outer walls and one room that held a really large wine cask).
The guided tour (in English!) took us through several small rooms with manuscripts, armor and two miniature models of the castle (one before the fire that destroyed it in the 19th century and one from the Baroque area, with a model of the formal gardens attached), which would be the best dollhouses ever. We also saw several floors of the 17th century residence building (full of statues of electors and stag skulls or taxidermy animal heads [one of which had a turnip in its mouth]), and the king’s banqueting hall (which can apparently be rented for weddings). We went down a loooong spiral staircase to the ornate Baroque chapel (also rentable, and apparently mostly taken advantage of by the Japanese) where we got to look at a humongous, rather overwrought altar.
Another thing inside the castle was a museum of the history of apothecaries, which I really enjoyed, given my interesting in the history of medicine. Also, it had reconstructed apothecary’s rooms from various historical periods. My favorite was a toss-up between the Beidermeyer era room, the 18th century room with the crocodile hanging from the ceiling, or the medieval herb-drying room.
Our experience of the castle was, of course, dominated by student tour groups. None of the Americans were TOO obnoxious, but every time one of the kids used the word ‘Dude’ three times in one sentence, or put his hands on his hips, hitching up his shirt to reveal a full four inches of boxer short, I wanted to smack someone. The girls in their enormous sweatshirts and teeny-tiny short-shorts were just as bad.
After we exhausted the castle interior we wandered around the grounds a bit, looking at where the formal gardens would have been and examining the towers that had been blown up by a gunpowder explosion 200 years ago. It was SO rainy and SO cold that we couldn’t linger as much as we wanted, though, and instead we retreated to the café to eat more sausages and sauerkraut. I also ordered a salad, but it came drenched in sugary salad cream, so James ate it instead. To make up for it we went to a little fruit stand as soon as we got off the funicular and bought a punnet of The World’s Biggest Gooseberries (see picture). The fruit stand was in the fussgangerzone, the pedestrian-only area that takes up most of the center of the city. This is a wonderful idea, but it would be more wonderful if the area actually WAS pedestrian-only. I saw more cars driving in the fussgangerzone than almost anywhere else in the city.
In the afternoon we went to the Krupfalsich museum, which is a museum of the history of the city and of the palatinate (I do not understand Germany medieval politics—there were a lot of people who seemed like princes running around, but they all had different names; even James can’t explain it to my satisfaction). (The museum is in an old Baroque palace that used to be the residence of a university professor; it would be nice if modern professors had that kind of disposable income). The museum is famous for a certain altarpiece, but my main impression is of rooms and rooms of period furnishings and of 17th and 18th century paintings. The museum was fabulous, but the rooms never seemed to end, and we kept getting lost and ending up on different floors than we thought we ought to be on, according to the map. The basement held the archaeological finds, including the jawbone of Homo Heidelbergensis, which I studied in Anthropology class in college. There were also a lot of miniatures of local Roman life (mostly legionaries, but also some craftsmen like potters and salt manufacturers), reconstructed burial stele (complete with colored paint, which I’ve never seen reconstructed before—it was perfect), a completely reconstructed temple to Mithras (the god of the Roman legions) and several rooms about the finds from the nearby Roman cemeteries.
I loved the museum, but next to nothing in the period rooms and nothing at all in the archaeological rooms was translated into English. I know that it was unreasonable to want everything to be in English, but it was amazing how not fun my favorite subjects were when I didn’t understand anything being said about them.
Dinner that night was as Zum Roten Ochsen, the oldest student pub in Heidelberg. It was excellent, but halfway through the meal I realized that I’d eaten sausages for every meal since I arrived in town, and sauerkraut at all but one of them. This could not continue (no matter how good the sauerkraut was, I was really beginning to want some fresh vegetables. I didn’t get a special salad with chantarelle mushrooms on it, but it wasn’t very substantial).
The opera that night: hmmmmmmmmm. It was moved into the king’s banqueting hall, because of the rain and the cold, so the environment was very pleasant. The interpretation, though, is what precipitated the ‘Hmmmmm.’ I can see Count Almaviva as a slightly oily white-suit-and-loafer-wearing loathario, but Figaro as an 80’s-hair-band-esque, green-spandex-tights-wearing bike messenger? Basilio with a broken arm and leg? Marcellina in a slinky dress and obsessed with a pull-string talking baby doll? I was SO CONFUSED. WHAT did it all mean? It was bad enough when it was just German that I couldn’t understand, but at the opera I couldn’t understand the Italian it was sung in, OR the ‘helpful’ German annotations that scrolled across a tiny LCD screen at the front of the hall (“Bartolo ist baft!” “Ein Betrunken Offser?!” Okay, those are pretty easy to translate, but STILL). The singing was absolutely perfect and the singers were extremely good actors, but it was like trying to watch a play given by Martians. I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I REALLY couldn’t understand what they were doing. (Why was everyone in their underwear at the end of Act 1, including the police? Why was there a big yellow phonebooth onstage? What was WITH that pull-cord doll??). I was never bored, and the production didn’t make me angry the way that modern staging usually does, but I didn’t get it. I enjoyed it a great deal, even; it must have been the quality of the singing.
Photos: Heidelberg
On Tuesday morning we went up to Heidelberg castle, taking the funicular railway from near the cathedral all the way to the top. The castle was beautiful, but it was about 40 degrees and raining. Also, my guidebooks are completely inaccurate about many things, including when the castle opens and how much of it one can see without a guided tour. I didn’t mind paying for a guided tour, but was annoyed to be told that I didn’t need one when I really did (without one we’d only have been able to see the outer walls and one room that held a really large wine cask).
The guided tour (in English!) took us through several small rooms with manuscripts, armor and two miniature models of the castle (one before the fire that destroyed it in the 19th century and one from the Baroque area, with a model of the formal gardens attached), which would be the best dollhouses ever. We also saw several floors of the 17th century residence building (full of statues of electors and stag skulls or taxidermy animal heads [one of which had a turnip in its mouth]), and the king’s banqueting hall (which can apparently be rented for weddings). We went down a loooong spiral staircase to the ornate Baroque chapel (also rentable, and apparently mostly taken advantage of by the Japanese) where we got to look at a humongous, rather overwrought altar.
Another thing inside the castle was a museum of the history of apothecaries, which I really enjoyed, given my interesting in the history of medicine. Also, it had reconstructed apothecary’s rooms from various historical periods. My favorite was a toss-up between the Beidermeyer era room, the 18th century room with the crocodile hanging from the ceiling, or the medieval herb-drying room.
Our experience of the castle was, of course, dominated by student tour groups. None of the Americans were TOO obnoxious, but every time one of the kids used the word ‘Dude’ three times in one sentence, or put his hands on his hips, hitching up his shirt to reveal a full four inches of boxer short, I wanted to smack someone. The girls in their enormous sweatshirts and teeny-tiny short-shorts were just as bad.
After we exhausted the castle interior we wandered around the grounds a bit, looking at where the formal gardens would have been and examining the towers that had been blown up by a gunpowder explosion 200 years ago. It was SO rainy and SO cold that we couldn’t linger as much as we wanted, though, and instead we retreated to the café to eat more sausages and sauerkraut. I also ordered a salad, but it came drenched in sugary salad cream, so James ate it instead. To make up for it we went to a little fruit stand as soon as we got off the funicular and bought a punnet of The World’s Biggest Gooseberries (see picture). The fruit stand was in the fussgangerzone, the pedestrian-only area that takes up most of the center of the city. This is a wonderful idea, but it would be more wonderful if the area actually WAS pedestrian-only. I saw more cars driving in the fussgangerzone than almost anywhere else in the city.
In the afternoon we went to the Krupfalsich museum, which is a museum of the history of the city and of the palatinate (I do not understand Germany medieval politics—there were a lot of people who seemed like princes running around, but they all had different names; even James can’t explain it to my satisfaction). (The museum is in an old Baroque palace that used to be the residence of a university professor; it would be nice if modern professors had that kind of disposable income). The museum is famous for a certain altarpiece, but my main impression is of rooms and rooms of period furnishings and of 17th and 18th century paintings. The museum was fabulous, but the rooms never seemed to end, and we kept getting lost and ending up on different floors than we thought we ought to be on, according to the map. The basement held the archaeological finds, including the jawbone of Homo Heidelbergensis, which I studied in Anthropology class in college. There were also a lot of miniatures of local Roman life (mostly legionaries, but also some craftsmen like potters and salt manufacturers), reconstructed burial stele (complete with colored paint, which I’ve never seen reconstructed before—it was perfect), a completely reconstructed temple to Mithras (the god of the Roman legions) and several rooms about the finds from the nearby Roman cemeteries.
I loved the museum, but next to nothing in the period rooms and nothing at all in the archaeological rooms was translated into English. I know that it was unreasonable to want everything to be in English, but it was amazing how not fun my favorite subjects were when I didn’t understand anything being said about them.
Dinner that night was as Zum Roten Ochsen, the oldest student pub in Heidelberg. It was excellent, but halfway through the meal I realized that I’d eaten sausages for every meal since I arrived in town, and sauerkraut at all but one of them. This could not continue (no matter how good the sauerkraut was, I was really beginning to want some fresh vegetables. I didn’t get a special salad with chantarelle mushrooms on it, but it wasn’t very substantial).
The opera that night: hmmmmmmmmm. It was moved into the king’s banqueting hall, because of the rain and the cold, so the environment was very pleasant. The interpretation, though, is what precipitated the ‘Hmmmmm.’ I can see Count Almaviva as a slightly oily white-suit-and-loafer-wearing loathario, but Figaro as an 80’s-hair-band-esque, green-spandex-tights-wearing bike messenger? Basilio with a broken arm and leg? Marcellina in a slinky dress and obsessed with a pull-string talking baby doll? I was SO CONFUSED. WHAT did it all mean? It was bad enough when it was just German that I couldn’t understand, but at the opera I couldn’t understand the Italian it was sung in, OR the ‘helpful’ German annotations that scrolled across a tiny LCD screen at the front of the hall (“Bartolo ist baft!” “Ein Betrunken Offser?!” Okay, those are pretty easy to translate, but STILL). The singing was absolutely perfect and the singers were extremely good actors, but it was like trying to watch a play given by Martians. I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I REALLY couldn’t understand what they were doing. (Why was everyone in their underwear at the end of Act 1, including the police? Why was there a big yellow phonebooth onstage? What was WITH that pull-cord doll??). I was never bored, and the production didn’t make me angry the way that modern staging usually does, but I didn’t get it. I enjoyed it a great deal, even; it must have been the quality of the singing.
Photos: Heidelberg
After breakfast on Wednesday we headed over to the Marktplatz to check out the farmer’s market. It was rather paltry in numbers, but the fruit looked good. We bought strawberries to round out our breakfast and some tomatoes, a head of lettuce and some currants to pack for a picnic lunch. We ducked into a tiny grocery store to grab some cheese (something Swiss that started with an ‘L’) to augment the produce, and then went back to the hotel, grabbed the car and took off on a day trip.
Our first stop was an hour’s highway drive away. Bad Wimpfen sounds cute in the guidebook description, but nothing can prepare one for the utter Grimm’s Fairy Tales-ness of it all. I kept expecting to find the Bremen Town Musicians around a corner or to discover the Rathaus staffed by talking rats in little bowties. We left the guidebook in the car, so we were a bit at a loss for finding things. We followed a steeple down many winding cobbled streets until we found the city church. The church was beautiful, and gorgeously gothic on the outside, but somehow it was grim rather than Grimm. In the courtyard there was a 16th century statuary group of the crucifixion (marking a burgomeister’s family tomb) and just theway it was carved made on think that the sculptor was the sort of person to believe that the plague was a visitation on the population for the people’s sins.
The church was not open for visitors (another thing my guidebook lies about) so we just peered through the inner glass doors, then moved on to the Blue Tower, an edifice that used to be part of the old town walls. The spiral staircase inside wasn’t as narrow as the one in the Heiligeistkirch, so I managed to make it all the way to the top. This tower actually has a real live tower keeper, a pretty, dumpling-like woman who lives in a little apartment at the top of the tower and charges 1 euro for entrance to the surrounding walkway. Appropriately, for a dumpling, her name is Blanca Knodel.
After the blue tower we drifted through the Steinhaus, a former castle building (where the women lived, predominantly) that is now a history museum with lovely wall paintings, the red tower (which was overrun by children on a school trip) and a random catholic church, that was extremely Baroque. (I really think that I would find such places distracting if I tried to attend a religious service there. How could one think about anything but the life-sized marble statues of avenging angels? They kind of noticeable.
At around 1:00 we left Bad Wimpfen, Grimmed-out, and drove to Burg Gutenberg, a castle that not only has a museum of its own fascinating history, but also has a raptor rescue and education sanctuary. We ate lunch in the picnic area, surrounded by three classes worth of screaming, lunching 11-year-olds, also on a school trip. Our lunch was delicious, but it could have been a little quieter.
We toured the raptor enclosures, cooing at all the birds (especially the owls) and then watched a flight demonstration/show given by three of the resident bird handlers. It was very entertaining, even in a language I didn’t understand (though 1 1/2 hours was a rather long time to spend poking James for translations) and the school children were quiet and much better behaved (naturally—they were enthralled at the sight of eagles eating dead baby chicks fished out of the handlers pockets). There was, however, one American tourist family who made my skin crawl. The couple was probably in their mid-thirties, and they had three children, two elementary-aged boys and a girl who was probably around 3. They just let the girl WANDER all over the arena, even when everyone (including the presenter) was asking who she belonged to. The parents were so vague that they never even LOOKED at the child when all of this was going on. During one period when the presenter was appealing to the audience for someone to PLEASE get her to sit down, James even tried to get the child to sit down by us—the mother didn’t even look up when a strange man asked her 3-year-old daughter to come sit by him. It was astonishing and appalling. I saw the family many times later when touring the castle museum and it was all I could do to contain my disgust.
BUT the castle museum was very entertaining. The former lord/knight/whoever it was had had a library of over 3,000 volumes—we could only look at it through a little window, but just the sight of all of the maps was exciting. James saw a fighting book on display that he’d never heard of before and took pictures of all the displayed pages and provenance information.
We left the castle at around 5 and drove back to Heidelberg along the Neckar river, through myriad fields of wheat, lettuce, and, oddly, corn. )What’s with all the corn in Germany? I certainly never saw it on any menus or for sale in any grocery stores or markets. Are they making ethanol?) We thought about stopping for a bit in Hirschorn, one of the places the boat tours are supposed to go, but once we got there we couldn’t figure out how to get up to the castle, so we just skipped it. We ate dinner at a cheap Indian place near our hotel, found an Internet café to check our email, and then collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
Photos: Heidelberg
Our first stop was an hour’s highway drive away. Bad Wimpfen sounds cute in the guidebook description, but nothing can prepare one for the utter Grimm’s Fairy Tales-ness of it all. I kept expecting to find the Bremen Town Musicians around a corner or to discover the Rathaus staffed by talking rats in little bowties. We left the guidebook in the car, so we were a bit at a loss for finding things. We followed a steeple down many winding cobbled streets until we found the city church. The church was beautiful, and gorgeously gothic on the outside, but somehow it was grim rather than Grimm. In the courtyard there was a 16th century statuary group of the crucifixion (marking a burgomeister’s family tomb) and just theway it was carved made on think that the sculptor was the sort of person to believe that the plague was a visitation on the population for the people’s sins.
The church was not open for visitors (another thing my guidebook lies about) so we just peered through the inner glass doors, then moved on to the Blue Tower, an edifice that used to be part of the old town walls. The spiral staircase inside wasn’t as narrow as the one in the Heiligeistkirch, so I managed to make it all the way to the top. This tower actually has a real live tower keeper, a pretty, dumpling-like woman who lives in a little apartment at the top of the tower and charges 1 euro for entrance to the surrounding walkway. Appropriately, for a dumpling, her name is Blanca Knodel.
After the blue tower we drifted through the Steinhaus, a former castle building (where the women lived, predominantly) that is now a history museum with lovely wall paintings, the red tower (which was overrun by children on a school trip) and a random catholic church, that was extremely Baroque. (I really think that I would find such places distracting if I tried to attend a religious service there. How could one think about anything but the life-sized marble statues of avenging angels? They kind of noticeable.
At around 1:00 we left Bad Wimpfen, Grimmed-out, and drove to Burg Gutenberg, a castle that not only has a museum of its own fascinating history, but also has a raptor rescue and education sanctuary. We ate lunch in the picnic area, surrounded by three classes worth of screaming, lunching 11-year-olds, also on a school trip. Our lunch was delicious, but it could have been a little quieter.
We toured the raptor enclosures, cooing at all the birds (especially the owls) and then watched a flight demonstration/show given by three of the resident bird handlers. It was very entertaining, even in a language I didn’t understand (though 1 1/2 hours was a rather long time to spend poking James for translations) and the school children were quiet and much better behaved (naturally—they were enthralled at the sight of eagles eating dead baby chicks fished out of the handlers pockets). There was, however, one American tourist family who made my skin crawl. The couple was probably in their mid-thirties, and they had three children, two elementary-aged boys and a girl who was probably around 3. They just let the girl WANDER all over the arena, even when everyone (including the presenter) was asking who she belonged to. The parents were so vague that they never even LOOKED at the child when all of this was going on. During one period when the presenter was appealing to the audience for someone to PLEASE get her to sit down, James even tried to get the child to sit down by us—the mother didn’t even look up when a strange man asked her 3-year-old daughter to come sit by him. It was astonishing and appalling. I saw the family many times later when touring the castle museum and it was all I could do to contain my disgust.
BUT the castle museum was very entertaining. The former lord/knight/whoever it was had had a library of over 3,000 volumes—we could only look at it through a little window, but just the sight of all of the maps was exciting. James saw a fighting book on display that he’d never heard of before and took pictures of all the displayed pages and provenance information.
We left the castle at around 5 and drove back to Heidelberg along the Neckar river, through myriad fields of wheat, lettuce, and, oddly, corn. )What’s with all the corn in Germany? I certainly never saw it on any menus or for sale in any grocery stores or markets. Are they making ethanol?) We thought about stopping for a bit in Hirschorn, one of the places the boat tours are supposed to go, but once we got there we couldn’t figure out how to get up to the castle, so we just skipped it. We ate dinner at a cheap Indian place near our hotel, found an Internet café to check our email, and then collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
Photos: Heidelberg
We ate our last breakfast at the hotel in Heidelberg, ran out one last time to the crunchy store to get picnic lunch supplies and then hit the road. It didn’t take us long to find Schwetzingen (it’s only 6 miles from Heidelberg) but there were some fraught moments finding the Schlossgarten once we got there. (Schwetzingen, for the unaware, was the summer palace for the royalty who lived in the castle in Heidelberg, and the palace is surrounded by a massive formal Baroque garden).
The signs were very clear: “Schloss.” That only means one thing. We followed the signs into an underground parking garage, came up the pedestrian exit and found ourselves in the courtyard of an 18th century building. A small overgrown courtyard of an 18th century building. A building that was now a MALL.
“This is not it,” I said.
“Are you sure?” asked James.
“Really,” I said. “They have pictures of this place in books and I’ve seen them and this is NOT IT.”
We went back down into the parking garage and asked the attendant and she gave us some loooong and convoluted walking directions, which we followed, and after ducking and dodging and passing through the town square (which they had filled with sand and cabana tables for “Mexi-fest 2007,” of all things) we finally found ourselves in front of the gates of a massive Rococo palace.
We bought tickets for the formal gardens and for a tour of the castle, and decide to wander the main, linear part of the garden while waiting for 11:00, when the tour was to begin. It was still extremely cold and grimly overcast, but the gardens were gorgeous (I am always thrilled by intricately cut boxwood mazes; this is probably a character flaw).
Just before the tour began it started to rain again, so we were glad to get inside. As expected, the tour was in German, but the guide had descriptive handouts in various languages, so I (along with an older French couple) could still follow along with what was being said. Also, James was very good at letting me know about anything funny or off-topic the guide said.
The rooms were full of gorgeous furniture, which is what I mostly paid attention to (I knew the history of the electors from our tours of the castle and the Kurpfalsisch museum in Heidelberg). We even took an illegal picture of one of the enameled chandeliers, just because it was too gorgeous not too. (I feel very guilty about this, but at least we did it without a flash).
After the tour, we explored the gardens more, enjoying the infrequent burst of sunlight, but more often hiding under our umbrella. We discovered a fake Roman aqueduct, various temples to Greek deities, random statues, a massive fountain surrounded by an 18th century apiary filled with canaries and cockatiels, an orangerie (now filled with statuary, not oranges), lots of lakes, a decorative pseudo-mosque, and the most impressive collection of random waterfowl that I’ve ever seen outside of a nature preserve.
“Look, there’s a heron!”
“That is totally a statue.”
“No, really, it’s alive—look at the feather on its neck.”
“Seriously, it’s a STATUE.”
“I had this exact conversation with Libby last October and it was a real bird THEN.”
“Yeah, but—oh. Okay, it flew away. It’s alive.”
. . . . . .
“Those ducks are definitely following you.”
“No they’re not.”
“They are, they really are!”
“Attack of the psycho-alien-crumb-seeking ducks!”
. . . . . . . .
“What are those duck-like-things with the heads?”
“I don’t know, but they don’t seem to really need to breathe. How long has it been down there?”
“Maybe it was eaten by one of those MASSIVE mutant koi.”
“That koi is looking at you. No, look—it’s head is all the way out of the water! I bet it HEARD you making disparaging remarks.”
The gardens were big. By the time we’d seen the right side of them we were tired and by halfway through the left we were exhausted. We bypassed the path to the temple of Mercury (though we later saw it from afar) and recoiled in horror at the spiral staircases in side the mosque’s minarets. The mosque was stunning, but we were so tired that when we saw the ‘back in 30 minutes’ sign on the door we just threw up our hands and left, without ever finding out what the very Christian 18th century electors used it for.
We stumbled back through town, drove around a bit until we found a rather grotty park where we stopped to eat our lovely lunch (cherry tomatoes, seedless cucumbers, organic emmenthaler and some other kind of cheese, and apricots for dessert—if we’d been smart we’d have taken the picnic with us when we originally went to the gardens, but when we left the car we weren’t sure we’d ever FIND the gardens so we didn’t), then got back on the highway and drove to France.
I was already freaked out at the idea of having to speak French to actual native speakers, and the violent rainstorms on the way there didn’t help my mood. I was amused by the fact that immediately after we crossed the Rhine the air began to smell like cheese (and also by the fact that there was even MORE corn growing in all the fields, this time alternating [rarely] with sunflowers. The corn was also much more healthy than it was in Germany; it almost looked ready to harvest).
Eventually we made it to Strasbourg and after a tense 20 minutes of trying to find our hotel on the micro-thin, twisting, one-way streets of the island (without anything like a decent map) we arrived at the very cute Hotel Gutenberg, unpacked and could relax. Not that we did relax. We changed our shoes and immediately began walking around the island, trying to find the things we’d be seeing the following day. I always find it easier to walk than to stand still (though sitting down is easier than either, obviously), so I walked poor James nearly into the ground before he managed to object. We found the cathedral (not hard, it being the tallest building in the entire city, let alone the medieval quarter), two other medieval churches, all the museums but one, a couple of boulangeries, and all the restaurants I wanted to eat at (including La Cloche au Fromage, a restaurant devoted entirely to cheese, which I’d been looking forward to for 6 months).
We ate that night’s dinner at Maison Kammerzal, an age-old restaurant in a 16th century half-timber house. James had steak tartare and I had choucroute with confit de canard and huge thick slices of bacon. The meal was fantastic and our waiter was great and we could hear an amazing street musician (an operatic counter-tenor with a voice so pure that it could have been a woman’s, singing a duet with himself, low voice on one part, high voice on the other). Unfortunately, we had to deal with a nearby table of obnoxious Texans, eating well-done steak and talking at the tops of their lungs about how uncivilized France was for having duck and raw meat on the menu in restaurants and how terrible their hotel rooms were for not having American television.
Our hotel room was very nice, and looked out onto part of the narrow street across the island and part of the Place Gutenberg, a big cobblestoned square with a statue of Gutenberg in it. The one quibble we had about the room was that it was definitely not sound-proof. The streets of the island are very narrow, and the stone buildings are very tall, and thus each street is like a little canyon—anything said at ground level echoes and reverberates right up to the top. Also, the cathedral bells (located one block away—we could see the top half of the facade from our balcony) chimed every 15 minutes (though they stopped between midnight at 6 am). These noises turned out to be nothing compared to the fact that the bars close at 3:30 in the morning, thus filling the streets with drunk, shrieking tourists. Luckily, even though we were awakened every night by macho shouting matches and wailing multi-voiced songs in foreign languages, we were able to go immediately back to sleep.
Photos: Heidelberg and Strasbourg
The signs were very clear: “Schloss.” That only means one thing. We followed the signs into an underground parking garage, came up the pedestrian exit and found ourselves in the courtyard of an 18th century building. A small overgrown courtyard of an 18th century building. A building that was now a MALL.
“This is not it,” I said.
“Are you sure?” asked James.
“Really,” I said. “They have pictures of this place in books and I’ve seen them and this is NOT IT.”
We went back down into the parking garage and asked the attendant and she gave us some loooong and convoluted walking directions, which we followed, and after ducking and dodging and passing through the town square (which they had filled with sand and cabana tables for “Mexi-fest 2007,” of all things) we finally found ourselves in front of the gates of a massive Rococo palace.
We bought tickets for the formal gardens and for a tour of the castle, and decide to wander the main, linear part of the garden while waiting for 11:00, when the tour was to begin. It was still extremely cold and grimly overcast, but the gardens were gorgeous (I am always thrilled by intricately cut boxwood mazes; this is probably a character flaw).
Just before the tour began it started to rain again, so we were glad to get inside. As expected, the tour was in German, but the guide had descriptive handouts in various languages, so I (along with an older French couple) could still follow along with what was being said. Also, James was very good at letting me know about anything funny or off-topic the guide said.
The rooms were full of gorgeous furniture, which is what I mostly paid attention to (I knew the history of the electors from our tours of the castle and the Kurpfalsisch museum in Heidelberg). We even took an illegal picture of one of the enameled chandeliers, just because it was too gorgeous not too. (I feel very guilty about this, but at least we did it without a flash).
After the tour, we explored the gardens more, enjoying the infrequent burst of sunlight, but more often hiding under our umbrella. We discovered a fake Roman aqueduct, various temples to Greek deities, random statues, a massive fountain surrounded by an 18th century apiary filled with canaries and cockatiels, an orangerie (now filled with statuary, not oranges), lots of lakes, a decorative pseudo-mosque, and the most impressive collection of random waterfowl that I’ve ever seen outside of a nature preserve.
“Look, there’s a heron!”
“That is totally a statue.”
“No, really, it’s alive—look at the feather on its neck.”
“Seriously, it’s a STATUE.”
“I had this exact conversation with Libby last October and it was a real bird THEN.”
“Yeah, but—oh. Okay, it flew away. It’s alive.”
. . . . . .
“Those ducks are definitely following you.”
“No they’re not.”
“They are, they really are!”
“Attack of the psycho-alien-crumb-seeking ducks!”
. . . . . . . .
“What are those duck-like-things with the heads?”
“I don’t know, but they don’t seem to really need to breathe. How long has it been down there?”
“Maybe it was eaten by one of those MASSIVE mutant koi.”
“That koi is looking at you. No, look—it’s head is all the way out of the water! I bet it HEARD you making disparaging remarks.”
The gardens were big. By the time we’d seen the right side of them we were tired and by halfway through the left we were exhausted. We bypassed the path to the temple of Mercury (though we later saw it from afar) and recoiled in horror at the spiral staircases in side the mosque’s minarets. The mosque was stunning, but we were so tired that when we saw the ‘back in 30 minutes’ sign on the door we just threw up our hands and left, without ever finding out what the very Christian 18th century electors used it for.
We stumbled back through town, drove around a bit until we found a rather grotty park where we stopped to eat our lovely lunch (cherry tomatoes, seedless cucumbers, organic emmenthaler and some other kind of cheese, and apricots for dessert—if we’d been smart we’d have taken the picnic with us when we originally went to the gardens, but when we left the car we weren’t sure we’d ever FIND the gardens so we didn’t), then got back on the highway and drove to France.
I was already freaked out at the idea of having to speak French to actual native speakers, and the violent rainstorms on the way there didn’t help my mood. I was amused by the fact that immediately after we crossed the Rhine the air began to smell like cheese (and also by the fact that there was even MORE corn growing in all the fields, this time alternating [rarely] with sunflowers. The corn was also much more healthy than it was in Germany; it almost looked ready to harvest).
Eventually we made it to Strasbourg and after a tense 20 minutes of trying to find our hotel on the micro-thin, twisting, one-way streets of the island (without anything like a decent map) we arrived at the very cute Hotel Gutenberg, unpacked and could relax. Not that we did relax. We changed our shoes and immediately began walking around the island, trying to find the things we’d be seeing the following day. I always find it easier to walk than to stand still (though sitting down is easier than either, obviously), so I walked poor James nearly into the ground before he managed to object. We found the cathedral (not hard, it being the tallest building in the entire city, let alone the medieval quarter), two other medieval churches, all the museums but one, a couple of boulangeries, and all the restaurants I wanted to eat at (including La Cloche au Fromage, a restaurant devoted entirely to cheese, which I’d been looking forward to for 6 months).
We ate that night’s dinner at Maison Kammerzal, an age-old restaurant in a 16th century half-timber house. James had steak tartare and I had choucroute with confit de canard and huge thick slices of bacon. The meal was fantastic and our waiter was great and we could hear an amazing street musician (an operatic counter-tenor with a voice so pure that it could have been a woman’s, singing a duet with himself, low voice on one part, high voice on the other). Unfortunately, we had to deal with a nearby table of obnoxious Texans, eating well-done steak and talking at the tops of their lungs about how uncivilized France was for having duck and raw meat on the menu in restaurants and how terrible their hotel rooms were for not having American television.
Our hotel room was very nice, and looked out onto part of the narrow street across the island and part of the Place Gutenberg, a big cobblestoned square with a statue of Gutenberg in it. The one quibble we had about the room was that it was definitely not sound-proof. The streets of the island are very narrow, and the stone buildings are very tall, and thus each street is like a little canyon—anything said at ground level echoes and reverberates right up to the top. Also, the cathedral bells (located one block away—we could see the top half of the facade from our balcony) chimed every 15 minutes (though they stopped between midnight at 6 am). These noises turned out to be nothing compared to the fact that the bars close at 3:30 in the morning, thus filling the streets with drunk, shrieking tourists. Luckily, even though we were awakened every night by macho shouting matches and wailing multi-voiced songs in foreign languages, we were able to go immediately back to sleep.
Photos: Heidelberg and Strasbourg
This morning started out very well, with the discovery that there would be plenty to eat at breakfast (what with the French having a reputation for eating nothing but coffee and croissants, if anything, at breakfast, we’d been a little worried). The fruit was a little elderly, but the fromage blanc is everything I’ve been trying to achieve when I make it myself, and they other cheeses were lovely as well (though cambazola is a bit much at breakfast, in my opinion).
After breakfast we went immediately to the cathedral, which was mightily impressive. I don’t know if it’s bigger than York cathedral (which was, until this trip, the most monumental, if minimalist, cathedral I’d ever seen), but the stone of the cathedral in Strasbourg is very dark, unlike the almost-white of York, which makes a big difference. Also, I don’t know if it was just my glasses, but all the interior lights had a kind of a halo around them. (James says that they did, even without glasses—maybe it was the ambient Dust of Centuries floating through the air). There isn’t much that can be said about the place without exhausting all of my adjectives.
The next thing we wanted to do in the cathedral was see the enormous clock with its moving figures, but that wouldn’t happen until 12:30 and it was only 10. To while away the wait, we went over to the Musee de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame, which is in a gorgeous medieval house (14th-16th century stone and wood, about 3-4 floors, with at least 3 courtyards and one exterior herber) and has religious statuary, paintings and stained glass from the Romanesque through the almost-Baroque periods. The Romanesque stuff in particular was really interesting and I could mostly translate the French on the descriptive signs. Also interesting were all of the statues rescued from the outside of the church (I think the façade is mostly reconstruction at this point)—virtues spearing vices, wise and foolish virgins, dogs, kings, angels, things with Hebrew inscriptions, etc. One of the neatest things was a medieval tapestry (laid out in a display case in the floor so that it doesn’t have to hang anymore) showing the life of St. Odile, the patron saint of Alsace. Saint’s lives are usually fascinatingly overwrought, and this one was no different. She was born blind, and sent off to a convent by her father, who wanted nothing to do with her. When she was baptized in adolescence her sight came back, so her brother brought her back home. Her father, who was a king (aren’t they almost always, in these stories?) was furious and killed her brother, but then repented and let Odile build a convent. And all of that was before she was even 16—she lived until she was insanely old and managed to get some nieces who were also saintly enough to be Saints (did she have another sibling? Did her brother procreate before his death?). I think there was also something about a bear.
At noon we went back over to the cathedral to watch the 20 minute film on the clock (mandatory if one wants to watch the actual clock chime the hour). The film was in French, German and English, but not as direct translations of a set text. The languages kind of tag-teamed through the narrative, making sure that everyone missed some essential sentence. Of course, the narrative was very new-agey and ‘spirituallllll,’ so I wasn’t too bereft. At 12:30 we got to watch the clock chime and the figures move. There are many moving wheels with figures on them—all of the apostles pass, turn and bow to Jesus, who makes the sign of the cross with his hand for all of them, and then for All The World (according to the film), while a rooster crows three times in the background. There are also cherubs ringing bells and turning hourglasses, a differently-aged figure to represent each quarter of an hour, Death (of course) ringing a bell with a giant femur bone, and various Greek gods in chariots with inscriptions identifying them with days of the week. Venus/Vendredi was at the forefront that day.
The clock display only lasted for about 7 minutes (and no one ever explained why it was at 12:30 instead of at the top of the hour) so upon exiting the church it was still vaguely the noon hour, and we went immediately to lunch. We went to Strissel, a winstub a block away (that has been in business, though under manymany different owners, since the 1600s). It was very European in that since there were only two of us, and so as not to take up too much room, we were seated at a table with another person. I got a place of dressed crudités and another platter of a salat mixt, which is a very Alsatian salad of meat and cheese in dressing, with only a leaf of lettuce and maybe a piece of tomato to garnish it. Both dishes were excellent, though I discovered that I do NOT like vegetables dressed with heavy cream, as two of the vegetables on the crudite plate were (not even when they’re cucumbers and celery root, two of my favorites). James got a tarte flambee (a thinthinthin pizza-like crust crust covered with cream cheese, cream and grated hard cheese) au truffle, which we thought would mean just truffle oil, but turned out to mean actual slices of truffle. He loved it, and almost licked the serving board clean (and then ate my cream-covered vegetables).
We ran back to the hotel room for ore camera batteries and then headed to the Palais Rohan, which is three museums in one buildling, The Palais, a baroque palace that was one the home of Strasbourg’s prince-bishops and eventually became one of Napoleon’s residences, has an archaeology museum in the basement, a fine art museum on the upper floor and a museum of the prince-bishop’s furniture and local decorative arts on the ground floor..
The archaeology museum had English translations on their signs! I was very happy. Even though I kind of know French and am pretty familiar with archaeology, I can’t necessarily mesh the two in my mind. Anyway, it was neat to learn about area-specific funeral rites and burials goods (the reconstructed burial cart—verrry interesting).
The museum of fine art on the top floor was outstanding. I don’t think there was s single painting (from 1400-1870) that wasn’t first-rate. Raphael, Botticelli, El Greco, Watteau, Goya, Giotto, Delacroix, Rubens, etc. It got to be rather overwhelming for the art center of my brain (and also my feet, legs, knees, hips and ankles were exhausted) so I sat down in almost every room to look at the paintings. My favorite painting was a still life of a bowl of fruit with a mouse surprised drinking out of a teaspoon.
The museum of decorative arts was nice, but we were so tired that I don’t think we paid as close attention as we ought to have. The prince-bishop’s furniture was very nice and the room with all of the bits of the OLD cathedral clock (that is, the one before they built the present one in the 1600’s) was very cool. There was even a room of wind-up toys donated by the artist Tomi Ungerer (who also does children’s books), who is apparently a local. (Come to think of it, the clock-maker who made the present cathedral clock was also an Ungerer. I wonder if they’re related).
We were too tired for another museum, so what did we do instead? Climb to the top of the cathedral platform, of course. Good grief, I nearly died. It was so narrow and so steep and it went on forever and I got dizzy and overheated and my heart was pounding and it probably took me 20 minutes to climb and 10 to recover. I didn’t even enjoy the view and the time up there because I had such a terrible stomachache and a stress headache. It took me another 20 minutes to carefully inch my way down again, and then all we could do is go back to the hotel and collapse. (James was very patient with me throughout all of this. Every time I had to stop on the stairs, he was comforting, and spent the time taking pictures while I recovered. The stairs were very open to the elements, so there were plenty of good views).
I’d been feeling a little sick to my stomach ever since lunch, and the stress of climbing the tower made it much worse. I almost begged off of dinner, but we had reservations at La Cloche au Fromage, and I’d been looking forward to eating there since I discovered the place online in December. I definitely had to go, even though it had started to rain again. There was a small mix-up about our reservation, but it was a fabulous meal and I’m so glad that I didn’t stay in the hotel. We both ordered from the selection of prix-fixe 3-course menus. James had a fondue (with a choice of about 12 different breads, from a rack near the door), a beef dish gratined with Comte, and a flourless chocolate cake with rhubarb ice cream for dessert. I had a salad with fresh mozzarella and feta, then a sample plate of 10 different kinds of cheese, and then a crème brulee. (I, obviously, didn’t eat the crème brulee—James got both desserts, which he didn’t mind at all).
None of the cheese on my plate were particularly challenging, but they were all very good, and one stood out in particular: a brie-like cheese crusted with dried sage. The sage was very strong and aromatic and the flavors went together very well. I really want to try fudging something like this together in my own kitchen, possibly by horizontally-slicing a brie, adding fresh and dried sage (to achieve the pungency of their dried) to the open middle and then closing it back up again and letting it sit in the refrigerator for a few days. We also noticed several people eating raclette melted over potatoes and prosciutto, which made us remember our new wedding present—the raclette grill! We cannot WAIT to use that thing.
It took them over half an hour to bring us our check, but we didn’t mind at all. During that time we made friends with the couple at the table next to us, Quebecois, over the hilarious introduction one of the waiters gave to another tables cheese platters. Thank goodness James was there to hold up the conversation and be jovial; even though the couple spoke English perfectly, I don’t think I have it in me to be companionable with people I’ve never met.
Dinner restored my equilibrium somewhat, and the rain stopped just as we left the restaurant. It was a lovely coda to the day.
Photos: Strasbourg
After breakfast we went immediately to the cathedral, which was mightily impressive. I don’t know if it’s bigger than York cathedral (which was, until this trip, the most monumental, if minimalist, cathedral I’d ever seen), but the stone of the cathedral in Strasbourg is very dark, unlike the almost-white of York, which makes a big difference. Also, I don’t know if it was just my glasses, but all the interior lights had a kind of a halo around them. (James says that they did, even without glasses—maybe it was the ambient Dust of Centuries floating through the air). There isn’t much that can be said about the place without exhausting all of my adjectives.
The next thing we wanted to do in the cathedral was see the enormous clock with its moving figures, but that wouldn’t happen until 12:30 and it was only 10. To while away the wait, we went over to the Musee de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame, which is in a gorgeous medieval house (14th-16th century stone and wood, about 3-4 floors, with at least 3 courtyards and one exterior herber) and has religious statuary, paintings and stained glass from the Romanesque through the almost-Baroque periods. The Romanesque stuff in particular was really interesting and I could mostly translate the French on the descriptive signs. Also interesting were all of the statues rescued from the outside of the church (I think the façade is mostly reconstruction at this point)—virtues spearing vices, wise and foolish virgins, dogs, kings, angels, things with Hebrew inscriptions, etc. One of the neatest things was a medieval tapestry (laid out in a display case in the floor so that it doesn’t have to hang anymore) showing the life of St. Odile, the patron saint of Alsace. Saint’s lives are usually fascinatingly overwrought, and this one was no different. She was born blind, and sent off to a convent by her father, who wanted nothing to do with her. When she was baptized in adolescence her sight came back, so her brother brought her back home. Her father, who was a king (aren’t they almost always, in these stories?) was furious and killed her brother, but then repented and let Odile build a convent. And all of that was before she was even 16—she lived until she was insanely old and managed to get some nieces who were also saintly enough to be Saints (did she have another sibling? Did her brother procreate before his death?). I think there was also something about a bear.
At noon we went back over to the cathedral to watch the 20 minute film on the clock (mandatory if one wants to watch the actual clock chime the hour). The film was in French, German and English, but not as direct translations of a set text. The languages kind of tag-teamed through the narrative, making sure that everyone missed some essential sentence. Of course, the narrative was very new-agey and ‘spirituallllll,’ so I wasn’t too bereft. At 12:30 we got to watch the clock chime and the figures move. There are many moving wheels with figures on them—all of the apostles pass, turn and bow to Jesus, who makes the sign of the cross with his hand for all of them, and then for All The World (according to the film), while a rooster crows three times in the background. There are also cherubs ringing bells and turning hourglasses, a differently-aged figure to represent each quarter of an hour, Death (of course) ringing a bell with a giant femur bone, and various Greek gods in chariots with inscriptions identifying them with days of the week. Venus/Vendredi was at the forefront that day.
The clock display only lasted for about 7 minutes (and no one ever explained why it was at 12:30 instead of at the top of the hour) so upon exiting the church it was still vaguely the noon hour, and we went immediately to lunch. We went to Strissel, a winstub a block away (that has been in business, though under manymany different owners, since the 1600s). It was very European in that since there were only two of us, and so as not to take up too much room, we were seated at a table with another person. I got a place of dressed crudités and another platter of a salat mixt, which is a very Alsatian salad of meat and cheese in dressing, with only a leaf of lettuce and maybe a piece of tomato to garnish it. Both dishes were excellent, though I discovered that I do NOT like vegetables dressed with heavy cream, as two of the vegetables on the crudite plate were (not even when they’re cucumbers and celery root, two of my favorites). James got a tarte flambee (a thinthinthin pizza-like crust crust covered with cream cheese, cream and grated hard cheese) au truffle, which we thought would mean just truffle oil, but turned out to mean actual slices of truffle. He loved it, and almost licked the serving board clean (and then ate my cream-covered vegetables).
We ran back to the hotel room for ore camera batteries and then headed to the Palais Rohan, which is three museums in one buildling, The Palais, a baroque palace that was one the home of Strasbourg’s prince-bishops and eventually became one of Napoleon’s residences, has an archaeology museum in the basement, a fine art museum on the upper floor and a museum of the prince-bishop’s furniture and local decorative arts on the ground floor..
The archaeology museum had English translations on their signs! I was very happy. Even though I kind of know French and am pretty familiar with archaeology, I can’t necessarily mesh the two in my mind. Anyway, it was neat to learn about area-specific funeral rites and burials goods (the reconstructed burial cart—verrry interesting).
The museum of fine art on the top floor was outstanding. I don’t think there was s single painting (from 1400-1870) that wasn’t first-rate. Raphael, Botticelli, El Greco, Watteau, Goya, Giotto, Delacroix, Rubens, etc. It got to be rather overwhelming for the art center of my brain (and also my feet, legs, knees, hips and ankles were exhausted) so I sat down in almost every room to look at the paintings. My favorite painting was a still life of a bowl of fruit with a mouse surprised drinking out of a teaspoon.
The museum of decorative arts was nice, but we were so tired that I don’t think we paid as close attention as we ought to have. The prince-bishop’s furniture was very nice and the room with all of the bits of the OLD cathedral clock (that is, the one before they built the present one in the 1600’s) was very cool. There was even a room of wind-up toys donated by the artist Tomi Ungerer (who also does children’s books), who is apparently a local. (Come to think of it, the clock-maker who made the present cathedral clock was also an Ungerer. I wonder if they’re related).
We were too tired for another museum, so what did we do instead? Climb to the top of the cathedral platform, of course. Good grief, I nearly died. It was so narrow and so steep and it went on forever and I got dizzy and overheated and my heart was pounding and it probably took me 20 minutes to climb and 10 to recover. I didn’t even enjoy the view and the time up there because I had such a terrible stomachache and a stress headache. It took me another 20 minutes to carefully inch my way down again, and then all we could do is go back to the hotel and collapse. (James was very patient with me throughout all of this. Every time I had to stop on the stairs, he was comforting, and spent the time taking pictures while I recovered. The stairs were very open to the elements, so there were plenty of good views).
I’d been feeling a little sick to my stomach ever since lunch, and the stress of climbing the tower made it much worse. I almost begged off of dinner, but we had reservations at La Cloche au Fromage, and I’d been looking forward to eating there since I discovered the place online in December. I definitely had to go, even though it had started to rain again. There was a small mix-up about our reservation, but it was a fabulous meal and I’m so glad that I didn’t stay in the hotel. We both ordered from the selection of prix-fixe 3-course menus. James had a fondue (with a choice of about 12 different breads, from a rack near the door), a beef dish gratined with Comte, and a flourless chocolate cake with rhubarb ice cream for dessert. I had a salad with fresh mozzarella and feta, then a sample plate of 10 different kinds of cheese, and then a crème brulee. (I, obviously, didn’t eat the crème brulee—James got both desserts, which he didn’t mind at all).
None of the cheese on my plate were particularly challenging, but they were all very good, and one stood out in particular: a brie-like cheese crusted with dried sage. The sage was very strong and aromatic and the flavors went together very well. I really want to try fudging something like this together in my own kitchen, possibly by horizontally-slicing a brie, adding fresh and dried sage (to achieve the pungency of their dried) to the open middle and then closing it back up again and letting it sit in the refrigerator for a few days. We also noticed several people eating raclette melted over potatoes and prosciutto, which made us remember our new wedding present—the raclette grill! We cannot WAIT to use that thing.
It took them over half an hour to bring us our check, but we didn’t mind at all. During that time we made friends with the couple at the table next to us, Quebecois, over the hilarious introduction one of the waiters gave to another tables cheese platters. Thank goodness James was there to hold up the conversation and be jovial; even though the couple spoke English perfectly, I don’t think I have it in me to be companionable with people I’ve never met.
Dinner restored my equilibrium somewhat, and the rain stopped just as we left the restaurant. It was a lovely coda to the day.
Photos: Strasbourg
Today was not the best day. It started out with a meander through the book market on the square outside the hotel, which was neat. James found an antique math book, which he bought, and I found a copy of the Fierce Bad Rabbit in French (though their translation of the title is The Naughty Little Rabbit, which is very different in tone). I tried to buy it from the guy at the stall, but he said that he didn’t have change for my bill and that I should go buy a hamburger. I don’t know if this was supposed to be some kind of insult against Americans, or what, but I was pretty upset. Later in the hour we did come back with exact change, and, seeing that his assistant was in charge and that the man himself was nowhere to be seen, bought the book, but still, it was a shaking experience.
The best part of the morning was a farmer’s market near the Palais Rohan, right along the river. There were people selling produce and cheese and smoked meat and raw meat and herbs and potted foie gras and there was a fiddle/accordion band playing what Dusan and I used to call ‘Depressing French Waltzes” (they’re not really depressing, just very swoony). We agonized over what to buy—I really wanted some of the freshly cooked beets, but I didn’t know how I would carry such things around in my backpack all day. In the end we bought two meals’ worth of vegetables. Meal #1: an English cucumber, a small head of cauliflower and about 2 pints of wild blueberries. (Oh, and an interesting-looking dried sausage for James). Meal #2: A big bunch (probably at least 1 1/2 lbs of carrots) and 2 pints of strawberries. We stashed the carrots and strawberries in our hotel room, put the rest of the food in my backpack and headed out of the rest of the day. The plan was to stop at La Cloche au Fromage’s boutique retail store to get some cheese for our lunch, go through the Musee Alsacien (local history and folk art) and then drive out into the countryside for the afternoon, stopping in Obernai and Mont St. Odile.
At the cheese shop I go flustered with my French, couldn’t remember what I wanted and just went with what the shopkeeper assumed I wanted. Also, she wouldn’t sell me the amount of it that I wanted, and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not that she was unfriendly—exactly the opposite—but I just couldn’t figure out why things went the way they did. In any case, we ended up with some very nice blue Forme D’Ambert, and it went into my backpack along with the rest of the food.
At the Musee Alsacien we discovered that the hours were completely different than those in my (increasingly worthless) guidebook, and that the museum was closed. If I had known that the previous day we would have gone there, in spite of tiredness, instead of risking our lives climbing that insane tower. Grr.
A funny moment: we passed a flea market on the way to the parking garage and saw a stall obviously staffed by the SCA—lots of 20-somethings in what could only be garb (one can really tell the difference between garb, stage attire and ‘costumes’). James wanted to go ask if they were “in a play or something,” but I wouldn’t tell him how to say it. (For the record, it’s something like “Ete-vous dans un piece de theatre ou quelque-chose?”)
We got to Obernai at around noon and had a problem we’d had in Bad Wimpfen earlier in the week: the pay parking meters didn’t seem to be working, even though they indicated that the day was NOT a free-parking day. In the end, we just parked and hoped for the best. The town was very cute, though not as appallingly cute as Bad Wimpfen. There was a lot of well-preserved town wall, complete with towers, an interesting belfry, a completely-overrated-by-the-guidebook Renaissance well (seriously—had they never seen another well before?), and a very pretty church that was closed, in complete contradiction of both the guidebook and the hours posted right on the door. We walked around the churchyard and then ate our picnic in a public park across the street. I was pretty cranky, but the view of the church was nice and the wild blueberries were excellent—in fact, they kind of tasted like raisins, which I cannot explain—and we thought we could see Mont St. Odile on one of the craggy mountains to the West. (A few hours later, on the way out of town, we noticed that the doors to the church were open. We dashed, whipping our hats off as we went, and got to see the inside. I swear that I saw someone locking the door after us as we drove away).
Next we drove up to Mont St. Odile, which is on one of the highest (if not THE highest) peak of the Vosges mountain range. According to my guidebook, it’s a mysterious place with a prehistoric earthwork, a Romanesque chapel with the sarcophagus of St. Odile (who we’d learned all about at the Musee de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame the previous day), and an adjoining Gothic chapel. Umm, no. What was there was a very modern building with a hostel, a restaurant and an ice-cream cart, two extremely old buildings with mosaics that were put in in the 1950’s and “made to look Byzantine.” Yeeeahh. They did look Byzantine in style, but they were also obviously really modern. And the big church on the site was completely early 20th century and even though the crypt with the sepulcher is apparently open to the public, there were no signs and se we left without seeing it. Given that the website says that St. Odile’s bones are in a box “dating back to the 18th century!!” (exclamation marks from the original) when she died over 1000 years before that, we don’t begrudge the lost opportunity. Probably the crypt is full of mosaics ‘made to look Byzantine’ as well. Oh well; at least we got a good view. The mountains were beautiful and we could see all the way to Germany (and, closer at hand, pick out the spire on the cathedral in Strasbourg). The drive up was also beautiful, but terrifying and treacherous—all hairpin turns and barely-more-than-one-lane-ness and extreme (if thickly wooded) drop-offs. Ugh. As James said, “I am not a mountain person. Hills are great, but not anything you can fall OFF of.” The road down the mountain (a different one) was much more reasonable.
We got back to Strasbourg at about 4:30, only to discover that our parking garage was full and that all the others we could find would be closed on Sunday—that is, they’d all be locked and we wouldn’t be able to get our car out, or worse, the car would have been towed. (Me, as we entered a parking garage: “Hey, doesn’t that say “Closed on Sunday”?” James: “Um, you’re the one who speaks French, remember.”) Eventually we did find a 24/7 garage, but it was a LONG way from the hotel, and in a huge, noisy, trashy mall, and on the walk back we got caught in a square where every car was honking and people were shouting and there was too much going on! Overwhelming over-stimulation! I put my head down and plowed across the island until we reached our hotel, where we collapsed for about half an hour.
We had been planning to go out for dinner and to then have a picnic lunch the following day, but we were so tired that we didn’t want to interact much with other people and we didn’t know where to go even if we did. Instead we ran over to La Cloche au Fromage’s shop again and bought two kinds of cheese to go with the carrots and strawberries from the farmer’s market. We got some of the sage-coated brie-ish thing (though again, I couldn’t convince them to sell me as much of it as I wanted) and some chevre with rosemary blossoms in the top: the sage cheese for the carrots and the chevre for the strawberries. Both were excellent combinations.
While we were eating a rather bizarre thing happened. We began to hear the faraway sound of drums and looked out the window in time to notice a drum corps marching across the far side of the Place Gutenberg, behind the carousel. For the next 15 minutes we heard the drums getting father away, then nearer, then farther, then nearer, etc, until they finally sounded so near that we got up to look out again and discovered the group marching out of the side street next to our hotel. Much to James’s excitement, they passed right under our window, where he could take lots of pictures.
The much touted summer illumination of the cathedral (which started on this night) appeared to consist entirely of shining a big white spotlight on the façade. This was pretty, but given that the ambient light of the city kept the thing out of shadow most nights anyway, this didn’t seem worth the all-over-town hype, and definitely not worth leaving the hotel to go look at it up close. As previously mentioned, our room had a view of the upper part of the façade anyway, so we got a good view of the illumination.
Photos: Alsace
The best part of the morning was a farmer’s market near the Palais Rohan, right along the river. There were people selling produce and cheese and smoked meat and raw meat and herbs and potted foie gras and there was a fiddle/accordion band playing what Dusan and I used to call ‘Depressing French Waltzes” (they’re not really depressing, just very swoony). We agonized over what to buy—I really wanted some of the freshly cooked beets, but I didn’t know how I would carry such things around in my backpack all day. In the end we bought two meals’ worth of vegetables. Meal #1: an English cucumber, a small head of cauliflower and about 2 pints of wild blueberries. (Oh, and an interesting-looking dried sausage for James). Meal #2: A big bunch (probably at least 1 1/2 lbs of carrots) and 2 pints of strawberries. We stashed the carrots and strawberries in our hotel room, put the rest of the food in my backpack and headed out of the rest of the day. The plan was to stop at La Cloche au Fromage’s boutique retail store to get some cheese for our lunch, go through the Musee Alsacien (local history and folk art) and then drive out into the countryside for the afternoon, stopping in Obernai and Mont St. Odile.
At the cheese shop I go flustered with my French, couldn’t remember what I wanted and just went with what the shopkeeper assumed I wanted. Also, she wouldn’t sell me the amount of it that I wanted, and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not that she was unfriendly—exactly the opposite—but I just couldn’t figure out why things went the way they did. In any case, we ended up with some very nice blue Forme D’Ambert, and it went into my backpack along with the rest of the food.
At the Musee Alsacien we discovered that the hours were completely different than those in my (increasingly worthless) guidebook, and that the museum was closed. If I had known that the previous day we would have gone there, in spite of tiredness, instead of risking our lives climbing that insane tower. Grr.
A funny moment: we passed a flea market on the way to the parking garage and saw a stall obviously staffed by the SCA—lots of 20-somethings in what could only be garb (one can really tell the difference between garb, stage attire and ‘costumes’). James wanted to go ask if they were “in a play or something,” but I wouldn’t tell him how to say it. (For the record, it’s something like “Ete-vous dans un piece de theatre ou quelque-chose?”)
We got to Obernai at around noon and had a problem we’d had in Bad Wimpfen earlier in the week: the pay parking meters didn’t seem to be working, even though they indicated that the day was NOT a free-parking day. In the end, we just parked and hoped for the best. The town was very cute, though not as appallingly cute as Bad Wimpfen. There was a lot of well-preserved town wall, complete with towers, an interesting belfry, a completely-overrated-by-the-guidebook Renaissance well (seriously—had they never seen another well before?), and a very pretty church that was closed, in complete contradiction of both the guidebook and the hours posted right on the door. We walked around the churchyard and then ate our picnic in a public park across the street. I was pretty cranky, but the view of the church was nice and the wild blueberries were excellent—in fact, they kind of tasted like raisins, which I cannot explain—and we thought we could see Mont St. Odile on one of the craggy mountains to the West. (A few hours later, on the way out of town, we noticed that the doors to the church were open. We dashed, whipping our hats off as we went, and got to see the inside. I swear that I saw someone locking the door after us as we drove away).
Next we drove up to Mont St. Odile, which is on one of the highest (if not THE highest) peak of the Vosges mountain range. According to my guidebook, it’s a mysterious place with a prehistoric earthwork, a Romanesque chapel with the sarcophagus of St. Odile (who we’d learned all about at the Musee de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame the previous day), and an adjoining Gothic chapel. Umm, no. What was there was a very modern building with a hostel, a restaurant and an ice-cream cart, two extremely old buildings with mosaics that were put in in the 1950’s and “made to look Byzantine.” Yeeeahh. They did look Byzantine in style, but they were also obviously really modern. And the big church on the site was completely early 20th century and even though the crypt with the sepulcher is apparently open to the public, there were no signs and se we left without seeing it. Given that the website says that St. Odile’s bones are in a box “dating back to the 18th century!!” (exclamation marks from the original) when she died over 1000 years before that, we don’t begrudge the lost opportunity. Probably the crypt is full of mosaics ‘made to look Byzantine’ as well. Oh well; at least we got a good view. The mountains were beautiful and we could see all the way to Germany (and, closer at hand, pick out the spire on the cathedral in Strasbourg). The drive up was also beautiful, but terrifying and treacherous—all hairpin turns and barely-more-than-one-lane-ness and extreme (if thickly wooded) drop-offs. Ugh. As James said, “I am not a mountain person. Hills are great, but not anything you can fall OFF of.” The road down the mountain (a different one) was much more reasonable.
We got back to Strasbourg at about 4:30, only to discover that our parking garage was full and that all the others we could find would be closed on Sunday—that is, they’d all be locked and we wouldn’t be able to get our car out, or worse, the car would have been towed. (Me, as we entered a parking garage: “Hey, doesn’t that say “Closed on Sunday”?” James: “Um, you’re the one who speaks French, remember.”) Eventually we did find a 24/7 garage, but it was a LONG way from the hotel, and in a huge, noisy, trashy mall, and on the walk back we got caught in a square where every car was honking and people were shouting and there was too much going on! Overwhelming over-stimulation! I put my head down and plowed across the island until we reached our hotel, where we collapsed for about half an hour.
We had been planning to go out for dinner and to then have a picnic lunch the following day, but we were so tired that we didn’t want to interact much with other people and we didn’t know where to go even if we did. Instead we ran over to La Cloche au Fromage’s shop again and bought two kinds of cheese to go with the carrots and strawberries from the farmer’s market. We got some of the sage-coated brie-ish thing (though again, I couldn’t convince them to sell me as much of it as I wanted) and some chevre with rosemary blossoms in the top: the sage cheese for the carrots and the chevre for the strawberries. Both were excellent combinations.
While we were eating a rather bizarre thing happened. We began to hear the faraway sound of drums and looked out the window in time to notice a drum corps marching across the far side of the Place Gutenberg, behind the carousel. For the next 15 minutes we heard the drums getting father away, then nearer, then farther, then nearer, etc, until they finally sounded so near that we got up to look out again and discovered the group marching out of the side street next to our hotel. Much to James’s excitement, they passed right under our window, where he could take lots of pictures.
The much touted summer illumination of the cathedral (which started on this night) appeared to consist entirely of shining a big white spotlight on the façade. This was pretty, but given that the ambient light of the city kept the thing out of shadow most nights anyway, this didn’t seem worth the all-over-town hype, and definitely not worth leaving the hotel to go look at it up close. As previously mentioned, our room had a view of the upper part of the façade anyway, so we got a good view of the illumination.
Photos: Alsace
We left the hotel after breakfast (and a bit of a mix-up about the hotel thinking we’d made phone calls when we hadn’t even been in our room) and got on the road to Selestat, a town with an intriguing-sounding library of medieval manuscripts. Surprise! The Bibliotheque Humaniste had vastly different hours than the guidebook said it did. Instead of being open from 10-5, it was open from 2-5. We couldn’t give up on seeing the manuscripts entirely, though, so instead of crossing the town off our list and moving on, we decided to drive down to Colmar and do what we’d planned to do in the afternoon, and then come back to Selestat before driving back to Germany. Luckily, nothing in Alsace is really more than an hour or two from anything else, and Colmar was only a 30-minute drive from Selestat.
Colmar is an extremely confusing town and it took us a VERY long time to find both the museum we were going to and a place to park that wasn’t in another country. We made it to the Musee d’Unterlinden at about 11 and spent two hours enthralled by 14th century liturgical art, armor and weaponry, and the building itself, which was once a medieval convent and still had most of the characteristics of the original building (such as a gorgeous cloister and central garden). The religious paintings were very impressive, though I did like a smaller altarpiece better than the enormous famous one that the museum is known for. (I know that Jesus is DEAD on the cross, but did he have to be so green and splayed? I wouldn’t have been surprised if his tongue had been hanging out. Anyway). Also, there were some wonderful engravings by Durer and a painting of a woman by Holbein that I really liked. We ended up buying several postcards, both to send out and to keep, the first time we’d been tempted to do such a thing for the entire trip.
We ate lunch at a restaurant across the street from the museum—it turned out to be awful. James’s Coq au Reisling tasted like frozen pot pie and the smoked salmon on my salad tasted like cat food. I felt quite sick for about an hour afterwards, as one does when one can’t get a terrible flavor out of one’s mouth (or brain).
It started to rain on our drive back to Selestat and alternately rained and drizzled for the rest of the day. We spent about an hour in the Bibliotheque, looking at myriad medieval books once owned by Beatus Rhenatus, a humanist scholar and a friend of Erasmus. Apparently Selestat was very important during the reformation and the development of the early printing industry, so a lot of philosophical thinkers settled there, eventually donating their books to the library. The Bibliotheque also had several scale models of the entire medieval town and a couple of the churches therein—more miniatures!
After the bibliotheque we went over to see the two churches in town, St. George and St. Foy. St. Foy is very Romanesque and was built in the 12th century. It was much nicer outside than in—it’s really just a little town church, now, with programs in stacks that spill over onto the floor and bulletin boards with pinned-up children’s art projects—but, oddly when contrasted with the exterior, it also had mosaics of the signs of the Zodiac in the floor. Hmm. The church of St. George was fabulous. It was very late Romanesque outside and gothic on the inside and just exactly the right size for me—big enough to awe-inspiring, but not so big that it’s intimidating (Strasbourg cathedral is great, but much like York cathedral, with which I compared it, it’s so big inside that it feels like it could generate its own weather and human beings get kind of lost in the grand scale). St. George had wonderful wall paintings—original colors and geometric designs. This was the first time we saw anything like this on our trip (though later we saw a lot more examples) and we were so excited that our pictures didn’t come out very well.
By 4:00 we were done with Selestat, so we got in the car and left France. No more having to speak French! We drove through the forete illwild (a “forest” that was much more like a savannah—great stretches of grassland with occasional copses), around about 25 roundabouts, and over a massive and terrifying dam/bridge, thus crossing the Rhine.
The A-4 to Freiburg was uneventful, and we found our hotel pretty easily, even though it was in the fussgangerzone (yes, we could drive right up to it). Our room was the smallest we’d had yet, but it looked directly out onto the cathedral, with no buildings in between. We ate dinner at the hotel bierstube—ham and sauerkraut and a fantastic salad for me, and almond-crusted trout with cherries for James. The food was excellent, but a little pricey, so we resolved to try eat in other places for the rest of our stay in Freiburg.
Photos: Alsace and Freiburg
Colmar is an extremely confusing town and it took us a VERY long time to find both the museum we were going to and a place to park that wasn’t in another country. We made it to the Musee d’Unterlinden at about 11 and spent two hours enthralled by 14th century liturgical art, armor and weaponry, and the building itself, which was once a medieval convent and still had most of the characteristics of the original building (such as a gorgeous cloister and central garden). The religious paintings were very impressive, though I did like a smaller altarpiece better than the enormous famous one that the museum is known for. (I know that Jesus is DEAD on the cross, but did he have to be so green and splayed? I wouldn’t have been surprised if his tongue had been hanging out. Anyway). Also, there were some wonderful engravings by Durer and a painting of a woman by Holbein that I really liked. We ended up buying several postcards, both to send out and to keep, the first time we’d been tempted to do such a thing for the entire trip.
We ate lunch at a restaurant across the street from the museum—it turned out to be awful. James’s Coq au Reisling tasted like frozen pot pie and the smoked salmon on my salad tasted like cat food. I felt quite sick for about an hour afterwards, as one does when one can’t get a terrible flavor out of one’s mouth (or brain).
It started to rain on our drive back to Selestat and alternately rained and drizzled for the rest of the day. We spent about an hour in the Bibliotheque, looking at myriad medieval books once owned by Beatus Rhenatus, a humanist scholar and a friend of Erasmus. Apparently Selestat was very important during the reformation and the development of the early printing industry, so a lot of philosophical thinkers settled there, eventually donating their books to the library. The Bibliotheque also had several scale models of the entire medieval town and a couple of the churches therein—more miniatures!
After the bibliotheque we went over to see the two churches in town, St. George and St. Foy. St. Foy is very Romanesque and was built in the 12th century. It was much nicer outside than in—it’s really just a little town church, now, with programs in stacks that spill over onto the floor and bulletin boards with pinned-up children’s art projects—but, oddly when contrasted with the exterior, it also had mosaics of the signs of the Zodiac in the floor. Hmm. The church of St. George was fabulous. It was very late Romanesque outside and gothic on the inside and just exactly the right size for me—big enough to awe-inspiring, but not so big that it’s intimidating (Strasbourg cathedral is great, but much like York cathedral, with which I compared it, it’s so big inside that it feels like it could generate its own weather and human beings get kind of lost in the grand scale). St. George had wonderful wall paintings—original colors and geometric designs. This was the first time we saw anything like this on our trip (though later we saw a lot more examples) and we were so excited that our pictures didn’t come out very well.
By 4:00 we were done with Selestat, so we got in the car and left France. No more having to speak French! We drove through the forete illwild (a “forest” that was much more like a savannah—great stretches of grassland with occasional copses), around about 25 roundabouts, and over a massive and terrifying dam/bridge, thus crossing the Rhine.
The A-4 to Freiburg was uneventful, and we found our hotel pretty easily, even though it was in the fussgangerzone (yes, we could drive right up to it). Our room was the smallest we’d had yet, but it looked directly out onto the cathedral, with no buildings in between. We ate dinner at the hotel bierstube—ham and sauerkraut and a fantastic salad for me, and almond-crusted trout with cherries for James. The food was excellent, but a little pricey, so we resolved to try eat in other places for the rest of our stay in Freiburg.
Photos: Alsace and Freiburg
We started the morning with a lavish breakfast from the buffet at the hotel (probably five kinds of meat and cheese each, along with myriad fruits, a couple of kinds of sliced vegetables, multiple kinds of bread, kuchen, muesli and other cereals, manymany varieties of juice and soft-boiled eggs) then ran outside to the farmer’s market to shop for our lunch picnic. The farmer’s market here really is fantastic—the stalls set up all around the cathedral square, selling all kinds of fruits and vegetables and herbs and flowers and cheese and olives and raw meat and smoked meat and cured meat and sausages and jam and syrup and homemade liqueurs and white eggs and brown eggs and blue eggs and other things that I cannot begin to recall. James says that its better than the farmer’s market in Madison, and I have to admit—it’s a tough call. The Freiburg market doesn’t have as much variety, but everything is perfectly ripe and beautiful to look at; it doesn’t have as many stalls, but it does have a cathedral. In spite of the fact that it rained while we were walking about (of course), we had a fantastic time. We ended up buying 2 pints of cherry tomatoes, a bunch of radishes, 2 pints of gooseberries (dark pink and almost overripe, it turns out), a pint of raspberries and 2/3 pound of smoked ham. We packed this all into my backpack with a bottle of water, the sweaters and hats and trekked back to the car.
We’d planned to spend our first day in Freiburg walking around the city, but some of the museums we wanted to see are closed on Monday, so instead we decided to do our in-town site-seeing on Tuesday and on Monday drive out into the Black Forest to look for Eifelheim. Yes, Eifelheim is a fictional town made up my a science fiction author, but the book makes the town so real that it’s almost impossible to believe that it doesn’t exist. That and the author places it in a very real setting, referring to towns that do exist, so we could triangulate our way along.
In any case, first we went to Breisach, which has nothing to do with Eifelheim. Breisach is just a little town on the Rhine with a nice cathedral and a neat situation on top of a crag. We could have skipped it with no great loss, but it was fun driving through the vineyards to get there and fun looking at the huge flock of swans swimming in the Rhine.
Breisach took us very little time and soon we were back on the road, driving back through Freiburg, out the other side, and into the Black Forest. To leave Freiburg to the East, one drives through two long tunnels and emerges onto a short plain (mostly full of pick-your-own blumen fields—gladioli are apparently very popular) that ends abruptly when the road enters a thick, dark forest and the cliffs begin to climb up on either side of the road. The highway runs through the Hollental, that is “Hell Valley,” which is a veryveryVERY narrow, winding valley through overhanging claustrophobic cliffs. Now that there’s a road going through it the place is considered amazing and romantic (the crags, the lush forest, the rushing rivers), but it would have been mostly impassable for a medieval traveler, and those, after all, were the people who named it.
We stopped at a car pullout at Hirschsprung (“Stag’s Leap”), the narrowest point in the valley, where, according to legend, a stag fleeing some hunters leapt from one cliff to the other, right across the valley. Highly unlikely, but a neat story, and now there’s a statue of a stag at that point in the cliff, seen to best effect through wind, mist and rain. (Luckily, we had all three).
Once through the Hollental we drove up the mountain to Titisee, a mountain lake resort usually full of tourist buses. Because it was so rainy, though, we mostly had the place to ourselves. Additionally, we avoided the center of town (though it took a few passes through to discover that there WERE any other parts but the center) and parked looking out over the lake, which was beautiful. We ate our picnic (which was delightful both to the taste and to look at—the golden speckles on the tomatoes were enchanting) in the car, because of a rain shower, then ventured out to take a walk down a small stretch of public beach.
The rain cleared up and the buses descended, so we got back in the car and left. We turned southwest to drive to Todtnau (a village with a waterfall) and ended up driving up the side of the Feldberg, the highest mountain in the Black Forest. Most of the time there were guardrails along the side of the road, but some of the time there weren’t and we alternated shrieking about the wonderful views (capture mostly through the rain-besmirched windshield of the car) and whimpering about how terrified we were of the drop-off.
Todtnau, at least, was in a valley, so once we got there we had left the frightening bits behind. Or so I thought—Todtnau is overrun by a terrifying mutant humongous breed of slugs, thicker and longer than James’s finger (and no, I couldn’t get him to take a picture). I am not that squeamish, but they were Everywhere and Grotesque and I admit to a bit of squealing and leaping about.
Todtnau falls were a bit further down the road, though, and luckily, slug-free. Parts of the trail to the falls were closed for forestry work, but we managed to get close enough in the end, and the falls were very photogenic. (And anyone who has read guidebook descriptions, do not be deceived by their dire pronouncements about the steepness of the trail. It’s practically level—we actually saw a young couple pushing a baby stroller [complete with baby] along its wood chip-paved length). Then it was back in the car and down the rest of the mountain and onto the road where we had started, just before the Hollental. We stopped at Himmelreich, Obereich, St. Wilhelm, and drove the Hollental twice more (once in each direction) and finally figure out exactly where Eifelheim would have been. There was a traffic pullout nearby, so we left the car (in the care of The Biggest Slug Ever) and crashed through the undergrowth until we reached a path beside a stream (exactly where it was supposed to be) and stared at it for a while, remembering the book.
By this time it was 5:00, so we drove back to Freiburg, remarking the many small herds of very tail-waggy goats with floppy ears, and the one herd of cows so excited to be going in to be milked that the lead cow was actually galloping.
There was a bizarre storm squall just as we crossed the cathedral square to our hotel, so we had to change clothes before dinner, which we had across the way at Oberkirch weinstube, another historic hotel/restaurant. I had a trio of grilled meats (lamb, pork and beef) with salad and a huge dish of chantarelles roasted in butter. (I may not have gotten any foie gras while I was in the area, but I certainly indulged in chantarelles at every possible opportunity). James had sausages and lentils with spaetzel. Everything was FABulous. The evening was spent in our room, relaxing and listening someone practice the organ in the cathedral (even though it was after 9).
Photos: Black Forest
We’d planned to spend our first day in Freiburg walking around the city, but some of the museums we wanted to see are closed on Monday, so instead we decided to do our in-town site-seeing on Tuesday and on Monday drive out into the Black Forest to look for Eifelheim. Yes, Eifelheim is a fictional town made up my a science fiction author, but the book makes the town so real that it’s almost impossible to believe that it doesn’t exist. That and the author places it in a very real setting, referring to towns that do exist, so we could triangulate our way along.
In any case, first we went to Breisach, which has nothing to do with Eifelheim. Breisach is just a little town on the Rhine with a nice cathedral and a neat situation on top of a crag. We could have skipped it with no great loss, but it was fun driving through the vineyards to get there and fun looking at the huge flock of swans swimming in the Rhine.
Breisach took us very little time and soon we were back on the road, driving back through Freiburg, out the other side, and into the Black Forest. To leave Freiburg to the East, one drives through two long tunnels and emerges onto a short plain (mostly full of pick-your-own blumen fields—gladioli are apparently very popular) that ends abruptly when the road enters a thick, dark forest and the cliffs begin to climb up on either side of the road. The highway runs through the Hollental, that is “Hell Valley,” which is a veryveryVERY narrow, winding valley through overhanging claustrophobic cliffs. Now that there’s a road going through it the place is considered amazing and romantic (the crags, the lush forest, the rushing rivers), but it would have been mostly impassable for a medieval traveler, and those, after all, were the people who named it.
We stopped at a car pullout at Hirschsprung (“Stag’s Leap”), the narrowest point in the valley, where, according to legend, a stag fleeing some hunters leapt from one cliff to the other, right across the valley. Highly unlikely, but a neat story, and now there’s a statue of a stag at that point in the cliff, seen to best effect through wind, mist and rain. (Luckily, we had all three).
Once through the Hollental we drove up the mountain to Titisee, a mountain lake resort usually full of tourist buses. Because it was so rainy, though, we mostly had the place to ourselves. Additionally, we avoided the center of town (though it took a few passes through to discover that there WERE any other parts but the center) and parked looking out over the lake, which was beautiful. We ate our picnic (which was delightful both to the taste and to look at—the golden speckles on the tomatoes were enchanting) in the car, because of a rain shower, then ventured out to take a walk down a small stretch of public beach.
The rain cleared up and the buses descended, so we got back in the car and left. We turned southwest to drive to Todtnau (a village with a waterfall) and ended up driving up the side of the Feldberg, the highest mountain in the Black Forest. Most of the time there were guardrails along the side of the road, but some of the time there weren’t and we alternated shrieking about the wonderful views (capture mostly through the rain-besmirched windshield of the car) and whimpering about how terrified we were of the drop-off.
Todtnau, at least, was in a valley, so once we got there we had left the frightening bits behind. Or so I thought—Todtnau is overrun by a terrifying mutant humongous breed of slugs, thicker and longer than James’s finger (and no, I couldn’t get him to take a picture). I am not that squeamish, but they were Everywhere and Grotesque and I admit to a bit of squealing and leaping about.
Todtnau falls were a bit further down the road, though, and luckily, slug-free. Parts of the trail to the falls were closed for forestry work, but we managed to get close enough in the end, and the falls were very photogenic. (And anyone who has read guidebook descriptions, do not be deceived by their dire pronouncements about the steepness of the trail. It’s practically level—we actually saw a young couple pushing a baby stroller [complete with baby] along its wood chip-paved length). Then it was back in the car and down the rest of the mountain and onto the road where we had started, just before the Hollental. We stopped at Himmelreich, Obereich, St. Wilhelm, and drove the Hollental twice more (once in each direction) and finally figure out exactly where Eifelheim would have been. There was a traffic pullout nearby, so we left the car (in the care of The Biggest Slug Ever) and crashed through the undergrowth until we reached a path beside a stream (exactly where it was supposed to be) and stared at it for a while, remembering the book.
By this time it was 5:00, so we drove back to Freiburg, remarking the many small herds of very tail-waggy goats with floppy ears, and the one herd of cows so excited to be going in to be milked that the lead cow was actually galloping.
There was a bizarre storm squall just as we crossed the cathedral square to our hotel, so we had to change clothes before dinner, which we had across the way at Oberkirch weinstube, another historic hotel/restaurant. I had a trio of grilled meats (lamb, pork and beef) with salad and a huge dish of chantarelles roasted in butter. (I may not have gotten any foie gras while I was in the area, but I certainly indulged in chantarelles at every possible opportunity). James had sausages and lentils with spaetzel. Everything was FABulous. The evening was spent in our room, relaxing and listening someone practice the organ in the cathedral (even though it was after 9).
Photos: Black Forest
Today started out as the most beautifully sunny day we’d had yet, but turned into the rainiest. It had rained for some portion of every day we’d been in Europe, but no so hard and at such length as it did that day.
When we woke up it was warm and sunny, if windy, and we spent a wonderful time at the farmer’s market, picking out a bunch of fresh basil, garlic olives, two pints of cherry tomatoes, 2 red carrots, 6 apricots, 1/2 lb of sweet cherries, and three kinds of organic cheese (a weinkase, a sheepsmilk brie and a goat chevre crusted with pink peppercorns). We took the groceries back to our room and then set out to walk the city over.
Our first stop was the Munster/Cathedral, which was extremely cool. The cathedral started out as Romanesque chapel and over the next century or two was added onto and added onto until it became a gothic cathedral. The outside is covered in statues of saints and biblical figures, intricate flying buttresses and lots of fully-functional gargoyles—they all still spit the rain runoff down onto the square, which, given the weather, was something to watch out for. The main doorway (facing west) is nothing but statues of carved stone, all still mostly painted with their original paint. They’re also covered with fine mesh, to keep the pigeons out, which didn’t seem to obscure our pictures. The inside of the church was also gorgeous, but fascinating rather than affecting, unlike the church in Selestat. There are statues and columns all down the middle of the nave and sculptural groups on either side of the altar, one of the last supper and one of the laying out of Jesus. (We think this last used to be a reliquary, since it had a little metal door with a keyhole in Jesus’s chest). We discovered that there was a tour to take one to otherwise inaccessible parts of the cathedral at 2 pm, so we decided to come back for it.
After the cathedral, we went to the Augustiner museum, housed in a former Augustinian monastery a few blocks away. It’s supposed to be one of the best museums in the Black Forest and even more of a draw to Freiburg than the cathedral. Also, it was advertising all over town that admission was free all year, in celebration of the university’s 550th anniversary. As it turns out, the building is under MAJOR renovation and almost all of their exhibits—the original stained glass from the cathedral, the gold and silver treasures from the cathedral, etchings by students of Durer, carved altarpieces and other gothic wood carvings, were blocked off. I surmise that the REAL reason that they’re open free all year is because they couldn’t bring themselves to charge anyone for the paltry few things they still had on display. The ground floor was a shambles of wooden pallets and yellow tape, with some cathedral and museum sculptures stacked in corners. Seeing a few gargoyles up close was cool (especially the soldier one who shot the rainwater out of his gun) but I felt sorry for the statues of Merovingian kings (I think they were kings, anyway—there were few to no labels on these things) who were chopped in half at thigh-level and weren’t even stacked in the same pile with their corresponding bottom half. The upper floor was a few rooms of random 18th century furniture and some not-very-inspired paintings. (There was one of the annunciation which made both Mary and the angel Gabriel into fat, eye-rolling, bored-looking tugboats). The museum was disappointing, but at least we didn’t have to pay for it.
After we left the museum we walked some back streets until we found the Schwabentor, one of the 13th century city gates (that now has a 1910 painting of St. George on it—apparently he’s the patron saint of Freiburg). We walked back up to the Munsterplatz, stopping to gawk at Zum Roten Baren, the oldest hotel in Germany, and to look at the maroon-and-gilt painted merchant’s hall/custom house from 1530. It’s very neat, but isn’t allowed inside.
The disappointing Augustiner Museum had only taken 30 minutes, so we decided to go to the town history museum, which hadn’t really been on our agenda. It’s a nice little place with copies of the original city constitution (Freiburg being a free city made the charter and constitution a bit more complicated than usual), stained glass with local significance, the family tree of the last baron of Freiburg (before it became ‘free’), and several models of the entire city at various points in its history (the one from the 1400s was really cool—the town was built with fortifications in the shape of an 8-pointed star with a moat around the entire thing and a castle up on the mountain. The castle is completely gone, alas, since it’s been more than 500 years since there was no longer anyone to live in it), and, even better, a BIG miniature of the cathedral, halfway into being built (complete with little workmen and market-goers and things. These little models seem to be pretty common in German museums—I can hardly think of one that we went to that didn’t have at least one. Luckily I found them all completely fascinating and spent far too much time pouring over each one. The shapes of these particular ones reminded me of the game Cathedral, and how I always just wanted to arrange the pieces in pretty designs instead of actually playing the game.
When we left the town history museum (Museum fur Stadtgeschichte) it was raining, so instead of picnicking in the square, we ate in our hotel room. In spite of the fact that the red carrots turned out to be long, pointy (and painfully spicy) radishes, the meal was delicious. We wrapped the tomatoes and sheeps-milk brie in basil leaves, topped the weinkase with olives (a heretical blending of cultures, I’m sure) and spread the chevre on the apricots. That last combination was the most inspired, and the pink peppercorns had a lot to do with it—their spicy floralness sparked the chevre and blended with the apricots.
It was still raining when we finishes, so we hung around the room for a bit before running back over to the cathedral for the 2:00 tour. The tour was conducted by the Messner, the ordained official who helps the priests and bishops with their robes and pre-service needs. (The online German/English dictionary says that the title can be translated as Sacristan, but this guy seemed a little more official than that). It rapidly became apparent that the tour was going to be mostly about what this guy did himself (he spent TWENTY MINUTES on vestments, telling us things that I know just from looking at priests and ministers wearing the things) and about the religious significance of the objects in the cathedral with barely a mention of the historical or artistic significance thereof. We saw an altar with paintings by Hans Holbein and he only mentioned the painter’s name at the last minute, as an offhand thrown-in. When it became obvious that the tour wasn’t going to take us into the crypt (our secret wish) we broke away from the group and just looked at the Romanesque sculptures, archbishop’s gravestones and all the altars in the priests’ confessional chapels (arranged in a circle behind the main church altar). We snuck away entire before the tour was over, not willing to spend more than an hour being bored.
By then it was raining harder, but we still walked west to see the two Rathauses (alte and neue) and the university quarter. We took many pictures, got lost, got very wet, found another old city gate (the Martintor, presumably dedicated to St. Martin) and bought tickets to an organ concert in the Munster set for that evening. In an attempt to get out of the rain, we spent an hour in an internet café, but it was raining even harder when we left.
By the time we got back to our hotel I was wetter than ever, cranky, cold, and starting a sore throat. I declared that I was NOT leaving the building for dinner no matter WHAT, even if I had to eat the same thing at the hotel restaurant that I’d eaten before. As it turns out, it was the really the only thing on the menu without potatoes or noodle/dumplings/spaetzel, so I did eat it again. James had big stuffed sumplings in a cheesy mushroom cream sauce and I had the ham and sauerkraut and a salad. I tried to get James to order a piece of Black Forest cake, but while I was cajoling the last piece was sold.
After dinner we went back to the Munster for the third time, for the organ concert. The first piece was by Bach and it was played on an obviously Baroque organ connected to the oldest pipes. It was quite lovely. The second (and far longer) piece was by Charles Marie Widor and was very modern. It was fine, and even very pleasant in places, but not really my style. Still, I was very glad we went: listening to the organ while watching the light fade through the stained glass was not something I can do every day.
There were thunderstorms during the night that woke me up, and I almost pushed back the curtains so I could see the cathedral lit by lightning. Suddenly, though, I was afraid that it would be like Night on Bald Mountain out there, and that I’d expire of fright on the spot, leaving nothing but a little pile of ash behind. So instead I went back to sleep.
Photos: Freiburg
When we woke up it was warm and sunny, if windy, and we spent a wonderful time at the farmer’s market, picking out a bunch of fresh basil, garlic olives, two pints of cherry tomatoes, 2 red carrots, 6 apricots, 1/2 lb of sweet cherries, and three kinds of organic cheese (a weinkase, a sheepsmilk brie and a goat chevre crusted with pink peppercorns). We took the groceries back to our room and then set out to walk the city over.
Our first stop was the Munster/Cathedral, which was extremely cool. The cathedral started out as Romanesque chapel and over the next century or two was added onto and added onto until it became a gothic cathedral. The outside is covered in statues of saints and biblical figures, intricate flying buttresses and lots of fully-functional gargoyles—they all still spit the rain runoff down onto the square, which, given the weather, was something to watch out for. The main doorway (facing west) is nothing but statues of carved stone, all still mostly painted with their original paint. They’re also covered with fine mesh, to keep the pigeons out, which didn’t seem to obscure our pictures. The inside of the church was also gorgeous, but fascinating rather than affecting, unlike the church in Selestat. There are statues and columns all down the middle of the nave and sculptural groups on either side of the altar, one of the last supper and one of the laying out of Jesus. (We think this last used to be a reliquary, since it had a little metal door with a keyhole in Jesus’s chest). We discovered that there was a tour to take one to otherwise inaccessible parts of the cathedral at 2 pm, so we decided to come back for it.
After the cathedral, we went to the Augustiner museum, housed in a former Augustinian monastery a few blocks away. It’s supposed to be one of the best museums in the Black Forest and even more of a draw to Freiburg than the cathedral. Also, it was advertising all over town that admission was free all year, in celebration of the university’s 550th anniversary. As it turns out, the building is under MAJOR renovation and almost all of their exhibits—the original stained glass from the cathedral, the gold and silver treasures from the cathedral, etchings by students of Durer, carved altarpieces and other gothic wood carvings, were blocked off. I surmise that the REAL reason that they’re open free all year is because they couldn’t bring themselves to charge anyone for the paltry few things they still had on display. The ground floor was a shambles of wooden pallets and yellow tape, with some cathedral and museum sculptures stacked in corners. Seeing a few gargoyles up close was cool (especially the soldier one who shot the rainwater out of his gun) but I felt sorry for the statues of Merovingian kings (I think they were kings, anyway—there were few to no labels on these things) who were chopped in half at thigh-level and weren’t even stacked in the same pile with their corresponding bottom half. The upper floor was a few rooms of random 18th century furniture and some not-very-inspired paintings. (There was one of the annunciation which made both Mary and the angel Gabriel into fat, eye-rolling, bored-looking tugboats). The museum was disappointing, but at least we didn’t have to pay for it.
After we left the museum we walked some back streets until we found the Schwabentor, one of the 13th century city gates (that now has a 1910 painting of St. George on it—apparently he’s the patron saint of Freiburg). We walked back up to the Munsterplatz, stopping to gawk at Zum Roten Baren, the oldest hotel in Germany, and to look at the maroon-and-gilt painted merchant’s hall/custom house from 1530. It’s very neat, but isn’t allowed inside.
The disappointing Augustiner Museum had only taken 30 minutes, so we decided to go to the town history museum, which hadn’t really been on our agenda. It’s a nice little place with copies of the original city constitution (Freiburg being a free city made the charter and constitution a bit more complicated than usual), stained glass with local significance, the family tree of the last baron of Freiburg (before it became ‘free’), and several models of the entire city at various points in its history (the one from the 1400s was really cool—the town was built with fortifications in the shape of an 8-pointed star with a moat around the entire thing and a castle up on the mountain. The castle is completely gone, alas, since it’s been more than 500 years since there was no longer anyone to live in it), and, even better, a BIG miniature of the cathedral, halfway into being built (complete with little workmen and market-goers and things. These little models seem to be pretty common in German museums—I can hardly think of one that we went to that didn’t have at least one. Luckily I found them all completely fascinating and spent far too much time pouring over each one. The shapes of these particular ones reminded me of the game Cathedral, and how I always just wanted to arrange the pieces in pretty designs instead of actually playing the game.
When we left the town history museum (Museum fur Stadtgeschichte) it was raining, so instead of picnicking in the square, we ate in our hotel room. In spite of the fact that the red carrots turned out to be long, pointy (and painfully spicy) radishes, the meal was delicious. We wrapped the tomatoes and sheeps-milk brie in basil leaves, topped the weinkase with olives (a heretical blending of cultures, I’m sure) and spread the chevre on the apricots. That last combination was the most inspired, and the pink peppercorns had a lot to do with it—their spicy floralness sparked the chevre and blended with the apricots.
It was still raining when we finishes, so we hung around the room for a bit before running back over to the cathedral for the 2:00 tour. The tour was conducted by the Messner, the ordained official who helps the priests and bishops with their robes and pre-service needs. (The online German/English dictionary says that the title can be translated as Sacristan, but this guy seemed a little more official than that). It rapidly became apparent that the tour was going to be mostly about what this guy did himself (he spent TWENTY MINUTES on vestments, telling us things that I know just from looking at priests and ministers wearing the things) and about the religious significance of the objects in the cathedral with barely a mention of the historical or artistic significance thereof. We saw an altar with paintings by Hans Holbein and he only mentioned the painter’s name at the last minute, as an offhand thrown-in. When it became obvious that the tour wasn’t going to take us into the crypt (our secret wish) we broke away from the group and just looked at the Romanesque sculptures, archbishop’s gravestones and all the altars in the priests’ confessional chapels (arranged in a circle behind the main church altar). We snuck away entire before the tour was over, not willing to spend more than an hour being bored.
By then it was raining harder, but we still walked west to see the two Rathauses (alte and neue) and the university quarter. We took many pictures, got lost, got very wet, found another old city gate (the Martintor, presumably dedicated to St. Martin) and bought tickets to an organ concert in the Munster set for that evening. In an attempt to get out of the rain, we spent an hour in an internet café, but it was raining even harder when we left.
By the time we got back to our hotel I was wetter than ever, cranky, cold, and starting a sore throat. I declared that I was NOT leaving the building for dinner no matter WHAT, even if I had to eat the same thing at the hotel restaurant that I’d eaten before. As it turns out, it was the really the only thing on the menu without potatoes or noodle/dumplings/spaetzel, so I did eat it again. James had big stuffed sumplings in a cheesy mushroom cream sauce and I had the ham and sauerkraut and a salad. I tried to get James to order a piece of Black Forest cake, but while I was cajoling the last piece was sold.
After dinner we went back to the Munster for the third time, for the organ concert. The first piece was by Bach and it was played on an obviously Baroque organ connected to the oldest pipes. It was quite lovely. The second (and far longer) piece was by Charles Marie Widor and was very modern. It was fine, and even very pleasant in places, but not really my style. Still, I was very glad we went: listening to the organ while watching the light fade through the stained glass was not something I can do every day.
There were thunderstorms during the night that woke me up, and I almost pushed back the curtains so I could see the cathedral lit by lightning. Suddenly, though, I was afraid that it would be like Night on Bald Mountain out there, and that I’d expire of fright on the spot, leaving nothing but a little pile of ash behind. So instead I went back to sleep.
Photos: Freiburg
Today was another driving tour. We ate breakfast, hit the market (where we bought way too much food—1/2 kilo of tiny cucumbers, four carrots, 10 oz feta, 2 pints strawberries, a tiny 1/3-cup container of crème fraiche from Alsace, and an entire kilo of free-stone plums) and then drove out for the rest of the day.
We drove north into the Kinzig Valley and followed lots of little roads, not really meaning to get anywhere. Accidentally, we found ourselves in Alpirsbach, a town I’d ignored the guidebook descriptions of, because its monastery (kloster) was described as being ‘in the flamboyant gothic style.’ In actuality, it’s gorgeously Romanesque, with only a few gothic touches. The altar area of the church was being renovated, but we could see the Romanesque columns and arches in the nave. We also got in on a tour of all the close-to-wandering-visitors parts, including the cloister (the gothic part), the dormitories, the infirmary and the room where the rule of silence could be broken. During late period the monaster was used as a pre-seminary school for young would-be priests. After finishing their education at Alpirsbach they’d move on to Kloster Maulbronn, or, if they were really good, the monastery at Stuttgart.
We looked around the museum, then ate our (excellent) lunch in the car, on account of a terrific rain squall that passed through. Because we did so much moving between towns on our driving tour, we moved between rainstorms as well. Even though we did have periods of calm, the storms just kept coming over the mountains, alternating between infrequent but blinding sunlight and torrential downpours.
We left Alpirsbach during a sunny episode and drove through several iterations of weather on our way to Freudenstadt. We stopped there to stretch our legs, and while out of the car (and remarking on the FREEZING temperatures—I think it was in the 40s) ended up looking at the town church (incredibly modern and weird) and stopping by the tourist center to ask some questions about scenic drives. We wanted to drive the Schwartzwalder Hochstrasse (the Black Forest High Road), but one of my guidebooks said that it took FOUR hours to drive the 80 kilometers. We thought that this couldn’t possibly be right, and sure enough, the tourist office girl said that it would take about an hour to drive it. She was right—it took us exactly that amount of time, even though we drove really slowly, because were terrified of the sheer, 1,100 meter drop-offs. The road is incredibly beautiful (and much less rainy than anywhere else, since it’s above the clouds), but scarier than I want to deal with ever again. Also, there were a few cars that really wanted to drive fast, or trucks behind us that weren’t braking as frequently as we would like, so we frequently used the pulloffs to let people by. I didn’t like the Northern Black Forest as much as the Southern part—it was much more open and American-mountain-forest-like, unlike the Hollental area, where one felt like the forest was trying to take back the road. Also, there was MUCH less undergrowth—one could actually see more than a few feet in to the forest.
At the highest point in the forest we followed the road around a curve and discovered a huge herd of sheep, overseen by two, old, drover-coat wearing men in hats. One of them actually had a shepherd’s crook!
The Hochstrasse ended in Baden Baden. We drove around a bit, looking at things like the neo-classical casino, but mostly we were just trying to find the highway back to Freiburg. The autobahm is wonderful when one is trying to get somewhere quickly, but it can be kind of frightening to have Smart Cars barreling up behind one at 180 kph. Also, when we stopped at a truck stop to use the bathroom I was trapped in the midst of an enormous, loud, insensible group of 60-ish American women from the South, all bellowing about how crazy European bathrooms are. There was more neo-colored eye-makeup in that room than would fill the entirety of the 1980’s. Another time on the trip that I was embarrassed to be an American. I wonder if there were American tourists that I didn’t notice, thinking the same thing about me—I’m certainly loud, anyway.
When we got back to Freiburg we went immediately to dinner at a local brewery—Hausbraueri Feierling. James had Weisswurst, a pretzel, and, he says, the best beer he has ever purchased in his life. I had wurstsalat, which I adore, and snuck many of the leftover plums out of my backpack. It was a fun place and a good meal, but unfortunately afterwards we realized that cigarette smoke in the room had penetrated everything—our clothes down to our belts and underwear, the fabic of my backpack, the paper in the maps, everything. It was pretty revolting. I was almost tempted to throw my backpack away, it smelled so bad, but I left it draped over a chair overnight, and it was fine in the morning.
Photos: Black Forest
We drove north into the Kinzig Valley and followed lots of little roads, not really meaning to get anywhere. Accidentally, we found ourselves in Alpirsbach, a town I’d ignored the guidebook descriptions of, because its monastery (kloster) was described as being ‘in the flamboyant gothic style.’ In actuality, it’s gorgeously Romanesque, with only a few gothic touches. The altar area of the church was being renovated, but we could see the Romanesque columns and arches in the nave. We also got in on a tour of all the close-to-wandering-visitors parts, including the cloister (the gothic part), the dormitories, the infirmary and the room where the rule of silence could be broken. During late period the monaster was used as a pre-seminary school for young would-be priests. After finishing their education at Alpirsbach they’d move on to Kloster Maulbronn, or, if they were really good, the monastery at Stuttgart.
We looked around the museum, then ate our (excellent) lunch in the car, on account of a terrific rain squall that passed through. Because we did so much moving between towns on our driving tour, we moved between rainstorms as well. Even though we did have periods of calm, the storms just kept coming over the mountains, alternating between infrequent but blinding sunlight and torrential downpours.
We left Alpirsbach during a sunny episode and drove through several iterations of weather on our way to Freudenstadt. We stopped there to stretch our legs, and while out of the car (and remarking on the FREEZING temperatures—I think it was in the 40s) ended up looking at the town church (incredibly modern and weird) and stopping by the tourist center to ask some questions about scenic drives. We wanted to drive the Schwartzwalder Hochstrasse (the Black Forest High Road), but one of my guidebooks said that it took FOUR hours to drive the 80 kilometers. We thought that this couldn’t possibly be right, and sure enough, the tourist office girl said that it would take about an hour to drive it. She was right—it took us exactly that amount of time, even though we drove really slowly, because were terrified of the sheer, 1,100 meter drop-offs. The road is incredibly beautiful (and much less rainy than anywhere else, since it’s above the clouds), but scarier than I want to deal with ever again. Also, there were a few cars that really wanted to drive fast, or trucks behind us that weren’t braking as frequently as we would like, so we frequently used the pulloffs to let people by. I didn’t like the Northern Black Forest as much as the Southern part—it was much more open and American-mountain-forest-like, unlike the Hollental area, where one felt like the forest was trying to take back the road. Also, there was MUCH less undergrowth—one could actually see more than a few feet in to the forest.
At the highest point in the forest we followed the road around a curve and discovered a huge herd of sheep, overseen by two, old, drover-coat wearing men in hats. One of them actually had a shepherd’s crook!
The Hochstrasse ended in Baden Baden. We drove around a bit, looking at things like the neo-classical casino, but mostly we were just trying to find the highway back to Freiburg. The autobahm is wonderful when one is trying to get somewhere quickly, but it can be kind of frightening to have Smart Cars barreling up behind one at 180 kph. Also, when we stopped at a truck stop to use the bathroom I was trapped in the midst of an enormous, loud, insensible group of 60-ish American women from the South, all bellowing about how crazy European bathrooms are. There was more neo-colored eye-makeup in that room than would fill the entirety of the 1980’s. Another time on the trip that I was embarrassed to be an American. I wonder if there were American tourists that I didn’t notice, thinking the same thing about me—I’m certainly loud, anyway.
When we got back to Freiburg we went immediately to dinner at a local brewery—Hausbraueri Feierling. James had Weisswurst, a pretzel, and, he says, the best beer he has ever purchased in his life. I had wurstsalat, which I adore, and snuck many of the leftover plums out of my backpack. It was a fun place and a good meal, but unfortunately afterwards we realized that cigarette smoke in the room had penetrated everything—our clothes down to our belts and underwear, the fabic of my backpack, the paper in the maps, everything. It was pretty revolting. I was almost tempted to throw my backpack away, it smelled so bad, but I left it draped over a chair overnight, and it was fine in the morning.
Photos: Black Forest
